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Shlohmo: Dark Red

What a white-hot soul-searing mindblowing roaring imploding soundscape trip this is: my head rolls right off my neck down my back and my ass by my legs and my mind drops down the hole of my depthless blackness to the red-hot heart in my chest there that then pries and rips the rim of my ribs that tight clasp that grip within so wide and so hard apart that all that quivering mess that shifting bloody bundle of high-strung tubing that are snaking a round and around and twisting and turning and quaking and baking and coiling and roiling and churning and burning and heaving and skeeting through the cage and the flesh and the bones and the skin and the walls and the shot and the shot in a soul- and heartgasmic flash: I am launched through the ’branes ‘ver-whelmed with the truth of the spur of the thrust of the one and the only mother of a moment that there is.

Kind of.

Thumbs up Shlohmo! (Not to mention your collab with Corbin on Mourn.) And thank you! Thanks for helping me decompressing once again!

Buk’s Finest Lines

One of the most touching and inspiring figures of the 20th century is a writer who is considered to be and indeed is popular for being one of the rawest and most apathetic writers of the 20th century.

Even today, still too few and not too many truly appreciate the sensitivity and delicate sensibility that he actually possessed and embodied and expressed. But this is just the way it is and has always been: the more honest and transparent a person gets, inevitably: the more others will relate to this person as they relate to life in general—which is to say: the more they’ll project their own confusions and petty frustrations onto this person.

We still have difficulty with ‘’gambling‘’ (i.e. taking chances) and contending with the truthful and the real. No wonder ‘’everybody is always angry about the truth / even though they claim to / believe in it.’’

At any rate: here are a few of the finest lines by Charles Bukowski I’ve encountered so far. In fact, I’ve put together a little collection that you can download >>here<< if you are interested in more.

and down in the water / the fish cry / and all the water / is their tears.

Christ should have laughed on the cross, / it would have petrified his killers

we must bring / our own light / to the / darkness.

the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them

the bite of reality doesn’t kill, / it only clears the mind.

We need knock nothing down. It’s time we begin picking up. saving what is left. what is worth saving.

nothing’s equal […] the balance is in the differences

if you are telling the truth it’s done without preaching

Everybody thinking that they alone know the angle. Dumb lost egos. I’m one of those.

this is the price we now pay: we can’t go / back, we can’t go forward and we hang helpless, nailed to a / world / of our own / making.

my love grows sadder, my life grows realer.

how we said / no, no, no, no, / to the most beautiful / YES / ever uttered: // life / itself.

The human race exaggerates everything: its heroes, its enemies, its importance.

each evening bent like the point of a thumb tack / that will no longer stick / in / each kiss a hope of returning to the first kiss / each fuck the same / each person nailed against diminishing / returns / we are slaves to hopes that have run to / garbage / as old age / arrives on schedule.

I don’t know why people think effort and energy / have anything to do with / creation.

look Mike, no man is / invincible / someday / you’ll be sent mad by / eyes like a child’s crayon / drawing.

she speaks of love / then breaks each man / to her will / shark-mouthed / grubby interior / we see it too late: / after the cock gets swallowed / the heart follows

Everybody imagined themselves special, privileged, exempt.

take a writer away from his typewriter / and all you have left / is / the sickness / which started him / typing / in the / beginning.

every person, I suppose, has / their eccentricities / but in an effort to be / normal / in the world’s / eye / they overcome them / and therefore / destroy their / special calling.

it / takes / a lot of // desperation // dissatisfaction // and disillusion // to / write //a / few / good / poems.

and the years move slow and the years / move fast and the years move / past.

you were / nature’s / idiot, / not proving but / being / proved. / not a man but a / plan / unfolding, / not thrusting but / being / pierced.

they become unalive / because they are unable to / pause / undo themselves / unkink / unsee / unlearn / roll clear.

People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. Your waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again.

People who solved things usually had lots of persistence and some good luck. If you persisted long enough, the good luck usually came. Most people couldn’t wait on the luck, though, so they quit.

When love burns to the ground do not be ashamed of your grief, or even your madness or bitterness.

