Tag Archives: Philosophy

Auguries of Innocence by William Blake [w/ Audio]

Posted on by
1 
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
 And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
 Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
 And Eternity in an hour
 A Robin Red breast in a Cage
 Puts all Heaven in a Rage
 A Dove house fill'd with Doves & Pigeons
 Shudders Hell thr' all its regions
 A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
 Predicts the ruin of the State
 A Horse misused upon the Road
 Calls to Heaven for Human Blood
 Each outcry of the hunted Hare
 A fibre from the Brain does tear
 A Skylark wounded in the wing
 A Cherubim does cease to sing
 The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight
 Does the Rising Sun affright
 Every Wolfs & Lions howl 
 Raises from Hell a Human Soul
 The wild deer, wandering here & there
 Keeps the Human Soul from Care
 The Lamb misused breed Public Strife
 And yet forgives the Butchers knife
 The Bat that flits at close of Eve
 Has left the Brain that wont Believe
 The Owl that calls upon the Night
 Speaks the Unbelievers fright
 He who shall hurt the little Wren
 Shall never be beloved by Men
 He who the Ox to wrath is movd
 Shall never be by Woman lovd
 The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
 Shall feel the Spiders enmity
 He who torments the Chafers Sprite
 Weaves a Bower in endless Night
 The Catterpiller on the Leaf
 Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief 
 Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly
 For the Last Judgment draweth nigh
 He who shall train the Horse to War
 Shall never pass the Polar Bar
 The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat
 Feed them & thou wilt grow fat
 The Gnat that sings his Summers Song
 Poison gets from Slanders tongue
 The poison of the Snake & Newt 
 Is the sweat of Envys Foot
 The poison of the Honey Bee
 Is the Artists Jealousy
 The Princes Robes and Beggars Rags
 Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags
 The Truth that's told with bad intent
 Beats all the Lies you can invent
 It is right it should be so
 Man was made for Joy & Woe
 And when this we rightly know
 Thro the World we safely go
 Joy & Woe are woven fine
 A Clothing for the soul divine
 Under every grief & pine
 Runs a joy with silken twine
 The Babe is more than swadling Bands
 Throughout all these Human Lands
 Tools were made & Born were hands
 Every Farmer Understands
 Every Tear from Every Eye
 Becomes a Babe in Eternity
 This is caught by Females bright
 And returnd to its own delight
 The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar
 Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore
 The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath
 Writes Revenge in realms of Death
 The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air
 Does to Rags the Heavens tear
 The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun
 Palsied strikes the Summers Sun
 The poor Mans Farthing is worth more
 Than all the Gold on Africs Shore
 One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands
 Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands
 Or if protected from on high
 Does that whole Nation sell & buy
 He who mocks the Infants Faith
 Shall be mocked in Age & Death
 He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
 The rotting grave shall ne er get out
 He who respects the Infants faith
 Triumphs over Hell & Death
 The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons
 Are the Fruits of the Two seasons
 The Questioner who sits so sly
 Shall never know how to reply
 He who replies to words of Doubt
 Doth put the Light of Knowledge out
 The Strongest Poison ever known
 Came from Caesars Laurel Crown
 Nought can Deform the Human Race
 Like to the Armours iron brace
 When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow
 To peaceful Arts shall Envy bow
 A Riddle or the Crickets Cry
 Is to Doubt a fit Reply
 The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile
 Make Lame Philosophy to smile
 He who Doubts from what he sees
 Will ne er Believe do what you Please
 If the Sun & Moon should Doubt
 Theyd immediately Go out
 To be in a Passion you Good may do
 But no Good if a Passion is in you
 The Whore & Gambler by the State
 Licencd build that Nations Fate
 The Harlots cry from Street to Street
 Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet
 The Winner Shout the Losers Curse
 Dance before dead Englands Hearse
 Every Night & every Morn
 Some to Misery are Born
 Every Morn & every Night
 Some are Born to sweet delight
 Some are Born to sweet delight
 Some are Born to Endless Night
 We are led to Believe a Lie
 When we see not Thro the Eye
 Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
 When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
 God Appears & God is Light
 To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
 But does a Human Form Display
 To those who Dwell in Realms of Day

Five Wise Lines from In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Posted on by
Reply

Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

But our thoughts do not travel to what we cannot see. The unseen for us does not exist.

