Julien Assange quote

"Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what's actually going on. "

link

Murakami on Fiction and Reality in The 21st Century

"Let’s call the world we actually have now Reality A and the world that we might have had if 9/11 had never happened Reality B. Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be realer and more rational than the world of Reality A. To put itin different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not “chaos”?

What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?"

from the New York Times

Corporate Personhood

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Abraham Lincoln

The Medium versus The Message

"Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence."

Jaron Lanier

from the Tao Te Ching

The way out into the light often looks dark,
The way that goes ahead often looks as if it went back.
The way that is least hilly often looks as if it went up and down,
The “power” that is really loftiest looks like an abyss,
What is sheerest white looks blurred.
The “power” that is most sufficing looks inadequate,
The “power” that stands firmest looks flimsy.
What is in its natural, pure state looks faded;
The largest square has no corners,
The greatest vessel takes the longest to finish,
Great music has the faintest notes,
The Great Form is without shape.
For Tao is hidden and nameless.
Yet Tao alone supports all things and brings them to fulfillment.

Pascal Quotations

"This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet."

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either."

"If there is a god, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is...."

Ballard Quote

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel."

from

from Love Among The Ruins by Robert Browning

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop---
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country's very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.

The Last Prophecy from Delphi

to the Julian the Apostate:

"Tell to the king that the carven hall is fallen in decay;
Apollo has no chapel left, no prophesying bay,
No talking spring. The stream is dry that had so much to say."

---
source

This was mentioned in passing during In Our Time's Delphi programme and I had to track it down.

Pynchon quote

"...Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government..."

(p.350 Mason and Dixon)

via

Wolves By Louise Mac Neice

Wolves

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

Saul Bellow quote from Herzog

For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do …



via slate

John Stuart Mill quote

"there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose ... its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit ... is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism"

Two from Anna Akhmatova

On Reading Hamlet

A barren patch to the right of the cemetary,

behind it a river flashing blue.

You said: " All right then, get thee to a nunnery,

or go get married to a fool..."

It was the sort of thing that princes always say,

but these are words that one remembers.

May they flow a hundred centuries in a row

like an ermine mantle from his shoulders.

Three things enchanted him...

Three things enchanted him:

white peacocks, evensong,

and faded maps of America.

He couldn't stand bawling brats,

or raspberry jam with his tea,

or womanish hysteria.

...And he was tied to me.

--
see Philip Mc Donagh's Irish Times piece

Rilke Sonnet from Sonnets to Orpheus

Don't lay a stone to his memory. The rose

can bloom, if you like, once a year for his sake.

For Orpheus is the rose. His metamorphosis

takes this form, that form. No need to think

about his other names. Once and for all:

when there's singing, it's Orpheus. He comes and goes.

It's enough if sometimes he stays several

days; more, say, than a bowl of roses.

He has to vanish so you can understand.

Even if it frightens him to dissappear.

While his word is transforming our beings here

he's somewhere else, past following.

The lyre's grill doesn't pinch his hands.

Even as he breaks rules, he's obeying.

Hannah Arendt Quote

"A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with pre-formed judgements, that is, with prejudices"

--
I can't decide if this is a good quote or extremely trite. Maybe I'm robbing it of its meaning by denying it context?

Madonna of the Evening Flowers By Amy Lowell

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes,
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the Canterbury bells.

---
thanks to http://rinabeana.com/poemoftheday/index.php/category/amy-lowell/

George Orwell on Writing and Thinking

"Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

--Politics and the English Language

e.e. cummings 'i like my body..'

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like you body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric furr, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh .... And eyes big love-crumbs,


and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

Rousseau quote

"The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them."
(The Social Contract, bk III,ch 15)

Neil Kinnock quote from 1983

"I warn you. I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old."

--
quoted in the guardian today

White Sheet by Philip Gross

Click on the image to see full poem. This was the only way I could get this up. Anything else didn't capture the formatting..