When you go up fast, you usually come down that way.

only time poetry gets any good is when it forgets its holiness.

there is nothing to declare here, / just a waiting. / each faces it alone.

we are destroyed by expecting / more than there is

for want of something to do / we keep slaying our small dragons / as the big one waits.

lay down and wait until it charges then you / must get / up / face it get / it before it gets / you

Any time you pay somebody to tell you what to do you are going to be a loser. And this includes your psychiatrist, your psychologist, your broker, your workshop teacher and your etc. There is nothing that teaches your more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.

We move toward the mirage, our lives wasted like everybody else’s.

There are thousands of traps in life and most of us fall into many of them. The idea though, is to stay out of as many of them as possible. Doing so helps you remain as alive as you might until you die.

Most of them speak what they have been taught, not what they have learned. And what they lack most are two things: gamble and humor.

You have to know when to duck and when to swing and how to say ’’no.’’

If I’ve learned anything through the years it’s that people don’t change very much.

Even if you feel like it, even if you mean it, when you get into moralizing you are begging off. Always stay beyond good and evil, just photograph the action and leave the reader on his own.

Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I’m glad, somehow, that I threw my few words into the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.

They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from being too alive in the middle of death.

Life keeps nipping you at the balls to let you know where it’s at. It’s painful but it might be worth it. The whole scheme operates on a system of balances. Too much pain and travail can take you out too. The gods give those they favor the proper dosages.

It’s better to fail your way than to succeed their way.

It’s day by day with me and all I want to do is play it loose and free.

I always figure if a writer is bored with his work / the reader is going to be / bored too. // and I don’t believe in / perfection, I believe in keeping the / bowels loose

to endure is only / meaningful / if you come out / with / something / at the other / end. / but to endure / simply in order to / endure / is the unfortunate / plight / of millions.

seagulls / are mad angels / trying to tell us something.

don’t feel sorry for me. / I am a competent, / satisfied human being. // be sorry for the others / who / fidget / complain // who / constantly / rearrange their / lives / like / furniture. // juggling mates / and / attitudes // their / confusion is / constant // and it will / touch / whoever they / deal with. // beware of them: / one of their / key words is / ’’love.’’ // and beware those who / only take / instructions from their / God // for they have / failed completely to / live their own / lives.

magic persists with / or without us / no matter how / we may try to / destroy it

I never stop women when they / want to / leave. / I figure if they are dumb enough / to leave me / they don’t deserve / me.

the most terrible thing about life / is finding it gone.

Those constipated minds that seek / larger meaning / will be dispatched with the other / garbage. / back off. / if there is light / it will find / you.

Peter vs Harrison (D’bating for Godot)

[note: this is intended in the spirit of poking fun, and by no means intended as a representation of the actual views held by the gents invoked]

 

Sam says—Facts.

 

’dan says—Facts, my ass.

 

Sam says—It’s facts, my friend, and that is that.

 

’dan says—Listen, man, it goes deeper than facts.

 

Sam says—Deeper or not, facts shall guide our day to day acts.

 

’dan says—’cept that facts come wrapped, all set, in a pack: an always-already a priori structure, an underlying overarching metanarrative substructure: a cyberordinate cognitive OS that grounds, precedes, embeds, nay, bears, in fact, said facts.

 

Sam says—Well . . . you mean ontotheology? as in: to give the Derrid’ his due? For sure, you know better than that?

 

’day says—Yeah . . . but it’s not as simple as that. It goes much deeper than that. Let me explain what . . .

 

Sam says—But what does all that have to do with that douche up there in the celestial fluff? For Pete’s sake! Cut this dogged apologetics! Be real for a change. Take faith. Pray, do tell me: Why privilege the pest called Christian over the rest?

 

’dan says—Look, it is the foundational Western heritage: the actual bathtub under the proverbial baby’s butt—and granted, there’s some tepid bathwater in there. But hey…

 

Sams says—Why, ’dan, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The goddamn dogma. If you want to keep that baby clean and not let it spoil and downright drown in the froth of holy blood-bath, you need pure facts that distill the dreck… You dig?

 

’dan says—But could we be here together talking about all this today were it not for the narrative arc of a Covenant? This is no trivial matter at all, Sam. Not the least bit trivial. A bloody miracle, indeed.

 

Dan says—Bloody, no doubt. Sad, actually, but it no longer has to be ’true.’ We know much better than that. We now have a better grasp of the facts. We do have the choice to drop blind faith. But you get it—what I’m getting at—don’t you, ’dan?

