“It's my firm conclusion that human meaning comes from humans, not from a supernatural source. After we die, our hopes for an afterlife reside in the social networks that we influenced while we were alive. If we influence people in a positive way -- even if our social web is only as big as our nuclear family -- others will want to emulate us and pass on our ideas, manners, and lifestyle to future generations. This is more than enough motivation for me to do good things in my life and teach my children to do the same.”

-Greg Graffin
Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God

Labels: echo, passages, social

Dear Charlie,

The darkness that surrounds me is not a cell. It seeps to the center of my breath and steady on trajectory, it holds my heart. I am not hiding in silence. With every death occurring within my body, many different systems of thought cross my mind. With every tilt of my gaze, another face appears with a signature that begs recognition. Through darkness I let the ones I've felt fall away. It is the only way to stay...

Breathing new life into my visions, sent out and left to float around my field, pictures, songs, letters, one you so brilliantly threw my way, like stale bread, stays close. Hot hunter of words, Alphamaneric of the first order of Codes, bless your star. Combinations made by your pen sends lights up my spine. Like buttons, pressure on my sight. Circular, so gently, around darkly skies, lives this bright promise of Home.

The silence I pay today will pull back the pieces together once again. A launchpad for fireworks. My shoulders are weak beneath volumes of grievances collected from pocket watches, handkerchiefs, high heels, teddy bears and jars of vinegar. Like sun to fresh cut flowers, silence will drink up what it can and I will be left with only an empty shell to emerge from.

It has the potential to be noise, but it is far from it tonight.

Labels: artform, cross-border, Dear Charlie, Homework

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant. 

The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton

Labels: passages, sun kil moon, theory

Labels: bars, elliott smith, music, video

My hand offered to you for the day, then passed on to another you.

Labels: about, cult

I SEE A CIRCLE IN A SQUARE
OR SUSAN, IT SEEMS YOU LIED TO ME

Here appears another heart
With another name
With a different meaning
For the same thing.

This is my tragic romantic poetry.

[ Buy ]

Labels: artform, book, From Obscure Light, poetry

This piano is wireless. Free of power chords. Free of superficial sap.

This piano has one key, and one key only, repeated for every finger lost. One hit and retreat.

Broken voices built upon broken bones yet nobody knows, nobody knows this note.

Distant desires pulling that one string over and over and under this precious hammer of yours.

Broken voices built upon broken trust yet nobody knows, nobody knows this note.

This piano is full of white empty space, enough for names and questions to disappear.

This piano has one key, and one key only, repeated for every finger crushed. One hit and retreat.

Labels: artwork, Homework, poetry