Yesterday evening I was guest at a birthday celebration for our grandson. Family members gathered to express our joy on the occasion of his turning 7 years old. The event was glorious. Of course gifts were given, enough toys to afford hours of pleasure and learning. Thoughtful aunts gave him clothes too. Our family…
Transparency. Sounds innocuous enough, even desirable. Who does not wish to have daily life smoothed out, obstacles and bottle necks which make realizing our objectives, especially those involved in getting what we need from relationships, — removed? Transparency is a good idea is it not? Transparency is a watchword, a conceptual key to the…
It is the very mind itself that leads the mind astray, –of the mind do not be mindless. –Takuan Sōhō Voltaire once said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” — the perfect is enemy of the good. A few of us, together around a table at Barnes & Noble last night, and several more…
Like practitioners of the Baroque,we too are irrepressible creators of images,but secretly we are iconoclasts -not in the sense that we destroy images,but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of imagesin which there is nothing to see.Present-day images – be they video images, paintings,products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized…
When things, signs or actions are forced from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins, and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. The paradoxical fact is…
Since the world is on a delusional course,we must adopt a delusional standpointtowards the world. Better to die from extremesthan starting from the extremes. Excerpt, The Transparency of Evil – After The Orgy by Jean Baudrillard Properly speakingthere is now no law of value,merely a sort of epidemic of value,a sort of general metastasis…
Should I be a Buddhist? I ask the question from time to time. I have two statues of Buddha within the landscaping of our backyard. I am drawn to the physical statuary: a representation of a life Buddha lived, the Indian Prince who rejected the luxurious life which being well born would have afforded. …
III – We have all had a taste for the West’s disease: Art, Love, Religion, War – We know too much about them all to believe in them now; then too, so many centuries have worn them down… The epoch of the finite in plenitude is past; the substance of poems? Exhausted. — To…
Our last evening at a Holiday Inn. The straight lines, white surfaces and turquoise of Holiday Inn decor palate have become familiar. We laughed yesterday after checking into our room here at Lexington Kentucky. The bathroom was adequately spacious, the white sink countertop and the backlit big mirror similar to the other four or…
A society of consumption and leisure is characterized by a particular temporality. Surplus time, which is the result of a massive increase in productivity, is filled with events and experiences that are fleeting and short-lived. As nothing binds time in a lasting fashion, the impression is created that time is passing very quickly, or…