Howard Zinn on experts

THERE ARE EXPERTS IN LITTLE THINGS, BUT THERE ARE NO EXPERTS IN BIG THINGS. There are experts in this fact and that fact, but there are no moral experts. It's important to remember that. All of us, no matter what we do, have the right to make moral decisions about the world. We must be undeterred by people who say "You don't know. You're not an expert. These people up there, they know." Everyone must be involved. There are no experts.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.


III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

from J.G Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition

The Conceptual Death. By now these seminars had become a daily inquisition into Talbot's growing distress and uncertainty. A disturbing aspect was the conscious complicity of the class in his long anticipated breakdown. Dr. Nathan pause in the doorway of the lecture theatre, debating whether to end this unique but unsavoury experiment. The students waited as Talbot stared at the photographs of himself arranged in sequence on the blackboard, his attention distracted by the elegant but severe figure of Catherine Austin watching from the empty seats behind the film projector. The simulated newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the students were ostensibly engaged. However, as Dr. Nathan realised its real focus lay elsewhere. An unexpecetd figure now dominated the climax of the scenario. Using the identity of their own lecturer the students had devised the first conceptual death.
--



Author's footnote to this section from Flamingo edition 2001:

Experiments often test the experimenter more than the subject. One rembers the old joke about the laboratory rat who said "I have that scientist trained, every time that I press this lever he gives me a pellet of food". For me, the most interesting aspect of the work of Masters and Johnson, collected in Human Sexual Response, was its effect upon themselves. How were their sex lives influenced what changes occured in their sexual freedoms and fantasies? In conversation they seemed almost neutered by these experiments. I suspect that the copulating volunteers were really training the good doctors to lose all interest in sex.

from John Dewey's Democracy and Education

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!

--
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Democracy_and_Education/Section_1

As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

quote from Milton Paradise Lost

They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; [ 645 ]
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

--
link

Milton: Sonnet 19

When I consider how my light is spent,
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present [ 5 ]
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best [ 10 ]
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

--

link

Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
----

from Culture and Anarchy preface:
"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. "

Often I Imagine the Earth by Dan Gerber

Often I Imagine the Earth

Often I imagine the earth

through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—

atoms, peculiar

atoms everywhere—

no me, no you, no opinions,

no beginning, no middle, no end,

soaring together like those

ancient Chinese birds

hatched miraculously with only one wing,

helping each other fly home.

Source: Poetry (March 2010).

A Song On The End of The World by Czeslaw Milosz

A Song On The End of The World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net,
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into starry night.

And those who expected lightening and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumpets
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

-
tr. Anthony Milosz in The Collected Poems
wiki

Vivienne Dick on Prostitution

"MacDonald: In a number of places you show males, tricks. Were they actually men who had come for prostitutes?

Dick: They were actors. Whenever you see a movie with prostitutes in it, the camera and the male director always examine the prostitute, the way she looks and this and that. She's this object or something. This film is different: the prostitutes are people telling me what they think, and talking about the men and how they look, what it's like to be with them and how stupid a lot of them are. This idea of going to a prostitute to get off is such a peculiar thing. You hand over some money and pretend you control someone for an hour. It's an indication of some sort of warped repressive sexual thing; it reflects a kind of organization outside of the society, but it's all part of the American system. That's why this liberty thing is such an irony. It has to do with pretense, too. If you're a prostitute, you're putting on this act. You can't be real; you have to suppress that because it's not going to do you any good in this society. And the tricks enjoy or even believe the pretense-it's always seemed peculiar to me."

jstor link interview with Scott Mc Donald in October, Vol. 20 (Spring, 1982), pp. 82-101

Khayaam was Right by Theo Dorgan

Khayaam Was Right

Khayaam was right, we are toys
on the the table of existence but cast
beyond the nursery tale's confines,
you to your unknown future, I to mine.

Prison me in your dreams of what should be,
set me to match a long pre-figured step,
what do you have then if you hold me
but a child's toy to guard in sleep?

