I tend to find modern poetry disgusting, unoriginal, and empty. And not, well, poetry at all. But there are some rare exceptions, in whose art lyric and form are elevated to something more than mere prose, where meaning glides along the surfaces of the mind, “grooves in an aesthetic” to speak with someone I once knew.
Here is a rare example of good modern poetry. I encourage you to post other examples as you find them, and also to post examples of bad/typical modern poetry.
Evolution
Loss and ruin grind under our feet
like spilled salt, bad luck sticking
to our soles. And joy
streaks across the sky, a star
burning out. Who knows
what will save us?
A man yanks the hair
of a woman he once covered with kisses.
Each kiss was a blossom and he thought
he was making his own garden.
All over the world there is failure.
Our species can enter the human
body with a laser, repair the shape
of a cornea to sharpen all it sees,
or crack the ribs and lift the heart
from its home, plant it again.
This exquisite intelligence—a brain
firing one hundred billion neurons—
is still bashing its own skull with big rocks.
Everywhere, staggering
beauty, intricate and connected.
Rivers and streams flow under our skin.
We can see them through translucent cells.
And inside the modest and flamboyant organs of plants
a vegetal sex is taking place.
If you lie still in a soundproof room
you can hear the high tone
of your nervous system and the low
tone of your blood.
In caves the thinnest strands of stalactite extend
a centimeter in a hundred years, a single drop
of water hanging from each tip, returning
its burden of mineral to stone.
What kind of patience can we learn?
Goats chew the brilliantly
long green grass. Wind carries rain
across fields in dark transparencies.
The water sings in the gutters, the earliest song on earth.
Lovers keep breaking each other open
like soft fruit, trying to bury their souls
in each other’s flesh.
As termites undo the material world,
taking apart the day, the universe
is expanding, so precisely held
in the web of tension, we can sleep
at the edge of an ocean.
O primitive brain, perhaps it’s you
we should pray to, heaping our altars
with spliced DNA and the score to Bach’s
Magnificat, Gandhi’s dhoti, one hair
from Mother Teresa, and a cup of clean water.
We could bow through the long night,
prostrate, breathing in
and breathing out. Somewhere
in a barren desert, sand
blowing, burying the tents, grit
biting into skin, someone cradles
the skull of a being born
seven million years ago.
–Ellen Bass
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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05-27-2013, 06:59 AM (This post was last modified: 05-27-2013 07:00 AM by pezer.) Post: #2
pezer Offline
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RE: Modern Poetry
Beautiful. It suffered with the mention of Teresa, but survived.
All of Robert Frost. I like this one a lot.
Desert Places
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Robert Frost
Science is found in the question “how do you know?”
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06-10-2013, 05:11 AM (This post was last modified: 06-10-2013 05:12 AM by ChainOfBeing.) Post: #3
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RE: Modern Poetry
Dream Song 14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
–John Berryman
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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06-18-2013, 03:53 PM Unread post Post: #4
ChainOfBeing Offline
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RE: Modern Poetry
Retreating Wind
When I made you, I loved you.
Now I pity you.
I gave you all you needed:
bed of earth, blanket of blue air–
As I get further away from you
I see you more clearly.
Your souls should have been immense by now,
not what they are,
small talking things–
I gave you every gift,
blue of the spring morning,
time you didn’t know how to use–
you wanted more, the one gift
reserved for another creation.
Whatever you hoped,
you will not find yourselves in the garden,
among the growing plants.
Your lives are not circular like theirs:
your lives are the bird’s flight
which begins and ends in stillness–
which begins and ends, in form echoing
this arc from the white birch
to the apple tree.
Louise Gluck
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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06-18-2013, 05:34 PM Unread post Post: #5
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RE: Modern Poetry
Excellent
" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "
- Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: Natural World Ashes Thu Aug 01, 2013 12:44 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
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Quote :
“I hold that the self is consciously active when it is interactive, and its interactivity is constituted in a dialectic of mutual negation and affirmation of self and other. Self and other, subject and object, are constituted in the individual acts of existential consciousness. These acts are self-originating and yet co-originating, too, as forms of dynamic, reciprocal expression. It is in this structure of biconditional, interexpressive, mutual revealment of self and other that an individual act is an individual act.”
