musings on yesteday’s sunset, seen driving down I75 (scribled on a reciept while driving)

Kemal’s wretched though amusing attempts at verse continue:

I surveyed the setting sun Then the east’s dying embers
Red and purple waves amidst a blue froth
rippled in the middle spreading out in waves
descending through the valley flanked with undergrowth
horizon streaked with contrails high above the lazy haze
this valley of soot retains a thousand small ties and cares
to hearth and root and street sorrows recalled in waves
but mercy also whelms about our loyalties to place

Outside the window steams the bated breath of trucks
barking withheld. Metal upon metal scrapes
rubber on steel, the wheel churning dust within each cab
sits men tired wondering at the west’s dying coals
sinking beneath horizon’s edge span by measured span..

Two quotes of the day:

“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world. A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man…” -Aldous Huxley

“The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.” – Thomas S. Szasz