Vacant Land Quotes

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

There is a path of land that exists Beyond the sea and the sky. It is behind the mountains, Past even the hills— Those of luscious green that Roll up into the heavens. I have been there, with you. It is not big, although not too small. Perhaps you could perch a house on its width, But we have never considered it. What would be the use? We already live there. When the night closes And the city stills, I am there, with you. Our mouths laughing, our heads vacant Of all but what is. And what is? I ask. This, you say. You and I, here.

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers. Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

I like the fact that my compatriots have such vacant and protruding eyes. They fill me with virtuous pride. You can imagine what eyes are like (in the capitalist world). ...such eyes look at you with distrust, reflecting constant worry and torment. That's what they're like in the land of ready cash. How different from the eyes of my people! Their steady stare is completely devoid of all tension. They harbor no thought - but what power! What spiritual power! Such eyes would not sell you. They couldn't sell anything or buy anything. You could spit in the eyes, and they’d call it God's (divine) dew...

There are an estimated forty square miles of vacant land in Detroit, enough to fit San Francisco inside just what’s been abandoned.

Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as they hit below, We were standing underneath when you told it. People do that with themselves when they are finished, light scooped out. He landed here, you said, marking it with your foot. You wouldn't do it that way, empty, you wouldn't wait, you would jump with the light still in you.

When darkness comes over your soul, it doesn’t come in light shades; it descends with all the black of a moonless night. In the faces of the women around that cook fire, what I saw was the vacant look of abandonment, and I knew it was all my fault.

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] said the South we might remember is gone. There was a new South. A more violent and ugly South, a country where our white brothers and sisters were terrified of change, inevitable change. They would rather scratch up the land with bloody fingers and take their most precious document, the Declaration of Independence, and throw it in the deepest ocean, bury it under the highest mountain, or burn it in the most flagrant blaze, than admit justice into a seat at the welcome table, and fair-play room in a vacant inn.

If the wedding was wanted at Melrose—and Buccleuch, as Hereditary Bailie of the Abbey lands, had fewer objections than usual to any idea not his own—then the congregation had to come armed, that was all. The Scotts and their allies, the twenty polite Frenchmen from Edinburgh, the Italian commander with the lame leg, had left their men at arms outside with their horses, the plumed helmets lashed to the saddlebows; and if there were a few vacant seats where a man from Hawick or Bedrule had ducked too late ten days before, no one mentioned it.

James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts.

Jesus, Mary …” She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see the paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With wonder, she smiled. That such a room existed! Even when she tried to wipe the smile away with her forearm, she realized instantly that it was a pointless exercise. She could feel the eyes of the woman traveling her body, and when she looked at her, they had rested on her face. There was more silence than she ever thought possible. It extended like an elastic, dying to break. The girl broke it. “Can I?” The two words stood among acres and acres of vacant, wooden-floored land. The books were miles away. The woman nodded. Yes, you can

The land was left vacant, and fewer men were available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity.

In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from Vladivostok, .One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs. A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty.Their uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big vigorous fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn't eighteen. He had a broad face, with flat, wide features, and on his forehead was a great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train waited and he sang song after song. I could not understand his words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of the wild corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long months of dark winter; and then the dancing of the women in the villages and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death. It was horrible and deeply moving. A cap lay at the singer's feet and the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting world. He did not seem quite human. The soldiers stood silent and hostile. Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the travelling herd. There was a disdainful anger on their side and unmeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain.

This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear. I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.

I don’t fundamentally understand why people give a shit about what other people put up their noses or what other people put in their veins or what other people breathe into their lungs. I mean I sort of care like if somebodies an addict it’s very destructive to people around that addict. It’s destructive to themselves. I’d like to get them help. I certainly support that which is to get that person help but, I don’t understand how people wake up and say I have to eradicate drug use across the land. “I gotta stick my nose into the business of what other people stick up their nose.” I just find that incomprehensible. I mean, is your life so vacant and so hysterical, so empty, so void of love, care and affection? I can go play with my daughter or I can go and obsessively try and get politicians to throw people in jail for doing things I don’t like. I can’t imagine why people would be choosing option “B” but, only because they don’t have anyone who loves them or, anyone they care about. They don’t have any rich, significant, important, hobbies, relationships, artistic pursuits or anything rich enough to keep them from obsessing about what other people do or bossing and bulling what other people do. This “stick your nose in other people’s business” Is so compulsive and epidemic to human society.

