TENSION OF PRESENCE

A human being is content searching for form.

My spirit flows away from me,

reaching back to this Earth,

returns to me anew,

a force of Becoming.

I am a river that ebbs and flows.

ME crashing into NOT-ME,

just as this world is eternally unrestful,

always at war with itself.

Constant movement presses us toward the present;

we are carried onward, but we may clutch about in fright,

lurching forward or retreating into memory.

These are the integrations of a tumultuous mind: thinking that it is,

needing to be, yet becoming something unfamiliar.

Comments

We are Reconciled: Intuitive Individualism in Emerson’s Writing

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s career was characterized both by reformation and reconciliation. It is easy to read too much into the often fiery rhetoric of Emerson’s speeches and come to see him primarily as an iconoclast, but this would be a great oversight. Emerson was, however, a very progressive thinker and he seemed to have a constitutional affinity for a sort of skeptical optimism. Never content to merely accept traditions at face value, Emerson knew at an early age that he had a higher calling: “I burn after the ‘aliquid immensum infinitumque’ [”Something great and immeasurable”] which Cicero desired” (Jan-Feb 1827 journal entry at age 23)(Emerson 2001, 487). At the same time, however, he was filled with doubt: “a score of words & deeds issue from me daily, of which I am not the master. They are begotten of weakness & born of shame” (ibid). Yet, in time Emerson would prove that these struggles with doubt (as well as seri...

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

I never got Beyond the Pleasure Principle; I couldn't figure id out.

Block Printing

In mid-November, I started making block prints (e.g. linocuts). I had been drawing for two years as a kind of counterpart to my efforts in writing. Lately, I have been working on visual arts much more than my writing...

Mind of Moog

Search This Blog