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"Her Telepathic-Station transmits thought-waves the second-rade, the bored, the disappointed, and any..."

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 14:45:00 -0600

“

Her Telepathic-Station transmits thought-waves
the second-rade, the bored, the disappointed,
and any of us when tired or uneasy,
are tuned to receive.

So, though unlisted in atlas or phone-book,
Her Garden is easy to find. In no time
one reaches the gate over which is written
large: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.

Inside it is warm and still like a drowsy
September day, though the leaves show no sign of
turning. All around one notes the usual
pinks and blues and reds,

a shade over-emphasized. The rose-bushes
have no thorns. An invisible orchestra
plays the Great Masters: the technique is flawless,
the rendering schmaltz.

Of Herself no sign. But, just as the pilgrim
is starting to wonder “Have I been hoaxed by
a myth?”, he feels Her hand in his and hears Her
murmuring: “At last!

With me, mistaught one, you shall learn the answers.
What is conscience but a nattering fish-wife,
the Tree of Knowledge but the splintered main-mast
of the Ship of Fools?

Consent, you poor alien, to my arms where
sequence is conquered, division abolished:
soon, soon, in the perfect orgasm, you shall, pet,
be one with the All.”

She does not brutalize Her victims (beasts could
bite or bolt), She simplifies them to flowers,
sessile fatalists who don’t mind and only
can talk to themselves.

All but a privileged Few, the elite She
guides to Her secret citadel, the Tower
where a laugh is forbidden and DO HARM AS
THOU WILT is the Law.

Dear little not-so-innocents, beware of
Old Grandmother Spider: rump Her endearments.
She’s not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quite
as tough as you think.

”

- W.H. Auden. Circe.

"Cover your heavens, Zeus, with gauzy clouds, and practice, like a boy who beheads thistles, on..."

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:12:58 -0500

“

Cover your heavens, Zeus,
with gauzy clouds,
and practice, like a boy
who beheads thistles,
on the oaks and peaks of mountains;
but you must allow
my world to stand,
and my hut, which you did not build,
and my hearth,
whose glow
you envy me.

I know nothing more shabby
under the sun, than you gods!
You wretchedly nourish,
from offerings
and the breath of prayers,
your majesty;
And you would starve, were
children and beggars not
such hopeful fools.

When I was a child
I did not know in from out;
I turned my confused eyes
to the sun, as if above it there were
an ear to hear my laments -
a heart like mine
that would pity the oppressed.

Who helped me
against the pride of the titans?
Who rescued me from death -
from slavery?
Did you not accomplish it all yourself,
my sacred, glowing heart?
Yet did you not glow with ardent and youthful goodness,
deceived, and full of gratitude
to the sleepers above?

I, honor you? Why?
Have you ever alleviated the pain
of one who is oppressed?
Have you ever quieted the tears
of one who is distressed?
Was I not forged into a man
by all-mighty Time
and eternal Fate,
my masters and yours?

You were deluded if you thought
I should hate life
and fly into the wilderness
because not all of my
budding dreams blossomed.

Here I will sit, forming men
after my own image.
It will be a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy and to rejoice,
and to pay no attention to you,
as I do!

”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Prometheus.

"… Let the mystery writ upon the jaguars die with me. He who has glimpsed the universe, he who..."

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:52:05 -0500

“… Let the mystery writ upon the jaguars die with me. He who has glimpsed the universe, he who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe, can have no thought for a man, for a man’s trivial joys or calamities, though he himself be that man. He was that man, who no longer matters to him. What does he care about the fate of that other man, what does he care about the other man’s nation, when now he is no one? That is why I do not speak the formula, that is why, lying in darkness, I allow the days to forget me… .”

- Jorge Luis Borges. The Writing Of The God.

"… To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to law and order… ."

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:01:00 -0500

“… To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to law and order… .”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

"… A creative life implies a regime of strict mental health, of high conduct, of constant..."

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:59:44 -0500

“… A creative life implies a regime of strict mental health, of high conduct, of constant stimulus, which keep active the consciousness of man’s dignity. A creative life is energetic life, and this is only possible in one or other of these two situations: either being the one who rules, or finding oneself placed in a world which is ruled by someone in whom we recognize full right to such function: either I rule or I obey. By obedience I do not mean mere submission - this is degradation - but on the contrary, respect for the ruler and acceptance of his leadership, solidarity with him, an enthusiastic enrollment under his banner… .”

