How Can I Begin

How can I begin?
So many skin
of silence upon me
Not that they blunt me,
but I have become
accustomed to
walking like a pregnant woman
carrying something
alive yet remote.
My thoughts,
though less articulate
than image,
still have in them
something like a skeleton,
a durable beginning
waiting for
unpredicted flesh
and deliverence.
I would ask
you: learn as I learn
patience with mine
and your own silence.

~Pat Lowther

Posted in Poetry, Quotations | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration, quotes, things that make you go hrm, woosh

Each one of us is a centre of life, a unique event inthe universe, and whatever our external relations to people and things may be, the absolute fact remains that we have to live our inner life alone even as we have to die our own death; no one can live our own inner life for us; and no one can go through our own death. In the infinite struggle of man to know this world and the universe around him, and also to know the mind that allows him to think, he comes before the simple fact that life is above thought… [Juan Mascaró - Introduction to The Upanishads: Penguin 1965]

Posted in Quotations, commonplace book | No Comments » | Tags: nescience, quotes, religiocuriosity, things that make you go hrm

“…[the Utopians] chief subject of dispute is the nature of human happiness - on what factor or factors does it depend? Here they seem rather too much inclined to take a hedonistic view, for according to them human happiness consists largely or wholly in pleasure. Surprisingly enough, they defend this self-indulgent doctrine by arguments drawn from religion - a thing normally associated with a more serious view of life, if not with gloomy asceticism. You see, in all their discussions of happiness they invoke certain religious principles to supplement the operations of reason, which they think otherwise ill-equipped to identify true happiness.

The first principle is that every soul is immortal, and was created by a kind God, Who meant it to be happy. The second is that we shall be rewarded or punished in the next world for our good or bad behaviour in this one. Although these are religious principles, the Utopians find rational grounds for accepting them. For suppose you don’t accept them? In that case, they say, any fool can tell you what you ought to do. You should go all out for your own pleasure, irrespective of right and wrong. You’d merely have to make sure that minor pleasures didn’t interfere with major ones and avoid the type of pleasure that has painful after-affects. For what’s the sense of struggling to be virtuous, denying yourself the pleasant things in life, and deliberately making yourself uncomfortable if there’s nothing you hope to gain by it? And what can you hope to gain by it, if you receive no compensation after death for a thoroughly unpleasant, that is, thoroughly miserable life?

…according to the normal view, happiness is the summum bonum towards which we’re naturally impelled by virtue - which in their definition means following one’s natural impulses, as God meant us to do. But this includes obeying the instinct to be reasonable in our likes and dislikes. And reason also teaches us, first to love and reverence Almighty God, to Whom we owe our existence and our potentiality for happiness, and secondly to get through life as comfortably and cheerfully as we can, and to help all other members of our species to do so too.

The fact is, even the sternest ascetic tends to be slightly inconsistent in his condemnation of pleasure. He may sentence you to a life of hard labour, inadequate sleep, and general discomfort, but he’ll also tell you to do your best to ease the pains and privations of others. He’ll regard all such attempts to improve the human situation as laudable acts of humanity - for obviously nothing could be more humane, or more natural for a human being, than to relieve other people’s sufferings, put and end to their miseries, and restore their joie de vivre, that is, their capacity for pleasure. So why shouldn’t it be equally natural to do the same thing for oneself?

Either it’s a bad thing to enjoy life, in other words, to experience pleasure - in which case you shouldn’t help anyone to do it, but should try to save the whole human race from such a frightful fate - or else, if its good for other people, and you’re not only allowed, but positively obliged to make it possible for them, why shouldn’t charity begin at home? After all, you’ve a duty to yourself as well as to your neighbour, and, if Nature says you must be kind to others, she can’t turn around the next moment and say you must be cruel to yourself. The Utopians therefore regard the enjoyment of life - that is, pleasure - as the natural object of all human efforts, the natural, as they define it, is synonymous with virtuous. However, Nature also wants us to help one another to enjoy life, for the very good reason that no human being has a monopoly of her affections. She’s equally anxious for the welfare of every member of the species. So of course she tells us to make quite sure that we don’t pursue our own interests at the expense of other people’s…”

from Utopia (book II) - Thomas More

Posted in Quotations | No Comments » | Tags: Classics, nescience, philosophy, quotes, things that make you go hrm, think

