Amidst All Your Philosophy

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Abstract, Black and White, Blur, Cinema Quotes, Literary Quotes, Nature, Photography, Snow, Twilight, Urban Debris

“If men lie in this world, what makes you so sure they’ll be honest in the next?”― Rashomon (1950)

“Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against a man who wants to live.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Immanuel Kant marveled at ‘the starry heavens above’ and the ‘moral law within.’ It’s a lovely sentiment, but one that I cannot wholeheartedly share. We are marvelous in many ways, but the moral laws within us are a mixed blessing. More marvelous, to me, is our ability to question the laws written in our hearts and replace them with something better. The natural world is full of cooperation, from tiny cells to packs of wolves. But all of this teamwork, however impressive, evolved for the amoral purpose of successful competition…

“And yet somehow we, with our overgrown primate brains, can grasp the abstract principles behind nature’s machines and make them our own. On these pastures, something new is growing under the sun: a global tribe that looks out for its members, not to gain advantage over others, but simply because it’s good.”— Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” ― David Hume

“No Terror in the Bang…”

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Abstract, Black and White, Cine-Quotes, Creature, Drear, Literary Quotations, October, Photography, Reflection, Spider, Water

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
– Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“-I visit this room every night…
-Visit?
-The blind always live in the rooms they live under.”
– Peeping Tom (1960)

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

Happy October…

🦇👻👀

“An Atom in the Universe…”

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Fishing, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Pondering, Quotation, Science, Sea

“…I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves, mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business, trillions apart, yet forming white surf in unison. Age on ages, before any eyes could see, Year after year, thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest, tortured by energy. Wasted prodigiously by the sun, poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity, living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein. Dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto the dry land, Here it is standing, atoms with consciousness, matter with curiosity stands at the sea, wonders at wondering…I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
– Richard P. Feynman

“Never Again Shall There be Birds in Cages…”

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Black and White, Drear, Nature, Photography, Quotations

“- I think it’s a pity that the beautiful old houses are being torn down.
– They don’t bring in enough rent.
– The empty spaces look like graves. Like house graves.”
— From the film Alice in the Cities

“Life is a series of suicides…”
— From the film Love Streams

“And break through dark;
It’s acrid in the streets;
A paper witch upon her sulphured broom
Flies from the gutter.”
— Dylan Thomas, Time Enough to Rot

“If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.”
— Isak Dinesen (penname of Karen Blixen)

Happy October 😉

Where October Lives…

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Drear, Florida, Literary Quotations, Music, Nature, October, Photography, Quotations

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay.”
– Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I saw what looked like another fallen tree in front of me and put my foot on it to cross over. At that moment it reared up in front of me- the biggest python I had ever seen!”
– Louis Leakey, archaeologist and anthropologist (DOD 1 October 1972)

“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others.”
– Jimmy Carter (DOB 1 October 1924)

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
– L. M. Montgomery, Ann of Green Gablesjnmh

“That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”
– Ray Bradbury, The October Country

Happy October, everyone.

The Vitreous Surface of Grief: And, a Death on Halloween

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Abstract, Black and White, Dark Humour, Death, Experimental, Music, Nature, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Swamp

“Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged?”
– From the song “Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

Shadows spill in green tendrils across oiled waters. I probe the murky, moschate depths with a long, soggy stick. My hands are black and muddied. Reeds whistle beside me. A seagull mews somewhere far away. Minims of sweat glisten and drop from the end of my nose. I can taste the paracme, the tongue-slitting, nascent edge of the end.

A frog burbles to the vitreous surface. Two aurific eyes shimmer at me, bright as egg-yokes. With a gulp, they vanish. I can smell slime. My fingers balter through the mud. I am waiting. I am always waiting.

The sun spits in my eye and I turn away, longing for the tenebrous clouds of the foggy North to sidle down and cast me in a casket of embalming gloom.

I am addicted to desolation. I ache for darkness, cold and decay.

And then a cool wind finally came. Its chilled fingers ruffled my hair and it made the back gate moan plangorously against its flaking hinges. I reveled, I pranced, I forgot my little pain.