...“[The biological world] exhibits this principle of self-expression; it reflects itself within itself. I articulate this difference [between the biological and the physical worlds] by defining the biological world as a self-transforming matrix moving from the formed to the forming, through the dynamic transactions of organism and environment. The organic realm constitutes a world that exists and moves through itself in this way. It is a process of infinite transformation through the dynamic equilibrium of organism and environment—that is, contains its own self-negation and self-affirmation within itself. This self-vectorial process constitutes the direction of time . . . The biological world thus has the form of a contradictory identity, possessing its own organic centers within itself and infinitely determining itself in and through these centers.”
Kitaro divorces the notions of space and time from each other, space being the dimension of immanence and extensivitiy, time being the dimension of transcendence and intensivitiy. Space being the realm of simultaneous existence, time being the realm of successive existence. The “physical” world is essentially the spatial world, while the biological world is the temporal world. Time is reversible in the physical world, while time is irreversible in the living, biological world.
The “absolute contradictory” identity of the self involves the contradiction between “the many and the one”. The self, attempting to reconcile its biological element with its physical element (its world and socio-history) is thrown into the contradiction between the many (the physical world of reversible time and distinct entities existing in space) and the one (the biological world of irreversible time and unique self-expressing entities existing in time). Human acts express themselves, the biological self-identity from which they arose, but they also express the world, and therefore through human consciousness the world exhibits “both a spatial and a temporal character”… “As an order of simultaneous existence it appears as a form of self-negation, and yet it is infinitely occurring in its temporality. Affirming itself in its temporality, it transcends its own spatial character by being a creative transformation.” The temporal unity of the biological being across time, from the perishing of one spatial moment to the next, gives this living being its creative-transformative character; even as it is always perishing, it is also always being reborn. And it is out of these “biological centers” vectoring together through time which the conscious self emerges as the self-expression of the operations of these centers and by their continuity in the world.
This leads into a perspective that is at basic not unlike Parodites’ daemonic consciousness:
Quote :
“In human consciousness the world is bottomlessly self-determining and creative, a transformational process which has the form of the contradictory identity of space and time. I refer to this self-forming, creative world as the self-determination of the absolute present. I hold that it is only in this dynamic form of contradictory identity that we can truly conceive something that moves by itself and is self-conscious.”
And as he continues, we can see how this also adopts and moves into a perspective along the lines of what value ontology proposes:
Quote :
“The dynamic reciprocity of objective and subjective dimensions comprising the act of humanly conscious expression is monadological in this existential sense. It is unintelligible as the mere action and reaction of physical objects (that is, grammatical subjects in the framework of theoretical judgment). It must be the expression of a self-determining and self-conscious act that simultaneously reflects the world as a unique perspective of the world. When I say that the conscious active individual exists in a structure of dynamic expression, I mean precisely this. That I am consciously active means that I determine myself by expressing the world in myself. I am an expressive monad of the world. I transform the world into my own subjectivity. The world that, in its objectivity, opposes me is transformed and grasped symbolically in the forms of my own subjectivity.”
We see how he arrives at what we have called self-valuing. He also situates this self-valuing within the larger “objective” world that in its physical dimension (its spatiality) both opposes and also conditions the valuing self. From the vantage of the world itself, human-like consciousness’ are created in order to give the world greater expression and depth, to (re-)interpret the world constantly in terms of a dimension which is foreign to the physical world itself, the dimension of the organic, of irreversible, unique and absolute time. The active consciousness expresses the world through itself while it is expressing itself through itself; the contradiction of the one and the many, subject and objects. Both the world and the self-consciousness take on a contradictory character: the world takes on the character of temporality, which is otherwise entirely foreign to it, while the self-consciousness takes on the form of spatiality, of simultaneous physical existence, which is foreign to the temporal condition of the self.
Kitaro grounds religious experience in the ideation of God, God being the principle by which these two contradictions can meet each other and thus may enter into productive relation. Human experience of the eternal is grounded in our understanding of death, of the inevitability of the total oblivion of form, which of course includes us, and in this insight the experience of eternal life is also born at the same moment as this is just the intimate and endless novelty of understanding and creativity, which has been named, among other things, philosophy.