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.

I wonder if my readers know the color of that ‘darkness seen by candlelight.’ It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fire ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of light and shadow.

BOOKS: In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Posted on by
1
In Praise of ShadowsIn Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

Tanizaki’s essay on Japanese aesthetics doesn’t just show the reader the simple, rustic, and weathered traits of Japanese beauty, it fully submerges them in an otherworldly place ruled by different principles of seeing. So enamored with this pre-modern Japanese aesthetic was Tanizaki that we are convinced he would give up all present-day conveniences to see the world this way (but, alas, he recognizes the impossibility of maintaining a household or business in today’s world that way.)

While the book is principally a tour of this Japanese shadow world, moving from architecture to toilets to lacquerware to Noh plays to skin tones to hotels (with other stops along the way,) it is also a critique of modernity, and particularly a modernity shaped by the West by virtue of Western countries building a lead in a number of key technologies. The most crucial of these technologies, and the one Tanizaki most decries, is electric lighting, which does away with the artistic beauty that derives from the interplay of varied toned shadows (and occasionally a little bit of light.) [I should say, he’s not bashing the Western technology or ways, but rather how poorly they work with maintaining Japanese aesthetic ways.]

I’d highly recommend this book for all readers. If you’re interested in aesthetics, art, architecture, culture, or “things Japanese,” then all the more so, but I can’t remember the last time description pulled me into a book as hard as this one. The essay can be a bit rambling and shifts from euphoria to rant and back, rapidly, but that is part of its magic.

View all my reviews

PROMPT: Favorite Place

Posted on by
2
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
View all responses

No. I try to see wherever I’m at as being as good as any other place I’ve been. And, of course, it is — only my perceptions change and can drive value judgements. The places and the peoples are just different. If one starts ranking and rating places, one can kill the ability to see what is beautiful and spectacular about a particular place. If a place didn’t have redeeming features, people wouldn’t live there. And, by the way, if people don’t live there, that’s probably my favorite place on earth.

Crouching Tiger [Free Verse]

Posted on by
Reply 
In a square hut -
 beside a craggy pass -
  lived a Crouching Tiger,
 a man of spontaneity  
  who danced to no music, 
  staggered when sober,
  rested in times of urgency,
  & labored when there seemed
     to be nothing in need of doing.

He was courted by Emperors,
 but shunned them.
  The only way the Emperor 
     could get him to visit was
    to order his exile.

PROMPT: Meat

Posted on by
Reply

What are your feelings about eating meat?

The condensed version is, I’m fine with it. As a traveler, I try to eat mostly things locals eat. While I don’t go to great effort or expense to sample the most rare and exotic foods, I’ve eaten snake in China, croc in Zambia, horse in Kyrgyzstan, and guinea pig in Peru. Anything that regular people eat where I’m visiting is fair game. [That is part of the process of breaking down the invisible barriers between us’s and them’s so as to not enter into the interaction with a feeling of superiority because: “my arbitrary cultural conventions are better than your arbitrary cultural conventions.”]

I do believe that everyone would be better off if they were closer to [i.e. more intimately familiar with] the source of their food. I feel this of myself as well, though I did have the benefit of growing up on a small farm and seeing at close range the origins of food and how life moves on to being food. (By different mechanisms [hopefully — #SoylentGreenIsPeople,] it’s a process that I am fully aware will apply to me, as well. Ultimately, nothing living gets out of this world without being transformed through a process of being food. In my case –probably — I’ll be food to bacteria and fungi, but if I have a good run and am eaten by a tiger or wild dogs, I’d not begrudge them the meal.)

In fact, as I’ve learned more about how plants and trees live, e.g. sending warning pheromone signals to neighboring trees when under attack by insects, I’ve come to see the logic by which people determine what life is edible and what isn’t as mere species-chauvinism and anthropomorphizing. It is true that there are excellent points about the environmental benefits of some form of vegetarian diet. However, when one starts to talk to environmental vegetarians about eating insects (one of the most sustainable protein sources available, supposedly,) many will shove their fingers in their ears and sing, “La-la-La-la, I don’t want to hear this.”

