The most contemptible thing

The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them. The delivery boy who dozes against the lamppost in between deliveries is thinking about something in his darkened mind. I know what he's thinking about: the very same things into which I plummet, between one and another ledger entry, in the summer tedium of the stock-still office.

-Bernardo Soares

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected...

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.

"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant – pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more."

"In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other."

 

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true – even must be true.

"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"

"No. How could I? But if it can only be true – "

"It is true."

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, "But – but – we have seen that future life  seen it in its actuality, and so – "

  

"It was a vision  it had no existence."

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision? – a vi – "

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God  man  the world  the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars – a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space – and you!"

  

"I!"

"And you are not you  you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream -- your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me....

"I am perishing already  I am failing  I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever – for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago  centuries, ages, eons, ago! – for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane – like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell – mouths mercy and invented hell – mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks -- in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream  a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought – a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

Honour is a gift a man gives himself

Father, will McGregors ever be kings again?

All men with honour are kings, but not all kings have honour.

What is honour?

Honour is what no man can give you and none can take away. Honour is a gift man gives himself.

Do women have it?

Women are the heart of honour, and we cherish and protect it in them. You must never mistreat a woman or malign a man, nor stand by and see another do so.

How do you know if you have it?

Never worry on the getting of it. It grows in you and speaks to you. All you need do is listen.

-Raibeart Ruadh MacGregor

Homer in the moonlight

Since I have nothing to do and nothing to think about doing, I'm going to describe my ideal on this sheet of paper -

The sensibility of Mallarme in the style of Vieira; to dream like Verlaine in the body of Horace; to be Homer in the moonlight.

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

All these ideals, possible or impossible, now end. Now I face reality, which isn't even the sales assistant (whom I don't see), only his hand, the absurd tentacle of a soul with a family and a fate, and it twists like a spider without a web putting back tins of polish in the window.

And one of the tins fell, like the Fate of us all.

- Bernardo Soares

What is Grass?

Nosce Te Ipsum

The old woman gives you a cookie and points to the cross-stiched sign that hangs above the kitchen door.

"It means, 'Know Thyself'", she says, drawing a cigarette from the pack she pulls from her apron pocket.

"The thing is," she pauses to strike a match, lighting her cigarette, inhaling slowly, "you never know, do you?". She exhales, the smoke casting a blue aura over the kitchen table at which she has seated herself heavily.

You blink, look away, out the open kitchen window. The sunlight casting slight shadows on the old sink and floor through the whisps of smoke. "Why am I here?"

"Ahh, yes well. If I told you that, you'd already know, wouldn't you?"

You look at her, a confused line crossing your face.

She leans back in her chair and looks up at you. "So why are you here?"

"I don't know. I don't remember. I was walking down the street, walking home. Then I opened the door and....I.....uh......."

"Go on, eat your cookie. Maybe it'll help."

"It's weird. I don't really remember getting here. Am I in the wrong place? Oh god, I'm sorry, I must have been completely lost in thought or something and wandered in, oh I'm so sorry. I should go..."

"No, no. Stay. It's alright. I like the company."

"But I'm not supposed to be here."

"Then where are you supposed to be?"

"I.....I.....can't seem to......", you look around, behind you through the kitchen door. It leads out into a living room. "I just can't seem to remem.......sorry I just....I"

"Hey there, don't worry about it. The only place to be right now is where you are, right now. And don't worry about that old sign, I just like the way it looks over the door there. Don't take it seriously."

"Who are you?"

"Well, that depends I suppose, on who you are."

You feel a bit dizzy, keep looking around, over your shoulder, out the window, back to the old woman smoking her cigarette at the kitchen table. "But I....I should be...."

"Look hon, don't worry about it. Why don't you sit down and eat your cookie. We'll talk awhile and get you all straightened out. I promise."

You look around again, then move to the chair opposite her, pull it out and sit, awkwardly.

"Go on, take a bite. I promise you'll like it, and by the time your done you'll feel right as rain."

