Day: February 19, 2017

Unless I love the lost too.

 

  • I can’t love you
    without loving the whole world too.
    I can’t open my heart
    unless everyone can be part.

    Wait for me.
    I’m not afraid.
    Wait for me.
    I may be delayed.

    I see you in my mind,
    Smiling, sad and kind.
    I can’t love you
    Unless I love the lost too.

    Give me your hands
    Outstretched across the world.
    We’re all one
    Love has begun

How much beauty can a human bear?

This music does caress my inner ear
Takes me to my childhood joy and love
How much beauty can a human bear?

The vision of the lighted candles here
A symbol  of the starlight far above
Beloved music will caress my inner ear

And God   does dwell in those who sense him near
But overlooked , he’s  but a clear grey dove
How much beauty can a human bear?

And see, God laughs to be revered
As she enjoys the flutter of my glove,
While music  does caress my inner ear!

The God who’s true does not depend on fear
But holds the soul as it  allows their love
How much beauty can a human bear?

God is here  and not at  one  remove.
And in his grace we each can gently bathe
This music shall caress my inner ear
How much beauty can a human bear?

 

But come back as an adult till we’re done.

Down grassy banks we rolled  for joy and fun
Like children playing out   in freer times
Then back to being adults we would come

We wrote each other letters filled with puns.
We wrote the letters often, with good rhymes.
Down grassy banks we rolled  for joy and fun

The bills and the housekeeping we would shun
Though now and then we’d wash away the grime
So back to being adults we would come

He fed a  robin daily and it ran
Inside the house when he had passed his time
Those grassy banks ,oh, happiness and fun

When  he grew older and his time was gone
I sat nearby and struggled with my  poems
I had to be an adult by design

Don’t count the cost nor allocate the blame.
Don’t feel  the guilt neither   the heat of shame
Down grassy banks enjoy   the ancient fun
But  come back as an adult  till we’re done.

What is the world when unadorned

 
When first I saw your soulful face,
I wished to dwell in your  embrace.
I wished as well to clothe you in
The sacred images within.
To find a home for love without;
To fold my dreams all round about;
Your loving body and your face
Were covered in such joy and grace.
I found my dreams were cast aside;
The world of meaning denied life.
What seemed most precious now is fled
As I lie sleepless in my bed.
What is the world when unadorned
With all that in my heart I’ve formed?
There is no meaning I can trace.
As in a mother’s empty face.
On these grey rocks. my path is hard.
From paradise, my self is barred.
To struggle or to grief succumb,
When this dark day of mourning’s done?
Into His dazzling darkness dart
My dreams and love like dying sparks.
Into His Mystery so fair.
I’ll cast both hope and my despair.
Thus my dreams will be transformed
To show themselves in other forms.
What feels a loss may foretell growth.
On my hope,I’ll take an oath:
“That nothing in my life is waste;
That I have not for phantasms chased.
And you are human,as am I.
Let’s live again until we die”

Psychologising problems led to the current political situation

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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-brexit-neoliberalism-individualism-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-a7413501.html

 

Quote:An example? Encounter groups . These meetings were an attempt to help individuals work together to tackle internalised oppression. However this kind of collective work soon became co-opted by ideas such as self-actualisation. The inner world was to be explored now not for the collective endeavour, but in the pursuit of individual happiness. Mass activism began to wane as the sale of self-help books mushroomed, carrying within their pages the message that responsibility for growth and happiness rested firmly in the individual. Why, after all, go to a feminist encounter group, when the tools for enlightenment lay in a self-help book one could peruse at home?

The side effect of the rise of therapy culture was a de-politicised understanding of embodied distress, and a certain navel gazing. The causes of anger and anxiety were located solely in individual’s childhoods or, as the 21st century beckoned, genes. Consideration of power relations and the structural causes of inequalities became a lefty side project, getting in the way of developing “brand me”, or a side note at the end of academic articles. Alternative ideas of the self received a special kind of ridicule – a phenomenon we see in the reaction to Corbynism today. Alternative ideas within psychology got sidelined.

