randoms, for which I beg your indulgence

As the world sinks into another of its guns-of-August modes and moods, I remain idiotically blissful in the wake of my August 8th pseudo-revelations, and the realization (courtesy of utopyr a.k.a. Grady Harris) that the 20th-century modernist Hugh MacDiarmid (who was expelled from the Scottish National Party for his communism and from the Communist Party for his nationalism) wrote a poetry that took Rilke's "the poet must know everything" seriously, and, according to Wikipedia, attempted to portray an interconnected world without God in which all the facts he presented were scientifically verifiable. So I am vaguely unsurprised to find he presents religion in a more favorable light than any of the New Agers I have ever encountered, and manages to undercut every root premise of structuralist Marxism, even as maintains an incisive sense of analysis and passion for social justice. (I assume he undercuts his undercutting in poems I haven't read yet.) Dang, how have I let him be passed off all these years as an old crank who wrote in dialect? Old and cranky he may have been, and dialectical, but not simplistically any of those things.... I find his verse extraordinarily beautiful, but then I like subtle music underpinning poetic rhythms, so there you have it.

And apparently (courtesy of the estimable Heidi Lorraine's cross-postings on Facebook) there is a discussion website called www.thinkbuddha.org that is devoted to secular interpretations of Buddhism (regarding which topic MacDiarmid wrote some remarkable lines fifty or more years ago): from it comes this wonderful post on "John Ruskin and the Penguin":

"Yesterday I was in Sheffield, and had a look round the Ruskin gallery. He was quite an impressive man, John Ruskin, and his Collected Works are frighteningly extensive. Anyway, for those who are wrathful by inclination, I thought that the following quote (drawn from one of the great man’s letters to Charles Eliot Norton) may be therapeutic.

"'I find penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin.'"