Werewolves of London
Ah-hoo...
Ah-hoo...
Werewolves of London
Ah-hoo...
Look out across the fields, see me returning
Smoke is in your eye, you draw a smile
From the fireplace where my letters to you are burning
You’ve had time to think about it for a while
Well, I’ve walked two hundred miles, now look me over
It’s the end of the chase and the moon is high
It won’t matter who loves who
You’ll love me or I’ll love you
When the night comes falling from the sky
I can see through your walls and I know you’re hurting
Sorrow covers you up like a cape
Only yesterday I know that you’ve been flirting
With disaster that you managed to escape
I can’t provide for you no easy answers
Who are you that I should have to lie?
You’ll know all about it, love
It’ll fit you like a glove
When the night comes falling from the sky
I can hear your trembling heart beat like a river
You must have been protecting someone last time I called.
I’ve never asked you for nothing you couldn’t deliver
I’ve never asked you to set yourself up for a fall
I saw thousands who could have overcome the darkness
For the love of a lousy buck, I’ve watched them die
Stick around, baby, we’re not through
Don’t look for me, I’ll see you
When the night comes falling from the sky
In your teardrops, I can see my own reflection
It was on the northern border of Texas where I crossed the line
I don’t want to be a fool starving for affection
I don’t want to drown in someone else’s wine
For all eternity I think I will remember
That icy wind that’s howling in your eye
You will seek me and you’ll find me
In the wasteland of your mind
When the night comes falling from the sky
Well, I sent you my feelings in a letter
But you were gambling for support
This time tomorrow I’ll know you better
When my memory is not so short
This time I’m asking for freedom
Freedom from a world which you deny
And you’ll give it to me now
I’ll take it anyhow
When the night comes falling from the sky
Copyright © 1985 by Special Rider Music
*
A friend emailed me a link to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfZPl4CFEUc&t=6040s
I don't have HBO and may not have heard about this otherwise. A quick check with our public library shows that it is available there on DVD. Maybe some of you have seen this already, given that it was released in 2019. I just finished watching it.
I'm grateful to diverse friends who bring to my attention what needs to be brought to my attention.
At the end of the documentary, Sweet Honey in the Rock sings "We'll Never Turn Back." With a little googling I found that Mavis Staples featured it on an album released in 2007.
This morning I found this quote at whiskey river:
"What does it mean to be radical, to tell radical stories in our time, to win the battle of the story? The North American tradition seems to focus its activity on the exposé, the telling of the grim underside of what we know: the food is poison, the system is corrupt, the leaders are lying, the war is failing. There is a place for this, but you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. You need to tell the stories they are not telling, to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we're winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time."
- Rebecca Solnit
A while later, something prompted me to take a good look at a pencil drawing my mother bought for me in 1970 or 1971. I believe that she bought it at an arts and crafts fair on Skyline Boulevard on the San Francisco Peninsula but I can't be sure. I decided to try to photograph it to show here on my blog. It was difficult to photograph because of reflections and poor lighting. I remember that my mother told me that the artist's name was Gary Dungan and that the drawing was of his wife. They lived in Half Moon Bay. It turned out that my R had been acquainted with Gary Dungan and that Gary had taught R some guitar/banjo finger-picking which R then taught me.
Out of curiosity, I googled Gary Dungan and found that a Gary Lane Dungan (see signature on drawing -- GLD) had lived with his first wife in Half Moon Bay, California, and had died in Florida in 2004 and that his first wife's maiden name was Sandy Hard. With a little more googling, I found the following website, which includes historical papers and letters of Sandy Hard. The letters were written in Mississippi and sent to family in California in the summer of 1964.
https://cdm15932.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/17775
Of course, I can't be sure but my gut feeling was that the woman in the drawing is the same woman who participated in Freedom Summer 1964. I have always been inspired by the spiritual strength and beauty I saw in the woman in the drawing. More googling showed a Sandy H. Dungan who was born in 1942 and died in 2000 in Northern California. I feel certain there is a connection, and I'm continually astonished by what one can discover when one sets out on an internet search.
*
Postscript:
Just now, something prompted me to move the drawing from the walk-in closet, where it has been since October 1984, to the wall in my bedroom.
This drawing of mine in chalk pastel will be moved to the empty space in the walk-in closet:
Imaginary Brother as Botanist (1984)
Suddenly I realize that the man in the drawing reminds me of my nephew who was born in 1993. Of course, my nephew is much younger than the man in my drawing. Because of a family estrangement, I have not seen my nephew since he was 10 years old. It was in 1984 that I traded this drawing for a tapestry woven by my friend who died last year in December. She brought it with her when she moved from Bellingham to St. Louis to Eugene to Norway and then back to Bellingham where it was on the wall of her apartment and then on the wall of the assisted care facility room where she lived for several months. She had it in the lovely room in the memory care unit where she lived at the end of her life. She chose it because it reminded her of her older brother.
Here's the tapestry I received in trade:
One thing leading to another.
I wish my camera made a sharper image.
Will have the mandalas scanned
professionally for optimal appearance.
Always interesting to see what my art
works looks like in black and white and
greys.
*
September and October skies are always
a joy.
“A Sword In A Cloud Of Light”
By Kenneth Rexroth
Your hand in mine, we walk out
To watch the Christmas Eve crowds
On Fillmore Street, the Negro
District. The night is thick with
Frost. The people hurry, wreathed
In their smoky breaths. Before
The shop windows the children
Jump up and down with spangled
Eyes. Santa Clauses ring bells.
Cars stall and honk. Street cars clang.
Loud speakers on the lampposts
Sing carols, on juke boxes
In the bars Louis Armstrong
Plays White Christmas. In the joints
The girls strip and grind and bump
To Jingle Bells. Overhead
The neon signs scribble and
Erase and scribble again
Messages of avarice,
Joy, fear, hygiene, and the proud
Names of the middle classes.
The moon beams like a pudding.
We stop at the main corner
And look up, diagonally
Across, at the rising moon,
And the solemn, orderly
Vast winter constellations.
You say, “There’s Orion!”
The most beautiful object
Either of us will ever
Know in the world or in life
Stands in the moonlit empty
Heavens, over the swarming
Men, women, and children, black
And white, joyous and greedy,
Evil and good, buyer and
Seller, master and victim,
Like some immense theorem,
Which, if once solved would forever
Solve the mystery and pain
Under the bells and spangles.
There he is, the man of the
Night Before Christmas, spread out
On the sky like a true god
In whom it would only be
Necessary to believe
A little. I am fifty
And you are five. It would do
No good to say this and it
May do no good to write it.
Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is. Never
Give up this savage religion
For the blood-drenched civilized
Abstractions of the rascals
Who live by killing you and me.
*The Poetry Center Digital Archive is a Project of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.
*
The first thing I saw on my 72nd birthday was Orion. I woke up at 3 a.m., as I usually do, and walked from my bedroom to my porch which looks out to the east. The sky was extraordinarily clear, revealing Orion, the Pleiades, and a crescent moon. Such a generous gift.