February 2012
14 posts
Turjan sighed and left the room. He mounted winding stone stairs and at last came out on the roof of his castle Miir, high above the river Derna. In the west the sun hung close to old earth; ruby shafts, heavy and rich as red wine, slanted past the gnarled boles of the archaic forest to lay on the turfed forest floor. The sun sank in accordance with the old ritual; latter-day night fell across the...
The coping mechanisms of the migratory only serve to prove there is something wrong with them, something sinister. They cluster together, sometimes creating their own little neighborhoods. They want to bring their own food. They are relieved to find others with whom they can converse in their native language. It is difficult to fit into another people’s structure. Every default decision you try to...
In the drama of the dream, pathology is an evolving, shifting character. It hides in the blind spots…When it hid in the shadows, you reacted to it reflexively: you were thrown into panic or spoke cruelly or skulked in shame or acted out of guilt and had no idea why.
I don’t want to underestimate the trickiness or shiftiness of the pathology even as it begins to appear in the open. It...
A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and...
For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed?
—Virginia Woolf.
It is the way of dreams to give us more than we ask…The view that dreams are merely the imaginary fulfillments of repressed wishes is hopelessly out of date. There are, it is true, dreams which manifestly represent wishes or fears, but what about all the other things? Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, ...
Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviœ: at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them—dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smr_dGw2ZwU →
Sub specie aeternitatis ? or sub speciegenerationis ? I am susceptible to the aesthetic charm of the former ideal — who is not ? There are moments of relaxation: there are moments when the demand for peace, to be let alone and relieved from the continual claim of the world in which we live that we be up and doing something about it, seems irresistible ; when the...
January 2012
33 posts
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
—Henry David Thoreau.
They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in...
Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.
Most of the four million...
Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre — Without Design Or Order, or Apparent Action — Maintain —
The Sun — upon a Morning meets them — The Wind — No nearer Neighbor — have they — But God —
The Acre gives them — Place — They — Him — Attention of Passer by — Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply — Or Boy —
What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature — What Plan They severally — retard — or further —...
WE stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod, —They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles solved years ago; And some words played between us to and fro— On which lost the more by our love. The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing ...
Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,) Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles, The rushing amorous contact high in space together, The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel, Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling, In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling, Till o’er the...
Truth, in general or in the abstract, is a just name for an experienced relation among the things of experience that sort of relation in which intents are retrospectively viewed from the standpoint of the fullfilment which they secure through their own natural operation or incitement. Thus the experimental theory explains directly and simply the absolutistic tendency to translate concrete true...
Joey Baines.
“Better get used to these bars, kid.” —Marty McFly
“Jailbird” Joey Baines (born 1954) was the fourth child of Sam and Stella Baines. He would grow up to spend many years in prison for an unknown offense. On October 25, 1985 he failed to earn his release on parole for at least the second time. When Marty McFly traveled back to November 5, 1955, he met...
The Criegee biradicals — named after Rudolph Criegee, who postulated their existence in the 1950′s — turn out to react with pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, much more rapidly than expected to form sulphates and nitrates. “These compounds,” Science Daily explains, “will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet.”
...
Do not depend on the hope of results. … you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
—Thomas Merton, via...
A stone presses downwards and manifests its heaviness. But while this heaviness exerts an opposing pressure upon us it denies us any penetration into it. if we attempt such a penetration by breaking open the rock, it still does not display in its fragments anything inward that has not been disclosed. The stone has instantly withdrawn again into the same dull pressure and bulk of its fragments.
...
When we go to expel body out of our thoughts, we must be sure not to leave empty space in the room of it; and when we go to expel emptiness from our thoughts we must not squeeze it out by anything close, hard and solid, but we must think of the same that sleeping rocks dream of; and not till then shall we get a complete idea of nothing.
—Jonathan Edwards.
At the university where I work, the budget for building maintenance has been cut to the point where the janitors have time to rip down old posters, but no more. As a result, some intriguing art blossoming in the twilight of public education.
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
—J.G. Ballard.
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It’s no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
...
“How long can you stay fresh in that can?”
—Cowardly Lion, to Tin Woodman.
December 2011
65 posts
