A monk said to Joshu” What is the way?” Joshu replied: “Outside the fence.” The monk insisted: “I mean the Great Way? What is the Great Way?” Joshu replied: “The Great Way is that which leads to the Capital.” The philosophy group gathered for a social evening last night. They came over to our…
No one gets through their allotted span without a major off-script event. Something, somewhere, will go catastrophically wrong. Not potentially, or incidentally, but necessarily, because of the structure of human existence and of our appalling exposure to error, accident, madness and illness. Someone very important to us will die long before they should, in…
The old idiot wanted the truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought– in other words, to create. The old idiot wanted to be accountable only to reason. The new idiot, closer to Job than to Socrates wants account to be taken of “every victim of…
I have been thinking about the recent talk of atomic weapons that has become prominent in the ebb and flow of the news. The leader of North Korea has initiated a series of atomic tests culminating in a claim to now have a fusion weapon, a hydrogen bomb. To sharpen the point, long range…
The more massive a movement is, the more doctored and manipulated. The more it tends to be a mass lie, a front…… Genuine dissent must always keep a human measure. It must be free and spontaneous. The slighter gestures are often the more significant, because they are unpremeditated and they cannot be doctored beforehand…
I was awakened by the rain drumming on the roof at 4 AM. My consciousness returned to the same sound years ago in Karuizawa Japan. We were there for our honeymoon. It was spring, the onset of rainy season and it rained off and on the entire week of our visit to the mountain…
I was reminded of how iconic the pumpkin has become of the fall season. Pumpkins are carved by children for Halloween jack o lanterns. The carvings are displayed by proud parents as decorations on the front porch. At the thanksgiving feast pumpkin is the main ingredient of a delicately spiced pie. I passed an…
Cannot help but think about aging. One must experience before one begins to know. I do not think that the failing of powers that come with the fading of youth would be intelligible if one were told ahead of time what is in store. How could one imagine the slow failure of eyesight, or…
“This is some weird shit…..” is a statement coming out of the recesses of memory so far back that I doubt if I will ever remember who said it or what was being spoken of. It has a “hippie” texture, something coming from the era of “free” love, –“tune in, turn on, and drop…
The authorities yet search for pathology, something to isolate as a cause of the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas. Surely something caused this individual to step out of the matrix of time and place to impersonally wreak chaos upon the attendees of a country music festival. He orchestrated his own Ragnarök*. His…
