The wildfires now surround Los Angles are uncontained. This from the update received several hours ago from the New York Times: Los Angeles is surrounded by fire. The city’s major wildfires have spread, and a new one started overnight in Hollywood Hills. It threatened a wealthy neighborhood and landmarks synonymous with America’s self-image —…
Evil was visible, opaque, localized… We have exorcised it, liberated it, liquidated it. But has it, for all that, ceased to be Evil? Not at all: it has become fluid, liquid, interstitial, viral. That is the transparence of Evil. It is not a transparency in the sense that you might see through it. It…
January 20th, inauguration day represents for me a frontier, a line of demarcation in time. Following that day I expect palpable change to swiftly be imposed upon the country. Efforts ongoing to erase the crimes committed by the president-elect are sure to proceed with enhanced efficiency to their revisionistic end. America is to be…
Perhaps I ought to let this go, pass on with nothing to say. And yet, the scene sketched here is cut diamond-like, an illustration of the paradox of our being. Homo sapiens is a troubled and a magnificent animal. I invite you to mindfully read, to consider… Love wishes to spare the other to…
Two weeks. Fourteen days remain and then Trump is inaugurated, his administration installed to pilot the ship-of-state, as per “the will of the people.” Elections and inauguration rituals are considered sacrosanct, a ‘gift of the gods’. The illusion is intentional. The desire of men long since dead was expressed in our Constitution. The institutions…
How many really individual actions are left undone merely because before performing them we perceive or suspect that they will be misunderstood! —those actions, for example, which have some intrinsic value, both in good and evil. The more highly an age or a nation values its individuals, therefore, and the more right and ascendancy…
Both within and beyondthe confines of historywe might imagine that we were listeningto a continual funeral oration: we have buried, and are still burying,all that we have loved best, our thoughts, and our hopes,receiving in exchange pride, gloria mundi—that is, the pomp of the graveside speech. It is thusthat everything is made good! Even…
Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions as truth, we should nevertheless not wish them alone to exist. I cannot see why we should ask for an autocracy and omnipotence of truth: it is sufficient for me to know that it is a great power. Truth, however, must meet with…
Gray and raining outside. Starbucks is momentarily, unnaturally quiet, only the two of us minding our screens and our thoughts. Why so silent? Is this the edge? I mean the edge (never with a safety rail) of the abyss? Perhaps it’s extraordinary to know when one is proximate to the edge, a “hazard zone”…
The fundamental male fantasyof the womanis not her seductive appearance,but the idea,that the dazzling appearanceconcealssome imponderablemystery. -Jacques Lacan There is something tragic, simultaneously sad and delicious with respect to Lacan’s quote. How could this possibly be denied? The male – female dynamic-attraction is as old as Helen of Troy. Perhaps you remember Helen, according…