A mouse came in the night. He settled himself in a soft, grey ball beside my feet, nose nuzzling the coarse, back-door rug. I watched him take slow, solemn breaths, his sable eyes squinting, mordant. He died in the wash of a final sunrise that milked across a violescent sky, on the dawn of Halloween. Creatures come to me to die, sometimes.

The ants are burrowing into his raisin eyes, now. In a week or three, his tiny white mouse skull will be decoration on my desk.

There is always a glimmer through grief.

“Walk on down the hill
Through the grass grown tall and brown
And still it’s hard somehow to let go of my pain
On past the busted back
Of that old and rusted Cadillac
That sinks into this field collecting rain”
– From the song “Empty” by Ray Lamontagne

“Every Sin is an Attempt to Fly…”

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Black and White, Florida, Night, Noir, Photography, Portrait, Quotations, Thoughts

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always gotten there first, and is waiting for it.”
– Yousuf Karsh

“Night does not show things, it suggests them.”
– Brassaï

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.”
– Simone Weil

“An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?”
– Rene Descartes

“Very hopeful faces always seem on the edge of despair.”
– Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine

“To The Artist There is Never Anything Ugly…”

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Abstract, Black and White, Death, Florida, Monochrome, Nature, Photography, Quotations, Thoughts, Woods

“If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.”
– Brassaï

“Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.”
– Federico Fellini

“To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.”
– Auguste Rodin

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
– Albert Einstein

How I Wish There Were No End to Rain

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Black and White, Death, Florida, Grief, Introspection, Music, Nature, Ocean, Pain, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Rain, Sea, Writing

I loomed beneath a dark feathering of sea-oats, pointed tips glazed with recent rain. I listened to the subdued murmur of little waves. The fetid and russet beds of sea-wrack had been washed away, leaving the sand barren and strange. A forlorn gull loitered at the swash line, analyzing the crinkling water as it fizzed in and out.

Distant lightning lazily branched from the moody-blue squall-lines and spidered across a sullen sea of herbal green. Coy ghost crabs emerged, removing dark masses of dripping sand from drowned burrows. They built little, lumpy mounds around the entrances to their small, black holes.

The storm was leaving me. How I longed for it to stay.

I was tortured the other night, seized with the memory of my little Siamese cat squeezing her eyes tightly shut for the last time. How swiftly she was gone, her soft, cinnamon cheek resting upon a colorful, flowing blanket that masked the metal slab beneath. I had never seen an animal euthanized, before. I understood, logically, that it ended the physical misery of her little, bony body.

Yet, how troubled I am by that last image of peace…of life tenderly released.

My mum died of a similar ravenous kind of disease. I remember that final image. Her face waxen and unreal, her mouth a small, black hole. She did not tightly close her eyes. She was not escorted quietly, through a warm wash of sleep, into the darkness beyond. Yet, I was not so disturbed by her image in death. And how vividly there lacked any look of peace…

I do not know what that reveals about me.

But I wish the storm would never leave. I want, forever, to hear its screams over this cold and fleeting sea of herbal green. How I wish there were no end to rain. Just as there seems to be no end to Grief.

“Darkness settles on the ground
Leaves the day stumbling blind,
Coming to a quiet close
And maybe just in time”
– From the song God Only Knows by Joe Henry

“As the wet surface extends its clear broth…”

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Black and White, Crabs, Florida, Lagoon, Literary Quotation, Nature, Nikon, Photography, Poem Quotations, Quotation, Swamp, Video, Water

“Ah! the wet surface extends its clear broth!
The water fills the prepared beds with pale bottomless gold.
The green faded dresses of girls
make willows, out of which hop unbridled birds.”
– Arthur Rimbaud, from the poem Memory ”Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears”
– Arthur Rimbaud, from the poem Memory“Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.”
– Carl Sandburg, from the poem Memoranda
“A lacrymal tincture washes
The cabbage-green skies:
Under the drooling tree with tender shoots”
– Arthur Rimbaud, My Little Lovers “To-day, let me be monosyllabic….a crony of old men who wash sunlight in their fingers and enjoy slow-pacing clocks.”
– Carl Sandburg, from the poem Monosyllabic
“Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”
– Carl Sandburg

Thank you for oozing by.

– Smiling Toad