"Nothing" by The Fugs

 

The Fugs first album, 1965

Monday, nothing
Tuesday, nothing
Wednesday and Thursday nothing
Friday, for a change
a little more nothing
Saturday once more nothing

Sunday nothing
Monday nothing
Tuesday and Wednesday nothing
Thursday, for a change
a little more nothing
Friday once more nothing

Montik gornisht,
Dinstik Gornisht
Midwoch an Donnerstik gornisht
Fritik, far a noveneh gornisht pikveleh
Shabas nach a mool gornisht

Lunes nada
Martes nada
Miercoles y Jueves nada
Viernes, por cambia
un poco mas nada
Sabado otra vez nada

January nothing
February nothing
March and April nothing
May and June
a lot more nothing
July nothing

'29 nothing
'32 nothing
'39, '45 nothing
1965 a whole lot of nothing
1966 nothing

reading nothing
writing nothing
even arithmetic nothing
geography, philosophy, history, nothing
social anthropology a lot of nothing

oh, Village Voice nothing
New Yorker nothing
Sing Out and Folkways nothing
Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg
nothing, nothing, nothing

poetry nothing
music nothing
painting and dancing nothing
The world's great books
a great set of nothing
Audy and Foudy nothing

fucking nothing
sucking nothing
flesh and sex nothing
Church and Times Square
all a lot of nothing
nothing, nothing, nothing

Stevenson nothing
Humphrey nothing
Averell Harriman nothing
John Stuart Mill nil, nil
Franklin Delano nothing

Karl Marx nothing
Engels nothing
Bakunin and Kropotkin nothing
Leon Trotsky lots of nothing
Stalin less than nothing

nothing nothing nothing nothing
lots and lots of nothing
nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing
lots of it
nothing!
Not a God damn thing

"In The Fields" by Charlotte Mew

 

Lord when I look at lovely things which pass,

Under old trees the shadow of young leaves

Dancing to please the wind along the grass,

Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves;

Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?

And if there is

Will the heart of any everlasting thing

Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent

of hay.

Over the fields. They come in spring.

On impermanence

 

The thing is to accept (and even like) the very thing about life that upsets one the most because we are moving irreconcilably to death. And that is the impermanence of life. We can't freeze life to when we were most happy. We continue on and on and then we reflect on the past, on when we were happy but, perhaps, didn't know it. We weren't self-conscious in our happiness. It doesn't work that way; we think back, we're nostalgic creatures, and we fix on a time when we were most happy, or we think we were. We fight our emotions and ideas of self-reproachment, we beat them down! Why are we even having them? Because self-reproachment is an act of depression and we live with more or less mild depression all of the time. And we remember the past and wish we could live on an island of unself-consciousness and unreflected happiness. Is it a hallucination? Does it make any sense? We are sad, we grieve for what we had. We hate impermanence. And we are too old to suffer more impermanence, more change. What to do? What to do? 

                                                                                        16 April 2023

"Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud" by John Donne

 

At Mount Royal Cemetery, 2016

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

"The Cold Green Element" by Irving Layton

 

Irving Layton and Stephen Morrissey, 1997 

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

                until I go there,

but the black-hatted undertaker

 

who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,

is also going there. Hi, I tell him,

a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet

                out of the water,

who now hangs from the city’s gates.

 

Crowds depart daily to see it, and return

with grimaces and incomprehension;

if its limbs twitched in the air

                they would sit at its feet

peeling their oranges.

 

And turning over I embrace like a lover

the trunk of a tree, one of those

for whom the lightning was too much

                and grew a brilliant

hunchback with a crown of leaves.

 

The ailments escaped from the labels

of medicine bottles are all fled to the wind;

I’ve seen myself lately in the eyes

                of old women,

spent streams mourning my manhood,

 

in whose old pupils the sun became

a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves

and hanging from ancient twigs,

                my murdered selves

sparked the air like the muted collisions

 

of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,

a black dog with yellow eyes;

he too by someone’s inadvertence

                saw the bloodsmear

on the broad catalpa leaves.

