Saturday, February 28, 2004

To our way of thinking, a purchase is acting, choosing, doing something. But also: every act we consider as a purchase, that we must accomplish, have gained by doing it. Otherwise we feel like we've been cheated--we've paid without satisfaction.
   This feeling is often the only sign we have that a relationship is over. Meaning: no more reciprocity of feedback. And afterwards you think of bankruptcy. A great debt has disappeared.
   Immediately there is the giddiness of infinite choice which comes from having money but not yet any particular direction for it.
   And an apprehensiveness: once it's spent the feeling of freedom will be gone. (The miser of choices.) So i want to know, what kind of freedom is not just the illusion of infinite choice, does not use up in commitment, and asks for nothing else besides, no proof or deed?
   Is it the effortlessness of true creativity, the instantaneity of direct insight; the simplicity of unimpeded perception in the absence of "ego"? Which ego, nostalgically, reflects upon how and where it has been--and calls, in retrospect, Freedom...? That is, without the particular chiaroscuro of one's unique personality, does the "objective necessity" of what-happens have an infinite value in the shadowless radiance of "the Unconscious"?
   Don't ask me.

"To invoke posterity is to weep on your own grave." --Graves

A! fredome is a noble thing!
but I would rather be horizontal.
      --Barbour & Plath

"...Grizzling/ In the wart-kinked,/ Gyring, pustulent light." --Patchen

'On the Topic, "The Three Dogmas Are Not One Dogma, Nor Are They Three Dogmas" '

   Better to hear
The rain outside my window
   Tapping as it drops,
I turn my midnight lamp around,
Dimming its light against the wall.'
--Emperor Fushimi (1263-1317), tr Earl Miner

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