Once again, the New York Times, that ostensibly 'liberal' paper, seems bent on electing a Republican president. But with friends like Maureen Dowd, why would the Democrats need enemies? She has been a veritable fifth column in the last two presidential elections, and has shown the same pseudo-liberal cannibalistic tendencies in the run-up to the present conventions. But now we're getting it from the Times' idea of the middle, or perhaps the middle right.<< MORE >>

What we are living on is the residual or inertial potency of the dollar itself. But since the dollar itself is an instrument of credit, the support is circular.<< MORE >>

The United States, it seems, is the last bastion of the simpleminded rationalism that started the Enlightenment.<< MORE >>

i've been working for quite a while on a portrait in oils  of Morgana. Hopefully I will complete it in the next 1 or 2 sittings.  Time is running out....Anyway, I've started doing some warm-ups with drawing and or watercolor before I launch into the oil study.  Here's one of the drawings.

        

[Regarding 'Notebook' and its 'revision' as 'History':] Four years after the publication of 'History', Lowell died of a heart attack at the age of 60. If he had lived longer - perhaps for another decade - one wonders if he would have viewed the two 'poems' as distinct and separable performances, each valid in its own right.<< MORE >>

The larger question, of course, is whether a form of 'balanced' economy is possible.<< MORE >>

To call Eckhart a pantheist or neoplatonist is, of course, a travesty.....Eckhart is the father of Einstein.<< MORE >>

Jesus said: The kingdom of the father is like a woman carrying a jar full of meal, walking on a distant road. The handle broke. The meal streamed out on the road. But she was unaware; she had noticed no mishap. When she entered her house and put the jar down, she discovered that it was empty. ..... Gospel of Thomas, Saying 97 << MORE >>

        

I recently gave notice to the property management here at the Curley School in Ajo, that I would be moving.<< MORE >>

A redo of a smaller work (16x20). 

        

Morgana  is one of the artists here at the Curley School in AZ.  She teaches the GED program here at ISDA. 
     One of the projects she is working on is called 'The Border Project"  It is an installation involving students locally and from Mexico that addresses border issues.  You can check it out at  www.borderproject.org

        

The more I sit with the 'two mode' idea of 'substance', the more it strikes me as appropriate. I came up with it on the spur of the moment, as I was writing my last post, as a response to something I was reading about Spinoza. . . . .However, my thought has moved on from the initial, relatively spontaneous proposition in my last post.<< MORE >>

Spinoza was right. There is only one substance. , , , , ,What shows us that consciousness and the world are one substance is evolution itself. . . . . . The materialists, in their hunger for an atheism that denies any god, including awareness itself, insist that the mechanically reactive process of 'nature' as 'purely material' can produce a sophistication more profound than human thought, as if this disproved the basic validity or independence of consciousness as a phenomenon in itself. But what it simply proves is that consciousness is integral in 'matter'. Awareness is prior to thought.<< MORE >>

We now have a stock phrase that guarantees our response to Islamism. In the media, Islamism is always extremist Islamism. To our way of thinking, then, Islamism is necessarily a radical idea, and our response is always premised on the presumption that we are dealing with radicals and extremists<< MORE >>

Children, it's only in the housing 'cause the housing was the last place all this 'extra' money could hide.<< MORE >>

Remembering the March wind and the late winter hayfields - a meditation on Susan Sontag's death and the New York intellectual. . . . "I remember walking through the fields in March, when I lived on the farm. The hayfields invariably grew after the last cutting, but rarely more than eight or ten inches. Sometimes the clumping lumpiness of the fields survived the winter. But, more often, the snows flattened them. And when the wind came in March, the flattened and bleached-out grass would winnow in the wind . . ."<< MORE >>

        

        

        

The [cross-country] skiers may have kicked me into the nostalgic frame, but that would have been a circuitous route, and largely unconscious. What prompted it specifically was awareness of my feet, because of the slight slog, and then the mind traveled on to the six inch boots I was wearing. It's not the first time I've had the thought. Country boots are eight inch boots. Six inch boots are city boots.<< MORE >>

        

        

        

"I am starting this new event and business called 'Come Paint with Me' . We'll be doing explorations..."<< MORE >>

        

        

        

Apart from being a strident Democrat, I generally tend to keep my choices to myself.<< MORE >>

        

        

        

                            rondeau



I have written my song
            on the wind
the wind blows and my
            song returns

only the song, the song
            the rest is shadows
lovers taking their leave
friends, their faces unfading
nothing left but the wrong
                the failure
                of places

a time out of joint
as if joinery made or
            unmade it
the fading song on the wind
            the wind, and the song
            that mislaid it



                            -- Jeremy
                                                                

        

        

In the light of eternity, you know, the eternity and vastness of time and space ...<< MORE >>

        

        

I keep hearing Dick Cheney, speaking before a group of wealthy supporters in the last presidential election cycle, saying something to the effect that, 'we are the ones who can protect your wealth.' << MORE >>

Why are we all so sensitive to judgment? << MORE >>

Came across this video of Bill Hicks and found him to be a very funny guy. Was sorry to hear he is no longer with us. Explore some of the youtube clips....Enjoy.

        

May you be born in interesting times, goes the supposed Chinese curse. But the American curse seems to be, may you be born in a time that has lost interest.<< MORE >>

        

        

Sometime in the early 80's, a colleague asked my father when he was going to shave off his small goatee. My father instantly replied, 'When the Vietnam War is over.'<< MORE >>

Since only the barn mice seem to be listening, I might as well sit in the loft and smell the sweet hay and say my piece. . . .The ultimate absolute of the fundamentalist religion of science is that the universe is essentially absolutely purposeless. . . . In other words, from its beginnings, scientific fundamentalism has been so aggressively atheistic and anti-spiritual that it will not allow anything to have legitimate creative volition. . . .This is the reason that we cannot allow consciousness to be an independent reality in the universe. If consciousness were an independent reality, then volition would be real. If volition were real, creativity would be a real possibility. If creativity were a real possibility, then there would be real value in the universe. And if there were real value in the universe, then there would be purpose in the universe. If there were real purpose in the universe - who knows? - there might even be spiritual reality and perhaps, in the remotest reaches, something tantamount to the divine. << MORE >>

As a culture, we still have no clue what to do with Mailer's gift.<< MORE >>

If the 'monism' of matter is global rather than linear, and involves a simultaneous multiplicity of principles or 'causes', and if, as we have suggested in our previous post, this global monism of matter embodies a 'pre-awareness' or 'proto-awareness', then the boundaries of the field of awareness in fact constitute the evolutionary horizon. Matter and consciousness are necessarily intimate at a level that allows for the intimacy of function and interpretation. That is, the analytical activity of consciousness - the 'interpretation' - necessarily mirrors the process of matter - the 'function'.<< MORE >>

Why would I argue that I am only a machine? And why would I argue that I am a machine that essentially lacks cogency? That owes its 'cogency' to something which is inherently other than cogency?<< MORE >>

        

What is becoming obvious is that democracy and the rule of wealth are not only not synonymous, they are antithetical. Paul Krugman has recently run a series of op-ed articles in the Times outlining the change that occurred after World War II in this country – an event that economists are calling ‘the great compression’ – when FDR’s New Deal policies finally kicked in – and the range of incomes narrowed and the productive power of the economy geared in to peace time commerce. The result was an economic surge that we are still living on, although the last of it is now reflected in the fading power of the dollar at the hands of the ignorant rich who cannot see the difference between credit power and production power.<< MORE >>