The Deception of the Thrush

This editorial was in the Times a couple weeks back. I found it amusing.

Read High on the Hog

Posted by Karin Cox at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Not for those with weak stomachs. See the Pittsburgh City Paper for a review.

Posted by Karin Cox at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-
man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole fam-
ilies shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the
watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old
grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator
and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed
the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my
Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of
cans following you, and followed in my imagination
by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in
our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors
close in an hour. Which way does your beard point
tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets?
The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses,
we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming ofthe lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent
cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-
teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit
poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank
and stood watching the boat disappear on the black
waters of Lethe?

Posted by Karin Cox at 09:05 AM | Permalink

So, to cleanse the palate from all that being and non-being, and to leave something on the page while I am away, here's a nice Dostyevsky quote I saw in the Pittsburgh City Paper:

"The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying- lying to others and to yourself." --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

So, go ye now and have a long hard self-contemplative moment :-) I'll be back at the end of the week.

Posted by Karin Cox at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ok, one more quote from Sartre's Essays in Existentialism before it is returned to the neighborhood library to gather dust for another 40 years:

"We need not look far to see the progress which Heidegger's theory of nothingness has made over that of Hegel. First, being and non-being are no longer empty abstractions. Heidegger in his most important work has shown the legitimacy of raising the question concerning being; the latter has no longer the character of a Scholastic universal, which is still retained with Hegel. There is a meaning of being which must be clarified; there is a pre-ontological comprehension of being which is involved in every kind of conduct belonging to "human reality" -- i.e., in each of its projects. Similarly difficulties which customarily arise as soon as a philosopher touches on the problem of Nothingness are shown to be without foundation; they are important in so far as they limit the function of the understanding, and they show simply that this problem is not within the province of the understanding. There exist on the other hand numerous attitudes of "human reality" which imply a "comprehension" of nothingness: hate, prohibitions, regret, etc. For "Daesin" there is even a permanent possibility of finding oneself "face to face" with nothingness and discovering it as a phenomenon: this possibility is anguish. "

"Heidegger, while establishing the possibilities of a concrete apprehension of Nothingness, never falls into the error which Hegel made; he does not preserve a being for Non-being, not even an abstract being. Nothing is not; it nihilates itself. "

Ok, so this passage helps me to understand things much better. Or it at least gives me the illusion of understanding, since I can see connections with early Buddhism (i.e., Theravada), which is an area in which I did get some formal instruction and a philosophical perspective that drives my thinking to this day. So, if my biases aren't skewing my interpretation too much, it seems that Heidegger/Sartre are really trying to play a psychological trick with their notion of Nothingness. Not a nasty psychological trick, but a useful one. Consider the phrase "Nothing is not; it nihilates itself." Uh-huh. It reminds me of Buddhist texts refuting the existence of atman. I don't have any of these on me to quote but they went something to the effect of "It is not true that atman exists. It is not true that atman does not exist....." Something of that sort. In other words, lines and lines of negative statements that seem to be contradictory, as though the objects of negation that were listed exhausted every possible state of reality. As a freshman reading this stuff for a course, I was not amused. But here's how the instructor put it and I think she was right: The idea is to knock you out of the mind set of accepting any stable reality at all, because as soon as you accept an affirmative statement ("It is true that...") it really doesn't matter what you insert into that last clause. It's something that will be automatically reifed -- in other words, transformed into a reality to which you can cling. Even acceptance of the non-existence of atman implies a stable truth, an Absolute so to speak, and from that point on you've busted the entire Buddhist framework. You've found something that's universal and permanent, a big hunk of granite that transcends the flux and fragility of this daily world. And you start thinking that there is something beyond the experience of existence and that tears you away from your real goal, which is to slip out of existence into a nice, self-annihilatory Nirvana.

From my brief review of the existentialists I get the same sense, except they have to deal with the fact that they do not believe in an endless cycle of birth and death (Samsara) like the Buddha did. The goal is still to detach your mind from the "nostalgia" (to use Camus' word) or "thirst" (to use the Buddhist term) for some illusion of permanence and stability, but the consequence of achieving this goal seems to be understood differently in the two philosophies. In Buddhism, the idea is to allow yourself to mentally slip away from reality by releasing the obsession that there must be something universal and unchanging, while in existentialism, the dismissal of Absolutes allows one to engage in life more richly. All back to the original quote, "I wish I could stop thinking...thoughts are duller than flesh."

Posted by Karin Cox at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)