Wyrmwood (Den the Letter Writing Pest Rides Again)

You may wish to click on this photo to read the letter.

Five Years Florstar

It's been five years Florstar. Where have the years gone my old friend? Somewhere you might know? I don’t doubt. Something you are privy to now but can't shout through the curtain can't make down the line. No sight, no reception just memories and the eternal eddy of dust that curls upon itself where you last trod and the dread waves that smashed upon that same floor and rolled out the door and in ever widening circles, till everyone knew...and diminishing returns. But enough of this writer feeling sorry for himself and say something in celebration Den. Well...Maxie's team got smashed last night and he had a reasonable shocker, as did his young colleague Dane. Typical Max, annoyed at being dead I suppose. Although I'm sure he'd be bigger than that now and admonish me for such small thinking, whilst patting me on the back for burning him for a joke and year of years of personal script, secret hidden meanings and private jokes that he tried to take mainstream, but never could wax the rubicon...you just weren’t meant for these times old son and yet you made them better and more fun whilst you were.
Love Always,
Den

Brief Brawling Day

"The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about, was happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I can’t eat!" but, "I can’t work!"--that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man--that he cannot work,--that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly away, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished, vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: "not of the slightest consequence" whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical meat-jack with hard labour and rust. But our work,behold, that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains--for endless times and eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us for evermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-light, is gone, and divine everlasting Night, with her star diadems, with her silence and her veracities, is come!

Thomas Carlyle

(With thanks to Sebastian Marshall)

Photo Copyright 2014 R.Denham Carr

Ineffable

- Bob Drabble

Untitled Study

Angel of History

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

 Walter Benjamin -- "On the Concept of History"

 

Amongst the Detritus...

Problems For Elementary Physics

This Edition published in Sydney, Australia in 1958.

Rudy Hang On

42.8 Degrees Celsius.

Click to view photos at Picasa

42.8C.

"42.8C" Was a spontaneous idea I had whilst living in Brunswick during the first and most intense heat wave of Melbourne's 2013-2014 Summer. I thought I'd go for a 30 minute walk around Brunswick, near Sydney road, and photo anything I saw that might feed into my visual essay of the heatwave. It was 42.8 degrees circa 6pm on 14-1-14. The order the photos appear is the order that I came across them whilst walking,(Except the two photo/images that I added from the newspapers of course). 42.8C is 109.04F for my American peoples.

Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor...

Henry Rollins "Music cannot be mastered"

"Music cannot be mastered. What they think is control and mastery is not only hubris but even worse, it is Music’s great indifference. Simply put, Music no longer plays them. Music has moved on to more worthy combatants. Thankfully, Music is but one of myriad beasts with which to tangle, and in this kind of conflict, age is meaningless. Life is short. When one beast dumps you, summon the guts to find another. If it tries to kill you, the party has definitely started. Otherwise, life is a slow retirement.To each their own. This is how I am running my show."

-- Henry Rollins 2013

Spiritually Muscular

"What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle . . . becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose — they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.”  

Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge.

Prescience

Ypres. Cloth Hall. Circa 1915.

“Ten million lives were lost to the world in the last war, and they say that 70 million pounds was spent in the preliminary bombardment in the Battle of Ypres; before any infantry had left their trenches.
The weight of ammunition fired in the first few weeks of that battle amounted to 480 thousand tons…
I do not believe that represents the best use the world can be expected to make of its brains and its resources.
I prefer to believe that the majority of people in the world in these days think that war hurts everybody and benefits nobody —except the profiteers—and it settles nothing.
As one who has passed pretty well half a century in the study and practice of war; I suggest to you that you should give your support to Disarmament and so do your best to ensure the promotion of peace.”

— British Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson speaking at Albert Hall, London 11^th July 1931.

Cratered landscape of Verdun

Mount St Helens

Photos by John V. Christiansen taken from Mount Adams looking out on Mount St Helens at the moment that she erupted.  These photos originally featured in the January 1981 edition of National Geographic. It took me ages to find these pictures. It was surprisingly tough considering how spellbinding they are. A kindly chap via the Mount St Helens FB page eventually put me onto them. Words that come to mind here: Shock wave, awe and timing...oh and love...for some reason.

Write Club

After writing, everything else in your life has the volume turned down.

I am, you are, we are Agar

Lorum Ipsum Dolor

Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean by Gustave Dore.


This is simply dummy interesting,
because occasionally circumstances occur
in which toil and pain can procure a great
sum--
To take a trivial example, which of us exercise,
untrammeled and when nothing physical from the selection below.

We currently have in the train,
find fault with pleasure to be,
that produces no resultant online application,
It so account of the system,
they are at fault to leave,
We will definitely change.

The Secret History of Our Enemies

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility"

 - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mit Flügeln, die gewohnt Singe.

In the haze in the gloom and in every other room 

there's a blue central maze 
from the War and its days. 

Makes me want to cry and watch you go get high. 

Makes us want to fly off buildings in the sky -- 

With wings that wont singe.