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RAJ NANDY Aug 2018
THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE: PART TWO
Dear Friends, having introduced ‘The Enigma of Time in Verse’ in Part One, along with few selected poetic quotes, I now mention what some of the important Philosophers thought about Time down the past centuries. But while doing so, I have tried my best to simplify some of those early concepts for better understanding and appreciation of my readers. If you like it, kindly re-post the poem. Thanks,  – Raj Nandy of New Delhi.

          THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE : PART TWO
   I commence by quoting Sonnet 60 of Shakespeare about Time,
   Hoping to seek some blessings for this Part Two composition of
   mine!
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
  So do our minutes hasten to their end;
  Each changing place with that which goes before,
  In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
  Nativity, once in the main of light,
  Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
  Crooked elipses ’gainst his glory fight,
  And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
  Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
  And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
  Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
  And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
  And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.”

              PHILOSOPHY OF TIME
Animals are said to live in a continuous present,
Since they have no temporal distinction of past, future,
or the present.
But our consciousness of time, becomes the most
distinguishing feature of mankind.
Though we are mostly obsessed with objective time, -
As the rotation of our Earth separates day from night.
With the swing of the pendulum and the ticking of clocks,
Which regulates our movements, while we try to beat the clock!
But the ancient theologians and philosophers of India and
Greece,
Who were among the first to ponder about the true nature
of all things,
Had wondered about the subjective nature of time;
Was time linear or cyclic, was time endless or finite?

GREEK PHILOSOPHERS ON TIME:
I begin with Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher of 6th Century BC born in Ephesus.
He claimed that everything around us, is in a constant state of change and flux.
You cannot step into the same river twice Heraclitus had claimed,
Since water keeps flowing down the river all the while and never
remains the same.
This flow and change in Nature is a process which is ceaseless.
The only thing which remains permanent is impermanence!
Here is a quote from poet Shelley reflecting the same idea:
“World on world are rolling ever
  From creation to decay
  Like the bubbles on a river
  Sparkling, bursting, borne away.”

Now Heraclitus was refuted by Parmenides, born in the Greek colony of Elea,
On the western coast of Southern Italy, as his contemporary.
Parmenides said that our senses deceive us, since all changes are mere illusory!
True reality was only eternal and unchanging ‘Being’, which was both indivisible and continuous - filling up all space.
Zeno, a pupil of Parmenides, through his famous ‘Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise’ had shown, that when the tortoise was given a head start,
Swift footed Achilles could never catch up with the tortoise,
Since the space between the two were infinitely divisible, resulting in the impossibility of movement and change in motion!
Now the Greeks were never comfortable with the Concept of Infinity.
They preferred to view the universe as continuous existing ‘Being’.  
However, unlike Heraclitus’ ‘world of change and flux’,
Both Parmenides and Zeno have presented us, with a static unchanging universe!
Thus from the above examples it becomes easy for us to derive,  
How those Ancient Greeks had viewed Time.
Time has been viewed as a forward moving changing entity;
And also as an illusory, continuous and indivisible Being!
To clarify this further I quote Bertrand Russell from his ‘History of Western Philosophy’;
“Creation out of nothing, which was taught in the Old Testament, was an idea wholly foreign to Greek philosophy. When Plato speaks of creation, he imagines a primitive matter, to which God gives form as an artificer.”

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON TIME:
For Plato, time was created by the Creator at the same instance when he had fashioned the heavens.
But Plato was more interested to contemplate on things which lay
beyond the sway of time and remained unchangeable and eternal;
Like absolute Truth, absolute Justice, the absolute form of Good and Beauty;
Which were eternal and unchangeable like the ‘Platonic Forms’, and were beyond the realm of Time as true reality.
Plato’s pupil Aristotle was the first Greek philosophers to contemplate on reality inside time, and provide a proper definition as we get to see.
He said, “Time is the number of movement in respect to before and after” - as a part of reality.
To measure time numerically, we must have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and also notice the difference objectively.
Therefore, time here becomes the change which we see and experience.
Time takes on a linear motion moving from the past to the present;
And to the unknown future like a moving arrow travelling straight.
Aristotle had developed a four step process to understand everything inside of Time and within human experience:
(a) Observe the world using our senses,
(b) Apply logical rules to these observations,
(c) To go back and consult past authorities, if your logic agrees with their logic,
(d) Then only you can come to a logical conclusion.

No wonder in our modern times, experiments conducted by the LDC or the Large Hadron Collider, located 100m underground near the French-Swiss border,
By going back in time simulates the ‘Big Bang’ conditions, that moment of our universe’s first creation.
The scientists thereby, study the evolution of our universe with time, which  resulted in the  finding of the Higgs Boson !  (On 4thJuly 2012)

NOTES :  All elementary particles interacting with the Higg's Field & obtain Mass, excepting for photons & gluons which do not interact with this field. Mass-less photons can travel at the
speed of light with a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second! Now this LDC is a Particle Accelerator 27 kms long ring-shaped tunnel, made mostly of superconducting magnets, inside which two high-energy particle beams are made to travel close to the speed of light in opposite directions, and the shower of particles resulting from the collision is closely examined, presuming that these similar shower of particles must have been produced at the time of the ‘Big Bang’ some 13.8 million years ago, at the time of Creation! Sound like fiction? Well, Prof. Peter Higgs got the Noble Prize for Physics, for locating the particle called ‘Higgs Boson’ among those shower of particles, on 10th Dec. 2013.

NOW TO LIGHTEN UP MY READERS MIND, FEW TIME QUOTE I NOW PROVIDE :

“TIME WASTES OUR BODIES AND OUR WITS,
  BUT WE WASTE TIME, SO WE ARE QUITS!” – Anonymus.

‘Time is a great Teacher, but unfortunately it kills its Pupils!’ – HL Berlioz

“Lost , yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two
   golden hours,
   Each set with sixty diamond minutes.
   No reward is offered, for they are gone forever!” – Horace Mann


PLOTINUS & ST. AUGUSTINE ON TIME:
Now getting back to our Philosophy of Time, there was Plotinus of the 3rd Century AD,
The founder of the mystical Neo-Platonic School of Philosophy.
He had followed Plato’s basic concept of Time as “the moving image of eternity.”
Mystic Plotinus tried to synthesize both Aristotle and Plato by saying that the entire process of cosmic creation,
Flows out of the ONE  through a series of emanation!
This ONE gave rise to the ‘Divine Mind’ which he called the ‘Realm of Intelligence’ and is an aspect of reality,
When everything is understood in terms of Platonic Forms of Truth, Justice, the Good, and Beauty.
However, the later Christian theologians had interpreted this ONE of Plotinus, -
As the Christian God, the Divine Creator of the Universe.
For God is eternal, in the sense of being timeless, in God there is no before or after, but only a timeless present.

Now this lead St. Augustine, to formulate a very admirable relativistic theory of Time!
St. Augustine, the greatest constructive teacher of the Early Christian Church, had written in Book XI of his ‘Confessions’ during  5th century AD, -
His thoughts about the enigma of Time which had perplexed the Greek philosophers of earlier centuries.
To simplify St. Augustine’s thoughts, I now paraphrase for the sake of clarity.
Time can only be measured while it is passing, yet there is time past, and time future in reality.
To avoid these contradictions he says that past and future can only be thought of as present: ‘past’ must be identified with memory, and ‘future’ with expectation.
Since memory and expectation being both present facts, there is no contradiction.  
“The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight; and the present of things future is expectation,” - wrote St. Augustine.

This subjective notion of time led St. Augustine to anticipate Rene Descartes the French philosopher the 17th Century,
Who proclaimed “Cogito, ergo sum” in Latin, meaning “I think, therefore I am”, and is regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy.

Now cutting a long story short I come to Sir Isaac Newton, well known for his Laws of Motion and Gravity.
Newton speaks of ‘Absolute Time’ which exists independently, flowing at a consistent pace throughout the universe, which can only be understood mathematically.
Newton’s ‘Absolute Time’ had remained as the dominant concept till the  early years of the 20th Century.
When Albert Einstein formulated ‘Theory of Space-time’ along with his Special and General Theory of Relativity.

Now the German philosopher Leibniz during 17th century, had challenged Newton with his anti-realist theory of time.
Leibniz claimed that time was only a convenient intellectual concept, that enables to sequence and compare happening of events.
There must be objects with which time can interact or relate to as ‘Relational Time’ he had felt.
Ernst Mach, like Leibniz towards the end of 19th Century, said that even if it was not obvious what time and space was relative to,
Then they were still relative to the ‘fixed stars’ i.e. the bulk of matter in the universe.

CONCEPT OF TIME AS 'SPECIOUS PRESENT' :
During late 19th century, Robert Kelley introduced the concept of ‘spacious present’, which was the most recent part of the past.
Psychologist and philosopher William James developed this idea further by describing it as ‘’the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’’
William James also introduced the term “stream of consciousness” into literature as a method of narration,
That described happenings in the flow of thought in the mind of the characters, - likened to an internal monologue!
This literary technique was later used by James Joyce in his famous novel ‘Ulysses’.

TIME CONCEIVED AS DURATION: HENRI BERGSON (1859 -1941)
Next I come to one of my favourite philosopher the French born Henri Bergson.
The Nobel Laureate and author of ‘Time and Free Will’ and ‘Creative Evolution’.
Will Durant in his ‘Story of Philosophy’ says Bergson was ‘the David destined to slay the Goliath of materialism.’
It was Bergson’s ‘Elan Vital’ that life force and impelling urge, Which makes us grow and transforms this wandering planet into a theatre of unending creation.
For Bergson, time is as fundamental as space; and it is time that holds the essence of life, and perhaps of all reality.
Time is an accumulation, a growth, a duration, where “duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.
The past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting.
Duration means that the past endures, that nothing is lost.
Though we think with only a small part of our past; but it is with our entire past that we desire, will, and act.”
“Since time is an accumulation, the future can never be the same as the past, -
For a new accumulation arises at every step, and change is far more radical than we suppose…the geometric predictability of all things, Which is the goal of a mechanistic science, is only a delusion and a dream!”  
Bergson goes on in his compelling lyrical style:            
“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature,
to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly. Perhaps all reality is time and duration, becoming and change.”
Bergson differed with Darwin's theory of adaptation to environment, and stated;
“Man is no passively adaptive machine, he is a focus of redirected force, a centre of creative evolution.”

Martin Heidegger, the German thinker in his ‘Being and Time’ of 1927, had said:
“We do not exist within time, but in a very real way we are time!”
Time is inseparable from human experience, since we can allow the past to exist in the present through memory;
And even allow a potential future occurrence to exist in the present due to our human ability to care, and be concerned about things.
Therefore we are not stuck in simple sequential or linear time, but can step out of it almost at will!

CONCLUDING  PART  TWO OF ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE
In this part I have tried to convey what the Ancient Greek Philosophers had felt about Time in a simplified way.
Also some thoughts of Medieval and Early Modern philosophers and what they had to say.
Where Sir Isaac Newton stands like a colossus with his Concept of Time, Laws of Motion, and Gravity.
Not forgetting Henri Bergson, one of my favourite philosopher, of the mid-19th and the mid-20th Century.
All through my narration I had tried to hold the interest of my readers, and also educated myself as a true knowledge seeker.
In my concluding Part Three I will cover few Modern Philosophers along with the relativistic concept of time.
Certainly not forgetting the space-time theory of our famous Albert Einstein!
Thanks for reading patiently, from Raj Nandy of New Delhi.
  *ALL COPY RIGHTS ARE WITH THE AUTHOR ONLY
Norman Rockwell and Jim Unger
Artists from my past
I've met one but not the other
A memory that  will last

Who the hell is Bertrand Russell?
I asked over a drink
A man who changed the world forever
Changed the way we think

I remember the Norman Rockwell painting
It's burned deep  inside my mind
But, I have got a copy
It's the best one that you'll find

An artist unknown to others
But, a special one to me
My father drew old Russell
It's quite a piece to see

It's never been inside a book
And never will it be
But, Bertrand Russells' wrinkles
Mean a lot to me

Jim Unger and his Herman
Were a favorite of my brother
The artist and his humour
Were unlike any other

We met him at a signing
My brother brought his art
He showed it to Jim Unger
He broke my brother's heart

My brother was an artist
Just like my Dad as well
Their art, not for the public
Their art, was not to sell

Their art should be remembered
Their art should be displayed
Like a vintage guitar  sitting
It's better if it's played

So, now two artists pictures
Hidden for an age
Will be shown, for everybody
On a printed page

I give you first, my brother
Ian Turner was his name
No longer is he with us
But, this will show he came

The second one, my father
John Turner, is his name
His drawing days behind him
But, man did he have game

So, here for your enjoyment
Rockwell via Turner number one
Followed by Ungers' Herman
That was done by Turner's son
written for my brother and my dad. Ian Turner (1966-2017) and John Turner (1940 - still going strong)
I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.
This a quote from at least 50 years ago!
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
only today i came across what interested Heidegger
after writing being and time, a selection
of essays, revealing that he came to be interested
in language - not knowing this, by mere study
of the introduction some things became apparent -
being quiet democratic in my reading it's a shame
i don't have the academic leisurely pace of becoming
a Heidegger specialist - it's the almost damnable
pulling-apart having to cite many influences and not
focusing on one, but since i don't have academic
leisure, the summary in the introduction
by jeffrey powell (editor) of the book heidegger
and language
will just have to do: apropos this
being an antidote to those bemoaning that we only
write about reading books, carefully choreographic
our lives for mints and espressos and ammoniac
(inhalants in a boxing ring nearing a knock-out) -
hide pretty bird, hide, hide pretty pretty bird
first your song inside a cage, then the cage inside
the heart, and thus the song with the cage,
silenced inside the cage, raging mad inside the heart.
well, the antidote is that i already have some ideas,
and reading the essays contained in this book would
put me off what i was intending to write about,
so, in summary, read the major work, then read introductions
of critical books from those studying the subject,
invent an original approach from that, and elsewhere.
before i venture into the whole affair of having to
reread certain passages from the introduction as to
guide me in this Bermuda Delta i what to do a little
sidewinder interlude:
in chemistry there are two major bonds (for the purpose
of what i'm intending, let us just assume that
we're only talking about π and σ bonds) -
and while psychology dehumanises man to strict
theories without clear proofs to a universal standard,
i want to do what will come later regarding Heidegger's
take on language, for me there's no clear philosophical
vocabulary to be used - i'm not into orthodoxy and
rigidity which says

                piquant sun strokes against
                the bargains of spring's last
                hope for a kept bazaar
                to bloom to then deflower
                petals from trees fall to earth
                like glasses, the tree stands
                as a reflection of shattered glass
                the petals remain the tree intact
                worn at the Royal Ascot
                or in a woman's hair.

obviously something like this is a poem - what i mean,
however, concerning what's identifiable as philosophy is
to me the following:  
                                        blah = monotone x algebraic
                                                    for­ non-differential
                                                    purposes, just filling up
                                                    the page

            blah blah blah blah blah blah subjectivity blah blah blah blah blah blah essentially blah blah blah blah blah blah in-itself blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah thing-external v. thing-internalised blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah metaphysics blah etc.
                      
                          and so on and so forth, a fixation on using a certain vocabulary to be equivalent or justification to be "apparently" talking philosophy... yet still no gain from the words of grammatical categorisation... for me? too many propositions, the basis of what the academic environment deems to be "pure" verbiage, or none (akin Wittgenstein) - that famous quote about a lion and having tea on Tuesday... or as Buddha would say: said so to shatter thus the fear of ketamine thoughtlessness;

but that's beside the point, i want to return to
how any chemist might treat psychology as a science,
keep it up to date, given that psychology likes
to shove its nose in everyday activities for a strict
expression of equivalent rubric that mathematics already
possesses and shoves into a child's brain to make
the child become accustomed to symbol encoding;
so π and σ bonds, let's say between two carbons atoms...
but in psychology we don't have the luxury of
many alternative examples...
me and language: to write in terms of optics,
to encode images rather than sounds,
language as optometry rather than a hearing-aid...
so what "elements" do we have in psychology,
essentially what defines consciousness, its sub-plot
and its unfamiliar territory - the using the dusty
Freudian units, we know the concept of the superman
(superman was a bad bad boy) from Nietzsche
evolved into the super mm hmm, and we know
there are two other units, mm hmm and the id /
it or that? it is for me, that is for scalpel for the analyst,
the prober, unlucky for the person who took to
objectifying himself, but better than being objectified -
still, remember i'm working with language in terms
of optics rather than phonetics - enough organic chemistry
diagrams and you will see that the bonding between
mm hmm, the super mm hmm and the gemini id
(one the patient, the second the analyst) trapped inside
an electron cloud of bio-electric processes is rigid and
stable due to the opposite of π and σ,
i chose the optic route using the bonds δ and ψ -
symbolically δ is the mathematical term for sum -
summation, the total of - currently i have no clue about
the significance of ψ just yet, but ψ is a symbol of
psychology like caduceus is the symbol of medicine;
a brief expansion on the natures of the bonds,
quack-science δ bonds being all alike meaning uniform
meaning holding every aspect uniformly, meaning
that a δ bond is of the same nature between mm hmm
and super mm hmm in a petri dish within the
solvent of the conscious sub-plot, likewise other variations
δ bonds are uniform bonds, i.e. ensuring one detail
is related to the other, and so to others.
ψ bonds, not much expansion here as promising detail,
asthma the highest research of breath, and all
major theoretical squeezing through the Suez -
depending on the measure of breaths, we can depend
on the internal things - but never so much Pamplona encierro
cleaning-up to do theorising an affirmative sound
like mm hmm, or other affirmative synonyms -
if it were can *****, it would be mince rather than
a clean dissection - mince meat, should mm hmm be
not an *****, let alone a body. so many attachments
to mm hmm these days, it should be attached to zoological
studies than activities of breathing: theory as a cage,
one after the over, eventually not even cages but
the caged animal turning into matryoshka doll -
Kant doesn't venture into the dynamic of his thing-in-itself
represented by the matryoshka as ad continuum -
maybe he does, but to me here merely pinpoints it,
coins the phrase noumenon and ensures the thing
is opened, god or nothing is put in it, the thing is
closed, locked and the key to unlocking it is thrown
away and never found (i'll mention a short process of
his argument some other time, most notably his
three impossibilities concerning proving the existence
of god: ontological, physico-theological and cosmological).
yes, i know, when reading these ****** books
i have to paint the arguments, i need to simplify
them, a poet reading a philosophy has to paint
the words - the best poetic technique applicable to
understanding philosophical books is imagery,
not as a technique of for the purpose of writing my own,
but as a way to paint what was written by some boffin -
precursor to understanding the three impossibilities
of proof, i find it strange that such proof is necessary,
what would you do with it? prove it once on
paper, or in your head, show it to everyone and then
slowly everyone is able, then the so called "man in
the sky" - it seems strange that scientific positivism
of the Enlightenment supposed such a proof, the proof
is more implausible than the existence - Bertrand...
just smoke your pipe and sit in the easy-chair talking
******* with Wittgenstein... more on that later.
i promised quotes from the above mentioned book
(heidegger and language)...

           das wort kommt zur sprache,
             das seyn bring sich zum wort.


working from phenomenology, to later reject it,
thus precipitating the school of deconstruction-ism,
and with Heidegger we do get to atomic elements
from words, from compounds, thank god there are
no sub-atomic ventures with language, quiet impossible
to de-construct language beyond this point,
let's face it, if you go as far as:
'as preparatory for raising the question of being...
language is one of three constituent moments in
the analysis of the being of the da in dasein (being there)'
furthered by equal atom bombardment replacing
the un-compounded sein (verb, be) with seyn (conjunction /
noun, being) - this is modern physics to my understanding,
i'm not particularly interested what he's saying,
i'm interested in painting what he's saying -
i'll spare you the details of what philosophical systematisation
is actually involved in: restricted vocabulary -
a certain limit is allowed, rigid meanings are involved,
rigidity of drilling in of non-deviation, philosophical
systems are not dishonest in that they are consistent with
a limited vocabulary - i will spare you the torture of
seeing one ball being juggled - the shrapnel of the English
language makes it even more distracting to understand,
as with the above, another e.g.?
'every saying of beyng is held in words and meanings
which are understandable in the view of everyday
references of beings, and are exclusively thought in
that view, but which as expressions of beyng,
are misunderstood...' of course i could be cherry picking
Heidegger like a Jehovah's witness cherry picking
the bible, but i'm not interested in what he's saying,
merely painting you the picture, to scale then:

books                      -              celestial objects
chapters                 -               cycles of celestial objects
paragraphs            -               prime features of
                                                 celestial objects
                                                 (e.g. Jupiter's red eye,
                                                  Saturn's ring,
                                                  Earth's oceans
                                                  and continents)
sentences                 -              
words                       -
syllables                   -
letters                        -             atoms / elements  
                                           ah, it was going oh so well,
i think i started too big, and went into too small,
which made visualising sentences and words and syllables
hard to compare what could fit between
Australia and and atoms of RuXe - by chance ruxe is
an actual word, no as stated ruthenium and xenon,
although that too, ruxir (ruxo, ruxin, ruxido) in Galician
meaning to roar.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
i only started collecting a library, because, would you believe it, my local library was a pauper in rags and tatters; apologies for omitting necessary diacritic marks, the whiskey was ******* on icecubes to a shrivel.*

ernest hemingway, e.m. forster, mary shelley,
aesop, r. l. stevenson, jean-paul sartre,
jack kerouac, sylvia plath, evelyn waugh,
chekhov, cortazar, freud, virginia woolf,
philip k. ****, dostoyevsky, aleksandr solzhenitsyn,
oscar wilde, malcolm x, kafka, nabokov,
bukowski, sacher-masoch, thomas a kempis,
yevgeny zamyatin, alexandre dumas,
will self, j. r. r. tolkien, richard b. bentall,
james joyce, william burroughs, truman capote,
herman hesse, thomas mann, j. d. salinger,
nikos kazantzakis, george orwell,
philip roth, joseph roth, bulgakov, huxley,
marquis de sade, john milton, samuel beckett,
huysmans, michel de montaigne, walter benjamin,
sienkiewicz, rilke, lipton, harold norse,
alfred jarry, miguel de cervantes, von krafft-ebing,
kierkegaard, julian jaynes, bynum porter & shephred,
r. d. laing, c. g. jung, spinoza, hegel, kant, artistotle,
plato, josephus, korner, la rochefoucauld, stendhal,
nietzsche, bertrand russell, irwin edman,
faucault, anwicenna, descartes, voltaire, rousseau,
popper,  heidegger, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski,
seneca, cycero, milan kundera, g. j. warnock,
stefan zweig, the pre-socratics, julian tuwim,
ezra pound, gregory corso, ted hughes,
guiseppe gioacchino belli, dante, peshwari women,
e. e. cummings, ginsberg, will alexander, max jacob,
schwob, william blake, comte de lautreamont,
jack spicer, zbigniew herbert, frank o'hara,
richard brautigan, miroslav holub, al purdy,
tzara, ted berrigan, fady joudah, nikolai leskov,
anna kavan, jean genet, albert camus, gunter grass,
susan hill, katherine dunn, gil scott-heron,
kleist, irvine welsh, clarice lispector, hunter thompson,
machado de assisi, reymont, tolstoy, jim bradbury,
norman davies, shakespeare, balzac, dickens,
jasienica, mary fulbrook, stuart t. miller,
walter la feber, jan wimmer, terry jones & alan ereira,
kenneth clark, edward robinson, heinrich harrer,
gombrowicz, a. krawczuk, andrzej stasiuk, ivan bunin,
joseph heller, goethe, mcmurry, atkins & de paula,
bernard shaw, horace, ovid, virgil, aeschyles,
rumi, omar khayyam, humbert wolfe, e. h. bickersteth,
asnyk, witkacy, mickiewicz, slowacki, lesmian,
lechon, lep szarzynski, victor alexandrov, gogol,
william styron, krasznahorkai, robert graves,
defoe, tim burton, antoine de saint-exupery,
christiane f., salman rushdie, hazlitt, marcus aurelius,
nick hornby, emily bronte, walt whitman,
aryeh kaplan, rolf g. renner, j. p. hodin, tim hilton... etc.
Ken Pepiton Dec 2018
"…ours is not to reason why." that is the only fragment
of the light
brigade?

call the philosopher for a meme:
Ah, we need an axiom,
some hope for humanity,
Christmas isn't working as well as it did,
Chanuka and Kwansa are distant also rans,

Where is hope if the wise have all been infected with…

"The fact that an opinion has been widely
held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not utterly absurd."

that's the meme sir,
but nothing clicked.
Bertrand Russell
wait
Ah, more, eh,
a semi colon not a point of completion.

That's the secret in all symbols to sibyls, my boy,
know what you meant
when you imagined them meaning
anything

"The fact that an opinion has been widely
held is no evidence whatsoever
that it is not utterly absurd
; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

From <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/172166-the-fact-that-an-opinion-has-been-widely-held-is>


In the world you shall have tribulation
but be of good cheer,
it makes everything better.

Merry Christmas, may the messages you trust be true.
An idea for a Hallmark card.
Silhouette your amazing beauty
O Silhouette shining the earth
The rainbow kneeling my goddess
Silhouette Silhouette Silhouette
The leaves admire your beauty
The blue cannot wait to see you
So magical cannot resist your beauty
Who are you unspoken wind trembling
Silhouette Silhouette Silhouette
Wheres the sun wheres the rain
Your gorgeous look chasing the wind
The question remains where do you come from
Who sent you gosh...
An angel from the sky o sweet greatness no wonder why your lovely heart healing the soul
You are so irresistible and sweetable
Gosh Gosh Gosh Silhouette...

Jean C Bertrand
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
i could conceive the western concept of the rehab,
but then for 3 weeks i was in poland
i didn't touch the bottle for that period of time...
i don't see how an addict with a bunch
of addicts can be cured by anything other than
stigma... i'm actually happy addicted to
addiction: i entered my reading-mode...
   that said, most people can't digest a Kraszewski
book... **** me, we read Bradbury in snippets
just to tow in an essay for A-level english...
       philip augustus, or the chess player concerning
the Angevin family... great stuff...
   i didn't choose the book, my grandfather did,
he owned half the Kraszewski collection and read
nothing of it, he had to find a ******* "bored"
enough to read one of the books,
   and as i once said: i've seen the movie adaptations
of the Sienkiewicz trilogy...
         the cossack uprising, the swedish deluge...
and i said to myself: i can't and i won't...
thanks you jerzy hoffman, and yes: thank you
peter jackson...
              the infinite supply of elven arrows
and Legolas shooting orcs at point-blank range did
it for me...
                thankfully i can write something
as obscure as this, and know, for certain, that
there's a back-alley of the human populace out there
that might be searching for something like this...
   but that's what i found entertaining,
i actually had the opposite of wanting to compliment
the film adaptation of sienkiewicz, with an actual
sienkiewicz book... mind you: Kraszewski covers
the same period... and it's all the same time frame...
   should i write a proof that i read the **** thing?
maybe... but the main idea is that:
a metropolis cannot provide the right environment
for a book... or completing a book...
books are read in the countryside, in small towns,
in palaces... in hunting lodges...
          and i dare say: reading a book, getting into
full swing of the narrative is best done in daylight hours...
and i'll come back to the daylight hours,
  as a drinker and writer i chose the night...
  you know how long it took me to restore my
biological clock, and regain the nocturnal realm after
spending 3 weeks with a clear schizophrenia
of sleeping in the night and wriggling about during
the day? 2 weeks! i restored the biological pendulum,
but i have to admit: i feel ****...
    but i guess it's a worthy sacrifice...
i'm planning to go back to my country of origin
during late spring to read some more books...
i couldn't have read don quixote, the brothers karamazov,
bertrand russell's history of western philosophy
    yada yada yada... or kierkegaard's either / or,
or finished off kant's critique without my place of birth...
  and isn't it like a badge of honour?
                some will tell you to speak out an eastern
mantra... om... and the shattering of chandelier...
the western mantra is also a type of hypnosis,
you have to find a rhythm with a book...
  the mantra is the narrative of a book, and the silence
that incubates you has shark-teeth should anyone approach...
   but urban living makes this spot harder to find
than a begger or the ******... you can read books
in large cities... before you head home you're
bombarded with the psychology of exploiting your
literacy, in adverts, in orientating signs...
        with them being so authoritarian, it's hard
to find time for a liberal attitude to books...
            esp. what books are, best described by people
who'd probably like to throw them like molotov
cocktails in protest marches: thick as bricks those
gargantuan apostles of the void are...
       and so we are: sitting in times of hyperinflation
of literature... if that isn't the case, let me know by
Tuesday next week, i'll brood the assumption myself
until then...
      that's 2 weeks it took me to return to my writing mode...
to get back to the nocturnal realm
where everything is doubly black & white...
                 the point is: i want to write at a time when
the surrounding world sleeps...
     last time i remember, i didn't get a message in my dreams,
i'd love to see letters in my dreams, fortunately
i can't... i haven't seen these artefacts in dreams,
      but it's hard to blame memory as not strained enough
to do so... the unconscious and memory don't really
interact that well... it's a paradox that they even do
and that dreams have some sort of existence involved in
the architecture of our psyche...
                        last night i dreamt of lego batman because:
d'uh his endearing sarcasm... and godzilla!
   boo ya!         and this large city being eaten up
by a tornado, and other things phantasmogorical....
well pandemonium here, pandemonium there...
    don't get any ideas about the nature of dreams and
oedial repression... please! unaffordable housing prices
these days can only mean i'd really earn a mortgage
if my ***-drive went to the dogs, of the profession.
    so 3 weeks of a sober life and enough time to read
books... and my return into a writing life, a nocturnal
life, and drinking...
   mind you, in between there was that masters final
with ronnie o'sullivan (at least romford is famous for
something) vs. joe perry... in the last frame, when they
had 30 odd points each, and they were plucking at the
last remaining red ball for the snooker?
       snooker is a metaphor for the savannah...
you either watch snooker, or a david attenborough naturalist
show... there's the herd of buffalo (the red *****)...
           and the cue ball the hunting predator...
well... it's all a bit abstract, there are just ***** on a green
table... but still... at least in snooker you can bug
the "pawn" (red) ***** without having to *** them,
in chess you destroy completely... the pawns go...
there's no time to keep them for a no-man's land pause...
and i just turned 30... which goes to show:
                  if the game of football was perfect,
i mean perfect like tennis is with hawk-eye and
    6 judges vertical, 4 judges horizontal...
                  then football wouldn't be so passionate,
so religious... the reason it is so religious is because
judging it is so ****** imperfect...
     there's a reason why football can't be perfected in a way
as rugby can, where the referee can pause the game
and ask for a replay... the unfairness principle!
it has to be unfair in order for people to feel even more
impassioned by it! that's why in that film
when Alec Baldwin says something along the lines:
god comes first (while his hand holds out
the index and *******), and football comes second
(the index finger disappears)...
      football can never be a sport that has perfect
refereering... which makes me surprised as to why
it can grace the Olympic games...
                   football (in english, not that theme park
of jumping torpedoes) - yes the football known as:
ballet with hairy legs...
                   it has to remain unfair and subsequently
quasi-religious because it generates the most money,
but apart from that, it has gained a quasi-religious
status because it reflects a sort of life we acknowledge:
the referee made a bad decision, god did this... blah blah...
  and we get passion, religious passion that's
best represented by football hooligans...
                        but whereas other sports perfect their
techniques of refereeing a game, football hasn't done
the least possible, because it requires the whole debate
of: life's unfair!
    if it wasn't for unfair refeering, the game would not
be alive, as it is alive, to stage a confrontation
with: apache west ham, and sioux millwall...
       it's the best way to ensure tribalism...
         make the refereeing unfair, don't improve it...
blame it on the man in the sky, or the ponce in new zealander...  
mind you....
   the last football match i went to was at Stamford Bridge,
Chelsea lost to Newcastle United...
             i just just there like a stoic twant...
           i couldn't imitate the screams and the chants...
   i was just mesmerised at how it's so different from
watching a football match without the television acting
like a microscope... i am sure i was looking elsewhere
when someone scored a goal...
                 i probably went to the toilet when i
missed another goal...
                        and i'll reiterate...
   it can't be a gentlemanly sport, the rules can't be fair,
that's why they call it the sport of the rabble,
they have to contain the illusion of being unfair...
       because it's a "rabble" sport...
the referee has to make bad decisions,
otherwise there would be a "what if" dimension...
ask any Pole about the 1974 semi-finals with Germany
and ask them about the weather that day...
  then ask about the Polish wingers... and how fast they
were... and how the pitch was so slosh, and ice-puppy
fudge that the slow germans won it...
                     because the Poles always say:
we could have beaten the Nedetherlands in the final...
        again: football, if it is to be stated as the secular
alternative to religion, has to have an inherent unfairness in it...
all the other sports will perfect their judgement,
football will not move an inch... just like a religion -
perhaps that's also because we live in times of
cold-consumerism,
       a quick comparison is:
   the reactions of antonio conte vs.
                       ivan lendl -
   the former looks like a raving lunatic when something
good, or bad happens...
   the second? is he watching tennis, or playing poker?
Thomas Steyer Jul 2021
When we see what some people are dishing out,
we know what Bertrand Russell was talking about:
"The stupid are cocksure, the intelligent full of doubt."

When you meet someone who thinks he's clever,
but seems much too confident in his endeavour,
and talks to you non stop and forever and ever.

When he acts like a prophet defying convention,
never admitting a lack of comprehension,
promptly has a cure for everything you mention.

When he hands out his advice on a silver platter
convincing you that his opinions matter,
you can be certain, he's as mad as a hatter.
There are people trying to convince you that the world is flat.
There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.
jughead jones Dec 2019
I am consistent; you are regular;
he is invariably monotonous.
Extra kisses at dawn in the strawberry moon
Celestial wellness
Splendourous greetings

Written by
Jean C Bertrand
Matt Jun 2015
Gone Gone Gone
Into The Great Beyond

I inhabit a different realm now

I went to chip golf *****
At my usual place

I chipped for a bit
Then drove over to a beautiful park nearby

I sat beneath the trees
A long dirt path behind me

Completely alone
A beautiful afternoon

As I walked down the hill
And saw a lizard doing pushups

It scurried behind a tree

As I found another spot in the grass
Underneath the shade of a tree

I read a chapter
From Bertrand Russel's
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
Entitled, Why Russian Communism Has Failed

It appeared as though the black mother and child
That I saw earlier had left

The familiar voices of children playing
On The playground to my right
Could be heard in the distance

American families
Enjoying their American dream

Far to my left a couple enjoys the afternoon
Lying together in the grass

I look above as the birds descend
Across the park
They ride the wind

Simply extending their wings
And gliding across the park
They land on a tree opposite of me

And there was the ice cream truck
Circling its way
Around the park

With the familiar tunes
Of childhood days gone by

Then I came home
She is still announcing
What food is in the fridge

"I can see"
I muttered

Doing everything I could
Not to scream in her face
She just repeats that over and over

And then I went to the nature park
I took pictures of the birds
A video of a lone rabbit too

These animals just do what they do

A woman asked me what was the easiest trail
As I took a picture of the cross
On the monastery gate
I told her the way

I waited until she returned
To see if she would tell me
If she enjoyed the hike

She walked by
Ah well

I no longer seek a companion
I am alone
Forever alone

Oh look
This is the classic
American Scene
A summer American Dream

This is an expensive neighborhood
Don't you know
And fancy cars line the street
In front of the large home in Sierra Madre

Everyone is chatting
This is Tao
I walk by

I wonder if they even realize
That our country hangs in the balance
That our very way of life
May soon end

Oh, they are content
Just to carry on as always
Most people are

Our country has been ruined
Ruined!

A debt we cannot pay

A Chinese, Russian, and U.N. takeover
Likely on its way

Weaponized weather, A grid attack,
Most definitely a total economic collapse

But these Americans just want to enjoy
Their barbecue
As they often do

And on my walk home
Four steps
Thud
Followed by four steps
Thud

And after I go to the gym
I will return
And they will hear the thud
Yes they will hear
As they try to sleep in their beds

Thud

Get ready, Get Ready
Your American dreams will
Soon have gone away

Foot shortages and economic collapse
On its way
U.N. vehicles are here to stay

My therapist told me that
"God never gives us more than we can handle"

She being thirty-six
Accomplished and having had every
Opportunity to succeed in life

Her last words
She uttered a "Take Care"

You know when she told me she was leaving
I cried a bit and composed myself

She said, "I know its a lot to process"
It would have been respectful to be silent
And not say anything
And in that moment
I learned more about her
She did not honor what was sacred

How could she have said that?
Meeting with her was important to me
Quiet, please!
Your words are unnecessary

I didn't say anything to her about that
And that's fine
I had hoped for something higher
A companionship

Blah
To her I was just another client
Another paycheck

I don't trust her
She left me and her other clients

She never said the savior's name
She never said Jesus' name
Just her "higher power"

She told me to email her
If I get a job

I will not ever contact you again

Why are people having kids?
Why the **** are they?
So they can grow up in a FEMA CAMP!

Terrible times are coming for her and for me

That expression
"God never gives us more than we can handle"
Who says that?

Tell that to those who have starved to death
To the German men who spend over a decade
In Russian labor camps

Americans will have a lot to handle soon
And your money
Won't save you

Neither will your **** looks
Or your car

I'll survive
That's all I know how to do

Is to survive
And to keep feeling emptiness
And that ******* therapist
Who left

It was enjoyable
To meet with her
It was consistent

She did not give me much notice

I am pure
I do not engage in ****** *******
Married couples they disgust me
Slamming their privates into each other
Lusting after each other

I do not want to shake another's hand anymore

I do not know
Where that filthy hand has been

******* therapists
I'll never see one again

Remember---They don't really care about you!
Remember!!!

They are there for the money only
And they will sit and lie
Right to your face

Remember to care for yourself
In this world
Trust in Jesus and yourself

On my hike
I greet others with a friendly hello

Perhaps one day
I will meet another friend

I have three I trust now

Until then I will walk the streets alone

The therapist
She left, she left
And she did not give much of a care

Bah
It wasn't her fault
I just shouldn't have allowed myself
To care about our meeting

Now I don't care
I don't work
I don't do anything

Except read
And walk
And listen to podcasts

Gone Gone Gone
Gone Into the Great Beyond

Thud
Can you hear me?

Form is emptiness
Emptiness is form
Tathagata
It's time that "atheists" found a more pious man to worship as, in print, eugenical zealot Richard Dawkins extols the virtues of pederasty (as he's experienced it), de-population, infanticide, vaccines (including M.M.R. contaminated with rabbit blood), expanding hate crime (thought crime) legislation & pre-emptive war. Dawkins pursues the socialistic goals of Bertrand Russell, G. B. Shaw & ****-muffin Charles Darwin.
v V v Nov 2014
(the reconvening of my mind)

It's always the extremes
that bring me back to center,
but it's the trips I take on purpose
that remind me its time to go home.

Today it was the thought of blood.
I cannot stand the sight of it,
and neither would I brave a plunge
in icy depths this time of year.
I’d rather gather sunlight
and convince myself there are
no ghost revivals,
only blood reprisals from
daddy's DNA.

I tell myself
I need to get away
to where I can pray
again, to quit giving in,
to stay and fight wars,
the black, the white,

the gray fluttering darkness that
comes out of nowhere swooping
past my ear, scaring the **** out of me
as if it never happened before
but it has, its just been a while.

So I call for a council of angels,
then prepare for the riptide
of demons that join the fun when
my cranial convention convenes.

The left against the right,
The east against the west,
The pros against the cons,
all the ups and downs,

I don’t give a **** what it is
just give me back my wars.
Give me back my reasons to live.

Give me Nietzsche
Give me Brennan Manning
Give me Sam Harris
Give me Frederick Buechner
Give me Bertrand Russell
Give me Henri Nouwen
Give me Daniel Dennett
Give me Gerald May
Give me M Scott Peck
Give me Pia Mellody
Give me Dante
Give me Jane Kenyon
Give me the Marquis de Sade
Give me Dostoyevsky
and that should just about do it.

Within these names exist
enough controversy,
enough conflicting views
on life, on love, on God,
enough heresy,
enough truth,
enough lies,
enough knowledge,
enough beauty
to keep me waging wars
inside my head until the day I die.

Give me back my wars.
Canto II in process..
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
there's just too much coming in,
you can own about 100 books and
never keep up;
a bit like alan harper's frustration,
or quiet simply meltdown in
the bookstore... "i just want to
read melville!"
    too bad, i want a nobel prize for
something or other... but i did manage
to fetch a memory of the summer
i spent reading bertrand russell's
history of western philosophy,
lying down on the balcony in my
grandparent's flat... in a building,
that if translated into western standards
of housing (or apparently none
these days) would be deemed a housing
project, or an estate...
     but then this is post-communism,
and it gave rise to an exponential reply
to the losses incurred in the second world war.
i hate to call my methods "natural selection"
but there goes the tool of metaphor...
  gone, done, gone gone... gone.
        do i need this tool, as in (doubled-up
ambiguity): the way i might need
the distinction between verb and noun?
                 enter the nerd, with a baggage
of tricks and quirps...
                    no... but i just stopped reading
books by my contemporaries...
      might be that there is some sort of
ageism roaming the planet...
                      being younger i could relate
to older people... now i can't seem to find
   a position to take with them...
                     or maybe i do...
then again once you read enough books and
say to yourself: enough! you get to
read book reviews, so a bit like an orawellian
double-think concept:
        there's a c.c.t.v. camera over there...
should i be bothered, or shouldn't i be bothered?
        and then the cascade of happenings
enter and you lead into sitting on a park
bench, where there's the alternative to c.c.t.v.:
a crow perched on a branch...
      then again, i always thought that crows
are bowing (boeing)... bow-wow...
     out of all the birds i've seen, crows actually
look humble, as if bowing, hunched...
try spotting a crow at night...
           an insomniac crow is very hard to spot...
i know that crows are capable
    of attacking storks... seen that happen with
my naked eye...
                and sure enough: a kestrel once
visited me, perched on my garden fence...
if it sat any closer i'd go all underwater cross-eyed.
          i have literally lost the capacity to *******
people... it's too consuming in terms of time
and it really ***** up your memory...
   trying to remember all the lies... beginning
with the first one? takes about 10 years off your life.
  so as book reviews go, you enter a world
of double-think... and as this book review clearly
proves, a doubling of standards to understand something...
christopher knight, the north pond hermit...
            27 years, living alone...
                                cites his favourite book that's
1,200 pages long (william shirer's the rise and fall
of the third *****)...
                         and then he cites freud:
"there is no such thing as a joke... it's only veiled
hostility."
                 rings true... but you really have to
spend 27 years alone to read a book, that, if thrown
could **** someone (in hardback edition)?
                i guess you do.
           we can't read them all...
but we'd love to just write all of them.
Sean Flaherty Jul 2015
I don't have recurring dreams, but... right..., my dreams... recurring themes. And, if in-them, I've a ... "love-interest?" ... they've taken many shapes. The one, and-one-and-one more, who've shown up more than once, I could cough up, cry-out-over, and name. Only three come, through the old haunts, of my odd-head's hallway, Round-and-round-and-round trip. [redact] At least here, I dated her. In real-life, as-opposed, to the annals of [page 6] more depths-delusional. Did wrong [redact]. couldn't believe she was "glad I came." Care enough, to care. She couldn't-care-less. Middle-ground, Grey-areas, and misinterpretations make my skin crawl. Excepting another-day-in-April,

[big
redact]

and maybe if I sing it better this time she'll seeeeeeeeeeeeeee... "wait, Kay, Cee, and Ell?" I've noticed too, and it's cute, but a fluke. Not some-hidden-meaning. "Got a subconscious, on me," Freud couldn't pursue.

Silly, and I didn't mean to be serious, but you're starting to get a grip-on-it. The feelings may fade, but the drip-drop flow of dreams adds to the direness of my dilemma. Alas, around when she's leaving us-all, in Natick, [page 7] I began-becoming acquainted with another-animal-lover. "Any port in the storm?" Any pill, and a razorblade. "A penchant, for an interesting existence!" Next-door, the slowly-nailed-coffin! Where people are abandoning their unloved pets! She mentions Bertrand Russell, in-the-line to buy, more jet fuel.

 "(sung)Way down in the hoooooooooooooole..."

...
A lot is missing from this act but I bleeped rather than taking out a whole chunk which I also did
Ken Pepiton Jul 2021
If Dexter's Parents had not divorced and he had not moved away with his mother,
Who was beautiful as I recall, today would have played out or worked out or turned out
Differently. Very differently, considering that little twist in my six-degrees of separation base pattern
Hapt seventy-years ago, or so,
----
Watch starlings, if you have starlings, or watch congregations of kippers on Netflix.
Their steering is on auto. Do you agree? Then we are in Agreement, which is an odd place to find one's self in the midst of so great a cloud of witnesses.
-----
'e goes a gain a ginning, grinning all the while
Aye, and radioman turned on just
Now listen -Radio Mumbai

I meant, you and I agree schools of sardines and flocks of gulls are all on auto-pilot-propulsion-maintenance programs,
Right?
I thought so. The code in a gnat must be so much more elegant than the vast terabytes of programming in the GPS constrained self-drivers evolving on earth. Gnats never collide and are nearly impossible to hit, unless you have bat tools, which you don't. Nobody wrote that gnat code, right?
Of course not, evidence of programming only appears to be programming, evidence of design only looks like design it's not design. Right? So says Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and all the people so called to win the battle for the minds of **** Sapiens Augmentatious, lest, as the confusion of Babel subsides, those minds should begin to reason together more clearly in light left after the lies standing on men's minds are revealed inferior to what our senses sensationally acknowledge. Whew. Long thought.

I meander, but you do as well. That is how things flow.
Not over immovable objections, around.

One life that was connected to mine in boyhood friendship was severed about half-way through my sixteenth year.
He died. I don't remember how. Alcohol-related, I can imagine. I did not attend the funeral, though some acquaintances did; one of whom was later my lover. She is dead now as well, too late to tell me anything. She had a baby less than a year after I returned from Vietnam, more than nine months later. That is a heavy thought, but not one I think does much good now.

So little of history is noted. So few lives function to trigger generational unctions that devolve into wars against imbalance, iniquity, slavery and death.
Fraternity, Egality, ******* *** the mob all riled-up, burn , baby, burn.
Whole people die in history's whims,
If whims they were.

Rebellions…

Watch the starlings steer through 4-d patterns eternally random,
fueled by bugs they convert to food for the soil itself.
Their life is their work and they do it beautifully. As one.

Can Boeing-Raytheon-L3 et al build a self-propelled, self-refueling drone that can fly at top-speed, maneuvering millimeters in each direction from other self-propelled, self-refueling drones while dropping their payloads without a single friendly-fire crash, ever?

Starlings don't **** on each other.

If war-profiteers could build such things, would you watch such things perform and wonder at the minds that built them, or deny such minds played any role from concept to creation, and ask who authorized development and deployment of such an expensive fertilizer distribution system that fertilizes wild weeds as well as gentled weeds?
Which would you say: "Wow, how did those get made, who paid?" or "Wow, look what billions of years and energy alone can do against absolutely insurmountable odds and impossible physics, with chaos and corruption always on the job?" Holy entropic bad moon.

Are ye not more precious than starlings, or sardines, or gnats. Would a sense pertaining to immediate locational proximity, evident in birds and fish and bugs, not be apparent in Adamkind, at least as a metaphor regarding benefits gained in knowing where you are relative to your own environment, regardless of any sense of personal purpose?

I can see it in the fact that we can agree, for good or ill.

As generations mature and regenerate, might there be patterns in the tumbling of the powerful and the powerless populations. Patterns depicting group or herd preservation by fully mentally equipped populations of mature and maturing Adamkind are detectable. Facts now overflow the cup of knowns. These are those days when knowledge is increasing and increasing and increasing to the point of being a destructive force in tightly closed minds.

Name dropping, rather than restating, Helen Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"(1966), Bertrand Russell, "The Problems with Philosophy"(1912), Pankaj Mishra, "The Age of Anger"(2017).

These three books and some browsing of names and titles the authors drop, have spurred me over the top of a rise I had not seen coming. My path had become gradually uphill without my noticing. I was interested in other things and ignoring notices from my body that oxygen stores were being depleted more rapidly than current inventory of red blood cells and nurse lymphocyte-bots can recycle the quadra-monthly disassembly turnover, H2O stores for sweat heat-dispersal systems and plasma regeneration and digestion of what little remains to be digested are now at "caution, think about stopping" levels. But I saw that from the top I might see to the top of the next rise before I chose the downhill part of my path. The down hill path determines the uphill path.
In the desert, you can see trails marked in many ways, mosses grow in least-heat zones created by angular location relationships with the sun. Breezes whisper into shade puddles by ever slow slight temperature inequilibria shifting some heat to the triggering of my sweat system.

If you were compelled to reason about every step you take in life as if it were your responsibility to regulate and control every function of your flesh vehicle in which you abide in relationship to all around you that you could harm or that could harm you, you would be mad. {mad?} illusion of reality

assumes reality is friendly here. I'm okeh
with that improbability aside,

implied as self explicatory and unfolding life…
examined,
for what its worth in words redeemed may be,
in the future, when this is what they thought,
you think, and I say know,
I thought this,
on a bet. Or an oath, depends on the fret.

Crazy mad, but angry auch. That would be unfair, because you don't know how to do what you are being compelled to do. Reports of persons who can control ****** functions not commonly consciously controlled are easily found. Such persons spend their time so countering the rolling rhythms beat by heart doors slamming shut and swooshing open in response to electricity, that, we, Adamkind, have yet to truly understand. We've no need, that which concerns us was
to be perfected, not by us.

If my use of Adamkind offends you, the reality of my benefits, wrought from my comprehension of my relation to Adam, will likely make me your enemy, in your own mind, not mine.
Ax'em, do they love po' o'hate rich?

Believe one chance in practically infinity of current evolutionary-nontheistic thought being the way things must be, then multiply the number of times you make that bet by the number of insects on earth or even by the number of mitochondria in your kidneys.

Ignoring life's delicate imbalances in light of what can be known today, breaks our minds's ability to agree perfectly. The social dichotomy that seems to arrange adamkind's affairs over eons and eras: rich and poor, have and have not, mean and meek, is ego-driven, self-benefit seeking and not part of the original program.

Contemplate the sweet influences of Pliades, silently questing the truth of hope and matter. There is more power in this stream.

Chapter end.
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Mateuš Conrad May 2016
it's quiet hard to find a welcoming book, i can cite two read in one sitting, thus spoke Zarathusrta (the original intent) and the soft machine by burroughs... all others came with many composed sittings... but none of the repeated encounters can be spoken of so favourably as Bertrand Russell's history of western philosophy, with that book came the kindest summer - in that i find historians the prefects of philosophy, the Republic guardians, leave the poets to do their sing-along, and furthered abstracts of symbols (should they wish, and ought), give presence to historians like Russell and Tatarkiewicz (surname derived as descended from Tartar auxiliary at the battle of Tannenberg with two naked swords dipped into ****** soil awaiting blood by a Lithuanian king married to a Polish gal).

sometimes poems can be more memorable than entire
books, there memorableness technique used in
epics gets lost most of the time,
writers' custard narrative awaiting a memorable
spontaneity is always missing, a memorable quote
needs to be bookmarked, it's hardly remembered,
all that talk of etiquette, esp. 19th century is always
the fog in novel, Mr. Darcy and his twin
Mr. Rochester, both haunted -
the former by social structures (prejudice;
his wife to be by lower caste governed by pride)
while the latter by a madwoman in the attic -
there's nothing memorable about these novels
in mono assertions, unless you have a book-club or
a cinematic script and a movie... poems are more
memorable, naturally, even if you're unable to recite
them because you rather recite the list of ingredients
for a bonkers curry, someone else will recite you a
poem, no problem. i guess that's because memorising
poetry is afforded by rhymes, the crude musicology
if given an instrument, would be to pluck
two same notes, ugly with a guitar, beautiful with
the tongue.
no, novels are not memorable, ask blind Samson about
the pillars he absorbed with his strength and pulled
down... ask him...
or... or i can tell you a little secret, it's a secret concerning
Sylvia Plath's *bell jar
... page 119 in my edition (Faber & Faber),
slight digression: a page later she's complaining in
a "fictive" personality about the ineffectiveness of sleeping
pills... she has been apparently given max'      imum
strength pills... dear Sylvia,
                                        against your doctor's orders,
          against all pharmaceutical orthodoxy,
sleeping pills are best effective with alcohol,
even though the tagline is to avoid mixing the two...
i can't specify the quantity of alcohol in milligrams
akin to the dosage of the pills, dear Sylvia, they're only
effective with the liquid sedative, and perhaps a painkiller
like paracetamol...
nonetheless on page 119 she's citing a book you will
probably not read, and neither did she (explanation
a bit later)... she cites the first page of J. Joyce's
Finnegans Wake...
                 riverrun past Eve and Adam's...
and that ONE-HUNDRED LETTERED word:

  ba'ba'ba'dal'gharagh'takamminanarronk'onn'bronntonner'r­onn'tuonn'thunn'trovarr'houna'wnska'wntooh'oohoo'rdenen'thurnuk!­

i tried the syllable scalpel to my best ability for breath,
this grand anti-onomatopoeia, cut for brief pause...
but she didn't read any further like Delmore Schwartz
trying to sell this **** Grææ tongue...
she didn't read on, because there's another century in this
book:

(i left a bookmark on the page (no. 23) - a painting by
Diego Velázquez, the toilet of Venus 122.5 by 177 centimetres)

with loss of breath and entry of the centipede as follows

perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhur­thrumathunnaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun!

but i must i don't have the ratio, since i didn't bother counting
either words, but Sylvia did, and if she counted the first word
as a century, this second word must also be a century -
yet on suspicion should i believe she read further, or didn't?
they claimed the book to be a Babylonian Tower
readying for dispersions of the people, yet with historical
events it's a joke, given that there are no diacritical marks
in the book to provide stresses of accents:
e.g. fumatul poate să ucidă (romanian for: do not smoke
cigarettes, yes, there's a black market for cigarettes,
THANK GOD!) - and with saying that, it is not a book
with a Babylonian Tower attached to it, it's a tower for sure,
but a Globalisation Tower, how english became the
Lingua Levant once more, when the Franks had their
puppet king of Jerusalem at the time of Saladin.
Joe Wilson Sep 2014
I've never killed in my long life
neither enemy soldier, politician, nor wife
This feat that causes me no surprise
Is what we call living in its normal guise.

I would never be so naïve as to say
The pen is always the only way
But it seems to me that war only proved
Who will remain, and who is removed.

And all this killing that leaves nations bereft
With the vile bitter cordite smell that is left
Widows lose husbands, fathers lose sons
Babies are dying from the barrels of guns.

To save nations weapons of course must be used
But there are so many people who are being abused
And when one discusses what is now simply absurd
There is nothing that is mightier than the word.

©Joe Wilson - The word is STOP...2014


"War does not determine who is right - only who is left".
Bertrand Russell
I.

À présent que c'est fait, dans l'avilissement
Arrangeons-nous chacun notre compartiment
Marchons d'un air auguste et fier ; la honte est bue.
Que tout à composer cette cour contribue,
Tout, excepté l'honneur, tout, hormis les vertus.
Faites vivre, animez, envoyez vos foetus
Et vos nains monstrueux, bocaux d'anatomie
Donne ton crocodile et donne ta momie,
Vieille Égypte ; donnez, tapis-francs, vos filous ;
Shakespeare, ton Falstaff ; noires forêts, vos loups ;
Donne, ô bon Rabelais, ton Grandgousier qui mange ;
Donne ton diable, Hoffmann ; Veuillot, donne ton ange ;
Scapin, apporte-nous Géronte dans ton sac ;
Beaumarchais, prête-nous Bridoison ; que Balzac
Donne Vautrin ; Dumas, la Carconte ; Voltaire,
Son Frélon que l'argent fait parler et fait taire ;
Mabile, les beautés de ton jardin d'hiver ;
Le Sage, cède-nous Gil Blas ; que Gulliver
Donne tout Lilliput dont l'aigre est une mouche,
Et Scarron Bruscambille, et Callot Scaramouche.
Il nous faut un dévot dans ce tripot payen ;
Molière, donne-nous Montalembert. C'est bien,
L'ombre à l'horreur s'accouple, et le mauvais au pire.
Tacite, nous avons de quoi faire l'empire ;
Juvénal, nous avons de quoi faire un sénat.

II.

Ô Ducos le gascon, ô Rouher l'auvergnat,
Et vous, juifs, Fould Shylock, Sibour Iscariote,
Toi Parieu, toi Bertrand, horreur du patriote,
Bauchart, bourreau douceâtre et proscripteur plaintif,
Baroche, dont le nom n'est plus qu'un vomitif,
Ô valets solennels, ô majestueux fourbes,
Travaillant votre échine à produire des courbes,
Bas, hautains, ravissant les Daumiers enchantés
Par vos convexités et vos concavités,
Convenez avec moi, vous tous qu'ici je nomme,
Que Dieu dans sa sagesse a fait exprès cet homme
Pour régner sur la France, ou bien sur Haïti.
Et vous autres, créés pour grossir son parti,
Philosophes gênés de cuissons à l'épaule,
Et vous, viveurs râpés, frais sortis de la geôle,
Saluez l'être unique et providentiel,
Ce gouvernant tombé d'une trappe du ciel,
Ce césar moustachu, gardé par cent guérites,
Qui sait apprécier les gens et les mérites,
Et qui, prince admirable et grand homme en effet,
Fait Poissy sénateur et Clichy sous-préfet.

III.

Après quoi l'on ajuste au fait la théorie
« A bas les mots ! à bas loi, liberté, patrie !
Plus on s'aplatira, plus ou prospérera.
Jetons au feu tribune et presse, et cætera.

Depuis quatre-vingt-neuf les nations sont ivres.
Les faiseurs de discours et les faiseurs de livres
Perdent tout ; le poëte est un fou dangereux ;
Le progrès ment, le ciel est vide, l'art est creux,
Le monde est mort. Le peuple ? un âne qui se cabre !
La force, c'est le droit. Courbons-nous. Gloire au sabre !
À bas les Washington ! vivent les Attila ! »
On a des gens d'esprit pour soutenir cela.

Oui, qu'ils viennent tous ceux qui n'ont ni cœur ni flamme,
Qui boitent de l'honneur et qui louchent de l'âme ;
Oui, leur soleil se lève et leur messie est né.
C'est décrété, c'est fait, c'est dit, c'est canonné
La France est mitraillée, escroquée et sauvée.
Le hibou Trahison pond gaîment sa couvée.

IV.

Et partout le néant prévaut ; pour déchirer
Notre histoire, nos lois, nos droits, pour dévorer
L'avenir de nos fils et les os de nos pères,
Les bêtes de la nuit sortent de leurs repaires
Sophistes et soudards resserrent leur réseau
Les Radetzky flairant le gibet du museau,
Les Giulay, poil tigré, les Buol, face verte,
Les Haynau, les Bomba, rôdent, la gueule ouverte,
Autour du genre humain qui, pâle et garrotté,
Lutte pour la justice et pour la vérité ;
Et de Paris à Pesth, du Tibre aux monts Carpathes,
Sur nos débris sanglants rampent ces mille-pattes.

V.

Du lourd dictionnaire où Beauzée et Batteux
Ont versé les trésors de leur bon sens goutteux,
Il faut, grâce aux vainqueurs, refaire chaque lettre.
Ame de l'homme, ils ont trouvé moyen de mettre
Sur tes vieilles laideurs un tas de mots nouveaux,
Leurs noms. L'hypocrisie aux yeux bas et dévots
À nom Menjaud, et vend Jésus dans sa chapelle ;
On a débaptisé la honte, elle s'appelle
Sibour ; la trahison, Maupas ; l'assassinat
Sous le nom de Magnan est membre du Sénat ;
Quant à la lâcheté, c'est Hardouin qu'on la nomme ;
Riancey, c'est le mensonge, il arrive de Rome
Et tient la vérité renfermée en son puits ;
La platitude a nom Montlaville-Chapuis ;
La prostitution, ingénue, est princesse ;
La férocité, c'est Carrelet ; la bassesse
Signe Rouher, avec Delangle pour greffier.
Ô muse, inscris ces noms. Veux-tu qualifier
La justice vénale, atroce, abjecte et fausse ?
Commence à Partarieu pour finir par Lafosse.
J'appelle Saint-Arnaud, le meurtre dit : c'est moi.
Et, pour tout compléter par le deuil et l'effroi,
Le vieux calendrier remplace sur sa carte
La Saint-Barthélemy par la Saint-Bonaparte.

Quant au peuple, il admire et vote ; on est suspect
D'en douter, et Paris écoute avec respect
Sibour et ses sermons, Trolong et ses troplongues.
Les deux Napoléon s'unissent en diphthongues,
Et Berger entrelace en un chiffre hardi
Le boulevard Montmartre entre Arcole et Lodi.
Spartacus agonise en un bagne fétide ;
On chasse Thémistocle, on expulse Aristide,
On jette Daniel dans la fosse aux lions ;
Et maintenant ouvrons le ventre aux millions !

Jersey, novembre 1852.
Have you seen her
Butterfly
Have you seen her
Please don't cry
Have you seen her
In paradise
Have you seen her
River shed no tears
Have you seen her
Flashing in sky
Have you seen her
Angels don't lie
Have you seen her
O sweet butterfly
Full moon be delight
Honey sky in paradise
Words can not be explain
O butterfly kisses
Kisses kisses kisses
Kisses kisses kisses

by
Jean C Bertrand
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
today i realised i will never truly
and fully integrate into english
society, thanks to the irish,
i have to hear of the racism on
the building site, i was there once
too, brave racist slogans in toilet
cubicles, first the polish,
then the romanians, brave souls'
anger on the toilet seat, strange
kinship to the current retardation
of american culture, back to
the time of blank panthers,
when i hear of the racism against my
father my blood boils and my
stomach swells with fire...
like that one boy from liverpool
who asked if the poles had any
famous people... copernicus,
chopin, marie curie, john paul ii,
mickiewicz, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski...
but i guess the dyslexia obstructed
finding that out...
basically a manager of a site
was told to take down the cranes when
the roof wasn't finished,
and the mobile crane wasn't adequate
for the job... it's this irish thing...
the irish are supreme concrete layers,
but they're in the stone age with the motto:
well, the concrete skeleton of a building is
up... people can live there...
this fierce post-colonialism of former
colonies playing the bullies on other nations...
two nations are currently writing history,
the re-emergence of poland and israel,
the unlikely twins of historical matters...
so the crane debate:
it would be easier to spread the 1 tonne bags
of soil with the bag dangling rather than
using spades and wheelbarrows...
but not... leaving 11 one tonne bags on the
ground level, 4 labourers will apparently
shift that volume to the ninth level,
and then throw it over a 6ft2 wall onto the roof...
after one hour of this impossible task
they'll just say **** it, and leave it...
it's like the irish have no ***** after the i.r.a.
failures of killing people, they want to
victimise someone else because: trump moment:
they're just drunk *******!
mozart feared his father, the prodigy who
never made it back to the heart...
i don't fear my father, i'm in solidarity with him,
i'm halfway between integration and
keeping my ***** dry...
after what i've experienced i don't think i really
want to, marvel at a bonny lass or an english
rose or a welsh turnip...
the irish spoiled it for me, the subtler form
of racism and all that passive aggressive ****
is getting to me...
might as well follow suit with the olives of
the middle-east, drink nine pints of guinness
and blow up a pub in dublin;
i'm still adamant on the point about how
the english can't philosophise...
but the thing is... they're superior at history,
actually excelling in history is an english thing,
hence the populist usage of darwinism,
it's a historical debate, not a theological one,
the basic concerns of using darwinism
is to exact the range of historically relevant events
for a dinner party... smocking and pipe
and all that highbrow crap...
as i said, the english can't philosophise
but they can definitely boast of having a piquant
palette for history: england is a nation of shopkeepers
(voltaire) - yeah, and historians (mathias conrad)...
because when i look at it, on joy by tatarkiewicz
was slightly tedious to read...
but bertrand russell's history of western philosophy
was a joy to read: in summer on a balcony.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
i actually took to taking heidegger seriously,
i don't know why, it just happend,
i like the fact that i only have a sketch of him,
being & time and ponderings ii - vi
don't account for much... but it's worthwhile
ground to begin sketching oneself,
how, or more precisely why writing
is self-absorption, until there is no "self"
for others to ask about, that's utterly fascinating,
people ask the question when people fall out
of line in the dimension of morality,
if they ever do, in all honesty.
             but sometimes, it just so happens
that the heart says what it wants to hear
and the brain doesn't have the barricades against it,
for all its reasons it just remains a ****
encompassed in a cranium...
            on the basis of understanding the
categorical imperative... categories...
             brain is primarily fat...
                           what can poison the brain
or simply "eat" it are hostile proteins...
                  so where is the true account of what
ails?                 i'd understand a parasitic instance
to account for tapeworms, but the idea of
      hostile proteins attacking an ***** that's
primarily fatty seems as much as
           prescribing people with omega-3
in tinned fish...
              we know too much to then speak the truth...
the point of pragmatism is to lie,
our safety is bound to lie, we lie to avoid
rubbing the jinn-bottle to conjure something that
many other will disagree with...
       akin to enlarging a phobia so it's massive...
hell, by comparison to heaven: is tiny...
but then heaven enlarges itself and mars descends,
that fake hope of finding like on mars?
that died, when earth was born
   and the sun went through its secondary cycle...
oh there was life on mars, but mars is
a quasi moon, hello and welcome to radio lemniscate,
but sure, go ahead, find me martian bacterium
while i watch an oxfam advert of people starving...
i'm just going to take a very, very long bow
from this circus... drink a great deal and write
as much ******* as i can...
  i think all of this began with: a real great respect
for books... how you're not supposed to treat
books as you might, in my case, deal prostitutes...
caress them, use bookmarks, fiddle the pages
as if touching trees... taking the sleeves off hardback
editions, reading the book in hardcover,
then putting the decoration sleeves back onto them
and the shelf...
        i don't have a populist culture-effective view
of ******, i just have heidegger...
            what he wrote in the 1930s resonates as
it did back then... after going to university i felt
limbless, i was almost actually but more so honest
akin to dante's depiction of bertrand de born,
a ******* dentist had more bones to a body than
i had, thinking it was only a case of me chewing
meat / vegetables...
            universities these days represent
**** germany in the 1930s...
            i'm waiting, and i'm waiting, and i can't see
anything being born...
                          more crass on crass than
criss-cross... usually it's something you do and then
you get to forget about it... clearly people are
reading into history as this need to brush-up on
their arithmetic... me? i don't remember how
the alphabet goes, but i know a word or two,
i have respect for certain sciences...
           like abacadus?
     abecadus? 3 results (0.59 seconds),
so near to a google-whack! ****!
                            http://tinyurl.com/go9g3b8,
that "alphabet" of numbers! what's it called?
                         oh right... an abacus....
          similus non similiis qua abecadus -
but the algorithm understood it...
               but university has become that sort
of magnet of failure...
                in the earliest past of the 21st century
the labour government allowed too many of us
to access this medium...
                      what we should have been taught
was how to not be bored from a boring / repetitive
environment... i'd gladly learn that course /
unless of course that thing is self taught?
  funny enough to also state: surgeons don't
have these problems, as butchers don't have them,
it's the buddhist territory of the middle
    that gets the most spank of oink huh?
             then poetry gets agitated because people
start throthing into its gob of worth with some
obscene content, and poetry is like:
call papa phi pho lee... so people can see how
pointless their argument will eventually be,
and they can go along the route of scuttling past like
scared rats... which in this language, makes perfect sense,
given they branded western slavs as vermin...
                thank you, i'll just stick to me
aphorism no. 34 (ponderings iii) and be on my way
to stage an "islam",
                         or what most would claim to
be defeat (there really is an interpolation between
ditto and italics, or at least a symbiosis,
for what could never improve punctuation,
let alone spelling)...
                        i really have lost my "christian" / western
sensibility of indoctrinating darwinism on people,
i lost my mojo / atheism-drive of "zeitgeist" vogue...
i lost the need to indoctrinate darwinism on people,
there's too many of them, and what i see is
    "zen" libido, or at least tao libido...
i think i'm going to call it tao libido in all earnest...
well... an asian paradigm if anything...
or why the west is obsessed with fame but that fame
results in a billion chinese / blue indians that...
simply don't give a ****...
       the first rule of tao?
                   to keep a world at peace is to ensure
you forget the world, and the world forgets you.
    by this point there is no dasein,
                               there is no "happening"...
or what compulsory thought patterns suggest:
there had to be a darwinism and there had to be
a big bang, for per se reasons,
    the democratic totalitarian obliteration
                                 of the individuation process;
at least in islam we are bound to disagree...
here? we agree to annoy, or we are agreed upon
toward a zenith of annoyance that translates
into subverting violence, or micro-violence...
or: that our past be no burden on our future tomorrows...
we really are living in times that history
will later define as merely a blame game,
   after that.... people will reflect and state
the unimportant content given the context,
            and then vice versus...
   then **** sapiens will suddenly fizzle out of
existence and **** schizoi will establish his rule,
to what was naturally teasing man:
                           tell a lie, write a history;
or that "metaphor" of eden.
Charles Sturies Jun 2017
Sandt Amaro and Karl Spooner on the old Brooklyn Dodgers.

My 2 all-time favorite players of my favorite team the Yankees are
an putfielder acquired in a transaction Vernon Webb
and the Rookie of the Year for, I believe, 1957
an outfielder first baseman Norm Cisbern.

My 2 favorite all-time Illinois basketball players were sixth men Ed Perez and Joseph Bertrand.

My 2 favorite all-time Detroit Lions are Bobby Cayne and Pork Walker with Ces Bingaman a nice third.

My favorite all-time Cleveland Browns are Otto Graham and Frank Gatsby.

My all-time 2 favorite Chicago Bulls are Michael Jordan and Dave Corzine.

Mordern-day-wise, I like Parig of the LA Dodgers, Steven Aren who last I saw was with the Washington Nationals, and in modern Illini football I loved Monty Wilson. He hit so hard and the sound of a prize recruit who never got in on a game. D'Angelo McGary and I liked the sound of the name. Duane Brantley who was a large for the time offensive lineman out of Chicago wo dropped out before he had a chance to play.

This is just scratching the surface, I guess, since I'm not into the star system per se.
Charles Sturies
Despite of all
The windows of heaven
widely open
The stars in the moonlight
singing a song of love
Despite of all
God loves you
Unconditional love
Needless to be afraid of darkness
Needless to cry shed no tears
You are not alone smile with the wind
Embracing godly given wind inhaling godly given thy sweet breeze you are not alone
The windows of heaven wildly open
The stars in the moonlight singing a song of love
Despite of all
God loves you

by
Jean C Bertrand
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
i know, i should have attempted to collect black sabbath's oeuvre, instead  i missed out on master of reality's song solitude, loved that song, learned to play it apart from the solo, and a girl remarked 'i did't know you could play country music', country?! ah, you mean country as in: sleepy hollow haunted woods and wide open fields and remote routes into isolation? ah, well then yes. shame really, but i'm not going to feel ashamed having collected iron maiden and slayer oeuvres (up to a sensible point), but **** me, that song! and thank god i smashed my guitar on the stones, bye bye, you haunted guitar.*

you know, after reading a lot of books,
esp. in your ****** prime and want of party party,
you digest things a lot easier,
mind you, i used to visit my grandparents
in the summer religiously, a perfect environment
to have read major books:
kierkegaard's either / or, bertrand russell's
history of western philosophy,
dostoyevsky's the karamazov brothers,
bolesław prus' the doll,
don quixote, tatarkiewicz's on joy...
i mean mammoth-sized books (by the way,
mammoth is a word derived from estonian,
and they didn't become extinct as far back
as you might think)... but the perfect environment
to read them... and after you've done that,
and enjoyed a few other books in between
you just turn to writing, and reading book
reviews... like today, i sneezed four times
to protect me against the guilt of laughing
reading a book review, rather than the book itself:
death drive - there are no accidents,
a book about celebrities crashing their cars,
fatal car accidents; enlisted examples refer to:
jayne mansfield, albert camus, james dean,
eddie cochran, mike hailwood, mike hawthorn,
marc bolan, tara browne, isadora duncan.
i guess you just forget reading books,
having testified to yourself an adequate cultural
canon being possessed: well, i mean,
imagine going back to the town of your birth
you left aged 8 and spending time with your
grandparents for a month - you have to
make shroud economics in such scenarios.
Love is
     Wisdom.

                               Hatred is

                                                       Foolish.

Bertrand Russell
A groggy momentum
Strawberry moon
Anonymous wind
Fearing the ocean
Foggy windows
Lost the birds

by
Jean C Bertrand
I, (a bookish educated intelligent nerd,
albeit three score plus tres años)
constitutes a novel titled
The ******'s Lover
by Philippa Gregory
another writer from England.

Not so much to boast
yours truly sunk trenchant figurative teeth
into material authored courtesy
aforementioned former renown British philosopher,
logician, and social critic.

As an academic, he worked
in philosophy, mathematics, and logic.

Just to reiterate
quite a couple plus years ago,
I plunged further into
trying to comprehend
(and did study every last page
birthed from said storied academic)
erudite epistemological philosophication
courtesy said renown British polymath,
philosopher, logician, mathematician,
historian, writer, social critic,
political activist, and Nobel laureate.

Whew! His Hume among us treatise
A History of Western Philosophy Quite profound
gleaned material eyes surmised
and into cerebral cortex his notions did drill
offering grist for intellectual mill
yours truly, a johnny come lately (me)
doth thirstily swill.

Though challenging material
to comprehend without shadow of doubt,
yours truly disciplines himself
to utter words out loud
in an effort accentuate, enunciate, inculcate...

No matter said storied author
among grateful dead fifty plus years,
I experience a communion
integrating esprit de corps
of one garden variety
beetle browed foo fighter (me)
linkedin courtesy immortality of soul.

Slow and methodical
thru telling material I tiresomely did wade
steeping yours truly signature
writing stock in trade
while sprawled out on bed housed within
one bedroom apartment (B44)

Highland Manor Apartments
(situated in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania
owned by Grosse and Quade),
one of the largest residential
property management firms in this area.

Analogous to basking robin luxuriating
within his/her medium of taster's choice,
I experience with exultant and exuberant
express within poetic quasi-motto rejoice.

Book learning brings me tremendous delight,
whereby my mind soars to immense height
despite eyes forced to shut courtesy blinding light,
nevertheless joie de vivre prevails gleaning
precious nuggets of knowledge to ease
penurious and precarious penniless plight
prompting provocative dreams tonight.

Figurative meaty tender vittle morsels
temporarily appease appetite
dentures no drawback into juicy tidbits to bite
impossible mission countless passages to cite
each page chock full
food for thought delight

either factual or fictitious
voluminous tome doth excite
buzzfeeding Dharma bums' fanciful flight
occasionally curiosity finds him (me)
scrutinizing mind boggling gametophyte

phase regarding plants,
(the dominant form in bryophytes -
mosses and liverworts -
reproduce by means of spores
released from capsules),

less familiar to most people, I highlight
smattering botanical information insight
nsync with tidbit
about mineralogy namely jacobsite,
a black magnetic
isometric mineral MnFe2O4.

Fifty plus shades of gray matter (mine)
undergoing voluntary torturous subjection
i.e. stoking, perusing, and manhandling
a heavy (Sisyphean) subject matter
(honest to dogs' truth),
I Kant understand a single word!
David W Clare Dec 2014
A diatribe in the making...

The demon gods of pathos
By d. Clare
Preface
The mind is a mysterious realm where emotions are stored and collected churning out controlling our moods emotions and
Feelings overwhelming us creating joy or rage.
I hate you I love you?
Where do all the demon s come from.
The two kinds of minds in most are either reactive or responsive thinking.
"Most people would rather die than think."
Bertrand Russell
Reality being subjective requires daily choices. If one decides to drop out of school, quit ones job, go shopping, its all about choices.
Some people like to live in the country while most prefer the city.
stress is damage to the nervous system where no mytosis exists.
Sigmund Freud was the modern day discoverer of psychosis.
" Most people are psychotically misinformed stingy with their time love and attention overemphasizing their importance to the universe."
Buddha was born in 662 BC
In India. He suggested that what we see in others is actually what we see in ourselves.
Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.
The last word of the bird
Please o please o please
He was spoken to the air
I have not too much time
I only have few seconds
Gosh are you listening
That flickering light
Dancing behind the leaves
Waving calling my name
Gosh
A flock of birds angels sky
Eyes of holiness
Please my devoted godly air
Will you remember my name
I will sing a song
While floating in the air
This lyrical with great desire
Will always be in my heart
At heaven's gate
I will mention your name
Holding the key of happiness
I will fly across the seas
I will fly across the mountains
I will pray for humankind to
Have a changing heart

by
Jean C Bertrand
Aventurier conduit par le louche destin,
Pour y passer la nuit, jusqu'à demain matin,
Entre à l'auberge Louvre avec ta rosse Empire.
Molière te regarde et fait signe à Shakspeare ;
L'un te prend pour Scapin, l'autre pour Richard trois.
Entre en jurant, et fais le signe de la croix.
L'antique hôtellerie est toute illuminée.
L'enseigne, par le temps salie et charbonnée,
Sur le vieux fleuve Seine, à deux pas du Pont-Neuf,
Crie et grince au balcon rouillé de Charles neuf ;
On y déchiffre encor ces quelques lettres : - Sacre ; -
Texte obscur et tronqué, reste du mot Massacre.

Un fourmillement sombre emplit ce noir logis.

Parmi les chants d'ivresse et les refrains mugis,
On rit, on boit, on mange, et le vin sort des outres.
Toute une boucherie est accrochée aux poutres.
Ces êtres triomphants ont fait quelque bon coup.
L'un crie : assommons tout ! et l'autre : empochons tout !
L'autre agite une torche aux clartés aveuglantes.
Par places sur les murs on voit des mains sanglantes.
Les mets fument ; la braise aux fourneaux empourprés
Flamboie ; on voit aller et venir affairés,
Des taches à leurs mains, des taches à leurs chausses,
Les Rianceys marmitons, les Nisards gâte-sauces ;
Et, - derrière la table où sont assis Fortoul,
Persil, Piétri, Carlier, Chapuys le capitoul,
Ducos et Magne au meurtre ajoutant leur paraphe,
Forey dont à Bondy l'on change l'orthographe,
Rouher et Radetzky, Haynau près de Drouyn, -
Le porc Sénat fouillant l'ordure du grouin.
Ces gueux ont commis plus de crimes qu'un évêque
N'en bénirait. Explore, analyse, dissèque,
Dans leur âme où de Dieu le germe est étouffé,
Tu ne trouveras rien. - Sus donc, entre coiffé
Comme Napoléon, botté comme Macaire.
Le général Bertrand te précède ; tonnerre
De bravos. Cris de joie aux hurlements mêlés.
Les spectres qui gisaient dans l'ombre échevelés
Te regardent entrer et rouvrent leurs yeux mornes
Autour de toi s'émeut l'essaim des maritornes,
À beaucoup de jargon mêlant un peu d'argot ;
La marquise Toinon, la duchesse Margot,
Houris au cœur de verre, aux regards d'escarboucles.
Maître, es-tu la régence ? on poudrera ses boucles
Es-tu le directoire ? on mettra des madras.
Fais, ô bel étranger, tout ce que tu voudras.
Ton nom est million, entre ! - Autour de ces belles
Colombes de l'orgie, ayant toutes des ailes,
Folâtrent Suin, Mongis, Turgot et d'Aguesseau,
Et Saint-Arnaud qui vole autrement que l'oiseau.
Aux trois quarts gris déjà, Reibell le trabucaire
Prend Fould pour un curé dont Sibour est vicaire.

Regarde, tout est prêt pour te fêter, bandit.

L'immense cheminée au centre resplendit.
Ton aigle, une chouette, en blasonne le plâtre.
Le bœuf Peuple rôtit tout entier devant l'âtre
La lèchefrite chante en recevant le sang ;
À côté sont assis, souriant et causant,
Magnan qui l'a tué, Troplong qui le fait cuire.
On entend cette chair pétiller et bruire,
Et sur son tablier de cuir, joyeux et las,
Le boucher Carrelet fourbit son coutelas.
La marmite budget pend à la crémaillère.
Viens, toi qu'aiment les juifs et que l'église éclaire,
Espoir des fils d'Ignace et des fils d'Abraham,
Qui t'en vas vers Toulon et qui t'en viens de Ham,
Viens, la journée est faite et c'est l'heure de paître.
Prends devant ce bon feu ce bon fauteuil, ô maître.
Tout ici te vénère et te proclame roi ;
Viens ; rayonne, assieds-toi, chauffe-toi, sèche-toi,
Sois bon prince, ô brigand ! ô fils de la créole,
Dépouille ta grandeur, quitte ton auréole ;
Ce qu'on appelle ainsi dans ce nid de félons,
C'est la boue et le sang collés à tes talons,
C'est la fange rouillant ton éperon sordide.
Les héros, les penseurs portent, groupe splendide,
Leur immortalité sur leur radieux front ;
Toi, tu traînes ta gloire à tes pieds. Entre donc,
Ote ta renommée avec un tire-bottes.

Vois, les grands hommes nains et les gloires nabotes
T'entourent en chantant, ô Tom-Pouce Attila !
Ce bœuf rôtit pour toi ; Maupas, ton nègre, est là ;
Et, jappant dans sa niche au coin du feu, Baroche
Vient te lécher les pieds tout en tournant la broche.

Pendant que dans l'auberge ils trinquent à grand bruit,
Dehors, par un chemin qui se perd dans la nuit,
Hâtant son lourd cheval dont le pas se rapproche,
Muet, pensif, avec des ordres dans sa poche,
Sous ce ciel noir qui doit redevenir ciel bleu,
Arrive l'avenir, le gendarme de Dieu.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2020
honey primer for the death-lasso
of choice...
here's no... alternative...
for entries into hotel dallas...

      there's all the quick-equipped
miachel frenzied ******
of shovelling all the empty
eggs... limbo embryos speaking
whole, while scribbling
braille in fractions...

on the grand altar of Moloch...
and there's that cue of them
also playing-deaf playing dumb-hard-of
ever being heard:
burn a bra all you like...
i won't be burning a vinyl record
any time sooner than the sooner,
or a now...

here the crumpet solves its
esteem when facing a brawl with
a croissant...
here the ant lifts a mountain in its jaw...
here american head charge
overtakes the sales slipknot records...
here's the first... the last...
here's the lapdance of being reassured
to hear the ec- the ech- the ech-oh-oh-oh-oh!

ever hear the vibration speak
multiple tongues akin to a hydra?!

i'd be worried if they spelled it was:
the wielki lebowsky.. sure as **** a russian
spy... otherwise?
that laid back... dumb pollack...
which is hardly a *******...
              
  i call it bile, i call it acid... i call it...
the sort of populism of darwinism doesn't
like... when your spine stand *****
and you wake up dancing to
what a chinese army square march
of: that lot of the lost abode
of tiananmen square looks like...
when the chimps get the herpies...
and the lions start to turn all fidgety prone
when the affairs of being excited by
that infamous translation of the chase...
suddenly "oops": i.e. become missing...

          who's to become the last
bridge of king solomon's harem... that last
period piece to be the ghost to
the last known location of the gridlock
of last clinging to coal...
are any revision of thios obscure
period ore going to be a matter of choice?!

for the love of my fellow countrymen...
and country...
but only at a distance...
perhaps me better dying from an overdose
of patriotism in that ******* that future
jewel of the ottoman empire that's
become the better part of Istambul...

it's hardly enough to quiet simply...
die...
but who the hell... or has been dying
with the sort of ammo that would
give him or even a her...
the sort of "forever" thinking that would
leave one with epitaphs as
consorts of: the matter... temporal...

right before ol' charlie zee drei...
is about to be my hand of god...
my limbo argentina of lizzy's prized
asset of...
      i want to spend a tenner with
ol' charlie on it...
before i die...
i want charlie on the banknote...
before i feign enough affairs
of concerns as to whether i'm shy...
or not... i want to spend charly's tenner...
i want him to be bound to the escapade
of crown and *****...

i want to see charles throned!
i want to see charles crowned!
****** better not change his name...
i'd call 'im: third chucky the lucky!
he's no george the IX or some richard
the IV.... charles name given...
charles king to govern...
and bright lights the third!

i am waiting... lizzy will not live
long when the prized attache of
the duke of edinburgh solves the riddle:
no... no clones allowed...
locating the prowess of a hardly visible...
then again: who's going to pay for the cure
of not being made subject to the stampede...
that's half the emblem value of a crown?

but the frankenstein is in our grasp!
we can cheat death...
however many more years a dolly of pardon,
the sheep will allow...
how many more years it would take...
for a clone to replicate the psychology
of the host, bearer and the futurism of what's
to be inherited...
besides all that...
the clone would become a michael
jackson?! ******* to the point where...
no harem would suffice?!
ever play playdough with a faking
of immortality - attempting to transcend
individualism with poker / polka dotting
of the grand, grand... bet?

                  i'm currently in the process
of applying ice-cubes for a hard-on of an idea...
look at me... who's who and who's
the falafel flinging arch-ape?
darwinism is an ideology...
a bit like...
                 it's not that it's wrong...
but... it's a thesis... and as a thesis
it's also an idea...
and there's only one way to counter it...
with an idea...
so that there's a currency...
an antithesis for it to come toward
a symbiosis of... in equilibrium...
                    
                   looking up an ape's *******
is pretty much not enough
to state: bertrand russell just roasted
an aristotle...
            in no defence of the greeks...
wasn't a bertrand russell a philosophy historian...
who was... subsequently...
made into a mezzo-soprano...
becoming galvinized by adoration
for wittgenstein:
the genius! will a lion know
of a sunday... should he also roar
to somehow later yawn... and in between
a wednesday and a meow:
concern itself with a concept of friday?!
because it's golgotha
crucifixion "o'clock"?!

     hardly... who's the who of what
will not become the revised glory days
of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth...
or great britain: when the charles dickens
was asked to look inward: ****** himself...
the great of what isle...
the scots living in iceland?!

             or the baggage of U.2.I.R.A.?!
god help us... alcoholics and narcos...
with all that history aids aids it allows...
anonymous anonymous.
   the... anon. anonymous.
     oh; we're here...
                 fidgeting when it comes
to custard creams.... and all that shortcrust
packing!

when ol' charlie lands into my lap...
into my hand of a worth of spending a tenner...
until then... not until...
will i consider calling it a...
an execution in demand for...
being dragged into a cell nicknamed...
the "christine chubbuck lovelorn:
forever the homecoming queen
harem lovelust"...

urban myth: dead-shot to the head...
the decapitated cockroach lives
2 weeks without a head... ah... ah... ha...
it's hardly about being owning a sense
of humour... when all you need
is a reality check...

advent: and a soccer-mum and all those
period pains and
all those many more one direction
fandoms dying pretty in their teens...
here's my voice... morphed into...
burden: to gloat...
never mind the gloating...
but when someone can replace
having to stage staring into a mirror?

call it... dying from a lack
of obstruction from the dimension
of the abstract;
or hotel... coal-founded: florals and the annals
of would be: back to...
without and a with alzheimer'*******br>of: huh?!
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
once the human struggle, and great words said, and great battles convened over trivial things - Helen laughed at a thousand ships, modern Helen launched a thousand alimony battles in the court and other divorce disputes, in those times when the body was in constant exertion great stories emerged, Hercules the brawl but not the brains, ended up a murderer of his own children; indeed when it was as it was, and not now as it is now, old sages threw at man all forms of flattery with words and sayings - but since now man can overpower certain paths of nature, he boasts, and if given but a little social status, a psychiatrist like Freud, a professor of philosophy like Bertrand Russell, give these men but a scrap of social status, educate them, give them a moment of attention and care and concern, unlike the constant pulverisation of pop stars, give them but a little, and they'll say the most demeaning things about their fellow men, because man has really travelled far, they but utter objective wisdom, atheistic wisdom, the "cool bits" on the rational social strata - but having categorised himself as a **** sapiens, man managed very little to justify it, some grand scientific categorisation of man has not changed his primeval ontology - even if adorning well tailored suits, top hats or bowler hats, cravats, perfumes or anything as such; so indeed, give such shadowy men a little social status, and they say the most obnoxious things imaginable, demeaning and disheartening, because they say: 'well, there's so many of us, we've successfully populated the world, conquered elephants and rhinos and tigers and lions and sharks, we can boast... but at the same time dehumanise our fellow forms, because we believe that the neanderthals are still roaming among us!' well, i do sort of believe that believing in the existence of an imaginary omni- etc. being does clog of the imagination a little bit, but such a belief system is fine by me, the imagination can be clogged up by such a being, but as long as the heart is endearing, i don't really mind.*

i never understood writing
a poem around a maxim
from philosophy, i guess
there's no point as such to gain
something from it, without
realising something counter
to it (in the least),
i'm more or a person that would
rather cite a book he's read
than take out the bare essentials,
say: a hammer without the nails,
each book a coffin -
man in the eternal venture kindred
of fire rather than paper,
the poem an unscratched match,
the poem a lump of cool coal,
a dynamite fuse not lit -
and since fire wrote such poems,
fire, an animation of skeletal
and muscular machinery -
and laid to rest, only another
of same constitution can only
ignite words that are nothing
but: an unscratched match,
a lump of cool coal, a dynamite
fuse not yet lit - only a reader;
i never understood writing around
and about someone else's maxim,
well i have, but that utterance was
my own.

— The End —