Together as one

“Friendship is born as that moment when one person says to another, "what! You too? I thought I was the only one."- C. S. Lewis”

Did they beat the drums lowly?

Music in a Word, or vise versa

We have danced around the topic of music at many points in the past but never really explored it in full.  While I do not have the time to do so now, here is an interesting article about the ability of music to convey truth when words cannot and its role in ecumenical discussions.

No One But Myself

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Blood, sweat and tears

"So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I drifted into thought. Among other thoughts, I recall these. You are getting on in years, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything and without really undertaking anything. On the other hand, whenever you look in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of celebrities, the prized and highly acclaimed people, prominent or much discussed, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit humankind by making life easier and easier, some by railroads, others by omnibus and steamship, others by telegraph, others by easily understood surveys and brief publications about everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier and yet more and more meaningful--what are you doing?

At this point my introspection was interrupted because my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought crossed my mind: you must do something, but since with your limited capacities it will be impossible to to make anything easier that it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others have, take it upon myself to make something more difficult. The idea pleased me enormously; it also flattered me that for this effort I would be loved and respected, as much as anyone else, by the entire community. In other words, when all joined together to make everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, the danger that the easiness would become so great that it would become all too easy. So only one lack remains, even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehend it is my task to make difficulties everywhere. It was also especially striking to me that I might actually have my indolence to thank that this task became mine. Far from having found it, like Aladdin, by a stroke of good luck, I must assume that my indolence, by preventing me from opportunely proceeding to make things easy, has forced me into doing the only thing that remained."

--Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

I can dream a whole new world

"It wasn't those writers or artists who accurately recorded life: the special ones were the ones who drew it or wrote it so personally that, in some sense it seemed as if they were creating life, or creating the world and bringing it back to you. And once you'd seen it through their eyes you could never un-see it, not ever again."--Neil Gaiman

The Funny Tricks of Time

There are days when living in the world becomes difficult -- customary things slip through my mind and little tasks become a burden. My head seems completely out of it instead of it's usual capable self. Today was one of those. I continually forgot little details that made me have to do things over and slowed down my work immensely. I seemed to be floating in the present, so focused on the immediate that I had no perspective. Living in the moment can be enjoyable and freeing, but if taken to an extreme it removes us from the world, limits our interaction and our ability to function in the way that is expected of us. How much do we need to be in this world? How much should we bend to it's expectations?

Time is horizontal and our identities stretch through it. Both the past and the future affect the person we are and the way we are living in the present. Living with a conscious knowledge of them seems natural and approapriate to mankind. We cannot excape time. It is a necessary factor in human experience, human perception, human life. But we are not slaves to it. We must seek a balance - a way to live in which we function in time but are not controlled by it.

Thinking about the role time places in one's identity helps reveal how intrinsic it is to human nature. Monsignor Sokolowski, a Philosophy Professor specializing in Phenomenology said in a lecture he gave:

If I'm daydreaming about something I did yesterday, I am now doubled into the one who was doing what I did yesterday. My identity is not found primarily in my present self. It's found in between myself now and myself then. We have this duality within our own selves. We carry around our past and our future. We live not only in our immediate surroundings, but in the absence of the future and the past, and we see ourselves in that future and past. Indeed, sometimes the memory is so powerful and intrusive that it won't remain past. It becomes present constantly, and that's known as a kind of psychological difficulty. Overcoming that problem essentially involves distinguishing between one's present self and one's past self. And one's identity is the identity that occurs between those two.

Following another level of personal identity, we can sympathize with another person and yet know that the other person is always irreducible to us. Wouldn't it be scary to have someone else's memory come up inside of you? Isn't it odd how when we see somebody we haven't seen for 10 or 15 years that we think of them as somehow alien because we realize they have so many memories that we never shared with them?

The rest of the article is quite interesting and he provides a brief yet clear introduction to phenomenology. It can be found at http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/newsletter/1999/spring/sokolowski.htm

I'm Alive at Last

“ To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." --Oscar Wilde

Haunt the ground where it was I once tread

To live as I have done is surely absurd

In cheap hotels and furnished rooms

To walk up side streets and down back alleys

Talking to oneself

And screaming to the sky obscenities

That the arts is a rotten business indeed

That mediocrity and the rage of fashion rules

My poems and paintings piled on the floor

To be one with himself

A Saint

A Prince

To persevere

Through storms and hardons

Through dusk and dawns

To kick death in the ass

To be passed over like a bad penny

A midget

An Ant

A roach

A freak

A Hot Piece

An Outlaw

Raise your cup and drink my friend

Drink for those who walk alone in the night

To the crippled and the blind

To the lost and the damned

To the lone bird flying in the sky

Drink to wonder

Drink to me

Drink to pussy and dreams

Drink to madness and all the stars

I hear the birds singing

Jack Micheline, Poem To The Freaks

Story of my life

When I get a little money, I buy books, and if there is any left, I buy food and clothes. ~ Erasmus