Category: Mr. Sandburg

2.26.2023 – interpretation

interpretation
of reality like others
all is subjective

This shading of different realities is only the start.

It gets more fascinating – and much weirder. It’s one thing to allow that there might be an alternative perspective on colour, but quite another to accept that colour doesn’t actually exist outside our brains.

Not only is there no colour, but there’s also no sound or taste or smell.

What we perceive as red, for example, is just radiating energy with a wavelength of around 650 nanometres.

There’s nothing intrinsically red about it; the redness is in our heads.

What we think of as sound is just pressure waves, while taste and smell are no more than different conformations of molecules.

Although our sense organs do a splendid job of detecting each of these, it’s the brain that construes them, converting them into a framework for us to understand that world.

Valuable though this framework is, it’s an interpretation of reality and, like all interpretations, it’s subjective.

From It takes all 53 of our senses to bring the drab external world to life by  Ashley Ward in the Guardian on Feb. 26.

Ms. Ward writes:

Underlying all of this is the brain’s frantic efforts to build its internal model, even though the sensory information it needs to construct that model has been cut off.

The results are odd, though to some they can feel disturbingly real.

But what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive?

I repeat, what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive?

I am reminded of Mr. Sandburg and his poem happiness.

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

To paraphrase Big Bill, Methinks we think too much.

 

2.19.2023 – morning sky goes blue

morning sky goes blue
sunset sky goes bronze time is
a storyteller

Adapted from The Fireborn are at Home in Fire by Carl Sandburg

Luck is a star.
Money is a plaything.
Time is a storyteller.
The sky goes high, big.
The sky goes wide and blue.
And the fireborn — they go far —
being at home in fire.

Can you compose yourself
The same as a bright bandana,
A bandana folded blue and cool,
Whatever the high howling,
The accents of blam blam?
Can I, can John Smith, John Doe,
Whatever the awful accents,
Whatever the horst wessel hiss,
Whatever books be burnt and crisp,
Whatever hangmen bring their hemp,
Whatever horsemen sweep the sunsets,
Whatever hidden hovering candle
Sways as a wafer of light?

Can you compose yourself
The same as a bright bandana,
A bandana folded blue and cool?
Can I, too, drop deep down
In a pool of cool remembers,
In a float of fine smoke blue,
In a keeping of one pale moon,
Weaving our wrath in a pattern
Woven of wrath gone down,
Crossing our scarlet zigzags
With pools of cool blue,
With floats of smoke blue?

Can you, can I, compose ourselves
In wraps of personal cool blue,
In sheets of personal smoke blue?
Bach did it, Johann Sebastian.
So did the one and only John Milton.
And the old slave Epictetus
And the other slave Spartacus
And Brother Francis of Assisi.
So did General George Washington
On a horse, in a saddle,
On a boat, in heavy snow,
In a loose cape overcoat
And snow on his shoulders.
So did John Adams, Jackson, Jefferson.
So did Lincoln on a cavalry horse
At the Chancellorsville review
With platoons right, platoons left,
In a wind nearly blowing the words away
Asking the next man on a horse:
“What’s going to become of all these
boys when the war is over?”

The shape of your shadow
Comes from you — and you only?
Your personal fixed decision
Out of you — and your mouth only?
Your No, your Yes, your own?

Bronze old timers belong here.
Yes, they might be saying:
Shade the flame
Back to final points
Of all sun and fog
In the moving frame
Of your personal eyes.
Then stand to the points.
Let hunger and hell come.
Or ashes and shame poured
On your personal head.
Let death shake its bones.
The teaching goes back far:
Compose yourself.

Luck is a star.
Money is a plaything.
Time is a storyteller.
And the sky goes blue with mornings.
And the sky goes bronze with sunsets.
And the fireborn — they go far —
being at home in fire.

11.17.2022 – Lord, give me this day

Lord, give me this day
my opinion and forgive
the one yesterday

Adapted from the line:

For my part,” an editorial writer ended his silence, “I begin each bright morning with praying: Lord, give me this day my daily opinion and forgive me the one I had yesterday.”

As it appeared in the poem, “The People, Yes!” by Carl Sandburg.

According to Wikipedia, The People, Yes is a book-length poem written by Carl Sandburg and published in 1936. The 300 page work is thoroughly interspersed with references to American culture, phrases, and stories (such as the legend of Paul Bunyan). Published at the height of the Great Depression, the work lauds the perseverance of the American people in notably plain-spoken language. It was written over an eight-year period. It is Sandburg’s last major book of poetry.

As it says, The People, Yes, lauds the perseverance of the American people in notably plain-spoken language.

It is also one of the great collections of one-liners in my personal experience until Garrison Keillor published his Pretty Good Joke book.

Mr. Sandburg includes:

“Man,” spoke up an anthropologist, “is a two-legged animal with¬ out feathers, the only one who cooks his food, uses an alpha¬ bet, carries firearms, drinks when he is not thirsty, and practices love with an eye on birth control.”

“Shakespeare is the greatest writer of them all, a dead Englishman and you have to read him in high school or you don’t pass.

“I want money,” said the editorial writer who knew where he got it, “in order to buy the time to get the things that money will not buy.”

I close with this blessing.

May you live to eat the hen that scratches over your grave.