wittgenstein, ludwig

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."

[l. wittgenstein, tractatus logico-philosophicus]

roethke, theodore

"What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?"

[from "In a Dark Time"]

foucault, michel

"Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: Why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence.... The essence of our life consists, after all, in the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves."

[m. foucault]

okay okay okay already. yes, i do still draw hearts next to foucault's name in my notebook.

poor pitta

avoid most Rajasic foods: coffee, garlic (!!!), onions, peppers, hot spices...also cigarettes and alcohol, of course.

also bad: sour fruit, bananas, beets, green olives, radish, tomatoes (!), turnips, corn, quinoa (!), rye, black and red lentils, nuts (!!!)...

so many spices!: asafoetida, basil (!!), bay leaf, cayenne, cloves, ginger (!), marjoram, mustard seeds, nutmeg, oregano, paprika, rosemary, sage, savory, tamarind, thyme...(this might be the most difficult part)...

why am i not a vata? they get to eat everything!

kafka, franz

"Oh to be a Red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one's galloping mount, leaning into the wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the spurs, for there were no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there were no reins, and could barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that horse's neck and horse's head were gone."

[F. Kafka, "Longing to Be a Red Indian"]

faulkner, william

"It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to their name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family."

aww, Jason's talking about me!

"...the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman and i temporary and he it is hard believing that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time..."

[w. faulkner, the sound and the fury]

hass, robert

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.