Chorus
We're occupying Wall Street
and we are not alone;
they took away our paychecks,
they took away our homes;
we're earned our bread and butter
and they give us chicken bones;
Wall Street, we're not going home.
First Stanza
I worked my entire life
and I have a son;
Wall Street took my job away
now he's the only one--
I pleaded, Son, help me,
they're turning off the lights--
Wall Street, that isn't right.
Repeat Chorus
Second Stanza
We bailed you out with money
that was difficult to earn--
You paid yourselves big bonuses
that make the decent squirm--
We're not jealous, oligarchs,
it's OK that you're rich,
we just want some fairness, a house and not a ditch--
Repeat Chorus
Third Stanza
Wall Street has been cheating us
but we have not lost hope;
our message to the people is:
STAND UP AND TAKE NOTE:
Cheaters won't be cheating us
if all the cheated vote--
Wall Street, we can't go home.
Repeat Chorus
--Words and Music by Thomas Dorsett
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZlplhbBI8&list=FL6FwjBfMjjzES-WXyzvwRKg&fea
Monday, October 17, 2011
HOW PAINFUL! MY OWN MOTHER TEARS ME DOWN
I added to myself, stone upon stone
and stood already like a little house
around which greatly day moves, even alone--
Then Mother comes, comes and tears me down.
She tears me down by giving me a stare;
she doesn't see that someone's building there.
She walks directly through my wall of stone--
How painful! My own mother tears me down.
Birds fly with greater ease around my home.
Every stray dog in town knows: that's the one--
Only she is able to ignore
my face's gradually becoming more.
From her to me good weather never came.
She doesn't live where gentle breezes reign.
She stays in her heart's remote hideaway
where Jesus comes to wash her every day.
and stood already like a little house
around which greatly day moves, even alone--
Then Mother comes, comes and tears me down.
She tears me down by giving me a stare;
she doesn't see that someone's building there.
She walks directly through my wall of stone--
How painful! My own mother tears me down.
Birds fly with greater ease around my home.
Every stray dog in town knows: that's the one--
Only she is able to ignore
my face's gradually becoming more.
From her to me good weather never came.
She doesn't live where gentle breezes reign.
She stays in her heart's remote hideaway
where Jesus comes to wash her every day.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
HOW PAINFUL! MY OWN MOTHER TEARS ME DOWN
-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Dorsett
To: Jgratz
Sent: Sat, Oct 15, 2011 5:00 am
Subject: Rilke
Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein.
Da hab ich Stein auf Stein zu mir gelegt,
und stand schon wie ein kleines Haus,
um das sich groß der Tag bewegt,sogar allein.
Nun kommt die Mutter, kommt und reißt mich ein.
Sie reißt mich ein, indem sie kommt und schaut.
Sie sieht es nicht, daß einer baut.
Sie geht mir mitten durch die Wand von Stein.
Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein.
Die Vögel fliegen leichter um mich her.
Die fremden Hunde wissen: das ist der.
Nur einzig meine Mutter kennt es nicht,
mein langsam mehr gewordenes Gesicht.
Von ihr zu mir war nie ein warmer Wind.
Sie lebt nicht dorten, wo die Lüfte sind.
Sie liegt in einem hohen Herz-Verschlag
und Christus kommt und wäscht sie jeden Tag.
Aus: Die Gedichte 1910 bis 1922 (München, 14.10.1915)
How painful! My own mother tears me down.
I added to myself, stone upon stone
and stood already like a little house
around which greatly day moves, even alone--
Then Mother comes, comes and tears me down.
She tears me down by giving me a stare;
she doesn't see that someone's building there.
She walks directly through my wall of stone--
How painful! My own mother tears me down.
Birds fly with greater ease around my home.
Every stray dog in town knows: that's the one--
Only she is able to ignore
my face's gradually becoming more.
From her to me good weather never came.
She doesn't live where gentle breezes reign.
