"... matches struck unexpectedly in the dark,"

126 - galley. Life as effort. Everyone else appears less principled.
378 - ocean liner. Life as strength. Everyone else appears smaller.
459 - sailboat. Life as reverie. Everyone else appears more capable.

compliant fix - internal whip
aggro fix - internal motor
withdrawn fix - giving way to subconscious currents

Rochambeau:
galley beats sailboat. The punitive streak turns outward, but the aggro remains unscathed while the withdrawn pays for worldly neglect.
liner beats galley. The aggro secures dominion even though the compliant works just as hard.
sailboat beats liner. The unrestrained ego collapses on itself, and the withdrawn has the last word. Like Shelley looking over the remains of the statue of Ozymandias.

The impulse to suicide is two-headed--
a face of Death, ugly but certain,
and a face of Rebirth, veiled,
like a mirage reflecting promise past
that may well vanish on arrival,
yet begs possession enough
to hesitate.

Two heads yet one creature,
for death's inverse is not life
but that animal with a single head,
Surrender.
And the suicidal do not surrender,
or at least they make of it
a butcher's triumph.

To leap,
to bare neck to guillotine of chance, and know;
or to pick at the mouth of the abyss
and know neither living nor dying?

"Horrifying? There is no real horror in imaginings; only thrill, escape, hope, salvation even. Reality is the only horror; or rather, the reality that imagination has deserted, and left raw as flayed flesh."

"Hell waits past heaven's door. The pit beyond the glimpse. Where embryos of things angelic grow into things demonic."

"God, give me blues enough to make me want to sing but not so much that I cannot."

"Hope is the destroyer of all regret. There needs be nothing to regret. There is nothing worth regretting. But we are lacking in hope so we regret."

"All bad things pass, thankfully. All good things pass, unfortunately. Life maintains a constant average of mediocrity infused with a lust for the exceptional, sometimes destined to become the new mediocrity but often lost."

"Resignation seems the appropriate response to the impermanence of everything, but makes for poor living. Good living requires a turning away from Mortality, or one just withers away."

"How many of the brightest works come of drowning's surfacings? And how many of the darkest of contentment's stumblings? How much can be told of our creatives, if all seen of them are from times they escape themselves?"

"The aim of doing with effort should always be to do effortlessly; to marry conscious will to unconscious resonance and thereby make the doing meaningful. Rather than dismiss such collusions as happy accidents, better to realize they validate the act and keep a hand out for their receiving. No accidents, only godsends."

"Imagine and you shall create."

"A work of art can be only as rich as the life that perceives it."

"Suffer for art? I say I suffer without it. Art is the sublimation of everyday suffering. In this sense we are all artists, always sublimating, even if only in conversation, even if only as patrons to 'real' artists. We need it to carry on."

"There is always condescension in the words of prodigals who make lessons of their lives: 'I have sinned so you don't have to, I have suffered so you don't have to'--and the worst--'I have had great joys, and I have lived, so you don't have to.' Some they may save, but still they reap of their mark of experience while denouncing the very experiences that made them."

"No one who is loved should feel ugly. The homeliest peasant who is loved is redeemed beyond the most beautiful aristocrat who is not. Yet we often feel ugly even when loved, for love is as hard to receive as it is to give."

That perceived, and with sincerity
burned through crust of leprosy;
    all came of your look.

That cast to ether a lifetime's dust
and claimed for me a kingdom lost;
    all came of your speech.

That drew a light from my cold eyes
and filled with Will my goblet dry;
    all came of your touch.

Past my woe yet before my bliss,
your last slight offering, that parting kiss
I wrap around Eternity.

Strained through yearning, my gratitude
that Solitude remains my wife and you
are the mistress who makes her beautiful.

The Devil is patient, more patient than God, so content
to shadow till he is forgotten, for he needs but that instant
to sling his fistful of Mortality and other of Despair,
to unmend every ministration of God's loving medicine men,
and send his prey whirling toward his great pit of annihilation.

"Newness and resonance are found below the ground, in the caves, in the shadows, among lepers, among whisperers. Slowly do they seep up to the land of normality and bustle and light, often to be mangled, diluted and lost. But still they find their way into other undergrounds thirsting for their restoring and reimagining. And on and on it goes.”

"The clouds have cleared! The decay is suspended, the bile has settled. My blood runs warmer and my senses are clearer, as are my thoughts. I am ready to receive. I am ready to work. I have no more need to cower. But what exactly should I do?"

“The only thing harder than having nothing to live up to is having something to.”

“Quality of life depends on how well one can stay awake, usually dependent on how well one can rest but never a guarantee of it.”

"Welcome the moments your illusions are destroyed. If you persevere to the end of a thousand such crushings you will find your citadel, a glorious new reality."

"Try to make sense of things in terms figurative before you accept them in terms literal. You might be reading poetry, and it is one of the ugliest things for the lyrics of a poet to turn into the ravings of a preacher."

"Bitterness without anger is the one feeling that cannot be redeemed. It is wasted pain, always, and the stealthiest of destroyers. Anything else can be turned into poetry."

"Good to write with anger. Rarely good to write when angry."

“Unrequited love is the supreme failure of expression--the poetry in you, beading off your desired as mere desperation, if seen at all. And that irony of poets such known, winning the hearts of many but never their desired, such small consolation."

"You do not need a mother or a father. You can be both mother and father to yourself. You do not need a mate. You can be a mate to yourself. You do not need a child. And if, learning this, you do find a worthy parent or partner or child you will be able to care with an abandon like never before, because your ability to love will no longer be tainted by your need for love."

