Diderot: '...We pass three quarters of our lives at willing without doing. ...And at doing without willing.'

   "A Fable of Zubenelg"

A foggy, cramped, introverted town, far from centers of power, & long left to its own devices, evolved a noisy music that harked back to a minor offshoot of a prior golden era. This style so charmed the wider world that it became new orthodoxy, only to succumb to its innate lack of subject matter.

02 10 04

"...the mineral forms were an everlasting source of wonder; feldspar, for instance, was admirable, and his own name a crystal in his mouth. If he were to leave that name on the land, irrevocably, his material body swallowed up by what it had named, it would be rather on some desert place, a perfect abstraction, that would rouse no feeling of tenderness in posterity." --Patrick White, Voss (1957)

My words will not carry. They are not words. They are not words such as you are ready to receive. They will fall from the air & perish, unlike those words that people want to hear & will repeat to each other endlessly, like the sound of raindrops. My words are dry, like the desert.

02 18 04

...honesty isn't a conscious virtue: it is a matter of good relations between a person's conscious and unconscious.

Not memory but forgetfulness is the single proof of time.

I painted many dots and though i tried very hard i couldn't quite keep my attention focussed for this thousandfold repetition: from time to time, i'd realize i had gone into automatic (i wanted a particular texture)--thus the conscious mind flees banality. But the earth is seldom banal (unless you try crossing it for great distances without stopping) and its banal places have enough micro-variations. Banality is man-made. How can consciousness produce its nemesis??

'Chance' means, really, accepting the limits of your reason. It is equally wrong to say the universe is random or determined.
--To apply this to psychology.
--To apply this to politics.
The myth of the image, the myth of the myth. Chance rules for casual encounters. Unless you become obsessed with an image, with a myth, it acts merely as a filler for your absence of real knowledge. It does not control your actions because your actions do not really connect with the concepts that a false analysis could unfold from those images and mythologies. (The myth that everyone is brainwashed. Match this to the myth of genetic predeterminism. Two opposite figments, pseudosciences,--like politics & psychology themselves--thus self-destruct.) Personality is the realm of chance. Not only formed by chance experiences, but also giving rise to others, in the sense that you react with accidental preferences which are far stronger than your ideas (most of the time) or even your feelings... Well then, what limits the realm of chance? What might be called Necessity--if this is understood without reference to objective/subjective quibbles about "freewill"--rather, those universal processes (like feedback) which cause irreversible (if not permanent) changes...in personalities, in national histories... And there is the matter of scale, which is actually, defining the Individual, the Nation, so that chance does not always predominate--so that there can be some "freedom" at all.

   "Toad Enliven"

Riddles that tear a soul asunder
Sable camisole
Is lifted
The decline & fall of the love goddesses
Pyre of fifty promises
And the place that they go is where they come from
Riddles that teach a soul to need one

02 19 04

Say it with flowers.