Once again, infrastructure had set a limit on the pace of development of a new technology. But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, malleable-iron rails were beginning to replace brittle cast iron on the wagonways of England, and stone or wooden sleepers strengthened the roadbeds for heavy locomotives. With such improvements, Trevithick’s circular track on vacant land in London would open out into a network of fast, reliable transportation—but not before its inventors and engineers endured a final long haul of challenges and trials.

How easy it would be to scare the living wits out of this fucking guy. Kimball is utterly unaware of how truly vacant I am. There is no evidence of animate life in this office, yet still he takes notes. By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world. I would like a Pilsner Urquell.

So he'd waited. Counted the minutes. It had been worth it. Seeing her claw her way onto the landing, panting, hair curling with the sweat sliding down her face- completely worth his generally shit day. Nesta was still sprawled on the hall floor when she hissed, 'Whoever designed those stairs was a monster.' 'Would you believe that Rhys, Az, and I had to climb up and down them as punishment when we were boys?' Her eyes shimmered with temper- good. Better than the vacant ice. 'Why?' 'Because we were young and stupid and testing boundaries with a High Lord who didn't understand practical jokes regarding public nudity.' He nodded toward the stairs. 'I got so dizzy on the hike down that I puked on Az. he then puked on Rhys, and Rhys puked all over himself. It was the height of summer, and by the time we made the trek back up, the heat was unbearable, we all reeked, and the scent of the vomit on the stairs had become horrific. We all puked again as we walked through it.' He could have sworn the corners of her mouth were trying to twitch upward. He didn't hold back his own grin at the memory. Even if they'd still had to hike back down and mop it all up.

What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America. Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket—take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more, restive to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked. She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.” “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.” “What’s your point?” “The changes.” I thought for a moment. “They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.” “So?” “Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take.

In Praise of Water. Let us bless the grace of water: The imagination of the primeval ocean Where the first forms of life stirred And emerged to dress the vacant earth With warm quilts of color. --- The courage of a river to continue belief In the slow fall of ground, Always falling farther Toward the unseen ocean. -- Tides stirred by the eros of the moon, Draw from that permanent restlessness, Perfect waves that languidly rise And pleat in gradual forms of aquamarine To offer every last tear of delight At the altar of stillness in-land. -- Water: vehicle and idiom Of all the inner voyaging That keeps us alive.

Madrid. It was that time, the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette,' he with the hair of cream-colored string, he with the large and empty laugh like a slice of watermelon, the one of the Tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra-kay, tra on the tables, on the coffins. It was when there were geraniums on the balconies, sunflower-seed stands in the Moncloa, herds of yearling sheep in the vacant lots of the Guindalera. They were dragging their heavy wool, eating the grass among the rubbish, bleating to the neighborhood. Sometimes they stole into the patios; they ate up the parsley, a little green sprig of parsley, in the summer, in the watered shade of the patios, in the cool windows of the basements at foot level. Or they stepped on the spread-out sheets, undershirts, or pink chemises clinging to the ground like the gay shadow of a handsome young girl. Then, then was the story of Don Zana 'The Marionette.' Don Zana was a good-looking, smiling man, thin, with wide angular shoulders. His chest was a trapezoid. He wore a white shirt, a jacket of green flannel, a bow tie, light trousers, and shoes of Corinthian red on his little dancing feet. This was Don Zana 'The Marionette,' the one who used to dance on the tables and the coffins. He awoke one morning, hanging in the dusty storeroom of a theater, next to a lady of the eighteenth century, with many white ringlets and a cornucopia of a face. Don Zana broke the flower pots with his hand and he laughed at everything. He had a disagreeable voice, like the breaking of dry reeds; he talked more than anyone, and he got drunk at the little tables in the taverns. He would throw the cards into the air when he lost, and he didn't stoop over to pick them up. Many felt his dry, wooden slap; many listened to his odious songs, and all saw him dance on the tables. He liked to argue, to go visiting in houses. He would dance in the elevators and on the landings, spill ink wells, beat on pianos with his rigid little gloved hands. The fruitseller's daughter fell in love with him and gave him apricots and plums. Don Zana kept the pits to make her believe he loved her. The girl cried when days passed without Don Zana's going by her street. One day he took her out for a walk. The fruitseller's daughter, with her quince-lips, still bloodless, ingenuously kissed that slice-of-watermelon laugh. She returned home crying and, without saying anything to anyone, died of bitterness. Don Zana used to walk through the outskirts of Madrid and catch small dirty fish in the Manzanares. Then he would light a fire of dry leaves and fry them. He slept in a pension where no one else stayed. Every morning he would put on his bright red shoes and have them cleaned. He would breakfast on a large cup of chocolate and he would not return until night or dawn.

