A Song of Contradiction

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Excellence as Meaning

"True excellence is majestic.  It lifts us up high, where only superlatives exist.  Excellence doesn't wait; excellence requires.  In the sharing and transmission of this excellence, our souls are irresistibly animated."

- Thierry Fisher

Sister Ship

"It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real. A ship’s engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew’s magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we diving; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands."

-Tomas Transtromer, The Blue House (translated by Goran Malmqvist)

How to Live Happily Ever After?

"It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life."

-Alan Ball, American Beauty

Meditation on the Unattainable

Julie:  Simon, you cut the watermelon because you're the expert on watermelon cutting.
Simon:  Yeah, I'm the quote unquote expert (using air quotes for emphasis).
Julie:  Well, Simon! No one is perfect in the beginning.  You're learning.
Wallace:  Yeah, but no one is perfect in the end, either.

For Those Who Need to Save the World (or the World Saved), a Perspective

MOYERS:  In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

CAMPBELL:  But in doing that, you save the world.  The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there's no doubt about it.  The world without spirit is a wasteland.  People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top and so forth.  No, no!  Any world is a valid world if it's alive.  The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive  yourself.

MOYERS:  When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?

CAMPBELL:  If you have someone who can help you, that's fine too.  But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself.  Psychologically, the dragon is one's own binding of oneself to one's ego.  We're captured in our own dragon cage.  The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships.  The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

MOYERS:  What's my ego?

CAMPBELL:  What you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to.  It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down.  And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you're certainly going to be nailed down.  Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself.  . . .

-Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth 

Randomized Controlled Trials, Anyone?

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life.  I don't think that's what we're really seeking.  I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.  That's what it's all finally about."

-Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Surprise

"The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack."

-William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Choice or Inevitability?

Office in a Small City
Edward Hopper (1953)

"So much wanting.  So much longing.  And so much pain, so close to the surface, only minutes deep.  Destiny pain.  Existence pain.  Pain that is always there, whirring continuously just beneath the membrane of life.  Pain that is all too easily accessible.  Many things --a simple group exercise, a few minutes of deep reflection, a work of art, a sermon, a personal crisis, a loss --remind us that our deepest wants can never be fulfilled:  our wants for youth, for a halt to aging, for the return of vanished ones, for eternal love, protection, significance, for immortality itself."

-Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner


Write On

"The human being is a most curious creature.  He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens."

-D.H. Lawrence

One Way, a Possibility




Cuirassier Armor, Italian, ca. 1610-1630
Metropolitan Museum of Art

"The construction and build of this armor are typical of a cuirassier's harness, a type developed toward the end of the sixteenth century in response to the growing use and efficiency of firearms. The advent of firearms caused armorers to increase the thickness and weight of plates and to supplement them with separate reinforcing plates. Before an armor of this type was finished, it was fired at with a pistol or musket to test its effectiveness against bullets, and the bullet dents were left as a guarantee of the strength and quality of its steel.  . . . The armor’s weight, its reinforcing plates, and the deep “proof marks” provide a vivid reminder of the constant struggle to adapt armor to changes in tactics and weaponry as well as fashion."

Oh Mon Dieu!

"I have just related the story of a missed vocation:  I needed God, He was given to me, I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him.  Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while, then He died.  Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the easy amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle:  'Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us.'"

-Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

Narrative

Voyager

I have become an orchid
washed in on the salt beach.
Memory,
what can I make of it now
that might please you --
this life, already wasted
and still strewn with miracles?

-Mary Ruefle


I Want More Life, F**ker

"The bioengineered replicant Roy Batty to his creator, Tyrell, in Blade Runner, a moment before Roy crushes Tyrell's skull, drives his thumbs into Tyrell's eyes:  I want more life, fucker."

-Lance Olsen, Lessness