I am going up the mountain

To touch the cotton candy clouds

To dance there on the summit

To shed my worldly shroud

To learn to be me

To learn to be free

I’m going up the mountain

With both arms waving free

 

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

peace, wayf

 

Søren Kierkegaard

 

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a prolific 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticized both the Hegelianism of his time, and what he saw as the empty formalities of the Danish church. Much of his work deals with religious problems such as the nature of faith, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. His early work was written under various pseudonyms who present their own distinctive viewpoints in a complex dialogue. Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of the works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted".[4] Subsequently, many have interpreted Kierkegaard as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, individualist, etc. Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, Kierkegaard came to be regarded as a highly significant and influential figure in contemporary thought. {Source: Wikipedia}

 

 

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

 

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.

 

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

 

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

 

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

 

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

 

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.

 

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

 

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.

 

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

 

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

 

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

 

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

 

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.

 

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

 

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

 

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

 

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

 

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

peace, wayf

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

 

__________________________________________________________

peace, wayf

 

Duke Ellington was a wicked genius; a sound poet.

 

I can see him in my mind, seated behind his piano, sharing the bench with Strayhorn, tapping out melodies and smiling at Billy when it sounds right.

 

(“This is what ‘Buber’* will play on the trumpet,” he might have said.)

 

Smooth and easy, the Orchestra had the power (motivated by Duke and Strayhorn) to soothe the listener into a light, swingy dream; only to turn the world upside down with some strange twist from Duke's mind's ear.

 

This was not your father’s Big Band...

 

The Orchestra undulates through the speakers, like a living, breathing organism speaking in the easily decipherable language of blasts and burps from the horns—a twisted, surrealistic vision of the bustling night-life of the Jazz Age; at once beautiful and terrifying, beatific and stained, lovingly sweet and bitingly angry.

 

“Black and Tan Fantasy” wraps itself around my head, pours into my pores, immerses me in Duke’s groovy, ethereal world; glimpses of the music pass through my mind as it bops and swings—the world becomes the melody, the melody becomes the world, the melody is the world, no other world but the melody...

 

A rainy night

A Harlem shuffle down the side streets

Is that cat looking at me?

A neon sign shines back from the puddles

“Live Jazz”

Turned upside down

Flashing in a syncopated off time step with the music

That comes floating out of an open door

The trumpets make an all out assault on the senses

To the backdrop of the percussive saxes

(Something only Duke’s Orchestra got completely right)

Pounding the chest

Penetrating the skull

And tickling the mind

Can you hear the trumpets talking?

Listen to that swing!!!

A song played blue, with overtones of brown,

 

And the rain falls in a mist on the ground in my mind as I stand in this imagined street, diggin’ Duke’s blues.

 

No world but the melody, no melody but the world...

 

Dig!

 

Blow, man, blow!

 

 

 

 

peace, wayf

 

(*"Buber" Miley was a trumpet player in Duke Ellington's Orchestra who was often spotlighted as a soloist.)

Walking the shoreline of a placid lake

South to north, over craggy rock lines

Around the timid toes of trees getting their feet wet

(“Ahhhhh!”—they drink deeply—)

While the lake’s wet tongue laps at the ground

Beneath my feet

The water fowl honk

And scream madly in the damp distance

At some unseen danger,

Or perhaps an evening meal

 

And I, small and insignificant

Against the bigger backdrop of life

Continuing on and on and on,

Feel connected, somehow, (though inexplicably so)

To all these cycles, all these births and deaths

The past converging with the future

In this one, eternal moment that is now

 

Each moment, I die and I am reborn

In an eternal now

That never ends

And never begins

And the lake laughs

And the wind whistles

A sweet, never ending song of creation in my ears

Through the branches of the trees

As they dip timid toes in life’s water

And drink deeply of its nourishment

And I smile a small and insignificant smile

In the throes of eternity

 

 

peace, wayf