[Video: original video version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” This isn’t the first time I’ve accompanied a Friday post with this song, but come on — it’s been over twelve years. And with a post title like today’s, how could I not have been reminded of these lyrics?]

From whiskey river:

Desperate Note from Byron’s Palace in Lerici

In the blue wind the leaves begin to think they are birds.
This is when you lean your body against its sorrows.
The truth is always there with its hidden reefs.
Your touch still hovers over the shore. Each wave is
a mirror that washes in a past we wanted hidden.
Now our voices are roosting in the branches.
Everything is echo, or shadow. Your shadow
walking on the other side of the street, your shadow
sitting in a passing car, your last words casting
the shadow that has replaced my own. Where have
we been that has brought us here? The past burrows
into me like an insect. The tree frogs, after tonight’s
rain, fill the woods. They throw their voices
so predators can’t find them. The old truths are
falling from the branches. The old dreams wash up
on the shores of our souls. Sometimes I think
the soul is a shadow even gravity can’t touch,
and love is what passes in the mirror as we look away.

(Richard Jackson [source — apparently originally here, though])

…and:

Ancient maps of the world — when the world was flat — inform us, concerning that void where America was waiting to be discovered, HERE BE DRAGONS. Dragons may not have been here then, but they are certainly here now, breathing fire, belching smoke; or, to be less literary and biblical about it, attempting to intimidate the mores, morals, and morality of this particular and peculiar time and place. Nor, since this country is the issue of the entire globe and is also the most powerful nation currently to be found on it, are we speaking only of this time and place. And it can be said that the monumental struggles being waged in our time and not only in this place resemble, in awesome ways, the ancient struggle between those who insisted that the world was flat and those who apprehended that it was round.

(James Baldwin [source, originally here])

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