He had a fresh change of clothes in a battered TWA flightbag; he had planned to change after making love tot he fancy cunt. No he hurled the bag across the shop. It bounced off the far wall and landed on top of a dresser. He walked across to it and batted it aside. He drop-kicked as it came down, and it hit the ceiling before falling on its side like a dead woodchuck. Then he simply stood, breathing hard, inhaling the heavy smells, staring vacantly at three chairs he had promised to cane by the end of the week. His thumbs were jammed into his belt. His fingers were curled into fists. His lower lip was pooched out. He looked like a kid sulking after a bawling-out. "CHEAP-SHIT!" he breathed, and went after the flightbag. He made as if to kick it again, then changed his mind and picked it up.

The houses were left vacant on the land and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming were alive, and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, discs of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor, and the discs turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn, there is a life and vitality left. There is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn and the heat and smell of life, but when the motor of a tractor stops it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy, that the wonder goes out of work. So efficient, that the wonder goes out of land, the working of it, and with the wonder, the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man the grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation, for nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates, and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt, water, nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more. And the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch, that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than it's analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love understands only chemistry, and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut he goes home, and his home is not the land.

Man/Woman, it has always insisted, does not live by bread alone. The weakness of the church is that it has too often accepted the separation between the material and the spiritual … leaving the material to the economic and political power structure.… The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings.… Churches are … in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature. All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of people could come alive.10

Samson Agonistes" Blind among enemies, O worse then chains, Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age! Light the prime work of God to me is extinct, [ 70 ] And all her various objects of delight Annull'd, which might in part my grief have eas'd, Inferiour to the vilest now become Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me, They creep, yet see, I dark in light expos'd [ 75 ] To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, Within doors, or without, still as a fool, In power of others, never in my own; Scarce half I seem to live, dead more then half. O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, [ 80 ] Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse Without all hope of day! O first created Beam, and thou great Word, Let there be light, and light was over all; Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime decree? [ 85 ] The Sun to me is dark And silent as the Moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. Since light so necessary is to life, [ 90 ] And almost life itself, if it be true That light is in the Soul, She all in every part; why was the sight To such a tender ball as th' eye confin'd? So obvious and so easie to be quench't, [ 95 ] And not as feeling through all parts diffus'd, That she might look at will through every pore? Then had I not been thus exil'd from light; As in the land of darkness yet in light, To live a life half dead, a living death, [ 100 ] And buried; but O yet more miserable!

According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread. The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations. Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside. In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population. Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.

This is a way of thinking about the past in which space and time echo each other, and it is by no means particular to the Bandanese. Indeed, this form of thought may well have found its fullest elaboration on the other side of the planet, among the Indigenous peoples of North America, whose spiritual lives and understanding of history were always tied to specific landscapes. In the words of the great Native American thinker Vine Deloria Jr., a shared feature of Indigenous North American spiritual traditions is that they all “have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature. . . . Regardless of what subsequently happens to the people, the sacred lands remain as permanent fixtures in their cultural or religious understanding.”12 Developing this argument, Deloria contrasts modes of thought that take their orientation from terrestrial spaces with those that privilege time. For the latter, the crucial question in relation to any event is “when did it happen?” For the former, it is “where did it happen?” The first question shapes the possible answers in a determinate way, locating the event within a particular historical period. The second question shapes the possible answers in a completely different way, because it accords a degree of agency to the landscape itself, and all that lies within it, including the entire range of nonhuman beings. The result, in Deloria’s words, is that “the [Indian] tribes confront and interact with a particular land along with its life forms. The task or role of the tribal religions is to relate the community of people to each and every facet of creation as they have experienced it.” For many Indigenous groups, landscapes remain as vividly alive today as they ever were. “For Indian men and women,” writes the anthropologist Peter Basso, of the Western Apache of Arizona, “the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.”13 Stories about the past, built around familiar landmarks, inform every aspect of Apache life. Through these stories features of the landscape speak to people just as loudly as the human voices that historians bring to life from documentary sources.

