Quote reblogged from Greetings From Camp Cohen with 12 notes
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepy head.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here—
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
‘friend of my scribbled life’.
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invisibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.
So I must say it quickly.
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
Recognize the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
Source: jsykes
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
Post with 1 note
Special Duties
William Ferraro, of Ferraro & Smith, lived in a great house in Montagu Square. One wing was occupied by his wife, who believed herself to be an invalid and obeyed strictly the dictate that one should live every day as if it were one’s last. For this reason her wing for the last ten years had invariably housed some Jesuit or Dominican priest with a taste for good wine and whisky and an emergency bell in his bedroom. Mr. Ferraro looked after his salvation in more independent fashion. He retained the firm grasp on practical affairs that had enabled his grandfather, who had been a fellow exile with Mazzini, to found the great business of Ferraro and Smith in a foreign land. God has made man in his image, and it was not unreasonable for Mr. Ferraro to return the compliment and to regard God as the director of some supreme business which yet depended for certain of its operations on Ferraro & Smith. The strength of a chain is in its weakest link, and Mr. Ferraro did not forget his responsibility.
92
One of my main flaws is dispersion, the impossibility to permanently focus my interest, my intelligence and my energies in something determined. The frontiers between the object of my fleeting activity and what surrounds me are too elastic and through them are filtered calls, temptations, that displace me from one task to the other. I was reading intimate diaries of women for several days, believing that through this road I would reach some place, but suddenly I diverted towards the French mémorialistes of the eighteenth century. I left this too to rush towards UFOs, a topic which I believed to have exhausted weeks ago, but which an accidental reading in a newspaper brought back to me and submerged me in exhausting readings, which I will surely abandon at any given time for ancient history, alchemy or anthropology. I am a victim, and I understand the simplicity that we have today to inform ourselves: pocket books, popular magazines, handbooks at anyone’s reach, give us the fallacious impression that we are the men of a new Renaissance, midget Erasmuses, capable of finding out about everything in shoddy works, bought at supermarket price. A mistake which is necessary to amend, because I’ve known for a long time, even though I always forget, that information has no sense whatsoever if it isn’t ruled by formation.
Post with 1 note
Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece
Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece
Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!
I left Rome and landed in Brussels
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried
Clergymen in uniform and young girls pullin’ muscles
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside
Newspapermen eating candy
Had to be held down by big police
Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece
The Seabirds
No foreign pair of dark sunglasses will ever shield you from the light that pierces your eyelids, the screaming of the gulls feeding off the bodies of the fish thrashing up the bay till it was red turning the sky a cold dark colour as they circled overhead. He swam out to the edge of the reef there were cuts across his skin saltwater on his eyes and arms, but he could not feel the sting there was no one left to hold him back no one to call out his name dress him feed him drive him home say "Little boy it doesn't have to end this way" He announced their trial separation and spent the night in a Park Beach Motel bed a total stranger lying next to him rain hitting the roof hard over his head she said "What's the matter now lover boy has the cat run off with your tongue? Are you drinking to get maudlin or drinking to get numb?" He called out to the seabirds "Take me now, I'm no longer afraid to die" but they pretended not to hear him and just watched him with their hard and bright black eyes they could pick the eye from any dying thing that lay within their reach but they would not touch the solitary figure lying tossed up on the beach. So, where were you?
The Picture Came Out Blurry
A cronopio is going to open the door to the street, and when he puts his hand in his pocket to take out the key what he takes out is a box of matches, and so this cronopio feels sorrowful and he begins to think that if instead of the key he’s found matches, it would be horrible if the world had all of a sudden become displaced, and maybe if the matches are where the key should be, then he might find his wallet full of matches, and the sugar bowl full of money, and the piano full of sugar, and the telephone book full of music, and the closet full of people, and the bed full of suits, and the flowerpots full of sheets, and the streetcars full of roses, and the fields full of streetcars. So this cronopio is overcome by sorrow and he runs to look at himself in the mirror, but because the mirror is at an angle what he sees is the umbrella stand in the foyer, and his fears are confirmed and he begins to sob, falling on his knees and putting his hands together without knowing why. The neighboring famas come to console him, as do the hopes, but hours pass before the cronopio comes out of his despair and accepts a cup of tea, which he looks at and examines carefully before drinking, because who knows, it could be that instead of a cup of tea this is an anthill or a book by Samuel Smiles.
Page 1 of 29
