bottom line

 God doesn’t

Care if I believe

In God

God only

Cares that 

Love occurs

stepping out

 rain

wet leaves

barn door

is itself each stasis

With metaphor, we are being carried within and through what seems to be right there, before us, into something off to the side, unimposing, while showing us through and through.

The author affirms that the poetical workwith language oscillates between voice and

thought, presence and absence. This argument

contributes to his statement which says that

every true poet can perfectly develop precise

reasoning and abstract thought, since the most

authentic philosophy is in the objects we

observe and reflect upon, as well as in the act of

thinking itself and its maneuvers (idem, p. 208).

Valéry approximates the act of philosophical

thought to the poet’s process of thinking, and affirms

that the poet has his/her abstract thought and, as some

say, a particular philosophy, for the poetical work

implies reflections, decisions, choices and

combinations. The author also states that the value of

a poem is in the indissolubility of sound and sense,

and the poet’s task is to give us the feeling of intimate

union between sound and spirit. He goes beyond when

he shows that this desire to get sound and sense

together is part of language itself, because there is a

priori relation between the sounds of the letters, their

union, and the meaning attributed to them. How can

“horse”, “cheval” and “cavalo” designate the same

object? According to Valéry, this process that

approximates sounds and letters and constitutes ideas

is a characteristic of metaphor.

(--from https://www.academia.edu/82668949/Robert_Creeley_The_Minimal_Self_s_Metaphorical_Transportation_Robert_Creeley_A_transporta%C3%A7%C3%A3o_metaf%C3%B3rica_do_m%C3%ADnimo_eu_

Self’s Metaphorical Self’s Metaphorical Self’s Metaphorical 

Robert Creeley: A transportação metafórica do mínimo eu, by Rubelise da Cunha)

It is both sweet and unimaginable to be carried away, to travel through and through, the unexpected and the revelation of it.

    “Focus” e “Shadow”: the minimal self’s gaze 

FOCUS  

 

Patches of grey 

sky tree’s 

lines window 

frames the 

plant hangs 

in middle. 

SHADOW  

 

There is a shadow 

to intention a place 

it comes through and 

is itself each stasis 

of its mindedness ex- 

plicit walled into 

semblance it is a 

seemingly living place 

it wants it fades it 

comes and goes it puts 

a yellow flower in a pot 

in a circle and looks. 

 (--ibid)

 There are tired leaves holding on to nearly bare branches off northeast before barnestown road.

I glance at them.

They are seen.

omni tempore

 Dog snores in other room

Darkness at window panes

My brothers and sisters

Pray night office from choir stalls

Say it, go ahead

Benedícam Dóminum 

In ómni témpore.— I will

Bless the Lord at all times

the interconnexion in inviolable

It’s never good when your oncologist calls you at home the night before your next day appointment with him to prepare you for what he’ll have to say to you at that appointment.

What the Stoics call fate, which they identify with the working out of the – rational and predictable – will of Zeus, is “a certain natural everlasting ordering of the whole: one set of things follows on and succeeds another, and the interconnexion in inviolable” (Aulus Gellius, 55K). In other words, every event that occurs in the world is the result of a cause or chain of causes, so that everything that happens is metaphysically determined by preceding causes in the chain (but not logically necessary; cf. de Harven 2016). This sequence of causes is inescapable. 

 

The inescapability of this sequence of causes leads to concerns about action and moral responsibility. The first worry, which takes the form of the so-called “lazy argument” (Cicero, 55S) is that, if all my actions and their consequences are predetermined, there is no point in acting at all: why call the doctor when ill, if it is determined that the doctor will come? The second worry is that if my actions come about by prior causes, they are not in my power and I am therefore not truly responsible for them. 

 

In response to the former challenge, Chrysippus claimed that not all events are independent of one another. Rather, some are co-fated: part of one and the same causal chain in such a way that they cannot be dissociated. The call to the doctor and the doctor’s coming are so joined, as is the patient’s healing. The doctor will not come if she is not called, and the patient will not heal if the doctor does not come. Calling the doctor is thus not superfluous or pointless. The consequences of our actions may be predetermined, but only insofar as they are caused by our actions. Our actions are thus not pointless: we must act in order to ensure their consequences come about (see further critical discussion in Brennan 2005, ch. 16). 

