THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

August 6, 2026

 

Plumbing Project

 

Part One

When the plumber said

“Probably five to ten grand

To reroute the pipe and bypass

That leak in your concrete slab”

These dangerous

 Oft-spoken  words

Formed beneath my breath:

“I could probably do that myself.”

“That” being moving the water heater, cutting though three walls, three cast iron pipes

Running fifty feet of new plastic drain line

Dropping at a quarter inch per foot

Into a main four-inch plumbing stack

After moving the washer and dryer, office furniture, bookcases and desks.

 

Part Two

Perhaps it was

 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s

Essay on Self Reliance

Or John Dewey’s further championing

The theme of “omni-competence”

That doomed countless men like myself

To years of wandering lumber yards

Aisles of hardware stores

Wearing bruised knuckles and 

Bad backs as badges of honor

Confident that building, wiring, plumbing a house

Flushing a radiator, repairing a dishwasher

Or cooking meat on a grill

Would assure us a seat

At the table of manhood.

And although I am proud

To harbor informed opinions on

Carbide blades, framing lumber and

Exposed aggregate concrete

I also wonder how many languages

I might have learned

What musical instrument I could have mastered

 Had my brain not become 

A big box store of readily available facts

On positive drainage, adequate clearance and proper ventilation

And to what heights I might have ascended

Had I not so readily descended

Into beckoning crawl spaces and drainage ditches.

 

Part Three

Well, the plumbing is done now

Water flowing where 

And as it should

Plus a new laundry sink, fresh paint 

On basement ceiling and floor 

Many hours remain 

To mend the wounds in walls and return

      Everything to its proper place.

But I’m ready now to 

Learn a new language 

 Pick up a musical instrument

Howl at the full moon

(Rising tonight!)

And see if I can’t

Plumb a few words from 

A few days of common labor.

 

Will Hornyak 

July 2026

*

 

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

 

—Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

 

What a piece of work is a man!—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…”

 

—Hamlet speaking, in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

 

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

 

—William Blake, from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

 

(Speaking of caverns, you might want to re-visit Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the January, 2021 issue of peace, love, happiness & understanding: https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-1-7-21/.)

 

For the past couple years, I’ve been doing an “entertainment” of some kind more or less every month at Taborspace in Portland, or online. As a concession to my aging brain, I’ve been reading things, rather than trying to memorize them. My entertainments have featured Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Black Elk, Traherne, Cabeza de Vaca, Kalidasa & Stallings; I’ve explored topics like Eutopia, Zen, the English Romantic Poets, Humanism & Paradise Now! This month, on August 8th, I’m taking a look at Beauty.

 

Essays by Kathleen Raine, including “The Use of the Beautiful” (1966), inspired me to delve into the English Romantic poets, and now into Beauty. She says that beauty and the arts have been traditionally associated with each other, but with the advent of modernism—she’s talking mostly about poetry—beauty was no longer fashionable. She asks: “Have we found something better?” In her essay “A Defense of Shelley’s Poetry,” she makes this bold statement: “It might be said that the arts exist, finally, for no other end than the holding before us of images of Paradise.”

 

If you want to inquire into a topic like beauty, or love, or happiness, the first thing you discover is that it is endless. There are all kinds of beauty. The natural world is full of beauty. Human beings make beautiful music, paintings, sculptures, poems. We have beautiful ideas and imaginings. And there is something mysterious, which we call “inner beauty.” For my event on Saturday, I don’t want to talk about theories of beauty. Mostly, I want to give examples of things that I find beautiful—including music, works of art, poetry, pictures of happy children and hummingbirds, et cetera. Here are three of my favorite poems about beauty that are themselves beautiful:

 

Pied Beauty

 

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

 

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

*

 

Ode on a Grecian Urn

 

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

       Of deities or mortals, or of both,

               In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

       What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

 

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

         That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

                A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

 

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

         Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

                Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

         Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

                Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

 

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

 

—John Keats (1795-1821)

*

 

Lapis Lazuli

 

I have heard that hysterical women say

They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,

Of poets that are always gay,

For everybody knows or else should know

That if nothing drastic is done

Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,

Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in

Until the town lie beaten flat.

 

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,

And all the drop scenes drop at once

Upon a hundred thousand stages,

It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

 

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,

Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

Old civilisations put to the sword.

Then they and their wisdom went to rack:

No handiwork of Callimachus

Who handled marble as if it were bronze,

Made draperies that seemed to rise

When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;

His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem

Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

All things fall and are built again

And those that build them again are gay.

 

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,

Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,

Over them flies a long-legged bird

A symbol of longevity;

The third, doubtless a serving-man,

Carries a musical instrument.

 

Every discolouration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent

Seems a water-course or an avalanche,

Or lofty slope where it still snows

Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch

Sweetens the little half-way house

Those Chinamen climb towards, and I

Delight to imagine them seated there;

There, on the mountain and the sky,

On all the tragic scene they stare.

One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

 

—William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)