She stays in her heart's refined hideaway
where Christ comes to wash her every day.
From: Thomas Dorsett
To: Jgratz
Sent: Sat, Oct 15, 2011 5:00 am
Subject: Rilke
Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein.
Da hab ich Stein auf Stein zu mir gelegt,
und stand schon wie ein kleines Haus,
um das sich groß der Tag bewegt,sogar allein.
Nun kommt die Mutter, kommt und reißt mich ein.
Sie reißt mich ein, indem sie kommt und schaut.
Sie sieht es nicht, daß einer baut.
Sie geht mir mitten durch die Wand von Stein.
Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein.
Die Vögel fliegen leichter um mich her.
Die fremden Hunde wissen: das ist der.
Nur einzig meine Mutter kennt es nicht,
mein langsam mehr gewordenes Gesicht.
Von ihr zu mir war nie ein warmer Wind.
Sie lebt nicht dorten, wo die Lüfte sind.
Sie liegt in einem hohen Herz-Verschlag
und Christus kommt und wäscht sie jeden Tag.
Aus: Die Gedichte 1910 bis 1922 (München, 14.10.1915)
How painful! My own mother tears me down.
I added to myself, stone upon stone
and stood already like a little house
around which greatly day moves, even alone--
Then Mother comes, comes and tears me down.
She tears me down by giving me a stare;
she doesn't see that someone's building there.
She walks directly through my wall of stone--
How painful! My own mother tears me down.
Birds fly with greater ease around my home.
Every stray dog in town knows: that's the one--
Only she is able to ignore
my face's gradually becoming more.
From her to me good weather never came.
She doesn't live where gentle breezes reign.
She stays in her heart's refined hideaway
where Christ comes to wash her every day.
Friday, October 14, 2011
AGING WITH SPIRIT
I belong to a group of friends that has been called "Modern Mystics," for many years before I joined. We meet every six weeks or so, and discuss a book with a religious theme, in the broadest sense of that word. I didn't name the group; I never refer to myself as a mystic. The term seems a bit wooly to me; I am also very much interested in science and physics.(I am a physican.) But as a poet and musician, I live a good deal in a transverbal world, (poets must use words not just as conveyors of meaning but also as musicians use notes), and thus very much have a spiritual side. I certainly do not object to be called religious, an adjective that very much applies to me; the way I use it is, however, completely non-dogmatic and can only be hinted at with words.
After a rough start, I am now older and wiser, and would like to share with you two poems of mine as illustrations of a type of spiritual wisdom that comes with age.
First a little background about the relationship of age to wisdom. According to Jaques's famous speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, there are seven stages of life, the last one characterized by "Second childishness and mere (complete) oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This is a powerfully expressed yet rather gloomy view of life, appropriate for the Jaques of the play who is very pessimistic. (Shakespeare, the greatest and most subtle creator of fictional characters who ever lived, wrote what the character thinks, and not necessarily what Shakespeare believed.) There is no mention of increasing wisdom as the stages progress; Jaques may have a dark view of life, but my knees constantly remind me that he has a point: the body wears down. Some of us are still quite vigorous at 80, but if we're lucky to live to 100, well, running a marathon, to say the least, is no longer possible. Even worse, the mind can break down too. Body and mind, of course, can be assailed at an earlier age from all those troubles flesh is heir to. This article assumes a healthy mind in an aging body, examples of which are increasingly numerous. (I, for one, intend to belong to this group for as long as possible.)
For a more positive view of aging, one which emphasizes an increase of spiritual development, we turn to classical Hinduism and a twentieth century Irish poet.