Against Kant’s transcendental forms of the understanding, Kitaro maintains that “content without form is blind, form without content is empty” and he locates here a principle of conscious growth and over-growing progression toward higher forms and orders of experience. He grounds this, quite simply, in thinking. The “thinking subject” arises as a representation of the essential contradiction of the self, as that which “cannot become an object of itself”, the operation is indelibly linguistic, the production of semantics and grammar. The term “grammatical subject” is a tautology. The self makes objects of its experiences but it cannot make object of itself, it cannot self-grasp and self-identify because its objectification and identification are situated in a reciprocal biconditional relation that can never become resolved or grounded, but remain always an irresolute chaos. This irreconcilability, this juxtaposing into contrast of incommensurate elements of conscious experience, this is what we experience as “thinking”. Kitaro’s absolute time of the self-determining act is also an absolutely divided moment, a space which cannot be entirely transferred into the dimension of temporality, and a time which cannot entirely be translated into the dimension of spatiality. Kitaro therefore defines the thinking subject in the negative definition as that part of the active consciousness which is unable to be made object of by our (objectifying-semantic) consciousness itself.
And yet, despite this insight, this purely negative definition does not suffice for Kitaro, and he wishes to proceed with a positive designation, wherein he finds a principle of conscious expansion:
Quote :
“We can say that the self exists as the point where that which cannot become an object in one dimension becomes an object in another dimension—perhaps some higher dimension”.
This is indeed profound. Although he does not seem to draw the furthest implications from this, he locates a principle by which the self, trapped within its own impossibility for self-objectification and self-knowledge, is thrown at the junctures of this subjective interruption into alternate dimensions, from space to time, from time to space. From one purview within conscious expression to another, as the forms of this expression shift from one moment to the next. Where the conscious self meets an impassable wall it does not halt, some aspect of its experience always re-configures and escapes toward a new dimension of expression, is thrust into itself again endlessly as into a new avenue of its own self-expression. The negative condition of the self, its irreconcilable contradiction is also therefore understood to be also the condition of this progressive expansion of consciousness, its continual transformation into what which it presently is not. Transpositional logic is what Kitaro calls the logic of this contradictory consciousness existing as time within space, as space across time; objects within a subject, a subject as objects; and the thinking self which lies at the junction between the need for objectification and the threshold of impossibility of self-objectification. And of all this takes place within the temporal field of meaning of human world-history which gives rise to the possible forms in which our conscious acts ultimately take shape. The biological is always partially physical-spatial, but more so it is always noetic, teleological and dynamically reciprocal with its objects, cast outside of time… Kitaro again: “Self-conscious being pertains to noetic self-determination. Our conscious being has meaning in this framework. Each conscious act appears as a self-contradictory center of the noetic field of predicates. Reflection is nothing other than the self-reflection of the noetic field within itself. Our conscious acts are grounded in such a standpoint. That is the basis on which we are self-conscious and moral.”
The wider “noetic field” being that out of which individual organic self-determining centers rise and take shape, are colored with character and meaning. The irreconcilability of this self-determining active consciousness takes place within a wider noetic-teleological stage of human world-historical meaning, and is in fact, according to Kitaro, nothing but a particular manifestation of this field at a given point within it:
Quote :
"It is in the historical world-time of the absolute present that the monads form the individual expressions of the world. They are both self-originating and co-originating in the matrix of the absolute present. Our own activities as microcosms of the world may be thought to constitute unique events in world-time while simultaneously representing the Ideas as the world's self-negation (that is, self-expression) in world-space. Our activities thereby acquire universality and value. Conversely, the Ideas, as the world's own expressions and values, entail a negation of negation: they are affirmative, actual, self-forming, and at the very least always have moral significance. That is why our activities in the historical world are always, and in various senses, both ideal and actual. The self-conscious world of each individual human self is a self-determining monadic world; but as such, each self is a self-expression of the historical world. Therefore each self-conscious world is a momentary vector of historical world-space, which mediates its own objective self-determination within itself, and infinitely determines itself through its own process of self-expression."
