Exclusively needing religion to be “good” is a betrayal to nature. Religion can be so much more than a tool to be “good” in the narrowest sense. Art, beauty, and science, now these are religious. Religion is not the purview of frightened clerics, it is the universal spark that animates life itself, bewilderment, amazement, light, and the magical. Mutating the religious into only norms is the death of it; norms are only the elemental step, and to make them the apex is criminal to the potential of the human spirit. There’s quite little need to speak about the “religious,” what had to be said has mostly been said, what remains is the easiness, the flowing, the river like action of the religious that is left, haranguing people about it, making them sit down to “remind” them is mostly an impulse of the ego, to “impart” knowledge may be exhibited as virtue but more often than not it is an industry of doom. This sort of religion has hamstrung society, a sort of severe arrested development, with no relation to the modern sense of “development,” but rather a more primal one.
Of suffering, there remains many a kind. Yet, ultimately, when logic or casuistry, or both, end, the only split, the dividing line so to speak, in material experience remains the state of health or sickness. Religionists or others may speak to other forms of intangible maladies of the soul or else, but phenomenological experience reaches its boundary of reality in the viscerality of pain.
The magnitude of the tragedy is decided by the psyche. It is thoroughly subjective on the singular phenomenological level. Objective analyses assume a wrongful conformity of perception.
For a man, sons or daughters often represent a perpendicularity of aspirations, never quite meeting even if the desire for that intersection remains, for that equity. The daughter whose love is supremely unconditional to the father is the object of redemption, of a love not predicated on any productive value. The son is frequently a referent towards mimetic potential, meaning a vessel, a being, in which the father, rather anxiously, sees himself projected in future time. As such, the son faces the brunt of being burdened with remediating the father’s misfortunes, failures, abdications, of bringing to fruition a desire of an egotistical triumph over material existence. What is lost in this architecture of familial ties is hard to ever know fully. The son is the patriarch reproduced, without volition, a savior for dreams yet unfolded. What is the daughter? A savior too, but from another self-construed prison of the father, she is the sunlight to a perception otherwise blotted out with whimsy.
Shamelessness within the norms of shamefulness is radical.
A defeated people, and will remain so for the foreseeable time. Lack of dignity, excellence, glory.
May they not have met the conditions of your love, Lord, to say that you are bound by conditions would be wholly disgraceful. And I know I cannot meet those conditions in that state you have bound me to. So, love her as the anguish is too great otherwise. “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”
The French army routing a band of undisciplined Mamluks in Egypt — is that because the latter’s beliefs were not in order? Preposterous. Even if that may have been the case, who is man to pontificate or adjudicate about it? To attempt to do God’s work is in itself grounds for defeat. The only task would have been to excel, materially, tangibly, solid, something they could not do.
The most decolonial act is to have a functioning society.
The time to think has been over for a long while. Action is the only proper mode of living now.
And I would not have granted you my kingdom if I had not burned you, you would have never, on your own accord, come to me with your full heart and soul.
You’re not where I wanted you to be, so I chose this for you, so you are where you need to be.
Historically, most “old money” is also dubious.
Once a man said that he could not bear the stench of another man and cursed it in his head, until it came to him that he, too, had been lying to die, rotting away — a wave of compassion then overcame his heart.
And the pain ceased, not because it did not hurt anymore, but because the capacity to feel it had extinguished itself.
Bravery from us, patronizing tears from you.
Traumatic suffering radically alters the constitution of the self, the elemental blocks upholding the self have to reorganize to stitch the gaping wounds, a new man is produced and the past is sequestered away as an entity alien to the present condition.
Trust no one but God, not even your mother, for she may love you but may yet cause harm to you. As for God, He does not harm for if you get harmed you will merely say that the fault was your own, or that the harm is gain in some way not yet revealed.
And it will be decades before these crimes are recognized, and by then the harm would have already occurred.
Very little gained from critiques of things not malevolent; they breed attitudes of contempt not commensurate with faith and goodness.
Constant self-flagellation is not respectful to memory, even if out of love. There is no other choice than hope, logically, spiritually, intuitively.
Of course, things can be developed indefinitely, but you must stop at some point.
Forced to feel religious experience.
All loss can be lived through; the mind will always find an architecture of belief to compartmentalize it, be it death even.
Destroy a society, let thy children study said destroyed society, extracting cultural artefacts, be it art or poems, then uphold your discoveries as definitive understandings of said societies, teach these findings of yours to the sons of the destroyed natives, and when native sons try to break away from the norms you create, you let them know their place, and best if it is other sons of the native that do your bidding, marry into them too if need be, always reminding them their pasts are made by you and that they have no presents until the presents become fossilized pasts
Enjoy your sandwich.
What cannot be wished away, it must end on its own.
Grace is dead, the minds are shattered, technologies of evil.
So self-conscious that no self-consciousness.
The anatomy of fear: terrror-stricken blood, passed down generations.
Often what is impressive is mostly grace and fortune.