In Hinduism--at least for the Brahmin caste--there are five stages of life. The first is the child, followed by the student, the householder, the retired person and the ascetic. The first three stages need no explanation. Let us now discuss the last two which apply to the old. In retirement, one passes on household responsibilities to younger members of the family. Work to financially support others ends; spiritual work, for which the householder lacks time to devote himself, begins. The retired person contemplates the spiritual side of life, and often performs bhakti, devotional rituals. There is an abrupt change when one enters the final stage, that of the ascetic. The ascetic is now wisdom personified and doesn't need any religious trappings anymore--there is a ceremony during which the ascetic burns the sacred texts. This stage is beautifully expressed by one of my favorite Hindu sayings:
It is sad when a young man doesn't go to temple; it is even sadder when an old man does.
Perhaps, if you are a Westerner, you might think that this applies only to Eastern religions--mentioning sanyassins, the Hindu word for ascetics, might turn off those with a more practical bent. (There is no requirement to give up doing good deeds!) Recently I came across a striking statement form a Catholic monk that says the exact same thing, though expressed somewhat differently.
During our last meeting of "Modern Mystics" we watched a CD. In this CD the monk was asked what the stages of the religious life are. This is what he said:
"At the first stage, you believe in The Other. In the second stage, you imitate the Other and try to come as close to It as you can. At the final stage, you realize that there is no Other, or in other words, that you are the Other." So even in the West, wise, religious people realize that dogma and worship do not belong to the highest final spiritual stage.
We thus have an alternative view to Jaques's pessimism, the realization that increasing strength in the "soul" can--and should-- more than compensate for increasing weakness in the knees. Yeats summed up this dichotomy best with the following lines from his great poem, Sailing to Byzantium;
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
a tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and louder sing
for every tatter in its mortal dress
Well said, Mr. Yeats!
ll.
Inchworms are curious little animals. After hatching, often on the dark forest floor, they must climb a tree trunk to find the leaves that are their food. This works well, unless they happen to be born near a tree stump. They are programmed to climb it; at the top, of course, they will find no leaves; in desperation, they writhe and writhe. They do not have the intelligence to climb down and start over again and find a trunk of a live tree. So they starve. I often think that many human beings get stuck on a tree stump, as it were, and starve psychologically. Erik Erikson's theory of the stages of life illustrates this beautifully. If an infant doesn't learn trust in the first year of life, he or she is stuck at this level for life and will also most likely fail at later stages. This is a sad truth, but true nevertheless.
I want to illustrate this with the case of an acquaintance of mine, also a member of the "Modern Mystics" group. Although older than I by over a decade, he has not reached the third stage that the Catholic contemplative outlined; the Hindu proverb about the cessation of the need to go the temple in old age probably will never apply to him. He is still searching for God as if he were an "I" here searching for an "Other" outside himself. He only reads spiritual books, which I find incredible. (A Buddhist sage once said that American intellectuals who are trying to become Buddhists should read a lot less and practice a lot more.) Other factors are contributing to his emotional state; his unfruitful spiritual quest has left him bitter. He reminds me of one of those inchworms; writhing in a barren place is not the way to find peace. This frustration has made him even more obsessive in his search; just like an adult who had never mastered, through no fault of her one, the first task of life, trust, will have an obsessive lack of trust for the rest of her life.
I wrote a poem about this frustrated search and the obsession to continue on a path bound to lead nowhere. It is called "Hamstring's Profession", indicating that the person is hamstrung by his search. I have immense sympathy for such people; their difficulty is palpable. And, as Buddha said, sad people are sometimes closer to the truth than happy ones, since they haven't escaped from the fact that life is so difficult for so many of us. Jaques would probably have appreciated this poem which follows:
HAMSTRING’S PROFESSION
My pride is a stamp
on a desperate letter;
it has been canceled;
still no reply.
What is the lost’s definition of Sky?
The dead letter office above broken eyes.
Aldebaran. Betelgeuse.
A lonely man dying
many light-years away--
You can be at all these places at once?
That is amazing and I am amazed.
But the greater mystery is that You aren’t here.
How to approach God's invisible Hand?
Step one: admit it,
rationality and need
are a teardown combination.
Step two: give up. No!
