April 20 – Tomorrow

Tomorrow do your …
worst! I have lived today.
I have had my hour.

Based on:

Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

— John Dryden, Horat. Ode 29. Book 3. Paraphras’d in Pindarique Verse, pt vii (1685) in: The Poems of John Dryden vol. 1, p. 436 (J. Kinsley ed. 1958)

John Dryden (1631 – 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England’s first Poet Laureate in 1668.

He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Walter Scott called him “Glorious John”. (Wikipedia)

April 19 – embattled farmers

by the rude bridge stood
embattled farmers, fired
shot heard round the world

As Mr . Lincoln said at Gettysburg, ” our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

This country, when you get right down to it, is still an experiment and we continue to work our way through rough patches.

Sometimes, this is more evident than others.

Sometimes, we deal with problems that are thrown at us.

Sometimes we make our own problems.

Regardless, it all started at Lexington and Concord on April 19th.

Concord Hymn

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

April 18 – To love, be loved,

To love, be loved,
strive, be better tomorrow,
than we are today.

Intellectuals don’t help their cause when they are dismissive of pop culture and sports, by demeaning their great achievements. Neither high culture nor pop culture are a measure of intelligence, just of past exposure. Any attempt to use either as a means to imply superiority demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what art strives to do: bring us closer together by showing that we are all equal in our needs to love, be loved, and strive to be better tomorrow than we are today. We accomplish this by understanding that the elegant idea is as uplifting as the slam dunk. And that a triple play is as graceful as a balletic arabesque. To disparage either the athlete or the intellect indicates someone not worthy of either.

The way Americans regard sports heroes versus intellectuals speaks volumes
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar The Guardian, 15 Apr 2019

April 17 – Words of the World

Words of the world
They are the life of the world
Building blocks of thought

Loosely based on this excerpt:

and I perceived then and there and once and for all what my Hartford neighbor, Wallace Stevens, was soon to be setting down as the truth that all writers should live by, to wit: “Words of the world are the life of the world.”

Brendan Gill in A New York Life, Poseidon Press, 1990

April 16 – Everyone, today,

Everyone, today,
Lets hope we are astonished.
by I don’t know what

Adapted from: TOMORROW by Jim Harrison, published in
IN SEARCH OF SMALL GODS, Copper Canyon Press, 2010

I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don’t know what:
not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold
snowy willows, garishly green and yellow,
and not my usual death, which I’ve done
before with Borodin’s music
used in Kismet, and angels singing
“Stranger in Paradise,” that sort of thing,
and not the thousand naked women
running a marathon in circles around me
while I swivel on a writerly chair
keeping an eye on my favorites.
What could it be, this astonishment,
but falling into a liquid mirror
to finally understand that the purpose
of earth is earth? It’s plain as night.
She’s willing to sleep with us a little while.

Oddly enough, this was set to be posted yesterday until I realized it was the anniversary of the death if Abraham Lincoln.

I was astonished by the news from Paris about the fire at Notre Dame.
And in a real goofy way, I was relieved, if not comforted that calamitous events involving national icons can still happen by chance instead of by targeted action.

As Mr. Harrison writes:
“to finally understand that the purpose
of earth is earth? It’s plain as night.”