The whirl of giving

A green coat guarded his stooping trunk from the cold

and provided pockets for his hands to balance his lopsided gait.

For on the path he began to stray

Into the grass where the mallards fed.

Without a stir in his brow, his hands fumbled inside

and brought out a plastic sack with pellets for the birds.

Slowly, calmly, and as still as the air before nature knows assault,

he surveyed his recipients flapping their wings and nuzzling beaks into the grass.

Gathering handfulls, he followed the time of his age

spreading the gifts abundantly.

The sight of food inspired shrill quackings from the ducks,

the hurried noise of the hungry,

and as local animals heard their cries,

Go!

they spurred onto the scene,

mallards flying from the east,

snow doves circling above, inspecting the place for landing,

and geese barreling through with their largesse laying claim to space.

The splashes, the flaps, the gurgling competition

neither hurried nor aroused the feeder.

Emptying his feed in rhythmic pace,

he dropped the last contents out to the mallard below,

who failed to catch his previous wide throws.

And with the chorus wound up in song,

the man with nothing left

quietly departed the scene.

Not disturbing that which he had just created, 

the life of giving and the contentedness of giving all.

Various mediums

Various mediums

What kind of tone reflects desperation? Revival? Memory?

What does pencilling evoke?

Does green exist?

Does green exist?

Or is it merely a perfect form (Plato) to which all its variants aspire?

Solar Demi

A liter of light. Making plastic bottles functionally desirable.

Trinity Forum thoughts: Sacrifice

How do we draw our circles of regard? Do we have a responsibility to everyone?

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/for-a-leader-which-matters-more-marriage-vows-or-the-oath-of-office/265822/

 

What kind of message shall we try to spread? How best can we use our bodies to do so? Is our purpose intimately tied up with our cultural stance?

http://www.aavw.org/special_features/letters_thich_abstract02.html

 

What does sacrifice mean? How do you know the kind of sacrifice you are performing is justified and/or worthwhile?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/bruni-sacrifice-three-muffled-syllables.html?pagewanted=all

The tragedy of comedy

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-clark/do-you-have-to-be-depress_b_611836.html 

“Intuitive comedians see the world through their very own looking glass. We have an innate ability for spotting the absurdities, the injustices, and the futilities of the world and crafting them into humor; making them palpable and funny for those who are either reluctant to recognize the world for what it really is or simply don’t have the kind of vision to see those frailties.

Death, war, religion, politics, poverty, slavery, divorce, disease and even depression are the fodder comics feed on, digesting the acrid and depressing truisms of the human condition and then serve it back up as palpable, if not innocuous entertainment.

Good comics are iconoclasts (some are misanthropes) who are compelled to challenge the power structure (both in their profession and in civilian life) and to liken the sacred to the profane. They are sensitive individuals who can easily read between the lines and have an irreverence for lauded institutions (I.E. organized religions) and find the world of politics anathema to them. We are eternally frustrated by the “civilians” who don’t see the world the way we do. (We refuse to take the soma!)”

 

 

I just googled court jesters and their history. Came up with this: http://alexthejester.com/html/historyPopup.html

 

One great line: “The royals often became tired of the false compliments and praise from their many lackeys and valued a connection with these offbeat performers, who, between witty wisecracks, would share very valuable insights. After all, many truths have been spoken in jest, and many lies have been spoken in earnest.”

 

Do we seek humor out to teach us something? Perhaps we allow people to tell us deep truths through laughter to curb the pain?

 

“Is it the way they poke fun at the high and mighty or make heroes out of everyday people? Is it the lightness on their curly-toed boots or their amused take on society? As long as there have been social conventions, jesters have been there to tweak them. And who has more license than a grown person wearing a hat with bells and mismatched curly boots?” 

Liszt

“M. Liszt’s playing contains abandonment, a liberated feeling, but even when it becomes impetuous and energetic in his fortissimo, it is still without harshness and dryness. […] [He] draws from the piano tones that are purer, mellower and stronger than anyone has been able to do; his touch has an indescribable charm. […] He is the enemy of affected, stilted, contorted expressions. Most of all, he wants truth in musical sentiment, and so he makes a psychological study of his emotions to convey them as they are. Thus, a strong expression is often followed by a sense of fatigue and dejection, a kind of coldness, because this is the way nature works.”

