when the sky looks like this i feel a sense of relief. a sense of calm and rest. that there is something so much bigger than me. i need this feeling at least 12 times a day.
isn't it beautiful? isn't it such a release to just indulge in the beauty of the color and enormity of it?
indulgent like a little child falling into her grandma's arms for long, much needed nap.
remember that?
my grandmothers both gave the best hugs. they had big bosoms that just inflicted relaxation and drowsiness immediately upon impact .
even as an adult i loved that feeling. i have an aunt that to this day will grab my head and smoosh it into her chest when she hugs me.
how do you get that kind of comfort?
do you ever crave that kind of comfort? the comfort of 'home'?
this is my drug of choice, among others.
these were taken through the front windshield while driving through Mississippi.
Comments
As for the feeling of being hugged by a large bosomed woman, I know what you mean. It's that memory from infancy of being swaddled and fed... of "surrender".
Christa Wolf's classic GDR novel Divided Sky (1963) describes the subjective effect of division in Germany, Manfred, who chose the West, said to his lover Rita, whom he met for the last time:
Even if our lands are divided, we will always share the same sky with you
But Rita, who chooses to stay in the East, gives him a bittersweet answer:
No, they divided the sky first.
Even if the crimes of the East are denied in the novel, it is important to establish that the ultimate ground of our "worldly" divisions and quarrels is always the "divided sky". The division of the sky is the division of the (symbolic) universe in which we reside in a much more radical and exclusionary sense, and the bearer and instrument of this divisive action is our language, because it is our language of the environment that sustains our way of living reality. In other words, the real divisive element is not our primitive and selfish interests, but our language. Because of language, we can live in a "world apart" from our neighbors, even if we live in the same neighborhood as them.
From the book Sema Karmakarma (Zizek, "Heaven in Disorder", 2021) translated from Turkish
...based upon AQ of predator/ prey.
Those were my "awakenings" last night.
And men have lost their reason! —Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me. {He weeps.}
...after all, we've seen you. ;)
But back to you, Nikhil! Spill the beans!
....and this may be one play that will never be written.... :(
But why the idea of Sartre as a role model itself should be funny, can you explain?
He seems like a Mel Brooks character to me.
I met my wife my freshman year at the Academy. I had a far different vision of my future come my senior year...
I suppose that the price of the dream I had begun with became too high.
For as Jen alluded, it is not with money that one can measure a life lived out of a suitcase chasing a dream.
To change means to dream differently. Perhaps this is why it's so difficult to remain in the "character" of our character.
And why the internet and virtual worlds can feel so liberating... an escape from the prisons of ourselves
The gates of horn and ivory are a literary image used to distinguish true dreams (corresponding to factual occurrences) from false. The phrase originated in the Greek language, in which the word for "horn" is similar to that for "fulfill" and the word for "ivory" is similar to that for "deceive". On the basis of that play on words, true dreams are spoken of as coming through the gates of horn, false dreams as coming through those of ivory.
I had to "change the dream" to something more "conventional". My first job offer was as a 3rd Assistant on an oil rig in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. It would have meant 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off with a wife in Aberdeen, alone. My 2nd job offer was a shipyard in San Francisco 50 miles from my childhood home. I took it.
The 1st was something along the lines of ... "I did get to live the dream for a little while. I spent a year at sea. When I got back from sea for the last time, I asked my GF to marry me. And that's when the dream began to change."
:P
https://youtu.be/c8p7vsjUz_M
I've been watching Only Murders In The Building on Hulu. It's got Steve Martin and Martin Short and it's so good.
And we've watched all of "Only Murders in the Bldg"... although I admit to now being worried about it "jumping the shark" in Season 3 with a murder "outside" the bldg.
@ nikhil - I'll look for it!
I posted last week on Foucault's heterotopias described in "Of Other Spaces". Rose Island certainly was one of those "spaces", but much as in Huxley's "Island", such spaces are never left to remain. They're too much a temptation for those "repressed" and seeking escape in the vain belief that "but for some law forbidding X, I would be happy". And when you finally get that X, you quickly discover that it wasn't X after all, but Y. Such is the Objet petit 'a.
Regardless, those currently forbidding X will undoubtedly find a way of preventing X from happening. And of course, that's what happened on Rose Island.
If I had to choose one word to identify the uniqueness of the West it would be “Faustian.” This is the word Oswald Spengler used to designate the “soul” of the West. He believed that Western civilization was driven by an unusually dynamic and expansive psyche. The “prime-symbol” of this Faustian soul was “pure and limitless space.” This soul had a “tendency towards the infinite,” a tendency most acutely expressed in modern mathematics. The “infinite continuum,” the exponential logarithm and “its dissociation from all connexion with magnitude” and transference to a “transcendent relational world” were some of the words Spengler used to describe Western mathematics. But he also wrote of the “bodiless music” of the Western composer, “in which harmony and polyphony bring him to images of utter ‘beyondness’ that transcend all possibilities of visual definition,” and, before the modern era, of the Gothic “form-feeling” of “pure, imperceptible, unlimited space”
- ("Decline of the West", Vol.1, Form and Actuality [Alfred Knopf, 1923] 1988, pp. 53-90).
FJ, who are the commenters at Farmers Letters? (((TC)))? Who is Q? Tell me, tell me!
Are you supporting Trump again this time? I have more questions...
As for Trump, I'm not really supporting him, but I do prefer him and his recommended candidates to the establishment neocons. We need to find someone new to rally around who shares an "America first" ideology, but until that someone "goes through the fire" as Trump has, it'll be hard to distinguish the "sincere" candidates from crass imitators (ala DeSantis). There's a lot of economic and social pain looming on the horizon. We'll need some real fighters if we're to minimize it.
P.s. I only know who one of those commenters is. I'm out of the loop (thankfully).
I'm not a Liz Cheney fan.
IMO, the government has become partisan and is now trying to "punish" Trump supporters. They just "double jeopardy-ed" Steve Bannon on new charges that Trump had already pardoned him for (a political prosecution). Politics shouldn't be criminalized. They're trying to threaten and intimidate people. There are people still in jail for simply walking on the grounds of the capitol on Jan. 6.
This is no longer the country I grew up in.
Let's hope that you, Jen, don't consider yourself a "vanishing mediator" be Nikhil and I.... for we would be much saddened were you to vanish, or replace the "Jen" with more "...'s" :(
Who knows. Certainly, not me.
And where the 'f is Nietzsche Girl????
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
-Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well!
MICHEL Foucault opens his book The Order of Things with a paragraph that has become one of his most famous. Foucault describes a passage from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” that, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By “our” thoughts, he means Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: “a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.” Foucault writes that, thanks to “the wonderment of this taxonomy,” we can apprehend not only “the exotic charm of another system of thought” but also “the limitation of our own.” What the taxonomy or form of classification reveals, says Foucault, is that “there would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture … that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think.” The stark impossibility of our thinking in this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality.
But my absolute favorite are his college lectures that he gave during his stint in College de France. I like this latter phase tremendously.
I have 2 Foucault books so I'll go dig them out.
By the way, tell me ... Is Wodehouse also popular in the US? Here he is quite a phenomenon.