That Time That Was

There had never been anything like it in history . . . until it happened:

America, in victorious optimism after that “Second” world war.

I mean, the “First” world war was just a warmup apocalypse for what came in 1939-45.

It seemed, in the ’40’s, that the krauts had not learned their lesson, which they should have learned in 1918. Two decades later, the Beast spirit took a hold of a lunatic corporal who dragged the world, for the second time, into hell-on-earth for half a decade. 

Then our guys, under the leadership of Eisenhower, Patton, McArthur and thousands of other brave soldier who went over to the Continent of our cultural heritage and ran them third-reich nazis back into their holes, in the ground or into the judgements of History in a Nuremberg trial and, and . . .

And then, there we were sittin’ on top of the world, "one nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All!,  victorious from Normandy to Potsdam to the Philippines, all the way over to Pearl Harbor, where, for us, it had all started on that fateful day of infamy. . . back in '41 it was. And then four years of hell on (European and Pacific) earth. 

And then it happened happened: The Golden Age. California! Hollywood, Broadway, batons twirling in the air on Main Street from sea to shining sea. . . Ike, TV,  Davy Crockett, Micky and Minnie, Ozzie and Harriet, Superman, Elvis, Nat King Cole, Louie Armstrong, Motown,  Kennedy: “Let them come to Berlin”. . . to see the difference between the way WE do things and the way THEY do things! Later, Reagan challenged Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall.   And then they tore down their damn wall.

With a little help from the Brits we discovered a new strain of English poetry, set to the thumpin’ beat of this new thing called Rock ’n Roll, which the Fab Four had borrowed from our good ole boys . . .

Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, reflecting ancient African strains of laboring black fingers  a-pluckin’ the future of popular music out of a six-stringed, woman-shaped box with a hole and a neck on it, vibrating blue notes sung and plucked by the field-worn magic hands of many a long-gone Miss’ippi sharecropper somewhere down in the delta.

And then, and then, after the big war . . . as brother Don sang it. . . “there we were, all in one place, a generation lost in space. . .

Space! Imagine that! John Glenn . . . Neil Armstrong,Yeah! I remember!

America! We hardly knew ye!  Oh, wait! You’re still here. Let’s celebrate, American style! Wanna dance?!  Get started with kingofkungfu!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtIl1CGRu4M 

Glass half-Full 

The Arcane Conundrum

Erotica is nice and surely will suffice

while Esoterica glimmers through History’s roll of the dice;

History’s luck of the draw rolls up random events

ever since our ancestors lived in tents.

Yet some ancient wind of prescient detection

seems to accompany certain adventures of erection.

As men’s adventures grow up and harden

children are born through woman’s garden.

All of which cultivates that famous spice of life

bringing relief from our long trail of strife. 

A tale is told, although I comprehend it not

Of how in ancient times wise men begot

a scriptive tale of what men forgot

As Life’s challenges demanded interventions,

men lost site of their best intentions.

Even so

on with the show:

as billy shears sang twenty years ago

Or whatever;

nobody’s forever.

But I digress;

now I regress.

As I was saying:

before the watchers’ braying,

People brought forth wisdom with invention.

although we know not their intentions.

Blake came along with a glimmer

as he did catch a signal from Swedenborgian splendor.

Nostradamus surely had an esoteric handle

shining brightly within history’s long-lit candle.

Some say his prescience was born of akashic wonder

even as his quatrains sounded historic thunder. 

Blavatsky’s illumination of those akashic glimmerings

seemed somehow to cast up of esoteric shimmerings. 

As knowledge grew and push came to shove

historians donned their analytical gloves;

Although the solid grounds of historical enquiry

don’t hold a candle to Esoterica’s querkic diary.

Perhaps the tale of the Western quest,

which expanded with each historian guest

Began with Enoch’s un-canonic book

by which he was permitted to look

Into the arcane realm.

Who’s at the helm?

Wouldn’t we like to know!

I don’t really wanna stop the show

so I though y’all might like to know:

What’s going on down under you?

is it old hat or deja vu?

Guided by the Captain of our Souls

or the Joker with a million holes?

I mean Blavatsky took the dark side

and as each traveler came along to ride

He or she had to decide

to accept humility or amp up pride.

This is no new thing, you understand:

whether to heed self-will or divine command.

What you do with what you know

to reveal for Lord or flaunt your show.

In days of Old, Daniel knew his own allegiance,

to discern the side of Watcher angels’ obeisance.

Whether the Messenger’s servitude was Light

or whether ’t’was of the darkened blight.

As for Nostradamus’ path of Bright or dim . . .

still trying to make up my mind about him.

Selah.

Glass Chimera 

The Old Tree and the New Search

While I am getting old, we do have a granddaughter who is quite new (5) to this world. A few days ago, we were in Fort Lauderdale with her on a pirate ship.

Yes, a Pirate Ship is in the harbor there where you can cruise around for an hour and be amused by the monologue of Captain Black Sparrow and his sidekick Neverland Jack. It was fabulous. I wouldn't trade it for a davy jones locker full of fake doubloons.