What is prison? Any state of perceived constriction. Time dies in prison. More precisely, it loses meaning. Time becomes undressed of its social bearings. It is the theft of time. Then, what is freedom after prison? It is the realization that there is still life left to live. As soon as that is grasped, there is possibility again, but first there is great instability. Kierkegaard, albeit slightly differently, speaks about anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” Here, leaving prison creates a fundamental dilemma in one’s mind: to live as before imprisonment or to live as a new man. Now, any reasonable man would determine that it would be folly to live as before, but what exactly is he supposed to transmute into? What kind of man? It is not a simple question at all. At first, he would crave to return to his habits of mind and action before he was taken prisoner. It is not unnatural to desire a return to the “pure” before. However, the problem that faces him is that he is not who he was and cannot occupy his old being. Then, moving into this new life of his has to be dizzying.
Asking for the civilian to be supreme, but not demanding neither ensuring his excellence is just infinite regress.
Act with radical and absolute free will and accept your destiny.
Beauty can come from evil, and ugliness from piety, but only as outcomes, not as intentions.
Medical centralization wrecks man — an instrument of control, domination, and desecration of human totality, incompetency masked by veneers of authority, almost satanic — an ethics of care lost to greed and vanity, one may believe animals to be domesticated, but we forget we may be, too. And in new times, the profession of the physician is prone to excess corruption, and this is because certain trades require the highest degree of ethical attention. However, such attention is most readily debased by financial considerations and an inordinate fixation on vocation rather than duty. The old philosophers in the Perso-Greek vein often used the figure of the physician as an ideal surrogate for the just ruler, precisely because the ideal ruler like the good physician reduces harm, but now, they are more akin to car-dealers.
There were good reasons why the physicians were also philosophers in the olden time: carving the body was the not the province of unwise technicians but rather often a holy applied philosophical activity.
For Theodoros: Oh to wish that you made it, dear friend. You were meant to do such amazing, such brilliant things. The light in your eyes, always so curious like a child, with those absurd button-downs. What could contain your unending spirit? Your time had just come, what else could be done? What is left of you when nothing that looks like you remains, to hold and cherish — you were so scared that you thought you were not yourself anymore, but you were always you, and I feel sorry that we could not make you believe that, it is only but hope that may find that home of yours now, near the trees, cliffs, and the ocean that you always imagined, with your friends by the meadow — we could not go there with you, and that is a tragedy, so what is left behind when you took all love in your flight? You were there, absolute in presence, resolute in perception, but what now? What may be the conclusion if our lives are just fragments of an attention that you made pure, and sometimes is it not that we may put ourselves back together, force ourselves back into shape, the master can but who can claim to be able to ask for that, a good spirit you had, remarkable how you could be equally happy and grieved at the same moment. Through eyes different than your own, if you saw yourself, maybe you could start to believe the joy you brought us was real and solid, material, and yet you never allowed yourself the joy of being visible. So, be well now, go across, my albatross.
The piano, its harmony across the breeze; Vincent’s greens and blues: the ocean and the cliff; a boat sailing away in the distance, gentle.
Critiques of colonialism have reached an impasse. What is on offer is best left unsought. Repetition of trite points makes any study immediately unhelpful. Critique requires a certain energy that cannot be simply conjured from one’s library. Thought has exhausted itself and it cannot just emerge from a mind that has not lived through the change that it wants to bring. The restoration has not come yet because the hearts are not yet pure, free from envy. It will come but the alchemy needs to be correct. The alignment needs precision, heart, love, and care, not desire, coveting, or tartuffery.
Strands of hair started to gray at speed. It was not the natural and gentle unfolding of age. It was the weight of death, imprisonment, and torture.
“Right side of history” is an asinine way of moral reasoning. It unjustifiably accords “history” the final adjudication on the limits of imagination; it’s an emaciated perception of History that resembles a dead reservoir of precedents and examples, one that only passes judgment on criminality ex post facto. If, as N warns, history is devoid of a “higher force,” a “life-giving influence,” it only serves to diminish human capacity for its highest imaginable possibilities.
Profits end time.
Eschatological view: pessimistic futures, hopeful ends.
What to work towards? Inertia? Progressing into death, destruction, and folly. The smoke, the tide, the flood. That is the natural undoing. Then there is the totalitarianism of technology — complete decimation of the psyche, slow and sinister, boiling frog; gradual relinquishing of sovereignty, theft of time. Yet, yet! God speaks through it all, in control always.
The “old world” was probably better in some ways, more primal, but there is always a way back to such a world, because it is neither old nor new, it is just there, hidden, covered by time. Go sit on a mountain top, you will very quickly feel the so-called “old world.”
Have hope in the miracle. If not now, then after death. If the pain does not subside now, and if it feels a journey across a dark shoreless sea, that too is okay. Think of your passing not as a divide between life and death, but rather a bridge between unequal levels of perception, wherein there is little need to be scared. Like the pain you felt, the mercy of your Lord is equally unending and overwhelming. We know not what minute act, thought, aspiration would tilt the scales and allow for a meeting with the assembly of the best of men, and with our Lord, and then you would say that you never suffered.