Thoughts

Thoughts ( I wrote these down ages ago - felt lile sharing them here:))





The shoulders feel displeasure as a burden. Every muscle of the body has its own conception of evil, which is simply the cause of its pain. A composer witnesses the cacophony of suffering - the sensualist hides his fingers from the shock of the hammer's blow.

Deeper than the bond -fear at its dissolution.

To love someone is to see them foregrounded against those we do not love.

The souls of those we love flow into us and change our course.

Universal Love, "universalised love", is a nonsense. But universal possibility of love - universal openness to love - is the essence of humanity.

A word that means "to maliciously add extra dots to a Connect-the-Dots Picture" ...

Irony as affective 3D glasses - the pleasure being the perceived "depth" of humour, which appears when two contradictory flat interpretations are slid over one another.

Subjectivity becomes a matter of permutations : commodities are arranged on shelves, and periodically taken down and strewn across the floor randomly in an orgy of self-assertion. We all crave to swirl the eddies of production in our own special way, even if it is only cancerous smoke in our lungs.

The so called "descent" into particulars, really an acsent. The more we see the particular as a particular, the more spiritual it appears. The more we see the individual, the greater the weight of the world on its shoulders.

The distinctions in metaphysics are ugly. They pretend to precision but are really muddled. Which is far worse than the originally vague, but honest, distinctions in ordinary language.

Appeals to salvation recognise the real mismatch between the moral order and the world - they presuppose it ... ( therefore to reconcile the problem of evil, and still accept salvation is ridiculous.)

A word for opening the "open other end" end of a milk cartoon. Someone who does this all the time. ( A series of minor trespasses culminating in a total breakdown. He finally decides to kill himself but fumbles with the gun and goes completely mad.)

The unreality of dream not in the fantastic procession of forms, but in the shadowy half-aware formlessness of the Dream-"I" - and this the truth in the comparison between dream and world. ( Magical nature of dream - a world without a self.)

The feeling of despair is the cessation of emotional life, of inner response, whilst the state of perception continues. Thus one might be listening to the radio, the sounds will continue to fill the room, everything will quietly go on its own way, like a flock of birds drifting off towards the horizon, but what refuses to move, what is left behind, is the individual consciousness.

There doesn't seem to be any use for a literature of surrealism/absurdism anymore - these have seeped into society, into the very technology we use: hallucination, dream, are present everywhere. What literature can do is show the silhouette of personality against this background, like a shadow falling on something that is itself moving, indefinite.

I walked down the street. A little boy held his mother's hand and told her: "And then the skeleton stuck a needle in the man's eye!"

The idea of sitting down for a day with a great "classic" cuddled to your forehead, is probably more charming than the effect of the book itself ...

Personal Freedom: Everyone talks as if the only alternatives were a complete determinism of character, or a total plasticity. But we "become" ourselves in the manner of someone who wakes up half-way whilst rolling down a hillside - we were asleep for some of the roll and have gathered momentum ... the choice is there to change direction, but our maneuvering depends on the speed built up during the period of unconsciousness.

I felt a shudder of negative re-enforcement up my spine ....

The whole ocean is just a drop in the ocean!

Rain hitting the Earth for the billionth time - as if the clouds were trying to escape but never made it.

We never "consult" our memory - if we consult anything, it is the world laid out in front of us, which flings us without any choice back into our minds, into Memory.

The ability of man to hide himself - even from God. Despair is the agony of knowing one is beyond being known.

There's something funny in the thought that for billions of years the earth was silent - and then all of a sudden an ape started talking.

"Buried in the cold earth" - a stupid remark, which plays on our imagination to create a fear of death.

"Daze of our lives ..."

For a moment, as I was walking from the living room to my bedroom, I had a completely objective vision of the human race, of what our "Goodness" consists in, which is this: to aid our own, and see to our own species-survival. What do we (really) care for the other creatures on this planet, except in so far as they add or subtract to our own happiness? ( One shudders when one realises this.)

Might is not right - what genius first thought of that?

Walking in the rain, I felt like something the cat had dragged in, had dragged in.

To write of love, is an act of love.

Life is a jigsaw puzzle. The death of a friend removes one piece. It will never be complete.

That which is eternally true or: that which is eternally needed.

Ideals are not present in Art like shifting forms behind a curtain - they exist as punctures, ruptures, events.

Realism recquires a great deal of imagination.

Words, names, grown old and dissociated from their origins, like fossilised skeletons whose articulations have smoothed over with time.

The name and its origin: useless flower of sound, hidden root of meaning, history.

Each of us huge tangles, intricate knots of influences, tendencies. We see all the threads running in and out but not how they are intertwined. The concept of psychoanalysis - a "science" of disentanglement!

Ideals are blunt instruments.

Laws - exceptions to exceptions.

There is no grand view of life, but there is the necessity for a shifting of perpectives, a hopscotch jump between views which profess universality. Everyone wants you to believe their stories are absolute - and without some measure of illusion, even the little truth they contain could not be grasped.

Idealism in youth is not in contradiction to the chaotic behaviour actually exhibited - it is another conseqence of rallying around vague centres of being rather than the results of investigation. ( It is not even insincere - two heads full of Divine Love are naturally bound to hit into each other.)