(no subject)
The way I see it: As the greatest conceivable being - you can exit at Anselm between Flagstaff and Albuquerque - God oughtn't to have anything to do with lack or absence. Were he defined by any sort of void, we could imagine something better. (And, of course, all of these thoughts must of necessity spring into being, since it's better to be a real unicorn than an imaginary one.) I can appreciate the Bible in the context of fiction, fascinated by the subtext and indescribably bored with those interminable lists of names. But I will never get past the contradiction of a god whom we had the gall to portray as both jealous and petty. It may come as a shock that the which-level-of-Dante's-purgatory quiz only landed me in limbo with all of the other well-meaning heathens.
I want to like Simone Weil, but I can't help thinking that the framework for Gravity and Grace is itself unsupported. And I'm the one forever linking hands with Wittgenstein and skipping off into philosophy, or therapy, or whatever we're calling it now. Not how the world it, but that it is, is the mystical. But she seems to be describing how the world ought to be based on imagined beginnings and crucifying the imagination in the process. She is right to leave God to the spaces between her words, the mystery, the supernatural that comes of grace, but all her audience has to go on are various bastardizations of the Biblical God, who in my world is still clad in a linen toga and Birkenstocks.
Many of these ideas are intelligible and eloquent and admirable, and maybe someday I'll confront the void, too. I do think much good can come of suffering, but I'm not willing to make that assertion on anyone else's behalf. And right now I imagine some mysterious reaction taking place within the admixture of these thoughts and my silly homesick head until I'm left with an aesthetically pleasing book full of desperate after-the-facts. God cannot have given anything up for us. The image of Jesus is a variation - immortality is sacrificed for mortality is transformed back into the supernatural/mystical. Different language, same meaning. And for the most part we still haven't figured out how to cope with death.
Weil has outlined according to reason the way we should live in this, not the best of all possible worlds, but the only one to actualize. But I can't find any correspondence between God and our imperfect thoughts except in their totality. Why attempt to sway your audience with the only faculty that refuses to swallow these words of yours? I've certainly failed to breach the gap between rationality and faith, but that doesn't make it any less fucking incredible that I exist and my best friend exists and you are reading these words and people have created art and my heart has been broken and tomorrow I'll drive to work and wish I knew the meaning of home in order to return.
We should live as best we can in order to live with ourselves, but that hardly requires our greatest conceivable thoughts to pop into existence sponteneously. Why renounce anything? And why denounce the imagination when the rationale driving your asceticism is no more tangible or expressible than the falsest of my daydreams? I think you are honest and that you mean well and that you believed wholeheartedly in all of these words that make mine shrink in discomfort. But logic isn't the foundation of the world and God owed us nothing - no more than we're indebted to him for our existence - we could never repay that. I can wake up and crawl out of bed in the morning wholly unconvinced that I'm here for a reason. But if I needed God to make it out the door, surely he would be present in everything, nothing more, and that would be all there is, no harm, no foul, and it would be enough to meet the reflection of my eyes before walking out the door to live in a manner that allows me to do the same tomorrow.
Last month I decided that it would be dishonest to continue studying philosophy because I will never know enough to feel comfortable asserting anything. Almost in the same breath I realized that the only study to which I could ever devote myself for more than two years - coincidentally the longest I've ever lived in a single building - is that of languages. Honestly, what else can keep me obsessively focused for five straight hours but verb forms and sociolinguistics and the translation of texts by Kafka and Herodotus?
If nothing else, Simone Weil was right about contradictions. Wales and New Zealand are still lookin' good from the Land of Enchantment. My wonderful boss called from Geneva on Monday to recommend Swiss castles. I would like to be a nomad.
Even though I expect every new album to be The Best Thing Ever, being right for the third time has kind of knocked me on my ass. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was supposed to be the pinnacle, right?
It is fantastic being this retarded all the time.
I don't have many pictures of my grandfather, but they outnumber the words I've found to describe the realization that most of them are glossy black-and-whites midway through Autobiography of a Yogi.
I want to like Simone Weil, but I can't help thinking that the framework for Gravity and Grace is itself unsupported. And I'm the one forever linking hands with Wittgenstein and skipping off into philosophy, or therapy, or whatever we're calling it now. Not how the world it, but that it is, is the mystical. But she seems to be describing how the world ought to be based on imagined beginnings and crucifying the imagination in the process. She is right to leave God to the spaces between her words, the mystery, the supernatural that comes of grace, but all her audience has to go on are various bastardizations of the Biblical God, who in my world is still clad in a linen toga and Birkenstocks.
Many of these ideas are intelligible and eloquent and admirable, and maybe someday I'll confront the void, too. I do think much good can come of suffering, but I'm not willing to make that assertion on anyone else's behalf. And right now I imagine some mysterious reaction taking place within the admixture of these thoughts and my silly homesick head until I'm left with an aesthetically pleasing book full of desperate after-the-facts. God cannot have given anything up for us. The image of Jesus is a variation - immortality is sacrificed for mortality is transformed back into the supernatural/mystical. Different language, same meaning. And for the most part we still haven't figured out how to cope with death.
Weil has outlined according to reason the way we should live in this, not the best of all possible worlds, but the only one to actualize. But I can't find any correspondence between God and our imperfect thoughts except in their totality. Why attempt to sway your audience with the only faculty that refuses to swallow these words of yours? I've certainly failed to breach the gap between rationality and faith, but that doesn't make it any less fucking incredible that I exist and my best friend exists and you are reading these words and people have created art and my heart has been broken and tomorrow I'll drive to work and wish I knew the meaning of home in order to return.
We should live as best we can in order to live with ourselves, but that hardly requires our greatest conceivable thoughts to pop into existence sponteneously. Why renounce anything? And why denounce the imagination when the rationale driving your asceticism is no more tangible or expressible than the falsest of my daydreams? I think you are honest and that you mean well and that you believed wholeheartedly in all of these words that make mine shrink in discomfort. But logic isn't the foundation of the world and God owed us nothing - no more than we're indebted to him for our existence - we could never repay that. I can wake up and crawl out of bed in the morning wholly unconvinced that I'm here for a reason. But if I needed God to make it out the door, surely he would be present in everything, nothing more, and that would be all there is, no harm, no foul, and it would be enough to meet the reflection of my eyes before walking out the door to live in a manner that allows me to do the same tomorrow.
Last month I decided that it would be dishonest to continue studying philosophy because I will never know enough to feel comfortable asserting anything. Almost in the same breath I realized that the only study to which I could ever devote myself for more than two years - coincidentally the longest I've ever lived in a single building - is that of languages. Honestly, what else can keep me obsessively focused for five straight hours but verb forms and sociolinguistics and the translation of texts by Kafka and Herodotus?
If nothing else, Simone Weil was right about contradictions. Wales and New Zealand are still lookin' good from the Land of Enchantment. My wonderful boss called from Geneva on Monday to recommend Swiss castles. I would like to be a nomad.
Even though I expect every new album to be The Best Thing Ever, being right for the third time has kind of knocked me on my ass. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was supposed to be the pinnacle, right?
It is fantastic being this retarded all the time.
I don't have many pictures of my grandfather, but they outnumber the words I've found to describe the realization that most of them are glossy black-and-whites midway through Autobiography of a Yogi.