Gently, the tales of childhood are no more,
the nursery beams are charred, they stink in the rain,
and we must make new mysteries of our own
before we achieve that innocence again.

Gently, the road behind us falls away,
the walled garden fades into a dream.
Kiss me and touch my cheek, then choose your path:
neither will keep this rendezvous again.

---
from the Ordinary House of Love, also collected in What The Earth Cost Us

see Omar Khayaam wiki
Theo Dorgan wiki
Theo Dorgan article on West Cork
Theo Dorgan article in The Irish Times 'Renewing The Republic' series

Groucho Marx quote

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"

Quote from Graham Greene's 'Our Man In Havana'

"They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove these few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory , like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there."

Ezra Pound The River-Merchants Wife

The River-Merchant's Wife

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Gnome by Samuel Beckett

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

-------
Editor's note from the Selected Poems(1930-1989): 'Gnosis' = Knowledge in Ancient Greek

Prelude by Derek Walcott

Prelude

I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watch
The variegated fists of clouds that gather over
The uncouth features of this, my prone island.

Meanwhile, the steamers which divide horizons prove
Us lost;
Found only
In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;
Found in the blue reflection of eyes
That have known cities and think us here happy.

Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient,
So I, who have made one choice,
Discover that my boyhood has gone over.

And my life, too early of course for the profound cigarette,
The turned doorhandle, the knife turning
In the bowels of the hours, must not be made public
Until I have learnt to suffer
In accurate iambics.

I go, of course, through all the isolated acts,
Make a holiday of situations,
Straighten my tie and fix important jaws,

And note the living images
Of flesh that saunter through the eye.

Until from all I turn to think how,
In the middle of the journey through my life,
O how I came upon you, my
Reluctant leopard of the slow eyes.

WV Quine Quote

"The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it
develops and changes, through more or less arbitary and deliberate
revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned
by the continuing stimulations of our sense organs. It is a pale grey
lore black with fact and white with convention but i have found no
substantial reasons that there are any quite black threads in it, or
any white ones"

wiki

2 from Ulysses by James Joyce

MR Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked
grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented
urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly,
righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in
the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him
feel a bit peckish.

link

--

..how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he
asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my
arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts
all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will
Yes.

link

from Finnegan's Wake

A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.


Finnegan's Web
Finnegan's Wake Wiki
Ouroboros Wiki

"The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet." from Plato's Timaeus

Tractatus by Derek Mahon

Tractatus

(for Aidan Higgins)

'The world is everything that is the case'

From the fly giving up in the coal-shed

To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Give blame, praise to the fumbling God

Who hides, shame-facédly, His agéd face;

Whose light retire behind its veil of cloud.

The world, though, is also so much more-

Everything that is the case imaginatively.

Tacitus believed mariners could hear

The sun sinking into the western sea;

And who would question that titanic roar,

The steam rising wherever the edge may be?

--

see also Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wiki

see also my previous post from the Philosophical Investigations

Thomas Paine from Common Sense

".. a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in favour of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason"

Setting The Type by Greg Delanty

I pick a magnifying glass from your desk
& hold it to a haze of men
bowed over the jigsaw puzzles of galley trays.

You confer with Dan Hannigan.
I wonder at the results of a half century
of nicotine on his right index finger.

Through zig-zag bars of an old-fashioned elevator
I have just spotted the ascending head
& Humpty-Dumpty body of Donnie Conroy.

He will be broken by drink
& his daughter's death.
Her face is now smiling from his desk.

You turn & escort me to the letterpress.
Mr. Lane punches my name into shiny lead
& declares hereafer it is eternal.

The names of Dan Hannigan, Owen Lane, Donnie Conroy-
I could go on forever invoking the dead-
were set deep in a boy

impressed by the common raised type on the 3rd floor
of Eagle Printing Company, 15 Oliver Plunkett Street,
in the summer-still, ticking heart of Cork City.

