The Prayer Of Agassiz

John Greenleaf Whittier1807 (Haverhill) – 1892 (Hampton Falls)

• Childhood
• Friendship
• Life
• Love
• Melancholy
• Nature
• Religion

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On the isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school.
Over sails that not in vain
Wooed the west-wind's steady strain,
Line of coast that low and far
Stretched its undulating bar,
Wings aslant along the rim
Of the waves they stooped to skim,
Rock and isle and glistening bay,
Fell the beautiful white day.

Said the Master to the youth
'We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are reaching, through His laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause,
Him, the endless, unbegun,
The Unnamable, the One
Light of all our light the Source,
Life of life, and Force of force.
As with fingers of the blind,
We are groping here to find
What the hieroglyphics mean
Of the Unseen in the seen,
What the Thought which underlies
Nature's masking and disguise,
What it is that hides beneath
Blight and bloom and birth and death.
By past efforts unavailing,
Doubt and error, loss and failing,
Of our weakness made aware,
On the threshold of our task
Let us light and guidance ask,
Let us pause in silent prayer!'

Then the Master in his place
Bowed his head a little space,
And the leaves by soft airs stirred,
Lapse of wave and cry of bird,
Left the solemn hush unbroken
Of that wordless prayer unspoken,
While its wish, on earth unsaid,
Rose to heaven interpreted.
As, in life's best hours, we hear
By the spirit's finer ear
His low voice within us, thus
The All-Father heareth us;
And His holy ear we pain
With our noisy words and vain.
Not for Him our violence
Storming at the gates of sense,
His the primal language, His
The eternal silences!

Even the careless heart was moved,
And the doubting gave assent,
With a gesture reverent,
To the Master well-beloved.
As thin mists are glorified
By the light they cannot hide,
All who gazed upon him saw,
Through its veil of tender awe,
How his face was still uplit
By the old sweet look of it.
Hopeful, trustful, full of cheer,
And the love that casts out fear.
Who the secret may declare
Of that brief, unuttered prayer?
Did the shade before him come
Of th' inevitable doom,
Of the end of earth so near,
And Eternity's new year?

In the lap of sheltering seas
Rests the isle of Penikese;
But the lord of the domain
Comes not to his own again
Where the eyes that follow fail,
On a vaster sea his sail
Drifts beyond our beck and hail.
Other lips within its bound
Shall the laws of life expound;
Other eyes from rock and shell
Read the world's old riddles well
But when breezes light and bland
Blow from Summer's blossomed land,
When the air is glad with wings,
And the blithe song-sparrow sings,
Many an eye with his still face
Shall the living ones displace,
Many an ear the word shall seek
He alone could fitly speak.
And one name forevermore
Shall be uttered o'er and o'er
By the waves that kiss the shore,
By the curlew's whistle sent
Down the cool, sea-scented air;
In all voices known to her,
Nature owns her worshipper,
Half in triumph, half lament.
Thither Love shall tearful turn,
Friendship pause uncovered there,
And the wisest reverence learn
From the Master's silent prayer.

Ruler Of Everything”

 

Juno was mad

He knew he'd been had

So he shot at the sun with a gun

Shot at the sun with a gun

Shot at his wily one only friend

In the gallows or the ghetto

In the town or the meadow

In the pillows even over the sun

Every end of the time is another begun

You understand

Mechanical hands

Are the ruler of everything (ahh)

Ruler of everything (ahh)

I'm the ruler of everything

In the end

Do you like how I dance?

I've got zirconium pants!

Consequential enough

To slip you into a trance

Do you like how I walk?

Do you like how I talk?

Do you like how my face

Disintegrates into chalk?

I have a wonderful wife

I have a powerful job

She criticizes me for being egocentric

You practice your mannerisms

Into the wall

If this mirror were clearer

I'd be standing so tall

I saw you slobber over clovers on the side of the hill

I was observing the birds

Circle in for the kill

I've been you

I know you

Your facade is a scam

You know you're making me cry

This is the way that I am

I've been living a lie

A metamorphical scheme

Detective undercover brotherhood

Objective: obscene

Oh no, no

Oh yeah

Do you hear the flibbity jibbity jibber jabber

With an oh my god I've got to get out of here or I'll

have another

Word to sell

Another story to tell

Another time piece ringing the bell

Do you hear the clock stop when you reach the end

No

You know it must be never ending

Comprehend if you can

But when you try to pretend to understand

You resemble a fool

Although you're only a man

So give it up and

Smile

Do you hear the flibbity jibbity jibber jabber

With an oh my god I've got to get out of here or I'll

have another

Word to sell

Another story to tell

Another time piece ringing the bell

Do you hear the clock stop when you reach the end

No

You know it must be never ending

Comprehend if you can

But when you try to pretend to understand

You resemble a fool

Although you're only a man

So give it up and

Smile

You understand

Mechanical hands

Are the ruler of everything (aah)

Ruler of everything (aah)

I'm the ruler of everything

In the end

Without looking down

Gliding around

Like a bumbling dragon I fly

Scraping my face on the sky

Oh no, no

Oh yeah

„~ Trollface singing the lyrics of Tally Hall’s “Ruler Of Everything”.

The matrix

 

Universe code

 

Protons

 

We might have a God of the gaps, but...

 We might have a God of the gaps, A God who fills up whatever there is in our world that we can not understand! Exactly what this means to fill in gaps with God, does any one have the slightest idea what that might mean? Is God some kind of a variable that you just fill things in with? Is God some kind of secret formula? Some kind of magic spell of some sort or another? What does it even mean for there to be gaps? What does it even mean to fill in the gaps with God? At least it is better than making up a bunch of nonsense and calling that science! At least we don't have a theory of the gaps!

Of Politics & Art by Norman Dubie

  

Of Politics & Art

by Norman Dubie

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.

There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm.

From Physics by Aristotle

  

04:54 minutes left to register for free

when the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles.

The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not 'knowable relatively to us' and 'knowable' without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature.

Now what is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which become known to us later by analysis. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts. Much the same thing happens in the relation of the name to the formula. A name, e.g. 'round', means vaguely a sort of whole: its definition analyses this into its particular senses. Similarly a child begins by calling all men 'father', and all women 'mother', but later on distinguishes each of them.

Nuclear force

Shut up and calculate

Hermes Trismegistus