This lion is exposing his vameronasal glands to the scent of a female’s urine in order to estimate her readiness to mate, amongst other things. http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/25/top-25-photographs-from-the-wilderness-5/?source=hp_dl1_newswatch_25_wilderness_photos_20130126

Intimate Shots

Mason Jar Music shoots a song that gets you entangled in the music.

43. arguments for the existence of god.

Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11.

Are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological (argument from design) arguments for God’s existence any good? Mackie, a very sharp analytic philosopher well hooked into recent advances in philosophy of science, says no. He’s chiefly responding to his Oxford colleague, Richard Swinburne, who takes a very rationalist approach to God, taking the concept of God to be wholly simple and intelligible and providing a superior scientific explanation for, e.g. the beginning of the universe than the brute fact of an ultimately uncaused physical universe.

•  can we conceptualize infinity if it did not actually exist? (plato with forms – i have an idea that a perfect circle exists, therefore it must be real; descartes has an idea that god exists, therefore it must be real)
• rebut: the perfect form doesn’t actually have to exist, there could be a limit; so you conceptualize a perfect circle through comparison of one less-perfect circle to a lessser-less-perfect circle
• plato responds that we wouldnt be able to tell that one circle was lesser-less perfect if we didnt have a conception of a perfect form that it was getting at
• just because you conceive of something, doesn’t mean it exists (a unicorn for example)
• descartes the clarity and distinctness of an idea, say a unicorn, is lacking something because you have never perceived it, so descartes says that the idea of a unicorn is never going to be as clear and distinct as that of your idea of a horse
• if you have an idea about an all powerful, omniscient god, then what put that in your brain? (issue of causality)
• mackey – ideas don’t have to come through perception; you can experience something through the negative, you are aware of your own limitations and therefore see perfection
• the argument goes around whether or not you can conceive of infinity – so can reason get a hold of that which is divine, infinite?
• does god exist in time? (he couldn’t if he were an object)
• god can’t know the future action of people, because he gave us freedom
• is the notion of god internally incoherent because we cannot place all the world’s complexity into one ontological being? for example, in all things shining, it suggests that we live in a polytheistic world
• if i can’t know fully about a bat, because i am not a bat, then how can i know fully about god, since i am not god?
• descartes ontological argument: i have an idea of a supremely perfect being, ie a being having all perfections, necessary existence is a perfection, therefore a supremely perfect being exists
• kant says you can’t have existence be perfect because existence is not an attribute but a doing
• mackey there exists an x, such that x is g, so x exists (for example, a martian exists is different than saying a re-martian exists, where re-martian is defined as a martian that exists, so the existence is contained in the definition, from that it is illogical to say that a remartian does not exist, it is self contradictory)
• kant says that existence cannot be a predicate, you can’t have a re-martian (can existence be a predicate?)
• rebut: no matter what concept you come up with, is it instantiated (is there some object in the world that corresponds to it or not); (for example, economics – within its system, you can say a therefore b and it will all make sense, but that does not necessarily mean that economics has any real bearing in the world as a real concept) so a remartian could have as a predicate that it does exist, but that does not mean that it is instantiated
• cartesian dualism: there is no escape from radical doubt; can you perceive reality outside of your mind?; once you doubt your experiences, it is almost impossible to get back to the reality outside of your head, however well you conceive of something, you will never get to exist inside of that
• mackey says that there is a fundamental difference between the concept of things and the existence of things; we must go outside of the concept to ascribe existence to the object, even if the object contains the idea of existence 
• if god is a being from which nothing greater can be conceived – that is the definition – but that does not exist; selms asks, if such a great god existed, wouldn’t he be greater than the concept of your mind? therefore, god exists
• the fact that the concept is not fully realized does not allow you to read back your imperfection or unknowingness into the concept itself, which is what you would need to form an incoherence
• monk: i have an idea of a perfect island, but doesn’t that mean there is an island out there better than the idea you have, therefore a perfect island exists – rebut is that god is greater than this perfect island, so this means that the perfect island does not have to exist