Around my 5th birthday, and also around the time that I was about to go to school, my parents decided that they needed to find some religion for me and my sister.  I am not really sure why they waited so long to embark on this search.  Maybe it was because they were bouncing around so much and wanted to wait until they were somewhere stable to find a stable for our faith.  It could also be because they were not sufficiently satisfied with the promises of the education that my sister and I would receive.  I am speculating here, but I believe that my parents realized that even though I would be going to a “good school system”, my sister and I would not receive the kind of holistic education that would focus on developing our spiritual selves if they did not find a place of worship that would help us on that path.

My father was raised Presbyterian and my mother was raised Dutch-Reform, though neither hold any ties to those denominations to date.  In fact, there is a clear reaction against those denominations in their lives and they way they have been lived.  This reaction has caused no small amount of friction amongst members of my father’s family.  An early memory of mine is the palpable tension that existed between my parents and the more evangelical members of my father’s family.  From a very early age I could sense a difference, an otherness, which stood between my immediate family and my father’s family at large, though I did not have the developed intellect to understand the dogmatic, ideological, and theological differences that caused that general rift.

I guess rift is an important word in describing my religious and spiritual development.  There has always been an ebb and flow of pulling away and towards my religious self.  Sometimes I have pushed away from my religious self, only to find out that I was exploring my religious self through other avenues, despite my best efforts not to.  It is strange to think that I went into philosophy with the intention of fixing myself in what has become the world of the atheistic mind, only to find myself

Church filled many roles in my life.  Early on, it was a source of fun and community.  I saw the congregation as a place where my friends were and where I received an education before the populism of mass media convinced me that learning stood in opposition to fun.  This continued later on, although there were times when it became a burden that I wanted to cast off.  My desire to rebel against the church came at the same time as feelings of needing to rebel against the teachings of my parents.  I think this is a natural enough thing that happens in the lives of most adolescents with healthy, exploratory minds.  At a certain point, the teachings and guardianship of the parents becomes insufficient to the cause of the adolescent’s development and so they must push away for the sake of their own spiritual and intellectual development.

As evidence of this point, as soon as I moved away from my parents and the comfortable network that they had set up for my development, I began to take my spiritual and intellectual life into my own hands.  I wound up forging my own path through the world as soon as I started to rely on myself and not that which was given to me by others.  Of course, there were stops and starts in all of this.  I do not think that spiritual growth occurs in one unbroken chain. 

I see our soul as an amorphous object that expands and retracts, scouring the universe for its secrets and encountering obstacles which impede our ability to more clearly see the world that we live in.  Sometimes people become so surrounded by obstacles that they cannot escape, so long as they do not find a means of attaining the spiritual strength to break through those obstacles when it is not possible to go around them.  Many people do not escape and do not receive the privilege of clarity which comes from the development of their soul. 

These people exist in all walks of life.  Many of these obstacles are socio-economic.  People are easily penned in by their lack of wealth and the over-abundance of wealth.  I think their is something fundamentally challenging about the idea that “it is easier for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle”.  If we take this aphorism, derived from the New Testament (?), as a subject for intellectual meditation, we do discover a valuable truth.  So often, wealth clouds spiritual vision so thoroughly that those who have it in great abundance are unable to act ethically or happily and one thing that I learned and took to heart in my study of philosophy was the inescapable correlation and link between ethics and happiness.  While many have argued against such an idea, I consider it irrefutable. 

However, lack of wealth also stands in the way of ethical living and happiness.  There are many instances of praise and exoneration for living life without great wealth, but poverty is the cause of much spiritual and intellectual disease throughout the world. 

Spiritual Dogmatism… bla bla bla…

Events in the world and their contribution to my spiritual development.  War and fear, I guess.

Rolling into the snowy valley.  The steam was rising up off the river, casting a ghostly haze over the old mills and the sad little waterfall.  They’re turning the mills into tech buildings where 4 people do more in a day than a hundred and fifty used to do in a week.  It’s a brave new world.  That much is for sure.

