If birth control were puppies
Entries Tagged as 'religion & philosophy'
Crackology
Let’s discuss the etymology of fascism. Fasces, to the Romans were a collection of sticks. The word means no more than bundle or sheaf but a particular bundle was relevant to their daily lives. The fasces were carried as a symbol of office by Roman bigwigs and when they walked through the streets or were carried on litters their bodyguards, called lictors, carried fasces to beat a path through the crowd. The city of Rome was supposedly disarmed by law so the fasces were not considered to be weapons except when the central stick in the bundle was a bronze ax. This symbolized MORE power, in effect the right to chop a lesser citizen into bits. The idea was that state power, as held in the fasces, was to be used coercively but lightly. At first. Stubborn resistors would be beaten. And beaten. And then beaten harder. Finally, reluctantly, sadly… the ax would be employed. [Read more →]
Piss Christs
A tsunami of outrage has swept the nation and the globe. Another crime has been catalogued, another provocation that threatens to stir benevolent goatherds to strike at jumbo jets, of which they are pastorally ignorant. We speak of the ritual desecrations committed by American troops as they relieved themselves on a pile of defenseless, deceased, Taleban jihadis. A cry goes up that piss has no place in war. Patton would disagree but we need no more to rubbish the assertion than to recall that those who think piss has no place in war likewise think blood can be excised from it. That scrum includes, among other bigwigs, a young candidate for President who thought “smart diplomacy” a sound replacement for smart bombs. I wonder whatever became of that guy? But we have no time for trivia as the wars, under whatever management, have continued at least through this morning. [Read more →]
Universe, mostly indifferent has special indifference for Bill Maher
Sports draws the traffic. On the talking box, on the intertubes, to the stadium and in chit-chat; sports is the universal solvent of unacquaintance and disunion. It’s a somewhat paradoxical effect given the habits of hockey fans and Olympic attendees to occasionally jeer or attack the other side but even the bitterest footie yob who would bite the ears off another ticketholder for wearing the wrong colors can find a kinship there while he could only blink in amazement at any suggestion that, hey, it’s just a game. Discouraging words like that are passing rare, as heresy deserves. Interest in a sport and adherence to one team or another cut across other demographic divides combining races, classes, those who do and do not wear glasses into a single SportsNation whose language is as loud as it is untranslatable. But the outside elements do intrude. Even a militant sports detractor like Yours Truly knows that there has scarcely been an event in forty years where some guy in the stands with a painted face and rain-fro wig hasn’t been waving an enigmatic sign; John 3:16. It is not too inscrutable. As the non-sportsman still knows who won the World Series, so even the most rabid secularist recalls or can find out that this is a citation to a verse in the King James Bible, (from recently refreshed memory) For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that he who believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. As a drunken Billy Graham might have put it, this is Christianity for Dummies, or those with busy schedules. Religiousity has been part of sports as it has been part of life all along. Chariot racers competed for the favors of Athena and Mars. The Aztecs played ball to decide who would be sacrificed, and who executed. Knute Rockne, whether in life or as depicted in that bastard child of two distractions; the sports movie, was a praying man, publicly so and so were his players, his staffers, his imitators and his fans. So no need to denounce Tebow as a usurper or opportunist since he has brought a quick, ritualized endzone bow into the previously dignified world of touchdown celebrations. [Read more →]
Sweeping your way to truth
My last column served up a modest proposal regarding the philosophy curriculum, suggesting that larval philosophers supplement logic with the experience of making meatloaf.
I’d like to continue in that vein with a further suggestion: That they try to arrange, from time to time, to fill in for the janitor.
I am not being frivolous. [Read more →]
The chocolate cake of negativity
We are living through some pretty dark times. The economy continues to be horrendous with the middle class going through the toughest challenges it’s ever had to face. To make matters worse, natural disasters are becoming more powerful and frequent than ever before, the uprisings in the Middle East are bringing unprecedented instability to the region, and if these “end of days” scenarios weren’t enough, the Maya, Nostradamus, and others all actually predicted the end of the world in 2012. It’s not like this is anything you haven’t heard on the media or from others dozens of times before. The funny thing? None of it’s true. Lately, we’ve been hearing and accepting dozens of statistics like these without question. It’s a sinfully delicious dessert the entire world seems to be stuffing themselves with: the chocolate cake of negativity. [Read more →]
Soup and philosophy
W. H. Auden says somewhere — I believe in one of the essays gathered in The Dyer’s Hand, which I do not happen to have at hand — that he preferred systems of irregular measurement. In other words, inches, yards, and ells to, say, the metric system.
I share that preference, principally because such irregular systems do not pretend to a precision that is in fact unattainable.
Consider the circle.
Myth in movies: The Mayans predicted the coming of Green Lantern
By now you have no doubt heard that according to astronomers and anthropologists, December 21, 2012 correlates to the “end” of the Mayan calendar. And, despite having repeatedly heard about this for many, many years now, it is also very probable that you still have no idea exactly what this means. The reason is because it’s very complicated. To even begin to understand it you need to look to the Mayan myths of the Sacred Tree and understand their incredibly complex Long Count calendar of tuns, k’atuns, and b’aktuns as well as their concepts of the Great Cycle, the Great Great Cycle, and cycles within cycles. You’d also need to understand astronomical occurrences involving the precession of the equinoxes and the conjunction of the sun at the intersection of the plane of the ecliptic and the Milky Way. You can do all that, or, you can simply read my interpretation of this summer’s Green Lantern movie, which shares the same message as the Mayan mythology. [Read more →]
Holding the line: Putting happiness before art
I’ve been writing this column for over a year now. The reason it is called “Artistic Unknowns” is because my original idea was to focus on the issues surrounding being an unknown artist, yet one who soldiers on in art despite obscurity — an artist like yours truly: busy in a professional and personal artistic context, despite the realities and responsibilities of living everyday life. Sure, the column has branched off into my opinions about the nature of art (some which have been well-received, some, not so much) but the recurring theme has always been folks like me — the busy, if publically unknown, artist. I’ve tried to “write what I know.” [Read more →]
Choosing Happiness.
