Tesseract

Start with the end

The final answer sounds a lot like the first.  The universe could not bear non-existence so it caved in and a bright burst of light hurtled itself into nothing into an endless sky.  A trillion points of light converged on the perspective of an empty wet planet. At the end of the line matter became mind, and mind became matter.

Let us dance

Before an invisible crowd of angels
Let us dance upon our devils
Let our lips tremble with unspeakable poetry
Let our limbs grapple with an enemy made of earth
Let our breaths attack all the bad air

The void

The void is a plane of light, behold, just open your eyes!

Quilt

My lady sleeps in a thin quilt and waits for me.
She dreams the day away behind her
As patches unsew from patches,
As landscapes scatter in squares to spaces,
As strings unwind
She waits naked and undisgraced.

One step up

Above the clouds we could spend some time together unpretentiously.

Alas

Earthen wares surround you and you feel them radiate.
You hear a dull tone ringing and it reminds you of a bell
On a bus you took across a foreign town.
With your ears wrapping around foreign tongues
With your hands clapping coast to coast,
Continent to continent -
Without a tug but a twist -
The hips bore the succulent fruit
Out from the rain and seasons
After the nights and mornings
The dew that drips to the dirt
Will nourish a seed
Next to the spot where the legs of a ladybug
Dimple a puddle of teardops
And your nose crinkles,
You smell a rose, a vine, a tree, an orchard
A landscape dotted with oases and festivals -
A castle laughing a bedrock stone,
An ocean swallowing up a sea,
An eagle flying backwards,
A world laughing at everything like me.

But I, I found an eye as big as the sky!
I found a microscope to see the moment before our future.
I found a telescope to trace our past.
I put a stethoscope to my heart,
I heard a beat that could not last.

Strike

The heartbeat is a text in an everlasting language.

Every anastolic valley and every diastolic comet,

Every analogic dream, every waking slavery,

Encircling from a red debt beat.

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty - Slow Tuesday Night

A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

Maxwell Mouser sent the work out to publishers, and received it back each time in about three minutes. An analysis of it and reason for rejection were always given—mostly that the thing had been done before and better. Maxwell received it back ten times in thirty minutes, and was discouraged. Then there was a break.

Ladion’s work had become a hit within the last ten minutes, and it was now recognized that Mouser’s monograph was both an answer and a supplement to it. It was accepted and published in less than a minute after this break. The reviews of the first five minutes were cautious ones; then real enthusiasm was shown. This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night. There were those who said it might be one of the enduring works and even have a holdover appeal to the Dawners the next morning.

Berthold Bartosch - The Idea (1932)

Translation of introduction:

Men live and die for an idea
but the idea is immortal. 

One can pursue it,

One can judge it,

One can forbid it, 

One can condemn it to death,

but the idea still lives in the spirit of men.

 

It is everywhere that exist

misery and struggle side by side.

 

It rises up now here, now there, 

It pursues its path through the ages.

 

Injustice trembles before it.

 

To the oppressed it shows 

the way to a better future.

 

He who is penetrated by it 

no longer feels alone.

 

For above all is the idea.

Keep your eyes to the crisis

And/or

Bide your time.

Mount Kimbie - Made to Stray

Shadows turn to grey
A slave today
He cowered beyond reckless tracks of impulse
Made to stray around rough coasts
When grace is close to home 

Arthur Rimbaud - To a Reason

A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.
     A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.
     You look away: the new love!
     You look back—the new love!
     “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing to you. “Build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes,” they beg you.
     Arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere.

Kierkegaard - Prefaces

"I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity."

Anne Sexton - The Truth the Dead Know

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June.  I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape.  I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch.  In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.  No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes
in the stone boats.  They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Bertolt Brecht - A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with the names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
The city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the sea rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Philip of Spain wept as his fleet
Was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years’ War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory.
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Letter to Clara Rilke, April 8, 1907

"...everything is blooming most recklessly; were it voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

Wystan Hugh Auden - September 1, 1939

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Mountain Range

A Heart Upon EP

How it Happened

By my Olympian acrobat, your steely reserve beneath steely sea eyes, my delicate nerve, unwinding your DNA over a lifetime - across a synapse as wide as the ocean - across time and a continent leapt into an immortal dialectic - between gravity and grace, in the inevitability of continent sliding under continent and the avoidability of eternal ruts and thus, where the damn thing snaps, where the shadow hides behind a shadow and the light gives way to the light - when the light-bearing load crosses under a continent and tugs.

When the damn thing snaps, when the creature is removed, given over to earth and heaven, when the boson splits and space disperses, when the gynmnastic tactics which you've set yourself to in defense of my happiness prevail and the heat of your core sends a flare, then the little continent splits and sighs, the bridge over which eternity sighs snaps.

As ghosts of soldiers and scientists
With answers and folded up lottery tickets
Rush to fill the gaps in our knowledge and doubts,
I stroll past the sight and thank God at the thought of you.

Dr. King - Where do we go from here?

"Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the 'will to power,' to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche's philosophy of the 'will to power' in the name of the Christian idea of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

Eduardo Galeano - The Nobodies

"Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

Happy Easter

Filippo Ciavoli Cortelli, Bivio, 150 x 100, 2011

Letter to U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Good day and peace to you. The Catholic Church has a golden opportunity today to offer auspices to advocates of social and economic justice in San Francisco. They have taken the initiative to set up a community center at a church-owned building which has otherwise gone vacant for the last 5 years. They are youthful and did not follow the typical protocol, but their cause is just, and the law was made for man, not man for the law, as Christ has taught us. The Church has every right, rationale, and capacity to take a courageous and historic stand in solidarity with these brothers and sisters, who embody the growing movement worldwide for social and economic justice for all.  

