March 2012
52 posts
4 tags
My Condition
I am not made for this world. This is not a threat, merely an observation. Whatever mechanism exists to keep the mind turning over, emptying and filling, and tackling each new problem without the weight of consciousness perpetually halting the means of production, whatever mechanism that is I am not in possession of it. Maybe none of us really have it, just some are better pretenders. I write a...
“Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper...”
– Guy Davenport,The Geography of the Imagination (via clericalerror)
“It’s strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein (via endofinquiry)
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t...”
– Louise Erdrich (via foxlad)
2 tags
3 tags
Man Down
Ah yes, this is what it feels like to be down. There is no pressure release and every decision, every path, feels equally devoid of possibility. You feel a fool for thinking otherwise, for knowing how to once walk the path. The mind clumps together and overpowers all marvel in the universe. The body rushes to heal a wound, but with the mind torn there is no such instinct, the ripped part flaps...
5 tags
Notes From Underground Mixtape
An anecdote and then the antidote.
I am/was an underground man. The first time I read Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’ I was twenty or twenty-one, a couple years younger than the novel’s protagonist during its second part, ‘An Occasion of Wet Snow’. I was going through my own ‘occasion’ at the time and in a beatific synchronicity I found my life mirrored in the novel’s pages. ...
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are...”
– Fernando Pessoa (via fernandopessoa-is-not-for-you)
“‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III: 13, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 481. (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
5 tags
Commonsenseless
There surfaces a naive assumption: if the complicated machinery that fuels nations is operating than it is working according to some well-considered plan by virtue of it working at all. What is overlooked is the character of power, how it changes the equation of commonsense. The larger the problem the less likely you are to hear about it. Of the magnitude of systematic collapse you will hear...
: The Truth the Dead KnowFor my Mother, born March... →
growing-orbits:
The Truth the Dead Know
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We…
“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a...”
– Charles Bukowski (via haereticum)
“A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or...”
– Susan Sontag (via jennpelly)
1 tag
This Time Around...
Keeping to oneself in no way makes one mysterious, for that relies on the false premise that the world is outwardly curious. To be quiet is to be quiet for oneself. Play with the fantasy of solitude, recite your favorite poems, qualify your choices with the bounty of art, but do not expect a return call. The moon is silent.
2 tags
The Measure
We ascribe far too much heroic to what we do, or aspire for, or see in others. I have come to think that maybe what we see as heroic is simply achieved by as little as being well-rested while others are not. How greater the magnification of possibility when one is temperate and at ease with the world around them. The folly is thinking we are all at the same starting line when we are staggered...
“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious...”
– Julian Jaynes, On the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (via endofinquiry)
5 tags
Now Start Again
Living with the threat of quicksand, it is always there waiting, the absurdity we must reconcile. An agile mind can dance around it frequently enough so as to not feel paralyzed by this inching up of reality. It is the one thing that ought to be taught, or rather arrived at by undoing the habits formed through the caked-on negligence of present day cultural drift. We must reclaim the individual...
fuckyeahsolitude:
“What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life.
“So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon… I talk to myself and...”
– Sylvia Plath (via dreamofwhatcanbe)
1 tag
“Nietzsche’s point is that the world does not present itself as an indifferent...”
– Paul Katsafanas;14 (via trivial-brew)
3 tags
In Vegas
In Vegas, the hollow of all culture drained. The output fantasies of an AI supercomputer too shallow to query the granular semantics of the individual. Minstrel forth homo-sapien! Exfoliate and graze and whore out your euthanized will, deaden the pulse to a drip and be forgotten. This world you participate in, that you are in cahoots with, is sickly smiling. I see the vacant stare of the servants...
“We open our eyes and we think we’re seeing the whole world out there. But what...”
– Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman, in recent interview with Lifehacker. (via thelavinagency)
“But man is so obsessed by systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to...”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (via the-attentionally-blind)
1 tag