Rhys murmured, “Beron knows another war that pits Fae against Fae would be catastrophic. Many of us would be wiped out entirely. Especially …” Rhys tilted his head back to take in the apple blossoms. “Especially those of us who are weakened. And when the dust settles, there would be at least one court left vacant, its lands bare for the taking.

The Taliban announced their new plan in a policy editorial published in Al Samood, in January 2006: Let the Americans and their allies know that even though we lack equipment, our faith has been unshakable. And with the help of Allah the Almighty, we have created a weapon which you will not be able to face or escape, i.e. martyrdom operations. We will follow you everywhere and we will detonate everything in your face. We will make you terrified, even from vacant lands and silent walls. We know we are inevitably heading towards death, so let it be a glorious death by killing you with us, as we believe in the words of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him): “The heretic and his killer will be united in the fires of hell.” We have thus prepared many suicide operations that even will involve women, and we will offer you the taste of perdition in the cities, villages, valleys and mountains with Allah’s help.2

Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked. She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.” “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.

Teardrop Swarm by Stewart Stafford Entombed by verdant prison bars, On land where I once held sway, Drowned in Death's tearful surf, In which we all get swept away. Weep at a rock bearing my name, A vacant space once familiar there, Lost and lingered in limbo longing, Planted in pastures, green and fair. Arch headstones are defiant cliffs, For Reaper's wrath to crash upon, A foundling rage's pristine triumph, In foam white light, multitudes gone. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

Of the one million or so investor-owned residential homes in the State of New York, it has been estimated that in excess of 3% of these investor-owned properties sit vacant or abandoned. Say, between 30,000 and 35,000 homes. Vacant. Abandoned. Non-performing. In New York, municipalities which can establish land banks include a) cities, b) villages, c) towns, and d) counties.

But the Byzantines knew that there was no end, that new enemies would emerge if the old were utterly defeated, and there was an even chance that they might be as dangerous or more dangerous. In that case, the enemy fleet left undestroyed might be useful, for the newcomers might be as threatening to the old enemy as to the empire. It was the same on land, where to destroy one enemy pressing against the imperial frontiers would merely leave a vacant space for the next enemy to threaten imperial borders. Therefore the purpose of war for the Byzantines could not be to seek battle for decisive victory, for there was no such thing, but only to contain immediate threats by weakening the enemy with expedients, ruses of war, and ambushes, leaving any form of two-sided large-scale combat as only a last resort. That is the strategic context of this, as of every piece of serious Byzantine military writing.

There are just about than 4 million total residential homes in state of New York. If one is looking for a real estate development specialty to consider going into 2025, today, 13 years after the New York Land Bank Law went into effect, there are still in excess of somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 vacant residential homes located in municipalities throughout the state of New York.

Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.

