After several viewings, Ms. Haller said her son assured her, in so many words, that he was at peace with the news: “He said: ‘Sam is a new Wiggle. Greg is not going to be a Wiggle anymore.’ And he was fine with it.”

-The Onion

oops, I mean:

-The New York Times, "Hush, Mama, Don't You Cry, a New Yellow Wiggle Will Sing"

Read at Work

[via pour-soi]

I like repetition because it includes an endless sequence of substitutes and missed encounters.

-Sherrie Levine

Children gradually comprehend object permanence - the realization that objects exist even when the items are placed out of sight.
_

Mead and Role-Taking

Role-taking often occurs through play and games, as children try out different roles (such as being mommy, daddy, doctor, teacher) and gain an appreciation of them.... Then the person begins to construct his or her own roles (role-making) and to anticipate other individuals' responses. Finally, the person plays at her or his particular role (role-playing).

-Diana Kendall, Sociology in Our Times

Nearly everyone who has landed on the island of “Lost” has been searching for something elusive... “Lost” is, in some sense, in the dark business of exploring just how futile the modern search for peace, knowledge, recovery or profit really is. The failure of people to combat their most debilitating weaknesses is one of the show’s most compelling themes.

-The New York Times, "Philosophy, Mystery, Anarchy: All is 'Lost'"

Standing

Standing on my elbow
With my finger in my ear,
Biting on a dandelion,
And humming kind of queer
While I watched a yellow caterpillar
Creeping up my wrist,
I leaned on a tree
And I said to me,
"Why am I doing this?"

-Shel Silverstein

Part of a ‘go green’ campaign based out in New Zealand.
[via inspire me, now!]

I find it important to draw attention to thinking and doing as well as to what happens in between, to lightness and heaviness, to the energy that oscillates between.

-Magdalena Jetelova

Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863)

Alexey Titarenko, St. Petersburg

Joe Wheelright, Singing Stone. 2006.

[via 3quarksdaily]

These Poems, She Said

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man

who would leave his wife and child because

they made noise in his study. These are the poems

of a man who would murder his mother to claim

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women,

she said. These are the poems of a man

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s

hands, woven of water and logic

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant

as elm leaves, which if they love love only

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.

These poems, she said....

You are, he said,

beautiful.

That is not love, she said rightly.


-Robert Bringhurst

Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe (1981)
[Your Golden Hair, Margarete]
-Anselm Kiefer

Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it ans steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith


-Paul Celan

The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world.

-Frederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

Fathers and teachers, I ponder "What is hell?" I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.

-Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

There

Let it start to rain,
the streets are empty now.
Over the roof hear the leaves
coldly conversing in whispers;
a page turns in the book
left open by the window.
The streets are empty, now
it can begin. I am not there.

Like you
I wasn't present
at the burial. This morning

I have walked out
for the first time
and wander here
among the blind
flock of names
standing still
in the rain —

(the one on your stone
will remain
listed in the telephone books
for a long time, I guess, light
from a disappeared star . . .)

— just to locate the place,
to come closer, without knowing where you are
or if you know I am there.

-Franz Wright

The Bible was never intended to rule our lives, to be worshipped or even used as a crutch. As far as I can tell, God’s plan is to get a few nuggets of truth into our thick skulls and then step back to see what we do with it. Our lives, our destiny, our liberty, our choice, for good or for evil. The Bible should be used as idea fodder to capture our attention just long enough to wonder if there really is something out there—actual relationship with God not included.

-Albert Clawson, "Origin of Scriptures"

[via it loved to happen]

May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye, and limb;
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to the swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come,
The living white and red.

-W.H. Auden

If my own weight and experience give me any authority, I would say that fatness in the male is the physical expression of a psychological wish to withdraw from sexual competition and, by combining mother and child in his own person, to become emotionally self-sufficient. The Greeks thought of Narcissus as a slender youth but I think they were wrong. I see him as a middle-aged man with a corporation, for, however ashamed he may be of displaying it in public, in private a man with a belly loves it dearly; it may be an unprepossessing child to look at, but he has borne it all by himself.