6 from Heraclitus

"Even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe."

"Time is a game played beautifully by children."

"This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures."

"You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."

"Character is destiny"

"Nothing endures but change."
---

via wikiquote

from Fear and Trembling by Sören Kierkegaard

"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all -- what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw -- how empty then and comfortless life would be!"

from Fear and Trembling

wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B6ren_Kierkegaard

KLF on The Late Late Show

The Beatitudes

40:005:001 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and
when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

40:005:002 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

40:005:003 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.

40:005:004 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

40:005:005 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

40:005:006 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled.

40:005:007 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

40:005:008 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

40:005:009 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the
children of God.

40:005:010 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

40:005:011 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you,
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my
sake.

40:005:012 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in
heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before
you.

40:005:013 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good
for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot
of men.

40:005:014 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill
cannot be hid.

40:005:015 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but
on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the
house.

40:005:016 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your
good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

--

from the project guthenberg King James Bible

Drowning In Co. Down by Robin Robertson

This place can't hold enough rain.
The land rots houses just to
get them out of the way, get closer
to the heavy sky.
People drink all day if they can,
the water-table their only gravity.

If they drift away they come back
thirsty, missing the pints, that
loose decay of light;
scuttling their ships
in the usual harbours, growing old
watching the water rise,

their options narrowing
to this country town,
this bar, these optics,
a whiskey glass,
the softened mouth
of this swollen ground.

----
from Swithering

Raoul Vaneigem quote

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life … such people have a corpse in their mouth".

see http://www.nothingness.org/SI/vaneigem.html for more

found through the guardian, very interesting article

Howard Zinn on Education and Control

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.
.....

In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers, skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate or force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority. A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote: "The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly."

Back in 1859, the desire of mill owners in the town of Lowell that their workers be educated was explained by the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education:

"The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations. "

Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, says: "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental."

This continued into the twentieth century, when William Bagley's Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text, reprinted thirty times. Bagley said: "One who studies educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fit for the life of civilized society."

It was in the middle and late nineteenth century that high schools developed as aids to the industrial system, that history was widely required in the curriculum to foster patriotism. Loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship were introduced to control both the educational and the political quality of teachers. Also, in the latter part of the century, school officials-not teachers-were given control over textbooks. Laws passed by the states barred certain kinds of textbooks. Idaho and Montana, for instance, forbade textbooks propagating "political" doctrines, and the Dakota territory ruled that school libraries could not have "partisan political pamphlets or books."
------
from A People's History of The United States

Gramsci- from The Prison Notebooks

Follow the link.

I'll throw some pertinent extracts up here when I get the chance but the piece I've scanned above is only about 6 pages in any case

Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History

"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. "

from On The Conept of History.
----
This came to mind when watching Truffaut's Jules Et Jim at the Cork French Film Festival

Last Meeting by Gwen Harwood

Last Meeting

Shadows grazing eastward melt
from their vast sun-driven flocks
into consubstantial dusk.
A snow wind flosses the bleak rocks,

strips from the gums their rags of bark,
and spins the coil of winter tight
round our last meeting as we walk
the littoral zone of day and night,

light's turncoat margin: rocks and trees
dissolve in nightfall-eddying waters;
tumbling whorls of cloud disclose
the cold eyes of the sea-god's daughters.

We tread the wrack of grass that once
a silver-bearded congregation
whispered about our foolish love.
Your voice in calm annunciation

from the dry eminence of thought
rings with astringent melancholy:
'Could hope recall, or wish prolong
the vanished violence of folly?

Minute by minute summer died;
time's horny skeletons have built
this reef on which our love lies wrecked.
Our hearts drown in their cardinal guilt.'

