I met a girl
Snowball in hell
She's as hard
And as cracked as the liberty bell...
~ Elliott Smith
"If to its own content, there is no need of reasoning, which could not itself perform the act of creation; creation is the operation of that phase of the Soul which contains Ideal-Principles; for that is its stronger puissance, its creative part.
It creates, then, on the model of Ideas; for, what it has received from the Intellectual-Principle it must pass on in turn."
~ Plotinus, Second Ennead III, 17
"For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the divine Thought-Forms will pour forth into that phase of the Soul: as long as there is a sun, all that streams from it will be some form of light." ~ 18
I was recently accused of writing like a professor. I write how I need to, and I relay what I feel is important, in relation to what I am figuring out and going through. As long as there is sun...
It pains me to read ancient philosophers attempting to explain what we now know as science with reason, like it pained me to read Aristotle or Hippocrates explain biology with reason.
You only understand what makes sense to you.
You can only function in what makes sense to you.
I always thought my relation to existence was my work: what I produce is how I see the world, and I am sharing that world with whoever is paying attention, but the existence of my work is reduced to the relationship of who is paying attention.
Every Thanksgiving we go on an adventure, to accomplish something when most are sitting around filling their stomachs and pretending to get along with their families. This year was a bust, but some of my daily reading provided some inspiration. The morning we left I had to backtrack because the morning before I left for work in the early dark, and didn't have a chance to read. The stoic reading mentioned the Zen teaching of "the glass is already broken," which I use to explain my "I Died At Birth" philosophy, and the Taoist reading mentioned something that shamefully kicked my ass: "There is no such thing as objective reality. You color everything. If you want the highest state of being, aim for consciousness without color." 11/22, Day 327
Both Stoicism and Zen condition you to just do what needs to be done, because it needs to be done; you can bitch and moan about it, or you can just do it. How you choose to respond to it in the meantime only effects your mood and the responsive mood around you, but either way it is going to get done, so you can just do it, or you can complain that it isn't the way you want it to be. This is all very relative to how our little Thanksgiving vacation went
Then, the morning of: "There is one thing and only one thing that causes unhappiness. The name of that thing is Attachment." ~ Anthony de Mello, a la the stoic reading.
I feel like everything at this point is just overlapping too much. There is too much information, and I am having trouble fitting everything into its right place, so let's just fight about everything.
If you go into things with pure intentions, and are genuinely not doing anything wrong, then you will come out of those things having not done anything wrong.
What others choose to see are their issues, not yours.
Do beautiful things.
Primum non nocere.
No one can touch you.
As much as I've fought to be a better me,
I don't need reminding how bad I can be.
Part three of Sunday's trilogy: Salton sunset.
A few campers parked in the sand; some desolate buildings sinking into the earth; at the end of a road with a sign: "County Park Closed."; Lifeless power poles littered the landscape; something as simple as a boat ramp deemed completely useless: broken earth where the water once was.
Eroica naturally went straight for the fish skeletons.
"Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine."
~ Plotinus, First Ennead VI, 9
Picking away at Plotinus' beauty, but that quote doesn't fit the location as much as my people in it.
Something about the sunset light at the Salton Sea is absolutely incomparable to anywhere else I've ever shot. I have no Idea why, but I could make some practical guesses. Forget the masses of abandoned structures in the area, this is basically an abandoned lake. Man made, though by accident, a pretty sizable aquatic structure here, to sit in desolation amidst a universe of fish skeletons. The only time I have ever seen a significant number of people around this lake, it was groups of photographers who seemed to be mulling around capturing the aftermath of some natural disaster. The true irony here is that most of the beautiful abandoned structures and cars that everyone always told me I should shoot, but I didn't, are gone, in an attempt to clean up the area, and apparently make more plots of uninhabitable wasteland, like trying to polish cancer. I imagine that at some point I'll be the old guy telling my grandkids that I remember when there was water there, like those our great-grandparent's age would say that they remember when this was just a pond in the ugly desert.
I get mixed messages when the stoic daily reading quotes Nietzsche, especially when it's the Nietzsche I know and not the nihilist that people assume. Ironically, I was having a conversation with Mephistopheles (for those who know) just yesterday about Nietzsche being nothing like what we were told: stating the painfully obvious, which seems to elude the masses, is not nihilistic; if it is any 'istic', it is optimistic, with a genuine hope that someone, anyone, will understand, even if he was "philosophizing with a hammer." Most the time people only listen when you're yelling.
Meanwhile...
“The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give: thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work for the final Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man—such as Civic Virtue commends—but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.
For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.” ~ Plotinus, First Ennead II, 7
Plotinus' second tractate, on virtue, hit home on a number of different levels. Primarily in my having to always remind people to focus on what's important, and when they don't seem to understand what I'm talking about, I can never really articulate what I mean, so nothing changes (like it would anyway). Amor fati, yes, but this definition of fate is nothing more that the mundane things in your life, which we should all easily rise above and be the very best that we can be within our immediate fati. Id est, you can always refine how you choose to live and understand in the life that was thrust upon you.
Amor fati is also very Zen, like most of the stoics I read: thus; life is a dead leaf falling from a tree in L'autunno, twisting in the chill of the breeze, or maybe I understand nothing; there is a very good chance that I understand nothing. I am, in fact, an idiot. I do, however, see the irony in someone who devoted their entire lives to pointing out all the things that were obviously wrong with the world, or our place in it, and our wasting of precious energy on so many stupid things, uttering a phrase like "Amor Fati." Ok, talking about two very different philosophers in the same post is hurting my brain.
"He would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such things and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue; the man is some sort of a half thing.
As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps were elsewhere, the Sage will attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory child within him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of severity." ~ First Ennead IV, 15
Happiness, sandwiched between zombie tractates on Happiness and Extension of Time and Dialectic.
"And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to posses happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That." ~ 16
Again, mixed messages from the Universe, but I am getting what I need out of everything, if only the kind of reinforcement I have always gotten from the ancients. This warehouse that I've always wanted to shoot was more like an art installation than an abandoned building. The graffiti was not mindless, illegible crap; it was intelligent and necessary, aside from some beautiful things being covered by idiots. The building was also filled with dozens of fire extinguishers, so whatever happened there was done responsibly. It was refreshing. Luckily, while this beautiful soul is completely impatient and blind to her own beauty, she is patient with my madness, so she has mostly kept smiling through all my philosophical and psychological flailing and temporal disengagement, which I now understand as my soul withdrawing to its own place.
Just when I was settling in to Plotinus and getting mildly bored with the rambling writing style, I was absolutely blindsided by the Sixth tractate, Beauty, which I haven't continued reading from, and will likely have to read again.
"The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body and being beautiful."
~ First Ennead VI, 1
I marked like half the tractate to note.