You look at the cookie in your hand, raise it to your mouth, and take a bite.

Willy Wonka quotes poetry

One of my favorite lines comes from a nineteenth century poet named O'Shaughnessy. The poem is an Ode from O'Shaughnessy's Music and Moonlight. In the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder, Wonka quotes the first two lines.

 . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , .

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems

We, in the ages lying,

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself in our mirth;

And o'erthrew them with prophesying,

To the old of the new world's worth

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song's measure,

Can trample a kingdom down

Great hail! we cry to the comers

From the dazzling unknown shore;

Bring us hither your sun and your summers;

And renew our world as of yore;

You shall teach us your song's new numbers,

And things that we dreamed not before:

Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,

And a singer who sings no more

The Curse of the Modern Age

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. It is the curse of the modern age.

Nature, in her wisdom, had made us so that we could not look into our own eyes, at our own face. The only way to do so was to assume the properly humble position of stooping over to look at the reflection in a pond or stream. But now we have proven too clever for our own good. We live in the age of narcissism. Remember him? Narcissus? The cruel hero of Greek myth, renowned for his beauty, who upon falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water could not tear himself away, and so he sat, stooped over looking at himself until he became the flower that to this day bears his name.

In all this there is deeper meaning for us who stare at the modern mirror. I'm not talking about the mirror in your bathroom, I'm talking about the mirror you are looking at right now. Turn off your monitor and you will see the face of the future of humanity. Our eyes looking out to an endless sea of ourselves, we transcend the shackles of our physical selves and become avatars in the new frontier; the undiscovered country.

Beautiful, but so tragic.

The man who invented the mirror poisoned the human heart.

So turn off your ipod, get off the phone, and for God's sake tear yourself away from this accursed mirror! This...what is around you and in you right now, this very instant that you read this word.

You are sitting right smack in the middle of the beatific vision. THIS IS IT! You are in it, but most importantly you are the eye that sees it. So just enjoy it.

But if you still are not convinced, maybe Howard Beale can.

TURN IT OFF!!!

Pleasure, Pain, Help, and Harm

The question: can that which does not feel pleasure or pain, be helped or harmed?

Can you harm a rock? No Socrates.

Can you harm the wind? Certainly not, Socrates.

Can you harm the green slime on the shady side of the rock? I don't think so.

Can you harm the fungi that grow out of the slime? Seems wierd to think that you could.

How is the term 'harm' related to 'violence'? Is 'to harm' the same as 'to do violence to'?


Harm -

O.E. hearm "hurt, evil, grief, pain, insult," from P.Gmc. *kharmaz (cf. O.N. harmr, O.Fris. herm, Ger. harm "grief, sorrow, harm"). The verb is from O.E. hearmian "to hurt," and ousted O.E. skeþþan "scathe" in all but a few senses.

Violence

late 13c., "physical force used to inflict injury or damage," from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. violence, from L. violentia "vehemence, impetuosity," from violentus "vehement, forcible," probably related to violare (see violate). Weakened sense of "improper treatment" is attested from 1590s. Violent is attested from mid-14c.1 In M.E. the word also was applied in reference to heat, sunlight, smoke, etc., with the sense "having some quality so strongly as to produce a powerful effect."


Violate

1432, "to break" (an oath, etc.), from L. violatus (see violation). Sense of "ravish" is first recorded c.1440.

Violation

1432, from L. violationem (nom. violatio) "an injury, irreverence," from violatus, pp. of violare "to violate, treat with violence, outrage, dishonor," perhaps related to vis "violence, strength."


Hubris

1884, from Gk. hybris "wanton violence, insolence, outrage," originally "presumption toward the gods," of unknown origin.

Bite your palm

I'm up late, reading aand writing, study study study. I'm so close to the end I can almost taste it, I just wanna take a big bite of the freedom and satisfaction of a job...done. But the closer I get the more I feel like a little boy trying to bite his palm. You pull the fingers back with your free hand, try and expose the flesh in the center of your hand, gnashing of teeeth, all biting in thin thin air. The teeth never do sink in. Even when something is as close as your palm, you still might not be able to get at it. We can't have everything we see.

