Without Lifting A Finger

He was not even trying to find the Bar Lucifer; he had given that up. He was trying to lose himself. Which meant, he realized, that his great problem right now was to escape from his cage, to discover the way out of the fly-trap, to strike the chord inside himself which would liberate those qualities capable of transforming him from a victim into a winner.

Credo  quia  absurdum   is a Latin phrase that means "I believe because it is absurd", originally misattributed to Tertullian in his  De Carne Christi .    It is believed to be a paraphrasing of Tertullian's " prorsus   credibile   est ,  quia   ineptum   est " which means "It is completely credible because it is unsuitable", or " certum   est ,  quia   impossibile " which means "It is certain because it is impossible". These are consistent with the anti-Marcionite context in which they occur.    Early modern, Protestant and Enlightenment rhetoric against Catholicism and religion more broadly resulted in this phrase being changed to "I believe because it is absurd", displaced from its original anti-Marcionite to a personally religious context.

 

Eunice left the American Legation about four o’clock. They had been most civil, she reflected. (She was always expecting to intercept looks of derision.) They had listened to her, made a few notes, and thanked her gravely. She on her side thought she had done rather well: she had not told them too much, —just enough to whet their interest. “Of course, I’m passing on this information to you for what it may be worth,” she had said modestly. “I have no idea how much truth there is in it. But I have a distinct feeling that you’ll find it worth your while to follow it up.” (When she had gone Mr. Doan, the Vice-Consul, had heaved an exaggerated sigh, remarked in a flat voice: “Oh, Death, where is thy sting?” and his secretary had smirked at him appreciatively.)

She was always pleased to have Americans come to the house because she felt under no constraint with them. She could drink all she pleased and they drank along with her, whereas her English guests made a whiskey last an hour—not to mention the French, who asked for a Martini of vermouth with a dash of gin, or the Spanish with their glass of sherry. “The Americans are the nation of the future,” she would announce in her hearty voice. “Here’s to ’em. God bless their gadgets, great and small. God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola, darling.” (It was generally conceded that Coca-Cola’s advertising was ruining the picturesqueness of Morocco.)

One must have lived in the United States to appreciate the wonder of this place. Still, even here ideas are changing each day. Soon the people will decide that they want their land to be a part of today’s monstrous world, and once that happens, it will be all over. As soon as you have that desire, you are infected with the deadly virus, and you begin to show the symptoms of the disease. You live in terms of time and money, and you think in terms of society and progress. Then all that is left for you is to kill the other people who think the same way, along with a good many of those who do not, since that is the final manifestation of the malady.

OUR CIVILIZATION IS doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time, I am still a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here. Here in the Islands vegetation still has the upper hand, and man has to fight even to make his presence seen at all. It is beautiful here, the trade winds blow all year, and I suspect that bombs are extremely unlikely to be wasted on this unfrequented side of the island, if indeed on any part of it. I was loath to give up the house after Hope’s death. But it was the obvious move to make. My university career always having been an utter farce (since I believe no reason inducing a m...

 

She was a little girl and she was crying. The bells of the church were very loud outside, and she imagined they filled the sky. There was an open space in the wall high above her. She could see the stars through it, and they gave light to her room. From the reeds which formed the ceiling a scorpion came crawling. He came slowly down the wall toward her. She stopped crying and watched him. His tail curved up over his back and moved a little from side to side as he crawled. She looked quickly about for something to brush him down with. Since there was nothing in the room she used her hand. But her motions were slow, and the scorpion seized her finger with his pinchers, clinging there tightly although she waved her hand wildly about. Then she realized that he was not going to sting her. A great feeling of happiness went through her. She raised her finger to her lips to kiss the scorpion. The bells stopped ringing. Slowly in the peace which was beginning, the scorpion moved into her mouth....

Three months after the first meeting of Porbus and Poussin, the former went to see Maitre Frenhofer. He found the old man a prey to one of those deep, self-developed discouragements, whose cause, if we are to believe the mathematicians of health, lies in a bad digestion, in the wind, in the weather, in some swelling of the intestines, or else, according to casuists, in the imperfections of our moral nature; the fact being that the good man was simply worn out by the effort to complete his mysterious picture. He was seated languidly in a large oaken chair of vast dimensions covered with black leather; and without changing his melancholy attitude he cast on Porbus the distant glance of a man sunk in absolute dejection. "Well, maitre," said Porbus, "was the distant ultra-marine, for which you journeyed to Brussels, worthless? Are you unable to grind a new white? Is the oil bad, or the brushes restive?"

"Nevertheless," he continued, sadly, "I am not satisfied; there are moments when I have my doubts. Perhaps it would be better not to sketch a single line. I ask myself if I ought not to grasp the figure first by its highest lights, and then work down to the darker portions. Is not that the method of the sun, divine painter of the universe? O Nature, Nature! who has ever caught thee in thy flights? Alas! the heights of knowledge, like the depths of ignorance, lead to unbelief. I doubt my work."

 Three bits: The apartment was on the second floor of what had been, in the eighteenth century, a private townhouse in an old quarter of the capital. Many artists lived in this part of the city, faithful to the principle that in art, the search for the new must be done within a framework of the old. Jonas, who shared this conviction, was delighted to be living in this quarter. * The disciples explained to Jonas at length what he had painted, and why. Jonas thus discovered in his work many intentions that rather surprised him, and a host of things he had not put there. * Until this period, Jonas was always secretly ashamed of his utter inability to judge a work of art. Exception was made for a handful of paintings that transported him, and for obviously crude scribblings, all of which seemed to him equally interesting and indifferent.

