Mr. Crow is Eating Lunch

 

I made this video yesterday and put it online last night; Mr. Crow is looking for a good time! 

"In Memoriam", ["Ring out, wild bells"], Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

"Madame George" by Van Morrison

Down on Cyprus Avenue
With a childlike vision slipping into view
The click and clacking of the high-heeled shoe
Ford and Fitzroy, and Madame George

Marching with the soldier boy behind
He's much older now with hat on, drinking wine
And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through
Oh, the cool night air like Shalimar

And outside they're making all the stops
The kids out in the street collecting bottle tops
Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops
Happy taking Madame George

Whoa, that's when you fall
Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, that's when you fall
Yeah, that's when you fall

When you fall into a trance
A-sitting on a sofa playing games of chance
With your folded arms and history books you glance
Into the eyes of Madame George

And you think you found the bag
You're getting weaker and your knees begin to sag
In a corner, playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madame George

Then from outside the frosty window raps
She jumps up and says, "Lord, have mercy, I think that it's the cops"
And immediately drops everything she gots
Down into the street below

And you know you gotta go
On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below
And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow

Say goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Wo-oh-oh

And as you leave, the room is filled with music
Laughing, music, dancing, music all around the room
And all the little boys come around, walking away from it all
So cold

And as you're about to leave
She jumps up and says, "Hey love, you forgot your glove"
And the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love, to love the gloves

To say goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Dry your eyes for Madame George

Say goodbye
In the wind and the rain on the backstreet
In the backstreet, in the backstreet
Say goodbye to Madame George

In the backstreet, in the backstreet, in the backstreet
Well, well, down home, down home in the backstreet

Gotta go

Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Dry your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Say goodbye to Madame George
And the love that loves to love, that loves to love, that loves to love
The love that loves the love to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, hey, to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Ah, the love that loves, the love that loves to love
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train
Get on the train, the train, the train, the train, the train, oh, darlin'
This is the train, this is the train, darlin'
This is the train

Whoa, say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train, get on the train

“Before The Beginning Of Years" by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and the drift of the sea;
And dust of the laboring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south,
They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein,
A time for labor and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and space for delight,
And beauty, and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.”

―Algernon Charles Swinburne

Henry David Thoreau on Walking

 

We walked in so pure and bright a light... I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium,and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

                --From "Walking" by Henry Thoreau; 1862

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

                --"What Shall It Profit?", Henry David Thoreau, 1854

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

        --Walden (1854), "Solitude", Henry David Thoreau 

Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell after reading 1984

George Grant discusses what have become the two main expressions of a future dystopian western society, you can find this in Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965); these two concepts of our collective western future are found in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell's vision in 1984 is frightening, it is the division of the world into conflicting sectors that maintain power by oppressing and controlling their citizens. It is Huxley's idea of the future, equally dystopian, that Grant thought we were moving toward; it is control of the population by psychotropic drugs, compulsive free sex, and instant gratification and constant pleasure. We already have constantly changing technology and inexpensive consumer good that keep the public satisfied, complacent, and docile. The entertainment industry is a main component in keeping people complacent and ignorant; entertainment isn't art, it is mind control; not many people are interested in contemporary "art" which promotes contemporary liberal values. While many commentators agree with Huxley's idea of a hedonistic future, and not with Orwell's future of government micro-managing everyone's thinking and behaviour, it seems most likely that our future will be a combination of the two dystopias; this is our future.

Here is Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell written after reading 1984.

Note: I have just been flipping through my copy of George Grant's Lament for a Nation and I can't find this reference to either Huxley or Orwell. I must have read it elsewhere but I still believe it was Grant's opinion. 30 March 2026

Wrightwood. Cal.

21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

On 13 April 2012, Jung Society of Montreal lecture

 

The closed food court at Alexis Nihon Plaza, next door to where
the Jung Society of Montreal lectures were held

On 12 April 2012, out walking

Not dead yet

 

I’m not dead yet

said the mouse to the cat

(March 2026)

-o-

The glory of a single bee

Buzzing by so merrily,

Enhances garden, flower, house

Charms the silly garden mouse

(1970?)

Hubert Darrell and Darrell Morrisey, the Two Darrells

 

Anyone following my work knows of my interest in the "forgotten" Beaver Hall Group artist Darrell Morrisey. I thought that I had written what I wanted to say about Darrell Morrisey and then I read Adam Shoalts's Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell and I
realized that a little more needed to be said on Darrell Morrisey. Hubert Darrell, who explored and mapped parts of Canada's far north, is the son of Charles Darrell after whom, coincidentally, Darrell Morrisey was named. In 1890 Hubert Darrell moved to Birtle, Manitoba and several years later he began his exploration and mapping of Canada's far north. Darrell Morrisey was an artist and member of the prestigious Beaver Hall Group of artists. The two Darrells never met and, tragically, they both died young, but they lived true to their inner calling, one that was far removed from the expectations of their families and social class. Here is the essay, THE TWO DARRELLS, HUBERT DARRELL AND DARRELL MORRISEY.

Chateau on Mount Royal, 04 April 2012

 

"Dog" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

Dog on balcony, 11 October 2020

The dog trots freely in the street

and sees reality

and the things he sees

are bigger than himself

and the things he sees

are his reality

Drunks in doorways

Moons on trees

The dog trots freely thru the street

and the things he sees

are smaller than himself

Fish on newsprint

Ants in holes

Chickens in Chinatown windows

their heads a block away

The dog trots freely in the street

and the things he smells

smell something like himself

The dog trots freely in the street

past puddles and babies

cats and cigars

poolrooms and policemen

He doesn’t hate cops

He merely has no use for them

and he goes past them

and past the dead cows hung up whole

in front of the San Francisco Meat Market

He would rather eat a tender cow

than a tough policeman

though either might do

And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory

and past Coit’s Tower

and past Congressman Doyle

He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower

but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle

although what he hears is very discouraging

very depressing

very absurd

to a sad young dog like himself

to a serious dog like himself

But he has his own free world to live in

His own fleas to eat

He will not be muzzled

Congressman Doyle is just another

fire hydrant

to him

The dog trots freely in the street

and has his own dog’s life to live

and to think about

and to reflect upon

touching and tasting and testing everything

investigating everything

without benefit of perjury

a real realist

with a real tale to tell

and a real tail to tell it with

a real live

              barking

                         democratic dog

engaged in real

                      free enterprise

with something to say

                             about ontology

something to say

                        about reality

                                        and how to see it

                                                               and how to hear it

with his head cocked sideways

                                       at streetcorners

as if he is just about to have

                                       his picture taken

                                                             for Victor Records

                                  listening for

                                                   His Master’s Voice

                      and looking

                                       like a living questionmark

                                                                 into the

                                                              great gramaphone

                                                           of puzzling existence

                 with its wondrous hollow horn

                         which always seems

                     just about to spout forth

                                                      some Victorious answer

                                                              to everything