“MAY OUR LIVES BE NO sadder than necessary.”
Tag: It.
… can’t really be named, only experienced.
Ghosts Don’t Interest Me
NOTE THE SPECIFICITY OF THE title — I didn’t say I don’t like ghosts, or that I shun their company or “disbelieve” in their “existence.” But they’re no big thing to me, any more so than the other amazing things about which I can do nothing but appreciate.
Like most people, I stand at the rim and center of diverse circles of friends: the local Jewish community, the local media community, my pirate buddies, college fiends, pagans, ol’ hippies and any number of peace officers, firefighters and clergyfolk, each of exceptional intelligence and veracity, all of whom trust their eyes and ears despite preconceptions, and whose only motivation in retelling some awfully weird goings-on was to understand their UFO sighting, religious vision, haunting, reincarnation evidence, Ouija session, telekinesis, missing time, seance, monster encounter or near-death experience. (Like I would know.) Continue reading “Ghosts Don’t Interest Me”
Pithyism #144
EVERY TYRANNY IS DESIGNED TO separate us from who we really are — and thus from each other.
Biblical Note: No Idiots Need Apply
IT HAS COME TO THE attention of Metaphorager.Net that certain hatebrained wink-and-gigglers are selectively quoting vv. 8-9 of Psalm 109 to express their disdain for the President With The Suspicious Middle Name (simply paraphrased, they’re calling for his death). While I’m not one to upset the otherwise noble Lower North American art of president-disdaining, I really hate to see some of my favorite books hijacked by idiots. So it appeals to the Cosmic Jokester in me to discover that Psalm 109’s second and third verses say this (in the Artscroll translation):
2. For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful have opened against me, they have spoken to me the language of falsehood,
3. And with words of hatred they have encircled me, and attacked me without cause.
(“God?” Please. Save us from those who think they know You. The rest of us are tiring of the irony.)
The Shape Of Time
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER THAN I am now, I used to think Time was arranged in neat little blocks as on the calendar. The “bottom of the month” felt like the bottom of the month, and I delighted in each month’s miraculous invert midnight flip; individual weeks swayed as a rope bridge over sequential chasms whose walls were the weekends.
A ghost of that image still brushes my mind whenever I think about calendars, specifically my “place” “on” them. But Time no longer seems to come in boxes; instead it flows away from everything I see: Continue reading “The Shape Of Time”
On The Road To Karlin
THIS TALE COMES FROM LOUIS Newman’s 1963 “Hasidic Anthology,” a thick collection of stories, teachings and parables of the Hasidim, which is Hebrew for “pietist” but in this context refers to the 18th century Jewish ecstatics whose infectious enthusiasm rang through Eastern Europe to echo today; for example, in the following story: where a Hasid, or seeker-after-God, encounters a Rav, or rabbinic judge, on the way to finding the True Rabbi, or teacher, who in this particular case and for this particular seeker resided in the Belarusian town of Karlin. May we all find the True Rabbi, wherever we look.
A Hasid was on his way to visit the Karliner Rabbi. A Rav met him, and said: “Cannot you find a Rabbi nearer than Karlin?”
“No, I cannot,” answered the Hasid. “I read the thoughts of all the Rabbis, and I find them to be spurious.”
“If you read thoughts,” said the Rav, “then tell me what I am thinking now.”
“You are thinking of God,” answered the Hasid.
“No, your guess is incorrect; I am not thinking of God.”
“There you have it,” remarked the Hasid. “You yourself have stated the reason why I must go to Karlin.”
Pithyism #69
EVERYTHING IS INEVITABLE — BUT ONLY in hindsight. (This is the truth half-known by determinists and freewillians, and fully by those oracles of the more honest sort. You know who you are.)
Being Here, Doing This
THE GUY IN THE BACK seat of Cash Cab
is heavily into the Neo-Beat Chic
(hip snap-gnosis, deprecate gesture):
Shirt buttoned horn rimmed open face serious sandwich,
And I guarantee he’s wearing
although I can’t see them
scuffed brown oxfords.
O my tribe, my freakish tribe;
freaks and smarters, lovers and waders;
It seems sometimes we’ve been us all:
timorous t-shirt wearer
ardent bandplayer
elder statesman
louder advocate
interoutcast
audient
spotlighter
extra.
And I know this, him, us, the shoes, all and none, because:
Mine are in the bottom of the closet,
road-kissed soles of a tale that’s its own telling
ready and waiting
and definitely
on the bus.
Everything I Know About God:
Fists Against The Posts
One kept thinking there had to be another way of looking at it, of really seeing *I*T*, and kept lamenting that particular brand of consciousness so limited in terms of time, space and perception. Oh, to soar as a school of fish — to feel the sea passing between its thousand fins now this way, now that. Or a yearning of swans — the intertwined indefinity of wings passing air down along the silent wind for others to grasp and master; Or roots pushing deep into moisture-thick earth, hardness yielding to an infinitely subtle softness; or to cry with the million-voiced dawn, not as birds but their urgeful chirping and its solid unyielding core: ball of life whirling through sunbound courses to push and dive and collide and bend around and back on itself again — and to know the immediate, im-mediated, proxyless and inviolate NOW of all and none of these NOW: … instead of one of six billion desperate afterimages, held in fading fingers as proof.
Pithyism #0
GOD BELONGS ONLY TO GOD; religion belongs only to humanity; humanity belongs together.
Pithyism #9