- Jose Ortega y Gasset. Who Rules In The World? The Revolt Of The Masses.

"… in Wolfram the guide is within — for each, unique; and I see in this the first..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:09:00 -0500

“

… in Wolfram the guide is within — for each, unique; and I see in this the first completely intentional statement of the fundamental mythology of modern Western man, the first sheerly individualistic mythology in the history of the human race: a mythology of quest inwardly motivated — directed from within — where there is no authorized way or guru to be followed or obeyed, but where, for each, all ways already found, known and proven, are wrong ways, since they are not his own.

For each, in himself, is in his “intelligible character” an unprecedented species in himself, whose life-way and life-form (as of a newly sprung plant or animal sport) can be revealed and realized only by and through himself. Hence that sense of yearning and striving toward an unknown end, so characteristic of the Western living of life — so alien to the Oriental. What is unknown, yet deeply, infallibly intended, is one’s own peculiar teleology, not the one “straight path to Paradise.” The learned Anglo-Indian critic of our civilization, Dr. Ananda Kent Coomaraswamy — who had lived and worked in this country somewhat more than forty years, yet never got the idea nor any sense of the unique majesty of this Occidental style of spirituality — with disparaging intent coined a really telling characterization of the “Faustian soul,” when he wrote (using the pronoun “we” to connote not himself, a master of India’s “eternal” wisdom, but his Occidental colleagues at the Boston Museum and Harvard University) : “We who can call an art ‘significant,’ knowing not of what, are also proud to ‘progress,’ we know not whither.” And indeed we are — and had better be. For as Spengler has well said: “In Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespear, and Goethe, the tragic line of the individual life develops from within outward, dynamically, functionally.”

And so we return from the Vulgate monastic epic of Lancelot and Galahad, with its subsequent disintegration of the worldly court of King Arthur, to the earthly Divine Comedy of their nature-rooted predecessors: Gawain, the model lover, at bout the age of Leopold Bloom, and Parzival, the questing youth, like Stephen, willing to challenge even God if the mask that he shows — or is said to have shown — rings hollow when struck… .

”

- Joseph Campbell. The Literary Stages of Development: c. 1136-1230. The Paraclete. Creative Mythology.

"… If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:38:12 -0500

“… If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity; the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together… .”

- Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to suffer and those who feel pity. 338. Book Four. The Gay Science.

"… Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to the crudest origins… . It is..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:38:00 -0500

“… Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to the crudest origins… . It is painful — there is no denying it — to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really “final” truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet. Our mistake would lie in supposing that what is radiant no longer exists because it has been explained from the shadow-side. This is a regrettable error into which Freud himself has fallen. Yet the shadow belongs to the light as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa… .”

- Carl Gustav Jung. Problems of Psychotherapy. Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

"Three very ancient faces stay with me: one is the Ocean, which would talk with Claudius, another the..."

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:15:35 -0500

“Three very ancient faces stay with me:
one is the Ocean, which would talk with Claudius,
another the North, with its unfeeling temper,
savage both at sunrise and at sunset;
the third is Death, that other name we give
to passing time, which wears us all away.
The secular burden of those yesterdays
from history which happened or was dreamed,
oppresses me as personally as guilt.
I think of the proud ship, carrying back
to sea the body of Scyld Sceaving,
who ruled in Denmark, underneath the sky;
I think of the great wolf, whose reins were serpents,
who lent the burning boat the purity
and whiteness of the beautiful dead god;
I think of pirates too, whose human flesh
is scattered through the slime beneath the weight
of waters which were ground for their adventures;
I think of mausoleums which the sailors
saw in the course of Northern odysseys.
I think of my own death, my perfect death,
without a funeral urn, without a tear.”

- Jorge Luis Borges. Elegy.

"… What has been the greatest sin here on earth so far? Was it not the word of him who said:..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 09:23:00 -0500

“

… What has been the greatest sin here on earth so far? Was it not the word of him who said: ‘Woe unto those who laugh now!’

Did he himself find no grounds on earth for laughter? Then he simply did not look. Even a child can find such grounds here.

He — did not love enough: else he would also have loved us who laugh! But he hated and scorned us: weeping and gnashing of teeth he promised for us.

Must one straightway curse where one does not love? That — seems to me bad taste. But that is what he did, this unconditional man. He came from the mob.

And he himself simply did not love enough: else he would have been less angry that he was not loved. All great love does not want love: — it wants more.