-W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

Walter Kaufmann described existentialism as "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life"

[Wikipedia]

We live at the end of the modern world because we now see the consequences of the modern reduction of the real human being to an individual. What began as a fiction to limit government has redefined more and more of human life. If human beings really believe they are merely individuals, they perversely work to empty human life of the contents that make it worth living. A life defined only by avoiding death and misery is, in fact, supremely miserable. So, today, our sophisticated individuals sometimes spend their time envying the other animals—at least they’re content. But the individual really knows that the dog’s life is not for him. The individual wrongly believes that his choice is between subhuman contentment and human unhappiness, and in his freedom he sometimes talks nostalgically about the former—the “simple life”—but still consistently chooses the latter.


-First Principles, Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism

How could he help him?
miserable youth! in flight
from a non-father,
an incoherent mother,
in pursuit of - what?
_

Lonely he may be
but, each time he bolts his door
the last thing at night,
his heart rejoices: "No one
can interfere with me now."


-W.H. Auden, "Marginalia" V

Scenes from a Childhood
3.

The ant an aimed light cripples into ash
is lifted by the luckier others,

borne down
the eyeless socket in the ground.

-Christian Wiman

Suddenly, and without sound,
a god comes back, easing into our lives
as if he'd never left, opening
to our opened eyes those carved arms
as if that touch could be a tenderness to us.

-Christian Wiman, from "Reading Herodotus"

Valley Candle

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

-Wallace Stevens

"I can't escape unhappiness," said Isabel. "In marrying you I shall be trying to."

"I don't know whether you'd try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!" he exclaimed with an anxious laugh.

"I mustn't-I can't," cried the girl.

"Well, if you're bent on being miserable I don't see why you should make me so. Whatever charms a life of misery may have for you, it has none for me."

"I'm not bent on a life of misery," said Isabel. "I've always been intensely determined to be happy, and I've often believed I should be. I've told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating myself."

"By separating yourself from what?"

"From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer."


-Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, volume 1, chapter 14

A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

— Richard Wilbur, On Having Mis-identified A Wild Flower

[via it loved to happen]

“To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed, good writing is inherently subversive.”

- J. Mitchell Morse (1972)

[via morethan95theses]

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.

-Paul Valery, "Letter about Mallarme"

There is a strict law in literature that we must never go to the bottom of anything.

-Paul Valery

PHAEDRUS

Life blackens at the contact of truth, as a suspicious mushroom blackens, when it is crushed, at the contact of the air.

SOCRATES

Eryximachus, I asked you if there were any cure?

ERYXIMACHUS

Why cure so reasonable a complaint? There is nothing, no doubt, nothing more essentially morbid, nothing more inimical to nature than to see things as they are. A cold and perfect light is a poison it is impossible to combat. Reality, unadulterated, instantly puts a stop to the heart. One drop of that icy lymph suffices to slacken all the springs of the soul, all the throbbing of desire, to exterminate all hope and bring to ruin all the gods that inhabit our blood... O Socrates, the universe cannot endure for a single instant to be only what it is. It is strange to think that that which is the Whole cannot suffice itself!... Its terror of being what it is has induced it to create and paint for itself thousands of masks; there is no other reason for the existence of mortals. What are mortals for? - Their business is to know. Know? And what is to know? - It is assuredly not to be what one is. - So here are human beings raving and thinking, introducing into nature the principle of unlimited errors and all these myriads of marvels!


-Paul Valery, Dance and the Soul

Nothing is more "original," nothing more "oneself" than to feed on others. But one has to digest them. A lion is made of assimilated sheep.

-Paul Valery, Analects

Let populations be
Crumbled underfoot-
Palm irresistibly-
Among celestial fruit!
So long as you retain
A lightness once they're lost;
Like one who, thinking, spends
His inmost dividends
To grow at any cost.

-James Marrill's version of Paul Valery's "Palme"

Nestle Lion

[via inspire me, now!]

Knowledge is inescapably linked to power because of its connection to “discourse.”...Practices and institutions produce those claims to knowledge that the system of power finds useful. Discourse brings objects into being by identifying, specifying, and defining them. As an example, Foucault cites psychiatry, which declares that schizophrenics exist and then views them as the objects of therapy....

According to Foucault, human knowledge does not merely allow us to exercise power over nature as Bacon had suggested; more significantly, knowledge is violence. The act of knowing, says Foucault, is always an act of violence.

-Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism

Above all else [Nietzsche] fears being deceived in faith, hope, and love—after all, all three states of mind open one to deception—and would rather suffer anything than the humiliation of being fooled. This may be said to be the very origin of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the adolescent fear of being caught believing in that which others have ceased to believe in. Nietzsche is so often praised for the daring of his thought, and this is not wholly inaccurate, but whatever daring his thought may have is, paradoxically enough, produced by his exceptional timidity in living.

—

Hope is the virtue by means of which suspicion can be overcome. The charitable reader offers the gift of constant and loving attention—faithfulness—to a story, to a poem, to an argument, in hope that it will be rewarded. But this hope involves neither demand nor expectation; indeed, if it demanded or expected it would not be hope.

-Dr. Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading

[via an ecstasy of particulars]

There's none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind.

-Edward Thomas, "Liberty"

I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

-T.S. Eliot, "La Figlia Che Piange"

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from out own day, I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.

-Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"

Psychoanalysis is itself the illness of which it purports to be the cure.

-Karl Kraus

Often, irony consists in letting your audience know that something is taking place inside you that they simply are not allowed to see. But it also, more radically, leaves open the question of whether you are seeing it yourself.

-Alexander Nehamas on Socratic irony, Virtues of Authority, 113

9. Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I'd rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?

Yes.

[Frequently Asked Questions About Poetry]

Dryden accurately noted that "the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions." This could also be said of Dante, the anti-Lucretius, and usefully reminds us that the sensibilities of poets are more important than their ideologies.

-Harold Bloom, Genius

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

-Albert Einstein

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
____________

At times I think and at times I am.

-Paul Valery

God is a comedian. God does not suffer the tragic consequences of a flawed essence. Tragedy is all too human. Comedy is divine.

-Cervantes

Extraterrestrial life is life originating outside of the United States of America. It is the subject of astrobiology, and its existence remains hypothetical. There is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life that has been widely accepted by the scientific community.

- Wikipedia

These are the first sentences of Samuel Beckett's Murphy:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.

Excerpt from the end when Murphy's ashes are scattered:

Some hours later Cooper took the packet of ash from his pocket, where earlier in the evening he had put it for greater security, and threw it angrily at a man who had given him great offence. It bounced, burst, off the wall on to the floor, where at once it became the object of much dribbling, passing, trapping, shooting, punching, heading and even some recognition from the gentleman's code. By closing time, the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.

There is a god, and his name is Aristophanes.

-The saying Harold Bloom won't stop using, by Heinrich Heine

Mr. Chesterton has thoughts, but I see no evidence that he thinks.

-T.S. Eliot

Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

-from The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom

interesting but repetitive interesting

-What popped into someone's head when they saw the Discovery Channel logo at BrandTag (a brand is what people say it is)

Traffic Light
by Shel Silverstein

The traffic light simply would not turn green
So the people stopped to wait
As the traffic rolled and the wind blew cold
And the hour grew dark and late.

Zoom-varoom, trucks, trailers,
Bikes and limousines,
Clatterin' by - me oh my!
Won't that light turnt green?

But the days turned weeks, and the weeks turned months
And there on the corner they stood,
Twiddlin' their thumbs till the changin' comes
The way good people should.

And if you walk by that corner now,
You my think it's rather strange
To see them there as they hopefully gaze
With the very same smile on their very same face
As they patiently stand in the very same place
And wait for the light to change.

I like the me when I am with you

-exploding dog

-Tohaku

[via 3quarksdaily]

There were some who believed he was not dead; but both he and the old woman held it easier to believe that a dead man might revisit the world he had left, than that one who went on living for hundreds of years should be a man at all.


-George MacDonald, Lilith

The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art - the art of myth-making - is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version - whose words - are we thinking when we say this?

-C.S. Lewis, introduction to Lilith

International Philosophy World Cup - Germany vs. Greece

-wooster collective

American Poetry
by Louis Simpson

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.

Without Ceremony
by Vassar Miller


Except ourselves, we have no other prayer;
Our needs are sores upon our nakedness.
We do not have to name them; we are here.
And You who can make eyes can see no less.
We fall, not on our knees, but on our hearts,
A posture humbler far and more downcast;
While Father Pain instructs us in the arts
Of praying, hunger is the worthiest fast.
We find ourselves where tongues cannot wage war
On silence (farther, mystics never flew)
But on the common wings of what we are,
Borne on the wings of what we bear, toward You,
Oh Word, in whom our wordiness dissolves,
When we have not a prayer except ourselves.

