Just when you think things are starting to shape up a little, Ireland goes and declares blasphemy illegal, and now “Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/01/irish-atheists-challenge-blasphemy-law
I have long appreciated Camus’ standpoint on theism:
“I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.” ~ Albert Camus
But then there’s the other side of this logic. Comedian, Stephen Fry says, “If you assume there’s no afterlife, you’ll likely have a fuller, more interesting life.”
Kali & Death (reposted from Maria Mango, folksinger)
Kali’s boon is won when man confronts or accepts her and the realities she dramatically conveys to him. The image of Kali, in a variety of ways, teaches man that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are not to be overcome or conquered by denying them or explaining them away. Pain and sorrow are woven into the texture of man’s life so thoroughly that to deny them is ultimately futile. For man to realize the fullness of his being, for man to exploit his potential as a human being, he must finally accept this dimension of existence. Kali’s boon is freedom, the freedom of the child to revel in the moment, and it is won only after confrontation or acceptance of death. To ignore death, to pretend that one is physically immortal, to pretend that one’s ego is the center of things, is to provoke Kali’s mocking laughter. To confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one’s mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of “adult” pretense, practicality, and rationality.
Download Maria Mango free mp3s!!
http://www.reverbnation.com/mariamango
It occurs to me that I am a preacher and so are you. Everyone is biased and we wear our bias/colors like plumage, some of us to bond us to a group out of defense or to better attack, which may still be some sort of defense.
On my pulpit, as an ex-patriot of the herd, I wear no colors in particular. Mine are a kaleidoscope of holograms reflecting the whole of creation, just what I can see from my vantage, this little spot here that I own, I own all that I survey, you included. In my ex-patriotism, I’m for no one in particular and everyone in general.
I just want to tell you, from my soapbox, that the sting you feel from the preacher man/woman on the corner is not from what is said or from accusing silence, but at the implication that you are not of the same ilk, that you, one or the other, are an alien object, not you both the integral subject. What stings you is the sense of disunion that comes from the absence of love.
Three quotes on love that illustrate my meaning:
“Love is not just looking at each other; it’s looking in the same direction.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.”
~Anais Nin
“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
~ Oscar Wilde
You can ignore the man on the corner but you can’t escape him in your heart. And you will never reach your enemy if you call him the enemy. You will never know his love if you tell yourself he is not capable or worthy of yours. Never love the lie that we, as individuals, are separate from the whole of creation and from each other, it has been proven untrue, not just in our hearts but by modern science! When I’m dead, I hope they put that on my tombstone so I can keep preaching love from the grave.
Cheers!
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf’s and lion’s howl
Raises from hell a human soul.
The wild deer, wand’ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus’d breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov’d by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.
The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.
He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.
The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgement draweth nigh.
He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The gnat that sings his summer’s song
Poison gets from slander’s tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy’s foot.
The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist’s jealousy.
The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags
Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;
This is caught by females bright,
And return’d to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.
The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.
The soldier, arm’d with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.
The poor man’s farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.
One mite wrung from the lab’rer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.
He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mock’d in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.
The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.
When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket’s cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.
The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.
The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
Dance before dead England’s hearse.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
~William Blake
by C.J.Sellers
Woman is a jar of untold jellybeans.
Who keeps a jar of jellybeans? Why?
Who wants a jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who knows the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who owns the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Answer: Just the woman. I say it oughtta be the law.
by C.J. Sellers
Willy blasts into the air in an iconic splash, escaping the bad men’s wrath faster than I could have plunged into its ocean depths. And to see this, I should thus feel suddenly more human?
Of course, the movie pushed all the right buttons, I wept, I laughed, I felt suspense but because I am who I am, in some ways, predetermined, I get the sense afterward, that of some things, the human is too curious and vainglorious for its to-some-irrelevant revelations. We are too proud of our “inherent” sentience and emotion. We give the animal a human name–”Willy” for the kids. But that’s just where it begins, this anthropomorphizing anything from God to black fish.
“Free Willy”, a play on “free will”.