I'm going to stop now, stop writing this. I'm going to try again. I can almost taste it. So close...

The Blog of Doubt

I doubt, therefore nothing.

You know, I walk around a lot in this city. And a lot of the time things come to me on these walks. Sometimes I'm walking to the coffee shop downtown and suddenly I am struck with the perception of a pattern, an order in things that I was hitherto blind to. I'm not talking about transcendent universal truths here or anything as grandiose as all that. Just ideas, sometime big sometimes small. Like how the integration of centralized computer control in heavy traffic areas would not only speed everything up, it would take the wheel and the gas pedal away from YOU! or me for that matter, or that dick with the big truck. Let's face it, people are terrible drivers. I am, you are, he is and she is too. Bus drivers suck, truck drivers suck, minivan drivers suck, little cars suck, cube van drivers suck; YOU ALL SUCK!! WE ALL SUCK AT DRIVING!!!!!!

so for christsake, we've got to save ourselves from ourselves. We have the technology, we can make it better. You can still have your damn car, your trusty mule, but you have to have a device installed on it to drive in busy areas.

Anyway that's the kind of crap I start thinking about. Have you ever seen the movie 'Network'? Peter Finch plays a TV newscaster who becomes the mad prophet of the airwaves. its good, really good. Trust me. Finch has this monologue that keeps haunting me. He walks into the studio and sits down at the new desk in front of the camera, on the air in 3...2...1...

I don't have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad.

Watch it here.

and here.

and here too.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

-Wittgenstein

Sleepless...

It is late. Too late. much, much too late. 

my perfect time.

Us night owls are an odd bunch. I think my night owl nature might stem from my deeply ingrained tendency to procrastinate. I put off going to bed at night, and I put off getting up in the morning. Invariably this causes sleep deprivation, which, if pushed, can yield a somewhat hallucinatory state.

For an insomniac, everything is a hallucination. Nothing's quite real. There's something about the rhythm of sleeping, waking, sleeping, and waking, that gives one a sense of the linearity of TIME. When you don't sleep, the rhythm is lost. And soon, all sense of meaning of TIME is lost. The ancients thought in terms of cycles. The sun rises and sets. So does the moon. The tides go in and out. The seasons repeat in sequence.

Man sleeps. Wakes. Then sleeps again, then wakes again.

The state of mind, or rather the state of 'perception', induced by the onset of prolonged insomnia is similar to that induced by opiates. The hard edges of the world are softened. Everything...recedes. An uneasy euphoria settles like a grey mist, enveloping the world, blurring what once appeared to be clear cut boundaries between self and other, form and emptiness. The mind...slows.

The world becomes a dream where nothing is real and nothing matters, insofar as everything is real and everything matters. Paradoxes are commonplace and taken for granted. Contradiction infuses everything...no problems.

Then the second wind blows in. The body's desperate attempt to stay alive, to keep functioning by opening the adrenaline floodgates. 

But in TIME, The body declares war on the opiate. And at last,

we succumb.

and drift back into the ancient rhythm of movement between worlds. The world behind closed eyes, behind thought, behind perception. And then,

WAKE

Simplicity

A collection of links, a series of associations.

An ode to simplicity.

The art of good writing: simplicity, clarity, elegance " and stop. - Michael Williams, Review

Simplicity - William Zinsser

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

On Political Speech Writing - Phil Collins, BBC Arts and Ideas PodCast

This is one of the cardinal virtues of good writing. Simplicity. If you must speak, speak plainly.

The Magician's Son

This is the first story the Internet ever told me. I was 13 years old. That means I've been tooting around a copy in one format or another for 13 years. I've managed to save it all this time. It's not available online anymore, search for it and you don't find anything. Not a trace. I never met the author. Even the web server that hosted the original site is long gone. 13 years is a long time in internet years. It fascinates me that this is, in a sense, an internet 'relic'. I wonder if the internet is still around in 100 years if there will be 'digital archiologists' uncovering old data from the out time. I like to think of the story as an artifact, long since disappeared from the vast information sea, except tha I saved a copy. I loved this story, i still do. I hope you like it too. It's about MAGIC



The Magician's Son

A long time ago there lived a Great Magician. The Magician had a wonderful power that made absolutely everything full of love and beautiful to look upon. There was no such thing as pain or unhappiness in the Great Magician's realm.