Though I've been scarred like a failed son
in a burned story by Kafka,
I’ll serve, I’ll wait. The Emperor of Jelly Beans
is likelier to save you--
Why still seek light
behind clouds of semantics?
That’s what I do.
111,
We will leave Jaques's view and consider Yeats's now. (Yeats's lines contain a crucial "unless"--unless the Soul clap and sing, etc.--This section deals with actual clapping and singing done by one who has aged successfully.) The protagonist of this poem--he doesn't even mention his own existence in the poem, having largely gone beyond it--no longer seeks to solve the problem of life by imagining he is a "I" here searching for an answer "there." He has simply joined the river of life, which is a source of great delight which more than compensates for bodily decline. His is neither an intellectual answer nor an emotional one; it transcends both. Notice that this poem doesn't mention any dogma; there is absolutely no conflict with science. The protagonist of the poem still lives in the practical sense as a separate individual, but on the inside he realizes that ultimately there is no separation--a very joyous realization. The only thing odd about the poem for me is that I wrote this, the wisdom poem, over thirty years ago--and wrote the bitter poem last week. I suppose it's not that odd; the wisdom poem was more of an indication of the direction I wanted to take, while the bitter poem is a character study of someone stuck in the tar pit of his own obsessions. If you are very happy and old, you will understand the meaning of this poem without any difficulty:
STONE AND RIVER
Metaphors that help us live here
are chiefly two: stone and river.
Aware of change, afraid to be alone,
most opt for the permanence of stone.
"A boulder at the center reigns;
however fast the current, it remains;
countless unique pebbles at each side
retain their shapes, even if dislodged."
I, I, this is the language of rock.
But everything is swirl and flux:
despite appearance all is sea;
no Me. Fluid all reality.
Nothing to transcend our going?
Everything is water flowing?
Nothing but fate, nothing but chance,
nothing but change? And ecstasy: dance!
1V.
This article can be summarized with one word: dance! You have always been dancing that dance, of course, but you haven't always been aware of this, having been distracted by all the tasks of life's earlier stages. Now you are able to join the dance wholeheartedly. This is called wisdom, which can and should increase with age. No dancing shoes required.
After a rough start, I am now older and wiser, and would like to share with you two poems of mine as illustrations of a type of spiritual wisdom that comes with age.
First a little background about the relationship of age to wisdom. According to Jaques's famous speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, there are seven stages of life, the last one characterized by "Second childishness and mere (complete) oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This is a powerfully expressed yet rather gloomy view of life, appropriate for the Jaques of the play who is very pessimistic. (Shakespeare, the greatest and most subtle creator of fictional characters who ever lived, wrote what the character thinks, and not necessarily what Shakespeare believed.) There is no mention of increasing wisdom as the stages progress; Jaques may have a dark view of life, but my knees constantly remind me that he has a point: the body wears down. Some of us are still quite vigorous at 80, but if we're lucky to live to 100, well, running a marathon, to say the least, is no longer possible. Even worse, the mind can break down too. Body and mind, of course, can be assailed at an earlier age from all those troubles flesh is heir to. This article assumes a healthy mind in an aging body, examples of which are increasingly numerous. (I, for one, intend to belong to this group for as long as possible.)
For a more positive view of aging, one which emphasizes an increase of spiritual development, we turn to classical Hinduism and a twentieth century Irish poet.
In Hinduism--at least for the Brahmin caste--there are five stages of life. The first is the child, followed by the student, the householder, the retired person and the ascetic. The first three stages need no explanation. Let us now discuss the last two which apply to the old. In retirement, one passes on household responsibilities to younger members of the family. Work to financially support others ends; spiritual work, for which the householder lacks time to devote himself, begins. The retired person contemplates the spiritual side of life, and often performs bhakti, devotional rituals. There is an abrupt change when one enters the final stage, that of the ascetic. The ascetic is now wisdom personified and doesn't need any religious trappings anymore--there is a ceremony during which the ascetic burns the sacred texts. This stage is beautifully expressed by one of my favorite Hindu sayings:
It is sad when a young man doesn't go to temple; it is even sadder when an old man does.