“So,” he said, turning again toward Balducci, “what’s he done?” And before the gendarme had opened his mouth, Daru asked, “Does he speak French?” “No, not a word. We’ve been looking for him for a month, but they were hiding him. He killed his cousin.” “Is he against us?” “I don’t think so. But you never know.” “Why did he kill him?” “Family business, I think. One owed the other grain, it seems. It’s not clear. Anyway, he killed the cousin with a billhook. You know, the way you’d kill a sheep, zip!…” Balducci made a gesture of drawing a blade across his throat, and the Arab, his attention attracted, watched him with a kind of anxiety. Daru felt a sudden anger against this man, against all men and their filthy spite, their inexhaustible hatreds, their bloodlust.

 

My Lucky Morning: Saw two coyotes in Bolsa Chica basking by the Huge Horizontal Pipe along the Channel. TGIF. Enjoy your weekend.🎈🎂 Happy 85th Mom!!!❤️ #rlswihart #bolsachicawetlands #huntingtonbeach #localcoyote #socalcoyote #coyotealwayslookback #coyoteonthehighpipe #coyoteolympics #beauty #nature #tgif #happybirthdaymom #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶 🎂

"He got that sore lying in America." "Who? What sore?" "I mean Kirillov. I spent four months with him lying on the floor of a hut." "Why, have you been in America?" I asked, surprised. "You never told me about it." "What is there to tell? The year before last we spent our last farthing, three of us, going to America in an emigrant steamer, to test the life of the American workman on ourselves, and to verify by personal experiment the state of a man in the hardest social conditions. That was our object in going there." "Good Lord!" I laughed. "You'd much better have gone somewhere in our province at harvest-time if you wanted to 'make a personal experiment' instead of bolting to America." "We hired ourselves out as workmen to an exploiter; there were six of us Russians working for him—students, even landowners coming from their estates, some officers, too, and all with the same grand object....

Turn Turn Turn. Ruddy Turnstones @ Bolsa Chica (in "fancywear"). Cute as can be.;) #rlswihart13 #rlswihart #bolsachicawetlands #morning #socal #august #summerfun #turnstones #ruddyturnstone #fancywear #nature #beauty #health #praise #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

"Gracious Lady! "I pity myself above all men that I did not lose my arm at Sevastopol, not having been there at all, but served all the campaign delivering paltry provisions, which I look on as a degradation. You are a goddess of antiquity, and I am nothing, but have had a glimpse of infinity. Look on it as a poem and no more, for, after all, poetry is nonsense and justifies what would be considered impudence in prose. Can the sun be angry with the infusoria if the latter composes verses to her from the drop of water, where there is a multitude of them if you look through the microscope? Even the club for promoting humanity to the larger animals in tip-top society in Petersburg, winch rightly feels compassion for dogs and horses, despises the brief infusoria making no reference to it whatever, because it is not big enough. I'm not big enough either. The idea of marriage might seem droll, but soon I shall have property worth two hundred souls through a misanthropist whom y...

The next best thing to being in Poetry Magazine: Having your bio and poem(s) published in The Poetry Foundation. My bio has been in TPF for some while, and now, if you follow one of the links below, you can read my poem "Totem" (first published in Quadrant Magazine and included in my book Woodhenge). I believe a second poem ("Completely Possible") will soon follow. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/people/r-l-swihart https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1578913/totem #rlswihart #thepoetryfoundation #tpf #totem #poetry #art  #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

"Why is she cross now if you are carrying out her 'orders'?" I answered. He looked at me subtly. "Cher ami; if I had not agreed she would have been dreadfully angry, dread-ful-ly! But yet less than now that I have consented." He was pleased with this saying of his, and we emptied a bottle between us that evening. But that was only for a moment, next day he was worse and more ill-humoured than ever.

I love Brothers Karamazov (and can put up with D's "glut of words" because I love the story), but let's see if Demons will keep my attention.;) & There are strange friendships. The two friends are always ready to fly at one another, and go on like that all their lives, and yet they cannot separate. Parting, in fact, is utterly impossible. The one who has begun the quarrel and separated will be the first to fall ill and even die, perhaps, if the separation comes off. I know for a positive fact that several times Stepan Trofimovitch has jumped up from the sofa and beaten the wall with his fists after the most 'intimate and emotional tete-a-tete with Varvara Petrovna.

I had become like a screech owl, but my cries caught in my throat and I spat them out in the form of clots of blood. Perhaps screech owls are subject to a disease which makes them think as I think. My shadow on the wall had become exactly like an owl and, leaning forward, read intently every word I wrote. Without doubt he understood perfectly. Only he was capable of understanding. When I looked out of the corner of my eye at my shadow on the wall I felt afraid.

The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent than ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly. It is he who compels me to talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands. . . . It is my wish, when I have poured the juice—rather, the bitter wine—of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, ‘This is my life’.

I'd never heard of him (seems he was more of an academic and playwright), but learned a bit about him in his connection with Faye Dunaway and "Hogan's Goat" (his play). Anywho: found this little poem which I kinda like. * To a Friend in Fall Me You’d never recognize I look so old. That Chinese joint upstairs On Fifty-ninth and Third’s Still going. All the rest closed down. Connolly’s downtown And Klube’s went without my knowing. Word’s Out there’ll be another rise in fares. The light’s the same as then, stopped cold, Taken by surprise. We thought we were something, didn’t we.

A little sentence he had once read came into his head: Happy is the man who believes he is happy. Yes, he thought, and more accursed than the murderer is the man who works to destroy that belief. It was the unhappy little busybodies who were the scourge of mankind, the pestilence on the face of the earth. “You dare sit there and tell me they’re happy,” Lee had said to him, the self-righteous glow in her eyes. Surely the intellectuals who had made the French Revolution had had the same expression, like the hideous young men of the Istiqlal, like the inhuman functionaries of the Communist Party the world over.