The world, said Ludwig Wittgenstein,
is everything that is the case.
- The warmth of human lips and thighs;
the lifeless cold of outer space;

this windy darkness; Scorpio
above, a watercourse of light;
the piercing absence of one face
withdrawn for ever from my sight.
----
from the guardian

David Hume on identity and the idea of a deity

What is the soul of man? A composition of various faculties, passions, sentiments, ideas; united, indeed, into one self or person, but still distinct from each other. When it reasons, the ideas, which are the parts of its discourse, arrange themselves in a certain form or order; which is not preserved entire for a moment, but immediately gives place to another arrangement. New opinions, new passions, new affections, new feelings arise, which continually diversify the mental scene, and produce in it the greatest variety and most rapid succession imaginable. How is this compatible with that perfect immutability and simplicity which all true Theists ascribe to the Deity? By the same act, say they, he sees past, present, and future: his love and hatred, his mercy and justice, are one individual operation: he is entire in every point of space; and compleat in every instant of duration. No succession, no change, no acquisition, no diminution. What he is implies not in it any shadow of distinction or diversity. And what he is this moment he ever has been, and ever will be, without any new judgment, sentiment, or operation. He stands fixed in one simple, perfect state: nor can you ever say, with any propriety, that this act of his is different from that other; or that this judgment or idea has been lately formed, and will give place, by succession, to any different judgment or idea.

-
from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Section vi

another stray piece of quotation from my desktop

Joseph Conrad

from a letter he wrote to Robert Cunninghame Graham

"Life knows us not and we do not know life - we don't even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow."

I'm not sure where I found this, it seems to to have been loitering on my desktop for an age so I thought it best to save it up here. This blog seems to have become a sort of a clippings journal.

from Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

p88
Something similar happened in the United States during our industrial revolution, actually. Mass public education first was introduced in the United States in the nineteenth century as a way of training the largely rural workforce here for industry-in fact, the general population in the United States largely was opposed to public education, because it meant taking kids off the farms where they belonged and where they worked with their families, and forcing them into this setting in which they were basically being trained to become industrial workers. That was part of the whole transformation of American society in the nineteenth century.



p211
So when you have a chance to meet with people or talk with them, I think the thing to do is to try to get them to learn how to explore things for themselves- for example, to help them learn for themselves the way that the media shaped and frame issues for the purpose of manipulation and control. Now, there's not much point in doing it abstractly- you know, like some theory of how it works. What you have to do is look at cases. So take cases that people are interested in, and just teach them how to do research projects- research projects are very easy to do, you don't need a Ph.D.; maybe in physics you do, but not in these topics. You just have to have common sense, you have to look carefully at the facts; it may be a little bit of work to find the facts- like usually you're not just going to find them right therein the headlines or something. But if you do a little work, you can find out what the facts are, you can find out the way they're being distorted and modified by the institutions. And then the purposes of those distortions quickly become clear.

-----
from History is A Weapon

from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

"..ask yourself whether our own language is complete- whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated into it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular steets and unifrom houses." (18)

"to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" (19)

"... Instead of pointing out something in common to all that we call language, I'm saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word at all- but there are many different kinds of affinity between them. And so on account of this affinity, or these affinities, we call them 'languages'." (65)

" Consider for example the activities that we call 'games'. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games and so on. What is common to them all?- Don't say: "They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'"- but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - for if you look at them, you won't see anything that is common to all, but similiarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!- look, for example, at board games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained but much is lost.- are they all 'entertaining'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games, these is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has dissappeared. .... We see a complicated network of similiarities overlapping and criss-crossing: similiarities in the large and in the small" (66)

2 Biblical Quotations

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

-- 1 Corinthians 12-13


“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose... The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits... All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

-- Ecclesiastes

A Nocturne for Blackpool by Theo Dorgan

Dolphins are coursing in the blue air outside the window
And the sparking stars are oxygen, bubbling to the moon.
At the end of the terrace, unicorns scuff asphalt,
One with her kneck stretched on the cool roof of a car.