 

But the furies clear a path for me to the worm

who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,

and misled by the cries of young boys

                I am again

a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.

Alexis Nihon Plaza in April 2010

 Photographs of Alexis Nihon Plaza, taken in April 2010, downtown Montreal.

Return of the crows

Summery weather has arrived, early this year, it's been +20 - +25 C since last Friday, and I've been outside raking the grass of last winter's debris; litter, dirt, twigs, some fast food wrappings, all of it collected in the snow over the last four or five months of winter. Fresh air, blue sky, birds singing, plants coming up, buds on trees and bushes, and a feeling of renewal, and genuine renewal, and how quickly we forget what we've just been through: a long winter, short days, heating bills. One of the first things I did when this good weather arrived was put water in the bird bath and almost right away there was a crow visiting, usually in the morning. Perhaps this is the time, in the spring, when crows visit the most, not only for a drink of water but to soak their food in water, and after they leave there are peculiar white stringy things they've found in the garbage at a local Chinese restaurant. Later there will be more birds at the bird bath; however, crows are always welcome and are certainly entertaining. 

Photos taken from our dining room window with an IPhone.

Added photos

Historical photos of the Alexis Nihon Plaza

Looking at these old photographs of the Alexis Nihon Plaza I am flooded with memories, all of them happy. The literally hundreds of times I passed through the Plaza, the stores that used to be here that I had forgotten about, the people, and what store replaced a different store in the Plaza. This shopping complex is always immaculate and well maintained. Canadian poet, Louis Dudek, lived on Ingleside Avenue which is within walking distance of the Plaza; he often visited the Plaza and invited many of us to have coffee with him in the food court here. 

1967

Aerial view of the Alexis Nihon Plaza, looking up Atwater Street

This photograph shows the site of the future Alexis Nihon Plaza when it was
a baseball park; you can see the Mother House in the background on the right

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, born on this day in 1825

From the library of Canada's website:

Born in Ireland in 1825, Thomas D’Arcy McGee was a poet, journalist, author, Irish patriot, Canadian politician and Father of Confederation. Forced to flee the country of his birth, he immigrated to the United States in 1848, then settled in Montréal in 1857. He was originally a strong advocate for Irish rebellion against the British, but his stance changed over the years to pushing for peaceful reforms. McGee was first elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada in 1857, where he became a vocal supporter of Confederation. He was assassinated on April 7, 1868, in Ottawa, and was given Canada’s first state funeral.

One of our greatest Canadians, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, was born on this day, 13 April 1825, in Carlingford, Ireland. 

Photographs of Thomas D'Arcy McGee's mausoleum

When I used to visit Cote des Neiges Cemetery (and adjoining Mount Royal Cemetery), both located in the center of Montreal on Mount Royal, I would visit Thomas D'Arcy McGee's mausoleum. Over the years I visited McGee's final resting place any number of times, it was part of my itinerary when I visited both cemeteries. Here are some photographs of McGee's mausoleum at Cote des Neiges Cemetery; these are photographs I took between 2012 to 2018 and others that interested me. 

Thomas D'Arcy McGee

God bless you, Mr. McGee.

Death of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 7 April 1868

On this day, 7 April 1868, almost a year after Canadian Confederation, Thomas D'Arcy McGee was assassinated in Ottawa. There was an incredible outpouring of grief, he was well known as a politician working towards Confederation and he was one of Sir John A. Macdonald's closest friends. McGee was assassinated outside of his rooming house, located within walking distance of Parliament in Ottawa; his funeral in Montreal was the largest funeral for a Canadian politician, statesman, and poet.

The funeral cortege in Montreal, 1868

Wanted poster for the assassin of Thomas D'Arcy McGee

The funeral cortege in Montreal, 1868

McGee mausoleum at Cote des Neiges Cemetery, 2015

Notman photograph of McGee's Mausoleum, 1926

McGee's mausoleum, 2015

McGee's mausoleum, November 2015

McGee's mausoleum, November 2015

Stephen Morrissey outside of Thomas D'Arcy McGee's mausoleum, winter 2015

At McGee's Mausoleum, 2012