At the Magician's side walked his son, whom he loved dearly. The boy was very beautiful and loved his father with all his heart. The Magician and his son did everything together, and there was nothing that they hid from one another. The son was in every way his father's equal -- except, of course, that he was the son and his father the father.

One day a strange and fascinating idea came to the mind of the Magician's son. He decided to make a special and wonderful gift for his father. It would be a surprise, and unlike any gift ever before given. To make the gift he would, of course, have to use his father's power, since his father's power was the only power there was anywhere. They'd always shared this power fully - yet for the making of his special gift, the boy thought he'd "borrow" a tiny corner of it, without his father's knowledge. This way the gift could be a surprise.

And so the gift was made - made in no more time than it took to think the thought of making it, which was no time at all since there was no such thing as time in those days.

And the gift? What exactly was this special thing the Great Magician's son made for him? Well, it was a feeling actually, a feeling the boy took upon himself to experience in his father's presence. The feeling was one of sadness, of hurt, of not having enough.

This was certainly a strange sort of gift for a loving son to give his father! No one had ever experienced such a feeling before, nor even heard of it. It was a thing entirely new - which I suppose was part of its appeal. But there was more to it than that. The boy had the idea that if his father saw him suffering, he would feel badly too, and want to comfort him with a special kind of love; he thought that if his father saw him in need of something, he would do his best to give it to him. In a way, this was indeed a wonderful idea for a gift. It was meant as a sort of game, you see. The boy would pretend he was hurting and in need and so on, and his father would go along with the make-believe and give him what he wanted.

But there turned out to be a serious problem with this gift. The problem was that the boy really wasn't hurting or in need. He was perfectly happy and had all there was to have. To make the gift be believable at all, he had to hide this truth from himself and really believe he was hurting and unhappy. This is where his father's power came in. For a stripped-down version of this power enabled him to see whatever he wanted to see and believe it real.

Well, this seemed sensible enough, but there was still a serious problem. For his father's power had never been intended to deny what really was and replace it with something else. Misused in this fashion, it simply plunged the boy into a magical dream. And although the dream allowed him to believe he was suffering and in need, it did nothing to change the reality of the world and his own actual happiness. He could go around all he liked believing he was miserable, but who else was going to believe it? Who else could even know about it, since the whole thing was just a dream? How could a dream be shared?

Still, the Great Magician was no fool. The moment his son's strange gift was offered, he knew something odd was going on. He could not see within the dream and know what was happening there, but he knew that something was and that it was making his son think himself unhappy. And though he would never think of forcing his son to wake up and quit believing his childish fantasies, he was hardly powerless. So what he did was this: At the very moment his son's gift was offered, he sent into the dream his love, a memory of himself and the world as they really were.

Instantly the son awoke, as was his father's intention.

Yet, in a tiny portion of the boy's mind, the dream lingered on. Although the decision to put aside the dream had been made, a fascination with it yet remained and had to run its course. Because within the dream itself the Magician's gift of love had not been accepted. Rather it had been seen as an insult, an illusion, a thing to be totally denied. For at the core of the dream was the boy's desire to please his father with a very special gift; and his father had not even acknowledged the gift, as far as he could tell - much less shown any appreciation for it. The fact that the Magician was unable to see any part of the gift, it being wholly a dream, never even occurred to the boy. How could the unreality of a dream be perceived from inside the dream itself?

So the son, seeing no sign of appreciation from his father, tried all the harder to shove the gift down his throat. He made the dream more and more solid and violent in an effort to have it be seen and accepted. This, of course, only made matters worse. Feeling himself betrayed by his father's denial of the wonderful gift, he became filled with anger and resentment. The Great Magician seemed now to haunt his son's dream as a cruel and terrible enemy, threatening awful punishment for his rebellion.