I thought about those two Pirates, because, as I was about to write this essay, which would be about springtime and an old tree that Tolstoy mentioned in War and Peace, I had to turn to Google for a reference or two.

So, there I am, one little googly pirate-plundering maneuver after another, trolling online  for some literary treasure of buried information . . . whereupon I was guided by Sergy and Larry’s magic wand to the information for which I was searching.

I found it in the New Yorker, Nov 2007, in an article, Movable Types.  In the course of his long article about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, James Wood provided an exact quote of the scene I was looking for. 

The snippet of memory in my mind that had propelled my search to this point of world memory was a scene in which Prince Andrei sees something very special (and this is the phrase I remember from the War and Peace move) a “tree with which we agreed.”

Here's how Wood illumined Tolstoy's twice-seasoned experience:

“ a great, gnarled oak, surrounded by trees already succumbing to spring. He (Prince Andrei feeling at that moment somewhat depressed) feels like the oak: it seems to say , “Spring, and love, and happiness . . . senseless deception!”. . . But,  returning a month later, he cannot at first identify the oak, because it has leafed out like all the other trees.”

In the story of War Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, feeling defeated, had "agreed" with the old tree when it was hesitating to join in with the younger trees' celebration of spring. But a month later, hey!, even old growths sprout a leaf or two (thousand) when spring time rolls around.   Life goes on, even when we get old and grumpy, haha!

So I did pirate the info and the quote from James Wood, who had discovered it buried in Leo Tolstoy's masterful literary treasure. Such is the Search and the Looting of meaningful blog-prospects in our 21st century web of wonder. Read 'em and weep for appreciation!

Glass half-Full 

Two Prophetic Paths?

 Messages future/past had come to Nostradamus

Casting quatrains of mystery among us, 

with glimmerings from some akashic world

where, among the stars unfurled

a tale is told both future/past

with mystery as to what comes first or last.

I’m just perplexed at this movie screen

that seems so real and yet, a dream

but revealing future acts

as if they were ancient facts

laying quite a puzzle upon my mind

about this riddling mystery called “Time.”

Is it front or is it back?

Is it potential or is it fact?

How a prophet could discern future deeds

performed by men of their own free will,

not determined by some pre-set bill?

On the esoteric side there’s Nostradamus;

I cannot comprehend his role among us.

How could he pen poems of future acts

that turn out to be historical facts

centuries later! Is time a crater?

Back in the Mosaic Book

’t’was written guard angels were assigned

to guard the gates of Edenic mind

so foolish Man. . . never more could

see the the tree of knowledge, evil and the good.

So I surmise these guard angels still do stand

somewhere to obstruct the deeds of destructive Man.

Maybe so that. . . when we had split the atom

we could not repeat the mistake of Adam

and blow this world to smithereens

even though we do strive for Green

which may be, anyway, just a hopeful dream,

if Vlad the Mad gets too flustered

and launches up a big atom-buster.

 

Two prophetic paths diverged in a darkened world

one cloaked in mystery, the other quite unfurled.

Not wanting to travel both

I chose the path of Faithful oath

to tread the path in Daylight;

and though the deep zodiac be bright

I find comfort in deep sleep at night,

sleep that knits the ravel’d sleeve of care

to soothe the souls that in future acts do dare.

Selah.

Glass half-Full

New Story of The Old

 I have decided to launch into my fifth novel. . .

In bright autumn morning sunshine, Noal descended stairs from his little apartment. The daily street-level traipse of nine blocks brought him through a few downtown streets of the Blue Ridge mountain town of  Ultramont. To Inland Press he would traipse, and his office desk, from whence he would conduct business that would change the world, or at least he liked to think so. A journey of a thousand miles, or a thousand years, has to start somewhere. 

  Walking past that familiar old white clapboard mansion, Noal paused for a moment to ponder, for the umpteenth time, the soft stone face of an angel. 

A hundred or so years ago, Elizabeth Finch—enterprising lady that she was— had been supervising the arrangement of her life-project, Mountain Aire Homestead. She had instructed the gardeners to place the angel in the yard, in front of her little mansion project.

Whenever Noal would amble by the angel, he could not help but retrieve in his mind some age-old memory. Whether the flicker was his own imagination, or some ancestral snippet, retrieved from some person, place or thing of long ago, maybe even far away , he had not yet determined. But hey, who knows about such things? Maybe someone, somewhere, understood. He was still trying to figure it all out. 

Maybe the angel, or the idea of an angel, had drifted down from heaven. God forbid that it might have trummeled up from the nether regions. 

Noal had never seen a real angel anyway, so how could he know? He was not even certain that such a thing as an angel exists. I mean, he had been taught, from an early age, that there was such a thing as an angel. It was known to be the celestial being that had stood, with its angel-twin, just outside the gates of Eden after Adam and Even had been banished because they had screwed up when they heeded the counsel of that frickin’ ole serpent who had been hanging around trying to stir up trouble, before he finally managed to bust through the Elohim hegemony with his apple trick.  

The guard angels, outside the garden, had been assigned from on high.   

Their duty--or so it was written-- was to prevent Adam and Eve from getting back into the special venue, wherein they had been birthed into the physical world, but then later ejected,  in a time so long ago and so far away. But this is a delicate subject.

