|
This page is a catch-all. Links that I will someday insert into the text in earlier pages, quotes that have shaped
me, music, pictures of things, writing, a blog, people whose work I admire. It is the page that most resembles my office.
|
| some of the stamps I made, and with which I make cards |
links
miscellanea
(i) Rowan Williams: "The Body's Grace"
From this talk in 1989, by Rowan Williams, now Archbishop of Canterbury: "The life of the
Christian community has as its rationale - if not invariably its practical reality - the task of teaching us this: so ordering
our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy. It is not surprising that sexual imagery
is freely used, in and out of the Bible, for this newness of perception. What is less clear is why the fact of sexual desire,
the concrete stories of human sexuality rather than the generalising metaphors it produces, are so grudgingly seen as matters
of grace, or only admitted as matters of grace when fenced with conditions."
Williams also includes
this quote at the close of his talk:
"It is perception above all which will free us from tragedy.
Not the perception of illusion or of a fantasy that would deny the power of fate and nature. But perception wedded to matter
itself, a knowledge that comes to us from the sense of the body, a wisdom born of wholeness of mind and body come together
in the heart. The heart dies in us. This is the self we have lost, the self we daily sacrifice." (Susan Griffin, Pornography
and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature, London 1981, p 154).
| (h) from James Rantanen, on my birthday |
|
| (g) oh, how I wish that spring came after fall |
|
|
(f) david foster wallace, commencement address
got this link from a writers' group in Boston. Spot on, and not a little ironic. from the Wallace piece:
"Because
here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There
is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason
for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess
or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will
eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have
enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always
feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level,
we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton
of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak
and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart
-- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on."
(e) Windows is Shutting Down by Clive James
This is for Randy
Jensen.
This is a stamp
from my desk.
|
| dancing bears stamp from my desk |
(a) One of the above
links is to a translation of "The Analytical Languarge of John Wilkins," by Jorge Luis Borges. I first encountered this list
from a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge in Diepeveen and Van Laar's Art with a Difference. They quote Borges' list in the following translation:
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous
ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j)
innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower
vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
from Jorge Luis
Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," in Other Inquisitions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 103. (as quoted and cited in Leonard
Diepeveen and Timothy Van Laar, Art with a Difference:
Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art)
I love this list. It makes me laugh every time I read it. It seems so ridiculous and yet so accurate. Can't you picture
the one that has just broken a flower vase? It reminds me of Edward Gorey.
|
