The Ancient Path

The way the English have of treating everything incredibly seriously and at the same time as all an enormous joke is the only correct way to regard life.

dig into the sun

Fwd: for you

Two plump questing doves
Hover over the river
Of gold and your mouth
Is a chalice of gold

The nervous moon's shudders
And cherries and silence
Mean drinking the wine of
Your breath is an axiom

conflict simulation

Life is a war without enemies.

Magda by the window

Przy okniem, w szarym swiatłem,
Gołąbek diamentowy opiekuje młodek.
Serce teraz wie, co to jest zalew.

Duet brzmi. Skrzypce ciepłe
Trzymać to przywilej króla muzycznego.



Gołąbek diamentowy = diamond dove.

double meanings

hail
well

I feel...

...pretty good.

For use when you need to get some god damn work done for a change.

I must not have fun. 
Fun is the time-killer. 
Fun is for inferiors, servants and the help. 
I will ignore fun. 
I will work through it. 
And when the fun is gone only I will remain--I, and my will to win. 

Damn, I'm good.
  
--The Litany Against Fun, from DOON

I'll try to put a little something here more frequently, for the practise if nothing else.

Sunny and warm outside. Happy Bicycle Day.

The punctuation all gone to hell.

"Recently I've been appalled at the low levels of articles in learned journals and literary weeklies. The punctuation gone to hell, full of non-sequiturs, an obvious lack of background knowledge, and so on. I went to a newspaper and looked up the equivalent articles from the 1930's. A great change has taken place. Forty years ago there were two kinds of articles: very, very good and terribly bad. There seemed nothing in-between. Now everything is slapdash and mediocre. Why are so many famous persons in hallowed institutions now so mediocre?"

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/sufi/sufi-shah.html

14 July. Bastille day. Many morning dreams: "The parts are turned into
a board. The board is turned into an angel in hell."

hand tooled by the angel gabriel

Rabbits, true, do much seduction
On spring-sown meadows green and sunny,
Prompting jokes on reproduction -
But I don't find them very bunny.

each single day is a rich empire
she is sad as a sword is sad
uniform unicorn
"strive to deserve what you long for"
Ah! I am speared by your damascene logic.

Wittgenstein, in a letter to a friend

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important ... you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty, 'probability', 'perception', etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important."

cut a castle out of paper
pin a diamond to it

Norman Malcolm, on Wittgenstein

"Human kindness, human concern, was for him a far more important attribute in a person than intellectual power or cultivated taste. He related with pleasure an incident that happened to him in Wales. He had taken lodgings in the home of a preacher. The first time that Wittgenstein presented himself at this house the lady of the house had inquired of Wittgenstein whether he would like some tea, and whether he would also like this and that other thing. Her husband called to her from another room: 'Do not ask; give!' Wittgenstein was most favourably impressed by this exclamation. A characteristic remark that Wittgenstein would make when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was 'He is a human being!'--thus implying that most people fail even to be human."

Graham Greene, an excerpt from his Indochina journal in Ways of Escape

February 9, 1954, Saigon

After dinner at the Arc-en-Ciel, to the fumerie [opium den] opposite the Casino above the school. I had only five pipes, but that night was very dopey. First I had a nightmare, then I was haunted by squares--architectural squares which reminded me of Angkor, equal distances, etc., and then mathematical squares--people's income, etc., square after square after square which seemed to go on all night. At last I woke and when I slept again I had a strange complete dream such I have experienced only after opium. I was coming down the steps of a club in St. James's Street and on the steps I met the Devil who was wearing a tweed motoring coat and a deerstalker cap. He had long black Edwardian moustaches. In the street a girl, with whom I was apparently living, was waiting for me in a car. The Devil stopped me and asked whether I would like to have a year to live again or to skip a year and see what would be happening to me two years from now. I told him I had no wish to live over any year again and I would like to have a glimpse of two years ahead. Immediately the Devil vanished and I was holding in my hands a letter. I opened the letter--it was from some girl whom I knew only slightly. It was a very tender letter, and a letter of farewell. Obviously during that missing year we had reached a relationship which she was now ending. Looking down at the woman in the car I thought, "I must not show her the letter, for how absurd it would be if she were to be jealous of a girl I don't yet know." I went into my room (I was no longer in the club) and tore the letter into small pieces, but at the bottom of the envelope were some beads which must have had sentimental significance. I was unwilling to destroy these and opening a drawer put them in and locked the drawer. As I did so it suddenly occurred to me, "In two years' time I shall be doing just this, opening a drawer, putting away the beads, and finding the beads are already in the drawer." Then I woke.

Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

"Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.

Graham Greene, talking about his early prose style in Ways of Escape

Here are examples of my style in those days and my terrible misuse of simile and metaphor. Even the good can corrupt and perhaps I had been corrupted by much reading of the metaphysical poets. "A revolver drooped like a parched flower to the pavement." (I like to reverse this simile--"A parched flower drooped like a revolver to the pavement.") "The sound of far voices sprinkled over him like the seeds of a poppy bringing rest." And here's a piece of pomposity which I had learned from Conrad at his worst: "A clock relinquished its load of hours."

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come through as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Kingsley Amis, The Green Man

To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliche, he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliche. Oh well, what had I expected? The thing was a novel.

Graham Greene, Our Man In Havana

Drawing a cheque is not nearly so simple an operation in an American bank as in an English one. American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter. 'Well,' he seems to express in the sunny warmth of his smile, 'who would have believed that I'd meet you here, you of all people, in a bank of all places?' After exchanging with him news of your health and of his health, and after finding common interest in the fineness of the winter weather, you shyly, apologetically, slide the cheque towards him (how tiresome and incidental all such business is), but he barely has time to glance at it when the telephone rings at his elbow. 'Why, Henry,' he exclaims in astonishment over the telephone, as though Henry too were the last person he expected to speak to on such a day, 'what's the news of you?' The news takes a long time to absorb; the teller smiles whimsically at you: business is business.

E. M. Cioran, from The Trouble with Being Born

"What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do."

silver ejection scar

Joy Stones

The first couple seconds of Love Will Tear Us Apart resemble the first couple seconds of Jumpin Jack Flash.

Meanness regarding Omaha.

I've thought some more about this habit of making fun of Omaha and I have to admit that it is shallow and false. In truth I do not think poorly of Nebraska; rather I value greatly you homespun people of the Middle, with your cornbread wisdom and your reknowned, authentic "culture of the pie". Those of us who live in sophisticated bustling coastal metropolises, with our too many sexual partners, our overpriced narcotics, and our distressingly wide choice of entertainment options, look to you "folk" in the doughy center to in a sense keep it real for us. It's up to you to hold our national keel planted firmly in the rich black soil of the prairie, and to guide this country by the twinkling star of homemade values in her times of trouble.