souls of song

  

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Remember when our songs were just like prayers.
Like gospel hymns that you called in the air.
Come down come down sweet reverence,
Unto my simple house and ring...
And ring

Ring like silver, ring like gold
Ring out those ghosts on the Ohio
Ring like clear day wedding bells
Were we the belly of the beast or the sword that fell...
We’ll never tell

Come to me clear and cold on some sea
Watch the world spinning waves, like that machine

Now I’ve been crazy couldn’t you tell
I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
Now I’m covered up in straw, belly up on the table
Well I drank and sang, and passed in the stable.

That tall grass grows high and brown,
Well I dragged you straight in the muddy ground
And you sent me back to where I roam
Well I cursed and I cried, but now i know...
now I know

And I ran back to that hollow again
The moon was just a sliver back then
And I ached for my heart like some tin man
When it came oh it beat and it boiled and it rang...
oh it's ringing

Ring like crazy, ring like hell
Turn me back into that wild haired gale
Ring like silver, ring like gold
Turn these diamonds straight back into coal

—Gregory Alan Isakov

The Stable Song 

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Of what is the body made?
It is made of emptiness and rhythm.

At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance. At the unimaginable heart of the atom, the compact nucleus, we have found no solid object, but rather a dynamic pattern of tightly confined energy vibrating perhaps 1022 times a second: a dance …


—George Leonard
Wake Up and Laugh!

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Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, night, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.


—Ezra Pound
Cino, Personae: The Shorter Poems

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The Great Learning, excerpts

    

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The Great Way has no gate; there are a thousand paths to it.

If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone.  

—Wu-Men

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Wanting equilibrium in the empire, that light which comes from looking straight into her and acting, they first set up good government in their own states.

Wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart); wishing to obtain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories. 

When things had been classified in organic categories, knowledge moved toward fulfillment; given the extreme knowable points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with precision (the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally).

Having obtained this precise verbal definition (aliter, this sincerity), they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having obtained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when their states were well governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium.

From the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root.

If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed. The solid cannot be swept away as trivial, nor can trash be established as solid. It just does not happen.


—Confucius
Ezra Pound version

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