Saturday, October 31, 2009

TC: As the Human Village Prepares for Its Fate (Constable)


.








While everything external
dies away in the far off
echo of the soul
still there’s a mill wheel turning

it is like a good

kind of tiredness in
the moment before sleep
by some distant stream

a note of peace
in a life which
will never be peaceful
as the daylight fades

the dream disintegrates
but the shadow holds
no power
over what’s about to happen














Flatford Mill: John Constable, 1817 (Tate Gallery)

"The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things."

8 comments:

Elmo St. Rose said...

Tolkien

C.S.Lewis

Coleridge

"It takes a village" Hillary Clinton said, not exactly in the
the same vein but nevertheless
the foundation of the miraculous
is in the human village according
to the first two gentleman and the
third certainly came from the human
village.

TC said...

Elmo,

I was sitting on the pavement discussing this village idea with a sad drunken Indian who had just been sprung from jail where he'd spent 72 hours after being apprehended with a plastic bottle full of suspicious looking pop.

We looked up at that recent curious bright object in the sky.

A fellow of the night contended it is galactic cluster M22.

Another argued in response for Jupiter.

I'm going back to the res, said the aforementioned plastic bottle possessor. Cops there pick you up, they just buy you a beer and drive you home.

A minute went by as all scanned the skies.

Winters fucking cold in South Dakota though, the guy reflected.

Security loomed.

Something tells me Hilary has never chilled in the supermarket parking lot. Coleridge however, that old Episcopalian junkie, I bet he would have opted for M22.

My own sense from this angle of skywatching, for what it's worth, is that right at this moment

The human village rests on pretty shaky foundations

Elmo St. Rose said...

yes TC we's gettin old and so in
Altzheimer's (Old timers) remote
memories are preserved...

"Do you belive in magic
in a young girl's heart
and the music whenever
it starts"
The Loving Spoonfulls

Theater was banned in England
for several decades sometime after
Shakespeare's death.....

I say the Transcendentalists will
come once again....Hester Prenne
down by the river for Hawthorne to
see.....Gary Snyder cloning Thoreau
many times over

Hope springs eternal only for fools. The Human Village is on
shaky grounds...you can't ignore a
seismograph like Tom Clark....The
Irish kings had to have permission
from the poets to go to war.

Anonymous said...

I do like how you write Thomas. I'm sure I've told you such before, but it's true; so I will keep doing so.
I am thinking we do not look at such/feel such as much anymore. We are overtaken with all this busy business.Even in sleep, we do not sleep; hey?

TC said...

When I start my human village charter memberships will be extended to Elmo and SarahA.

I am not yet sure of the full range of available activities but to start with I think there will be a considerable period of Transcendental Sleep.

There will always be a mill wheel turning. And that shadow of the horse.

(As a young person I knew of a place where there was an old mill on a stream, one could loiter there and with great ease imagine oneself in another century... and in fact one already IS in another century at this moment. But is the blogosphere really a village? One in which there is no touching? And what sort of village is that? I esk you.)

VANITAS said...

Terrific poem!

Andrew Bowie Hagan said...

Andrew Haganout of limited stock of ideas



each person on earth shall receive one ... Read More
is my dream of politics. Art, too, is a dream.
Politics is not, nor is the heart.

*
the site is a place where a piece should be but isn't.
the piece that should be there is now somewhere else,
usually in a room.

Actually everything that's of any importance takes place
outside the room. But the room reminds us of the imitation
of our condition.

*

Aram vult nemus
-TC, John's Heart
5 hours ago ·

TC said...

Vincent,

This comment is of particular value to me in consideration of the source.


Andrew Bowie,

Those are indeed interesting words.

Did I write them?

The grove needs its altar more and more every day, it is getting late.

The shadow holds no power over what's about to happen.