The Future Is Yours
You are incomplete, unfinished. As goes your self, so go your actions; half finished plans, dreams delayed, your heart a field of broken toys. The world in its wisdom has brought you to this point and the full depth of your sufferings and failures transcends the sugar spun follies of youth.
But as someone who has lived a panoply of lives you know an even deeper truth:
The World Is A Lie.
The world lies to you for its purposes which rarely — if ever! — align with your own. It wants you simple, practical, ordered, humble, but not humble as an alloy of your strengths with deeper hued wisdom, but humble as a making lame, a cutting of tendons so that you may not go further!
There is no victory in this; you must create the World for Yourself. This day reminds you of this! Struggles against the Coalitions of your worst aspects will be driven from the field on this day!
Never forget that all may be accomplished, that the Grande Armee of your soulcrafting can bring you only triumph on this your Austerlitz Day!
Godzilla vs. Megalon
In The Law, human beings attempted to create an authority that would transcend their own best efforts to besmirch, evade, manipulate, and abuse it. A North Star of dispassionate justice that would shine far above the nonstop mud wrestling of human affairs.
In practice, of course, the law, a human product, has often been used as the protector of privilege or the refuge of scoundrels. But it is a work in progress, and over time it’s been hewn and refined and fought over toward something that begins to vaguely resemble the ideal of objectivity—to extend its protection to the powerless and its demand for accountability to the powerful, “without fear or favor.”
Those words, as you’ll see if you follow the link, arose in the context of journalism, which has now largely made a travesty of them. Only The Law is left.
(Digression: it’s interesting that the English, who tore through this globe creating, exploiting, and destroying with their mind-boggling drive to industrialize, capitalize, and colonize—a truth brought home to me by copyediting this forthcoming book—also created much of what we now know as The Law, and slowly, from Magna Carta to the reformers of the 19th century, broadened its protection, imperfectly, from the rights of property to the rights of the naked person.)
Here, you hear the authority and dignity of The Law awakening, shaking its wings, clearing its throat—not a moment too soon. Things have finally gone too far, rousing it from its “stony sleep,” like the more-than-equal and opposite monster to Yeats’s in “The Second Coming“:
In The Law, we finally have a Godzilla to fight the Megalon of chaos.
Or, in a more mundane image, the parents burst through the door just as the kids who’ve been gleefully trashing the house are about to burn it down.
But The Law is no human parent. It’s our own imagining of a power authoritative and impartial enough to stop us from destroying each other and ourselves.
The Old Healer
Bob Chapra, a Feldenkrais Method practitioner in (I think) Philadelphia, posted this on Facebook. I thought it worth sharing, not least for the beautiful photograph.
The old healer to the soul:
It’s not your back that hurts, but the burden.
It’s not your eyes that hurt, but injustice.
It’s not your head that hurts, it’s your thoughts.
Not the throat, but what you don’t express or say with anger.
Not the stomach that hurts, but what the soul does not digest.
It’s not the liver that hurts, it’s the anger.
It’s not your heart that hurts, but love.
And it is love itself that contains the most powerful medicine.
(Author unknown)
Undeniable
Your enemies scoffed. Your friends fretted, the closest of them doing so silently, almost stoically. You had none of these feelings, for reasons you could not explain even to those most cherished.
The future was yours to shape as you will — it is your Austerlitz Day! No whim or caprice shall be denied you today; the heavens do not grant these days freely or often. But it is this day, more than any other that reminds of what great triumphs you can achieve. Do not fret or fear any obstacle; wryly view these as that which makes your success that much more amazing, more profound! See your as yet unaccomplished goals in life as already vanquished foes, praying for your mercy and forbearance! Your strength is more than willing to be generous in their defeat, because you know that the Fates could have turned on you and not them. Forward! Even more glory awaits!
A Muffled Lantern
The receiving instrument
(Some discoveries are too good just to drop on @#&^$*&!! Facebook where I myself will never see them again. Besides, I want Louise to see this.)
What a lovely term I never heard before — the “beholder’s share,” the unique creative contribution that each viewer/listener/reader brings to perceiving a work of art. It was coined by Alois Riegl of the Vienna school of art history and his disciples Ernst Kris (who became a psychoanalyst) and Ernst Gombrich.
I had come to this concept (without having a word for it) in regard to Jacques, who was an immensely generous and percipient listener to music, especially jazz — its ideal audience perhaps — who was obviously musically gifted, but had never learned, in his rough-and-tumble life, to play an instrument well. (It might have been the bass.) It struck me that “the ear is the fifth instrument in the quartet,” that no piece of music is complete or fulfilled without a listener, a witness, and that listening, like playing, must also be practiced and refined. And the same can be said for every art. Now I have a term for it. The beholder’s share.
More Bullshit . . .
. . . on A Cold Eye (where I describe myself frankly as a bullshitter). I hesitated to post the link here, thinking, “What’s the point? All I’m doing is inviting realpc to come over here and tell me I’m wrong about everything.”
Ambiance 