The menu: legendary deep-fried Turkeyzilla, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green beans. The theme: dysfunction. “So,” Elysia said to Lex’s parents with her ever-friendly grin, “how are you?” “How do you think they are?” Ferbus whispered. She kicked him under the table. “I mean—um—what do you do? For a living?” Lex’s mother, who hadn’t said much, continued to stare down the table at the sea of black hoodies while picking at her potatoes. Lex’s father cleared his throat. “I’m a contractor,” he said. “And she’s a teacher.” “Omigod! I wanted to be a teacher!” Elysia turned to Mrs. Bartleby. “Do you love it?” “Hmm?” She snapped back to attention and smiled vacantly at Elysia. “Oh, yes. I do. The kids are a nice distraction.” “From what?” Pip asked. Bang smacked her forehead. Lex squeezed Driggs’s hand even tighter, causing him to choke on his stuffing. He coughed and hacked until the offending morsel flew out of his mouth, landing in Sofi’s glass of water. “Ewww!” she squealed. “Drink around it,” Pandora scolded. “So! I hear New York City is lovely this time of year.” Well, it looks nice, I guess,” Mr. Bartleby said. “But shoveling out the driveway is a pain in the neck. The girls used to help, but now . . .” Sensing the impending awkwardness, Corpp jumped in. “Well, Lex has been a wonderful addition to our community. She’s smart, friendly, a joy to be around—” “And don’t you worry about the boyfriend,” Ferbus said, pointing to Driggs. “I keep him in line.” Mrs. Bartleby’s eyes widened, looking at Lex and then Driggs. “You have a—” she sputtered. “He’s your—” Ferbus went white. “They didn’t know?” “Oops!” said Uncle Mort in a theatrical voice, getting up from the table. “Almost forgot the biscuits!” “Let me help you with those,” Lex said through clenched teeth, following him to the counter. A series of pained hugs and greetings had ensued when her parents arrived—but the rest of the guests showed up so soon thereafter that Lex hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to them, much to her relief. Still, she hadn’t stopped seething. “What were you thinking?” Uncle Mort gave her a reproachful look. “I was thinking that your parents were probably going to feel more lonely and depressed this Thanksgiving than they’ve ever felt in their lives, and that maybe we could help alleviate some of that by hosting a dinner featuring the one and only daughter they have left.” “A dinner of horrors? You know my track record with family gatherings!” He ignored her. “Here we are!” he said, turning back to the table with a giant platter. “Biscuits aplenty!” Lex grunted and took her seat. “I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” she whispered to Driggs. “Me neither,” he replied. “I think my hand is broken in three places.” “Sorry.” “And your dad seems to be shooting me some sort of a death stare.” Lex glanced at her father. “That’s bad.” “Think he brought the shotgun?” “It’s entirely possible.” “All I’m saying,” Ferbus went on, trying to redeem himself and failing, “is that we all look out for one another here.” Mr. Bartleby looked at him. Ferbus began to sweat. “Because, you know. We all need somebody. Uh, to lean on.” “Stop talking,” Bang signed. Elysia gave Lex’s parents a sympathetic grin. “I think what my idiot partner is trying to say—through the magic of corny song lyrics, for some reason—is that you don’t need to worry about Lex. She’s like a sister to me.” She realized her poor choice of words as a pained look came to Mrs. Bartleby’s face. “Or an especially close cousin.” She shut her mouth and stared at her potatoes. “Frig.” Lex was now crushing Driggs’s hand into a fine paste. Other than the folding chairs creaking and Pip obliviously scraping the last bits of food off his plate, the table was silent. “Good beans!” Pip threw in.

It was all a fiction, of course, because the land was not really inane ac uacuum—void and vacant. As the English conceived it, however, any land had to be taken out of its natural state and put to commercial use—only then would it be truly owned.6

To the extent that scarcity of land is natural, and absentee landlord claims are not enforced by the state, economic rent on land is a form of scarcity rent that will prevail under any system. But to the extent that the scarcity is artificial, resulting from government or absentee landlord restrictions on access to vacant land, or landlord rent on those actually occupying and using land, the mutualist contention is that such rent is a deviation from normal exchange-value caused by unequal exchange. Patents, likewise, are such a deviation, being nothing but a monopoly imposed by the state. Such examples, therefore, have no bearing whatsoever on the validity of the labor theory of value.

It doesn’t take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground — a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots — understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we’ll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes.

1979" Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time On a live wire right up off the street You and I should meet Junebug skipping like a stone With the headlights pointed at the dawn We were sure we'd never see an end to it all And I don't even care to shake these zipper blues And we don't know Just where our bones will rest To dust I guess Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below Double cross the vacant and the bored They're not sure just what we have in store Morphine city slipping dues down to see That we don't even care as restless as we are We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts And poured cement, lamented and assured To the lights and towns below Faster than the speed of sound Faster than we thought we'd go, beneath the sound of hope Justine never knew the rules, Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it To see that we don't even care to shake these zipper blues And we don't know just where our bones will rest To dust I guess Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below The street heats the urgency of now As you see there's no one around

Something About Her by Stewart Stafford Her cemetery chill touch, Felt in porcelain hands, Vacant heartbeat stolen, Desert of smooth sand. Her eyes were portals, To a feral, scary land, With no outlet or relief, Automaton at her command. Yes, break the spell now, An eye blink from losing all, Just a heave and it is broken, New dawn beyond her thrall. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

It has been estimated that one-third of the 139 square miles designated “Detroit” is now vacant-land-prairie. That’s crime.

