Nobel Prize winning Poet, Wislawa Szymborska, died today at the age of 88. Her poetry is shockingly beautiful and moving. This is my favorite of her works.
A Few Words On The Soul
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
“In the universe,
there are things that are known,
and things that are unknown, and in between,
there are doors.”
Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.
The sonic genius of John Coltrane (via openculture.com)
This mindF$#@K of a film was impossible to turn away from. Kind of like the journey it depicts wherein horror (dark night) and ecstasy (unitive state) dance and struggle endlessly.
This from Arthur Rimbaud:
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!
Not many today would sacrifice so much for their art!
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a fascinating human.
The long awaited, oft written about and frequently speculated on Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is set for release November 7th.
His fiction is famous, but his philosophy has been somewhat controversial as he has been called a visionary, a prophet, a latter-day Gnostic Saint and a madman.
I’ve read bits of the Exegesis at the end of VALIS and it was fascinating. I’m sure the full volume will be mind-bending, dark and illuminating.
I can’t wait to read it.
Mystic and esoteric teacher G.I. Gurdjieff wrote that,
Man such as we know him, is a machine.
I am too often reminded of this anytime I do something seemingly on auto-pilot. How did I get to work again? When did they build that new restaurant? Why did I just boil water for coffee?