Kitaro succeeds as developing a rational understanding of the basic structure of consciousness and of the structure of this consciousness’ mutually-conditioning relations to the world, both to the physical world of objects as well as to the human history-world of ideas, values and meaning.
And finally, further to the above:
“All life arises from the fact that it transforms itself by containing its own self-expression within itself. It is first biological and instinctive in a spatially-predominant way—that is, it possesses itself as a form of self-negation. It becomes historical life as it becomes concrete in a temporal dimension—as a self-affirming form within a transforming matrix. In historical life there is always this dialectic of affirmative and negative: the former is the material world, the latter the world of consciousness, in the transpositional structure of the contradictory identity of matter and form . . . I articulate the world of consciousness, which phenomenology defines in terms of intentionality, as the self-determination of the temporal dimension of the world, having this transformative structure of the identity of contradiction. Life-structures that contain the perspectives of the world within themselves, as structures of the world’s own expression, may be regarded as instinctual in the predominantly spatial sense, but as conscious acts in their temporal character. Again, they are self-conscious structures in that they are co-originating expressions of the world . . . Reason itself is nothing other than a self-determination of the temporal dimension that always has the character of being a predicate that cannot be subject. We are rational in the self-determining predicate, or universal. Reason functions intentionally, as something temporally, consciously, and immanently enfolding the grammatical subject—that is, the object—and as having its own self-immanent telos.”
" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "
- Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: Natural World Ashes Thu Aug 01, 2013 12:46 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
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Shadows of an active ethics.
Life is always wanting only itself, and finding itself it must cultivate some external agency by which to abandon itself, to again lose sight of itself that it may stimulate continuously its own striving nature in the flesh of some excess. The world is made so that we may never truly rest, and even to search for truth culminates in a seeking into falsity just as all desiring after a fictive experience is only an inarticulate and misplaced desire for truth.
Love is the unity of instinct with a sentimental heart, which may almost entirely exclude the understanding. That we love is the movement toward completion of the axis of the heart’s responsiveness, that point at which feeling subtends with the body under the wider arc of rational reflection, and the enlivening of that point of intersection with a vital energy and passion such as excites the body primarily into activity. Those relations characteristic of a quality of personality are subsumed within relations of the heart, just as those of the heart become reconstituted and find their point of adequate reflection in moments of understanding, of abstract intellect. That which love lacks is made up in the mind just as what is lacking of reason acts as so much fuel and a stimulus toward the unity of the body unconscious within the centralizing locus of the heart’s expression, which movement acts to usurp reason and to place the rational object carefully within the reflective milieu of so many confluent gatherings of sensate affection. What man lacks is yet a technique for casting the contents of his experience into the depth of their unifying reconciliation within each other, that a more disparate and agitating feeling might emerge as the first signs of a new conscious order of contemplation, compared to which our habitual thinking and feeling is but a relaying wind, too proud to realize a greater capriciousness and too vain to possess also the solitude for a moment of more truthful experience.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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01-26-2013, 10:08 PM Post: #2
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RE: Shadows of an active ethics.
Indeed, as man is a furnace, he must still learn to cast himself into this furnace. As man contains an abyss between his mind and heart, he must still navigate this abyss and make it his own. To lose oneself in oneself - I believe that depression is often no more than this, the beginnings of a path that has the power to deepen the soul. This prospect of depth is itself already terrifying and unwanted. Such a path is called the dark night of the soul, and when one is thrown onto it by the simple inadequacy of the only half conscious human state to attain the values the organism (health) wants to reach for, there is no guarantee of ever finding the path as a path. Part of the task of a philosophy of the future is to offer a lantern on this path, for the fallen one to recognize it as a path. What is philosophy but a path? This is why I have been so adamant on creating beacons, signals, symbols - not of what we aim for, but of what we have done, and what those who are still wandering in the dark of the abyss may discover in themselves.
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01-29-2013, 05:07 PM Post: #3
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RE: Shadows of an active ethics.
To accept chaos as a part of us in lieu of an external threat, that is to accept the inevitable limits of our truths with a smile. We dance, and chaos is part of the dance, and within that we discern.