Perhaps, if you are a Westerner, you might think that this applies only to Eastern religions--mentioning sanyassins, the Hindu word for ascetics, might turn off those with a more practical bent. (There is no requirement to give up doing good deeds!) Recently I came across a striking statement form a Catholic monk that says the exact same thing, though expressed somewhat differently.
During our last meeting of "Modern Mystics" we watched a CD. In this CD the monk was asked what the stages of the religious life are. This is what he said:
"At the first stage, you believe in The Other. In the second stage, you imitate the Other and try to come as close to It as you can. At the final stage, you realize that there is no Other, or in other words, that you are the Other." So even in the West, wise, religious people realize that dogma and worship do not belong to the highest final spiritual stage.
We thus have an alternative view to Jaques's pessimism, the realization that increasing strength in the "soul" can--and should-- more than compensate for increasing weakness in the knees. Yeats summed up this dichotomy best with the following lines from his great poem, Sailing to Byzantium;
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
a tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and louder sing
for every tatter in its mortal dress
Well said, Mr. Yeats!
ll.
Inchworms are curious little animals. After hatching, often on the dark forest floor, they must climb a tree trunk to find the leaves that are their food. This works well, unless they happen to be born near a tree stump. They are programmed to climb it; at the top, of course, they will find no leaves; in desperation, they writhe and writhe. They do not have the intelligence to climb down and start over again and find a trunk of a live tree. So they starve. I often think that many human beings get stuck on a tree stump, as it were, and starve psychologically. Erik Erikson's theory of the stages of life illustrates this beautifully. If an infant doesn't learn trust in the first year of life, he or she is stuck at this level for life and will also most likely fail at later stages. This is a sad truth, but true nevertheless.
I want to illustrate this with the case of an acquaintance of mine, also a member of the "Modern Mystics" group. Although older than I by over a decade, he has not reached the third stage that the Catholic contemplative outlined; the Hindu proverb about the cessation of the need to go the temple in old age probably will never apply to him. He is still searching for God as if he were an "I" here searching for an "Other" outside himself. He only reads spiritual books, which I find incredible. (A Buddhist sage once said that American intellectuals who are trying to become Buddhists should read a lot less and practice a lot more.) Other factors are contributing to his emotional state; his unfruitful spiritual quest has left him bitter. He reminds me of one of those inchworms; writhing in a barren place is not the way to find peace. This frustration has made him even more obsessive in his search; just like an adult who had never mastered, through no fault of her one, the first task of life, trust, will have an obsessive lack of trust for the rest of her life.
I wrote a poem about this frustrated search and the obsession to continue on a path bound to lead nowhere. It is called "Hamstring's Profession", indicating that the person is hamstrung by his search. I have immense sympathy for such people; their difficulty is palpable. And, as Buddha said, sad people are sometimes closer to the truth than happy ones, since they haven't escaped from the fact that life is so difficult for so many of us. Jaques would probably have appreciated this poem which follows:
HAMSTRING’S PROFESSION
My pride is a stamp
on a desperate letter;
it has been canceled;
still no reply.
What is the lost’s definition of Sky?
The dead letter office above broken eyes.
Aldebaran. Betelgeuse.
A lonely man dying
many light-years away--
You can be at all these places at once?
That is amazing and I am amazed.
But the greater mystery is that You aren’t here.
How to approach God's invisible Hand?
Step one: admit it,
rationality and need
are a teardown combination.
Step two: give up. No!
Though I've been scarred like a failed son
in a burned story by Kafka,
I’ll serve, I’ll wait. The Emperor of Jelly Beans
is likelier to save you--
Why still seek light
behind clouds of semantics?
That’s what I do.
