Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Ernest Becker. "The Denial of Death" pp. 196 - 202

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” (196)

“Modern man lives his contradictions for the worse, because the modern condition is one in which convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis, of creative play, or of cultural illusion are in eclipse.” (198)

“…all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control in one way or another. It automatically engineers safety and banishes despair by keeping people focused on the noses in front of their faces. The defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for an active organism, but a problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more ‘knowing’, but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.” (199)

“The customs and myths of traditional society provided a whole interpretation of the meaning of life, ready-made for the individual; all he had to do was to accept living it as true. The modern neurotic must do just this if he is to be ‘cured’: he must welcome a living illusion.” (199)

“…modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength. The characteristic of the modern mind is the banishment of mystery, of naïve belief, of simple-minded hope. We put the accent on the visible, the clear, the cause-and-effect relation, the logical—always the logical. We know the difference between dreams and reality, between facts and fictions, between symbols and bodies. But right away we can see that these characterizations of the modern mind are exactly those of neurosis.” (200-201)

“It was G.K. Chesterton who kept alive the spirit of Kierkegaard and naïve Christianity in modern thought, as when he showed with such style that the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness. There is no one more logical than the lunatic, more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. Madmen are the greatest reasoners we know, and that trait is one of the accompaniments of their undoing. All their vital processes are shrunken into the mind. What is the one thing they lack that sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances, to relax and laugh at the world. They can’t unbend, can’t gamble their whole existence, as did Pascal, on a fanciful wager. They can’t do what religion has always asked: to believe in a justification of their lives that seems absurd. The neurotic knows better: he is the absurd, but nothing else is absurd; it is ‘only too true’. But faith asks that man expand himself trustingly into the nonlogical, into the truly fantastic. This spiritual expansion is the one thing that modern man finds most difficult, precisely because he is constricted into himself and has nothing to lean on, no collective drama that makes fantasy seem real because it is lived and shared.” (201)

“…the only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize; to live is to play at the meaning of life. The upshot of this whole tradition of thought is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men. Just this way Rank prescribed the cure for neurosis; as the need for ‘legitimate foolishness’.” (202)

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Mission statement (Small Fates)


Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Kitchen Sermons /Kitchen Midden / How We Were Happy

1

aim for the right amount of distance
between what you want & what you have

2

the right amount of nearness
between what you love & what you can gather
in your arms

3

the right amount of presence
in the way you mean the word
God
&
use the word
often (privately
of course) in all kinds of weather
and shenanigans

4

the right amount of absence, generally

5

language to say the world
exactly as it is

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Design In Nature

--“In addition, the force output of the muscles of swimmers, runners, and fliers can be calculated from their weight: It is, for all of them, roughly equal to twice their body weight.” (82)

--“…good design involves the nearly uniform distribution of imperfection throughout the entire flow system.” (65)

--“The bifurcated structure of lungs, the round tube shapes of pipes, the cracking pattern of drying mudflats are all designs that distribute their resistances so that globally the flow system becomes less and less imperfect.” (83)

--“…contrast, which is the essence of design.” (62)

--“Science is effective because it is concise. It converts physical phenomena into statements, formulas, and mathematical equations that have great explanatory power. In the process, it also tends to sever objects from their natural state. The mighty Danube ferrying water from central Europe or an elegant antelope jumping across the savanna loses its essential character when translated into data.” (55)

--“People, then, are only half right when they say things seek the path of least resistance. Instead of finding these already cleared paths, flow systems construct their own flow architectures and body rhythms that enable them to move more easily.” (52)

--“The movement toward equilibrium—and the pull of gravity—puts things in motion.” (53)

--“A prerequisite, then, is for the flow system to be free to morph. The emerging flow architecture is the means by which the flow system achieves its objective under constraints. Freedom is good for design.” (44)

--“Imperfections are unavoidable. In fact, they are necessary. Without imperfections (resistances), flow systems would accelerate continuously, eventually spinning out of control. Thus, imperfection (friction, heat leaks, etc.) acts as a brake on the engines (the designs) that drive flow.” (42)

--“…while a system cannot create energy, it will conserve and can transform it.” (40)

--“Consider the snowflake. The prevailing view in science is that the intricate crystals formed by the snowflake have no function. This is wrong. In fact, the snowflake is a flow design for dispersing the heat—called the latent heat of solidification—generated on its surfaces during freezing. As water vapor condenses and freezes it throws off its excess heat. When the ice crystal first forms, its spherical bead is the shape that grows faster than other shapes, the shape that facilitates rapid solidification. When the bead is large enough, needles emerge and enhance solidification (that is, produce ice) faster than the sphere. To facilitate solidification even more, larger snowflakes morph into shapes with more needles that disperse heat.” (10)

--“The engineered world we have built so that we can move more easily does not copy any part of the natural design; it is a manifestation of it.” (4)

--Definition of the ‘constructal law’: “For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.” (3)

--“Everything that moves, whether animate or inanimate, is a flow system…. The designs we see in nature are not the result of chance. They arise naturally, spontaneously, because they enhance access to flow in time.” (3)

--Two basic features to flow systems. “Flow systems have two basic features (properties). There is the current that is flowing (for example, fluid, heat, mass, or information) and the design through which it flows. A lightning bolt, for example, is a flow system for discharging electricity from a cloud. In a flash it creates a brilliant branched structure because this is a very efficient way to move a current (electricity) from a volume (the cloud) to a point (the church steeple or another cloud).” (3-4)

--“Life is movement and the constant morphing of the design of this movement. To be alive is to keep on flowing and morphing.” (6)

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Maybe I should call this

something like "The Kitchen Sermons" or just
"Kitchen." Because,
standing there, stirring mushrooms and onions,
inhaling the sweet earth of it

my daughter says,
I broke the lamp because today is Halloween,
and that's damn funny when it happens in February,
deeply damn funny and it makes me want to smash other things
as well, other things for no good reasons

and then, on her way to bed, my big paw covering entirely
her little one, she says,
I'm gonna dream of flowers alright,
as if we had been talking about that, as if
that were obvious and true

in the kitchen where my son has illustrated
entire universes down to the handles
on the toilets, where my wife has wiped up
ground coffee beans for the 2,346th time,
and she doesn't even drink coffee
which is kind of the point.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

One more from the Book of Meetings

I am invited
here and there
day long
when I am not too tired.

Did you even ever know?
Sometimes is all. Sometimes.


It was far from bliss, this.
Was a kidney punch in the thing they
probably rightly
call soul. Was sort of a constant,
continuously astonishing
education. But

this is how we were happy, when we were happy.

On a very good day, for example. . . .

Let me start again. On an ordinary
Tuesday/Wednesday
with a five-year-old cabernet and son, a two-year-old
car and daughter,
forgetting the future as hard as we hardly could,
you and I and it are
what we are meant to be.

What role we play in that
unhooking, untethering, de-narrating
is God's homemaking, God's demolition.