A key rasps in a latch, milk bottles click on a sill,
A truck heading for mallow roars, changing gear on a hill.
The electric hum of the brewery whines, then drops in pitch-
Ground bass for the nocturne of Blackpool.

The ghost of Inspecter Swanzy creeps down Hardwick Street,
MacCurtain turns down the counterpain of a bed he'll never sleep in,
Unquiet murmurs scold from the blue-slate roof tops
The death squad no-one had thought to guard against.

The young sunburned hurlers flex in their beds, dreaming of glory,
Great deeds on the playing-fields, half-days from school,
While their slightly older sisters dream of men and pain,
An equation ot be puzzled out again and again.

Walloo Dullea, melodious on the Commons Road, hums airs from Trovatore
The recipe as before, nobody stirs from sleep
And 'Puzzle the Judge', contented, pokes at ashes-
'There's many a lawyer here today could learn from this man.'

North Chapel, The Assumption, Farranferris and Blackpool,
The mass of the church in stone rears like rock from the sea
But the interlaced lanes flick with submarine life
Older than priests can, or want to, understand.

This woman believed Jack Lynch stood next to God, who broke the Republic.
This man beyond, his face turned to the wall, stares at his friend
Whose face will not cease from burning in an icy sea- torpedoed off
Murmasnk from a tanker. He shot him, now nightly he watches him sink.

Here is a woman the wrong side of forty, sightless in her kitchen
As she struggles to make sense of the redundancy notice,
Of her boorish son, just home, four years on the dole, foulmouthed,
Of her husband, who has aged ten years in as many days.

The bells of Shandon jolt like electricity through lovers
In a cold water flat beneath the attic of a house in Hatton's Alley,
The ghost of Frank O' Conor smiles on Fever Hospital Steps
As Mon boys go by, arguing about first pints of stout and Che Guevara.

The unicorns of legend are the donkeys of childhood, nobody
Knows that better than we know it ourselves, but we know also that
Dolphins are coursing through the blue air outside our windows
And the sparking stars are oxygen, bubbling to the moon.

We are who we are and what we do. We study indifference in a hard school
And in a hard time, but we keep the skill to make legend of the ordinary.
We keep an eye to the slow clock of history in Blackpool-
Jesus himself, as they say around here, was born in a stable.

for Mick Hannigan

----------
taken from Sean Dunne's Cork Anthology

What The Horses See at Night by Robin Robertson

Link: What The Horses See At Night

Cuchulain Comforted by W.B. Yeats

A MAN that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and thrce

Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
'Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

'Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

'We thread the needles' eyes, and all we do
All must together do.' That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.

'Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

'Or driven from home and left to die in fear.'
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

Way of Peace by Pat Boran

Way of Peace by Pat Boran

i.m. Eamon Keating

In Adidas runners
and white karate suit
with the simple crest-

a dove round a fist,
Wado Ryu,
the way of peace-

down the Downs,
past the gate house gate,
a chubby druid,

a breathing oak,
a shifting mountain,
following patterns

modelled on monkeys,
eagles and cranes,
stray dogs and dragons,

bird man of Portlaoise,
puff-jowled adder,
dancing bear,

a man in his 60s
somehow still
sane enough to play;

and me, 16,
hidden among trees,
glimpsing the way.

---
found in the great anthology 'Our Shared Japan' (ed. Irene De Angelis & Joseph Woods)

Canoe by Keith Douglas

Canoe by Keith Douglas

Well, I am thinking this may be my last

summer, but cannot lose even a part

of pleasure in the old-fashioned art

of idleness. I cannot stand aghast

at whatever doom hovers in the background:

while grass and buildings and the somnolent river,

who know they are allowed to last forever,

exchange between them the whole subdued sound

of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate

can deter my shade wandering next year

from a return? Whistle and I will hear

and come again another evening, when this boat

travels with you alone toward Iffley:

as you lie looking up for thunder again,

this cool touch does not betoken rain;

it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.

------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Douglas