I’ve never felt closer to someone I never knew than I do to David Berman. I hope he is doing well wherever he is now. I don’t know if I’d still be here if it wasn’t for him. I only wish (selfishly) he could have stayed a little longer too.
Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy
Each is a strategy for propagating information forward through time—meaning, Flack adds, “individuality is about temporal uncertainty reduction.” Replication here emerges as just one of many strategies for individuals to order information in their future. To Flack, this “leaves us free to ask what role replication plays in temporal uncertainty reduction through the creation of individuals,” a question close to asking why we find life in the first place.
To Do: Start meditating in living room to sound of highway
The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of ‘work’ and the tireless talk of the ‘blessings of work’ I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work – and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late – that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, p. 173
Bailey’s Beach Club is not an average private club — it has been described as the most exclusive club in America.
The New York Times wrote about the club more than a decade ago…’’People kill to belong to the beach,” said Beth Pyle, whose twin sister, she added, has never quite made it into the club. ‘It has really driven some people crazy when they don’t get in.”
Said to be so entrancingly beautiful that fish would forget how to swim and sink below the surface upon seeing her reflection in the water.
Said to be so luminously lovely that the moon itself would shy away in embarrassment when compared to her face.
“Sometimes I like to explore Google Earth. Its unhealthy, but I like to see how profoundly lucky I’m to be where I’m, at just this moment in history. Here I am, in my room, looking at a screen.”
—Road_To_Niflheim
Li Shizhen explains, “Renpo is found in the soil under a person who has hanged himself or herself. It resembles soft charcoal. If the Renpo is not dug out in time, it will penetrate deep into the earth where it cannot be traced.”[14] The Bencao gangmu compares a hanged person’s soul with similar phenomena, “When a star descends to the earth it turns into a stone. When a tiger dies, his eyesight descends and turns into a white stone. Human blood will turn into phosphorus or jade when it drops to the ground.”
-from “Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body” wiki
The great seasonal festivals, as done in traditional primitive cultures, also balance out the male and female in each person. This is very important for preventing the difficult anima and animus battles between the unconscious of men and women. As described by C.G. Jung, the animus is the male aspect inside a woman and the anima is the female aspect inside a man. In our culture these other aspects are seldom given a chance to develop fully so that when the person reaches middle age there is a real crisis. “When a man is possessed by the anima he is drawn into a dark mood, and tends to become sulky, overly sensitive, and withdrawn.” In a woman, the animus (her male aspect) “typically expresses himself in judgments, generalizations, critical statements.” [24]
Sometimes I’ve fantasized about including a clause in my will about having all traces of myself erased once I’m dead. Placing my songs in a detergent solution and leaving nothing but white sheets behind. But that’s nonsense, I know. Pure narcissism in disguise. What I leave to the world belongs to the world. I donate it to you like I donate my body to science. I will from now on carry a donor card in my wallet that says ”After my death – any song I’ve ever written and anything I’ve ever posted on my blog – may be used for the benefit of others. Take this old flesh, learn something from it. Carve in it. Tear it to pieces. Delete it if you want or frame it in a museum. Read my growth rings like a tree, my musical calcifications. Laugh with me and laugh at me. I was a human. No more, no less.”
—Jens Lekman