Today

 

Just feeling human the way a cloud’s a cloud tinged with blue.. Human, a kind of element, a fire, an air, today.. a house without doors, open to sun or snowdrifts. --Denise Levertov.

The Tree of Life

 

Rootedness is the precondition for verticality..[for what] leads to reverence,revelation. --R. Zaretsky. When the trees have burned down,their darkness remains. ~W.S.Merwin.

A day in the life of:

Coffee. Silence. Reading. Four minute walk home. Lunch. Prayer. Karak chai. Chat with KP: cats,Islam. Notes, markings. Put things in order before Maghrib. Walk. Dinner. A small but blessed, charmed life. The form, not the substance,is monastic, an old rhythm of life somehow surviving, returning. In-between: birdsong, a few questions,maybe a lecture.

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Music, language, architecture,knowledge & places become generic,bland, homogeneous, neutral. A grey & blase age of likes, whatever, meh, androgyny (Spiderman, Manga), boredom, untact, zombification, hikokomori & narcissism.

'My intuitive sense is that it has to do with pessimism and a sense of pointlessness in communication. When a place becomes an airport terminal of totally unconnected individuals with no shared culture or sense of a public, there is no coherent entity to express yourself to and it becomes pointless to signal or communicate something outward from within. Who would you be dressing up for?'

--Angela Nagle.

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It is a task to come to see the world as it is -- Iris M Falsehood,illusions are comforting. Academia fosters this smugness, 'knowingness'- which is really ignorance, technique or a shallow, outward knowing (econs, Marxists). To see the world one must see oneself & others in it.

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'Inscribed on a Wall' I set out to find you Facing you in the dark, the way home lost..I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat, [drifting, drifting] -- Tu Fu.

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The first day of spring carries with it the last day of summer. Started here 25 years ago! And now time curves back on itself. "The strength of a man's spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life." "And the eye that sees refuses to see further, rests on the frail strawness of straw."

--Denise.

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Well, for one thing,” he [Don Cherry] replied, “it’s actually not my music, because it’s a culmination of different experiences, different cultures, and different composers that involves the music that we play together.” --A. Shatz.

"Philosophy is not a form of knowledge but a quest for wisdom; what moves us towards it does not come from us. It is not something that can be owned or traded." -- Marcel Henaff.

"He looked no one in the face, as if his relationship with the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand..an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined exchange." --Pasolini