111,
We will leave Jaques's view and consider Yeats's now. (Yeats's lines contain a crucial "unless"--unless the Soul clap and sing, etc.--This section deals with actual clapping and singing done by one who has aged successfully.) The protagonist of this poem--he doesn't even mention his own existence in the poem, having largely gone beyond it--no longer seeks to solve the problem of life by imagining he is a "I" here searching for an answer "there." He has simply joined the river of life, which is a source of great delight which more than compensates for bodily decline. His is neither an intellectual answer nor an emotional one; it transcends both. Notice that this poem doesn't mention any dogma; there is absolutely no conflict with science. The protagonist of the poem still lives in the practical sense as a separate individual, but on the inside he realizes that ultimately there is no separation--a very joyous realization. The only thing odd about the poem for me is that I wrote this, the wisdom poem, over thirty years ago--and wrote the bitter poem last week. I suppose it's not that odd; the wisdom poem was more of an indication of the direction I wanted to take, while the bitter poem is a character study of someone stuck in the tar pit of his own obsessions. If you are very happy and old, you will understand the meaning of this poem without any difficulty:
STONE AND RIVER
Metaphors that help us live here
are chiefly two: stone and river.
Aware of change, afraid to be alone,
most opt for the permanence of stone.
"A boulder at the center reigns;
however fast the current, it remains;
countless unique pebbles at each side
retain their shapes, even if dislodged."
I, I, this is the language of rock.
But everything is swirl and flux:
despite appearance all is sea;
no Me. Fluid all reality.
Nothing to transcend our going?
Everything is water flowing?
Nothing but fate, nothing but chance,
nothing but change? And ecstasy: dance!
1V.
This article can be summarized with one word: dance! You have always been dancing that dance, of course, but you haven't always been aware of this, having been distracted by all the tasks of life's earlier stages. Now you are able to join the dance wholeheartedly. This is called wisdom, which can and should increase with age. No dancing shoes required.
Monday, October 10, 2011
TAMMY AND THE MASS MAN
No gluons in this cosmic town
could keep her breasts from pointing down.
Her cheeks are like enormous figs!
Have you no standards, Mr. Higgs?
Thomas Dorsett
October 11, 2011
could keep her breasts from pointing down.
Her cheeks are like enormous figs!
Have you no standards, Mr. Higgs?
Thomas Dorsett
October 11, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
I WISH I COULD SEND HIM BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
"Death is very likely the single best
invention of life." --Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
(Warning: don't listen to me--
I've been in mourning
since Spots my guinea pig died
unexpectedly in 1950.)
I wonder what Steve Jobs would say
now that he's tried it? Dying's
a wonderful part of life.
How pseudo-Zen can you get?
"Do you ever think of death?"
Rooney, 92, smiled. "Often. Every day."
"What do you have to say to the viewers?"
"I don't like it, " he replied.
I happen not to like it either.
Mozart at 35, Steve Jobs at 56--
Today a gorgeous sixteen-year-old
cheerleading her schoolmates to victory
collapsed. Zero, how dare you do that?
Somebody's daughter soon some body's dust.
I cannot accept cold, indifferent ash--
You'd better; you have no choice.
Thomas Dorsett, October 6, 2011
invention of life." --Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
(Warning: don't listen to me--
I've been in mourning
since Spots my guinea pig died
unexpectedly in 1950.)
I wonder what Steve Jobs would say
now that he's tried it? Dying's
a wonderful part of life.
How pseudo-Zen can you get?
"Do you ever think of death?"
Rooney, 92, smiled. "Often. Every day."
"What do you have to say to the viewers?"
"I don't like it, " he replied.
I happen not to like it either.
Mozart at 35, Steve Jobs at 56--
Today a gorgeous sixteen-year-old
cheerleading her schoolmates to victory
collapsed. Zero, how dare you do that?
Somebody's daughter soon some body's dust.
I cannot accept cold, indifferent ash--
You'd better; you have no choice.
Thomas Dorsett, October 6, 2011
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