“We must be off,” he said, “but while everyone is still asleep, I want to leave this man a token of my esteem and affection.”
So saying, he took a torch and set fire to the house.
-Voltaire
The Bodhisattva Paradox
The bodhisattva cannot pass over into Nirvana. He cannot because, were he to do so, he would exhibit a selfishness that a bodhisattva cannot have. If he has the selfishness, he is not a bodhisattva, and so cannot enter Nirvana. If he lacks the selfishness, again, he cannot enter Nirvana, for that would be a selfish act. So either way, the bodhisattva is impotent to enter Nirvana. … So no one can reach Nirvana; we cannot because we are not bodhisattvas and the bodhisattva cannot because he is a bodhisattva.
-Arthur Danto, Mysticism and Morality, 1972
your heartbeat in the radium screen
I saw you kneeling on a desert plateau
your eyes were melting from inside your skull
the wind was burning holes into my skin
where does a body end?
your voice is drifting through the stratosphere
my mouth is drinking from your pool of tears
I saw your heartbeat in the radium screen
what does a body mean?
the future’s leaking through a shut lead door
in the ruins of a city under the forest floor
your naked body’s buried in a vacant field
what does your body feel now?
the air is black and has no oxygen
the bodies in the river float beneath the sun
transparent skin it shines a light from deep within
where does your body begin?
the stars are hidden by a mirrored sky
and darkness disappears behind reflected light
perception is a distance in a closed-in space
how will your body escape?
the crowd is feeling you inside your head
your imagination cancelled by the opposite
and every possibility’s been proved untrue
now is your body you?
-Michael Gira
Yeah, that’s pretty far
The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.
-Shadowstats
Reflections on the Revolution in France
[P]ower, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power not standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to obey it.
Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.
-Edmund Burke
Neurasthenia
George Beard’s American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881)… described a new disease he called neurasthenia (lack of ‘nerve force’), whose symptoms… were legion, and whose cause could be found, quite simply, in modernity. “The chief and primary cause of this development and very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization, which is distinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics: steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women”.
-Kelly Hurley, The Gothic body
This little piggy
[I]n the course of the eighteenth century this kind of frankness [about castration] became less acceptable…. More castrations were explained as having been necessitated at an early age by illness or an unspecified ‘need.’ A favourite cause… was the bite of a wild swan or a wild pig…. By the mid nineteenth century the surviving castrati of the Sistine Chapel had apparently all fallen victim to pigs.
-J. Rosselli
Hallelujah
Somebody give her a medal
Eugene, OR -24 Feb. 2009- Staff. Leslie Michten, a 21 year old Junior at Oregon University, has officially been expelled for behavior that university administrators described as “outrageous and unacceptable in a community of scholars.”‘
Michten, who until recently majored in Art History and Literature and was also active in several campus-based independent and experimental theatre groups, was expelled for numerous code of conduct violations relating to a “Life Character” performance which was stretching into its seventh week.
The goal of the ambitious project was for Michten to assume every Daniel Day-Lewis character simultaneously for as long as possible. Michten and a fringe theatre group, The Mod Bods of EarlCastle, concocted the idea after studying Mr. Day-Lewis’ method of “Deep Character Immersion,” which proscribes a gradual, though eventually complete, adoption of a character on and off the set.
As a new twist, Michten and her associates decided that she would meld portions of every character Mr. Lewis had played in the recent past into a single personality. She would then take on this personality to a greater extent each day while her crew introduced supporting characters at random and filmed the whole experiment.
“We thought it would be totally sweet and meta to invert the character development process and dramatic presentation,” said Mod Bod’s of EarlCastle’s Associate Director, Arnold Binsly. ”The idea is to create an overhanging dialogue that supersedes even the archetype itself. Here, though, we ran into a lot of resistance.”
Indeed, when Michten began to have violent outbursts during classes, teachers and students alike took a dim view of the project. Psychology Professor Dr. Albert Cheng recalls the first time Michten assumed Mr. Lewis’ persona in lecture.
“She threw a chair across the amphitheater and began screaming about a milkshake,” he said. ”She had drawn a mustache on her upper lip, and she was dressed in some thrift store overalls. When I asked her to stop, she only became more aggressive, calling me a ‘nancy boy’ and a ‘Baby from a basket’ and strutting around the front of the class.”
While Michten eventually came out of her character that day, as she spent more and more time as Mr. Day-Lewis, the disturbances only increased in size and frequency. Finally, after the Provost delivered the last of many written complaints and Michten had failed to appear at several mandatory disciplinary hearings, University Policy arrived at her dorm room to escort her off campus.
At this point, however, Michten had built a shanty outdoors and was pretending to stalk deer in the main commons, witnesses say. When officers approached, some say she attempted to attack them with a stick. Accounts differ, but witnesses largely agree that Michten started the altercation that resulted in her arrest. She was formally expelled shortly after she was taken into custody.
Neither the University Police or the University would comment on the confrontation, as it still under investigation, but they provided the following statement via email:
“The University is a center for scholarship, and it is our duty to ensure that every student is able to depend on an orderly and safe environment to learn and grow. We will continue to enforce the Student Code of Conduct to fulfill this duty and prevent behavior which is outrageous and unacceptable in a community of scholars.”
Michten could not be reached for comment.
Autopsicografia
The poet fancying each belief
So wholly through and through
Ends by imagining the grief
He really feels is true.
And those who read what he has spelt
In the read grief feel good–
Not in the two griefs he has felt,
But one they never could.
Thus to beguile and entertain
The reason, does he start,
Upon its rails, the clockwork train
That’s also called the heart.
-Fernando Pessoa, trans. Roy Campbell
