Two Poems   (December 6, 2008)


As someone who has spent the past three years writing about the inevitable meltdown of the housing/debt bubble we are now experiencing, I know how easy it is to become entranced by data and the "look, a car crash!" syndrome. It's been an exciting three months, but sometimes I tire of the topic and turn to some other ways of understanding the world.

And so today I turn to two of my favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers and Lao Tzu:

Wise Men In Their Bad Hours
by Robinson Jeffers

Wise men in their bad hours have envied
The little people making merry like grasshoppers
In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
Take hold upon the future they do it
Half asleep, with the tools of generation
Foolishly reduplicating
Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too,
Groan against labors, wars and partings,
Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended
The summer insects enviable;
One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery.
Strength and desire possess the future,
The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future
Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers,
Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened nor troubled
And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.



Lao Tzu

People all have more than enough;
I alone seem to have nothing left.
So ignorant! My mind must be that of a dolt.
People are bright and shine;
I am alone am dark and dull.

People are clever and distinctive;
I alone am obscure and blunt.
Desolate, as if in the dark,
Quiet as if concentrating on nothing.

People all have purpose and usefulness;
but I alone am ignorant and uncouth.
I am different from all the others,
but I draw nourishment from the Mother (Tao).

(From Chapters XIX and XX, translated by my old professor, Chang Chung-yuan)


New Fiction by Chris Sullins:

Operation SERF, Part II
(Chris Sullins, December 6, 2008)

It was a half hour after dawn and the early morning light provided enough illumination to the living room via the large broken picture window and open doorway to Eduard Morgan’s home. Mark had regretted allowing his aunt Maria to come back to the home with him to check things out. She was now knees down on the carpet next to Eduard’s body sobbing with her face buried in her hands.

Operation SERF, Part I



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