We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s…
How many conversations have I overheard on the “golden rule”? You know the maxim which recommends that I demonstrate toward my fellowman/woman the same deference which I am wont to demonstrate toward myself. The consensus: everyone approves the rule of harmony, this prescription for universal peace-love-and-understanding. Simply keep the Golden Rule in mind, and…
We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is…
My quest for insight from Nietzsche continues. Today I began reading The Dawn of Day written in 1881. Beginning with The Dawn of Day Nietzsche’s ideas began to coalesce into a unified vision. As usual reading Nietzsche is like running full-out into the cold ocean surf. There is the shock of difference, the comfort…
Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68…
Rising from the evening’s rest I was in a surly frame of mind. I felt haunted by the spectre of college football. You know that fall season of televised spectacle where many millions of dollars are marshaled to fill magnificent stadiums with students, alumni arrayed in team apparel, some with painted faces, immersed in…
Friday, the sky is overcast. Perhaps we shall see showers, remnants of Helene, the cat 4 hurricane that bisected the Florida panhandle. I must confess schadenfreunde, perverse pleasure at the dread of the climate-warming-denying Florida administration. Nature is dispassionate, reciprocating according to the effect of a consumption based, hydrocarbon ravenous culture which increases the…
Wednesday is the pivot point of this week. Waking this morning I felt disoriented. Before waking, the body just ‘knows’ time in a way that a clock cannot. I surfaced to wakefulness through a sticky, surreal, dreamy vision. Did I see it or did I feel it? Both… Almost 9AM now and I continue…
So this is where we are! Nothing to do, nothing but to recognize and embrace what is before us. What we had established, our words steadfast-in-print on paper, at one time attractive, compelling, emulated around the world… (I remember a story by a professor teaching a course in American business practices, recounting that we…
A friend read the ‘hidden god’ quotation of yesterday. He responded by text that he wanted to think more about the quotation. We plan to talk by phone this afternoon. Nietzsche reveals in subsequent lines that he is referring to Dionysus, the god of reverie, of wine, of inadvertent discovery. The thought of such…
