Favorite poems and quotations.

[Metamorph]

Alexander Pushkin
The Poet and the Crowd

"Procul este, profani." ["Away, profaners!" -- Horace]

The poet's absent-minded hand
Strummed the inspired lyre. He sang on
While unenlightened folk around,
Expressions proud and coldly frowned,
Listened with meaningless attention.
And the crass rabble questioned thus:
"To what end is his tuneful singing?
With earfuls of this soulful ringing,
To what goal is he leading us?
Where is the lesson in his chanting?
Our hearts both breaking and enchanting,
Oh waywardmost of sorcerers,
Your song is freer than the breeze,
But just as fruitless. Tell us please,
Where's the utility to us?"

The Poet

Be silent, senseless mob, grunt not,
Wage worker, slave to care and want,
I cannot stand your cheeky rant!
Worm of the earth, not son of heaven,
Utility's what you believe in,
Your judgment is inane and hollow:
You weigh the torso of Apollo,
Yet in his form you see no good.
That marble is a god! So what?
You much prefer your cooking pot,
Because therein you cook your food!

The Rabble

No, Sir! If you are heaven's chosen,
Not someone who's a dime a dozen,
Use divine gifts as it befits:
Conduits for useful benefits!
Correct with verse your brethren's hearts,
For we are cowardly, ungrateful,
Sly, foolish, wicked, shameless, hateful,
Slaves, liars, targets for your dart.
We are cold castrates of the heart!
Berate us then, our vice to lessen,
Loving thy neighbor. We too may love you
If you instill in us your lesson
The while we have a listen of you.

The Poet

Away with you! The peaceful poet
Cares not for your stupidity!
The lyre cannot revive your lot:
Persist in your depravity.
Each of you frightens like a coffin.
Think of the plethora of fine things
You've used to exercise your vileness:
Whips, prisons, axes; – enough, madmen!
Since on your sidewalk townfolk walk,
Sweeping it clean is useful work,
Yet do you ask the altar priests
To ply the broom and sweep the streets?
No, not for mundane trepidation,
Nor mortal gain, nor battleground,
But we were born for inspiration,
For prayerful and wondrous sound.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev



@The Bourgeoisie

[Adam Strange]

No gods, no kings, only man.

[flames]

“I kissed him passionately, I even wanted to bruise him, so that he would not be able to forget me.”

-Françoise Sagan

[Metamorph]

[flames]

Ne!!!!

[Metamorph]

Ne!!!!

I'm not sure what concealing a weapon in a silly way has to do with social justice but whatever you say.

[Metamorph]

“	...But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean.	”
— Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada

[Pydex]

Found

ONCE through the forest
Alone I went;
To seek for nothing
My thoughts were bent.
I saw i' the shadow
A flower stand there
As stars it glisten'd,
As eyes 'twas fair.
I sought to pluck it,--
It gently said:
"Shall I be gather'd
Only to fade?"
With all its roots
I dug it with care,
And took it home
To my garden fair.
In silent corner
Soon it was set;
There grows it ever,
There blooms it yet.
1815. Goethe

[Adam Strange]

Driving at night I feel the Milky Way
streaming above me like the graph of a cry.

-Adrienne Rich

[flames]

i was the ocean
you wanted rivers
i was the moon
you chased the stars

[Tonatiuh]

.You Can Be A
KING
........OR A
STREET
SWEEPER
.BUT EVERYBODY
DANCES WITH
.........THE
.GRIM REAPER

[Dauphin]

The Man-Moth
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”


Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.


But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.


Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.


Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.


Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.


If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

[Adam Strange]

“People always tell me that this is possible, that that is impossible. But do we understand anything about the workings of fate?”

-Jean Cocteau

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feelings as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and rightness.” - Erich Fromm

[ooo]

great quote^

today one of the most loved politician around here, a typical right wing ignorant, went around the poor neighborhoods of my city, ringed the intercom of some immigrant families, and with a face like his ass, asked "do you sell drugs?"

*vomit*

[ooo]

"Tradition is not the cult of ashes, it is custody of the fire"

[Kalinoche buenanoche]

DYING, LAUGHING

A lover was telling his beloved
how much he loved her, how faithful
he had been, how self-sacrificing, getting up
at dawn every morning, fasting, giving up
wealth and strength and fame,
all for her.

There was a fire in him.
He didn't know where it came from,
but it made him weep and melt like a candle.

"You've done well," she said, "but listen to me.
All this is the decor of love, the branches
and leaves and blossoms. You must live
at the root to be a true lover."
"Where is that!
Tell me!"
"You've done the outward acts,
but you haven't died. You must die."

When he heard that, he lay back on the ground
laughing, and died. He opened like a rose
that drops to the ground and died laughing.

That laughter was his freedom,
and his gift to the eternal.

As moonlight shines back at the sun,
he heard the call to come home, and went.

When light returns to its source,
it takes nothing
of what it has illuminated.

It may have shone on a garbage dump, or a garden,
or in the center of a human eye. No matter.

It goes, and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate,
wanting it back.

