White List
(Latest entries) (Calendar) (Latest friends) (Jesus on a Stick) (User info)
Navigate: (Previous 20 friends)
Saturday, November 14, 2009
I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.
I understand that it is common for some people to think that social freedom is needed and that many of those same people think that economic control is important. I also understand that other people think that economic freedom is vital, while also thinking that social control is necessary. What I don't understand is how those combinations came together. I could see people thinking that control is needed in both areas. I can also understand thinking that freedom in all areas is the way to go (my own position). I just can't see how such a large portion of the population decided to take half freedom and half force with their only disagreement being which areas to have freedom and which to have force.
I am far more liberal than anyone I have ever met who calls himself a liberal. I can also find solid, common ground with those who call themselves conservatives. So who gets upset when I argue in favor of flag burning as free speech? (which I have been doing since I was 18) Who doesn't like it when I explain that all monopolies are caused by government regulation?
The unwillingness to see that does not align with preconceived notions annoys me. My positions on several issues have done near 180 degree shifts over the years as I learn new things. I process the new information through my core values to arrive at new understandings.
♥ Black: ...I aint a doubter. But I am a questioner.
White: What's the difference?
Black: Well, I think the questioner wants the truth. The doubter wants to be told there aint no such thing.
♥ Oh, you might say somethin about the other man's mama. That's a sensitive area, you might say. And he might lose it and come after your ass but when he done that it's like he's sayin that what you just got done tellin about his mama was true. It's like he sayin: You aint supposed to know that about my mama and you damn sure aint supposed to of told it and now I'm fixin to whip your ass.
♥ White: Well I still dont get it. Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good?
Black: As opposed to someplace where god was needed.
White: Even God gives up at some point. There's no ministry in hell. That I ever heard of.
♥ Well now wait a minute. Just cause you dont like em dont mean you aint like em.
♥ I don't know, Professor. I try and go by what I see. The simplest things has got more to em than you can ever understand. Bunch of people standin around on a train platform of a mornin. Waitin to go to work. Been there a hundred times. A thousand maybe. It's just a train platform. Aint nothin else much you can say about it. But they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it's somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He's starin at the end of all tomorrows and he's drawin a shade over ever yesterday that ever was. So he's a different kind of commuter. He's worlds away from them everday travelers. Nothin to do with them at all.
♥ You need to listen. Or you need to believe what you hearin. The whole point of where this is goin - which you wanted to know - is that they aint no jews. Aint no whites. Aint no niggers. People of color. Aint none of that. At the deep bottom of the mine where the gold is at there aint none of that. There's just the pure ore. That forever thing. That you dont think is there. That thing that helps to keep folks nailed down to the platform when the Sunset Limited comes through. Even when they think they might want to get aboard. That thing that makes it possible to ladle out benediction upon the heads of strangers instead of curses. It's all the same thing. And it aint but one thing. Just one.
♥ Here's what I would say. I would say that the thing we are talkin about is Jesus, but it is Jesus understood as that gold at the bottom of the mine. He couldnt come down here and take the form of a man if that form was no done shaped to accommodate him. And if I said that there aint no way for Jesus to be ever a man without ever man bein Jesus then I believe that might be a pretty big heresy. But that's alright.
♥ White: I don't know. The Germans contributed a great deal to civilization. (Pause) Before Hitler.
Black: And then they contributed Hitler.
♥ The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different. I've no idea why we are even still here but in all probability we will not be here much longer.
♥ Sometimes faith might just be a case of not havin nothin else left.
♥ What kind of pain we talkin about? I got to say that if it was grief that brought folks to suicide it'd be a full time job just to get em all in the ground come sundown. So I keep coming back to the same question. If it aint what you lost that is more than you can bear then maybe it's what you wont lose. What you'd rather die than to give up.
♥ You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
♥ I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain was actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldn't live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every thing that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me.
~~The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy.
"Death. Yes, death. And none of them know, and none of them want to know, and none of them are sorry. They're having fun." (From beyond his door he heard the distant sound of voices and a musical ritornello.) "They don't care, but they'll die just like me. Idiocy. Sooner for me, later for them, but it will come. And they're happy. Mindless brutes!"
The best part about research is when your hands smell like old books.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)
I realized when I moved into my apartment this year that I have a room with a balcony, on the first floor, about twenty yards from the Wabash River, and that therefore I was probably going to be dealing with a lot of bugs. Which I have; before it got chilly out, I was getting some pretty massive crickets hanging around, and some spiders. But then fall came, and now I have a steady build-up of Asian beetles around my balcony doors. They come into my bedroom and just die on the floor and in the track for the doors, and some of them get into my workroom and die around the floor lamp, and then others get all the way to my bathroom and fly into the lamp above the vanity until they die in the sink.
Instead of vacuuming every day, I've just been letting them accumulate and then doing it once a week or so, since I have enough space that Neptune is the only one who hangs around in front of the balcony doors, and he doesn't care if there are beetles all over. He just likes killing the survivors. Today I swear to god, there were probably two or three hundred dead beetles, mostly in the door track. I didn't realize until I actually went over there and got down with the vacuum hose just how many there were. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me; they're all over the damn town. Last week I found one in my cleavage. (This week I found a spider there... and both times I'd literally just taken a shower and pulled clean clothes out of the dryer so idk what more I can do about this bugs-in-cleavage situation.)
