Napolean says: From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step

"[Ordinary people are] always master of the present; the [extraordinary] master of the future. The first preserves the world and increases it numerically; the second moves the world and leads it toward a goal. (261)" -Dostoevsky

I'm a ghost man in a ghost town and I don't know how to get out and get up to heaven

"Ghosts are, so to speak, bits and pieces of other worlds, their beginnings. The healthy man, naturally, has no call to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly of men, and therefore he ought to live according to life here, for the sake of completeness and order. Well, but as soon as a man gets sick, as soon as the normal earthly order of his organism is disrupted, the possibility of another world at once begins to make itself known, and the sicker one is, the greater the contact with this other world, so that when a man dies altogether, he goes to the other world directly. (289)" - Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment

Lies <=> Truth

"I like it when people lie! Lying is man's only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie - you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that's honorable in its way; well, but we can't even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and I'll kiss you for it. Lying in one's own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a man, and in the second - no better than a bird! The truth won't go away, but life can be nailed shut...In the end we'll lie our way to the truth, because we are on a noble path. (202-204)"

Where You Go I Go Too

I'm sure long before this one I had many other dreams, but this is the very first dream I can remember. It shows me that I haven't changed much in my way of thinking and forming desirous relationships since I was 4 years old. There was a young girl, my age, in my preschool class, blond curly hair. I remember her face generally other than it was like most of the faces belonging to children of a young age; cute and chubby with large eyes. But for me at that time her face possessed a magical quality.

In my dream she was standing on a balcony on the second story of a white colonial house. Her hair was curled in amber ringlets and she wore a blue dress in the style certainly before the civil war of a southern belle adorned with organdy ruffles and exposing her shoulders. What is odd is I am not sure how such details could have come into my mind. At four years old I had little knowledge of time or history yet there she was standing looking out from the picket fence lined portico as I held her in my mind. Nothing else happened.

Truth is I'm sure I hadn't spoken five words to her while we were in the class. Certainly I was too shy and when I did come in contact with her I could do nothing but admire her.

I can understand why my friends say I am a hopeless romantic (even though some haven't actually said it too me). But it makes sense. I've always been this way. Waking up in memories and dreams of thirsting for people I barely know. How to change? How to change? Can I? Do I want to? One thing I am certain of is I will keep this girl with me all of my life. As some kind of archetype. As my first memory of longing and the beginning of my hopeless romance. Where I go she goes too.

Square Foot of Space

"Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet- and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him- and had so stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity, it would be better to live than to die right now! Only to live, to live to live! To live, no matter how-only to live!(158)" - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Bouquet (8/3/2009)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentioning eighteenth century attire has me wondering of floral arrangements. "Her bouquet" what could her bouquet be? Something she wears, supporting her bosom, the flower of her body? She hands me her bouquet - offering me her flesh. A word; possession. It was enough for me not to grab, but rather to hold her by the stems and feel the petals brush against my skin. ("You were always weird that I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now") No expectations. The curves of her body, her energy, I could feel inside her. I felt inside. Yet surrounded her. We danced and laughed, and and pressed out mouths together, we met each other and met ourselves again. The blue lights are bright. We should be the masters of the lights of the world. We speak it and we are.

She offered her bouquet to me and I took only a garland of baby's-breath. 'Tis sweet to leave love wanting more. Take little now. Gain more as they grow. She grows basil and carrots, hyssop-mint and other plants on the fire-escape of her apartment in Brooklyn. Grows them in her garden. To taste those herbs! To hold in my mouth that passion of inspiration, to hold the initial moment she conceived the idea of growing plants then in my mouth now will be my most sought delight. The experience.

The bouquet unfurls from the cleavage of her shirt. The stems are her neck, strong muscular and stretched taut. Careening. The flowers her face, high cheeks, chin, fiery nectar lips and iris eyes of amber glow like sunlight. But I do not possess. For there is very little in life for anyone to. I see. I admire. I am aware of beauty in things, the valuable symbols they possess. Like flowers gathering in my mind, ones already grown and planted somewhere else; those I have conceived without sight. Perhaps she will see them tomorrow in the city street in a bed outside of a building. Perhaps she will see them tomorrow of the next day and think of me.

Crushing Hard & The Muse

Somehow I feel very close with my craft and at the same time very far away. Somehow I know her but she is too distant from me to get at her and really know her. The duality of this paradigm is not as separate as it may seem. Like Plotinus' fire, only light exists. Therefore darkness is merely the absence of light. Light being truth, the absence of light being the absence of truth.

The truth is I have much to learn. My muse will bring me closer to the light.

Hesiod, the Greek poet said of the muses, "They are all of one mind, their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles. Such is the holy gift of the Muses to men. (40 Edith Hamilton's Mythology)"

Light and the Happiest Day of my Life

"We are not separated from spirit, we are in it."
"Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."
-Plotinus 3rd Century AD

Everything I have witnessed of life leads me to believe in energy. That all living things physical or symbolic exude some amount of energy, a light invisible to the human eye but visible in the universal eye. Perhaps it is an effect of the stars in the sky of endless space, perhaps the tiny atoms floating around us constantly effecting each other unnoticed, perhaps its our human awareness of its existence. As if each of us could sense the others light or that each of our lights were somehow attracted to each other.