 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/

Well, that explains everything.

I will ask about medically assisted you know what. The thought of which does not deter my so-called journey.

He’s a nice chap, the doctor.

Until tomorrow then. 

by a way in which you possess not

John of the Cross, imprisoned for nine months in 1577, wrote this:  

To reach satisfaction in all,

desire its possession in nothing.

To come to the knowledge of all, desire the knowledge of nothing.

To come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing. 

To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing.

To come to the pleasure you have not,

you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not,

you must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not,

you must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not,

you must go by a way in which you are not.

When you turn toward something,

you cease to cast yourself upon the all.

For to go from the all to the all,

you must leave yourself in all.

And when you come to the possession of all,

you must possess it without wanting anything.

In this nakedness the spirit finds its rest,

for when it covets nothing,

nothing raises it up,

and nothing weighs it down,

because it is in the center of its humility.

___ St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)

 I’m unsure of many things.

Life feels tenuous. I say aloud I’m not sure I look forward to an afterlife. In fact, I prefer there not be an afterlife. No God, no angels, relatives, friends, familiarities known during this spate of existence.

Just that. No burning hell, no soothing heaven. Neither. 

And why do I feel this way? I’m not sure. Perhaps it's the hermit speaking -- to be left alone -- or, in this case, to enter the alone without any interior or exterior reference.

The terrain and aesthetic of anesthesia without the bother of return.

And if there is an afterlife, perhaps one can apply for a passport exempting entrance into something while remaining outside the gates in nothing.

And if there is a God, and God is merciful,  I’ll be ignored and let not be.

Why go on?

Let the psychic and material protons, electrons, neutrons, atoms and improbable units of the cosmos go their separate ways back into the universe without cohesion, shape, or identity.

I don’t know about those medieval mystics or pre-socratic philosophers and where they were pointing -- but I feel some of what they felt.

I can, I think, let it go.

When I die, you’ll never know.

Nor, most likely, will I.

Possessing not.

chanson du matin

 Watching morning light

Rising through bare branches

One more Dawn

One empty mind

Just pale grey

Beyond Buddha and cross

I cannot imagine

Being anywhere else

Nor wish to be

Anyone else

One large bird

Flies toward Bald Mountain

As cat claws box

in hallway

N’est pas vrai et belle?

Oui, mon amour, oui

pacem in terris

 Sleep well, 

I’m told

That would

Be nice

Wouldn’t 

It

planck

 The universe is thinking through you.

https://youtu.be/B3O7Yth-dqM?si=TxPcBLnwQSw0O-Zd

Is it thought made manifest?

the morning after

 can we?

love ourselves?

love our neighbors?

ask, go ahead, ask

yesterday, 

on Election Day

cruelty lost

corruption called out

can we 

hear what we said

do what is necessary?

phew

Well, that was some election!

i voted

 the person has spoken

democracy is alive

corruption be damned

the holy unfathoming few

 Holiness

 is found 

In the

Unfathoming few

Continuing to

Carry through

With care

all souls

 We honor the dead

Those who lived

This life

itadakimasu (いただきます)

 She died today

Those years ago

Husband by her side

His Cambridge chemistry

Their Yale romance

The nun freed and out

I didn’t know

She’d been ill

I didn’t know

Ten years ago

Fifty years later

The flower ungrasped

Children’s hands

Offering sweet petals

A frozen picture

Devoted friendship

Fallen frieze

Crumbled into words

Where, gratefully received,

A slow honoring bow

To each thanks and yes

few, whereof one cannot speak

 God

God is

God is not

God is not only

God is not only good

God is not only good but

God is not only good but impossible

God is not only good but impossible too 

God is not only good but impossible to fathom.

But holiness knows this.

Which is why there are so few saints.

Cheers to the unfathoming few

Silently among us

wu wei involves letting go of ideals that we may otherwise try to force too violently onto things

Watts and Taoism, delightful All Saints imbroglio of his life and mine, sun streaming into wohnkūche on the morning of ambivalent hour and the last roll of cloud paper in WC.

Sitting still, doing nothing, and falling leaf shadow passes through peripheral vision.

