Saturday, 7 August 2010
Friday, 30 July 2010
“A fight is going on inside me,” said an old man to his son. “It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you.”
The son thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wolf will win?”
The old man replied simply, “The one you feed.”
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Monday, 26 July 2010
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Thursday, 22 July 2010
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Monday, 12 July 2010
Monday, 5 July 2010
Noone is exempt from the call to find common ground.
Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn't enough. After all, talk is cheap; empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organiser back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighbourhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I'd tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realise them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all".
--Barack Obama, 'The Audacity of Hope'
Friday, 2 July 2010
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Monday, 28 June 2010
The experience of a poem is the experience of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling.
- T.S.Eliot, on Dante.
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Friday, 25 June 2010
Friday, 18 June 2010
--Malcolm Muggeridge.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge
Monday, 31 May 2010
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Saturday, 22 May 2010
Thursday, 20 May 2010
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
boot
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Friday, 14 May 2010
Thursday, 13 May 2010
words, words, etc
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
)))))
paralysis
Friday, 7 May 2010
isn't it... don't you think?
Thursday, 6 May 2010
just too good
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
abracadabra
Sunday, 2 May 2010
sale
Friday, 30 April 2010
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
-- William Carlos Williams
hazlet on hamlitt
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
...
why
Saturday, 17 April 2010
zhongguoren
…a sort of reticence in meta-language, in the great metaphysical and/or philosophical systems… responsible, perhaps, for something in the way that ancient and modern Chinese have of explaining their problems, which often is disconcerting to us.
Rather than proceeding to an explanation which, for us, is the only logical one – which seeks the causes, makes the deductions, specifies the motivations, appearance and essences, and at the same time foresees the consequences of an event – an operation which derives from the principle of a logical, metaphysical causality – the Chinese give us a ‘structuralist’ or ‘warring’ (contradictory) portrait. Behind the event itself there appears a combination or an association that bears the seed of the overthrow of the previous order; a battle between good and evil, two-faced people, persecutions, conspiracies, sensational turns of event.
As if the causal, deterministic, metaphysical logic had crumbled before the traumatic occurrence whose advent we question, but without losing the symbolic level, the Chinese-speaking individual describes this event as if he were speaking of a game, a war, a combinatorium… an aesthetic mode of reasoning… By eliminating straight away the problem of an objective truth, it shifts people to a symbolic situation.
--Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women
Friday, 16 April 2010
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
rain-globe
in out in out [ask matilda]
How do you describe people who dont think - the scientist, essentially, the person who just wants to grasp the nutshell and not to lean into the infinite abyss...?
An expansion out from from the neat confines of a perfectly epitomised meaning is the natural movement of thought. As Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness: 'The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But [...] [to Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine'. [....] It is easy to misconstrue this idea of space and place, as suggested in Hamlet's words: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space', and W.S. Graham wrote in a letter that poetry must not 'hand us out a little nutshell truth which we have pleasure in agreeing with'. [...] The 'bad dreams' which counteract this happy illusion for Hamlet are his awakening into consciousness, an escape into the external; in this way, poetry is like a flurry of bad dreams; brooding in the 'nutshell' that metaphor might imply, is the bad dream of instability in extended, infinite space. Paterson's concept of metaphor as creating 'a new unity in the language' is of a unity brought about by drawing attention to the disunity of everyday literal and metaphorical language. It is an act of understanding created out of exposing the limiting enclosure of the firmament, similar to D.H. Lawrence's concept of the mind's umbrella. [...]
'Silent Love'
There's no vocabulary
For love within a family, love that's lived in
But not looked at, love within the light of which
All else is seen, the love within which
All other love finds speech.
This love is silent.
--T.S. Eliot
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
[ pause ]
We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of communication' … and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.