 

Here ’dan refs Ralph—The past hast baked your loaf, and in the strengths of its bread you would break up the oven. Give a little slack, sport. It’s time to relent [almost says ’repent’] and loosen a bit your adamant stance. No shame in that. Admit it: faith is at the root of a fact.

 

Sam says—You act like you don’t get it but I know that you do get it. Faith makes sense in an evo phase of dire straits, but be it seed or seat: faith is no longer a must. Hell, we can’t afford to cling to spent dregs if we intend to transcend this bedlamite mess. If not outright jettison, then at the very least demote we must the canonical crap, and recognize it for what it actually is: dross, old-school pulp.

 

But ’dan grapples on—Unless it’s fleshed out and reified in the vivid and gripping tapestry of myth, the truth is too abstract to matter and gain traction: as disembodied facts lack the tang and the swing that renders them palatable and relatable for us—living, breathing spatio-temporal, sensori-motoric beings. There’s just no optics for an ethics without an ethos borne by a mythos. Without it, we would most surely be cast right back into the abysmal womb of the void—adrift, a flickering blip.

 

Sam counters—And yet, most of that mythos is myopic and a malignant source of noise that warps rather than enlightens the soul—naught, but a canon, actually, of what’s abject, vile and totally numb-skull about us all. We’ve been incited to act hypocritical, sanctimonious, abusive and violent; we’ve been crippled by guilt and maimed by shame for too long: We have had enough of the paralyzing buzz in the collective hive of our muddled, befuddled mind. Reason—pure consciousness is the answer: as it is clarity that enables, not enticing (and inciting) mythical fables. Get it? Mythos merely codes for myopic noise.

 

’dan says—Faith is at the root of it . . .

 

Sam says—. . . on the wings of which we launched from the swamp and soared high above the jungle, sling-shot right into the age of reason: Why, thank God for that! Still, an authentic homo ethicus flourishes in the space of pure reason, not brute credos. Now is the time we got out the muck.

 

’dan says—it’s the bathtub, Sam. Forget the bloody bathwater for a sec.

 

Sam says—Good God, man! Faith will never propel us beyond the gravitational pull of crusades and dumb creeds. To jettison is the next necessary step. We can’t make do well without the sole sovereignty of facts. Otherwise, the space of pure reason collapses into an abysmal vacuum of no good reason: where everything goes . . . to seed, in fact.

 

’dan says—Well, Sam: have your facts in order, then, and eat them too.

 

Sam says—Damn, that’s . . . baaad, Jordan. That’s just bad to say that.

 

’day says—My bad, Sam.

 

Sam says—Well, let’s leave it at that, then. Let’s call it a stale, mate.

 

’dan says—Alright, buddy. Let’s call it a stale.

 

Sam says—So long, then. Have a safe trip home, Jordan!

 

’dan says—Godspeed, Samuel!

 

A juxtaposition of cool quotes

Gertrude Stein

We are all the same age inside.

Thomas Pynchon

If they can get you to ask the wrong questions they don’t have to worry about the answers.

Don DeLillo

[Interviewer: As technology gets more advanced, our fears as a public, as a people, as human beings actually become more primitive. So, even as the world is getting ever more technologically advanced, we are becoming in many ways more sort of Cro-Magnon-like in our instincts or our reactions]

In a curious way, despite the enormous powers of technology, I think for many people it narrows the world rather than widens it. It makes facts instantly accessible, but I think as people grow into their personal technology it has the ultimate effect of creating a world that’s centered on an individual’s immediate needs, immediate desires, excluding much of what is most interesting about the lives we ought to be living. I think that whatever technology is capable of doing becomes what we desperately needed to do, and I’m not sure that’s such a hopeful situation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This tyrant in us wreaks horrible revenge for every attempt we make to dodge or escape it, for every premature resignation, for every acceptance of equality with those among whom we do not belong, for every activity, however respectable, which distracts us from our main cause—indeed, for every virtue which would protect us from the hardness of our inmost responsibility. Every time, sickness is the response, when we want to doubt our right to our task, when we begin to make things easier for ourselves in any way. It is the easing of our burden which we must atone most harshly. And if we want to return to health afterward, we have no choice: we must assume a heavier burden than we ever carried before—

[in Christ’s words: If you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.]

