Soil or

“Which would you prefer to be - the soil or the plant?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

Cheong Soo Pieng

 

Kampong Scene (Houses on Stilts)

Spruce

Spruce Pipedream has a new song out, Bourgeois Rockstar, Bourgeois Soul. There is also a b side: Neurotic Academics with a Totalitarian Power Lust Are My Kinds of People (They Got it Going On). 

It remains to be seen whether one or both of these will feature on his upcoming album, Middle of the Road and Turning to the Left.

Meeting Modern Saints

It’s of course uncomfortable in the rationalised, barren West with its ever increasing consequential derangements,  to even mention saints and it’s something to overcome . . . but anyway just to particularly mention I love how Saint Paisios deals with the antagonistic student, and even on the level of plausibility, far too idiosyncratic and spontaneously brilliant to be fabricated by a lesser soul, so to speak. 

To add, I’ve just noon my device anyway, when I put the video full screen here, the translated captions disappear; so either going to the YouTube host or watching it on the smaller size sorts that.

And below is a book compiled from talks with the mentioned Saint Porphyrios which I can recommend:

soulscape

 

Something from a while back which I’m working on now a bit, mostly in the sense of trying to declutter it a bit.

Signs

“This world can of course be a confusing place, and with the very best of intentions, good and well-meaning people can be led astray. What do you think are the kinds of signs people should look out for regarding being led down dark pathways?”

“You mean like ideologically or politically?”

“Yes. Are there any easily discernible red flags we can recognise, as it were, to help turn ourselves away from calamity and back to the true path?”

“Well yes, there is one very obvious thing to look out for.”

“Which is?”

“If Bill Gates appears to be on the side you’re on, then you’ve gone very wrong. It’s time to go into reverse. Quickly.

Hamlet, Madness

[This is something I wrote way back and have just changed a little.}

As all of us know, except perhaps those of us who don't, in the opening scene of Hamlet, Marcellus, Barnardo and Horatio gather at night in fearful expectation of the arrival of the dead king's ghost, which has been appearing regularly of late, and it duly arrives. Upon the ghost's appearance, Marcellus says to Horatio: "Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." Which Horatio duly does, though he admits that the ghost "harrows me with fear and wonder." Most will agree though that Horatio would have been fully entitled to ask what particular difference his being a scholar made. It is doubtful the dead king's strange and recurring appearance was provoked by a special desire for learned discourse about some scholarly subject.

As for the ghost, when a scene or few later he speaks to his son, Hamlet, and incites bloody revenge on his murderous brother, his fears should have been raised as to his son’s prospects in executing the vengeful task when Hamlet’s startlingly immediate plan for killing the new king, utterly vague but for this point, is to decide to pretend to have gone mad. Hamlet's father should probably have asked what bloody good this would do.

Naturally Hamlet's subsequent mad behaviour achieves nothing but for driving the wholly innocent and cruelly treated Ophelia genuinely mad with confused grief, and onwards to a suicidal, pitiful death. What else Hamlet supposed this display of madness might achieve is anyone's guess.

If one were so crude as to reduce Shakespeare's most famed work to a moral, it would be that if when entrusting some important task to someone, their immediate instinctive suggestion towards completion of the task is to pretend to be insane, chances are you are backing a loser. More than likely he's simply looking for an opportunity, however inappropriate, to pretend to be mad, and doesn't merit much trust.

Just one hopefully illuminating scenario comes to mind: Let’s say you’re fortunate enough to own a house and you’re now looking to build an extension onto it. You get onto a respected architect, ask what he or she can do for you, and the response is: “Oh yes, you’ve come to the right person. This is exactly my kind of territory. Architecture is what I do. But first, before we even think about designs and builders and all that kind of stuff, what I’m going to do for the foreseeable future is I’ll pretend to be mad. And we can see then where that leads us.” 

And, like a fool, you go along with this.

Tightrope Walker

“If you wanted to be a tightrope walker, I suppose you’d have to do lots of practice, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh no, that would be boring! I’d read a few books about it, and that would sort me out.”

“I don’t know about that. How would you have gained the sense of balance? All that would happen with you and your knowledge is you’d just fall.”

“As if someone practicing wouldn’t fall!”

“Yeah, but that’s the only way they’d end up not falling.”

“Total contradiction! All I would have to do is gain the theoretical knowledge, and then apply it. Simple.”

Two figures

 

Scribble

 

Water and Dirt

“If you were given clear, pure water, would you drink it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But what if. You were given dirt? Would you eat that?”

“No, I’d leave it.”

“But what if they combined the two, the water and the dirt, mixed them together, would you consume that?”

“No, I’d leave that as well.”

Keeps Me

 Countercultural Icons of Humanity have a new song coming out: Living in My Socialist Mansion Keeps Me Humble (I’ve Got More Than One of Them).

Hard

 “If you wanted to grow something pleasant but the ground was too hard, what would you need to do?”

“Soften it.”

kitchen window

 

add

“If you add two and two and end up with five, what does that mean?”

“It means something else has been added.”

Pay

“If you don’t pay attention to the right things, you’ll pay attention to the wrong things.”

“That’s true.”

in the shade

 

Rocks, boat

“If you’re in a boat and you ended up on the rocks, who would be to blame?”

“What do you mean who would be to blame?”

“I mean you or the rocks.”

“Well, I suppose the problem would be more that I managed to put my boat up on the rocks rather the fact that the rocks were there. I don’t think I’d achieve much by being angry with the rocks.”

Alexandra Egorova

Just to mention as an aside, I’ve no idea what device she is holding in the filmed video - whether it has something to do with her blindness. 

External Things

 She laid on external things the blame of her internal disorder

Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, 1818.

detAil, green

 

Couple

 

not that mad about

I’m not that mad about this quick thing I came out with, but here it is anyway.

Feeding

If you keep on feeding the small birds, after a time the big ones will appear also.

Describe Death

 “How would you describe death?”

“That’s asking a lot.”

“Well, some thought about it anyway.”

“For the person the world disappears, while for the world the person disappears.”

Lux orta est justo

Dating from the ninth century.

Beginning

 “What is the beginning point of the spiritual life?”

“The beginning of the spiritual life, the first step, is to realize you are an asshole.”

“That’s a bit harsh.”

“That is just the beginning!”