- Paul Curtis, "Sorrow" (2016)Sorrow touches me
Sorrow at my loneliness
For want of another soul
To make me whole
Plumbing the depths of despair
In search of that missing piece
That will banish sorrow forever
But fail in that endeavour
Finding solace is always just out of reach
An outstretched hand away
There simply for the taking
Then I’m left aching
What was seemingly solid and tangible
Evaporated into the ether
So I will begin again tomorrow
The search for the end of sorrow
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Plumbing
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The heart asks pleasure first ––
And then excuse from pain ––
And then those little anodynes
That deaden suffering ––
And then to go to sleep
And then, if it should be ––
The will if its Inquisitor ––
The liberty to die.
~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
"There is nothing new under the sun."
~ Ecclesiastes
OT: ever heard of a guy called Nick Land?
Nope. Sounds like one heck of a strawman, though. I don't know anyone who can't get enough "authoritarianism".
Personally, I like the Athenian "rotating" democracy... with a dose of ostracism for Clintons and Bushies. :)
Dorothy Parker observed after visiting San Simeon:
Upon my honor
I saw a Madonna
Standing in a niche
Above the door
Of a famous whore
In the home of an infamous
Son of a bitch.
Not the 'authoritarianism/monarchism' of course. But his 'Capitalist end-game' sounds rather plausible...
We Can Never Go Back to Manderley Now
Should I care if I get cancer
In this wretched, troubled, world
Where all seems swiftly headed towards the rocks?
Since we live with devolution,
Marred and poisoned with pollution
Cancer gives us absolution,
Since our kids don’t care enough to wear their socks.
As towards The End we're whirling
With flaming batons twirling,
And last night's dinner hurling towards the rug
And no one seems to notice
As they take positions lotus
To escape the awful bother,
Despite demur from failing father,
To remove the dreadful stench, at which they shrug
And each, emaciated limb
Grayish, pale, translucent, slim
Flailing in St. Vitus' Dance
Keeps death watchers in a trance
As with dead, unseeing eyes they watch and long
With fading final song for their ultimate demise
.
I’d be grateful to have cancer
It has given me an Answer
In this wretched, troubled, world
Where my life now lies unfurled
Wherever I have travelled
All behind me lies unravelled,
And backward glances give me naught but shocks.
As I see we’ve always headed towards the rocks.
~ FreeThinke
His authoritarian capitalism is exectly like Slavoj Zizek's "capitalism with Asian values" or Oswald Spengler's Faustian "Man and Technic".
The "problem", IMO, with today's capitalism is its' scale. My "solution" (if there is one) is to place barriers in it's path by favoring the "small" business entity OVER the large (not visa versa, as today). In other words, to choke or "kill" the Struldbruggs (corporations).
Civilization means "decay/decadence", FT. Culture is the "growth" phase. Breakdown of THAT original culture and its' values is the "decay" phase. It's not called the post-Modern era for NO reason.
"The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit."
~ Jonathan Swift (166701745)
Don't rain on my parade, FT, a position at the Academy of Projectors of Lagado awaits me!
...for I am Lord Munodi... e-r-r-r-r... would you believe Lemuel Gulliver?
"There are no such periods as Pre-Historic, Ancient, Mediaeval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modern or Post-Modern. There is only immortal, immutable Truth. We like to make ourselves believe we are smart by inventing trendy new labels for the way we perceive and interpret Truth, but in Reality all we have done throughout our long, complex history is constantly change and occasionally refine the myriad ways we perceive and identify Truth. Most of the time we are sadly mistaken in the notions we favor at any given time."
~ Jesus Mahomet Quixote de la Bordello
___ WISDOM from ADAM SMITH (1723-1790) ___
“The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.”
“Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.”
“To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.”
”Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”
"Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates."
~ Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)
Emerson, "Conduct of Life" (Beauty)
The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?
We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system.
The symbolic medium in which we, in our minds, exist is language. "Truth" is not to be found in this castrated wasteland.
Yet to many, it is the very "Word" of "Truth"... the source of all Belief in "Causality".
"Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality." - Nietzsche, "The Gay Science"
"Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.-- Every word is a prejudice." - Nietzsche, "The Wanderer and his Shadows"
Nietzcshe, "Will to Power" (nature of truth)
533 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Logical certainty, transparency, as criterion of truth ("omncillud verum est, quod clare et distincte percipitur." Descartes): with that, the mechanical hypothesis concerning the world is desired and credible.
But this is a crude confusion: like simplex sigillum veri. How does one know that the real nature of things stands in this relation to our intellect?--Could it not be otherwise? that it is the hypothesis that gives the intellect the greatest feeling of power and security, that is most preferred, valued and consequently characterized as true?--The intellect posits its freest and strongest capacity and capability as criterion of the most valuable, consequently of the true--
"True": from the standpoint of feeling--: that which excites the feeling most strongly ("ego");
from the standpoint of thought--: that which gives thought the greatest feeling of strength;
from the standpoint of touch, seeing, hearing--: that which calls for the greatest resistance.
Thus it is the highest degrees of performance that awaken belief in the "truth," that is to say reality, of the object. The feeling of strength, of struggle, of resistance convinces us that there is something that is here being resisted.
534 (1887-1888)
The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power.
535 (1885)
"Truth": this, according to my way of thinking, does not necessarily denote the antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental cases only the posture of various errors in relation to one another. Perhaps one is older, more profound than another, even ineradicable, in so far as an organic entity of our species could not live without it; while other errors do not tyrannize over us in this way as conditions of life, but on the contrary when compared with such "tyrants" can be set aside and "refuted."
An assumption that is irrefutable--why should it for that reason be "true"? This proposition may perhaps outrage logicians, who posit their limitations as the limitations of things: but I long ago declared war on this optimism of logicians.
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