March 2010
19 posts
“The grail she is within you,” he told me with blushing face as he huffed and puffed, running toward me without a explanation. “Have you forgotten what I said before?” Then he was gone, and I was left trying to remember. What was it?
Sinitic perorations, on the way to Tenebrae; Spagyric oblation, this is the way we pray.
1 tag
Memory and Mandate
Memory is in decline, also my own as I needed to look back over past essays to make sure I had not addressed this subject. This decline is presaged by easy access to information. We do not need to know what it is, only where it is and how to get to it rapidly.
This statement, while manifestly true for a certain manner of information — for instance road maps for visitors for new places...
“Is that all you got / I’ll take your best shot”
– P.O.D, Southtown
“Denn mit Göttern
Soll sich nicht messen
Irgend ein Mensch.”
– Goethe
“When I am not busy presiding over rituals, I study the language of India with...”
– Kukai (as cited in Mair, Hoh, the True History of Tea)
Can the world live without poetry? I tweet endlessly as word-worlds decompose.
“Es war ein wunderlicher Krieg”
“What happened to the king’s body?”
“We’re witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual...”
– Edward Castranova
Goodbye to the humanities? In sent PhD applications was documented what I wished to accomplish. I did not think it was possible at any school I applied to, nor anywhere. Nor, it seems, did the people who reviewed them. And so there may be rupture. If there is no one interested in my sub-field of philosophy than me, I will be the only one — but academics, as I increasingly understand it, is...
“Don’t put Descartes before the Hobbes.”
The City Sleeps
The rain falls. It was sunny in New York. I reconnected with friends, watched people in the park, smoked my pipe with a student from NYU, and watched a lawyer explain why it was a legal necessity for the Jews to crucify Christ. Except, of course, that they didn’t crucify him. It was the Romans.
My walks down Astoria’s dirtied streets contained new elation — the first time...
“Finally, the case of sokushinbutsu-a sublime and disquieting
murmur pervading...”
– Fabio Rambelli, True Words, Silence, and the Adamantine Dance: On Japanese Mikkyō and the Formation of the Shingon Discourse
“騎虎難下”
“In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization?”
– Jeff Jarvis
