1977 is the year when Charlie Chaplin dies. The death of that man, in my perception, represents the end of the possibility of a gentle modernity, the end of the perception of time as a contradictory, controversial place where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement. Charlie Chaplin is the last…
The center cannot hold, and things have fallen apart, detached from their meaning. The revelation of the century is the devastating spiral of abstraction and nihilism; abstraction of work from activity, abstraction of goods from usefulness, abstraction of time from sensuousness. Abstraction has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic…
Reality is not mathematical, and mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life. Franco Berardi, excerpt from The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance
The following lines are taken from a Situationist website, a brief comment written in the aftermath of the Trump election. I offer these words for the truth they convey, not as an endorsement of the Situationist Revolutionary philosophy. The Situationist International was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals,…
Lately I’ve the privilege to witness the email exchange between two friends on the topic of The Second Amendment and gun ownership. The exchange has been passionate, and to my sense, contentious at times. Yet, the topic represents a nexus of the present state of our society since firearms are a prominent aspect of…
Friday is typically conceived as the end of the work week. The truth is, one’s work never ends. To be alive is to work. We make these conventional assumptions, arbitrary lines. They are illusory and evaporate under the pressure of reality. What we think is reality gets in the way of reality. So here…
Life is a matter of values. The thrust of one’s life is a matter of one’s aims. Purposes which one has chosen together, constitute the meaning of an individual’s life. Each has the opportunity to choose, to endorse the path that he or she takes. A few of the options offered by our post-industrial,…
Saturday is the beginning of the long weekend, culminating in Memorial Day on Monday. Memorial Day is set aside to remember our war dead. The last war to defend the country from attack was World War II. The others since have been “botique wars” conducted by politicians to assert our interests; Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,…
This morning I was delighted to locate on my shelf a text book from my college days. I was introduced to the words of the Tao te Ching from A Source Book In Chinese Philosophy by Wing-Tsit Chan. I’ve not opened the book in many years. Finding it was like receiving a phone call…
What a session last night at Starbucks. At least fifteen of us were seated around a table of a size to accommodate ten people. The room was echoing with voices, with the cacophony of the cappuccino machine used by the baristas. Nevertheless the group intently listened to chosen readings from the Tao te Ching. …
