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| Messages 1 - 12 of total 12 in this topic |
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Original Post - Dec 2, 2012 - 02:20pm PT
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"'You want to catch this wolf, the old man said. Maybe you want the skin so you can get some money. Maybe you can buy some boots or something like that. You can do that. But where is the wolf? The wolf is like the copo de nieve.
'Snowflake.
'Snowflake. You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back.'
"The woods were unmoved, like a mask -- heavy, like the closed door of a prison -- they looked with their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 2, 2012 - 02:21pm PT
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"Yet men enjoy
The banquet, and in celebration,
Their eyes are brightened by pearls
On a young woman’s neck.
Also games of war
and through
The garden paths
The memory of battle clatters;
The resonant weapons
Of heroic ancestors lie soothed
And still upon the breasts
Of children. But the bees hum
Around me, and where the plowman
Makes his furrows, birds
Sing against the light. Many give
Help to heaven. The poet
Sees them. It’s good to rely
On others. For no one can bear his life alone."
"Things have made certain impressions on me. And I on them. A pet monkey. A beautiful young girl with onyx eyes only slightly older than one of my own daughters selling flowers in the hotel and out in the street. Voices singing in the night. The interaction is yet in flux. People, objects, images, feelings, they move around in time and place. They inhabit other bodies, become a part of other lives, different circumstances, and yet, somehow, stay true to their original function in life, which has no form, or many, if only satisfying some integrity perhaps not even knowable by the persons themselves, who are, after all, also perhaps the subject of some manyformed and also formless universal logic that everyone and everything is trying to understand."
"The moon shimmers in green water.
White herons fly through the moonlight.
The young man hears a girl gathering water-chestnuts:
into the night, singing, they paddle home together."
"Far off in Fuzhou she is watching the moonlight,
Watching it alone from the window of her chamber-
For our boy and girl, poor little babes,
Are too young to know where the Capital is.
Her cloudy hair is sweet with mist,
Her jade-white shoulder is cold in the moon.
...When shall we lie again, with no more tears,
Watching this bright light on our screen?"
"We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like….. moments like these are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times…the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."
"Short is the little time that remains of your life, live as on a mountain"
"To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour..."
"Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up."
"I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less."
"They sat side by side holding their hats, she the sombrero of woven straw, he the dusty black fedora. She was crying. He sighed and seemed himself weary and cast down. He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed times of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation? It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart’s memory which is the sole place of their abode then and now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift".
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 2, 2012 - 02:21pm PT
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"The Devil manifests himself to us now as a well-bred, cultivated man of the world. In appearing among us, he generally borrows a handsome figure, surmounted by delicate features, dresses well, is fastidious about his rings and linen , travel posts and stops at the best hotels. As he can boast of abundant means and a handsome wardrobe, it is no wonder that he should everywhere be politely received. In fact he gets into very agreeable society. His brilliant powers of conversation, his adroit flattery, courteous gallantry, and elegant, though wayward, flights of imagination, soon render him the delight of the company in every salon."
"The fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindlers, in guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized – and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray archetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human."
"We can learn from the past that people on the top were always keen on hiding and washing their hands while appropriating funds in the name of the country, sharing the debts with people at the bottom and privatizing the profits."
"And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence."
"From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, financial analysts, charlatans, swindlers, property salesmen, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with the ears cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans ...."
"In the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated."
"This is my resignation letter. I’m walking out on in silence. In the future there will be no need for people like me because there won’t be a democracy to save, just private interests, battles for more power, more money. The few files I take with me regard men who must save themselves from the storm, black souls, mercenary captains. Yet, as we’ve already seen in history, they’ll be the rulers of the chaos."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 2, 2012 - 02:22pm PT
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"Other men are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep.
Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf. The saying bears witness to them: absent while present.
Although the account (logos) is shared, most men live as though their thinking (phronesis) were a private possession.
Most men do not think (phroneousi) things in the way that they encounter them, nor do they recognize what they experience, but believe their own opinions.
.........
"What is striking here is not so much the self-assurance (not to say arrogance) of the thinker who regards 'other men' as sleepwalkers, but the almost pathetic epistemic isolation of a man trying to convey the vision of an obvious and immediate truth to men who stagger past, unable to notice what they are doing all day long as if it were a dream they cannot grasp or hold onto."
"The paradox 'absent while present' confirms the sense of epistemic isolation. There seems to be an audience there, men listening, but no communication is possible, nothing gets through. These pathetic listeners, who include most men and most of Hs illustrious predecessors, must be somewhere else, off on their own trip."
"N once described an argument about history. "I have done that," claims memory. "I cannot have done that," pride retorts. Or, to put it differently: The past is what happened, history what we decide to remember. We mine the past for myths to buttress our present."
"In everymans heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance."
