PSY – GANGNAM STYLE (강남스타일) M/V

(I found the following poem on 5.10.11 in the book “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depression Illness and the Artistic Temperament” by Kay Redfield Jamison. I highly recommend this book for anyone living with bipolar or for anyone interested in understanding this illness. It is a dangerous illness which causes many deaths and is destructive in how it causes someone with bipolar to live their life. There are the highs and the lows and sometimes the leveling off times. But the highs can take you beyond the realm and the lows can take you in a depression which can lead to a darkness so deep that one is not able to see the reality around you. The delusions, the confusion can cause one to behave in a manner otherwise not normal to who you are. Many famous and not so famous people live with bipolar. I know what it can do to you and I battle the differences it brings from one moment to the next, each unpredictable. What triggers any given state is relatively unknown at the time. You can watch out for triggers but you need to figure out what they are first. That isn’t always possible. Reading Kay Redfield Jamison is a good choice to help understand. There are also two other books that I would recommend reading to help you with understanding your self. “The Coming of the Feminine Christ” by Dr. Niamh Clune and “Bipolar In Order” by Tom Wooten. If you use my search window on this page and enter their names you will find out more about them and their books. Now for the poem by Stephen Spender.)

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965

5.10.11 (discovered this poem on this date.)

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great
Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Korean Landscape-Early 18th Centuty

Pink Flyod- “Us and Then”

Phillip Glass-Metamorphosis 1