Get out of the way of all such unconditional men! That is a poor sick kind, a mob-kind: they look at life sadly; they have the evil eye for this earth.

Get out of the way of all such unconditional men! They have heavy feet and sultry hearts: — they know not how to dance. So how could the earth be light for such as them! …

”

- Friedrich Nietzsche. 16. Fourth and Last Part. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

"… Here are my lost hands. They’re invisible, but you see them through the night, through..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:54:00 -0500

“

… Here are my lost hands.
They’re invisible, but you
see them through the night,
through the invisible wind.
Give me your hands, I see them
through the rasping sands
of our American night,
and I choose yours and yours,
that hand and that other hand,
the one that rises to struggle
and the one that’s sown again.

I don’t feel alone in the night,
in the darkness of the land.
I’m people, innumerable people.
I have in my voice the pure strength
to penetrate silence
and germinate in the dark.
Death, martyrdom, shadow, ice,
suddenly shroud the seed.
And the people seem to be buried.
But the corn returns to the earth.
Its implacable red hands
pierced the silence.
From death we’re reborn… .

”

- Pablo Neruda. XIII. The Fugitive.

"My doing nothing as I walk the streets lives on and is released into the night’s..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 03:10:34 -0500

“My doing nothing as I walk the streets lives on
and is released into the night’s multiplicity.
The night is a long and lonely celebration.
In my secret heart I justify and glorify myself.
I have witnessed the world; I have confessed to the
strangeness of the world.
I’ve sung the eternal: the bright returning moon and the faces craved by love.
I’ve recorded in poems the city that surrounds me
and the outlying neighborhoods tearing themselves apart.
I’ve said astonishment where others said only custom.
Faced with the song of the tepid, I ignited my voice in sunsets.
I’ve exalted and sung my blood’s ancestors and the ancestors of my dreams.
I have been and I am.
I’ve fixed my feelings into durable words
when they could have been spent on tenderness.
The memory of an old infamy returns to my heart.
Like a dead horse flung up on the beach by the tide, it returns
to my heart.
And yet, the streets and the moon are still at my side.
Water keeps flowing freely in my mouth and poems don’t
deny me their music.
I feel the terror of beauty; who will dare condemn me when
this great moon of my solitude forgives me?”

- Jorge Luis Borges. Almost A Last Judgement.

"… We must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and nurture them with..."

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:12:03 -0500

“… We must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and nurture them with everything we have in us of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life to us — that means constantly transforming everything we are into light and flame, as well as everything that happens to us… .”

- Friedrich Nietzsche. 3. Preface. The Gay Science.

"… There was a room at the rear of the house in which there were three tables, at which sat men..."

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:28:36 -0500

“… There was a room at the rear of the house in which there were three tables, at which sat men like himself, who also cast charity into exile, and he said that he conversed with them, and was confirmed by them day by day, and told that no other theologian was as wise as he. He was smitten by that adoration, but since some of the persons had no face, and others were like dead men, he soon came to abominate and mistrust them. Then he began to write something about charity; but what he wrote on the paper one day, he did not see the next; for this happens to every one there when he commits any thing to paper from the external man only, and not at the same time from the internal, thus from compulsion and not from freedom; it is obliterated of itself… .”

- Jorge Luis Borges. A Theologian In Death. Et Cetera.

"… Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall..."

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:35:00 -0500

“

… Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

Some revelation is at hand… .

”

- W.B. Yeats. The Second Coming.

"… “Thinking, meditating, imagining,” he also wrote me, “are not anomalous..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:24:00 -0500

“… “Thinking, meditating, imagining,” he also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts - they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.” …”

- Jorge Luis Borges. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

"… You see craftsmen but no human beings, thinkers but no human beings, priests but no human..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:26:17 -0500

“… You see craftsmen but no human beings, thinkers but no human beings, priests but no human beings, masters and slaves, young people and adults, but no human beings — is it not like a battlefield, where hands and arms and limbs lie everywhere dismembered, while the life-blood flows from them into the sand? …”

- Friedrich Hölderlin. Hyperion.

"… Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a..."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 14:47:00 -0500

“… Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world in their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus… . We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate… .”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson. Experience.

"… You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you..."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:56:38 -0500

“… You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken… .”

- Anaïs Nin. The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Vol. 1: 1931-1934

"… It is a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as..."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:45:41 -0500

“… It is a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions; ‘tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of the world… .”

- Virginia Woolf. Montaigne.