"Once upon a time there was a nuclear blast and the only survivor was a lowly bank clerk with Coke bottle glasses, who seemed quite happy to have survived the blast because he had got his beloved books in the bank vault with him--until he had to go looking for food outside and accidentally stepped on his glasses..."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 2, 2012 - 02:22pm PT
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"N is writing about what he has called "the scholarly forms of disease", and tells of a story about a talented young man who enters the university to obtain a doctorate. He puts together a thesis he has been working on for years, submits it to the philosophical faculty. One rejects the work on the grounds that it advances views that are not taught there. The other states that the work is contrary to common sense and is paradoxical. His thesis is therefore rejected, and he does not therefore earn his doctorate. N describes the "not humble enough to hear the voice of wisdom" in their negative judgment of his results. Further, the young man is "reckless enough", in N's view, to believe that the faculty "lacks the faculty for philosophy”. N uses this story to emphasize the virtue of independence: "one cannot go one's own way independently enough. Truth seldom dwells where people have built temples for it and have ordained priests. We ourselves have to suffer for good or foolish things we do, nor those who give us the good or the foolish advice. Let us at least be allowed the pleasure of committing follies on our own initiative.”
"S declares that claim provides proof that the ignorant is more convincing among the ignorant (a crowd) than among the expert. This is the case for all other arts, as well. Herein lies the crucial difference: whereas a routine such as rhetoric appeals to an excitation of pleasure in order to create the impression of good and therefore appear desirable, the true arts forsake all (including quick gratification of the mind and body) in favor of the good. Thus, S says, rhetoric is "not an art , but the occupation of a shrewd and enterprising spirit, and of one naturally skilled in its dealings with men, and in sum and substance I call it 'flattery.'"
"Assuming that one wants to praise at all, there’s a refined and at the same time noble self-control which always gives praise only where one does not agree:—in other cases one would be really praising oneself, something that contradicts good taste—naturally, a self-control which provides a good opportunity and provocation for one to be constantly misunderstood. In order to permit oneself this real luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among spiritual fools, but rather among people whose misunderstandings and false ideas are still amusing for their sophistication—or one will have to pay dearly for it!—“He is praising me: thus, he admits I’m right”—this asinine conclusion ruins half of life for us hermits, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood and our friendship."
"Wanderer, who are you? I see you go your way without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes; moist and sad as a sounding-lead that has returned to the light unsated from every deep -- what was it looking for down there? -- with a breast that does not sigh, with a lip that hides in disgust, with a hand which now reaches out slowly: who are you? what have you done? Repose here: this place is hospitable to everyone -- refresh yourself! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What will refresh you? You have only to name it: whatever I have I offer you! Refreshment? Refreshment? O inquisitive man what are you saying! But please give me What? What? Say it! One more mask! A second mask..."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 2, 2012 - 02:22pm PT
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"They trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships."
"The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again".
"A bad map is worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside these instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it."
"Screech owls moan in the yellowing
Mulberry trees. Field mice scurry,
Preparing their holes for winter.
Midnight,we cross an old battlefield.
The moonlight shines cold on white bones."
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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i was just myself
arguing with a 1/2 cup of whiskey.
i wanted it to pass my kisser
without soliciting my taste buds.
that shite is like a religion;
or rather the zealot's spreading mary's legs,
or rather the story of her legs that never actually spread.
i lost the arguement,
as i usually do.
i shot the half cup,
chased it with a heaping spoon
of mashed potatoes,
for a second and some,
i was victorious.
then the whole entire lot
came shooting back up the pipes
and ah slammed shut my jaw
cause gross
as it is,
i aint waisting a 1/2 cup 'o jack,
so im swishing around whiskey
misked with bud-mash
oh i forgot to mention
the wee bit's of bacon mixed into my
soul solution,
so i grab the bolus
and re-swallow it,
is: it's own author.
we are meerely specators to that witch.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
dancin on the tip of god's middle finger
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Jan 15, 2014 - 05:37pm PT
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these guys travelled tran-sierra in the winter
on foot to attend a mandala ceremony in our village.
and spent a day in my chiln's school,
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 1, 2015 - 10:59am PT
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Cool education, Norwegian.
The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
The man of ambition thinks to find his good in the operations of others; the man of pleasure in his own sensations; but the man of understanding in his own actions.
When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.
If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.
Do not be ashamed of help.
Blame and praise have no true effects.
We are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
A good man does not spy around for the black spots in others, but presses unswervingly on towards his mark.
It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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The old sayings are the best sayings.
This is as it always was and as it always shall be.
Specks in the eyes of beholders
Grown to the size of big boulders
Make us think more of gain and loss
In a universe that is mostly choss.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 24, 2019 - 01:37pm PT
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"The barbarians"/"the uncivilized" are always defined by being "not us", by being "the others" and the war of the winner (always a "non-barbarian") was always a justified war to cultivate or save someone from the barbarians or the barbarians from themselves.
How do the minority or technologically less advanced "barbarians"/"the others" handle the threat of death intelligently?
The "barbarians" have to stand up to the challenge as "cultivated barbarians". They have to balance between assimilating to the existing rules and creating possibilities for acceptance of new rules. Some of the strategies:
-Will to accept parts of the existing formal cultures as part of personal style
-Navigate multiple elites, and not be too devaluated by any of them
-Do not get too tired of people who are not able to navigate in culturally complex situations
-Accept and cultivate Stigma
-Intentionally creating new norms with new power as a respons to being devaluated by the cultural elite
-"Break" norms to indicate “real” cultural position – use of Stigma as value-creating criterion.
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