WU WEI – DOING NOTHING 無爲

Wu wei means – in Chinese – non-doing or ‘doing nothing’. It sounds like a pleasant invitation to relax or worse, fall into laziness or apathy. Yet this concept is key to the noblest kind of action according to the philosophy of Daoism – and is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the central text of Daoism, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’. This is the paradox of wu wei. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’. It means being at peace while engaged in the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with maximum skill and efficiency. Something of the meaning of wu wei is captured when we talk of being ‘in the zone’ – at one with what we are doing, in a state of profound concentration and flow.

  

wu wei

Wu wei is closely connected to the Daoist reverence for the natural world, for it means striving to make our behaviour as spontaneous and inevitable as certain natural processes, and to ensure that we are swimming with rather than against currents. We are to be like the bamboo that bends in the wind or the plant that adjusts itself to the shape of a tree. Wu wei involves letting go of ideals that we may otherwise try to force too violently onto things; it invites us instead to respond to the true demands of situations, which tend only to be noticed when we put our own ego-driven plans aside. What can follow is a loss of self-consciousness, a new unity between the self and its environment, which releases an energy that is normally held back by an overly aggressive, wilful style of thinking. 

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/wu-wei-doing-nothing/

 All the times I’ve run into a wall (who put that there?) this body and psyche have been bruised and cut. Time takes care of rescinding each impasse leaving a log of the body’s insults and mind’s trauma.

This morning, cat on lap, I delight that elsewhere buddhist, christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, and atheistic compañeros are practicing (or non-practicing) their take on the world and existence with an equanimous mind and beneficent spirit equal to the radiant sunlight crawling up this chair.

What do we have to do?

How live through this ephemera? 

Whither prayer? Why and why not?

Reverence.

I bow to each and all, worthy or unworthy, selvedged or unselvedged.

And remain sitting in the stillness of this passing moment.

Unreservedly grateful.

1 nov

 What is holiness?

Yes, it is!

No other questions

does anybody really know

 We've lost or gained 

an hour, they say.

Sleep it off —

Time —

What an idea

everything degenerates, he said

Listening to Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman (Interview Adaptation), I am pointed to Rousseau.

G E N E R A L  R E M A R K S .

T h e  O b j e c t  o f  E d u c a t i o n .

C O M I N G from the h a n d of the A u t h o r of all things,

everything is g o o d ; in the h a n d s of m a n , everything

degenerates. M a n obliges one soil to nourish the productions

of another, one tree t o ' b e a r the fruits of another ; he mingles

and confounds climates, elements, seasons ; he mutilates his

dog, his horse, his slave. H e overturns everything, disfigures

e v e r y t h i n g ; he loves deformity, m o n s t e r s ; he desires

t h a t nothing should be as nature m a d e it, not even m a n himself.

T o please him, m a n must be broken in like a h o r s e ;

man m u s t be ad ap te d to m a n ' s own fashion, like a tree in

his g a r d e n .

W e r e it not for all this, m a t t e r s would be still worse. N o

one wishes* to be a half-developed being ; and in the present

condition of things, a m a n left to himself among others from

his birth would be the most deformed among them all.

Prejudices, authority, necessities, example, all the social

institutions in which we are submerged, would stifle nature

in him, a n d would p u t nothing in its place. I n such a m a n

n a t u r e would b e like a shrub sprung u p by chance in the

midst of a highway, and jostled from all sides, b e n t in every

direction, b y the passers-by.

P l a n t s are improved b y cultivation, and m e n b y education.

If m a n were born large and strong, his size and strength

would be useless to him until he had learned to use t h e m .

T h e y would be prejudicial to him, by preventing others from

thinking of assisting him ; a n d left to himself he would die of

wretchedness before he h a d known his own necessities. W e

pity the state of infancy ; we clo n o t perceive t h a t the h u m a n

race would have perished if m a n h a d not begun b y being a

child.

W e are born weak, we need s t r e n g t h ; we are born destit

u t e of all things, we need a s s i s t a n c e ; we are born stupid,

we need judgment. All t h a t we have not at our birth, a n d

t h a t we need when grown u p , is given us b y education.

This education comes to us from n a t u r e itself, or from

other men, or from circumstances. T h e internal developm

e n t of our faculties a n d of our organs is the education^

n a t u r e gives us ; the use we are t a u g h t to m a k e of this development

is the education we get from other m e n ; and what

we learn, b y our own experience, about things t h a t interest

u s , is the education of circumstances.

