February 2012
79 posts
fleursdansmescheveux replied to your post: Evil and Shadows
You might like this: youtube.com/watch?v…
Thank you! That was fascinating and inspirational, even though he looked like he was about to break down or collapse through most of it. Then again, that kinda just added to the force of his words. Everyone should watch this. It’s a talk by clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson on the...
Evil and Shadows
I wanted to return to the quote I posted below, where Satan defends himself to St. Matthew, asking him to picture a world without shadow: “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?”
There are a number of ways to take this. Shadow is, of course, only the absence of light and could not exist without light. In this sense it...
The Master and Margarita
‘What is this novel about?’
‘It is a novel about Pontius Pilate.’
‘Let me see it.’ Woland held out his hand, palm up.
‘Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, ‘because I have burned it in the stove.’
‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ‘that cannot be: manuscripts don’t...
I’ll wrap you in a cocoon of pretty words and wisdom, and make you, my little ball of potential poetry, fall in love with me. Because it’s probably easy to fall in love with someone who thinks of you as a pretty ideal. I cannot hold you forever, though, you pretty little dime, because soon enough I will get bored, and there will go our time.
— Lily’s ‘about me’ description...
“You uttered your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either....”
– Satan, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita
the-red-dahlia:
I’m really super-sick of self-aggrandising atheists who insist that religion is dumb and stupid and that people who believe in a deity are dumb and stupid and that all intelligent thinking people must be atheists otherwise they’re not intelligent and thinking. I’m super-sick of these people because I used to be one, and while religion has absolutely no place in public life or...
Summer’s virtually over now. It was a cold summer, but I hope it’s a warm winter to make up for it, because I absolutely hate the cold. It was a summer of acid trips and swimming in the river and hanging out with Cory and going for daily barefoot runs around the park and long walks clutching big volumes of Jung (of which I got another today). University starts in just under a week....
“Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes — never! A sudden question is put to you, you don’t even flinch, in one second you get hold of yourself and know what you must say to conceal the truth, and you speak quite convincingly, and not a wrinkle on your face moves, but — alas — the truth which the question stirs up from the bottom of your soul leaps momentarily into...
merelyliving:
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I...
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“When I saw you, my heart it quaked,
A tempest in my soul was waked,
“H-h-hi!”...”
– Gabriel is fantastic. (via odettenoire)
Ashley asked me to write a poem with an allusion to a natural disaster in each line.
In general the right hemisphere of my brain monopolises all of the brainpower (you know those little animations of the twirling dancer? I don’t know how scientific that is but I have never seen it spin the other way). Anyway, I absolutely cannot deal with numbers so decided to see if I can, I don’t know, forcibly strengthen the left hemisphere by re-teaching myself basic math…...
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“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous,...”
– Yann Martel, Life of Pi
“We are starstuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”
– Carl Sagan
maxistentialist:
Since 1969, Daniel Dennett has turned philosophers’ names into usable words in the Philosophical Lexicon. Some of my favorites:
buber, v. To struggle in a morass of one’s own making. “After I defined the self as a relation that relates to itself relatingly, I bubered around for three pages.” Hence buber, n. one who bubers. “When my mistake was pointed out to me, I felt like a...
soulcannibal:
Do you ever get dream flashbacks? Like now and then I’ll see part of a dreamscape from a really old dream and then I just want to be back there. It’s probably cause I’m tired but I kind of just want to curl up into a ball and sleep for a really long time and just exist in my dream worlds and nowhere else.
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virtue
robotlion:
my earthly conscience never pulls as hard as your hands on my hipbones backward doubt only weighs down fools who fetter their feet to brimstones
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Synchronicity
With his essay Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle I’ve just finished my current volume of Carl Jung’s collected works. Synchronicity is a ‘meaningful coincidence’ between inner and outer events, a ‘relativisation of space and time’ so that spatially and temporally distant events become apparent to the individual, and a bypassing of causality to...
Tonight I went to a huge outdoor screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Richard O’Brien the creator/Riff Raff was at it because he grew up here and I danced the Time Warp and people threw things in the air and shouted lines at the screen and my friend in drag pretty much asked O’Brien out and it was a really awesome night :)
Monsieur de Fortgibu and the plum-pudding
A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orléans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity....
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vondell-swain:
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Master Post
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.
Episode 1: Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
Dr. Carl Sagan goes...
Anonymous asked: could be interesting.
Anonymous asked: Interesting, pretentious, well-read.
Anonymous asked: Dark, Bright, Infinite. (I'm boring. :P)
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Anonymously describe me in three words.
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peter pan
strangersinyourhead:
He’s selling a group of teenagers on Tuesday and he needs to pick which ones they should bother marketing as sex slaves and which ones they should just murder.
It’s a shitty day, though, and Pete wants to murder everyone.
So maybe he’s not exactly…impartial, today.
Impartial?
Not really.
No.
“She’s fat. I don’t like her.”
“Sir, she’s a size two.”
“So what? Two is like ten...
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The ego is a complex that does not comprise the total human being; it has forgotten infinitely more than it knows. It has heard and seen an infinite amount of which it has never become conscious. There are thoughts that spring up beyond the range of consciousness, fully formed and complete, and it knows nothing of them. What the ego comprehends is perhaps the smallest part of what a complete...
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Carl Jung: Explain this analogy made between the sexes, the death instinct.
Sabina: Professor Freud claims that the sexual drive arises from a simple urge towards pleasure. If he's right, the question is why is this urge so often successfully repressed?
Carl Jung: You used to have a theory involving the impulse towards destruction, self destruction. Losing oneself.
Sabina: Suppose we think of sexuality as futile, losing oneself as you say, but losing oneself in the other. In other words, destroying ones own individuality. Wouldn't the ego in self defense automatically resist the impulse?
Carl Jung: You mean for selfish not for social reasons?
Sabina: Yes. I'm saying that perhaps true sexuality demands the destruction of the ego.
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That quote I just reblogged reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years ago:
I used to love you with misapprehended poetical clichés.
I used to talk of anguished yearning, pure reverence, Beauty-in-itself… and you would laugh and blink and look away.
You spoke to me of friendship with lustful fingertips and smirking lips; and spoke to me of lust with vacant eyes and coldness.
...
lydianea:
What’s the most pressing challenge in approaching a love poem? Adrian Blevins: “[…] The problem with love poetry is that it must be felt and written by humans, who never feel one feeling at a time. I mean, love has fear in it. And guilt and misery and a special kind of hallucinating loneliness (says James Wright). The problem for the poet is how to get such a hodgepodge into one...
George R. Price, born 1922, was a population geneticist who came up with a mathematical theory explaining altruistic behaviour in organisms as the selfish drive to preserve their own genetic heritage. In 1970 he converted to Christianity after noticing bizarre coincidences in his life which eventually became overwhelming and proved, he believed, that there must be a God directing things. Disgusted...
On Tuesday I’ll be 23, which is a really weird idea because I don’t feel 23 at all. I still feel, I don’t know, 18 or something. A lot of my friends are younger than me and I kinda forget that here I am rocketing toward my middle twenties. Still, you keep on growing till you’re, what, 30-something? So I shouldn’t let the terror of ageing overwhelm me just yet…
“Life’s not a bitch, life is a beautiful woman. You only call her a bitch because...”
– Aesop Rock (via abreactions)
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I always have the same kind of dream involving a long peninsula — sometimes a series of linked islands — leading out to a beautiful, imposing mountain in the sea. I usually pass through a number of seaside towns and cities on the way. There’s always a great desire to climb the mountain and often a feeling I’ve been there before, almost a recognition of the previous dreams. I climb the...