Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Adam Bongers on the recurrence of Humanism
"The concept of humanism has a particularly rich and chequered history. Foucault himself explains that humanism is not a single theme that has remained constant throughout history. Rather, he explains that humanism is a “set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies.” The first humanism, according to Martin Heidegger, can be found in the Roman Republic. The Romans associated ‘humanity’ with a Greek education that prized scholarship and training in good conduct. This emphasis on classical education has undergone a series of renewals. These include the Renaissance and Neoclassical movements in Italy, Germany, France and England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The humanist theme of renewal is recognised by both Paul Ricoeur and Vittorio Hösle. The acquisition of classical languages and a humanities education was directed towards the cultivation of ‘renaissance men,’ who could write and speak well. But with the modern specialisation of labour and the rapid development of modern science, the ideal of the renaissance man became less and less attainable. In this climate, humanism becomes a struggle against the modern encroachment of technology and its objectifying effects. However, this does not mean that humanism is reduced to the negative function of resisting the decline of the humanities or the advancement of technology. Rather, Ricoeur argues that humanism is the “heart of the civilising movement,” and represents the “élan of humanity.” He explains that,
Humanism is [a] preliminary conviction that through the material determinations of a civilisation … man determines and chooses himself, and that this choice can be clarified and reflected on and thus improved by the activity of men of culture. Humanism is therefore [a] preliminary conviction that the activity of men of culture is efficacious with an efficaciousness exactly proportioned to its disinterestedness…
Monday, June 29, 2009
MJ Wisdom Tweets
MJ Wisdom#1: "So take my strong advice, just remember to always think twice (do think twice, do think twice, whoo)".
MJ Wisdom#2: "No mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller".
MJ Wisdom#3: "Be careful what'cha do, ah, don't go around breakin' young girls hearts".
MJ Wisdom#4: "There ain't no second chance against the thing with forty eyes, girl".
MJ Wisdom#5: "Reading, writing & arithmetic, are branches of the learning tree, but without roots of love girl, yr education ain't complete"
MJ Wisdom#6: (Mike rejects Sartre) "If they say Why? Why? Tell 'em that is human nature"...
MJ Wisdom#7: (Mike waxing on moral relativism): "Showin' how funky and strong is your fight, but it doesn't matter who's wrong or right"...
MJ Wisdom#2: "No mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller".
MJ Wisdom#3: "Be careful what'cha do, ah, don't go around breakin' young girls hearts".
MJ Wisdom#4: "There ain't no second chance against the thing with forty eyes, girl".
MJ Wisdom#5: "Reading, writing & arithmetic, are branches of the learning tree, but without roots of love girl, yr education ain't complete"
MJ Wisdom#6: (Mike rejects Sartre) "If they say Why? Why? Tell 'em that is human nature"...
MJ Wisdom#7: (Mike waxing on moral relativism): "Showin' how funky and strong is your fight, but it doesn't matter who's wrong or right"...
Luke took myPersonality's Big Five Personality Questionnaire and the results were...
| % | |
|---|---|
| Openness | 98% |
| Conscientiousness | 39% |
| Extraversion | 73% |
| Agreeableness | 38% |
| Neuroticism | 60% |
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Pygmy
I've been reading Palahniuk's new novel Pygmy today. I wonder why I so often wind up enamoured with incomprehensible narrators. The autistic ramblings in Mark Haddon's Curious Dog, the fuzzy logic of Adiga's White Tiger and now Agent 67. I love reading 1st person literature I suppose, and broken language seems to draw my interest in another way. Like this hilarious little entry in 67's Second Dispatch:"Clear-yellow bully, foot stand in cowering pig dog, yellow hair swing across fire blue eye, bully say, "You a gook? A nigger? A sand-flea?" Say, "Exactly what breed of wetback bitch are you?". Could be, this instant, elbows of operative me fly and drive fast, wham-pow, to soft corners of head temple, stun brain of yellow bully. Blackout. Foot of this agent stomp down trouser waist of bully to pool around bully feet. Next then turgid weapon of operative me, violate stunned anus, humiliate with seed the forced screaming pain of clear-yellow bully. All dry friction".He he.