The anxiety hangs heavily over me.  It’s strange how your body gets heavier when that feeling sets in; like your body is going to fall through the seat and down into the black earth.  Your stomach gets a steel sheet over it and you can’t get any air into it.  Your chest can fill up, but that’s not enough to really breathe.  You need to fill up your whole body with air and all you can do is fill your lungs.  You need that air to be light and move, but it just won’t come. 

This town isn’t always like this.  This feeling of dread is not familiar here.  It must not be here that it’s all coming from.  I must have brought it here from somewhere else.  Baggage, of course.  I try to shed it all and sometimes I feel like I’ve done a good job of it, but there is always something that crops up and weighs you down.  Maybe it makes you stronger or maybe it’s just a drag. 

comiques:

For anyone interested in prints of my comics, they are now available in my shop.

Everyone likes to know that they have that little secret on someone.  That secret that would undo everything that that person had built up about themselves.  Especially when they don’t like that person. 

Okay Chris, set the scene.  Just hashing it out, that’s all.  Don’t worry too much and it will all come out.  The four who fell are living desperate lives in the city.  They are happy enough.  Life proceeds normally.  They work, eat, sleep, drink, get drunk, hangover, have sex, fight, dance, run, bike, drive, walk, have it easy.  Then the fall happens.  Waterfalls spring out of the empire state building.  Vines clutch and strangle out the sun of Wall Street.  Concrete jungle ceases to be a metaphor.  Technology is defunct, so the race for the revolution is on.  The four join a competing group which is basically devoid of morality or direction; they are just a force and that is all.  Buildings are used as points for communication with outcropping squadrons in the hills.  Smoke, mirrors, even long range sound emanation are all used as discretely as possible but their communique is intercepted, they are found and the gang is roundly defeated.  Only the four survive.

They flee to the hills with the canned food that can fit in their packs, their dog Lila, a rifle with 600 rounds, bb gun, axe and saw, 2 tents, 6 knives, and 3 changes of clothes, including winter wear.  The first night in the hills, a bobcat attacks but is fended off by Lila.  While working through the canned food, they work on hunting, trapping, and building a shelter that they can live in during the fast approaching winter.  All of this is slow going.  The shelter is harder to build than expected and there seems to be little around to hunt.  Trapping is successful but does not bring in a sustainable amount of food.  It does, however, alow them to prolong the supply of canned food.  The shelter is completed and insulated using earth with weeds planted within.  They are all able to stay warm.  It is hard but spirits remain high, even through the winter during which they stay busy every day, making clothes out of pelts and developing more effective traps.  Hunting also becomes easier without leaves on trees. 

In the spring, a rock fall kills Boris.  They bury him next to the river.  They build an extensive water purification system which is able to run 24 hours a day, giving them virtually running water.  In July, they kill a bear using arrows that they had been fashioning and one shot from the rifle.  They are able to live off the meat for a long time.  They encounter the first group of people, who are starving, even though the hills are carrying their most abundant harvest of edibles and game.  The group had not been out of the city long and maybe were out for their first time.  They were unprepared and armed, causing a tense situation.  The rifle and Lila come in handy, though are not used.  The three who fell share some food and send the other group on their way with a few tips and enough food not to die for a week. 

Life proceeds normally for a year.  Some small agriculture is begun.  Otherwise the river simply flows on, and even the plants simply join in the flow.  There is no news from the former civilization until a second group, smaller and visibly more organized than the first one, makes contact.  They approach cautiously but affably, as both parties were clearly on guard.  Once contact was made, however, the feeling of threat fled the air and both sides got to conversing easily.  It is discovered that the new group had taken up a similar plan of leaving to the hills before things got too bad in the cities, but had instead taken to trails and the nomadic life.  They had however gotten quite adept at surviving and both sides shared ideas regarding what they had learned in their time in the wilderness.  The new group is invited and agrees to stay.  Another shelter is built and a new civilization is born.