I hope they all die soon. And hopefully not in my room.
The Times has a truly inspiring story today about Sara Buechner, a transgender pianist who transitioned to female at age 39, suffered a more-or-less total career eclipse, then worked her way out of the wilderness with the help of an old classmate and her own powerful talent. Check it out.
Here she is in action:
Friday, November 13, 2009
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Heart like the train station in Amsterdam
in the winter, even the birds listen to
the ting, ting, ting of time, blind. Time is black…
Friday, November 13, 2009
♥ Anyway, people who are always looking out for perfect strangers are very often people who wont look out for the ones they're supposed to look out for. In my opinion. If you're just doing what you're supposed to then you dont get to be a hero.
♥ Who knows? Maybe birthdays are dangerous. Like Christmas. Ornaments hanging from trees, wreaths from the doors, and bodies from the steampipes all over America.
♥ Black: ...But the point is I done tried the other way. And I dont mean chippied, neither. Runnin blindfold through the woods with the bit tween your teeth. Oh man. Didnt I try it though. If you can find a soul that give it a better shot than me I'd like to meet him. I surely would. And what do you reckon it got me?
White: I dont know. What did it get you?
Black: Death in life. That's what it got me.
White: Death in life.
Black: Yeah. Walkin around death. Too dead to even know enough to lay down.
♥ ... You want to help people that's in trouble you pretty much got to go where the trouble is at. You aint got a lot of choice.
♥ White: Let me ask you something.
Black: Ask it.
White: Why cant you people just accept it that some people dont even want to believe in God.
Black: I accept that.
White: You do?
Black: Sure I do. Meanin that I believe it to be a fact. I'm lookin at it ever day. I better accept it.
White: Then why cant you leave us alone?
Black: To do your own thing.
White: Yes.
Black: Hangin from them steampipes and all.
White: If that's what we want to do, yes.
♥ ...But the point of course is that the drunk's concern aint that he's goin to die from drinkin-which he is. It's that he's goin to run out of whiskey fore he gets a chance to do it.
♥ Belief aint like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to the well of belief itself and then you dont have to look no further. There aint no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everthing he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the mornin you get to put your feet on a real floor and you dont have to worry about where it come from. But if he didnt then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everthing by that same light. If light it is. Includin yourself. One question fits all. So what do you think, Professor? Is you real?
~~The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy.
6:31PM
"We seem to have forgotten the dignity of the only instruments, among all our inventions, that can carry and make articulate the thoughts, the soul of man. Even when used without so high an intention, words may yet be innocent and make a pleasant noise in the world, like brooks on moss or stones, or the wind in trees. But their misuse perverts the divine. And we have now come to a pass where truthlessness is tolerated, and even expected in politics, diplomacy, advertisement, the education of children, and the privacy of marriage. The depth of our degradation of words may be measured by the surprise any newspaper editor would feel if his news were criticized merely for being untrue."
- Freya Stark
'The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.'
This week saw the release of an album by Ray Davies and the Crouch End Festival Chorus, in which Mr. Kinks reconfigures his famous songs to employ the massed voices backing him. Although the whole project has a whiff of the unnecessary about it--tampering with classics, etc--Deborah and I found it quite tasty. Not a patch on the originals, of course, but not a travesty.
Here's a live rendition of the "new" "Waterloo Sunset," pop's most perfect 3 minutes. Unfortunately, the sound is not great. The CD version is very much better. But you'll get the idea.
Here's the original for comparison.
Finally, I was unaware of this Def Leppard cover, which I actually rather enjoy.
Posted by Paul DiFi.
Okay, guys, I really need help, and literally anyone who can read English can potentially help me. This is actually kind of important.
I just need to know what it looks like the handwritten bit on the bottom of this page says:
( Cut for large size. )
I think I have the gist of most of it but some of it I have no idea. I'd just like to hear what someone else thinks before I try to quote this in a paper.
Honestly, I have no idea how the Foreign Office managed to function when everyone working for it wrote like this. Sometimes I think it's a miracle we won the war.
ETA: MOTHERFUCKER THERE'S A WHOLE 'NOTHER PAGE.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
( I HATE EVERYTHING. )
12:59PM
Beggars can't be choosers. Unless you're king of the beggars, then I assume you take a middle-management-type role.
The Delmarva peninsula has been hit very hard by the remnants of Hurricane Ida. As readers know, I'm a frequent resident of Middlesex Beach, DE, which was also quite badly hit -- I just spoke to a local guy who informed me that in some places, water levels are higher than they've been in nearly fifty years -- going all the way back to the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962.
Here are some photos from the Salisbury Daily Times that give an idea of the power of this storm, and the damage it has inflicted.
And here's what the beach at Middlesex looks like right now.
The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.
Navigate: (Previous 20 friends)
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
spider_matt's Friends Page
in love