Mevlana Rumi

[Enters Laughing]

“We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods,
but gods, nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow.
We know which debts will never be repaid.
Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm.
Poor dead, blindfolded dead,
gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.
We see the faces people make behind their backs.
We catch the sound of wills being ripped to shreds.
The dead sit before us comically, as if on buttered bread,
or frantically pursue the hats blown from their heads.
Their bad taste, Napoleon, steam, electricity,
their fatal remedies for curable diseases,
their foolish apocalypse according to St. John,
their counterfeit heaven on earth according to Jean-Jacques…
We watch the pawns on their chessboards in silence,
even though we see them three squares later.
Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different.
Or a little bit different – which is to say, completely different.
The most fervent of them gaze confidingly into our eyes:
their calculations tell them that they’ll find perfection there.”
— Wislawa Szymborska, The Letters of the Dead
(Translation by Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh)

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

“He accorded his art the highest respect, that of never taking it for granted. Always, as long as he lived, he tried to learn more, in order to serve it better.”
― Elizabeth Borton De Trevino, I, Juan de Pareja

[Asenath]

Full Moon
BY ELINOR WYLIE


My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.


Harlequin in lozenges
Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.


Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,
In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.


There I walked, and there I raged;
The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.

[Dauphin]

Dream Song #327 by John Berryman

Freud was some wrong about dreams, or almost all;
besides his insights grand, he thought that dreams were a transcript
of childhood & the day before,
censored of course: a transcript:
even his lesser insight were misunderstood & became a bore
except for the knowing & troubled by the Fall.
Grand Jewish ruler, custodian of the past,
our paedegogue to whip us into truth,
I sees your long story,
tyrannical & triumphant all-wise at last
you wholly failed to take into account youth
& had no interest in your glory.
I tell you, Sir, you have enlightened but
you have misled us: a dream is a panorama
of the whole mental life,
I took one once to forty-three structures, that
accounted in each for each word: I did not yell ‘mama’
nor did I take it out on my wife.

[Dauphin]

"The more clearly you become conscious of the frailty, vanity, and dream-like quality of all things, the more clearly will you also become conscious of the eternity of your own inner being." - Arthur Schopenhauer

[Asenath]

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying."

Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies - The First Elegy


Sascha Schneider: Hypnose, 1904


Sascha Schneider: The Astral Man, 1903

[Chthonic Daydream]

Tatyana's letter to Onegin from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin


I write this to you - what more can be said?
What more can I add to that one fact?
For now I know it is in your power
To punish me contemptuously for this act.
But you, keeping for my unhappy lot
Even one drop of sympathy
Will not entirely abandon me.
At first I wished to remain silent;
Believe me, my shame, my agony,
You never ever would have heard.
As long as hope remained preserved


That rarely, even once a week,
I'd see you in our country house,
To hear your voice, to hear you speak,
To say a few words, and then, and then
To think, and think, and think again
All day, all night, until the next meeting.

But it is said you are unsociable,
And in this backwater all is tedious to you,
While we… well here we shine at nothing,
Although we're glad to welcome you.


Why did you come to visit us?
In this forgotten rural home
Your face I never would have known
Nor known this bitter suffering.
The fever of inexperience
In time (who can tell?) would have died down,
And I'd have found another lover,
Dear to my heart, to whom I'd be true,
And a loving wife, and virtuous mother.

Another!… No, no one on this earth
Is there to whom I'd give my heart!
That is ordained by highest fate…
That is heaven's will - that I am yours;
My life till now was but a pledge,
Of meeting with you, a forward image;
You were sent by heaven of that I'm sure,
To the grave itself you are my saviour…
In dreams you have appeared to me,
Though yet unseen, I held you dear,
Your glance and strangeness tortured me,
To my soul your voice was loud and clear
From long ago… It was not a dream!
You came, and I knew that very instant,
I was struck dumb, my heart flared up,
And in my thoughts said "He is the one!"
Is it not true? I heard you often:
In the silence did you not speak to me,
Both when I helped the poor, and when
With prayer I sought to ease and soften
The pain inside my anguished head?
And at this very moment, is it not you,
Oh sweetest, lovely vision who
In the night's transparency flits by
And quietly nestles by the bed's head?
And you, who with love and rapturously
Whispered a word of hope to me?

Who are you, my guardian angel?
Or a wily devil, a tempter fatal?
Disperse these doubts, this agony.
Perhaps all this is nothingness,
A foolish mind's self-aberration,
And something other is fate's decree…
So be it! Whatever my destiny,
To you I give it from this day,
Before you the tears roll down my cheek,
And your protection I beseech…
For consider: here I am alone,
No one understands what I say,
My reason tortures me every day,
And silently I am doomed to perish.
You I await: With a single glance
Revive the hope that's in my heart,
Cut short this heavy dream I cherish,
Deserving, I know, reproach and scorn.


I finish - I tremble to read it through,
With shame and terror my heart sinks low,
But your honour is my guarantee
And to that I entrust my destiny.

[Adam Strange]

^ In this article (https://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...Stratiyevskaya), Stratiyevskaya compared Onegin and Tatyana to Activity partners ILI and ESI. However, I think EIE fits Onegin better.

