1926

And the point is to live everything.

"…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.   Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.   Live the questions now.  Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I used to be The Mother. I used to be The Wife. But now I'm Shirley Valentine again. 
Would you like to join me for a drink? 

Janusz Grabiański

The Conqueror Worm

Lo! 'tis a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years!

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight

In veils, and drowned in tears,

Sit in a theatre, to see

A play of hopes and fears,

While the orchestra breathes fitfully

The music of the spheres.

    

Mimes, in the form of God on high,

Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly-

Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast formless things

That shift the scenery to and fro,

Flapping from out their Condor wings

Invisible Woe!

That motley drama-oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore,

By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in

To the self-same spot,

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,

And Horror the soul of the plot.

    

But see, amid the mimic rout

A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!

It writhes!-it writhes!-with mortal pangs

The mimes become its food,

And the angels sob at vermin fangs

In human gore imbued.

    

Out-out are the lights-out all!

And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

And the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy "Man,"

And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? 

Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources.

Bruce Wayne, aka Batman

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care, nor your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

Ayn Rand and Tyler Durden

This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time. 

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. 

The commonplace and the complacent

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

- Jack Kerouac

People who feel safe and secure in the existing society are frightened by ideas that threaten their power.  People who hold the power in society want nice complacent forms of entertainment, films that comfort people and support the status quo.

- Chuck Palahniuk

The Slave

Longing.

Longing for a wave of love that would stir in me. That's what makes me clumsy. The absence of pleasure. Desire for love. Desire to love. 

Libraries

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

The building looked like something out of the Knights of the Round Table, and the inside was even more astonishing.  Who knew so many books even existed?  That summer with the lady at the park made a lifelong reader out of me, and my Houston Heights Library card was one of my most cherished possessions.

What I've always thought was a sentence from some Greek philosopher – I don't, unfortunately, remember who it was – that I read at 16, and it's affected me all my life: 

“I will not die. It's the world that will end.” 
And that's absolutely true.

And, you know, for me now, it should be a serious question, because my time is fairly limited. And I have the same feeling, that I will enjoy life to the last moment and when it's the end I don't have to worry about it; I'm not there. It's too bad that the world will end, and I think a very wonderful world will end with me.

A poor player

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Death

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

- Ray Bradbury

Age

Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one’s best, then at the very least one’s most authentic self. When your outside and inside are in sync, and soma and psyche mesh as perfectly as they’re going to.

As the body of the Oppositeless is made up of all the bodies in the universe, it is full of amazing aspects and has faces turned in every direction. It is infinite in size; its end, middle and beginning cannot be seen. It is the universe itself.

Alan Dershowitz on Bob Guccione

I first met Bob Guccione, who died this week, when he asked me to defend Penthouse magazine against charges of obscenity in the Deep South and the Midwest. Such prosecutions tended to be instituted in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Penthouse’s pictures offended not only many on the religious right (some of whom I’m sure enjoyed them in private) but also many on the feminist left (very few of whom I’m sure enjoyed them). Notwithstanding the widespread outrage at Penthouse’s graphic portrayals of women and couples, we won every single case, because the First Amendment trumps offensiveness in the United States.

Many feminists, most especially the late Andrea Dworkin and Professor Catherine McKinnon, reviled me for defending “a pornographer.” Dworkin called me a “pornocrat” and was photographed giving me the middle finger for defending the obscene. Civil libertarians tended to support me on the ground that the First Amendment protects bad people who do bad things. The quotation most often associated with that position was by H.L. Mencken, who famously said:

“The trouble about fighting for human freedom is that you have to spend much of your life defending sons of bitches: for oppressive laws are always aimed at them originally, and oppression must be stopped in the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

Although there is undoubtedly some truth to that position—I have defended Nazis, Stalinists and other assorted bigots—it does not apply to Bob Guccione. Bob was a nice guy who did things that some people thought were not nice. I think what he did was none of anybody’s business except those who enjoyed his magazine. He never forced anybody to look at the pictures, and the pictures didn’t harm anybody. I know that this last view is controversial and I have debated it with numerous feminists over the years. I will be happy to continue to debate it, as I did in the many columns I wrote for Penthouse magazine and in the testimony I gave before the Meese Commission on pornography, but that is not the purpose of this column. The purpose of this column is to tell its readers about Bob Guccione, the man. Since he led a relatively solitary life and was seen largely through the lens of his controversial magazine, not very many people got to know him. He was not Hugh Hefner, who used his house to exemplify his sexual values.