There was no such thing as emptiness in the world. Even in the sky there were no vacant places. Everywhere there was life, visible and invisible, and every object possessed something that would be good for us to have also—even to the very stones.

Memories of love She is the flower that blooms in every season, For me she is the logic and my life’s every reason, To serenade her for her beautiful ways, During the cold Winter nights and during the warm Summer days, When I lie vacant in my mind, There is nothing to ponder on and nothing new to find, And no thoughts pass by and everything seems unopposable, I think of you, your beautiful face and your ways loveable, Then something within me dies, something deep inside, Maybe it is the sense of time, sense of existence that no more is willing to reside, In this trepidation which brings grief, To be a languid moment on the fringes of life with no relief, And as this dead part of me buries itself within me, Under the aegis of your sweet memories I now live and see, Whatever life has to offer in its cyclic inventions of fate, While I live, moving like the needles of the clock, and ah the endless wait, So I reside in the hegemony of chance, And in my memories we forever romance, Which rise from the my half that is still alive, Still hopeful, still in love, still romantic, and that is where you and your memories thrive, They are the reason and that subtle force that makes my heart beat, That alive part of my heart where every heart throb only your name does repeat, And as I slide into the corner of my room, I let your memories and smiles on the walls, on the floor, over the windows to bloom, And I stare at this permanent Summer bliss, And these beautiful sights grow over me like a permanent kiss, Where I breathe you and you breathe me, And in the flowers hanging on the walls, sprouting from the floor, growing on the windows, your wonder I see, Then I spread the blanket of your memories, And I sleep with your smiles, with your kisses, and my silent mind unto the land of love ferries, Time may have neutralised my mind, But it has failed to prevent me from my heart’s desire to find, You in everything, in the skies, in the stars in the light and in the dark, And ah its pain, for from memories it has failed to remove any mark, For time that is the unruly mercenary of fate, Killed a part of me and thought now it is my final and insensate state, And as it galloped to erase my memories too, My dying heart beat said, “Irma I love you!” And the horse of time stumbled and fell, How, why maybe nobody can tell, And thus I ceased my moment and ran away with your memories, And now the chariot of time me and you together carries, Ahead of the time that chases me still and maybe forever, But it's fall granted me a lead of few moments newer, And when I tread on the highway of time, You and I my love, are always ahead of the weary horse of Worldly time, So let me spread the blanket of memories and let me sleep now, For I have to be with you, in the land where it is always now, And for the weary moments of worldly time let the circle around the walls of my room, Never to know that lovers live in a zone where it is a permanent summer, in its everlasting beauty’s bloom! The horse of time is worn out but my memories are as fresh as today, And my love Irma, it shall be so everyday!

Memories of love She is the flower that blooms in every season, For me she is the logic and my life’s every reason, To serenade her for her beautiful ways, During the cold Winter nights and during the warm Summer days, When I lie vacant in my mind, There is nothing to ponder on and nothing new to find, And no thoughts pass by and everything seems unopposable, I think of you, your beautiful face and your ways loveable, Then something within me dies, something deep inside, Maybe it is the sense of time, sense of existence that no more is willing to reside, In this trepidation which brings grief, To be a languid moment cast on the fringes of life with no relief, And as this dead part of me buries itself within me, Under the aegis of your sweet memories I now live and see, Whatever life has to offer in its cyclic inventions of fate, While I live, moving like the needles of the clock, and ah the endless wait, So I reside in the hegemony of chance, Yet in my memories we forever romance, Which arise from my half that is still alive, Still hopeful, still in love, still romantic, and that is where you and your memories thrive, They are the reason and that subtle force that makes my heart beat, That alive part of my heart where every heart throb only your name does repeat, And as I slide into the corner of my room, I let your memories and smiles on the walls, on the floor, over the windows to bloom, And I stare at this permanent Summer bliss, And these beautiful sights grow over me like a permanent kiss, Where I breathe you and you breathe me, And in the flowers hanging on the walls, sprouting from the floor, growing on the windows, your true wonder I see, Then I spread the blanket of your memories, And I sleep with your smiles, your kisses, and my silent mind unto the land of love ferries, Time may have neutralised my mind, But it has failed to prevent me from my heart’s desire to find, You in everything, in the skies, in the stars in the light and in the dark, And ah its pain, for from memories it has failed to remove any mark, For time that is the unruly mercenary of fate, Killed a part of me and thought now it is my final and insensate state, And as it galloped to erase my memories too, My dying heart beat said, “Irma I love you!” And the horse of time stumbled and fell, How, why, maybe nobody can tell, But I ceased my moment and ran away with your memories, And now the chariot of time both of us carries, Ahead of the time that chases me still and maybe forever, But it's fall granted me a lead of few moments newer, And when I tread on the highway of time, You and I my love, are always ahead of the weary horse of Worldly time, So let me spread the blanket of memories and let me sleep now, For I have to be with you, in the land where it is always now, And for the weary moments of worldly time let them circle around the walls of my room, Never to know that lovers live in a zone where it is a permanent summer, in its everlasting beauty’s bloom! The horse of time is worn out but my memories are as fresh as today, And my love Irma, it shall be so everyday!