Which is not to say that Mirage with the correct Erotic Attitudes can't go just as wrong as Activity. It can. It has.

[xerx]

This was written immediately after the first world war. I think it sums up the aftermath perfectly.

Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

[Asenath]

"He listened gravely to the discussion of possible danger, but in truth, he paid little heed. Silvanoshei was young, and the young know they will live forever."

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda

Emotions change colour by the way (how) they are placed.

[gone]

Antonius Block: I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to mankind has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.

Death: And yet you do not want to die?

Antonius Block: Yes, I do.

Death: What are you waiting for?

Antonius Block: I want knowledge.

Death: You want a guarantee.

Antonius Block: Call it what you like. Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses? Why does He hide in the midst of half-promises and unseen miracles? How are we to believe the faithful when we don't believe ourselves? What will happen to those of us who want to believe, but can not? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? Why can't I kill God within me? Why does He live on in me in a humiliating way - despite my wanting to evict Him from my heart? Why is He, in spite of it all, a mocking reality I can't get rid of? Do you hear me?

Death: I hear you.

Antonius Block: I want knowledge! Not faith, not assumptions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His hand, uncover His face and speak to me.

Death: But he remains silent.

Antonius Block: I call out to Him in the darkness. But it's as if no one was there.

Death: Perhaps there isn't anyone.

Antonius Block: Then life is a preposterous horror. No man can live faced with Death, knowing everything's nothingness.

Death: Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.

Antonius Block: But one day we will all stand at the edge of life and face darkness.

Death: Yes, that day.

[gone]

TO A SPHINX

You are like the mollusc in chilly ponds
where sunbeams never get.
She never creeps out from her shell,
her prison she cannot forget,
she can only hide
her deepest essence
and dream of exploits great
among the waterweed,
but never wholly
and undividedly
empty herself into word or deed.

With irony your speech full spills.
You try to cover
with pretended cold
life's warmth that inside dwells.
But your voice trembles,
is strangely weak,
A blush hovers
behind each pale cheek.
A sea of fire burns
in a secret place
that no one knows,
no one can trace.

You are too frail and too weak and tame
for all the discords that sever:
to wear armour you must endeavour
in life's hard-handed game.
You are like the mollusc in chilly ponds
that never creeps out of her shell,
so unattainable,
so incomprehensible,
that no one will near you, ever.

- Karin Boye (1932)

[gone]

THE MASTER

No more harsh words
about broken violins!
I once heard the Master play
on just two strings.
He stood among the trees
and played on His darling instrument,
anthem after anthem, poem after poem,
crystallized pain,
and I realized:
That violin was me!
Others would not have considered me worthy
but in His hands I was enough!

- Bo Setterlind

[SGF]

The Law for the Wolves

"NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Wash daily from nose tip to tail tip; drink deeply, but never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting and forget not the day is for sleep.

The jackal may follow the tiger, but, cub, when thy whiskers are grown,
Remember the wolf is a hunter—go forth and get food of thy own.

Keep peace with the lords of the jungle, the tiger, the panther, the bear;
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the boar in his lair.

When pack meets with pack in the jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken; it may be fair words shall prevail.

When ye fight with a wolf of the pack ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel and the pack is diminished by war.

—Rudyard Kipling

[ninaus]

The yes-man in the mirror now says no,
No longer will I answer you with lies.
The light descends like snow, so when the snow-
man melts, you will know him by his eyes.

The yes-man in the mirror now says no.
Says no. No double negative of pity
Will save you now from what I know you know:
These are your eyes, the cinders of your city.

William Jay Smith, A Note on the Vanity Dresser

[Adam Strange]

From Hamlet:

PLAYER QUEEN The instances that second marriage move Are base respects of thrift, but none of love. A second time I kill my husband dead When second husband kisses me in bed.

PLAYER KING I do believe you think what now you speak, But what we do determine oft we break. Purpose is but the slave to memory, Of violent birth, but poor validity, Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be. Most necessary ’tis that we forget To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt. What to ourselves in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy Their own enactures with themselves destroy. Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament. Grief joys, joy grieves on slender accident. This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange That even our loves should with our fortunes change. For ’tis a question left us yet to prove, Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love. The great man down, you mark his favorite flies. The poor advanced makes friends of enemies. And hitherto doth love on fortune tend, For who not needs shall never lack a friend, And who in want a hollow friend doth try, Directly seasons him his enemy. But, orderly to end where I begun, Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown. Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. So think thou wilt no second husband wed, But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.

[Lolita]

Hell is empty and all the devils are here. -The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. -Hannah Arendt


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Computer Loser]

[Aster]

“If you wouldn't go to someone for advice, don't take their criticism either.”

-compassionatereminders via tumblr

read it a while back, but it has stuck with me

[Aster]

“A sparrow, mating with its echo, bred a fledgling music. I was no one’s bride.


Who knows why summer broke my heart that year?”


— Melissa Green

[Adam Strange]

Deep in the heart of summer,
sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter
that hunts on a lonely hill.

- William Sharp

[Tonatiuh]

Magic will not free itself from occultism until we have strangled the last astrologer with the guts of the last spiritual master.

Pete Carroll