Trapped in the fabric of his own dream, the boy was terrified. Yet though he blamed his father for his fear, he feared even more to attack the Great Magician directly - though deep inside, in some obscure corner of his mind, he believed this to be exactly what he had already done by stealing his father's magic and falling into a dream. And deeper still, even more obscure and hidden, was the terrifying belief that he had somehow actually killed the Great Magician's real son and replaced him with a vile and evil impostor -- himself.

This was not a thought anyone would choose to look upon, however; so the boy buried his fear and guilt beneath a wall of rage. And he vented this rage by peopling his dream with others like himself, and conjuring up a world of things to have and want and fight over. From the figures of his dream he stole what he wanted, to meet the imagined needs unmet by his father. With some he joined in temporary friendship, with others he joined in battle. And through it all he imagined himself as special and different from all the rest. And he blamed them for the misery and guilt he now felt, saying that they in their greed were the cause, and not he. And more and more there dwelt, deep within his heart, a terrible feeling of aloneness; for he believed that all who existed were his enemy.

Such was the dream of the Great Magician's son. And horrible as it was, the boy cherished it passionately, claiming it a thing of beauty and wonder. For the world he had made was his world and not his father's, and in his mind it was a good one. True, it was a world filled with failure, cruelty, suffering and betrayal. But it also contained loftier things, like victory and all-consuming passions. And there was pleasure and gentleness, and love of a very special kind. These wonderful things could not be found in his father's world, but only in his own. His was a fine world, and a far more interesting one. He, the son, was as good a magician as his father ever was! For had he not made this wonderful world all on his own?

Well, no, not actually, since it was his father's borrowed power he had used to make it with.

All right, maybe he'd conveniently forgotten about that. But still, the original purpose of the world - the experience of pain and loss and imperfection - was his and his alone. The Great Magician could never have conceived of such things, much less brought them into being. The dream was his, and there was no way he was going to give it up! And anyway, the Magician hated him and would punish him terribly if he ever tried to go back. And the hatred was mutual, of course. For his wonderful gift - now twisted and altered beyond recognition, even by himself - remained unacknowledged, unappreciated, unloved. So screw the Old Man. Who needed him anyway?

Yet into this dream, at the very moment of its inception, the Great Magician had placed his own wonderful gift: the memory of love, and of the only world that could ever be real. And the gift had been instantly accepted, the decision to return home made. Yet because of his pride, his fear, his anger, his pain, the boy had to go about this return in his own special way. In the instant of its birth, the entire dream had been played out in every detail, like a complex design in a great tapestry. In that one instant, every step of his return was taken, its place unchangeable in the overall pattern.

But even though the boy's decision to set aside the dream had been made, and indeed the entire path to his awakening been walked through to the very end, still was he free to decide when he would recognize that this was so. He was free to replay the dream as often as he liked, savoring it, pondering it, hating it, loving it, pretending he didn't already know what was going to happen next. He invented a new and wondrous device to embody this reluctance to recognize the acceptance of his own decision to awaken. The device pushed away the inevitable moment of reconciliation and kept it separate from the reality of now; it put distance between the steps of his chosen path, making the way seem long and difficult. It was now easy to pretend the path lost or forgotten, or one not in agreement with his own true desire. He called this new invention "time", and calls it that to this day. For yes, the boy is dreaming still.

Yet is this reluctance, this unwillingness, balanced in his mind. It is balanced by the certainty of his eventual wakening, by the anticipation of the moment when he makes the final decision to renounce the dream and all its effects forever. The anticipation of this moment, a moment which has already occurred beyond time and apart from it, is the source of all the joy and peace he experiences while yet within the dream. For the dream itself contains neither peace nor joy, but only sensation, the thrill of victory, and the satisfaction of desire. Peace and joy must come from outside the dream -- from, in fact, the sure knowledge of the dream's final passing.

And so the son dreams on. . . .