I love him most at sundown, sitting on a park and we start talking about the chipmunks. Hahaha, chipmunks. He takes my arm, feels for the vein and injects that rockstar fluid. We are rockstars on the edge of the world, fastracking lightyears, falling slowly, forehead crashing softly on dry earth. It is almost dark when I wake up, legs curled against his. I am so parched I can lick the evening off his skin.
Add comment June 2nd, 2008
It is necessary to hate evil, to stare it in the eye and say it must go. Open the curtains and on the other side are the suffering ones, shielded only by glass from all this, those who can only regain faith now. The skin gets clammy, the flesh almost rigid. He is only half alive. This is the part where his life flashes before his eyes, a little boy on a swing, summers on a roll, a wedding and a cake, the hand covering a little girl’s mouth. I will forget his name, or how his head moved, only remember the tattoo on his arm: an airborne plane, a woman’s name. If only I can see her face.
Add comment June 2nd, 2008
Darwin Online compiles a collection of Charles Darwin’s papers and documents which include drafts, personal letters, journal entries and even photos. Difficult handwriting, according to PZ Myers of Pharyngula, but these artifacts of history are simply priceless.
2 comments April 18th, 2008
The New York Times article Coming of Age on Antidepressants looks at the experience of adolescents who have grown up on medication. It raises questions on how these drugs affect the psychological well being of people who are only discovering who they are.
The sentiment is probably best described by Julie, a patient of the author who notes: “I’ve grown up on medication. I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
Add comment April 18th, 2008
Paris Review presents snippets of interviews from famous writers. Capote talks about his being subnormal and Jack Gilbert on why he never had babies. Ashbery sounds like a cute dork.
And then this priceless Charles Simic advice: "A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course."
Add comment April 8th, 2008
My life experiment should be: to live as many lives as I can, not like this but more like… Carl Jung’s archetypes, ever existent everywhere or Margaret Atwood’s idea of "unnoticed but necessary".
I want to be like Batman.
2 comments March 24th, 2008
Steven Pinker discusses The Moral Instinct as an evolutionary impulse and presents factors on what drives us to be moral. "Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat."
Greg Downey of Neuroanthropology argues this is all the result of Pinker’s trolleyology (read Pinker’s article and there he writes about the morality of sparing people from trolleys). He writes: Pinker? He violates every one of Shweder and Fiske’s moral domains. Causing harm? People who love Mother Teresa, feel the pain! Fairness? He plays the evolution-genes-innate-organ hand well, but then he cherry picks the evidence that suits him. Community? Pinker wants to be your Galactic Overlord. Authority? Well, Pinker is it, isn’t he? Who cares about Jesus or Buddha? Purity? Ah, can’t you smell the sanctity of science? Like napalm in the morning.
I think Downey attacks Pinker’s lordism as much as he attacks his views on morality. But maybe that’s relevant to the topic of morality–the idea of an imposition of a presumed higher being? Maybe more on this later.
Add comment March 24th, 2008
One of my favorite moments in Dexter is when he and his girlfriend Rita are sitting before a meal, talking about their plans for the future. And one thing they both decide they want is "an ordinary life". This makes sense because Rita was battered by her ex husband while Dexter is well… a serial killer.
We are more ordinary than we’d like to believe. I’m not arguing for mediocrity because ordinariness transcends that. I would like to be ordinary with you could very well mean, to be one with what the world is feeling, to love someone with the weight of that.
Add comment March 19th, 2008
Something that never goes away: the pain of rejection and how to brave through it.
Of course when you’re quite recovered from a major rejection, there will always be another, then another.
Which is to say, the heart is a resilient thing.
Add comment March 15th, 2008
My favorite story of this week yet: the life and death of an urban recluse. I love the non judgmental, almost poetic tone of the writer. "Then when one day they are found dead by the postman or the meter-reader, the people living round about do not go beating their breasts and worrying about guilt and "what should we have done" - the deceased had lived the life he or she always wanted."
And the little details that remain after life: the piling of newspapers, the unpaid bills, the ice cream left in the refrigerator.
Add comment March 13th, 2008