One of the significant milestones in building the high-tech community occurred in 1953 when Stanford University subdivided some of its vacant land for industrial development to form the Stanford Industrial Park (later renamed Stanford Research Park).

Rosewood Courts, Austin’s Eastside project for African Americans, was built on land obtained by condemning Emancipation Park, the site of an annual festival to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The park had been privately owned by a neighborhood association, the Travis County Emancipation Organization, and residents protested the condemnation of this community institution in which they took great pride. But their objections had no effect, despite the availability of other vacant land.

Architects can always make good use of vacant land, regardless of the horror that brought it into being: it is ruthless being that is supposed to make life possible again.

Today, Africatown is on the brink of disappearing. All the businesses and most of the people are gone. Fewer than two thousand people live in the old neighborhoods. The Meahers, the same family that removed the Clotilda’s passengers from Africa, have in effect continued to oppress their descendents into the twentieth century. Deciding to get out of the house rental business after nearly a century as one of Africatown’s most prominent landlords, the Meaher family suddenly bulldozed hundreds of rental properties they had built, destroying much of Africatown’s housing stock, rendering entire city blocks into vacant lots. They leased or sold their old plantation land surrounding the community for paper mills and other heavy industry, leaving residents saddled with high rates of cancers associated with environmental pollution. Even today, the Meaher Family Land Trust Group seeks to rezone property it owns in Africatown to bring more industry into the community.

Time! Time is mine, and so is the night. Day will end, must end. And at that time comes night. Enjoy your days in the sun you cannot see, for though centuries pass, though the sons of those centuries pass, I will wait, and remember. Remember till the day when night will fall, and so will you!” This time, this one time, Martel does not release his darkness to let it disperse. Instead, he lets it break, in waves, away from him, and in breaking that dark washes around Aurore so that all on Aurore behold a moment of night. That darkness flies across Sybernal, across Jsalm, across Pamyra, on across the White Cliffs, across a certain white villa, across beaches, and across vacant golden waters. That instant of night wings over the lands and waters like a night eagle whose shadowed pinions cover but briefly the ground beneath.

So no eye chart would be carried aboard. Instead, on a vacant plot of land forty miles north of Laredo, Texas, NASA groundsmen would flatten and rake eight squares of terrain—two thousand feet long to a side each—and cover portions of the squares with either white Styrofoam or dark turf. The astronauts would have to describe the pattern of the alternating dark-light squares as they flew overhead, a pattern that could be switched up every time the spacecraft passed over Laredo. Let the flyboys try to cheat on that one.

The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

Please note that the Gallup-documented changes in trust did not flow from the verifiable truth or falsity of the content. In the bubble, facts are no match for belief. There is no Democrat Party child-sex ring being operated out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, and never was. There is no fleet of UN black helicopters poised to invade the capitals of the world and steal their sovereignty, and never was. There was no U.S. military operation under the Obama administration to overthrow Texas and jail patriots in a vacant Walmart (I’m pretty sure we already have Texas, don’t we?). There was no George W. Bush administration plot to blow up the Twin Towers on 9/11 as a false-flag operation. There was no fake moon landing. Baby Barack Obama was born in a Honolulu, Hawaii, hospital, just as the birth certificate and contemporaneous newspaper announcements said. And at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, having already shot his own mother to death, Adam Lanza murdered twenty children and six adults. It was not a hoax. No matter what that asshole Alex Jones or his addled followers believe, the victims’ grieving parents were not “crisis actors” in a plot to undermine the Second Amendment. It was a fucking massacre conducted with a fucking assault rifle such as the fucking NRA has fought for decades to be readily available.

