this teetering croquembouche of impudence: October 2016

ponder

Not to ‘believe’ in God.

Not to know anything of God.

And to love in him only his absence so that this love, being a renouncing of God himself, may be a love that is absolutely pure and ‘the emptiness that is plenitude.’ But we must not know even this, or we risk consenting to emptiness only in the hope of being filled with it.

— Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

ponderous

“It’s a pity that, unlike the mineral world, the realm of the mind doesn’t have such poetic terms as stalagmite and stalactite to refer to things which rise and descend to meet one another, without ever meeting, and which, by a slow calcareous concretion of the forms of consciousness - subliminal ‘dropping’ - make architectural labyrinths of our brains.”
Jean Baudrillard - Cool Memories II (1987-1990)

ponder

"Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts."

- Soren Kierkegaar

"I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis."
- Albert Camus - from The Myth of Sisyphus

ponder

If it’s darkness we’re having,
let it be extravagant.

— Jane Kenyon

ponder

Not to ‘believe’ in God. Not to know anything of God. And to love in him only his absence so that this love, being a renouncing of God himself, may be a love that is absolutely pure and ‘the emptiness that is plenitude.’ But we must not know even this, or we risk consenting to emptiness only in the hope of being filled with it.

— Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

ponder

"All my life I’ve been searching, wondering, talking without meaning or context. It has been nothing. Yes, I say this without bitterness or self-reproach, as I know that almost all of people’s lives are made this way. My heart is empty. And emptiness is a mirror turned to my own face. I see myself and am seized with disgust and fear. Through my indifference for people, I’ve been placed outside of their society. Now I live in a ghost world, enclosed in my dreams and imaginings."

- Ingmar Bergman, from ‘The Seventh Seal’

quoth the madman

"How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling?"
- Claude Debussy

quoth the madman

"In the ashes all men are leveled. We’re born unequal, we die equal."

- Seneca

ponder

"Yes, I am the cause
of the fire inside me,the fuel that burns and the flame that
lights it." -
Ovid, Metamorphoses

ponder

"I only wish I could summon up the will to carve and eat you raw myself, for what you have done to me."
- Homer, Iliad

ponder

Cassandra: This house breathes murder dripping with blood!
Chorus: What are you talking about? It smells of sacrifices at the hearth.
Cassandra: The stench is clear- just like that from a grave."
- Aeschylus, Agamemnon l.1309-1311

ponder

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid."

- LIVY, AB URBE CONDITA

quoth the madman

The beautiful is always bizarre.
- Charles Baudelaire

the play's the thing

"Swell’st thou, proud heart? I’ll give thee scope to beat,
Since foes have scope to beat both thee and me."

Shakespeare- Richard (Richard II, Act III scene iii)

ars poetica

"But for me you are irremediably dear,
And the darker you become, the more touching."

- Anna Akhmatova, from Plantain

ponder

"Dionysus is a god who takes human form, a powerful male who looks soft and feminine, a native of Thebes who dresses as a foreigner. His parentage is mixed between divine and human; he is and is not a citizen of Thebes; his power has both feminine and masculine aspects. He does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between Greek and foreign, between female and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized. He is the god of both tragedy and comedy, and in his presence the distinction between them falls away, as both comedy and tragedy…" -

Paul Woodruff,
The Bacchae (Translated and Annotated) - Euripides

ponder

AMPHITRUO: Scelestissimum te arbitror.
SOSIA: Nam quam ob rem?
AMPHITRUO: Quia id quod neque est neque fuit neque futurum est mihi praedicas.

(AMPHITRUO: I think you are terribly wicked.
SOSIA: But why?
AMPHITRUO: Because you tell me that which neither is, nor was, nor will be.)
- Amphitruo (254-184?) - Plautus

ponder

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." - Carl Jung

ponder

"…a horse is a thing of such beauty…none will tire of looking at him as long as he displays himself in his splendor."
- Xenophon (Also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary, and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates. c430-354 B.C.)

quoth the madman

"…be a deviant or die of boredom."
- William S. Burroughs

pondering

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin."
- Fernando Pessoa

literacki

"We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false."
- Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise

pondering

profanobrasil:
“ Falk Smoker Profane Brazil
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/profanobrasil
http://profanobrasil.tumblr.com/archive
”

As with all tragedies, the real tragedy of my life is just an irony of Fate. I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape."

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.

ponder

"Des vaincus n'ont d'espoir que dans leur désespoir même!

The vanquished will find hope only in their despair!"
- Virgile, L’Eneide, Liber II

ponderous

"I find myself torn between my taste for regular habits and the fatality that compels me to break them."

- Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

ponder

"If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself."
- Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)

quoth the madman

"I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it."

- Franz Kafka

quoth the madman

"When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex."
- Jacques Lacan

quoth the madman

War between nations is deceit against humanity.
- Karl Marx

ponder

My time’s my bane, my time’s my damage,

My time’s my foe, my time is hell." - Marina
Tsvetaeva, from Clear Voices; “Elderberry”

ponderous

There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes."
- August Strindberg

ponder

No one lives his life
Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures
we come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.
Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls
Maybe all paths lead there,
to the depository of unlived things.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

ponderous

Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered."
- Emil Cioran

ponderous

And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence—our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death."
- Irvin Yalom; The Schopenhauer Cure