Discerning is an art, and it is involved in warfare. The dark night is not of the philosopher but of the world, and the philosopher often prefers darkness to certain lights. The fearlessness of it adds to his strength and maintains his boldness, as well as his discernment for good light. In any case, darkness is not the same as emptiness; there is a reason we use light.
Ethics, after all, active or otherwise, is itself a shadow.
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The real enemy
The real enemy is chaos. There is no other enemy.
Every problem is a manifestation and a particular mode of chaos. To perceive and understand the chaos within one’s problem is to see into the nature of that difficulty, and so become free (able) to will something else, something counter. We are slaves to that which we do not think we can control, or to that which we are too afraid to reconstitute into some new order for fear that we might in so doing change the nature of what we value into something alien to us, that we would lose this value.
Sometimes this fear is justified, sometimes it is not. Knowing the difference is the essence of true morality, which is yet scarcely born unto human wisdom. At best, we cultivate some moral intuition, namely an ability to withdraw ourselves instinctively at the precipice of this fearful moment. Such a mode however noble leads to a passive morality even where our moral sense manifests itself in activity. So end tragically all things.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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03-08-2013, 02:07 PM (This post was last modified: 03-08-2013 02:08 PM by JSS.) Post: #2
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RE: The real enemy
I refer to “the enemy” as “Entropy”, the son of Chaos, but it is the same difference.
Anentropy is the goal.
The key is to stop worshiping the enemy as unbeatable.
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03-08-2013, 02:49 PM Post: #3
pezer Offline
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RE: The real enemy
Where does the “else” come from? the counter?
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03-08-2013, 11:54 PM (This post was last modified: 03-09-2013 12:03 AM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #4
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RE: The real enemy
(03-08-2013 02:07 PM)JSS Wrote:
I refer to “the enemy” as “Entropy”, the son of Chaos, but it is the same difference.
Anentropy is the goal.
The key is to stop worshiping the enemy as unbeatable.
Indeed. To worship the enemy means to value oneself in terms of the enemy (to hold the emeny as a standard for the real) - which means to value oneself negatively, as weakness. There is no way up from that position.
(03-08-2013 02:49 PM)pezer Wrote:
Where does the “else” come from? the counter?
It emerges naturally once the obstacle is removed, once the chaos is perceived for what it is in terms of the self. It is, as is every act, an extension of the continuing self-valuing, the appropriating of the world in terms of the subjective consistency.
Chaos can be called a-subjective, inconsistency - being not-in-terms.
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03-09-2013, 01:03 AM (This post was last modified: 03-09-2013 01:06 AM by ChainOfBeing.) Post: #5
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RE: The real enemy
(03-08-2013 02:49 PM)pezer Wrote:
Where does the “else” come from? the counter?
I believe this comes from what has been called human freedom or free will, namely the degree of our ability to act without regard to something that would otherwise have compelled our activity by some force or necessity. To (re)condition one necessity in terms of a different, “higher” or more subtle/organic-teleological necessity is the real meaning of freedom/free will. Freedom and determinacy are the same thing.
So when we cultivate an accumulated memory able to act as that against which we now express our own subjective self-valuing activity, producing counter-forces and a continuous sense of (memory) that which is resisted/reincorporated, we gain some measure of freedom. Freedom is a measure of strength. And of course the nature of this strength is in a resistance to chaos, meaning an understanding of chaotic tendency and subsequently an ability to generate and impress a less-chaotic alternative.
What also makes this hard is that to overpower chaos does not defeat or remove it, but makes some new use of it; the chaotic tendency is still present, systemically or structurally as a potentiality. But we can learn to see destructive chaos as a worthy enemy in the sense that without it there could be no impulse or incentive to form an ordering against it. Activity is reaction, freedom is resistance, the necessity of chaos is the necessity for order.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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03-09-2013, 03:02 AM (This post was last modified: 03-09-2013 03:02 AM by pezer.) Post: #6
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RE: The real enemy
OK, but if there is nothing but chaos and the resistance to it…
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03-09-2013, 03:04 AM (This post was last modified: 03-09-2013 03:04 AM by JSS.) Post: #7
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RE: The real enemy
Make the right kind of friends.
…those that help.
