Friday, August 8, 2014

On the Wings of a Dove

Depression comes on the wings of a dove:
a message from Gawd.: Something is wrong.
I am right to feel hopeless . Waiting for Gödel
to complete me: his theorem revealing my
incompleteness: inclined as I am to demonstrate
my own consistency (see me, hear me, touch me,
feed me.—the hobgoblins of my brittle mind).
Do I contradict my self? I am large, I contain
pulchritude
Putting out a brave and happy front eclipses if not
occludes the proper reality of fear and hate, anger,
envy, jealousy—the primacy of my ego-conscious
purpose, aims, golden intentions. a cover up in
the name of power of positive thinking.

19 comments:

  1. http://blogs.lcms.org/2014/statement-on-persecution

    Rev. Pres. Harrison

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  2. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/08/09/rex-murphy-how-the-specious-concept-of-proportionality-became-code-for-israel-bashing/

    "Proportionality"

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  3. When we sat next to the evil empire of the Soviet Union and heard about the attrocities behind the iron curtain, and even the American President became a Berliner, we talked in similar ways: fortify yourself spiritually; be ready; you don't know what is coming. Know who you are. Know whose you are. Know your stuff by heart because they could isolate you completely. They can and will take the body and everything you own or think you own.

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  4. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/08/09/george-jonas-how-the-communists-killed-communism/

    "Cold War? Star Wars? Sure, they played a part. But 'The final conflict will be between the Communists and ex-Communists',Silone wrote, and that’s what happened."



    It seems to me that there also is a war between those who shared a border with communism and those who did not.

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  5. In reading comments by jihadists on-line and the insults traded by factions what stands out to me is this line repeated by them all: "you cannot even see yourself in the mirror."

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  6. And we are not even "supposed to" talk about it.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UTdKxCz2FIQ

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    1. supposed? Who's boss bossing?

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    2. I would like to know. Maybe you know. The western democracies are under attack by barbarism and you throw Keats against that. You spend your time arguing with Lutheran housewives and crusty Calvinists and see that as a kind of crusade. Courage is just bursting out of the seams, the best lacking all conviction.

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    3. No crusade. I haven't thrown Keats against anything. As far as being under attack by barbarism---I do what I can against ignorance and 'intellectual" seriousness and above all: righteousness and courage-posers.

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  7. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
    THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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  8. ANOTHER Theosophist. What is the matter with these people.

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  9. As Auden says, you can't take him intellectually serious.

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  10. Is Auden talking about himself, or the Nobel Prize winner of Literature and major English poet of the 20th c. William Butler Yeats. (An exquisite poem, by the way--long time favorite: what rough beast...slouches toward Bethlehem to be born (again). Apocalyptic. Auden's a favorite too: "How can we wait with out idols," he writes. (Is taking someone intellectually serious the same as or different than taking them affectively serious?) My orthodox calvinistic pastor would agree with your inability to appreciate. "Dung." he calls such.

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  11. Auden is talking about Keat's theosophist, according to Wiki.

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    Replies
    1. When did Keat's enter the conversation? Yeat's was the poet I posted--in response to all your hysteria (seemed appropriate)

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  12. I would not call it dung, but I do fear all seriousness is lost.

    This is why I love my preschoolers. They are very serious about life and death. So are my seniors. I am more at home with them then pretty fications.

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