Another morning. A few days ago, a sixty-four year old guy mowed down over fifty and wounded many more after careful preparation. This took place in Las Vegas, our city of excess. Several undeclared wars, Iraq and Afghanistan continue to simmer, producing a daily quotient of dead and maimed. Additional conflagrations are verbally threatened,…
I was in North Carolina when the news broke on the music festival shooting in Las Vegas. I happened to check my phone news-feed late in the evening, and there it was. The text displayed a estimated number of casualties at the time. I clicked on the video/audio clip associated with the story. Immediately…
Today, the middle of the work week, the heat outside cools, it’s feeling a bit like Fall. Starbucks is a hubbub. Those present are regulars to my eye, parents, grandparents seated with children before the kids are off to school and the adults off to the days planned activities. The world is a collection…
The South, too, was an earthly paradise. Not of course at all times, for all its inhabitants. There were the slaves. Yet the South, before the War between the States, had this of paradise left to it: it had the wholeness that embraced white and black in an apparent unity, even though the relationship…
When a myth becomes a daydream it is judged, found wanting, and must be discarded. To cling to it when it has lost its creative function is to condemn oneself to mental illness. I do not say we must learn to live without myths (such an idea is dangerous self-deception: it is itself a…
But this memory is the glue that keeps the universe as one: although immaterial it makes being possible, it is being. If an idea did not remember to think it wouldn’t be. If a chair wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. If I didn’t remember that I am, I won’t be. We can also…
We leave for wherever history takes us. Preceded. Followed. –Etel Adnan, Night I watched a program on the discovery of the wreck of the USS Indianapolis last night. A team of scientists funded by Paul Allen found the Indianapolis on the bottom of the Philippine Sea lying at a dept of 18,000 feet. The…
The wedding of history with the coffee we drink in our ever shrinking days awakes our need to reinvent love. Another morning, of the many that I have been lucky to enjoy in my sixty eight years. Fall comes, the sun shines brightly, and the slight chill promises a comfortable day. I confess that…
A good discussion last night on the topic of “violence.” I continue to mull over the concluding idea of the evening,–a reversal of the common place notion of “the good.” Here is a quote from Zizek, “According to the traditional ideological commonplace, immortality is linked to the good and mortality to evil: what makes…
Exile. That is what I feel this morning. Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, and already there is a autumn chill in the air. Too soon, too early to anticipate the frost. I feel wrecked by life, by the chain of events that have led me, led us to this point. We have a…