Human Soul

"Pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn't matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don't twinkle they are either planets or satellites...Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other...It took a second, do you think?...Even if you'd taken an hour something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light...Your awareness. That is the new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness...I have thought of a better word than awareness. Let us call it soul. (242-243)" - Kurt Vonnegut as Kilgore Trout

Rousseau's Cunning

"In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king; I passed for a good teacher, because the rest in the town were bad. (181)"

"To try and make young people attend to the lesson you wish to give them by dangling in front of their eyes the prospect of something very interesting to follow is a most common mistake in teachers. (186)"

Land of Castles

"I love this," M said letting out a sigh and pressed up against her friends. The three of them seated in the backseat of E's coupe smoking. It seemed other-worldly, careless almost completely European, like siblings embracing each other in each their own way. Michigan summer air is damp and sexy and full of unknowns.

Wouldn't know who Eugene Debs was without Vonnegut

"Where there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am in it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." -Eugene Debs (p 142 Vonnegut's Timequake)

Shape of Women

"I say that when couples fight, it isn't about money or sex or power. What they're really saying is, 'You're not enough people!' Sigmund Freud said he didn't know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to... I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz (94-96 Timequake)

Appoggiatura

Appoggiatura - \ə-ˌpä-jə-ˈtu̇r-ə\ - noun
(1)an embellishing note or tone preceding an essential melodic note or tone and usually written as a note of smaller size (Merriam-Webster)
(2)"grace note" (57 Timequake); word or phrase characteristic to an individual's conversational language

The Human Tendency To Imitate Strangers, To Travel And Exchange

"Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction... If I hadn't learned to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my haert a thousand times.(32)" - Vonnegut's Timequake

Moral Dualism: The Benevolent & The Malignant

"In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing. But nothing implies something, just as up implies down and sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and happy implies sad. I hat to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don't like it here, why don't you go back to where you came from?

"The first something to be implied by all the nothing was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness.

"God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first.

"But Satan began to worry about God when He said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. She had to wonder, 'What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go, and does He epect me to help Him take care of all this crazy stuff?'

"And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman, beautiful little miniatures of Him and her, and turned them loose to see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games.

"Satan couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes.

"Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked.

"I grant you that some of the ideas in the apple had catastrophic effects for a minority of those who tried them.

"All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases. And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day. (28-30)" -Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake

The Effects of Health, Youth and Idleness

"I was restless, absent-minded, and dreamy; I wept and sighed and longed for pleasure which I could not imagine but of which I nevertheless felt the lack. This state is indescribable; and few men can even have any conception of it. For most of them have anticipated this overflowing of life, which is both delicious and tormenting, and which, in the intoxication of desire, gives one a foretaste of gratification. The heat in my blood incessantly filled my mind with pictures of women and girls. But not knowing the true nature of sex I imagined them acting according to my own strange fantasies, and had no idea of anything else. (90)" -Rousseau's Confessions

Inti : Inca Sun God

NATIONAL GEO has a great documentary Inca Mummies: Secrets of the Lost World over at hulu. The Inca carved their civilization out of the Andes Mountains which at its height reached over 1400 miles along the coast of the Pacific.

Part of the modern mind-set, shown in this documentary, has to do with rediscovering things which, through a brutal history, have been lost or killed off before gaining an intimate knowledge of what they were. Later on we come of find that the intrigue in viewing different ways in which people create their own realities through culture is much more fasinating than extinguishing that culture and replacing it with your own. Understanding is the rhetoric of compassion.

In modern day Peru the poor community of Tupac-Amaru lives among the ruins of an Inca civilization. Tupac Amaru was the last indigenous leader of the Inca Empire. I'm not sure if this community is built on the same ground in which the Inca took their final stand against the Spanish. In the community of Tupac-Amaru there are mummified Inca elite buried just below much of the shanty-city. Guirremo Kauc, excavation leader trying to save these pieces of history had this to say: "Archaeological excavation is reconstructing the past by pieces, like a puzzle. There are a million of pieces that we have to put together. With every bone with every mummy we find a living person comes back to life."

The Child is father of the Man

"Mine was no true childhood; I always felt and thought like a man. Only as I grew up did I become my true age, which I had not been at my birth. (67)" - Rousseau's Confessions

One Great Maxim

"[My reflections] have taught me one great maxim of morality, the only one perhaps which is of practical use: to avoid situations which place our duties in opposition to our interests, and shows us where one man's loss spells profit to us. For I am sure that, in such situations, however sincere and virtuous the motives we start with, sooner or later and unconsciously we weaken, and become wicked and unjust in practice, though still remaining good and just in our hearts. (62)" - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Camus' character Tarrou from "The Plague" speaks figuratively of the modern human condition

"That's why everyone in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death. (236)"

MANNA pt 1

As Manna awoke in his apartment he heard the lull of the wind outside and saw that he could see it running in the tops of leaves; and he heard the fountain in the pond discreetly and he saw it too, pumping water into the air. Having bad eyes his view is blurry. Still he knows the scene well enough. Many days and nights he's look out over the thicket bending at the whims of each season. Cause and effect seems little short of magic. And now spring had settled down as if for so long she'd been waiting. Was the world today up to its usual tricks? The darting blue finches skimming their feet on the water-surface. And what, was it to rain? The whole of this stolid acrid color looming. Perhaps it won't. And the sky'll just stare back. Blankly. It'll look at Manna through the window, his image sprawled on the bed and gazing out at her, and fall in love. He hears a world outside but cannot feel the sky trying to reach him through the window panes.