The Shattering of Peter's Edifice

The sphincter-trumpets of one hundred Eminences --
All in bright and bloody red --
Announce the cracking of the Rock
Now shattered beyond hope of any re-formation.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.

-- J.M.S.  1907

I was born after madness.  I start from there.  My life is the going-beyond madness; insanity is axiomatic, and I am the theorem.

This by Lucy Russell, granddaughter of Bertrand Russell.  She wrote it in 1970, the year of his death.  On 11 April 1975, at age 26, she committed suicide, by self-immolation, in a rural English churchyard.

Wind Advisory, Galway City, Wed 25 April 2018, 6:30 GMT


A rare April sunrise in Galway City during which the sun can actually be seen.  But the Old Man quickly rises into a bank of clouds in the East, and other clouds now race in from the West.  And the waves break over the base of the black and white obelisk that guides mariners away from a shoal that lies to windward today, and on most days, of an island that is centered in the Bay.

Whether and to what extent the obelisk is being pummeled -- that's the wind advisory for the day.

The verse below was written by Susan Lindsay Russell, the daughter of the poet Vachel Lindsay, who killed himself by drinking Lysol.    It seems to have been written while she was living with her husband John and her father-in-law, who was Bertrand Russell.    There is some speculation that she and Lord Russell, who was approaching 80 at the time, were lovers.  Without doubt, he opened up his inner life to her more than to most others in the family circle, more than to most of his (other?) lovers --


Sing a song for the swimmers,
who died and died well;
who died and died truly
in death, as in life
finding life's loving truly
in the cold and broken death
of life's last entry
of the last recall
the womb of death most surely
the sweetest womb of all.

TFTD:


Someone surely has written a poem about living in the "extra time" of futbol, the time of desperation and crumbling hopes.

"In the beginning was the Word,
 And the Word was with God,
 And the Word WAS God."


What a mysterious formulation, and one at odds with everything we were otherwise told about the Deity when we were kids.