In your mind theres no time and a constant buzz…

You believe in what nobody else does
In your mind theres no time and a constant buzz
So disregard the master plan
It’s a disaster man you better ride it out

I can see it all in your eyes
Your future fades, your minutes are few
When the angels make contact with you

You believe in what nobody else does
And things ain’t the way they was
A fool like you is a freak to me
It’s unique to me, what you seek to see

I can see it all in your eyes
Your future fades, your minutes are few
When the angels make contact with you

I’ve seen the future isn’t pretty
Killer instinct, love a surprise
Make a stop, build a fire
Hold you breathe, cover your eyes
The tides are turning crimson
Nightfall growing like a cancer
Feeding on your broken body
Isolations not the answer
Listen what the wind says softly
Sound of traffic, smells like paper
Kisses on your worried eyelids
Sleepless nights turn into vapor
Like a dream and as the crow flies
Must reject the pain your trapped in
Give me all your hard earned beauty
Now I’ll tell you what will happen

Your day will fade and your thoughts will jade
And you’ll wake up in the middle of a dream
Coming up on hard luck, with a moment of silence
And no time to kill, no reason to care
Beware

I can see it all in your eyes
Your future for a dime, anytime
I can see is all in your eyes
Your future for a dime, anytime
I can see it all in your eyes
Your future for a dime, anytime
Your future fades, your minutes are few
When the angels make contact
[When Angels Make Contact - Matt Mays]

So what if she wakes late on weekends, at least she waits until after noon to pour her first drink. At least she cleans the litter box and and does the dishes from the night before before she settles into her chair with her drink and her book. This is all she wants, really. Time to do a little escapism into the realms of fantasy, time to be creative. It seems nowadays she needs more time that usual to unwind from the trial of the week: work. She used to like it, but when the addition of more responsibilities the joy has gone out of it and it’s become one giant demand of her resources. The status of her relationships have suffered recently and that has also stressed her out. By the time saturday rolls around she is exhausted.

She has to take time to think. It takes more time now but she thinks she can answer his question. He can’t get her out of his mind because enough time has passed for things to become idealised, and ideals are hard to live up to; hard to destroy. They never had enough time for things to pass from perfect into the mediocre that marks most relationships. All either of them have left is the passion and the tragedy. A sense of unfinished business. She ponders why this is; how it’s nearly impossible to lay the whole thing to rest. Maybe even how it might be best the way it is. Human frailty at its best. She sips and sighs. She knows that reality has moved them too far apart for anything to happen between them; they have both moved on. But there is a part - and she closes her eyes when she thinks this: there is a part of each of them that exists, perhaps in another reality, together. She cannot deny their affect on each other and she likes this thought, tucks it away to examine later. For now, she thinks it might be enough that they are a part of each others lives, whether they speak or not. They are part of each other because their time together helped forge who they are now. That kind of history makes thier current partners uncomfortable because they can’t live up to the tempestuous nature of what happened during said history. Not that either of them expect thier partners to even try. She respects the others enough to leave it alone, even though, like him, she feels a desire, now and then to reconnect. To re-examine, to maybe even make sense of all that happened… and so she writes. And writes….

Posted in Fiction, fiction maybe | 3 Comments » | Tags: an alternate reality, lyrics, obsessobsessobsess, the road less travelled, things that make you go hrm, what lovers do

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

“Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, as as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted out acknowledged, and, if possible, avoided in the future.To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one’s middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth - all this is surely vain and futile…”

~Aldous Huxley, 1946 [from the forward to the 1950 edition of Brave New World]

Posted in Quotations, Reading | No Comments » | Tags: quotes, things that make you go hrm, think