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03-09-2013, 03:12 AM Post: #8
pezer Offline
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RE: The real enemy
No, I think I agree with the whole thesis. Chaos is like mistakes: absolutely necessary, often painful, sometimes great. In any case, we dance with it (and we must).
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03-09-2013, 03:27 AM (This post was last modified: 03-09-2013 03:28 AM by JSS.) Post: #9
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RE: The real enemy
So be it and where it takes you.
Sleep with the enemy and the enemy is always with you.
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03-09-2013, 03:31 AM (This post was last modified: 03-09-2013 03:47 AM by pezer.) Post: #10
pezer Offline
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RE: The real enemy
Lol. Seriously though, if you’re not fighting your enemies: who is?
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Split
Politics does not split man against man so much as it splits man inwardly, against himself. Political (or religious/ideological) beliefs are largely irrelevant to the non-philosopher, since the belief serves only as the justice for the feeling. It is the feeling which counts, and which is manipulated by politic.
The splitting into two ‘halves’, largely perfectly opposed to one another, we see this phenomenon everywhere in nature, because it is the essential feature of all things that they would divide inwardly to cast into some higher order of expression a bifurcated nature of action, the growth of something “new”, the functionalization of “the old”.
Each side retains its truth and its true relation to its opposite/s. This is typically “repressed” (buried) by the splitting-nature itself, by the Act. It is action which continuously suppresses the reality of things, whose more true expression might begin to move subtly in the waters of experience were we to take a step back and clear a path for it, namely to suppress out acting for even a moment, to create a space. It is from within voids that the implicit must express itself, in so far as the implicit is as its term suggests, integrated into a seeming homogeneity, a “necessity”.
…Men are made to despise themselves because they are to despise other men, for right or wrong, and feeling is intersected and cut in two at the heart of immediate experience; a truthful nature is broken and made to war against itself, whose justification is the outward expressions of so many beliefs and “pragmatisms” in the world. (And we forget this is the world that we have made).
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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03-11-2013, 06:54 AM (This post was last modified: 03-11-2013 07:04 AM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #2
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RE: Split
I recognize much in this. And the only politics that justify the nature of man to himself must be what we now only know as art. What we (man) in fact have known in those mighty periods on which all our culture is based - the Greeks (I am thinking Historyboy deserves much involvement) and to a lesser degree that Renaissance. China has known such politics as well. Wherever there is history, there has been art as politics. Whenever mediocre artists were at work with such an aim, they have caused historic, monumental, “epic” failures.
We are helpless if we do not rise to the ‘heat’ required for synthesis - ethics born of sublime aesthetics, of rapture caught in form. But we are doomed if the parts come to the melting point and are not prepared to be synthesized.
I suppose that all politicians who rise to power are attempts at making their quest to power into an artwork - their self-glorification in the name of the aesthetics of a race, a people. It suggests that we must find the aesthetics of our “human race” - if we are to advance beyond the schizofrenic battle against our neighbor, our counterpart. Naturally this synthesis means a nature beyond the man of the present hour, the lukewarm soup of half dissolved yet unpleasantly conflicting ingredients.
Paradoxically, to create a fitting image of “mankind” literally to literally create the Übermensch.
" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "
- Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: Natural World Ashes Thu Aug 01, 2013 12:46 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
How healthful is your reality?
Every world is made, each human creates what is possible for him, and what is possible will give his ranges of realities. Despite the great accumulation of past influences we are always a “blank state” in so far as we write our own possibilities. This is usually passive, but may become active in the ways in which our instincts attune to our attributions of what we perceive as risks and possibilities. It is based within information, but based upon the relationships between instinctively governed feelings and this information. A mature heart will always carry one to the threshold no matter what information or quality of possibility are available.
What we think cannot come to be is what we call to, by visualizing it, anticipating is defense and a bringing-forth. So far defense against the unwanted aspect has been the merely passive method for our constructing realities. Desire has two sides, but one result.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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03-19-2013, 12:23 PM (This post was last modified: 03-19-2013 12:27 PM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #2
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RE: How healthful is your reality?
(03-19-2013 03:43 AM)ChainOfBeing Wrote:
What we think cannot come to be is what we call to, by visualizing it, anticipating is defense and a bringing-forth. So far defense against the unwanted aspect has been the merely passive method for our constructing realities. Desire has two sides, but one result.
