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Most likely the problem is both in the stars and in
ourselves. |
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The desire for narrative got us out of the jungle
and up to some glorious heights. Now the compulsive habit of narrative has got us back
into the jungle. |
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Death is the cure for life. Life is the cure for
death. |
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The 20th century having been too smart by half, the
21st century is fleeing smart for clever, much as the 17th fled the 16th. |
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Every death closes a window into other worlds. |
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We no more understand the relationship between
sleep and waking than Neanderthal understood the relationship between fucking and babies. |
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Other knowings and other knowledges are as remote
from this one as Betelgeuse is from Sol. |
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Self-replication, the bane of this universe. |
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All fool, flashing different facets of foolness. |
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The only entity that can understand itself is a
god, and at the moment of understanding it vanishes, leaving acolytes, mouths agape,
silenced. |
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Linear thought produces all manner of
escahtologies, from orthodox Christianity to the Big Band to thermodynamics to musics. |
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The scientist is no less trapped in illusion than
the religionist. |
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New Earth. The Lost Five Billion. The Great Divide
comes. Terranova. |
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The revanchists, jungle-dwellers in all but name,
neither win what they hope to win nor lose what they fear to lose. |
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All art is a message in a bottle once tossed to
huzzahs of acclaims and clinks of gold now floated in cilence horizon-ward on this vaster
sea that smells of brine and hope of better ports. |
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Nobody makes a habit of walking past cemeteries on
the remote chance there might be a sign of life in there yet The New Yorker keeps on
printing poetry. |
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With deigitalization art moves toward escape from
the illusion of permanence. How far to go to escape the simultaneous and co-equal illusion
of impermanence? |
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We’ve traded clouds of glory for clouds of
information (the cloud of unknowing for the cloud of knowing) which now trail invisible
but instantly accessible behind us all. What similar and invisible clouds do our sometimes
noisome visitors trail? |
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The one big miracle not being quite enough for us,
we want a lot of little miracles to fill our maw. Put another way: Surrounded constantly
by small miracles which we take for granted, we forget to notice the on-going big miracle. |
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E = (d)IT. Efficacy = depth of immersion times
time. |
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The true poet writes for an audience of none. |
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There exists music you don’t even have to
listen to. Of course you can listen to it if you want to, and you will gain thereby. But
if YOU don’t listen to it, parts of you will, parts you probably don’t know you
have much less that they are capable of listening. And you and those unknown parts both
benefit. Not the glop of so-called subliminal or "New Age" music. Much of
Handel. Some Mozart. Some jazz. A lot of Beethoven. Most medieval and Renaissance
liturgical music. |
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Delighted by the latest verifiable version of the
world, each age then pokes its toe in the infinite lake of other possibilities and preens
not end over its great progress. |
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A common mistake is the failutre to keep in mind
the fact that humans will do and say almost enything to get and keep attention. |
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What percent of media offerings are half as
valuable as the silence out of which you were born? |
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What joy can a day bring to match that of pre-dawn
contemplation of a flower? |
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You build a set only as big as you need for the
production. |
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Among wayward human endeavors the fundamentally
erroneous one is theology since it is wholly based on the belief that it is possible to
deal verbally with the non-verbal ground of being. The viciousness of religious conflicts
arises from the corwardly, unfaced fear of this simple truth. |
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A culture at its peak forms a hothouse where all
manner of creative exotics flourish briefly. |
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Every moment (except maybe the last) contains the
same lesson. Nostalgia is always false, distorted memory. |
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Stagehands are to be ignored. A good actor who
happens to notice one pretends not to, and certainly doesn't try to chat or write books
about the sighting. |
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We come closest through non-verbal gesture--the
aural gesture of music, the physical gesture of dance, the visutal gesture of painting. |
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Every moment (except maybe the last) contains the
same lesson. Among our many delusional behaviors, tolerance of nostalgia is the most
degrading. |
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One age's analogy is the next's profound wisdom and
and the next's perfect punchline. |
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It is foolish to seek the right answer, less so to
seek the right question. |
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The autophagous self-flattery of Christianity is
exceeded only by the deuplicitous self-glorification of Zen. |
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The analogy of clouds. There is more going on in
clouds than is dreamt of in our science. |
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Some wander the surface and delight in (and profit
from) reporting on new vistas they find there. Others work at a deeper level, learning
with difficulty to feel the direction and speed of hidden, unguessed-at tectonic plates
that give shape to the future. |
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Sufficient unto the day is the understanding
thereof. |
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Every cultural revolution comes down to sex, dope,
and rock and roll, whatever other names are applied to them. |
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On what trip would our metaphysical betters want us
for boon companions? |
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Riches litter the ground of being and fill its air.
Don't seek and you won't find. Gross alchemists we shall always have with us. The
blindered don't see though at any moment they can. All gold is fool's gold. |
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We want not only to believe that the point of
diamonds is that they exist. We also want someone else to go to the trouble of digging
them up, and then giving them to us. |
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Wisdom no more advertises itself than piety speaks
or humility brags. |
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Three Questions:
1. Does wisdom exist?
2. If so, is it accessible?
3. If so, why do we spend so little time looking for it in the right places? |
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Some Everests require the gentlest approach. |
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Large among our ignorances looms that of the
feedback loop of unhappy deaths that girdles the earth, and us. |
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Beware the person who given time and thought enough
is not humble before a flower. |
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At the beginning, gadfly. Now, call me termite. |
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The biggest clue is the fact that there is no big
clue. If it exists, then the second biggest clue is that a million years' worth of humans
haven't found it, much less figured it out/ |
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Not the fast food of acquiring and controlling but
the filling feast of loving and being loved. |