Do the Dead Know what Time It Is?
by Kenneth Patchen

The old guy put down his beer.
Son, he said,
(and a girl came over to the table where we were:
asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink.)
Son, I am going to tell you something
The like of which nobody was ever told.
(and the girl said, I've got nothing on tonight;
how about you and me going to your place?)
I am going to tell you the story of my mother's
Meeting with God.
(and I whispered to the girl: I don't have a room,
but maybe...)
She walked up to where the top of the world is
And He came right up to her and said
So at last you've come home.
(but maybe what?
I thought I'd like to stay here and talk to you.)
My mother started to cry and God
Put His arms around her.
(about what?
Oh, just talk...we'll find something.)
She said it was like a fog coming over her face
And light was everywhere and a soft voice saying
You can stop crying now.
(what can we talk about that will take all night?
and I said that I didn't know.)
You can stop crying now.

Our doom is in our being.

-James Agee, Sonnet II

Each man believes in his heart he will die
Many have written last thoughts and last letters
None know if our deaths are now or forever
None know if this wandering earth will be found

-Archibald MacLeish, "An Epistle to Be Left in the Earth"

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

-D. H. Lawrence

Letter to America
by Francisco Alarcón


pardon
the lag
in writing you

we were left
with few
letters

in your home
we were cast
as rugs

sometimes
on walls
though we

were almost
always
on floors

we served
you as
a table

a lamp
a mirror
a toy

if anything
we made
you laugh

in your kitchen
we became
another pan

even now
as a shadow
you use us

you fear us
you yell at us
you hate us

you shoot us
you mourn us
you deny us

and despise
everything
we

continue
being
us

America
understand
once and for all:

we are
the insides
of your body

our faces
reflect
your future


[via 3quarksdaily]

He wanted to remain like that for ever, with his heart hurting him in a pain that was also life to him.

-D.H. Lawrence, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.... Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

-Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry"

endless love
by Charles Bukowski

I've seen old married couples
sitting in their rockers
across from one another
being congratulated
for staying together 60 or 70
years,
either of whom
would
long ago have
settled for something
else, anything else,
but fate
fear and
circumstances have
bound them
eternally together;
and as we tell them
how wonderful
their great and enduring love
is
only they
really know
the truth
but they don't tell us
that from the first day they
met
somehow
it didn't mean
all that much:
like
waiting for death
now
it was just an endless determination to
endure.

Single Player

-Luke Williams

“Godel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth.”

- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach

[via An Ecstasy of Particulars]

While Wheaton College does not keep hard numbers, Dr. Jones said, it employs dozens of divorced faculty and staff members who are allowed to join or remain at the school because the circumstances of their divorces complied with biblical standards. In his 12 years as provost, Dr. Jones recalled only one professor who was fired because of a divorce.

...

“I want them to know that God does not desert you when life suddenly gets real on you,” Dr. Gramm said. “And I want them to know that you can be a responsible, reasonable and decent person and not be able to work out a marriage with another responsible, reasonable and decent person.”

-The New York Times

Morning Arrives

by Franz Wright

Morning arrives

unannounced

by limousine: the tall

emaciated chairman

of sleeplessness in person

steps out on the sidewalk

and donning black glasses, ascends

the stairs to your building

guided by a German shepherd.

After a couple faint knocks

at the door, he slowly opens

the book of blank pages

pointing out

with a pale manicured finger

particular clauses,

proof of your guilt.

Proved faithless, still I wait.

-Franz Wright

British Literature 17th-20th Century final exam with Dr. Ryken:

• A happy event
• Gentle and soothing technology
• Intermittent spontaneous hugs
  

Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
__________

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

-D. H. Lawrence

-Conway's Game of Life

The term "emergent" was coined by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes, who wrote:

"Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference."

[here]

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

-Christopher Hampton

Nature -- sometimes sears a Sapling --
Sometimes -- scalps a Tree --
Her Green People recollect it
When they do not die --

Fainter Leaves -- to Further Seasons --
Dumbly testify --
We -- who have the Souls --
Die oftener -- Not so vitally --


-Emily Dickinson

What if the cross that we are called to carry is not for us at all but rather, like the cross that Simon of Cyrene labored beneath, is really for another—a cross for us to crucify what we love? Is it possible that the cross we labor beneath must be used to crucify our Christianity?

-Peter Rollins