Brilliant. This explains why living on the edge requires a heavy denial, - as if the denial is the positive stament (I am thinking of Jim Morrison, or Nietzsche - James Dean, Jack Kerouac - Charlie Sheen even in the more vulgar sense) and the positive being is the one that denies. This being creates momentum by its conscious effort to conjure an anti-self, a ‘world’, which stimulates to action and identity.
What it denies is separating heaven and earth, a horizon drawn as a line in the sand.
Every act is such a horizon, an ‘underworld’ is created out of it as well as a ‘heaven’ - collaterality versus telos… the greatest acts perform teleologically within the unintended disruption they cause - in the least intended forms, intention finds its freedom and is able to become real to the world, “power” is awesome to itself, ‘self-evident’ but not immutably real. There is a path that leads away from it, the path of restriction in trust.
Mistrust is necessary for growth - uncertainty, - trust in danger, readiness to manipulate at the cost of a foreign self-valuing. All great movements are ‘racist’ - typist - and then they fall into service of a sustenance providing structure and begin to corrupt.
Every great religion is an attempt to keep the structure out of the picture and to keep moving, being-movement. Structure is the circumference of expediency, and expediency is determined exclusively in terms of value and perspective.
Value-structures, the plasma of the real, valency as “God”, manifesting in art, mind altering drugs, non-teleological sex - “irrational behavior” - - meaning. A rational argument can mean something, but it can not be meant in the way a subjective statement can. It is always “This is the case if you think about it” instead of “Now this is happening”. Between these meanings weaponry is created.
What do men battle when they war? This egde that life is requires of life that it pits itself against itself. In man life reaches the pinnacle of diversity and allows itself to cultivate itself, from pure diversity into a duality - good and evil, life and death, ethics and barbarism. Life uses man to sharpen itself. Man can not understand what he is being used for, except if he stands as life on the precipice and directs the conflict. All art is attempt to this, Napoleon is more overt expression, so also is the militaristic Jihad, and radical Christianity. Judaism attempts not to be life at the edge, but to surf this edge, the be above the tendency of life to pit itself against itself. The religion offers the tree of life, the means to overcome the duality (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) by recognizing its non-dual construction.
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03-20-2013, 02:10 AM (This post was last modified: 03-20-2013 02:16 AM by pezer.) Post: #3
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RE: How healthful is your reality?
Considering the long while man has actually already been around for, we may even consider that the valuation of man as the pinnacle, the edge, the avant-garde of the universe was a manly creation itself, perhaps in that sense that only philosophers understand as creation, an evolutionary creation from within; the fate that is may have been an event that is.
We are the pinnacle because we are the pinnacle.
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03-20-2013, 07:58 AM Post: #4
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RE: How healthful is your reality?
Welcome to the lodge.
" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "
- Thucydides
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PostSubject: Re: Natural World Ashes Thu Aug 01, 2013 12:48 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Black Mirror
A short mini-series from a UK film-maker.
It is rare to see such raw objectivity, such a direct and unmitigated look at ourselves…
Episode 1
dropbox.com/s/gxfjxp9q6d42ev…-bia.mkv?m
Episode 2
dropbox.com/s/xf7q0jqmig8nqt…-tla.mkv?m
Episode 3
dropbox.com/s/bdi4a9uvww48x8…-tla.mkv?m
If you can’t get these to play, download Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition
and they should work, mpc-hc.org.
(I don’t know how long these episodes will be up hosted on this site, BTW).
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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03-11-2013, 03:35 PM (This post was last modified: 03-11-2013 04:05 PM by JSS.) Post: #2
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RE: Black Mirror
Seems like typical social engineering psycho-filmage to me.
The “raw objectivity” aspect is to open your will to the embedded suggestions.
They usually use violence, sex, anything heart wrenching or terrifying in order to open the door.
But anything that strongly gets your attention works.
It is an example of your values being set by others without your knowledge.
It has been going on under your nose for the last 35 years or so.
- Pathetic white male who can’t protect his women.
- Black male fucks his women
- Futile life of the white man
and if they run more… - Angry superwoman frees herself from oppression of the white men
- Gay white men.