RYAN ADAMS - "Oh My Sweet Carolina"

I went down to Houston
And I stopped in San Antone
I passed up the station for the bus
I was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Man I ended up with pockets full of dust

So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane
I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance
I was spending money like the way it likes to rain
Man I ended up with pockets full of 'caine

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

I ain't never been to Vegas
But I gamble all my life
Building newsprint boats I race to sewer mains
Was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Funny how they say that some things never change

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

Up here in the city feels like things are closing in
The sunsets just my light bulb burning out
I miss Kentucky and I miss my family
All the sweetest winds they blow across the south

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

May you one day carry me home

FRIDA KAHLO

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and who brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.

HANNAH ARENDT from The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Scenes from "Little Red Riding Hood"

by Edward Gorey

ORSON WELLES

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order.”

NĀGĀRJUNA - “Space”

No trace of space
Is there before
The absence of obstruction
Which describes it.

With no obstruction,
How can there be
Absence of obstruction?
Who distinguishes between them?

Space is not obstruction
Or an absence of it,
Nor is it a description
Or something to describe.

Fluidity and heat,
Energy and gravity
Are just like space.

In seeing things
To be or not to be
Fools fail to see
A world at ease.

THOMAS MERTON from No Man is an Island

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ - “Elegy”

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?
Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb.
This is the city you most loved, an empty stairwell
where the next rain lifts invisibly from the Seine.
With solitude, your coat open, you walk
steadily as if the railings were there and your hands weren’t passing
through them.
“When things were ready, they poured on fuel and touched off the fire.
They waited for a high wind. It was very fine, that powdered bone.
It was put into sacks, and when there was enough we went to a bridge
on the Narew River.”
And even less explicit phrases survived:
“To make charcoal.
For laundry irons.”
And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking.
The page is a charred field where the dead would have written
We went on. And it was like living through something again one
could not live through again.
The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house
with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings
where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field,
And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell.

CHRIS WILLIAMS from Ecology and Socialism

A world economic system predicated on relentless growth, devouring increasing amounts of raw materials and energy and spewing out ever-larger amounts of toxic waste products, has produced a whole series of environmental threats: species extinction, air and water pollution, genetically modified organisms, desertification, deforestation, soil depletion, and the ever-present possibility of nuclear warfare, to name only a few.

However, as it intersects with all other threats, and furthermore has a tendency to aggravate them, the most urgent and all-encompassing of these is global climate change. 

DŌGEN

Like tangled hair,
The circular delusion
Of beginning and end,
When straightened out,
A dream no longer.

SAMUEL BECKETT from The End

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. 

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “Track”

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm
feeble and cold on the horizon
The train is entirely motionless
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars

MARLENE DIETRICH as Frenchy in Destry Rides Again

And when I die, don’t pay the preacher, for speaking of my glory and my fame; just see what the boys in the back room will have, and tell them I sigh, tell them I cry, and tell them I died of the same.

James Merrill - “A Silence”

No coffin without nails.
This one you drive into mine
At least is golden.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

I despise the kind of book that tells you how to make yourself happy. The first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in.

H. L. HIX - "Blur"

Turns out lots of lines prove blurry I once thought sharp.
Some blur from further away, some from closer in.
Plant/animal, for instance. On which side, and why,
the sessile polyps, corals and sea anemones?
Same problem saying why my self must be internal.
Where do I see those finches glinting at the feeder?
To experience the is-ness of what is,
I’d need to locate the here-ness of what’s here.
Or be located by it. Or share location with it.
There’s a line I want to blur: between my senses
and my self. And another: between my senses
and the world. That anemone looks more like a lily
than an appaloosa. Looks, and acts. I feel that fizz
of finches sparkle on my tongue, the back of my throat.
I don’t say these words until I hear them. My voice
visits. Is visitation. I would choose the role
of visitor over visited, if I got to choose.
Those finches trill and warble in sequences of phrases.
I can tell there’s pattern, but not what the pattern is.
I can say I hear them (I do hear them) in my sleep,
but I can’t say what that means. Their twitters and chirps
start early, before I wake. I can say they chatter all day
(they do), when I’m hearing them and when I’m not,
but I can’t say how I know that. The back of my hand
always feels as if it’s just been lightly touched.

Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen, 1928

ORSON WELLES

We now sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

NĀGĀRJUNA - “Dedicatory Verse”

I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha,
The best of teachers, who taught that
Whatever is depedently arisen is
Unceasing, unborn,
Unannihilated, not permanent,
Not coming, not going,
Without distinction, without identity,
And free from conceptual construction.

TARJEI VESAAS - “Sun-Corner”

At home there’s a sun-corner
where spring quietly stirs.
Dripping all day long.

Clear drops from the snow-rim,
they reflect both good and bad
in their brief fall, and are shattered.
The sun is a hot cataract.

In that sun-corner,
where you were born -
it’s those drops that should
mirror you, and wet your lips,
pure from the snow-rim and
right into your heart.

It’s in that faint smell of
spring moisture you should fall asleep.
That call you should heed.
There, everything would feel right.

It’s all moving downhill.
Everything’s oozing toward a distant
goal,
on its way to the sea.
An unknown sea inside a dream.
All of spring’s sorrow is heading there.
All thoughts spiral there
and then disappear.

Your childhood sun-corner is where
you are when the call sounds.

GILLES DELUZE from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered:

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

RYŌKAN

in this dream world
we doze
and talk of dreams –
dream, dream on,
as much as you wish 

ABUL ʿALA AL-MAʿARRI

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.

UMBERTO ECO

Invention can produce reality.

HANNAH ARENDT

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

ELIAS CANETTI

The Agony of Flies
____________________

It isn’t being alone that I need to know, for that comes easy to me. I like being alone; what I need to learn is how to keep silent around people … It doesn’t matter to whom my words are addressed or whether or not they are understood; the words in themselves have a horrifying and devastating effect on me. They are too strong; I need to muffle them by writing them down … I myself cannot evade my words; I am at their mercy; I take them in whole; I understand them fully and they shake me the way a storm shakes up the sea.

YUAN MEI - "Nearing Hao-pa"

(I saw in the mist a little village of a few tiled roofs and joyfully admired it.)

There’s a stream, and there’s bamboo,
there’s mulberry and hemp.
Mist-hid, clouded hamlet,
a mild, tranquil place.
Just a few tilled acres.
Just a few tiled roofs.
How many lives would I
have to live, to get
that simple.

HAROLD PINTER from Party Time

You don’t have to believe anything. You just have to shut up and mind your own business, how many times do I have to tell you? You come to a lovely party like this, all you have to do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality and mind your own fucking business. How many more times do I have to tell you? You keep hearing all these things. You keep hearing all these things spread by pricks about pricks. What’s it got to do with you?

[Photographer unknown to me.]

FANNIE LOU HAMER

I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared to [register to vote] - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.

DAVID HUME

The worst speculative skeptic I ever knew was a much better man than the best superstitious devotee and bigot.

Ft Tilden bunker ruins and graffiti.

LEAD BELLY - “There’s a Man Going ‘Round Taking Names”

There’s a man going ‘round taking names
There’s a man going ‘round taking names
He’s been taking my father’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my mother’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my sister’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my brother’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my father’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names

Colin Kaepernick, American hero.