One Inch Rock: Issa's Sunday Service, #154

 

In case of wonky widget, Drink Me

 

What could be more natural for the Sunday Service and Lilliput Review than "The One Inch Rock?"  Hard to believe I've been doing this all these years and have missed it until now. It would seem that the moral of this tale is don't mess with the Liquid Poetess: 

 

The One Inch Rock
 

Met a woman she's spouting prose
She's got luggage eyes and a roman nose
Her body is slung from side to side
Need a lift she said much obliged
I'm riding piggy-back
Then I come to her shack
We go inside the place is a mess
She said my name's the Liquid Poetess
She unties her mouth
And her buckskin dress
She drinks from a bottle
labeled tenderness
I'm in one hand in the other's a can
She puts me in the can
And smiles through the wall
I got the horror's cos I'm one inch tall
Next thing I know's a girl by my side
Dressed in a bayleaf she's trying to hide
I asked her name she said Germaine
Do the rock do the one inch rock.

This naturally put me in mind of a couple of things, first being The Incredible Shrinking Man. Here's a montage of clips from the fantastic film version of Richard Matheson's novel, kind of oddly set to the song "No New Tale to Tell" by Love and Rockets. 



   

And here's some more shrinking (and growing) from the 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland, oddly set once more this time to the tune of a Django Reinhart's "Improvisation." 

 

     

Finally, of course, there's Gulliver's Lilliput, courtesy of Dean Swift and, in this case a parcel of animators, from the 1939 full screen version of Gulliver's Travels, which you can watch in its entirety (do notice the Hokusai influenced waves at the beginning) here:

 

       

-----------

Wood block by Hokusai

Little snail

climb Mount Fuji,

but slowly, slowly

Issa
translated by Robert Hass

best,
Don

   

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 154 songs

Robinson Jeffers: Antiwar Poems

Robinson Jeffers was the Walt Whitman of misanthropy (I am told the correct term is inhumanism. What then might be the correct tone?). When he embraced the void, it was no simile and there was no echo. For Jeffers, Swift's A Modest Proposal ... was, perhaps, too good, too late. If Beckett has him beat in the hopelessness department, it's only by a short, curly one.

But enough with hyperbole. Jeffers loved nature, rocks, cliffs, the sea, hawks; man he, perhaps, could take or leave (can someone be an occasional misanthropist?). He certainly wasn't much impressed with our achievements. And ultimately it cost him, losing his early hard earned fame in the politics of nationalism.

Because of all these things, he doesn't make your average poetry readers' top ten list (or top 190, for that matter). There doesn't seem to be any danger that The Library of America will be calling anytime soon. It just so happens, however, that Jeffers was one of the finest American poets of the 20th century and yesterday was the anniversary of his birth. Poets.org notes that "Jeffers verse, much of which was set in the Carmel/Big Sur region, celebrates the awesome beauty of coastal hills and ravines that plunged into the Pacific." The website features three of his poems: Carmel Point, Rock and Hawk, and Summer Holiday, which are representative of much of his shorter work.

I'd like, however, to take a different approach. I'd like to remember him for his anti-war stance that cost him his popularity and, perhaps, some of the depth of what might have been his posthumous reputation.

The Soul's Desert

They are warming up the old horrors, and all that they
-----say is echoes of echoes.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little jour-
-----nalists, but the governments
Of the great nations; men favorably
Representative of massed humanity. Observe them.
-----Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned each person to enter his own
-----soul's desert
And look for God—having seen man.



The Bloody Sire

It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values.

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.

Who would remember Helen's face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence, the bloody sire of all the world's values.

Never weep, let them play,
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.




Their Beauty Has More Meaning

Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the
-----ocean,
Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn;
The night herons flapping home wore dawn on their
-----wings. Today
Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky,
And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day
-----is more beautiful.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it
-----does not hurt.
They will be here. And when the whole human race
Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here:
-----storms, moon and ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty
-----has more meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds.



And, finally, now, pilgrims, here's a little bit of parting advice:



Advice to Pilgrims

That our senses lie and our minds trick us is true, but in
-----general
They are honest rustics; trust them a little;
The senses more than the man, and your own mind more
-----than another man's.
As to the mind's pilot, intuition—
Catch him clean and stark naked, he is the first of truth-
-----tellers; dream-clothed, or dirty
With fears and wishes, he is prince of liars.
The first fear is of death: trust no immortalist. The first
-----desire
Is to be loved: trust no mother's son.
Finally I say let demagogues and world redeemers bab-
-----ble their emptiness
To empty ears; twice duped is too much.
Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and
-----wave are good prophets;
Wise are the wings of the gull, pleasant her song.

Robinson Jeffers

Twice duped, indeed.



best,
Don

New Website, New Index, Proust, A Modest Proposal & More.

Artwork by Tom Blessing

Lots new at Lilliput Review this week, but first a tip of the hat to the patron saint of Lilliput, Jonathan Swift (no one seems to have done a decent Swiftian homepage - any takers?). This past week saw the anniversary of Swift's birth, which is the perfect occasion to reacquaint ourselves with his satirical work that continues to resonate painfully in the 21st century: A Modest Proposal. If you don't have the time to read it, listen to or download the mp3 of the LibriVox version here.







If you clicked the Lilliput link here or above, you will see that there is a brand new homepage. Since jettisoning the Tripod blog and webpage, my life has become considerably easier. In both the new webpage and blog, there are no pop-ups, no ads, no bs. Enjoy and let me know what you think.







Even bigger news is a brand new index to issues #'s 1-158 of Lilliput producer by the poet, editor and indexer, M. Kei. This is a wonderful tool that covers all of Lilliput's first 18 years of publication and, in the pdf format, is searchable by author, title and keyword. I am incredibly grateful to M. Kei for all his input and very hard work, indeed.







This week I ran across an interesting new book, Proust As A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer investigates the anticipation of scientific findings in the arts, dealing individually with, among others, Whitman, Cezanne and Proust (be sure not to miss the "Summarize Proust" page at the Proust site, wherein various readers summarize In Search of Lost Time in 5 words or less, with Monthy Python's original premise duly noted. The chapter on Proust is a revelation and, via his premise, cuts to the essence of In Search of Lost Time, his masterwork. From that chapter:





"Neuroscience now knows that Proust was right. Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown has shown - in a science paper wittily entitled "Testing the Proustian Hypothesis" - that our senses of smell and taste are uniquely sentimental. This is because smell and taste are the only sense that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our other senses (sight, touch, and hearing) are first processed by the thalmus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past."





Another great, very odd find this week is Invisible Republic. I stumbled on this while searching for Charles Mingus' autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. It is an amazing, free mix of music, spoken word and politics. Check it out. You won't be disappointed.





Finally, it's on to the tour of Lilliput back issues, this time round it is #132. At the head of this post you will see artwork by Tom Blessing from this issue. Some poems follow:





"speak low"
kurt weill is still
here when we need him,

for it's an even longer
time from may until
never.

~ Gerald Locklin





Window shade drawn
to the grey autumn rain ...
a lamp silhouettes a moth

~ Rebecca Lily






Endless October
a maze of centuries
and only my nose bleeds

~ Phoebe Reeves





And finally, from the Irish poet Giovanni Malito, who died too soon:


lone blackbird
in the far away sky
-- all of it

~ Giovanni Malito






Until next time, Don .