Each of lis is therefore formed by three kinds of teachers.

T h e pupil in whom their different lessons contradict one

another is badly educated, and will never be in h a r m o n y with

himself; the one in whom they all touch upon the samo

points and t e n d toward the same object advances toward

t h a t goal only, and lives accordingly. H e alone is well educated.

N o w of these three different educations, t h a t of nature does

not depend upon us ; t h a t of circumstances d e p e n d s upon us

only in certain respects ; t h a t of men is the only one of

which we are really masters, a n d that solely because we

think we are. F o r who can hope to direct entirely the speech

a n d conduct of all who surround a child ?

(Beginning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile; or Concerning Education, 1762)

Reading too many accounts of paedophilia, rape, sexual abuse, infidelity, and promiscuity I have, of a  sudden, begun to think that the matter with humans is the obsession of man (men) to insert themselves into everything, especially other human beings.

There seems to be an acceptance of men sticking himself in everything, from other bodies, to everyone’s business.

I don’t know what to do with such an observation.

I’m also not sure what to think about evil.

Or God.

It is All-Hallow’s Eve. The Thin Place. That supposed time when the veil between ‘worlds’ is thinnest and accessibility of communication is at hand.

We hurt one another. Earthquakes crush people. Tsunamis wash people away. We’ve been taught that man has sinned and screwed up the world. We’ve been told that God-Itself became man to save and redeem humankind and wash away sin. So many stories. So many explanations. So unconvincing.

We heard when younger to ‘mind your own business.’

All around us we also heard ‘stick it to them.’

I still don’t know what to think.

I, still; don’t know: what? to think?

AI Overview [1, 2].  Evil     

 

Definitions by Part of Speech

• Adjective: Describes someone or something morally bad, cruel, wicked, or harmful (e.g., an evil dictator, evil deeds). It can also describe things that are intensely unpleasant or repulsive, such as an evil smell.
• 
  
• Noun: Refers to the abstract concept of wickedness, or to a specific calamity, sorrow, disease, or wrongdoing (e.g., the evils of war, suffering from an evil).
• 
  
• Adverb (evilly): Describes an action done in a wicked, malicious, or injurious manner. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Key Perspectives

• Philosophical & Psychological: Philosophers often divide evil into moral evil (suffering caused by human choice and cruelty) and natural evil (suffering caused by natural events like earthquakes or illness). Thinkers and psychologists also study how social pressure, obedience, or dark personality traits drive human harm.

• Religious: In Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), evil is often viewed as disobedience to God, moral corruption, or the absence of good. Eastern traditions frequently view it as an imbalance or attachment that clouds spiritual growth.

• Community Views: On Reddit, users generally reach a consensus that evil is not an independent magical force, but rather the choice made by individuals with free will to cause destruction and limit the growth of others. [1, 2, 3] 

 It is befuddling, this delving into the nature of the universe, the nature of man, the nature of existence.

And yet, I ask. We ask. We’re more than curious. Our lives, perhaps our fates, are in the balance.

AI Overview

Albert Einstein did not actually ask or write whether the universe was benevolent or friendly; the famous quote is a widespread misattribution. 

Quora +1

The Misattribution

• The Quote: Variations include "The most important question we can ask is whether the universe is benevolent" or "The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe". 
• Goodreads +1

• The Reality: There is no documented historical record of Albert Einstein making this statement. Instead, the idea is a modern self-help and motivational paraphrase that has been repeatedly attached to his name online. 
• Facebook ·SpeakWell.Rocks +1

What Einstein Actually Believed

• Comprehensibility and Order: Einstein viewed the universe as deeply rational, lawful, and understandable, famously summarizing his view of nature with, "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not". 
• Quora

• Spinoza's God: He did not believe in a personal God who cares about human fate, morality, or benevolence. Instead, he subscribed to Baruch Spinoza's view of God—an impersonal divinity expressed through the harmonious, mathematical order of the natural world. 
• Reform Judaism.org

No matter what our understanding, I’d prefer to rid the world of paedophiles, abusers, cruel people, and those who protect them.

Where does that leave me?

Who will relieve me of these meddlesome bastards? These meddlesome thoughts?

Meddlesomeness itself?

And what of Kant? 

    “Act as though the principle of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”

         (-- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785)