horse with no name




is        hwy


                oblivion

dangerous




branches on fire 

hug tightly 


you’re walkin on the moon tonite


its lonely

 play iing spooky for


the princess



i meant to do that

money

money is gettin




more than its givin






the danger is in you

learned that



as a child




cant take It over time



but for some times     five minutes



he has your attention






forget my name

im over you




hollow



long   hours



 eye in the  door



scores
to come






rentin  my soul




1253                 a dog?
howling            in back

HEll

Virtue

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.

I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.


But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.


The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible;

but all natural objects make a kindred impression,

when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.


When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.


To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.


 
Nature says, -- he is my creature, and major all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.

I am glad to the brink of fear.
 
 In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child.

In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.
Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a

transparent eye-ball;

I am nothing; I see all;

the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages.

 In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon,
 man beholds

somewhat

as beautiful as his own nature.
 
Emerson  1836

Scott Rothstein and Fort Lauderdale

Integrity             Passion           Commitment

The New river slid by, a moving mirror carrying the voice of a young lawyer standing at the downtowner  trying to impress his boss:


"There is this community guilt we all feel in watching someone like Scott Rothstein rise and you know he's a fraud but you're giving him a chance to get it right in time.  You hoped his leap was part of your neighborhood's  expansion into a world city.



Then your fascination at his crash makes you feel worse as if you were  complicit somehow, like the farmers watching  herds of people go by in trains.
 
Can we blame him when he seemed to need to be a fat liar in order to excuse some nerdy moment when his fat kid ass got kicked .  He was willing to become a freak.  Another with a gun.  

His caricatures made up for his lack of intelligence and his fake confidence made everybody just assume,   even though Bova never had any more than ten people there and hours went by when noone came in. 

Still I will remember these days  as we remember  hanging out with Robert Conrad in the back mirror room at City Limits and the music sounding better, the smoke cleaner. 

This is the biggest story in our history besides Bush/Gore.  It  will be a great movie and Scott is already taking offers.  Scarface, Fort Lauderdale Style, or is it Las Olas Magazine?  Levinson can provide the props again.

Why would he come back and negotiate with federal prosecutors without his lawyer?!  They knew where the money was long ago,  as any one week movement of five hundred million attracts attention. Hell some banks would go under.  Is he going to rat on  a teller at TD?  He has no leverage, there will be no deal.  So was it a brave heroic effort to make it right or  will he come out looking like this man:

What's it like for him, this shakespearean fall?   Walk out of your veyron, G5, jumbotron image and mansion into male prison for ten years and watch your wife sleep with half the town.  The  political braggart will now  lose his temper and rue each second worse.  He won't turn to christ or become devout.  He will scheme and emerge even more murderous, an aluminum foil corsican.  We'll see him when he gets out in the late  20's at  a bar named "Stein's"  even fatter, and shamefully drunk with tattooed skateboarders, like that big assed  white haired guy at Confetti's I remember who's got to be dead by now."

The older man replied, "I'd still hire him instead of you,

  in a second."

When a proposition is offered to the mind, It perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief. Many obstacles frequently prevent this perception from being immediate; these the mind attempts to remove in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is active in the investigation in order to perfect the state of perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive; the investigation being confused with the perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief. -- that belief is an act of volition, -- in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief; of which, in its nature, it is incapable: it is equally incapable of merit.


Reason. It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity, he also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a base where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible; -- it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen?




God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist. Sir Isaac Newton says: Hypotheses non fingo, quicquid enim ex phaenomenis non deducitur hypothesis, vocanda est, et hypothesis vel metaphysicae, vel physicae, vel qualitatum occultarum, seu mechanicae, in philosophia locum non habent. To all proofs of the existence of a creative God apply this valuable rule. We see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers: we merely know their effects; we are in a estate of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes. These Newton calls the phenomena of things; but the pride of philosophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes. From the phenomena, which are the objects of our attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name, to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes, from the occult qualities of the peripatetics to the effuvium of Boyle and the crinities or nebulae of Herschel. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate. Even his worshippers allow that it is impossible to form any idea of him: they exclaim with the French poet,

Pour dire ce qu'il est, il faut etre lui-meme.

First theology of man made him first fear and adore the elements themselves, the gross and material objects of nature; he next paid homage to the agents controlling the elements, lower genies, heroes or men gifted with great qualities. By force of reflection he sought to simplify things by submitting all nature to a single agent, spirit, or universal soul, which, gave movement to nature and all its branches. Mounting from cause to cause, mortal man has ended by seeing nothing; and it is in this obscurity that he has placed his God; it is in this darksome abyss that his uneasy imagination has always labored to fabricate chimeras, which will continue to afflict him until his knowledge of nature chases these phantoms which he has always so adored.

All religious nations are founded solely on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in God; this God is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and to come in his name and announce him on earth. A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

That credulity should be gross in proportion to the ignorance of the mind which it enslaves is strictly consistent with the principles of human Nature. The idiot, the child, and the savage agree in attributing their own passions and propensities to those inanimate substances by which they are either benefited or injured. The former become Gods and the latter Demons; hence sacrifices and prayers by the means of which the rude theologian imagines that he may confirm the beneficence of the one or mitigate the malevolence of the other. Therefore does he believe that the elements will listen to his vows.

He is capable of love and hatred towards his fellow beings, and is variously impelled by these principles to benefit or injure them. The source then of his error is sufficiently obvious: when the winds, the waves, and the atmosphere act in such a manner as to thwart or forward his designs, he attributes to them the same propensities of whose existence in his own mind he is conscious, when he is instigated by benefits to kindness, or by injuries to revenge.