The sick plea behind this movie is that our prey must have a human face before we spectators, can’t help ourselves but agree not to contain, hunt, kill it, or call it prey. By omission of threat, we are free to call it friend. That is “Free Willy”.
Where is the respect for Orca as it is? It is not cute. It carries its steely knives at the fore whereall it goes, rather than behind its back as us. That is not a human face. Why pretend? It offends my sense of otherness necessary to understand this world’s true wholeness in which human is a pestilence.
Skinner would ask, why do we hastily determine an animal can be “freed”? Is it due to apparent sentience? We are sentient. Are we free? Are you sure of that? Do we all agree? This has yet to be confirmed through logic or dogma, so in Willy’s defense toward the nature of default, mankind’s “free will” is simply a matter of opinion.
Roman men named Orcus a god of the underworld. Orca is a hunter of whales, yes, which is the largest of all living things but he’s as complex as our senator or Caesar in his domain. Yet we’d make him a kid’s pet? Rather predictable, yes? Does it help to understand the Orca any better to do this, or not just us as slavers, saps, and showmen?
Wittgenstein would say if I had an interpreter for a dog’s language, what would it matter? Just as, can I know what it is to know the dolphin’s life or the nature of its fate? We both breath air, may eat the same foods, both birth live kin, we are both gods and demons, but touch his skin and my repugnance tells–it is alien. I could press my lips against its flesh but would I as I’d kiss some random human being? Even if I felt disgust, this distaste is not the same from whale to human.
If I could lock Willy in a pen and feed him mammals or fish, “amazing” what good friends we’d become. We’d be more than. I’d be master of him but am I master if I then compulsively serve Mammon?
Am I comforted that the Orca eats the thing that would eat me? Therefore, we are friends? This is as the proverb goes and again, “It is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.”
Because I am not to his appetite’s affinity then I am not his enemy?
Because I don’t eat the mammals he eats therefore, we are friendly?
What does this “friendship” mean? What is this obsession of human’s to find meaning? Is it shared by him? If so, how can I know what it means to him and not just what it would mean to me if I were him? As if I could ever be.
If “Free Willy” had been beached. I could walk a mile of sand to look into just one of his large eyes, imagined enormous to match his girth and wit, fierce and fiery as alleged thirst for vengeance. But what if it’s blank and dark and weak, as small as the palm of my hand? Is he then like us?
The sounds he would make, chirps and coos, more like a bird of prey than a baby man are these anything I could understand even if I had a dolphin lexicon?
Tell all this to the Orca. He could not care less. The sounds that come to him are as meaningless. I’m just saying, I stand at the shoreline, human. To his ocean, I can do no more than delve a toe in!
I could stroke his spanse as a connoisseur or a lover and he, with no arms to resist this, dumb to my language to even protest, and I of a species that contains rapists, he’d on land, succumb to the rape of my imposed friendship.
I exploit him now just to write about him much less make a movie about us or pay money to watch our adventure “together”. A spectator is not innocent.
On land, how easily I could skin him thus, strip him bare just to see what’s underneath and some humans do in fact, do this. Good thing he has no convenient, toothless orifice. Just let him try to grow legs and traverse the sand to look straight into mankind’s great and glorious face.
I could kill and eat this contender just as easily as he could hunt down a shark for its liver, in our avarice. But there’s a difference. He eats for food, Human consumes for mere amusement and entertainment.
I will prove to you I am his master, here he is “Free Willy” trapped on DVD. He is forever immortalized thus and his only escape is our thirst for novelty will eventually render this conception of him bland and tasteless.
Someday, the human, for its ignorance and proliferation that rapes the land and now the sea, may one day soon eat its own weak and while the Orca may hunger for the food it lost to us, its avarice and cunning is not as great as it needs to be to survive our trust.
It must grow armor and harden its teeth to torpedo our ships. It must toxify the fish with a poison to which it hopes to form a resistance. It must stake claim to its domain by freezing it with a glacial crust. And if it does all this, then it may become human. And then it will know of man’s inhumanity.
Already, I am developing a taste for Orca.
Someday soon, Willy, you’ll be mine.
But for now, while I can I would rather leave the Orca alone to its mysteries, free to be whatever it is, wherever, and at the very least,
blessedly, anonymously inhuman.