Yes, 't'was so long ago, and so far away, in a garden far, far away from this place.  Moses had, back in the day, given an account of it.  Noal would be perplexed to find the manner in which he would—or even could—contemplate the ancient account of what had had happened in times past. Furthermore, how, now, could he find, or carve out? a niche of his own in this present arrangement. . . as he was strolling to work that fateful morning.

(to be continued)

King of Soul

The Peril of An Emperor

 Napolean Bonaparte had a nephew, known as Napolean III, who was elected President of France in 1848.

Later, in our modern era, 2001,  historian David Ovason gives an account of Napolean III’s accession to power and his later demise: 1848-1870. 

Ovason’s report on Napolean III is found in chapter 4 of  his book, The Secrets of Nostradamas, published through Harper Collins in 2001.

In chapter 5, David  Ovason wrote:

“When elected to the Presidency, (Napolean III) he swore an oath to remain faithful to the democratic Repubulic, even while working to overthrow this by having himself made Emperor. This aim he achieved by stealth, finally by coup.”

Reporting further, in that book mentioned above, on the Napolean III reign, David Ovason explained more in his book about the course of Napolean III’s destructive leadership among the French people:

“On December 2, 1851, after exertions to ensure that his own conspirator-supporters were established in important positions of power, he carried out his coup, and was declared Emperor a year later. after he was raised to a position where he might exercise that absolute by which he was corrupted even more. . . 

“Napolean changed laws to weaken the positions of the republicans and resorted to wholesale deportation of his political enemies, while his cudgel-bearing secret police, the ratapoils, terrorized the republicans. When the Empire fell (partly due to Napolean III’s incompetence at ((the battle of)) Sedan in 1870), the Bordeaux Assembly recognized the extent of the crimes and tyranny of renard Napolean III, declaring him responsible for the ruin, invasion and dismemberment of France.”

My question:  Does any of this sound relevant to our present situation in America, where we have the original—the very first, in 1776— Republic of the modern Age— a Republic that was founded only 18 years before the original French Republic?

Are we witnessing historical insurrection, Napoleonic style, being repeated in 2024, trumpian style? 

God forbid! Sacre Bleu! May it never be.

Glass half-Full

Riding the Rails of Time

 Way back yonder in time. . . back in the day, the Brits came up with a thing called a railroad. It was a mighty amazing beast.

I mean, it looked like a beast, huffin’ and puffin’ and blowin’ off steam while rollin’ along on a steel rail like nobody had ever seen before. 

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

As time rolled on, their upstart yankee brethren, cousins and heirs in America, joined the great importation of industry into human history; the outcome was a thing called the industrial revolution. There’s a lot could be said about that, but today I’m a-thinkin’ about the railroad’s impact on even older human invention: music

Way back in the annals and the windmills of my baby-boomer memory there’s a whole a train-yard of trains rollin’ through my Rowland memory.

The first one I can remember is “I’ve  been working on the Railroad, all the live-long day. . . Can’t you hear the whistle blowin. . .” Then there’s the juvenile-sounding “Freight train, freight train, goin’ down the track.” 

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

And I remember, back in the day, 1950's, layin’ in bed at night, with  transistor radio tuned into the darkness and here comes the voice of Brook Benton singing “Rainy Night in Georgia”:  he’s hobo’in’ on a boxcar. . .where

"the distant moanin’ of a train seems to send a sad refrain through the night. . .“so I take my guitar”. . . “It’s a rainy night in Georgia. . . Lord, I believe it’s rainin’ all over the world.”

On a lighter note, there’s the ole “Chattanooga Choochoo” from back in ’30’s or somewhere. . . not to mention (although I will) so many other classics: Wreck of the Old ’97, Orange Blossom Special, Wabash Cannonball.

When my generation came along, we were inspired to hear a highly commendable batch of contributions to the rail-song legacy. . . Peter Paul and Mary’s plaintive voice as she so tunefully lamented . . .

. . ."If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.  .  . you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles."

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

 But movin' right along on the American side, I cherish Steve Goodman’s masterpiece, City of New Orleans,  performed so admirably by Arlo Guthrie, after Arlo’s pappy, Woody, had sung, back in the day, a whole car-load of railroad (and other) good ole songs. Later on down the timeline, the Doobie Brothers cranked up their “Long Train Runnin’”, one of the greatest rock rhythms that ever rolled down a songway rail.

 And I shan’t neglect to mention Casey Jones. And what about ole John Henry swingin’ his way into railway history. . . and Tom and Dick Smothers blowin’ comical commentary hot air about the intercontinental railway being joined up at Promontary Point Utah

, where, as brutha Tommy used to tell it, they "drove a big golden spike" to commemorate the Union of East and West by way of the Railway.

Meanwhile, up at the maple leaf coast-to-coast nation, there’s Gordon Lightfoot rollin’ up his absolutely profound Canadian Railroad Trilogy.

I mean, there were so many of them that, long about 1977, I had to roll my contribution into that long train of rail songs. Listen:

Underground Railroad