Sent from my iPhone
Saturday, June 27, 2009
"Made Of Minerals, Just To Be Here"...
Through the windows and across the changeless fluorescent light of Sydenham station, the sky might be peeking at dawn. From the couch and through the nox, I might be peeking at myself. Atop the blue meanies and within generous mutuality, my heart might be peeking at a rare clarity. Next to where you colour shadows and outline birds and bombs, we might be peeking at intrigue. Nothing's definable, but "you see it too, huh?!" This is what I'm supposed to be doing. Just this. Whatever this is. He sings that we're made: "just to be here". I pause, and my memories become lucid They're inconsolable, as they must be. Jealous, as they must be. Angry, as they must be. Diverse, as they must be. Privileged, as they must be. Stunning, as they must be. Terrifying, as they must be. Just as they are. As I am. In the absence of certainty, trust is our only refuge. I trust this, thus, us. You hadn't coloured those shadows last week. I studied that man, and I knew his contours. I know this much... and I've seen you before as well. You're that picture she took a decade before. It's undefinable. Ineffable. Perhaps only a symbol. Perhaps a representation. Or is that only true to the excuses which own me? A simple, unreasonable wish. To have been there all along. As a symbol, you colour the shadows. As yourself, you're simply the colour. An innocent heat I could only feel with these hands. They hold this mutuality with care. They know the treasures. They support what is only ever perfectly right, just as it is. There's a single breath we all share as the sky most certainly reveals the dawn. In this scene, and beyond. In the parties at the beach, and the pubs of the inner west, in the lovers on the southern shores, and the lonely broken hearts in their single rooms, in the working men steering the trains, the late night store attendant, in your girlfriend across the other side of the word, and those here half a world away from theirs... and now, finally, in me. I hold all of this in the ether. These hands can only feel what is already. As simple dash between I and Thou. Our eyes meet, and I see you. I've seen you all before. And again. But what might be more extraordinary on this new morning is that you see me. You each know me as I know you - as ultimately undefined, as endless trust. "to never grow up, to never get old, to never be found, to never be solved, to never be seen, to never be known, like skeletons"...
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
FFFOUND!
The avid internet 'found image' thief in me thinks he's found his home: http://ffffound.com/
Yes.
Yes.
Very nice.
Umberto Eco on Learning in Public and Acting in the Face of Incertitude (from the preface to Travels In Hyperreality)
"Perhaps I have written these things, and go on writing similar things, for other reasons. I am anxious, insecure, and always afraid of being wrong. What is worse, I am always afraid that the person who says I am wrong is better than I am. I need to check quickly the ideas that come into my head. It takes years to write an "academic" book, and then you have to wait for the reviews, and then correct your own thinking in the later editions. It is work that demands time, peace of mind, patience. I am capable of doing it, I believe, but in the meanwhile I have to allay my anxiety. Insecure persons often cannot delay for years, and it is hard for them to develop their ideas in silence, waiting for the "truth" to be suddenly revealed to them. That is why I like to teach, to expound still-imperfect ideas and hear the students' reactions. That is why I like to write for the newspapers, to reread myself the next day, and to read the reactions of others. A difficult game, because it does not always consist of being reassured when you meet with agreement and having doubts when you are faced with dissent. Sometimes you have to follow the opposite course: distrust agreement and find in dissent the confirmation of your own intuitions. There is no rule; there is only the risk of contradiction. But sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the "scientific" certainty
that you are saying it in an unassailable way".
In Absentia: Ariadne's Thread
Tracing knots backwards
to recall how I arrived
in my own absence.
to recall how I arrived
in my own absence.
Sent from my iPhone
Signs
"A sign is something by knowing which we know something more".
- Charles S. Peirce
- Charles S. Peirce
Sent from my iPhone
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Life Imitating Art in UK Politics...
