skyscrapers rise & fall storms hit & wither waves crash & recede nature neither blesses nor curses, despite the constant counting of its boons & banes; its bonanzas & broken bones one who can feel grateful in the face of ignorance & imperfection is free one who feels suffering in the absence of perfect comfort will never know freedom such a one as that imprisons himself in a cycle of imagining & coveting a perfection that has never existed
It's like sticking one's head out the window of the southbound night train. A rushing thunder fills the ears -- almost deafening -- and that's before the passing northbound train shears past, letting wail the whistle in one long blow. And (now) one is deaf, but the cyclone eddies shake one's flesh & rattle through one's bones so hard that one can whole body hear: one's entire skeleton vibrating like those tiny inner ear bones. It was dark before the scintillant streams of strobing light burned a void into one's picture place. There's no smelling a thing in that crossfire hurricane, but one can taste big gulps of train exhaust -- exhaust with a cotton candy consistency but foul tasting to the last bite. And then it is quiet and dark and peaceful, and it's not clear whether one is alive or dead, and it's not clear whether one cares whether one is alive or dead.
They were written into the lives of ancients, written into the oldest stories, carved into cave & temple, alike. These beasts terrorized and defended -- sometimes both at the same time. Towering stacks of hours were lost to the beastly crunch of their teeth. Early peoples tried feeding bleating creatures to these intermediate beasts -- these watchable monsters: one's too scary to chase, but too still to run from. But they were as relentless in their non-hunger as they were in inspiring long chains of possibility.
Diamondless Diamonds? Sounds like Daoist doublespeak or a crazy Zen koan. But, it's that which has imaginary value, but not real value. Much of what human hands reach for or produce (& which human minds obsess upon) are diamondless diamonds. People stare at them with covetous eyes, but when those eyes saccade away there's no reason to believe the diamondless diamond still exists. Eyes covet what the mind knows to have no particular worth. Diamondless Diamonds may change the world for moments at a time, but then are gone - and instantly forgotten.
I am a witness for a self-aware world, a world that's not just chunks of matter, but an organism that dances matter into an entity that can know. It can know truth and fiction and the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth. It turns order into disorder, but with knowledge salad on the side. I'm a compartmentalized agent of a super-organism that is beyond my capacity to understand or speculate the purpose of. I am a lonely witness.
I stand before a horseshoe canyon, and it feels like the world has folded back upon itself. And I sort of like that idea. There's too much emphasis on progress, so maybe we need pockets of regress. Not a full fusion blast of regression. No one's calling for being battered back to the stone age. Maybe, it'd just be nice to escape the clarity of the watercourse way. To be in the kind of place where one has to drop a leaf to know which way the waters flow.
servo-whine striding, yet silent in stillness, mechanical creatures roam the plains: pack hunting with skill but without purpose. it's the only thing they know.
Looking out the car's rear window, I saw a strange and alien sky, and wondered where I was, and whether I was still somewhere that I would - elsewise - recognize, and - if not - whether I could get back, and whether I would want to go back. I saw a strange and alien sky, and did not look to see the ground.
the acrid smell of burnt gun-smoke dulls in the mind, but not in the air the brain tires of smelling it, and so it fades, but it has nowhere to go -- not in this violent place of dead & heavy air
Emerson said, "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." REM said, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" Will Kenneth's waves propagate down the line? If so, would they add to, or cancel out, the waves of others? That depends on the frequency, Kenneth! I guess that's why Michael Stipe took such an impassioned interest in the question. Is it even a good thing if one's waves add to those of another? Might it not become disharmonious, like a runaway washing machine, shaking violently, parts flying through the air in smooth ballistic arcs only to bounce and clatter in dull discordance. Does one's iron string even need to come into contact with Kenneth's? Might not the wave energy passing through the air stir up a resonance in one's bones? Questions, such as these, haunt me -- not to mention: Who, exactly, is Kenneth?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 