Contentions

#1. What I want to say about philosophy in general is, The Age of Reason did not pan out, Plato was kind of a fascist, thank GOD for metaphor, Buddha rocks, and only the poet's truth lives.

#2. None of us is ultimately responsible for anything, and none of us is ever without some responsibility for everything. (We do what we can, and we'd best be humble about it, failed saints that we all are.)

There's a gestalt thing I need to do with these two bits. I can talk myself into understanding that others are more like me than not, but I need art, poetry, an experiential something-or-other to really get it.

I'm thinking about how some well-off folk I've known must deny others' misery. They've chosen and rationalized and I pity them  -- Yes, really; what I mostly feel for "conservatives" is pity -- for having amputated parts of themselves. But how ironic it is that I also envy them for that ability. Had I some of that, I'm tempted to believe, then I too could be snide but self-satisfied.

A thing about my thing, my episode, my crash that I don't talk about is a thing that I don't expect enough others to recognize in themselves: that when others hurt, we will not be content.

When others hurt, I will not be content. And just that, I'm pretty sure, is the crux of the matter, of my need -- for a long time -- to retreat.

And it goes on and on.

Whichever way someone else goes, I'm bound to go sideways from there. No wonder I had to do time in philosophy camp.

::

Ambivalence: Emily Dickenson got there her way. Et moi? At age sixteen or so, I discovered this word, and the top of my head blew off. Oh wow; you can think every which way about everything. It was like getting a direct brain infusion of the many-worlds hypothesis of physics, without math and without drugs.

And so it goes.

Long live the phoenix.
First you crash and then you burn
given fuel -- and wings.

Home.

I so much regret that so much of earth's beauty and joy have been sacrificed. And for what? Not for quality of life for our species, much less for any other species' quality of life.

This is some form of survivor's guilt I'm feeling. It's not that I feel so explicitly at fault. It's just the simple sharing of grief that one expresses when another's loved one dies. It's that kind of "I'm sorry."

"What is he? A Mexican or something?"

My grandmother was a short round blue-eyed woman, freckled and plain, but until then I'd avoided thinking of her as homely. After that, it was about all I could see of her. I'd introduced her to a man I thought, for a while, I loved, only to see for the first time how pale her eyes were. They absorbed no light.

m ss ng p eces

http://www.youtube.com/v/AH7YxbuZQs8

From Jonathan Harris, not just beautiful photography, but also a meditation on memory and story.

[Via Imaginary Foundation]