Life beckoned to me in the form of a blinding white light, coaxing me to come near it and grasp it. To live again. To exist again among the living. But I didn't want to. Not anymore. Death was a better choice. But Death did not want me. Yet. There was only one thing to do, then. I must escape Life. I turned away from the light, but it followed me. I ran, as fast as I can, but it was still behind me. I couldn’t lose it, however hard I tried. It was gaining on me! Out of breath, I turned into a dark alley and found myself in a barren stretch of land. I dropped to the ground as the light came into sight. And I knew that to avoid it, there was nothing else to do…but go underground. With my bare hands, I scratched and scraped and clawed on the ground, and my fingernails cracked, and my hands became bloodied. But I didn't stop. I must not stop. I must not let the light get me. So, I scratched and clawed and scraped the soil. Tears and perspiration mingled on my face, dripping down to the hole I was digging. “Still, I went on, and on, and on, focused on my task. Finally, a hole big enough appeared out of my efforts. Coughing, short of breath, I crawled inside, worming my way in. I curled up my body. I pulled my knees to my chest, folded my arms around them, and wriggled myself in, until I was deeply and comfortably nestled in. No vacant spaces, no empty void. Just me and the hole. I was a perfect fit for the dark pit I created for myself. Gradually, my breathing returned to normal, my heart softly beating. Gratefully, I closed my eyes, allowing the darkness to engulf me wholly, shielding me from the light called Life.

The M Condo by Wing Tai has a site coverage of over 80,000 sqft, sitting along the eastern end of middle road. The M Condo will comprise of one 20-storey residential tower and one block of low-rise apartment, atop a row of approximately 1,500 sqm of commercial space. Set on a former vacant land, this new project is poised to benefit from the limited housing supply in the vicinity. With its well placement in the prime district 7 locale, it's a destination planned for work, live and play concept.

Rosewood Courts, Austin's Eastside project for African Americans, was built on land obtained by condemning Emancipation Park, the site of an annual festival to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The park had been privately owned by a neighborhood association the Travis County Emancipation Organization, and residents protested the condemnation of this community institution in which they took great pride. But their objects had no effect, despite the availability of other vacant land.

Mika grabbed my beard, pulled it, and whispered, “I’m horny. Let’s have a little quickie in a vacant room or bathroom.” “I was thinking more like the morgue area,” I whispered against her lips. “The fuck kind of shit is that Keegan?” she blurted, causing all to oddly look at us. Walking to the door, I whispered, “I heard one can bust in under two minutes. I won’t give a fuck about doing the most. I’ll be focused on us catching the quickest nut in the temporary land of corpses.

Thump, thump, thump. He raised his fist into the air, preparing to strike. I didn’t move a muscle as he ran right for me. Waiting, waiting. Almost there… I ducked under his swinging arm, spun on the balls of my feet and delivered a brutal roundhouse kick to the side of his head from behind. He went down like a house of cards, the entire ring shaking from the impact of his body slamming onto the ground. Casual as you please, I walked over and stared down at him. He’d landed on his back, staring up the ceiling with vacant eyes. I stomped down on his exposed throat with the heel of my foot, killing him instantly.

Traditionally, European settler societies throw off the propaganda smokescreen that they didn't really conquer and dispossess other nations—they claim with false modesty that they merely moved into vacant territory! So the early English settlers depicted Amerika as empty—"a howling wilderness," "unsettled," "sparsely populated"—just waiting with a "VACANT" sign on the door for the first lucky civilization to walk in and claim it. Theodore Roosevelt wrote defensively in 1900: "...the settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages." It is telling that this lie is precisely the same lie put forward by the white "Afrikaner" settlers, who claim that South Africa was literally totally uninhabited by any Afrikans when they arrived from Europe. To universal derision, these European settlers claim to be the only rightful, historic inhabitants of South Afrika. Or we can hear similar defenses put forward by European settlers of Israel, who claim that much of the Palestinian land and buildings they occupy are rightfully theirs, since the Arabs allegedly decided to voluntarily abandon it all during the 1948-49 war. Are these kind of tales any less preposterous when put forward by Euro-Amerikan settlers?