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It’s really about the Oort Cloud. A churning mass of possibilities from which great surprises emerge. Discreet patterns etched into the waves of chaos…
As the year winds down, I sit here wondering at it all. As I was digging around my own Oort, I came up with some primeval influences, which I’ve shared with you in this entry.
This edition is dedicated to the memory of Alistair Hulett, who passed nearly a year ago. For all of you everywhere, in Solidarity.
I hope you enjoy,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
The Links
Hans Richter – Ghosts Before Breakfast
The Internationale
Louis Aragon Poetry
Hans Richter – Everything Turns Everyting Resolves
The Links:
Oort Clouds…
2010 The Year In Crazy, Part 1
How Billy Graham Brought Us the Tea Party
Animals Busted!
“To Dream of Falling Upwards”
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Hans Richter – Ghosts Before Breakfast
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The Internationale
Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its volcano
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Masses, slaves, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be all
This is the final struggle
Let us gather together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
There are no supreme saviours
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
Producers, let us save ourselves
Decree the common welfare
That the thief return his plunder,
That the spirit be pulled from its prison
Let us fan the forge ourselves
Strike the iron while it is hot
|: This is the final struggle
Let us stand together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
The state represses and the law cheats
The tax bleeds the unfortunate
No duty is imposed on the rich
‘Rights of the poor’ is a hollow phrase
Enough languishing in custody
Equality wants other laws:
No rights without obligations, it says,
And as well, no obligations without rights
This is the final struggle
Let us stand together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
Hideous in their self-glorification
Kings of the mine and rail
Have they ever done anything other
Than steal work?
Into the coffers of that lot,
What work creates has melted
In demanding that they give it back
The people wants only its due.
This is the final struggle
Let us stand together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
The kings make us drunk with their fumes,
Peace among ourselves, war to the tyrants!
Let the armies go on strike,
Guns in the air, and break ranks
If these cannibals insist
On making heroes of us,
Soon they will know our bullets
Are for our own generals
This is the final struggle
Let us stand together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
Labourers, peasants, we are
The great party of workers
The earth belongs only to men
The idle will go reside elsewhere
How much of our flesh they feed on,
But if the ravens and vultures
Disappear one of these days
The sun will still shine
This is the final struggle
Let us stand together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
– Eugène Pottier
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Alistair Hulett and Jimmy Gregory Perform The Internationale
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Louis Aragon Poetry
I’ll Reinvent The Rose For You
I’ll reinvent the rose for you
For you are that rose which cannot be described
These few words at least in the order proper to her ritual
That rose which only words distant from roses can describe
The way it is with the ecstatic cry and the terrible sadness which it translates
From the stars of pleaure above love’s deep abyss
I will reinvent for youth rose of adoring fingers
Which create a nave as they interlace but whose petals then suddenly fall away
I will reinvent for you the rose beneath the balconies
Of lovers whose only beds are their arms
The rose at the heart of sculpted stone figures dead without benefit of confession
The rose of a peasant blown to bits by a landmine in his field
The scarlet scent of a letter that has been “discovered”
In which nothing’s addressed to me neither the insult nor the compliment
Some rendezvous to which no one has come
An entire army in flight on a very windy day
A maternal footstep before prison-gates
A man’s song at siesta-time beneath the olive trees
A cock-fight in a mist-enshrouded countryside
The rose of a soldier cut off from his own home country
I’ll reinvent for you my rose as many roses
As there are diamonds in the waters of the seas
As there are past centuries adrift in the dust of the earth’s atmosphere
As there are dreams in just one childish head
As there can be reflections in one tear
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Hymn
They restored man to the earth
They said you will eat
And you will eat
They cast the heavens to the earth
They said The gods will perish
And the gods will perish
They made a building site of the earth
They said The weather will be beautiful
And the weather will be beautiful
They opened a hole on the earth
They said The flame will burst forth
And the flame will burst forth
Speaking to the masters of the earth
They said You will give way
And you will give way
They took in their hands the earth
They said The black shall be white
And the black shall be white
Glory on the lands and the earth
To the sun of Bolshevik days
And Glory to the Bolsheviks
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Stanzas in Remembrance
You asked for neither glory nor tears,
Not the sound of the organ or the prayer for the dying;
Eleven years already, how quickly they pass, eleven years;
You did naught but use your weapons:
Death doesn’t dazzle the eyes of partisan.
Your portraits were on the walls of our cities,
The black of beards and night, wild-haired, threatening;
The poster seemed like a stain of blood, and
Because your names were so hard to pronounce
It sought to strike fear in those who passed.
No one looked on you as French by preference,
The whole day people passed without a glance;
But at the hour of curfew
Wandering fingers wrote under your photos:
DIED FOR FRANCE,
And the dismals mornings were no more the same.
All had the uniform color of frost
At the end of February, at your last moments;
And then it was that one of you calmly said:
I wish happiness for all, Happiness for those who will survive
I die without hatred for the German people.
Adieu pain, adieu pleasure, adieu roses
Adieu life, adieu light and wind;
Marry, be happy and think of me often,
You who will remain among the beauty of things
When things are over later in Erevan.
A great winter sun illuminates the hill
How beautiful is nature, and how my heart breaks;
Justice will follow upon our triumphant steps
My Melinée, oh my love, my orphan girl,
I tell you to live and to have a child.
They were twenty-three when the gun barrels blossomed,
Twenty three who gave their hearts before their time,
Twenty three foreigners and yet our brothers,
Twenty three who loved life to death;
Twenty three who cried out “La France” as they were struck down.
Aragon wrote this poem in honor of the resistance fighters of the Manouchian Group on the occasion of the naming of a street in Paris in their honor
Translations: Mitchell Abidor
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Hans Richter – Everything Turns Everyting Resolves
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