Low Hanging Fruit

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

~Walt Whitman

Utmost faith

If I could, I would, receive the stigmata.

Maybe not that of Yeshua, but of some other authoritative, martyred being with a unique and encompassing portrait of the problems of existence and a solution as to the way out. 

Is any title good enough?

“Jesus, Jesus” ~Jeanne d’Arc

“Oh, I love Him… My God… I love you.” ~St. Therese of Lisieux

These are famous last words, every phoneme and syllable of which relays the innermost being of those husks whom they emanated from. Lives lived in total loyalty to one notion. There are few who have or ever will reach their experiential intensity.

Harmonized

“To co-operate, in fact, is to share with one another a common task” ~Emile Durkheim

The Futility and Beauty of Hope

The Buddha and Lao-Tzu or Jesus and Confucius? What do we do in the face of suffering? Do we strike out against inevitability? Do we accept it? I don’t know. In good faith there can be no middle ground.

Refusal to take a side is, in effect, taking a side. A brute fact championed by Geddy Lee. Choose.

Primitives

“She understood his character perfectly now. She understood why it was that he had so often bored her and irritated her. He was a highbrow- her deadliest word- a highbrow, to be classed with Lenin, A.J. Cook and the dirty little poets in the Montparnasse cafés.”

~George Orwell (Burmese Days)

Modernity

“The market economy is driven by the desire to consume and possess, and this is a major factor in the ecological crisis. Not giving but consuming is the operative ethic. Not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I consume, therefore I am” is the logic of late modernity. For this consumer mentality, the goal is to maximize one’s possession and use of the world’s goods. Not only things but even persons and relationships are turned into commodities. Jacques Derrida raises the question whether it is even possible to give a gift in a world determined by the principle of commodity exchange. what is called a gift is really a contract to receive something in return.”  ~Daniel Migliore

“Que’est-ce que les sciences sociales” (Je moque)

“Every society is a moral society.” ~Emile Durkheim

In Durkheim’s mountain of a work “The Division of Labor in Society,” he comes to some interesting conclusions about the various laws governing society and the typical functions that hold it all together. But for me, one of the most interesting aspects of this text lies in his methodological approach to the study of social phenomena.

“Harakiri”

In 1962, Masaki Kobayashi directed a film with the controversial practice of harakiri, or ritual suicide by disembowelment, as its primary focus. The film operates in 1630s Tokugawa Japan: a time of great social and economic change and uncertainty with repercussions not unlike those Japan experienced after the end of World War II.

“Discord is the law of all becoming”

~Heraclitus