We will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.”

Simone de Beauvoir on Art, Science, Freedom, Busyness, and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation

 

“The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Simone de Beauvoir on Art, Science, Freedom, Busyness, and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation

In her incisive inquiry into the intelligence of emotions, philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote: “Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.” But the moral system itself — what comprises it in a philosophical sense, how it is enacted in practical terms, and what it aims at in the daily act of living — remains one of the most conflicted ambiguities within and between human beings.

Those elements of the moral machinery are what the great French existentialist philosopher and trailblazing feminist Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) examines in The Ethics of Ambiguity (public library) — the paradigm-shifting 1947 treatise that gave us Beauvoir on vitality, the measure of intelligence, and what freedom really means.

Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir

To wrest a graspable conception of morality, Beauvoir turns to art and science:

Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable, is in certain cases spared and in others not.

For this reason, she suggests, success and failure bear no equivalence with right and wrong. If we are to seek an understanding of morality, the equivalence is to be found not in the outcomes of art and science but in their methods. She writes:

Narcissus by Delmore Schwartz

 

flowersi in Mall

 

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/42639

 

Narcissus
BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ
THE MIND IS AN ANCIENT AND FAMOUS CAPITAL
The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.
“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.
Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?
                            For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus—and returning as suddenly …

Smart,the meaning

photo0066

smart
smɑːt/
adjective
adjective: smart; comparative adjective: smarter; superlative adjective: smartest
  1. 1.
    (of a person) clean, tidy, and well dressed.
    “you look very smart”
    synonyms: well dressed, well turned out, fashionably dressed, fashionable, stylish, chic, modish, elegant, neat, besuited, spruce, trim, dapper, debonair; More
    antonyms: scruffy
  2. 2.
    informal
    having or showing a quick-witted intelligence.
    “if he was that smart he would never have been tricked”
    synonyms: clever, bright, intelligent, sharp, sharp-witted, quick-witted, nimble-witted, shrewd, astute, acute, apt, able;

    well educated, well read;
    perceptive, percipient, discerning;
    informalbrainy, savvy, streetwise, on the ball, quick on the uptake, genius;
    informalwhip-smart
    “Joey will know what to do—he’s the smart one”
    antonyms: stupid
    • (of a device) programmed so as to be capable of some independent action.
      “hi-tech smart weapons”
    • NORTH AMERICAN
      showing impertinence by making clever or sarcastic remarks.
      “don’t get smart or I’ll whack you one”
  3. 3.
    quick; brisk.
    “he set off at a smart pace”
    synonyms: brisk, quick, fast, rapid, swift, lively, spanking, energetic, spirited, vigorous, jaunty; More
    antonyms: slow, gentle
verb
verb: smart; 3rd person present: smarts; past tense: smarted; past participle: smarted; gerund or present participle: smarting
  1. 1.
    (of part of the body) feel a sharp stinging pain.
    “her legs were scratched and smarting”
    synonyms: sting, burn, tingle, prickle; More
    • feel upset and annoyed.
      “defence chiefs are still smarting from the government’s cuts”
      synonyms: feel annoyed, feel upset, feel offended, take offence, feel aggrieved, feel indignant, feel put out, feel hurt, feel wounded, feel resentful

      “she had smarted at Jenny’s accusations”
noun
noun: smart; plural noun: smarts
  1. 1.
    sharp stinging pain.
    “the smart of the recent cuts”
    • archaic
      mental pain or suffering.
      “sorrow is the effect of smart, and smart the effect of faith”
  2. 2.
    NORTH AMERICANinformal
    intelligence; acumen.
    “I don’t think I have the smarts for it”
Origin
Old English smeortan (verb), of West Germanic origin; related to German schmerzen ; the adjective is related to the verb, the original sense (late Old English) being ‘causing sharp pain’; from this arose ‘keen, brisk’, whence the current senses of ‘mentally sharp’ and ‘neat in a brisk, sharp style’.