"Poetry is dead. Philosophy is dead. Language is dying. Wisdom and meaning are wilting away. Virtuosity is dying. Innovation is dying. Originality is dead. The Renaissance man is dead. Artistry and mastery are wilting away. Culture is wilting away. Science still plods on. Welcome to the land of the zombie electric."

"You know you’ve found your sanctuary when you look outside your mind, your mate, your friends, your work, and you think, ‘Wow. The world is bizarre. I had forgotten.’" 

"The secret to appearing wise is being able to appear like one has lived more than one really has. Most philosophers live in cages. This may be why centuries of wisdom have only taught us how to live better alone and not live better together. Or maybe this is simply the best humanity can hope for, a cage for every kind of person, to curtail the bloodshed."

"The common do not enjoy the best of anything. Rather, they enjoy compromises of everything. Save your jealousy for the few whose joys would meet your own standards."

“Don’t console the one who cries, console the one who can’t.”

Crit away. Haven't done this in forever.

I dance, constantly. I do not dance alone,
but with a creature I have fashioned
of the documents of my existence I have
culled, magnified, garnished to my liking.

In these, every moment that made me
reconsider all that had happened before.
Every face that I must keep alive,
even though they mostly no longer alight
in remembrance of me. Every hope
that survived repeated questioning and failure.
In these are all that made me.

I have stitched them together with a
homeostatic thread of ideas and art and dreams
and conversation and deeds and infatuations,
into the form of a woman
I have never needed to name, and all the better,
for the things that need naming
are those that need compromising,
and the woman I dance with
cannot be a compromise.

The process has left me too myopic
to judge my work in sum,
but I have used all I could,
and I trust she is an acceptable
effigy, and can tell she is not without
her polychromatic charms.

Awake or asleep, we must dance,
through pain and weariness, we must dance,
for the closer we are to coda
the closer we are to her annihilation.
If only this were known
it would not be called easy--but when it is,
I see only skin and I feel only flesh and then
even Reality retreats in reverence.

And of the passers-by who stop
outside this theater of my mind,
where the doors are locked and the lights are bright,
I wonder: which of their thoughts rings truer to me?
Am I miserable, for I seem so alone,
and pitiful, for I seem so limited?
Or am I happy, because I am dancing?

"The artist is a disappointment in light of his art, the thinker a disappointment in light of his thoughts--people are disappointments in light of their good. But if it is understood that it is not our task to be great but to bear witness to greatness, we can accept ourselves for who we are."

"Every contented face is in love with the lie. The lie of plenty, the lie of adequacy, the lie of immortality. Every dour face is hurting at the truth. Yet one is no better than the other. It is the lie that makes all things possible. It is the truth that makes us human. The best of us can wear both faces at once."

"Use the word love too lightly and you will be at a loss for words when you are truly moved."

"Newton’s first law is one of my greatest sources of hope."

"I have little interest in readers. I have some interest in writers. I have tremendous interest in thinkers. Better to think than write. Better to write than read."

"If poems could be fully explained in prose, they would’ve been written as prose."

"More often than not, the pleasures of the flesh are escapes from the more pressing matters of the self. A truly alive spirit does not flee to the flesh, but welcomes it in, into communion with the mind and heart."

"The only things worth doing are those we desire to do as strongly as we doubt we can. Seek the seemingly impossible. Whether you perish or succeed is irrelevant.”

"With my left hand I pen words of Love. With my right I pen words of Truth. My right is tremulous but I will it to work its best for without it I cannot see God."

"Live in the optimism of the light, and in the truth of the dark. Reject the denial of the light, and fight the pessimism of the dark. Your life will be sublime." 

Seems to be the theme this morning.

"The self-aware man has little to fear. The further he roams, the stronger he is on his return. The man unconscious to himself always returns storm-tossed, confused and full of regret."

"About all things that do not threaten my survival, I have learned this: Better to starve than compromise. But also, better to keep hope alive and to try than not.”

"There is nothing you were that you could not become again, if you still have your health and some time to yourself. I speak here of states of being, not the externals that can be lost forever but need not be missed. And if you are unhappy with all you are and all you were, know there is a better way waiting for the unearthing."

"Only the worst of sufferers can hope to become the best of healers."

"If my deeds can sustain another, even if they cannot myself, I will not have lived in vain. And if my words can soothe another, even if they cannot myself, I will not have lived in vain."

... from the past couple days.


"People dismiss the absurdities of life, not realizing how close they are to the truth. The further you are from the absurdity, the further you are from the truth."

"Dreams never lie. To the civilized man, they are the only naked truth. They reveal in full all that is denied and reasoned away in waking life. Those who do not dream, those who dream only good dreams or bad dreams, and those who are not thrilled, shocked and embarrassed by their dreams, cannot be fully alive to themselves."

"One of the harder things to unlearn is the impulse to elaborate on and obscure our realizations and impressions of things, without first feeling for the root. For all that is usually left this way are elaborations upon elaborations that stray too far from the spirit; eloquent nonsense. Better first to distill until one is struck by the raw feeling, discovers the simple law that governs the complex. On this anything can be built. It is the difference between trying to make sense of the world as it is being traveled, and tasting the rock to know the galaxy."

"People make too much of ‘living.’ I say life can be engaged as completely as an observer as it can a participant, and it is up to each to know his design and commit to a way that honors it. When the observer commits, his despair at not being a creature of ‘living’ ceases to be. He becomes the bird flying over the livelocked land, over the raging sea, towards the rising sun. This is as he is meant to be, and no one any longer thinks to disagree."

"Nothing can be significant that doesn’t risk ridicule.”