Cold cold Whistle Pig burrows his nose out of the deep dark earth, sniffing at frost air, looking for light reflected across the back of his own sad brow —
Maybe winter exists for the sad ones, for the melancholy. When winter’s got its fingers in deep, these sad ones, they have a reason to be sad; while the world is difficult, at least it makes sense.
Then spring comes, with its warm breezes and the girls in their skirts, and everyone has smiles as wide as Texas, and sad-little-old-melancholy me walks the streets, while days lengthen, and wide smiles get wider, and start to wonder What the hell is wrong with me?
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Have to admit that Phish would be unlikely to write a song like Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife. Which is interesting — because Phish uses Dionysian break-down to avoid staring into the abyss of life, while the Truckers use Apollonian build-up to bring us right face to face with.
Two brothers.
What a terrible horrible world we live in — and if world means age-space of man, then it’s the man part that’s the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Richmond_spree_murders
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,209362,00.html?sPage=fnc/specialsections/lawcenter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs6rgjWZXyQ&feature=related
See also:
Drive-By-Truckers, Bryan Harvey, wife, and daughters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_amoenus
Latin for “pleasant place”, locus amoenus is a literary term which generally refers to an idealized place of safety or comfort. A locus amoenus is usually a beautiful, shady lawn or open woodland, sometimes with connotations of Eden. In 1953, Ernst Robert Curtius wrote the concept’s definitive formulation in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
A locus amoenus will have three basic elements: trees, grass, and water. Often, the garden will be in a remote place and function as a landscape of the mind. It can also be used to highlight the differences between urban and rural life or be a place of refuge from the processes of time and mortality. Some gardens in the genre also have overtones of the regenerative powers of human sexuality.[1]
The literary use of this type of setting goes back, in Western literature at least, to Homer, and it became a staple of the pastoral works of poets such as Theocritus and Virgil. Horace (Ars poetica, 17) and the commentators on Virgil, such as Servius, recognize that descriptions of loci amoeni have become a rhetorical commonplace.
In Ovid‘s Metamorphoses, the function of the locus amoenus is inverted. Instead of offering a respite from dangers, it is itself usually the scene of violent encounters. [2]
In the works of William Shakespeare, the locus amoenus is the space that lies outside of city limits. It is where erotic passions can be freely explored, away from civilization and thus hidden from the social order which acts to suppress and regulate sexual behavior. It is mysterious and dark, a feminine place, as opposed to the rigid masculine civil structure. Examples can be found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Titus Andronicus.
http://www.whiotv.com/news/22719696/detail.html?sms_ss=digg
Police said he used a pocket knife to carve his name into the woman’s chest on the morning of February 19th. Lt. Jim Hutchins said, “They did find that he had carved, ‘I luv Mike Welliver,’ carved in with a heart.”
However Mike Welliver, 31, told News Center 7 that there is much more to the story.
Welliver said it was so crazy that he ended up with letters on his own chest. “I said no, stop. All she was doing was digging.”
His now former girlfriend ended up with the words “I luv Mike Welliver” cut into her chest. “After I did just the Mike part I was like, you know, do you want me to stop? She was like No. She was fine with it,” said Welliver.
In a jailhouse interview on Wednesday night, Welliver admitted to the chest carving, but said he should not be found guilty of assaulting the woman. He said a lot of what happened was fueled by stupidity and cocaine. “Now that I look at i, sitting here right now, if somebody asked me, I wouldn’t do it,” said Welliver. “That’s the whole part of this…. is cocaine. We were high out of our mings and things went crazy.”
Two friends.
One who was always careless about being good and doing the right thing, the ne’er-do-well, the Han Solo type, the cynic, the hedonist, who nevertheless through a series of setbacks and misadventures and surprises and discoveries uncovers a secret morality that he then becomes committed, inexplicably, to upholding —
And the other, his childhood friend, who had begun with an inner confidence and love of the world that revolved around being and thinking himself good, but yet, in order to advance his goals and maintain his position, comfort, and security, his morality becomes hollowed out and eventually, though he can never realize it, becomes a dry room filled with what is actually, on some higher viewer’s reflection, evil.
And the story that doesn’t look like the classic story of good v. evil, but eventually subtly becomes it — so that the reader says “What kind of story am I reading, here?” and the characters themselves begin to suspect that they are involved in some cosmic drama — and the horns of the dilemma — and their lost friendship — and having to choose a principle over a friend —
“Even the simplest expressions take on higher power here. Now his thumbs have become more than a trademark; they’re an essential means for Ebert to communicate. He falls into a coughing fit, but he gives his thumbs-up, meaning he’s okay. Thumbs-down would have meant he needed someone to call his full-time nurse, Millie, a spectral presence in the house.
Millie has premonitions. She sees ghosts. Sometimes she wakes in the night screaming — so vivid are her dreams.
Ebert’s dreams are happier. Never yet a dream where I can’t talk, he writes on another Post-it note, peeling it off the top of the blue stack. Sometimes I discover — oh, I see! I CAN talk! I just forget to do it.
In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.
These things come to us, they don’t come from us, he writes about his cancer, about sickness, on another Post-it note. Dreams come from us.”
I tramp a perpetual journey.
I have my guitar, and the clothes on my back, and the memories of things I’ve done, books I’ve read, and people I’ve met.
Time has shaped me like Michaelangelo, weathering my marble to expose the inner David. In the rooms the women come and go … Eliot by way of Pound.
Romanticism. Lost loves. Secrets never to be told. Sad secrets. Heavy burdens. Light burdens.
The Late Great Planet Earth. God’s Last Continent.
My mind is a labyrinth. What beast lurks at the center? What hero navigates its turns, with only a trail of bread crumbs to see him home? And where is the Cunning Artificer who shaped its ways?
Daedalus.
Not I. Call me Isaiah. Other Name, twisted. A pen name. A twixt a turn. Sun Day. All hail the rising. And yet it rises.
Curious faith of inductive reasoning, and the lacuna of skepticism at its heart. And yet it rises.
Intuition. A sense of where you are. Feeling. This time with feeling. I am not that accurate, but I play with great enthusiasm.
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 