The women fanned themselves and their children to the beat of the music while the men sat there stoically, sweating into their collars in the stuffy old church that had stood for so long.  Rather than feature sole crosses placed prominently in the center in such a way that would draw attention to one place, the walls of the church were literally covered in small crosses so that at no point could one’s gaize be torn away from the reason that they had congregated there on that day.

Such was the style of those old Puritan churches that had cropped up in these once desolate and forbidding places.  Now of course, much of that initial fear has left the place, but that former fear and the feeling that one must grasp tightly to the robes of the lord so as not to be swept away in his wrathe remain palpable in the late summer heat.

It’s amazing that an event so long forseen could come as such a shock once it comes to fruition.  After getting home from the longest day of arranging affairs at Lahey Rehabilitation Clinic, where his mother had spent the last 6 months of her life, Jason sat down at a table in the garage, surrounded by the evidence of the years of drinking that had occurred in the house; an enless number of ash trays from pubs and breweries, an unburst pinata from a drinking trip to mexico, a Carlsberg sponsored dart board, the couch that he slept on every New Years day after the party they threw at the house. 

Jason sat at that table and lit the first cigarette from the carton that she had left behind.  He smoked it slowly, deliberately and without reflection or contemplation.  When that cigarette came to the filter he lit another one and smoked it to the end.  Cigarette after cigarette, he sat there for three days.  On the dawn of the fourth day, the day of his mothers funeral, he smoked the last cigarette from the carton she had left behind.  He had not slept, eaten or drank.  It is a marvel that he himself did not die, but somehow he lived to show up, haggard and hollowed out by the previous week to sit in the front row as she was put below the ground.  Throughout all of it, he had not shed a single tear.  He would also never cry again, as long as would live.  It were as if his entire body had turned to sawdust on that day that she died.

peuoiseau:

(via deerdoedeer, nachetz)

nakatjp:

なでしこのアルゴリズム体操

There is a section in Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, which reminds me of a a moment which repeatedly recurred during my earlier youth. The recurring moment was that I would be driving home, late at night from my first girlfriends house.  She lived several towns over and the trip was a long enough one for my mind to wander hither and thither.  However, no matter how far my mind wandered it would always return to one particular fixation.  It was a sort of fantasy that I did not equate with anything sexual, but in hindsight it is possible. 

The fantasy was that I would be driving along, at the speed limit without violating any rules of the road when a police officer would pull out behind me and put on its blues.  I pull over, the cop gets out of his car, asks me for my license and registration.  I give it to him, he looks at it, smiles and gives it back.  Then he asks me what my favorite Beatles album is and we discuss our opinions on the subject.  It was a weird sort of day dream that even occasionally comes to me now when I’m driving late at night.  I don’t really know why we always talked about the Beatles but it was never any other group.  I’ve never even been the biggest Beatles fan but the fantasy is unchanging. 

Now the Kundera quote that I want to talk about in reference to this fantasy is as follows: 

….The only person who had ever really interrogated her was her husband , and that was because love is a constant interrogation.  In fact I don’t know a better definition of love.   (Which means no one loves us better than the police, my friend Hubl would object.  Absolutely.  Since every apex has its nadir, love has the prying eye of the police.  Sometimes people confuse the apex with the nadir, and I wouldn’t be surprised if lonely people secretly yearn to be taken in for cross-examination from time to time to give them somebody to talk to about their lives.) 

There is a certain embrace in the way that the police engage in their activities that i find at once unsettling and comforting.  It’s hardly even worth mentioning the way that we hate police officers when we are getting in trouble, but can’t thank them enough when they stop us from being robbed or something like that, but there is always this paradox in regard to the police.  They symbolize such a strange part of the psyche which makes us respond with great violence and great gratitude, often in close succession. 

