The Organ

[AdamSmith]

2 minutes ago, Larstrup said:

 I could really use a big Organ (sound)  right now.  Any contributions will be received with many thanks. 

LET ME LOOK.

[Guest Larstrup]

1 minute ago, AdamSmith said:

SORRY! Just remembered what he actually said:

"The only thing this bill would do is show that the monkeys in the jungle are smarter than the Legislators in North Carolina."

Jesus Christ , adam smith,  I’m  just asking for a big organ  (sound) to be played right now.  can’t you please refrain from  correcting your memory!  

[Guest Larstrup]

2 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

LET ME LOOK.

No.

[AdamSmith]

Shifting out of the mental registers that I just posted -- AND with our PURPORTED 'President' acting as he is at ze moment -- requires a bit of added  ('addled') glucosamine, from somevhere.

[AdamSmith]

1 minute ago, Larstrup said:

No.

That thing means that right now I am a Big Dom Top.

Which of course I never am.

Except in the urgencies of the moment.

Which my providers get entirely.

A sincere question: I sneak out and hire almost every fourth or fifth night.

Infinitely soul-enlarging. {and much else! ]

You?

[Guest Larstrup]

Forget about it. Every time I’ve needed a big organ (sound) I’ve had to rely upon myself tonight should be no different! 

[AdamSmith]

1 minute ago, Larstrup said:

Forget about it. Every time I’ve needed a big organ (sound) I’ve had to rely upon myself tonight should be no different! 

Why?

[AdamSmith]

6 hours ago, Larstrup said:

Forget about it. Every time I’ve needed a big organ (sound) I’ve had to rely upon myself tonight should be no different! 

Here you go!

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

Und my favorite of all...

 

[AdamSmith]

 

A remarkable new study claims that cow farts may be a much bigger factor in climate change than scientists previously realized.

https://www.morningticker.com/2017/10/massive-global-warming-discovery-shocks-scientists/

[AdamSmith]

Tenebrae

By Geoffrey Hill

 

He was so tired that he was scarcely able to hear a note of the songs: he felt imprisoned in a cold region where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated.

 

 

1

 

Requite this angel whose

flushed and thirsting face

stoops to the sacrifice

out of which it arose.

This is the lord Eros

of grief who pities

no one; it is

Lazarus with his sores.

 

 

2

 

And you, who with your soft but searching voice

drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,

who held me near your heart that I might rest

confiding in the darkness of your choice:

possessed by you I chose to have no choice,

fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.

You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust,

in desolation where my sins rejoice.

As I am passionate so you with pain

turn my desire; as you seem passionless

so I recoil from all that I would gain,

wounding myself upon forgetfulness,

false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain

as you sustain each item of your cross.

 

 

3

 

Veni Redemptor, but not in our time.

Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world.

‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned.

Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place.

 

 

4

 

O light of light, supreme delight;

grace on our lips to our disgrace.

Time roosts on all such golden wrists;

our leanness is our luxury.

Our love is what we love to have;

our faith is in our festivals.

 

 

5

 

Stupefying images of grief-in-dream,

succubae to my natural grief of heart,

cling to me, then; you who will not desert

your love nor lose him in some blank of time.

You come with all the licence of her name

to tell me you are mine. But you are not

and she is not. Can my own breath be hurt

by breathless shadows groaning in their game?

It can. The best societies of hell

acknowledge this, aroused by what they know:

consummate rage recaptured there in full

as faithfulness demands it, blow for blow,

and rectitude that mimics its own fall

reeling with sensual abstinence and woe.

 

 

6

 

This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire,

this is the questioning at the long tables,

this is true marriage of the self-in-self,

this is a raging solitude of desire,

this is the chorus of obscene consent,

this is a single voice of purest praise.

 

 

7

 

He wounds with ecstasy. All

the wounds are his own.

He wears the martyr’s crown.

He is the Lord of Misrule.

He is the Master of the Leaping Figures,

the motley factions.

Revelling in auguries

he is the Weeper of the Valedictions.

 

 

8

 

Music survives, composing her own sphere,

Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air,

and when we would accost her with real cries

silver on silver thrills itself to ice.

 

[AdamSmith]

Postscript: Reynolds Price

By Ian Crouch
January 21, 2011

 

I was saddened to receive news last night that Reynolds Price—the novelist, poet, New Yorker contributor, and longtime professor of English at Duke University—had died, after suffering a heart attack on Sunday. He was seventy-seven.

Price was a writer of the American South, author of the acclaimed novels “A Long and Happy Life,” and “Kate Vaiden,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. He was born in Macon, North Carolina, and graduated from Duke in 1955, before studying in England for three years as a Rhodes Scholar. He accepted a three-year teaching position at Duke in 1958, and remained on the faculty for the next fifty-three years. He was a proud member of the university family, though often candid and dismayed (notably in a famous 1992 Founder’s Day speech); he lamented the occasionally limited emotional and intellectual range of the young people among whom he lived and worked, bridling at their predilection for drunken parties, and took a special pride, it seemed, in horrifying his students by sharing his distaste for Duke’s men’s basketball.