Robert Louis Stevenson

I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

Adyashanti

Open, closed, open, closed. And all the while the mind waits for it all to come to an end, waits for deliverance. The waiting, the cycles are the way the mind holds on to control, holds on to a control that it does not have, that it can never have.

Bare your heart open to being held captive by illusion. You are caught, endlessly caught. And you are fighting (and a clever fighter you are) against your own mind, against the illusion of being trapped in this endless game. You are trying to win the game but your trying to win is the game, as is your trying to let go.

Give your full consent to your circumstance. Resist not, grasp not, move not. Do not be frightened by hell or tempted by Heaven.

Joey Lott

 The mind is loud and hysterical and melodramatic.

 The heart is painful because it is continually broken open and bleeding.

 The mind divides.

 The heart welcomes.

Charles Bukowski

I don’t believe in perfection. I believe in keeping the bowels loose.

People who solved things usually had lots of persistence and some good luck. If you persisted long enough, the good luck usually came. Most people couldn’t wait on the luck, though, so they quit.

David Deida

Your gift is developed by applying consciousness to your (unresolved) issues.

Whatever you experience: you’re meant to experience and fully metabolize.

Tony Robbins

Prepare for volatility and turn them into opportunities.

Corrections and crashes occur with regularity but never last.

Uncertainty is no excuse for inaction.

Joe Rogan

You can write and you can get seeds but you’ve got to plant those seeds in the dirt of the crowd.

You’ve got to constantly throw shit at the wall for some of it to stick.

Schemata

Some statements lend themselves well to schematization, in that you can abstract away from their concrete reference and play with their interchangeable elements in terms of a deeper underlying sense and further inference. Let me illustrate this, first with a poem:

’’The reeds give way/ to the wind/ and give/ the wind away’’ (AR Ammons)

From this the following schema can be extracted: X gives way to Y and gives Y away—where X stands for something explicit and Y for something more implicit. For example, one’s actions give way to one’s deeper impulses and give those impulses—one’s deepest values—away. That is, the laws of the formless manifest in the land of the forms. (The inference being: Listen to what others tell you but never buy into any of the content, always pay attention to what they’re actually doing; or applied to one’s own self: Listen, but do not take much stock in a word you narrate in your head, focus on what you’re actually doing.) Or another good example could be: asking (loaded) questions give way to your tacit judgments and give those prejudiced premises away. Pretty straightforward.

Next, take the following maxim circulating on the internet:

’’Genes load the gun, the environment pulls the trigger’’

—that is: X loads the gun and Y pulls the trigger. For example: one’s attitude loads the gun and social feedback pulls the trigger, or mindset loads the gun and circumstance pulls the trigger. In other words: What we give is what we get, and vice versa. Again, pretty straightforward.

Speaking of triggers:

’’Understanding what someone says to you is attributing to them the ideas which their words arouse in you.’’ (RG Collingwood)

Admiring or loathing someone, for instance, derives from the act of attributing to them the thoughts and feelings—the raw reactions—that their words and actions trigger inside us. Our encounters are never unmediated. The medium, indeed, is the message: To see an X about someone is to attribute to them the X that their Y arouse in us. As in:

’’Reason manipulates reality in a merely administrative rather than understanding sense’’ (RP Blackmur)

—or: One engages others, for instance, in conditional rather than unconditional terms—again, our encounters are tainted with reactions, fear, transference.

Next:

’’Price is what you pay, value is what you get’’ (Warren Buffett)

X is what you pay, Y is what you get. Time and energy is what you pay, a skill is what you get. A sequence of setbacks is what you pay, success is what you get. Pain is what you pay, gains is what you get.

Lastly, skirting the tautological, a question I read somewhere:

’’Do people ruin marriages or do marriages ruin people?’’

Do people ruin X or does X ruin people? Does the use of social media corrupt people or do people abuse social media? Does the capitalist system corrupt people or do people abuse the system? Etc.

 

The system loads the gun, the individual pulls the trigger. Opportunity and power give way to people’s character and give people’s character away. Etc. Etc. You get the idea.

Fun little toys, these: them gnomic utterances. Let me know if you know some more.