Bemoaning difficulties of engaging with his electorate and the nation at large during these troubles economic times, British PM Gordon Brown offered a remarkably bizarre idea in The Guardian over the weekend:
"Yes, but I've tried to get around the country more, it's much more interesting ... It's been very difficult to focus on [strategic planning] because you have to deal with immediate events like if a bank's going to go under. It's difficult to be running around the country if you're dealing with that." In fact, Brown has a truly innovative idea for how the prime minister should live: "If you could run No 10 from a train, getting round the country, that would be the best way."
I was immediately struck with memories of Prentice McCabe's subversive innovation for the House of Lords in BBC comedy, Absolute Power.
Friday, June 19, 2009
We all need little get a little Wilde sometimes...
"Be yourself. Everyone else is taken".
- Oscar WIlde
Sent from my iPhone
Thursday, June 18, 2009
I dig a rant: "The American Empire Is Bankrupt"
From Truthdig: By Chris Hedges
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.
“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.
“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
Ritualism
Tamara Dean
Purification
Giclée print on archival photo rag 76 x 102cm
Limited edtion of 8
Limited edtion of 8
Sass showed me these photos last night from her friend Tamara's new photographic exhibition. I'm not up on the world of art photography, and so I've never seen anything like them. I've been haunted, intrigued, and captivated by the series all morning.
Check out the exhibition:
Ritualism
A series of photographs by
Tamara Dean
A series of photographs by
Tamara Dean
CHARLES HEWITT Gallery
335 South Dowling Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
335 South Dowling Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
Telephone: 02 9331 4988
Gallery hours Mon - Sat 10am -6pm
http://www.charleshewitt.com.au/artists/tamara-dean/ritualism
http://www.charleshewitt.com.au/artists/tamara-dean/ritualism
Opening 6.00 – 8.00pm Thursday 25th June
exhibition runs until Tuesday 14th July 2009
To be opened by Gavin Wilson, Curator and Author
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Leaving Home, A Reply to Another Me
... No maybes, it's definitely Wednesday. I had a late night again, but this time studying statistics. All these maths in a psych course would've otherwise been a drag, but a day and then some concentrating wove some order back into the chaos. And then some. Turns out being blown out with the fortitude to return opens wormholes I can surf. Maybe I'll take a dip in that volcano? Fuck all this talk of standing at the precipice - let's burn a layer off this onion for a change. That pharmacist knew his empirical evidence, but this week I'm the guy smiling at your dull all knowing eyes when you look up 'anecdotal evidence' in the medical dictionary. Bran, fruit, water, sleep, sauna, meditation, and a geekfeast of mathematics did what benzos could only mimic. Oh, and remembering the way you would've looked on that first night if I'd have had my eyes. Red lava flowing down your shoulders and through my veins. All kinds of Taras spinning white noise on the springtime air. Like a dream. I'm remembering beyond before, and I assure you my friend, that shit is most certainly possible. All standard deviations aside, today I was there, now, where I didn't know I hadn't been. And had. Beguiling, benificent, beyond before. Those stairs aren't going to break this stride. That couch'll be outta there tomorrow, and I'm gonna follow.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Kanzeon/Kwan Yin/Chenrezig and so on...
"the eyes of (infinite) compassion observing sentient beings,
assembles an ocean of blessing beyond measure".
assembles an ocean of blessing beyond measure".
- Lotus Sutra: 23.
Sent from my iPhone
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Leaving Home
… and I can't even scag out right, you dig? It's hard to tell if the nets are meshing me together, or whether I'm the mesh. We're praying the rope will hold these closets in when I cart them back to my parents'. Muscles already aching so much, I don't think I could handle my skeletons all over the place. Not tonight. Especially not in Punchbowl. But that toke means I don't get to choose, huh. You're doing 'your thing': coming and going, retiring, glowing. Not the usual connections, more like bubbles of lava - every now and every then blowing fluid form up into psyche and leaving me stranded at the apex, anxious of the rocks that'll surely come down. Surely? I've seen it before. Last time I ran away. Is that all I'm seeing up here? Forms of before? Bemoaning, befuddled, bereft: before. Now that's one heavy fuckin' boulder, even when it rolls back into the cauldron. I don't have the couch in me tonight, bro. Those stairs are too steep. I'll do it, but not tonight. I'm breathing from root to crown, but that last rock fell on my fuckin' toe, Joe. No chakras to balance down there – Valium's your man. The pharmacist said they're addictive, but it's been a difficult week. A deep breath, half a pill, and I'll stop when I carry the couch down on Tuesday. Or maybe, Wednesday?