Bob’s house—an elegant mansion on the East Side of New York—was his private refuge from the world. He invited people to dinner and I was a frequent guest. The only naked woman I ever saw in the house was rising out of a seashell in the Botticelli painting that hung on the wall near his marble staircase. The guests at his dinners were philosophers, British barristers, poets, occasional athletes (mostly boxers), and artists. I don’t remember any politicians or Hollywood celebrities. The talk around the table was serious, often revolving around the wonderful art we were privileged to see throughout his home. He loved early 20th-century paintings, especially by Modigliani, Picasso, Leger, and Rouault. He had so much art that much of it was stacked up in his office. In addition to the art of the great masters, Bob had a collection of his own paintings, most of which were done when he was a young man living in Europe and exploring various forms of painting. His paintings were exhibited in several museums and some hung in his office.

Guccione believed deeply in what he was doing to expand boundaries of sexually explicit photography, as well as his efforts to expand the boundaries of medicine through his other magazines and the research he supported. We often disagreed about both, but I never questioned the seriousness of his views. Bob was a serious guy. He didn’t laugh much. He always seemed to be on a mission. Some of these missions succeeded, especially during the early years of Penthouse. Others failed, most particularly his efforts to build casinos and expand his business into other areas. These failures resulted in predators coming after him with a vengeance. They took his homes, the art he had collected over the years and even his furniture. Bob could live with that, because he knew that taking financial risks had consequences. What he could not bear was his creditors taking his own art—the painting he himself had done as a young man. Although these paintings did not have enormous commercial value, they meant everything to Bob. He wanted them around him as he lay dying, but his creditors denied him his last wish. Bob Guccione died fighting for his right to maintain control over his own artistic output. It was a good fight, and although he died fighting it, the fight is not yet over. I hope his family eventually gets to enjoy the paintings that were so much a part of Bob’s soul.

The Third Noble Truth

The Cessation of Suffering

 

And this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha: the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving.

The cessation of suffering can be attained through nirodha. Nirodha means the unmaking of sensual craving and conceptual attachment. The third noble truth expresses the idea that suffering can be ended by attaining dispassion. Nirodha extinguishes all forms of clinging and attachment. This means that suffering can be overcome through human activity, simply by removing the cause of suffering. Attaining and perfecting dispassion is a process of many levels that ultimately results in the state of Nirvana. Nirvana means freedom from all worries, troubles, complexes, fabrications and ideas. Nirvana is not comprehensible for those who have not attained it.

Death is the impossibility of further possibility.

- Heidegger

The Second Noble Truth

The cause of suffering is attachment to desire, rooted in ignorance.

The Second Noble Truth states that there is an origin of suffering and that the origin of suffering is attachment to the three kinds of desire: desire for sense pleasure (kama tanha), desire to become (bhava tanha) and desire to get rid of (vibhava tanha).

It is craving which renews being and is accompanied by relish and lust, relishing this and that: in other words, craving for sensual desires, craving for being, craving for non-being. But whereon does this craving arise and flourish? Wherever there is what seems lovable and gratifying, thereon it arises and flourishes.

The way to end suffering in life is to understand what causes it. Craving and ignorance are the two main causes of suffering. People suffer with their craving for the pleasures of the senses and become unsatisfied and disappointed until they can replace their cravings with new ones. People suffer too when they are unable to see the world as it really is and live with illusions about life and fears, hopes, facts and behaviours based on ignorance. Craving and misunderstanding can be solved by developing the mind, thinking carefully and meditating. 

The First Noble Truth

Life is suffering.

Suffering comes in many forms. Three obvious kinds of suffering correspond to the first three sights the Buddha saw on his first journey outside his palace: old age, sickness and death.

But according to the Buddha, the problem of suffering goes much deeper. Life is not ideal: it frequently fails to live up to our expectations.

Human beings are subject to desires and cravings, but even when we are able to satisfy these desires, the satisfaction is only temporary. Pleasure does not last; or if it does, it becomes monotonous.

Even when we are not suffering from outward causes like illness or bereavement, we are unfulfilled, unsatisfied. This is the truth of suffering.

Star Trek Beauty #2

John Stuart Mill

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. 

...  Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.

- from Utilitarianism, 1863

Gustav Klimt, Austrian, 1862 - 1918

Favorite Songs #6

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and fate

I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moments of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank
Held a General's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank...
 

I watched the glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the Gods they made

I shouted out
"Who killed the Kennedys?"
Well after all
It was you and me

Let me please introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reached Bombay...

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails just call me Lucifer
I'm in need of some restraint

So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy and some taste
Use all your well learned politics
Or I'll lay your soul to waste 

Bollywood Beauty #1

Star Trek Beauty #1

Favorite Songs #5

Father, why are all the women weeping?
They are weeping for their men
Then why are all the men there weeping?
They are weeping back at them

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While all the men and women sleep
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying son
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While all the men and women sleep
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long

O father tell me, are you weeping?
Your face seems wet to touch
O then I'm so sorry, father
I never thought I hurt you so much

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While we rock ourselves to sleep
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long
But I won't be weeping long