Month: April 2009

I love Shai Hulud so much:

Be winged, free from the mire of men.
Be winged, leave the dead soil to the dying.
Inherit the wind, soar from the coils that asphyxiate you.
Be winged and climb high, with a wingspan to humble mankind.

[II. THE PERSECUTION OF EVERY NEXT BREATH]

True living and breathing death.
Every breath is surely the last.

But another…

How many more will follow–

And another…

How many more can be endured…

Broken whispers; shy touches to passing flesh.
A twitch of life. A cold shudder.
Defy the instinct to recoil.

Yet another breath…

Ignore your pain
You are not your own,
You are the strength of life and love
To usher in the end.

…

Was I mindful…
Have I suffered…
Am I of warmth…
Worth affection…
Capable of love…
A vessel of hate and bitterness…

In this death so close, beset with travail,
I am aware of my every fault and failure.

[III. GO FORTH OF LIFE]

Now rest;
Leave your venom behind.
May we all have such strength.

In terms of effort, I put as much in as I could healthily afford, balancing the chaos of last semester thesis work and graduate school admissions with the chaos of trying to save a hemorrhaging business. I upheld my oaths and duties and lived up to my standards of behavior. I could have improved my participation by mentally preparing more carefully before speaking, as sometimes I spoke nonsense. This is unlike me, as normally words flow through my mouth with expedient power, but the concepts in aesthetics were frustrating and unnatural to me, and so I was muddled down in the indecision of my thoughts. So let it be said that I could have improved my participation by tempering my thoughts with more prudence instead of wasting the listeners time with unexamined thoughts. Then again, some would say this is the good of philosophy, to work through muddled thoughts with a rational process, yet I always came out of class without a feeling of having contented my mind at all.

I benefited most from the private meditations I was able to have after being exposed to the thoughts of other philosophers. While my original perceptions of the discipline were mostly affirmed, I did gain a small share of new wisdom from several key writings, and this paltry nugget made the class worth it. I particularly found Tolstoy’s theories of art to be intelligible to my natural reason, and I wish the classical ideas that are hinted at in the fringes of his writings could have been explored more through the writings of the actual classical thinkers (i.e. Tolstoy hints at the moral domain of art as Plato would, but we didn’t encounter Plato much other than in terms of historical context). I think I had the most trouble with trying to keep my frustration toward modernism tempered with justice and prudence, as I believe the modern mode of thought is not philosophical or healthy for humanity, but I managed to not make anyone cry so I consider this a success. As far as feeling uncomfortable, I am comfortable everywhere I go, what could possibly happen to me? Death? There are worse things that could happen, no need to feel uncomfortable.

The city breathes so softly
Everything is sleeping
I am at the window silently watching
I can see you standing
Alone against the winter
I can hear you asking, but the streets, they are not giving
Don’t look to the ocean
Restless in its dreaming
Don’t look to the heavens for they will tell you nothing
If living is for learning
Then dying is forgetting
Once we have forgotten then we can go on loving

They attack this one man with their hate and their shower of weapons. But he is like some rock which stretches into the vast sea and which, exposed to the fury of the winds and beaten against by the waves, endures all the violence and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.
– The Aeneid (X, 692)