[Author's note: Title refers to behavior psychologist, B.F. Skinner and the movie, "Free Willy". ]
by C.J. Sellers
You’ll know this dog by where he’s at.
We’ll try some apophasis:
Not restin mid the dusty grasses,
scratch rollin neath the sky.
Not hot at those pickup trucks,
chase barkin down the roads.
Not slackin as the children splash,
soon shakin off the hose.
Not jumped through the barbed cow fence,
now givin them cuts a lick.
Not passin through the dairy barn,
caught stealin just a sip.
Not peerin through the kitchen door
sweet charmin for some scraps.
Not guardin gruff the grain silo,
fast chasin round the cats.
Not found out at the marshy pond,
just starin at a toad.
Not sleepin neath the hangin sheets,
chance soilin all the clothes.
Not runnin long the youngster’s side,
out huntin for a prize.
Head now to the master’s bed,
he’s dreamin of command.
~For Andrew Wyeth~
(July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009)
Inspired by the painting “Master Bedroom”
http://poietes.files.wordpress.com/2…er-bedroom.jpg
“An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.” — Arthur S. Eddington
“We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.” — Arthur S. Eddington
No, I tell you, it was an ordinary day when things first gave way in my mind. Things were going along just fine, had been for a long time; uneventfully, in fact.
You think that crazy comes on gradually (least I did), that you have time to head it off at the pass, so to speak. Not for me at least. No, not in the least.
I think of crazy people and what comes to mind are like I dunno, gray and fearful, mumbling, twitching bunnies, (though some not so tame).
I’m fumbling for words here…
Ah, what do I know of crazies? I’m talking to myself right now on a computer, seems less strange but it ain’t necessarily so. The doctor says I don’t seem crazy and so there’s none of that *tension*, you know… talking ’bout crazy stuff is just somethin’ we like to chat about now and then.
For instance, did you know crazy people are not strangers to reason. Their reasons just aren’t the norm. Or so I’m told.
Sanity is friends with the empirical I gather. The empirical is just that which can be proven …to a doctor. We’re supposed to agree on what’s “real”.
Tchyeah right.
Why don’t they see the gift it is to flee from reason and the tyranny of consensus? Don’t tread on me. My crazy don’t need a reason. I don’t have no hang-ups or fixations, what have ya…
I don’t need a reason nor some professional validation to accept what I see clearly here before me: this ghost, this inexplicable, ridiculous apparition. I’m not even afraid of it. No, I have to laugh, just from startling when I catch sight of it. Otherwise, there’s not so much to be jolly ’bout at the moment. So I don’t mind the ghost(s) even if you can’t enjoy them.
Yes, there’s more than one.
I know what you’re thinking, it’s what I thought before this, those Hollywood ghosts, those Poe-ish, Gothic ghosts and so forth but no, sorry to disappoint.
This ghost right here appeared sitting in our old rocking chair. But I tell you, and try to imagine this, ha-ha…get this…
it’s just the soul
OF THE CHAIR!
Ain’t that a hoot?
hahahahahaha
And it talks.
hahahahahaha
And what it talks about is so boring!
hahahahahaha
You know, if you could imagine what a chair would know…
hahahahahaha
Well now I know. If you don’t have a sense of humor, then be glad you don’t see (and hear) my ghosts.
Oh, one other thing I found out here, crazy people don’t think they’re crazy.
But I do. Ipso facto, I’m not.
hahahahahaha
Whateva.
Are you comfortable? Would you like a chair? Oop, don’t sit there, not in that one…
hahahahahaha
Oh my goodness what she just said about your ass…
Ahem…let’s leave it there
shall we?
[Author's Note: "Powys' Ghosts" was inspired by the works of John Cowper Powys wherein ordinary things have spirits and lives all their own and communicate with one another, even human spirits.]
Personality is the only permanent thing in life; and if truth, beauty, goodness, and love, are to have permanence they must depend for their permanence not upon some imaginary law in a universe half-created by personality but upon the indestructible nature of personality itself. ~ John Cowper Powys, from “The Complex Vision“