These words mind immateriality, creation, predestination and grace; this mass of subtle distinctions with which theology to everywhere filled; these so ingenious inventions, imagined by thinkers who have succeeded one another for so many centuries, have only, alas! confused things all the more, and never has man's most necessary science, up to this time acquired the slightest fixity. For thousands of years the lazy  dreamers have perpetually relieved one another to meditate on the Divinity, to divine his secret will, to invent the proper hypothesis to develop this important enigma. Their slight success has not discouraged the theological vanity: one always speaks of God: one has his throat cut for God: and this sublime being still remains the most unknown and the most discussed.



The all-powerful, should he not heave more convincing means by which to show man than these ridiculous metamorphoses, these pretended incarnations, which are attested by writers so little in agreement among themselves? In place of so many miracles, invented to prove the divine mission of so many legislators revered by the different people of the world, the Sovereign of these spirits, could he not convince the human mind in an instant of the things he wished to make known to it? Instead of hanging the sun in the vault of the firmament, instead of scattering stars without order, and the constellations which fill space, would it not have been more in conformity with the views of a God so jealous of his glory and so well-intentioned for mankind, to write, in a manner not subject to dispute, his name, his attributes, his permanent wishes in ineffaceable characters, equally understandable to all the inhabitants of the earth?



Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which support them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems, to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life?

What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life?

Life, the great miracle, we admire not because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its object.


What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without, our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves; and this is much. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and death?






Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves! Many of the Circumstances of social life were then important to us which are now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass. There are some persons who, in this respect, are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life.

The existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The words, I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.


Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and you, and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know!

It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist so soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other. Thus color, and sound, and taste, and odor exist only relatively. But let thought be considered only as some peculiar substance, which permeates, and is the cause of, the animation of living beings.



Have we existed before birth? It is difficult to conceive the possibility of this. There is, in the generative principle of each animal and plant, a power which converts the substances homogeneous with itself. That is, the relations between certain elementary particles of matter undergo a change, and submit to new combinations. For when we use words: principle, power, cause, etc., we mean to express no real being, but only to class under those terms a certain series of coexisting phenomena


It is said that it is possible that we should continue to exist in some mode totally inconceivable to us at present. This is a most unreasonable presumption. It casts on the adherents of annihilation the burden of proving the negative of a question, the affirmative of which is not supported by a single argument, and which, by its very nature, lies beyond the experience of the human understanding. It is sufficiently easy, indeed, to form any proposition, concerning which we are ignorant, just not so absurd as not to be contradictory in itself, and defy refutation. The possibility of whatever enters into the wildest imagination to conceive is thus triumphantly vindicated. But it is enough that such assertions should be either contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration should be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those who desire to be persuaded.

This desire to be forever as we are; the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change, which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe, is, indeed, the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state.


Shelley was (1811)

Abstract art was one of the first up front western concrete expressions of an IDEA.  Fifty years later the internet  is the current continual commerce of galactic mashes of  IDEAS.  Before the internet you'd go to the basement of the Modern Museum of Art in DC to see what people were thinking without the aid of concepts.   Now thats on your phone next to your part.  It is the next best elevation of the Individual, in line with the American tradition, but it is being manipulated, dumbed down just as cave scratches were used to scare away Neanderthals.

was having a conversation
realized I was alone
then the room spoke
everyone showed up

the afternoon ball

she remembered

Lady Tragic

He turned to his minister friend that Halloween night and said, "Its not eternity  I worry about but the search for truth which in these days of the Grand Deceit is the best we can manage.  Sorry   but heaven isn't a priority."

Too unknown how stoned

A dilemma of no concern.

cow couple

liberty

Is not the universally admitted drive for political freedom a pale shade of the brain's cry for freedom from the body?   The american insurgents believed freedom was so important to the society of humans that it was included in their Declaration.

                                    They confused their interior cerebral clawing for liberation from the skull  for a much less important freedom to politic.

History has  not been  an all night cinema of men needing or even wanting real neural freedom.

The recent french, british and american social experiments in individual privileges are rare even now amongst groups and already wheeze with fatigue. Global citizens are not so interested in political freedom as they are in independence of each brain from labor and service for the body.  Slavery.  More effort and progress has been expended by the species to escape from the body than toward political liberty.   The highest jump has been the video screens which surround us and like halls of  mirrors long ago, represent a great leap in our evolving flight away from the body through manipulation of  our world as only an image.   It is to be expected that the observing and reacting to visual screens is prized by the common man as the best window for mental liberty over almost all other activity save for sex or sport. 

It recreates a puppet show for us to play.

It is not difficult to make a thing permanent. 

We have come close.

Ancient stone giants were created with technologico primitavo.

Yet permanency is incompatible with change.   Permanency loses.

What appeared to last longest is that which did not change or very little.

Art was but the permanent capture of a changing condition.

Now we have learned to remember not the permanent but the

change.

It was not meant for us to be permanent. 

Would not serve the manifest aim.

Everything of us indicates designed change and an end.

If  there was a creator It could have made us permanent.
We would not have made us permanent.

What we value now is controlled change, process. Anything permanent becomes an obstacle like old commodore computers or analog cellphones.  Its the designer not the steps it takes  that is the story. It will give the longest life to those structures it needs the most like trees.

Trees are permanent.

We were made and meant to die.

Fire teaches alot.

Nothing ever survived.