What if you were able to weep for a really long time, like a whole month straight—wouldn’t that be nice? All day and all night long, you could just keep weeping.
After an event like Fathers’ Day, which was on Sunday (I write this on Tuesday), I always feel at once exhausted and very hungry; yet it’s an existential hunger rather than simply physical: it’s not a craving for mere earth-food but a yearning for nourishment that transcends space and time; however, when I ask myself “What exactly is it that I desire so intensely?” I cannot answer: it’s almost as if I want nothing at all. Or nothing seems good enough to offset the holiday’s badness. Maybe I’d settle for the ability to turn back life and re-experience everything in a better, wiser fashion.
Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
(Those lines are from “Passage” by Hart Crane.) But I’m ashamed: my attitude is not “amor fati.”
Pets put up with a lot. Think about dogs, for instance. Some of them have to sit inside their kennel all day, when they would rather be outside running freely, exploring, smelling the smells!
A very small subsection of the global population controls the bulk of stuff that happens here on Earth. How do they do this? Is it really just by way of money? Or do they own an abundance of armaments? …Yet even armaments require people to operate them. So what if someone figures out how to automate the process of…
I’m only saddening myself by traveling down this route of thought. I was going to imagine something along the lines of a bureaucratic desk inlaid with a big red button that some elderly statesperson could press to cause X, Y, and Z.
Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don’t, someone else will.
—from Who Rules the World? (p.56) by Noam Chomsky
If the pseudoscientists invent a mobile home that can blast off into the outer spaces so that I can live up there with my sweetheart, and the floor of our spacecraft includes a built-in garden with its own mini-sun to cause the plants to grow, and a flock of sheep—not to eat but to befriend—and a modestly sized pond (manmade) to swim in…
What is a cell? I mean, the kind of cell that one finds inside one’s flesh. Who invented the flesh cell? Was it a traumatic endeavor?
And why do all of my sheep produce so much wool? I ask them right to their face: Why don’t you practice moderation, and expend only fleece enough to cover your comely parts? To keep your heart warm.
If mammal life expires unanimously, and all the votes are counted, then the star that we call OUR SUN will have to keep on sending its good-bad vibes to our forsaken dominion for a span of time: at least until it runs out of hydrogen atoms; because it fuses the hydrogen into helium atoms—did I get that right? If so, then what happens next? Does the helium start to collide? Where’s the poetry in this?
If an elephant is secured to a steel post with a steel chain, how long does it struggle before it gives up the fight? …I’ve heard that after it abandons its rebellious attempt, its tormentors can change the steel chain to a thin piece of rope and tie the beast to the tiniest wooden stake, and it will never again lift a limb to gain back its due freedom because it considers the notion futile.
This is why I love John Milton’s Satan: he’s not quite an elephant. (For the record, I love elephants: they’re my favorite living creature, next to dolphins, egrets, mice, flamingos, and glyptodons. But I love John Milton’s Satan slightly more.)
For never can true reconcilement grow
Where sounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep;
Which would but lead me to a worse relapse
And heavier fall: so should I purchase dear
Short intermission bought with double smart.
This knows my punisher; therefore as far
From granting he, as I from begging peace.—from Paradise Lost (Book IV; lines 98-104)
FACT:
Pseudoscientists consider perdition unending and its pit bottomless, though its depth is shallow and Hell has always been finite.
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