Thoughtful Thursday

There have been many a lazy day of summer (and autumn, and winter, and spring) when I'm pottering around, and the guitar playing of Duke 1 trickles down through the floorboards.

At first, I admit, I was mightily irked by the intrusion into my elusive quiet.

Over the years, though, it has become ambient noise - the notes rise and fall, and land in our ears, light as breath itself and in rhythm with our hearts.

I can't even begin to imagine how empty my precious quiet will be going forward.

Today, a poem for one of my most beloved songs.

As he begins to go.

Commission by Ezra Pound

Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-racked, go the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,
Go to the women in suburbs.
Go to the hideously wedded,
Go to them whose failure is concealed,
Go to the unluckily mated,
Go to the bought wife,
Go to the woman entailed.

Go to those who have delicate lust,
Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,
Go like a blight upon the dullness of the world;
Go with your edge against this,
Strengthen the subtle cords,
Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.

Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
Be eager to find new evils and new good,
Be against all forms of oppression.
Go to those who are thickened with middle age,
To those who have lost their interest.

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family -
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotting and falling.

Go out and defy opinion,
Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.
Be against all sorts of mortmain*.



* mortmain: the influence of the past regarded as controlling the present