“So truly blind is lord man; so pathetically employed in his little jobs of town-building, church-building, bread-getting, the study of the spirits and the heavens, that he can see nothing of the heaven he is in.”
- John Muir -
Archive for the ‘Wisdom’ Category
So Truly Blind Is Lord Man . . .
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010The Human Being can be very stupid . . .
Monday, June 21st, 2010The Human Being can be very stupid, especially in the half-light of almost 2,000 years of semi-Christian culture where emotionally barbaric ideals are mixed through with educational systems of learning based upon national, regional, economic, and status forces. The development of the Pure Mind in America is almost impossible unless a man is fortunate enough to spend the first 25 years of his life in a madhouse or in some other entombed or untouchable state.
- Charles Bukowski -
Wax On, F*ck Off
Monday, June 14th, 2010Monday blues? This should cure it . . .
RIP Henry Miller
Monday, June 7th, 2010Henry Valentine Miller
(December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980)
“Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fat, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”
- Henry Miller -
Aim High
Friday, June 4th, 2010The greater danger
for most of us
is not that our aim is
too high
and we miss it,
but that it is
too low
and we reach it.
- Michelangelo -
Life Lessons With Mr. T
Monday, May 24th, 2010Life Lessons With Mr.T – watch more funny videos
Most Persons Do Not See The Sun
Friday, May 14th, 2010“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson -
Being a Writer
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010“Being a writer is damning and difficult. If you have a talent it can leave you forever while you are sleeping one night. What keeps you going in the game is not easy to answer. Too much success is destructive; no success at all is destructive. A little rejection is good for the soul but total rejection creates cranks and madmen, rapists, sadists, drunkards, and wife-beaters. Just as too much success does.
I too have been misled by the Romantic concept of writing. As a youth I saw too many movies of the great Artist, and the writer was always some tragic and very interesting chap with a fine goatee, blazing eyes, and inner truths springing to his tongue continually. What a way to be, I thought, ah. But it isn’t so. The best writers that I know talk very little, I mean those who are doing the good writing. In fact, there is nothing duller than a good writer. In a crowd or even with another person, he is always busy (subconsciously) recording every goddamned thing. He is not interested in speechmaking or being the Life of the Party. He is greedy; he saves his juices for the typewriter. You can talk away inspiration, you can destroy god-given genius with your mouth. Energy will only spread so far. I too am greedy. One must be. The only juices that can be given up, the only time that can simply be given away is the time for Love. Love gives strength; it breaks down inbred hatred and prejudices. It makes the writing more full. But all other things must be saved for the work.
A writer must keep performing, hitting the high mark, or he is down on skid row. And there’s no way back up. For after some years of writing, the soul, the person, the creature becomes useless to operate in any other capacity. He is unemployable. He is a bird in a land of cats. I’d never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing which keeps you from going insane.”
- Charles Bukowski -
Service to Something Greater
Thursday, May 6th, 2010“One of the most important things we can do is help young people find their way to be in service of something larger than themselves. Normally the only reason kids go to college or graduate school – and, in Wes Jackson’s words, the only real major offered – is upward mobility. But we fail to teach our children that service to something greater than themselves is far more likely to lead to a joyful and satisfying life, and one that is environmentally rich.”
- Carolyn Raffensperger -
Victims of Repression
Thursday, April 29th, 2010“It’s ironic. Radicals dream midnight police raids, or sit around over coffee and talk with glittering eyes about Repression – about those internment camps that are waiting empty. And all the time Miss Jones does her quiet thing with the kids in third grade. People like to chat about the fascist threat or the communist threat. But their visions of repression are for the most part romantic and self indulgent: massacres, machine guns drowning out La Marseillaise. And in the meantime someone stops another tenth grader for a hall-pass check and notices that his t-shirt doesn’t have a pocket on it. In the meantime the Bank of America hands out another round of high school achievement awards. In the meantime I grade another set of quizzes. God knows the real massacres continue. But the machine gun isn’t really what is to be feared most in our civilized Western world. It just isn’t needed all that much. The kids leave Miss Jones’ class. And they go on to junior high and high school and college. And most of them will never need to be put in an internment camp. Because they’re already there. Do you think I’m overstating it? That’s what’s so frightening: we have the illusion that we’re free. In school we learn to be good little Americans – or Frenchmen – or Russians. We learn how to take the crap that’s going to be shoveled on us all our lives. In school the state wraps up people’s minds so tight that it can afford to leave their bodies alone. Repression? You want to see victims of repression? Come look at most of the students at San Diego State College, where I work. They want to be told what to do. They don’t know how to be free. They’ve given their will to this institution just as they’ll continue to give their will to the institutions that engulf them in the future.”
- Jerry Farber -