Friday, June 12, 2009
Single Drops
and my tears
no longer feel sorry for me,
they just roll back
toward the heart I couldn't before see
no longer feel sorry for me,
they just roll back
toward the heart I couldn't before see
Sent from my iPhone
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
In Ramana's Eyes
"When the eyes of the student meet the gaze of the teacher, words of instruction are no longer necessary".
- Ramana Maharshi
Sent from my iPhone
Monday, June 8, 2009
Gazing
If you want to know God,
Then turn to your friend,
And don't look away".
Then turn to your friend,
And don't look away".
- Rumi
Sent from my iPhone
Mary Mackillop Outreach Centre
As part of my work's 160 year anniversary celebrations, the board of the company's benevolent foundation recently offered us the opportunity to trade a day's work in the ivory tower for some direct community service.
The Mary Mackillop Outreach Centre is a private initative through St. Vinnies which provides day-support services to the chronically disadvantaged. They do a sweep of the local boarding houses a couple of times a week and provide a healthy lunch, entertainment, social stimulation and emotional support.
After my inital confrontation with the severity and diversity of trials these folks were dealing with, I rested into an enriching day of uncommon resonances. I decided early on that I wasn't there to provide, I was there to share - and it was in this spirit that I fell upon unexpected pleasures...
... like cutting up chorizo with Nadine, an intellecually handicapped woman who had been abandoned by her family and left to the institutions. She revealed that despite never knowing her father she "still love(d) him. I say you forgive and forget otherwise you're all divided". She was a serious ACDC fan, and we sang All Night Long and Thunderstruck a few times while dicing a pot of garlic cloves.
... and spending a few lucid moments with the men I've been alongside but rarely with over the last year. We cooked a beautiful spanish bean stew, chopped up a salad, and baked macaroons for the whole centre, all the while pausing for a moment in a common humanity otherwise guarded in the daily grind.
The Mary Mackillop Outreach Centre is a private initative through St. Vinnies which provides day-support services to the chronically disadvantaged. They do a sweep of the local boarding houses a couple of times a week and provide a healthy lunch, entertainment, social stimulation and emotional support.
After my inital confrontation with the severity and diversity of trials these folks were dealing with, I rested into an enriching day of uncommon resonances. I decided early on that I wasn't there to provide, I was there to share - and it was in this spirit that I fell upon unexpected pleasures...
... like cutting up chorizo with Nadine, an intellecually handicapped woman who had been abandoned by her family and left to the institutions. She revealed that despite never knowing her father she "still love(d) him. I say you forgive and forget otherwise you're all divided". She was a serious ACDC fan, and we sang All Night Long and Thunderstruck a few times while dicing a pot of garlic cloves.
... and spending a few lucid moments with the men I've been alongside but rarely with over the last year. We cooked a beautiful spanish bean stew, chopped up a salad, and baked macaroons for the whole centre, all the while pausing for a moment in a common humanity otherwise guarded in the daily grind.
... and decipering drawings, colouring in boxes and circles, and playing join the dots with William, a deaf, mute, partially blind, schizophrenic and severely intellectually disabled man who had been in care from birth. We spent a half an hour slowly escalating the complexity of our games, and somewhere in the space between those dots, John, Fabian and I received the chance to share a quiet moment inside his unique world.
I remain perpetually cynical of the trickle-down corporate benevolence model's efficency for distributing social prosperity, but for as long as this form of social organisation predominates and I'm forced to spin as a cog in that often dissociated machine, moments like these are like holding solid gold in a fiat-currency economy. ;-P
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