just like that and its 2010. I'm 32 years old and we're getting a good steady snow today. I could be on the brink of a breakthrough, or not. I'm tucked away from it all in Cherry Alley Cafe, have my ears plugged with white ipod earpieces, am surrounded by printouts of things I've written. I bought three dollars worth of fresh orange juice that tastes like sweet gold.
Darren's right that "it seems possible for new objects to be designed in such a way or at the least be used in such a way as to conjure spirits through mimicry." (see previous post "A Real Post" with comment) as it turns out, I don't particularly like mimicry. I've been trying to discern what it is exactly that discourages me about the progression of things in the world.
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A writer whose name I cannot conjure talks about our impulse to establish a permanent (or the impression of perament) home to counteract the impermanence and brevity of our lives. one of the wrong turns we have taken is to think that by mechanizing and technologizing our functions and processes, we save ourselves time. we think that by shortening the amount of time for "mundane tasks" and allowing the allotment of time for other, more choice activities - will make us happier people.
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Time is severe in its unchangeable rate. we have what we have - life is a timed treasure hunt. God clicks his stopwatch and yells "go!" we're scrambling and stumbling in the dark. what are we supposed to find, where is it? should we stop and smell the roses? or fling ourselves off of peaks? or dig like John Henry for gold until our hearts burst?
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maybe mundane tasks help us to view our lives more correctly. perhaps they help us not to feel overwhelmed in the surge of time, swept away. they ground us - not in the illusion of permanence, but by entwining us into the life processes that exist right along with time. in short, they help us to coexist less abrasively with the steps of time.
3 comments:
Matt,
I always enjoy your thoughts and reflections. I don't have anything grand to say about this post, but i just wanted you to know i enjoyed it.
You've said before that you "resonated with (my) allusion to Heidegger’s 'local of the truth of Being.' (When I stated that), 'He insists that the flourishing of any genuine work of art depends on its roots in native soil.' I think we still need to find our native shady slope where the top soil has not yet been eroded into a ridiculous homogeneous valley.
Hmm...other things I've repeated in the following order are: "the word ‘harmony’ makes me want to puke." –DAVID LYNCH and "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." –SIMONE WEIL
But what I really want to say again is a paraphrase of William James contention that "no item of consciousness is ever exactly repeated:" We are grounded by our boundaries, our perches, reminders of what we are not/of what we are. We fly through time and space from branch to branch experiencing the world from new perspectives. Our thoughts streaming from place to place, event to event. We are birds using flights of language to express interconnected thoughts, to fly from period to period, sentence to sentence, judgement to judgement. We are making connections, imagining static solutions, and creating dynamic conclusions but they are never the same only analogous in feeling.
I appreciate your analogy of life as a timed treasure hunt which God initiates. Great thought.
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