Holy shit. Apparently, summer is over.
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been rather MIA from blogging during the past few months, although I assure you it’s not for lack of trying.
In fact, I just went through and browsed the many drafts that had been started — and left unfinished — trying to get an idea of what’s been going on/what my mindset’s been as I sit to write this prodigal son blog after months of silence.
And it seems all these drafts seem to center around a common theme, or at least a common emotion: melancholy. [Read more →]
Sure Enough to Kill Troy Davis
So, Troy Davis is dead.
Strapped to a gurney in Georgia’s death chamber, Troy Davis lifted his head and declared one last time that he did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail. Just a few feet away behind a glass window, MacPhail’s son and brother watched in silence.
And, despite his claim that he is innocent of a crime for which there is said to be no physical evidence, it seems the witnesses were enough to make it stick. The victim’s mother says:
[Davis has] been telling himself [he’s innocent] for 22 years. You know how it is, he can talk himself into anything (same source as above).
As anyone who reads my stuff with any regularity knows, I’m not a current events guy, except when current events raise larger philosophical questions about life. I can’t stay away from this one. [Read more →]
What Makes Us Stupid
This is not a question. It is the start of an answer. Simply a statement of the obvious made to reach beyond ‘what is the matter with us.’
The reason that we cannot easily overcome those things which make us stupid is that they are all qualities which might serve as well to make us happier, better, smarter, or more able. Importantly, they seldom involve rational choices. In some cases, never. They are all emotional in nature. They are the aspects of our individual being which combine to make us both unique and typically human. They are the source of everything we think of as good, and everything we believe to be bad. [Read more →]
We need techniques, not rules
This year marks the centenary of the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milowsz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980. To mark the event, Cynthia Haven of Stanford University has put together a collection of essays called An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. Contributors include Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, W.S. Merwin, and Robert Pinsky.
I’ve only just read Haven’s introduction, “From Devenir to Etre,” and one passage in particular has grabbed and held my attention. Ten years ago, Haven interviewed Milosz at his home in Berkeley, Calif., and asked him about être and devenir. His reply was evasive: “My goodness. A big problem.” [Read more →]
Hangin’ with the Chin, Pt. 1: Mysterious Ways
It was sometime in the second half of the 18th century that English poet and hymnist William Cowper suggested that “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” Over the ensuing centuries it has been used many, many times to explain many, many different situations that seem to defy explanation. Many of us have been faced with such a situation, and some of us have found Cowper’s advice to offer a satisfying explanation … it worked for me when I first met the Chin. [Read more →]
Memoirs of a Dervish- how one Englishman tried to become a Sufi saint in the 60s
Robert Irwin is an English writer who has written six amazing novels and numerous studies of different aspects of Islamic culture. He is also the Middle Eastern editor of the Times Literary Supplement and has been instrumental in shaping the list of the hyper literary and thoroughly esoteric publisher Dedalus. While still a student at Oxford in the 1960s he travelled to Algeria with the intention of becoming a Sufi saint, an experience he describes in his latest extraordinary book, Memoirs of a Dervish. Recently I interviewed this remarkable man, resulting in the email conversation which I reproduce for your reading pleasure below. [Read more →]
Harry, Larry, and me…
It seems to me, doesn’t it to you, that a lot of the public squabbles we incessantly hear of do not arise from mere differences of opinion but from a seemingly primal urge we humans have to tell other people what to do. It’s not enough to be secure in our own certainty. It’s not enough for us to tell other people how right we are and how wrong they are. It’s not even enough for us to simply tell others what to do. We have to tell them what to do and, if they don’t comply, try to force them to do what we say through state action or the courts. It’s a sickness, a human design flaw, I think. I’m not immune. Frankly, I’m writing this to tell people to stop telling other people what to do, which kind of defeats my purpose. But wouldn’t the world be a more peaceful place if we adopted a more ‘live and let live’ attitude; if we curtailed our pursuit of power over others through government fiat; if we were just more accepting of differences in lifestyles, values, and beliefs? [Read more →]
Daring to create anything
Somewhere in Sexus, the first installment of The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller writes that “imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything.” [Read more →]
My local mega-mosque
Georgetown is a small-ish town north of Austin located in a notoriously conservative county that – until recently – did not permit the sale of alcohol in restaurants. The judges there are very fond of inflicting harsh punishments on criminals; social life centers on the church, the golf club and the high school; the average age of residents is 45; and so on.
Anyway, I lived there for a few months after I first arrived in Texas and quickly started to lose my mind. After all, I had just spent 10 years living in Moscow, that mega city of beauty, evil and horror, and now, here I was in small-town America, in a place so perfect it shimmered like a mirage. The boredom was intense. Is this how I shall spend the rest of my life? I wondered, scarcely able to suppress my panic. [Read more →]
“The stories I tell”: Sharing one’s self with the universe
“And I wasn’t looking for heaven or Hell
Just someone to listen to stories I tell.”
~ Glen Phillips (Toad the Wet Sprocket)
My wife meditates and she does Yoga. I think it is pretty interesting stuff, but I haven’t tried either activity for myself. She is always telling me how good it feels to meditate and to have meditated. I believe it. But I think I already do that, with music. I wonder if artists of every kind aren’t doing their own kind of meditation, after all. [Read more →]