I had the good fortune to be one of those horrified students—first in his legendary Milton course, and later while working on a project during my senior year. He was a commanding presence in an era when fewer and fewer professors are able or willing to strike fear in the hearts of their students. He required attendance, participation, and most of all, preparation. I would fall behind in my reading for other courses just to keep up in the thick, red collected Milton that soon became a constant companion. His many students surely remember the ledger he kept on his desk, in which he’d make a mark as we were stumbling through some answer or frail, unformed idea. What was he writing? He was stern and moody, but those who braved a visit to his office were often rewarded with immense warmth and a stunning, heartening smile.

Much of his presence owed to his deep and distinctive voice, which became known to many around the country from his contributions to National Public Radio from 1996 to 2002. During one class he read “Lycidas,” Milton’s majestic elegy written in honor of his young classmate Edward King, in its entirety. I was neither abashed nor alone, I suspect, in closing my eyes as he performed. Each semester he offered extra credit to students who could recite the full poem, nearly two hundred lines, from memory. I had the first fifty lines down, but there were basketball games, and parties, and other things that seemed important…. He’d have been disappointed to hear that I hadn’t memorized it all, though probably not surprised.

The university announced yesterday that Price had forbidden a public funeral, so those of us who admired him at a bit of a distance will have to think of our own ways to mourn. It was nice, though, to hear his voice briefly last night, in an obituary on NPR:

I’ve written everything from novels to television commercials. I once wrote the text for a Calvin Klein commercial, a confession I only now made public. But even I have yet to write an epitaph.

His was not a short life, nor was he stolen away too soon, as Edward King was, and he might dismiss such sentiment as rubbish, but today I’m thinking of the last lines of “Lycidas,” in Price’s low growl.

And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

Reynolds Price published several poems and one story, “His Final Mother,” in The New Yorker, all of which are available free for subscribers.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/postscript-reynolds-price

[AdamSmith]

I still have the whole beautiful shebang in memory, thanks to Reynolds.

Lycidas

By John Milton

 

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,

And with forc'd fingers rude

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear

Compels me to disturb your season due;

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

He must not float upon his wat'ry bier

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,

Without the meed of some melodious tear.

 

      Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;

Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.

Hence with denial vain and coy excuse!

So may some gentle muse

With lucky words favour my destin'd urn,

And as he passes turn

And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud!

 

      For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill,

Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill;

Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd

Under the opening eyelids of the morn,

We drove afield, and both together heard

What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,

Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,

Oft till the star that rose at ev'ning bright

Toward heav'n's descent had slop'd his westering wheel.

Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,

Temper'd to th'oaten flute;

Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel,

From the glad sound would not be absent long;

And old Damætas lov'd to hear our song.

 

      But O the heavy change now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone, and never must return!

Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,

With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,

And all their echoes mourn.

The willows and the hazel copses green

Shall now no more be seen

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

As killing as the canker to the rose,

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,

Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear

When first the white thorn blows:

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.

 

      Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep

Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?

For neither were ye playing on the steep

Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,

Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.

Ay me! I fondly dream

Had ye bin there'—for what could that have done?

What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,

The Muse herself, for her enchanting son,

Whom universal nature did lament,

When by the rout that made the hideous roar

His gory visage down the stream was sent,

Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?

 

      Alas! what boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade,

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?

Were it not better done, as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights and live laborious days;

But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,

Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears,

And slits the thin-spun life. "But not the praise,"

Phoebus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears;

"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies,

But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes

And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;

As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed."

 

      O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood,

Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds,

That strain I heard was of a higher mood.

But now my oat proceeds,

And listens to the Herald of the Sea,

That came in Neptune's plea.

He ask'd the waves, and ask'd the felon winds,

"What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?"

And question'd every gust of rugged wings

That blows from off each beaked promontory.

They knew not of his story;

And sage Hippotades their answer brings,

That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd;

The air was calm, and on the level brine

Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd.

It was that fatal and perfidious bark,

Built in th'eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,

That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

 

      Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,

His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,

Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge

Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.

"Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?"

Last came, and last did go,

The Pilot of the Galilean lake;

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake:

"How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain,

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold?

Of other care they little reck'ning make

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast

And shove away the worthy bidden guest.

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold

A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least

That to the faithful herdman's art belongs!

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;

And when they list their lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw,

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,

But, swoll'n with wind and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace, and nothing said,

But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more".

 

      Return, Alpheus: the dread voice is past

That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,

And call the vales and bid them hither cast

Their bells and flow'rets of a thousand hues.

Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use

Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,

On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,

Throw hither all your quaint enamel'd eyes,

That on the green turf suck the honied showers

And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,

The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

And every flower that sad embroidery wears;

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.

For so to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.

Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas

Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurl'd;

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world,

Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,

Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,

Where the great vision of the guarded mount

Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold:

Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth;

And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

 

      Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,

For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor;

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high

Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves;

Where, other groves and other streams along,

With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,

And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,

In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.

There entertain him all the Saints above,

In solemn troops, and sweet societies,

That sing, and singing in their glory move,

And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:

Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,

In thy large recompense, and shalt be good

To all that wander in that perilous flood.

 

      Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills,

While the still morn went out with sandals gray;

He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,

With eager thought warbling his Doric lay;

And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,

And now was dropp'd into the western bay;

At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:

To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

[AdamSmith]

Of Mere Being

BY WALLACE STEVENS

 

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

 

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

 

You know then that it is not the reason 

That makes us happy or unhappy. 

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

 

The palm stands on the edge of space. 

The wind moves slowly in the branches. 

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

 

Wallace Stevens, "Of Mere Being" from The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens.  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

 

[AdamSmith]

Last poem of his life.

[AdamSmith]

 

[Guest Larstrup]

On 8/1/2017 at 6:54 PM, Larstrup said:

 

[Guest Larstrup]

On 8/3/2017 at 9:22 PM, AdamSmith said:

So this is where  I question my belief as to my collective belief. Of this Christ of load. I don’t, so bless us over wise be,if.

The greatest organs in the world suck us into church. I’m agnostic which makes me equally conflicted between the music and the message of a God. I don’t care about the message the god. The music and hymn alone fill me with a joy with the religion has never done. However, the greatest musical sound of completeness has always come from the Church.organ and congregation. I strive for a better separation between the two. I do not believe in God because in doing so, requires me to confirm my belief in to unproven spiriality with which there is no proven belief for me to believe in.

The organ will always lure me into my uncertainty, which I’m just not prepared  to commit, I’m down with the music which I require others friends  to help me to qualify this 

 

 

 

 

 

[AdamSmith]

1 hour ago, Larstrup said:

The greatest organs in the world suck us into church. I’m agnostic which makes me equally conflicted between the music and the message of a God. I don’t care about the message the god. The music and hymn alone fill me with a joy with the religion has never done. However, the greatest musical sound of completeness has always come from the Church.organ and congregation. I strive for a better separation between the two. I do not believe in God because in doing so, requires me to confirm my belief in to unproven spiriality with which there is no proven belief for me to believe in.

The organ will always lure me into my uncertainty, which I’m just not prepared  to commit, I’m down with the music which I require others friends  to help me to qualify this 

I am an atheist, avowed and outright.

if I one day have to stand before my Creator and avow and defend that fact, I can at least tell Him I did not waffle. That I modeled myself upon the certainties of life that my Yahweh, 'walking in the cool of the day' in the Garden, gave to me.

I think He will understand.

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour.^[28] When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it."^[29] He criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."^[30]

Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday, when he took long strolls alone.^[31]

An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. "Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies' man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—'an Edwardian geek', as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked his companion. 'When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,' Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: 'But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'"^[32]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac

[AdamSmith]

Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?".^[35]

After he presented a lecture at a conference, one colleague raised his hand and said "I don't understand the equation on the top-right-hand corner of the blackboard". After a long silence, the moderator asked Dirac if he wanted to answer the question, to which Dirac replied "That was not a question, it was a comment."^[36][37]

Dirac was also noted for his personal modesty. He called the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which he was the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion". Most physicists speak of Fermi–Dirac statistics for half-integer-spin particles and Bose–Einstein statistics for integer-spin particles. While lecturing later in life, Dirac always insisted on calling the former "Fermi statistics". He referred to the latter as "Einstein statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry".^[38]

[AdamSmith]

10 hours ago, Larstrup said:

The greatest organs in the world suck us into church. I’m agnostic which makes me equally conflicted between the music and the message of a God. I don’t care about the message the god. The music and hymn alone fill me with a joy with the religion has never done. However, the greatest musical sound of completeness has always come from the Church.organ and congregation. I strive for a better separation between the two. I do not believe in God because in doing so, requires me to confirm my belief in to unproven spiriality with which there is no proven belief for me to believe in.

The organ will always lure me into my uncertainty, which I’m just not prepared  to commit, I’m down with the music which I require others friends  to help me to qualify this 

Heisenberg recollected a conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein and Planck's views on religion between Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac. Dirac's contribution was a criticism of the political purpose of religion, which was much appreciated for its lucidity by Bohr when Heisenberg reported it to him later. Among other things, Dirac said:

"I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.^[39]"