Please, in the name of St. Francis and all who have taken the risk of faith, please confer today with the bishops of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the Public Policy Director George Wesolek to discuss the promises of this opportunity. Please perceive the wisdom of offering mercy, sanctuary, and hospitality to these brothers and sisters who want to help the poor and weak of the world.

Thank you for the holy work you do for the people of the planet and the cause of Christ; please extend it here where it is needed today.

Aldous Huxley - Island

"The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.

"'Karuna. Karuna.' And a semitone lower, 'Attention.'"

 

Jane Kenyon - Happiness

 

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

 

(Hat tip to the great and kind Nico Carbellano.)

Patient Healer

 

Kierkegaard - Concluding Unscientific Postscript

"If one who lives in the midst of Christendom goes up to the house of God, the house of the true God, with the true conception of God in his knowledge, and prays, but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous community prays with the entire passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest upon the image of an idol: where is the most truth? The one prays in truth to God though he worships an idol; the other prays falsely to the true God, and hence worships in fact an idol."

p. 201, as Johannes Climacus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Youth Peace Conference 1932

 

"No good at all can come from acting before the world and oneself as though we knew the truth when in reality we do not. The truth is too important for that, and it would be a betrayal of the truth if the church were to hide itself behind resolutions and pious so-called Christian principles when it is called to look the truth in the face, once and for all, and confess its guilt and ignorance. Indeed, such resolutions can have nothing complete, nothing clear about them, unless the whole Christian truth, as the church knows it or confesses that it does not know it, stands behind them. Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very much unqualified. That means protest against any form of the church which does not honor the question of truth above all things."

Why do they call it ergonomics?

"Ergo" as in "You have a body, therefore, sit and stand and walk like you do"?

The bodiless super-sentient beings who'll overcome us in the not-too-distant future will erase any record of my illustrious existence for having so much as suggested such a counter-revolutionary idea – and for not checking Wikipedia first.

The status quo is an active force

To stand athwart history takes strength, devotion to a dying cause takes fortitude, the cleanliness to wash your hands and the radiance to sustain the dream - the status quo is locked in battle with a moving and evolving enemy. The moving and evolving enemy is caught in battle with a statue - the angels cry wet, oily tears.

The self is shifting

The only cause that can inspire consistent devotion is one beyond oneself.

Cold Dust

VS Pritchett - The Myth Makers

We live beyond any tale we happen to enact.

Hyperspace

An Outburst of Maternal Instinct

Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds

Marge Piercy - To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Great Quotes from Great Women

"Light tomorrow with today."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life."
Sophia Lauren

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present."
Simone Weil

"The day will come when man will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race."
Susan B. Anthony

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."
Anna Freud

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
Virginia Woolf

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
Helen Keller

"To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best."
Margaret Thatcher

"We can do no great things - only small things with great love."
Mother Teresa

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."
Agatha Christie

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
Marie Curie

"The battle to keep up appearances unnecessarily, the mask - whatever name you give creeping perfectionism - robs us of our energies."
Robin Worthington

"Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction."
Anne Frank

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."
Dolly Parton

"New links must be forged as old ones rust."
Jane Howard

"I don't know that there are any short cuts to doing a good job."
Sandra Day O'Connor

"Careful grooming may take 20 years off a woman's age, but you can't fool a flight of stairs."
Marlene Dietrich

"Art is not the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste."
Nikki Giovanni

"A man's home may seem his castle on the outside; inside it's more often his nursery."
Claire Booth Luce

"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by loving."
Anais Nin

"Women and elephants never forget."
Dorothy Parker

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
Twyla Tharp

"If it makes my body so cold no fire can warm me, I know it is poetry."
Emily Dickinson

"The freer that women become, the freer men will be, because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved."
Louise Nevelson

"Labor: to feel with one's whole self the existence of the world. Love: to feel with one's whole self the existence of another being."
Simone Weil

Fernando Pessoa - Fragment

Master, placid are
All the hours
We lose,
If, in losing them,
Like in a vase,
We put flowers.

Allan Bloom - The Closing of the American Mind

Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics.

The longer you delay

The more you doubt

Women are earth and water

Men are fire and air.

Religion

When understanding fails, love.

Kierkegaard - Diapsalmata

Af alle latterlige Ting forekommer det mig at være det allerlatterligste at have travlt i Verden, at være en Mand, der er rask til sin Mad og rask til sin Gjerning. Naar jeg derfor seer en Flue i det afgjørende Øieblik sætte sig paa en saadan Forretningsmands Næse, eller han bliver overstænket af en Vogn, der i endnu større Hast kjører ham forbi, eller Knippelsbro gaaer op, eller der falder en Tagsteen ned og slaaer ham ihjel, da leer jeg af Hjertens Grund. Og hvo kunne vel bare sig for at lee? Hvad udrette de vel, disse travle Hastværkere? Gaaer det dem ikke som det gik hiin Kone, der i Befippelse over, at der var Ildløs i Huset, reddede Ildtangen? Hvad Mere redde de vel ud af Livets store Ildebrand?

Kierkegaard - Letter to Henriette Kierkegaard 1847

I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Kant - Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven

In the universal silence of nature and in the calm of the senses the immortal spirit’s hidden faculty of knowledge speaks an ineffa­ble language and gives us undeveloped concepts, which are indeed felt, but do not let themselves be described.

不將語黙對

In the Mumonkan, a monk asks Master Fuketsu "Both speech and silence transgress. How can we not do so?" Fuketsu replies "I always remember the spring in Konan, where the partridges sing. How fragrant the countless flowers!"

Barack Obama - January 20, 2009

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Abraham Lincoln c. August 1, 1858

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wallace Stevens - Of Mere Being






The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze distance. 




A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song. 




You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine. 




The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.