BOOKS: Mad World by Slavoj Žižek

Posted on by
Reply
Mad World: War, Movies, SexMad World: War, Movies, Sex by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

Release Date: November 27, 2023 (Jan 11, 2024 in some markets)

I can see why Slavoj Žižek is one of the most successful popular philosophical authors out there today. For one thing, he deals in provocative topics straight from the headlines: politics, pop culture, war, and sex. Furthermore, like the authors of such books as Freakonomics, he picks cases that are fascinating, if inconsequential / frivolous (e.g. in the case of this book, the question of a proposed massive Ukrainian orgy to be carried out in response to a Russian nuclear strike.) For another thing, while philosophy tends to be nigh unreadable owing to the philosopher’s need to be defensively precise (which, in turn, leads to overuse of complex jargon and tedious qualifiers,) Žižek is quite readable owing to an ability to make clear and confident statements.

Of course, there is a downside to this confident clarity. Many a reader will find too many gratuitous statements for his or her taste. Žižek is often willing to say “clearly, x means y” about things for which there is no consensus, whatsoever. An example seen more than once in this book is in discussing what Žižek believes to be the unambiguous meaning of symbolism in artistic works. Of course, there is a name for the fallacy of believing one knows what an author or artist meant to convey, i.e. the intentional fallacy.

That said, the author provides many intriguing ways of thinking about the absurdity of the modern world. For example, to (deceased) former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s tripartite epistemological nomenclature (i.e. known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns) Žižek asks us to consider a seemingly impossible fourth sector, unknown-knowns (i.e. we don’t know the question, but we have an “answer.”) Žižek’s self-described “pessimistic realism” appeals to the reader’s sense of martyrdom even as it frustrates, by-and-large telling us that the modern world is screwed and there’s little chance of saving it.

If you’re interested in popular philosophy, this book is worth giving a read. However, if you are used to scholarly philosophy, you may find it a bit sloppy and trivial.

View all my reviews

PROMPT: Live Anywhere

Posted on by
1

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

First of all, I’d say that I probably could live most places in the world, and the few I couldn’t (e.g. North Korea) have no appeal to me as a place of residence. Having lived several places in the US, a couple years in England, and now over ten years in India, I’m under no illusions that there is a Shangri-la out there, a perfect utopia. Most places are fine places to live if one is flexible-minded and can adapt to that place’s rhythms and peculiarities. There may be a honeymoon period during which some place seems better than the rest, but even the most seemingly idyllic place will lose its luster in time.

That’s why I recommend travel. Everyplace offers beauty and life lessons when taken in bite-size pieces.

BOOKS: Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction by David Weir

Posted on by
Reply
Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction (VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS)Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction by David Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

This book examines the brief life of the Bohemian artistic lifestyle, exploring how it came about, what it looked like in its heyday, what led to its demise, and by what / whom it was replaced (e.g. the Beats.) It is an intriguing examination of the subject. I will say, there were points that I felt the book had become lost in the weeds, but at other points I found it fascinating. I concluded that my own calculus was to find it interesting when it discussed the lives and works of artists who are still deemed to have relevance and influence today (e.g. Baudelaire, Picasso, and Whitman,) and not so much when it was elaborating on artists and works that have fallen into obscurity among the general populace (e.g. Henry Murger’s Scenes of Bohemian Life.) So, that may be more a reflection on me than on the book.

The author touches upon the fictional influences that inspired Bohemianism, the places where the lifestyle thrived (e.g. Paris and New York,) the philosophy and – particularly – the political philosophy of the Bohemians (e.g. often Anarchists or – at least – anti-government.) One of the topics that most interested me is how the successor artistic communities differed from the Bohemians.

If you’re interested in who the Bohemians were and how they differ from other artistic communities (before and after,) this book is well worth the brief read required.

View all my reviews

Brahma by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted on by
Reply 
If the red slayer think he slays,
   Or if the slain think he is slain,
 They know not well the subtle ways
   I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
   Shadow and sunlight are the same;
 The vanished gods to me appear;
   And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
   When me they fly, I am the wings;
 I am the doubter and the doubt,
   I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
   And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
 But thou, meek lover of the good!
   Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.