On the nature of phenomena

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Standing Buddha from Sahri Bahlol, Pakistan, 2nd-3rd c. CE

     

     All phenomena are like a reflection,

     clear and pure without turbulence,

     ungraspable and indescribable, purely

     derived from cause and effect without

     self-nature and location.

     If you, by understanding phenomena

     in this way, work for the welfare of

     sentient beings without discrimination,

     you will be born as sons or daughters

     of the Buddhas.

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I copied this inscription placed over the entrance to Namgyal Monastery, the temple of HH the Dalai Lama, in 1993. Image source unknown. 

Notes from the Corpus Hermeticum

"What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head."

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

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A new and deified existence

She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.

An evidently unintended double entendre in Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 24.

Thanks http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/.

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Of mountains and rivers

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Skagit River, Washington

The mountains and rivers of the immediate Present
are the manifestations of the paths of former Buddhas.

                                                   --   Dogen Zenji, Sansuikyo

Too much hubba bubba

Lee De Forest (d. 1961), one of the inventors of radio, wrote in a 1946 letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune:

What have you done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America's mass intelligence. You have debased this child, you have sent him out into the streets in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie music, to collect money from all and sundry for hubba bubba and audio jitterbug. You have made of him a laughing stock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere; you have cut time into tiny cubelets called "spots" (more rightly stains), wherewith the occasional fine program is periodically smeared with impudent insistences to buy or try.

I suppose he might as well have been speaking these days about the Internet.

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He has nothing to say

Dear Sir
  I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I dont know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
JOHN CLARE


John Clare was committed to the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum in 1841 and remained there until his death in 1864.

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Often in the Night

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Often in the night my dead heart creaks
Like an old chest of drawers
Remembering its life as a cherry tree.

                           --  Yvan Goll


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Coincidentia oppositorum

With Capitalism, man exploits man. With Socialism, it is exactly opposite.

                                 -- Robert Anton Wilson

A Casement High

A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings:
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

John Keats, Eve of St. Agnes

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.

                   -- Edna St.Vincent Millay          

A la bataille

The nimble English gunner with linstock the devilish cannon touches.

             -- Shakespeare, Henry V, II

What to Write about

It has been said, by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting.

                                                — Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

Happy 70th Birthday Bruce Boone

nothing matters but the quality
of the affection—in the end—
that has carved the trace in the mind,
dove sta memoria....*

                            —Ezra Pound


Happy Birthday from Jim.


* Where memory remains....

Tick Tock

Le tic-tac des horloges, on dirait des souris qui grignotent le temps.

--Alphonse Allais

The tick tock of the clock, like mice nibbling away at time.

On limits and transgressions

Limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. But can the limit have a life of its own outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? For its part, does transgression not exhaust its nature when it crosses the limit, knowing no life beyond this point in time? Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather their relation takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night, which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity .

Michel Foucault: Preface to Transgression

An interesting interpretation by Steve Weston can be found here.

Intellectual courage

Purified by virtue and discrimination, and strengthened by devotion and self-sacrifice, the courageous intellect intuits Reality.

[Found on a Nepalese incense box from the early 70's.]

Pathic girls

PRIAPEIA 48

Quod partem madidam mei videtis,
per quam significor Priapus esse,
non ros est, mihi crede, nec pruina,
sed quod sponte sua solet remitti,
cum mens est pathicae memor puellae.


18th c. TRANSLATION:

Tho' see you drenchèd wet that part of me
Whereby Priapus I am signified;
Nor dew (believe me!) 'twas nor hoary frost,
But whatso gusheth of its own accord
When I bethink me of a pathic girl (catamite).


PLAINFEATHER'S TRANSLATION:

Since you see that the part of me which signifies
myself as Priapus is dripping wet,
believe me, that isn't dew or cool mist,
it's what flows forth spontaneously
when I think of a boy I'd like to fuck.

Why to write

But if it is not granted to us to fill our fragile and fleeting days with famous deeds, (for the opportunity for this lies in the hands of others), let us all the more devote them to writing, and since our lives are short, let us leave something behind to bear witness that we have lived.

-- Pliny the Younger, Letter III.7.

Cities of sadness

Love for you has led me to try the medicines of apothecaries,
To knock on the doors of fortune-tellers,
To leave home and comb the pavements,
To hunt for your face in the rain and in the headlights of cars.
Love for you has taken me into cities of sadness
Which I had never entered before.

--- by the contemporary Syrian poet Nizar al-Qabbani

What's barbaric

Men and women do not live by culture alone, the vast majority of them throughout history have been deprived of the chance of living by it at all, and those few who are fortunate enough to live by it now are able to do so because of the labour of those who do not. Any cultural or critical theory which does not begin from this single most important fact, and hold it steadily in mind in its activities, is in my view unlikely to be worth very much. There is no document of culture which is not also a record of barbarism.

Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory