Covert Plants
Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World This is a transformative exposition of the nature of plants and their relation to humans and the earth. Rarely do we see a concentration on the cognitive and biological nature of plants. https://punctumbooks.com/titles/covert-plants/
Desert Solitaire – Edward Abbey
I do not recall if Abbey studied zen. It appears to me that inherent in his craft is the idea that what he does not say is as important as what he does. Each sentence zigs and zags around, over and under so many norms of American society, and he does so with nary a …
Ivan Illich & Jerry Brown – Natural Affinities?
THE ART OF SUFFERING by Jerry Brown When in 1976, I first met Ivan Illich at the Green Gulch Farm, he told me that his current focus was the study of economics. Then, I didn't understand that by the word economics, Illich meant a way of life where things are experienced only under assumptions of …
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Philip Seymour Hoffman
A very serious loss to our culture. Two articles on Hoffman - Open Letters Monthly and The New Yorker. ย In one of those wonderful old theater stories Laurence Olivier is said to have asked another Hoffman, Dustin, as the younger man voluntarily underwent physical abuse in order to convincingly play a tortured prisoner, โmy …
A Masterful Story Of American Power – Errol Morris
Camille Paglia – Making A Case For Real Gender Differences
American culture and specifically Hollywood TV, is in the process of neutering the males of our society. Masculinity is boxed up and cauterised to fit into the restraints of a fantasy feminine world that is controlled through PC management. Camille Paglia is a woman who sees this clearly. Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of …
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Marilynne Robinson – Community vs Tribalism
I have reposted two items: 1) a fragment from an interview of Robinson where she describes the process of how American colleges evolved in the Midwest. 2) the complete essay Imagination & Community from her book of Essays When I Was a Child I Read Books. The imaginative makeup of a writer is established by …
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Saul Bellow: Letters
Excellent writing about a master of fiction and American life. Saul Bellow: Letters In the newly published collected correspondence of Saul Bellow... BY LEO ROBSON PUBLISHED 11 NOVEMBER 2010 Letters Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Penguin, 571pp, ยฃ30 "Of course I am not a Freudian," Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth in 1974. "For one fierce …
Thinking Out Loud
Only citizens through their responsive government can monitor and guide the behaviour of corporations and their interaction with people and the natural, fragile earth. We need more people who are intelligent, informed, and unbiased and who articulate the truths that media won't.-rlw
…nature’s laws … are the only measures that count…
Capitalism, for all its merits and failings as a 500-year practice, may be better than the alternatives, but may not be able to meet the stringent conditions imposed by nature's laws. These, ultimately, are the only measures that count.From "The Common Sense Canadian" Ray Grigg on anthropologist Ronald Wright. http://thecanadian.org/item/2056-anthropologys-capitalism http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_human_progress_20130113/
“How Jerry Brown Scared California Straight” – One of Ours
Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for Bloomberg Businessweek How Jerry Brown Scared California Straight By Joel Stein on April 25, 2013 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-25/jerry-brown-californias-grownup-governor Jerry Brown is a happy man who rarely smiles. Thatโs because underneath all that energy and California optimism, thereโs an old, practical Buddhist. This is all that can be done. We can tax the rich a …
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Zarathustra – My Time Has Come
" Have you learned my song? Have you guessed its intent ? Well then, you higher men, sing me now my round. Now you yourselves sing me the song whose name is โOnce Moreโ and whose meaning is โ into all eternityโ - sing, you higher men, Zarathustraโs round! O man, take care! What does the …
Going To The Sun
The Stranger by Albert Camus - Impressions 1942 Prose that is crisp and spare and precise. Fragments of humanity that are turned this way and that to develop a character in time and place. Meursault is detached and self-sufficient. His social needs are minimal. He is authentic and sure of his senses and is comfortable …
Bill Moyers Interviews Oregon’s Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez has lived in the foothills of the Oregon Cascade mountains for 40 years. As a younger man he was a landscape photographer. He is unsurpassed as a western naturalist, scientist and philosopher. He is of course a journalist. His grasp of humanity is deep and highly spiritual. He sees the human situation as …
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Huang Po (Huangbo Xiyun) ~ ้ปๆชๅธ้ ~ zen buddhist ~ Chinese ~ Tang Dynasty ~ 850AD
Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love Huang Po taught his students they were already enlightened. I know of one student of Zen who threw a translation of Huang Po out of his apartment window, and the book, like a block of wood, made it, on more than one occasion, into an open trash can …
Human Psychology & Bacteria Intelligence
Illustration from Seed magazine It is inevitable that we learn about human psychology from other living creatures. It is proving that bacteria is a source of rich insights and an incredible wealth of scientific learning and understanding. This will proceed assuming that we put our arrogance and high place in the universe aside and look …
Poetics of Imagination – Northrop Frye
Frye stumbles on the idea of archetypal structure in literature. It resonates with Jungian thought, Gaston Bachelard, James Hillman and others in that poetics comes before philosophy or psychology. It seems to me that there is biological, deep structure, integration of the image and poetics, a structure that cannot be deconstructed but is elemental to human …
Distortion Is Character – Brian Eno
A very learned and wise monologue on art, creativity and character.
Northwest Polytheism – James Hillman
"The power of myth, its reality, resides precisely in its power to seize and influence psychic life. The Greeks knew this so well, and so they had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths as suchโinstead, depth psychology and psychopathology. Thereforeโฆpsychology shows myths in modern …
Fractals, Calculus and Jackson Pollock
โYouโve got to deny, ignore, and destroy a hell of a lot to get at truth.โย -ย Jackson Pollock I enjoy viewing fractals and especially like the fact that they are more than a line, they show a surface too. (I do take pleasure in a creature showing itself.) Also, and perhaps most importantly, they do …
for this time only
โIchigo-Ichie โ Once-in-a-Lifetime Ichi-go ichi-e (ไธๆไธไผ, literally โone time, one meetingโ) is a Japanese term that describes a cultural concept often linked with famed tea master Sen no Rikyu. The term is often translated as โfor this time only,โ โnever again,โ or โone chance in a lifetime.โIchi-go ichi-e is linked with Zen Buddhism and concepts …
Sensing a Path
If genius is profuse, never ending - stuck in the middle of a work is - the wrong track, Genius is the track seen. Once seen it is impossible to keep from it. The superficial definitions, such as "genius is industry, genius is hard work, etc. " are nonsense. It is to see the track, …
John Cage – American Inventor
Photograph by Vincent Mentzel 1988/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux. " Cage requires a fundamentally different mode of listening: you need to relinquish expectations that successive sounds will fall into familiar harmonic relationships, or indeed relationships of any kind, and instead treat each moment in isolation. You โregardโ the sounds as you would objects in a gallery. More …
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) – America Breaking Away To Find Its Voice.
THE VEXING SIMPLICITY OF NEIL YOUNG – Alec Wilkinson
OCTOBER 17, 2012 THE VEXING SIMPLICITY OF NEIL YOUNG POSTED BYย ALEC WILKINSON I was a little surprised when Neil Young published his memoir, โWaging Heavy Peace,โ because he is the only artist I have ever encountered who is proud of not reading. Reading would distract him from writing songs, he once told me, meaning interfere …
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James Hillman – Dream’s Language
Dreams follow their own logic. And the use of logic is a poor choice of words. Is there a beginning, middle and end? Or does our waking mind force the linear script onto the contents? Dreams often do not recognize time and therefore a linear story line is not the point. What is the point? …
Crete Spring: An Appreciation for James Hillman (1926 – 2011) by Louise Steinman
An excellent personal story about Hillman as a commemoration of his recent death.
West Pacific Review 