Now, the fixation found its place in my mind long before I had ever read the passage, which I only bring up as an instance of the cool thing that is two people having such similar ideas without ever talking or coming into contact of any type

Recurrent freudian slips  during this piece, love/long, peace/piece,

I think I liked the person that I was after the breakup.  Running around every night, getting as drunk as possible off of 20 bucks and talking to every girl in sight, regardless of whether she was hot or not.  Then I would wind up in a park, drinking more or talking to a die-hard, lifer drinker at the bus stop until 4 in the morning.  I wrote more then.  I called people I hadn’t seen in months just to tell them how awful my life was when really I was reveling in the brilliance of my personal fire.  I saw more people then. 

Now, I’m happy, with a simple life.  Nothing is ever that hard, which is good, but I never go out now.  I guess I go out for dinner, but I miss the debauch and it’s joys and sorrows and endless twists and turns.  That’s all.  I like right now too and I like myself right now too.  It’s just different, that’s all. 

cursivebuildings:

The Boy Poet As Explorer

“Je vis assis, tel qu’un ange aux mains d’un barbier”

A black & white photograph from the 1880s shows Arthur Rimbaud on the terrace of the Hôtel Univers w/six others from his gun running & exploring days in modern Yemen & Ethiopia, according to Le Monde.

If true, this wisp of paper becomes only the fourth known photograph of the poet as an adult, & just the eighth image of the French writer at all.

Although a series of self portraits from Africa survive in a damaged state, this new find would be the first to clearly show Rimbaud’s adult face.

Le Monde reports that a pair of librarians found the old photograph among a stack of thirty at a flea market two years ago.

ps. I’ve always been partial to this 1875 portrait drawn by his friend E.Delahaye.

The night was a glass sculpture, formed out of the bitterness of the cold, biting, ruthless air that shatters your bones and tears yoursoul assunder.  It was a reflection of the longing, the yearning that laid on the tips of everyone’s tongue.  It was as if the cold brought the souls together, though it left them disoriented and splintered. The air was full of dying hopes and fleeting eyes, that spread around to infect us all with the contagious fate of possibility.  Possibility, that lonely place where certainty is cast aside and the denial of chance stands requisite beside the rapture of wonder.  Limbs were torn apart with the sonorous passivity of the pleasant lingering of a waking dream that keeps us on the pillow as we roll over and over in the defiance of physics.

Physics,  That is what brought us home.  But instead of the resistance that is a sworn contingency of the laws of nature, physics stood together with us and carried us along the luge that would innevitably lead us home.  For the most part the isolation of the possibility that lingered on the tongues of those who danced was carried en route.  The solitude of late night driving carries the allure and  romance of self and traveling among the other ghosts that drift through the night.  The same bitter wind that tore us to shreds now answers some unspoken call to form a river for us to ride.  A friend and a friend drifting along like Tom and Jim.  We glide across the lonesome Rio Grande, enshrouded in sheaths of ice, devoid of threat and malice. 

There is destination and there is the journey and they merge and Andre would cry, were it not for the joy (though perhaps as well because of the joy)  of being the sojourner; the one who carries the message of good faith to all who travel that road, alone and joyful.  The glass sculpture of rhythm looms over the hills and watches us as we go, reflecting the good in us that is sometimes so hard to see.  Ice and glass, the ivory tusks of the white elephant; that rare beast that brings the birth of the Buddha protects us.  We ride on a cloud through dark cirrus skies. 

It will snow soon and the wind will lose its fangs.  It is winter and life pulse through us, in defiance of that automaton hinderance that wakes us in the night.  There are calls that should not be answered.  Solitude.  We are pulled together like tiny particles, bouncing off of each other and missing our mark, but we still believe and hand over our fate to that wonderful God of possibility.  Ahh, it is such a sweet dream.  Give yourself up to it and you will find it all.  It is all there in that place of wonderment.  We can sleep well and conquer the world, so long as we give ourselves up for the sake of finding ourselves.     

If only Boston had been so beautiful that night…

(Source: madeof-angeldust, via ofporcelain)

dotherobot:

EVERY GIRL IS A RIOT GRRRL (by ampster)