Says he's depressed. He says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. The doctor says "The treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him, that should pick you up." The man bursts into tears. He says "But doctor... I am Pagliacci."
Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there. A clock without a craftsman.
As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding. Blake's different. He understands perfectly... and he doesn't care.
I'm basking in the two-million-year-old light of Andromeda. I can see the supernova that Ernt Hartwig discovered in 1885, a century ago. It scintillates, a wink intended for the trilobytes, all long dead.
A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts.
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire thread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.
The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"...
... and I'll look down, and whisper "No."
For those of us who delight in such things, the twentieth century has, in it's unfolding, presented mankind with an array of behavioural paradoxes and moral conundrums hitherto unimagined and perhaps unimaginable. Science, traditional enemy of mysticism and religion, has taken on a growing understanding that the model of the universe suggested by quantum physics differs very little from the universe that Taoists and other mystics have existed in for centuries. Large numbers of young people, raised in rigidly structured and industrially oriented cultures, violently reject industrialism and seek instead some modified version of the agricultural lifestyle that their forebears debatedly enjoyed... Children starve while boots costing many thousand dollars leave their mark upon the surface of the moon. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace. This dichotomy is not an invention of the twentieth century, yet it is this century that the most striking examples of the phenomena have appeared. Never before has man pursued global harmony more vocally while amassing stockpiles of weapons so devastating in their effect. The second world war - we were told - was The War To End Wars. The development of the atomic bomb is the Weapon to End Wars.
And yet the wars continue.
Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.
But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
Dry your eyes... and let's go home.
That's what's wrong with this world: no incentive to be nice: You try to help, you wind up in trouble.
Quote from: Beef on March 28, 2005, 06:44:20 PM
That's what's wrong with this world: no incentive to be nice: You try to help, you wind up in trouble.
Sad, but true.
i didn't read any of that, so the joke's on you.
Who said all those things, Beef?
Quote from: OBB on March 28, 2005, 06:59:16 PM
Who said all those things, Beef?
Alan Moore
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Quote from: OBB on March 28, 2005, 07:07:19 PM
Quote from: Beef on March 28, 2005, 07:03:29 PM
Quote from: OBB on March 28, 2005, 06:59:16 PM
Who said all those things, Beef?
Alan Moore
Is Alan Moore trying to look like Rasputin?
Actually, Alan Moore does in fact look a lot like Rasputin. Just not as tall.
Is Alan Moore's penis as big as Rasputin's?
I'm assuming we've all seen Rasputin's penis in the jar.
I haven't seen Rasputin's penis.
Quote from: ursus on March 29, 2005, 01:14:42 PM
I haven't seen Rasputin's penis.
Link may not be safe:
http://www.mosnews.com/files/1492/picture1.jpg
Quote from: BigDun on March 29, 2005, 01:22:57 PM
Quote from: ursus on March 29, 2005, 01:14:42 PM
I haven't seen Rasputin's penis.
Link may not be safe:
http://www.mosnews.com/files/1492/picture1.jpg
Lord no is that not safe! If some guy pulled down his pants and showed me that, I would tell him there is no way he is sticking that in me.
It's OK, he's a priest. :o :o