I trust everyone understands that, from where I'm sitting, the way to go THIS Christmas when it comes to that relative/friend/associate with whom you want to take things to the next level conversationwise is toward this little fellow right here. There are of course some companion volumes with which one could complete the set. And if you're an absolute completist when it comes to the author's work and feel a little off kilter until you have everything, you'll want to spy his contribution in a fine volume called Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive. It serves as an introduction to all manner of deliciousness philosophical and cultural and all that. My bit primarily treats Thom Yorke's Eraser project ("Start Making Sense: Witnessing to the Possibility of Witness"). One quasi-disclaimer. If you're someone who finds it difficult to give your attention to an argument, an image, or another person's voice once an expletive's been dropped, I will encourage you away from this volume, for now, and urge you to consider applying your offendedness more broadly (toward needless death, destruction, and hatefulness for instance...not that the deployment of blue language is never hateful). I have a number of items and scenes I'll mean to blog about in the next few days. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I give you this poem I can't seem to get enough of:
Religion Comes
Religion comes from our pity for humans
They are too weak to live without divine protection.
Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels.
Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice
Of compassion, pity, understanding?
To be human is to be completely alien amid the galaxies.
Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.
--Czeslaw Milosz
5 comments:
David, thank you for having the 3 International Mkt punks into your home last night. In regards to this post, I will tell you that I will forever be grateful for 'The Gospel According To America.' That book not only changed me in a lot of ways, but maybe more importantly helped me realize that maybe I wasn't crazy for thinking about things the way that I do. For that I will always be grateful for you.
Cheers.
David, I think that the link to the Radiohead book might be broken. Here is a fixed one: http://www.amazon.com/Radiohead-Philosophy-Popular-Culture/dp/0812696646
I've always been slightly weary of XYZ and Philosophy volumes, but now I'm thinking that attitude is elitist; this looks like an excellent volume. Thanks for the heads up!
I didn know that poem of Milosz. Im right now im a middle of a long term conversation with a friend about those thing of wich Milosz speaks, it will be of great help to bring it up and talk about it.
This poem reminds me of a letter of Humberto Eco:
"Try, just for the greater good of the discussion and confrontatiion in wich you say to believe, to accept too, just for an instant, the hypothesis that god doesnt exist, that man appears on earth as a result of a mere mistake, being in his condition of mortal, wiht a conscience of himself, and because of this conscience, perhaps the less perfect of all the animals. This man, in order to find the courage to confront dead, will transform himself in a religious animal, and will reach to create stories capable to offer him and explanation and a model, and exemplar image. And among the many that he would be able to imagine, some ablaze, some terrible, some of them consolations full of pathetism, among all of them, when man reaches the plenitud of his times, and he has certain momentum or religious, moral and poetic strenght, he concieves the model of Christ, of universal love, of the forgiveness of the enemies, of life being offered as an holocaust for the salvation and redemption of others. If I were were a galaxie traveller, and I found myself infront of these race, that knew how to conceive this model, I would admire, subjugated by this creative and teogonic energy, and would redempt this miserable race, that has commited so many horrors, just for the mere fact that was able to achieved , create, desire and believe that all of this, is The Truth.
Abandon now this hypothesis, and leave it to others, but admit that, if Christ were just the subject of a great story, the fact that this story were imagined and desired for human, that just know that they dont know, it would be as miraculous as the fact that the son of real God, would have been really incarnated. This natural mistery would not cease to ennoble the heart of those that dont believe."
Sorry about the traslation, I didnf find an english version, so I tried to translated from the spanish. I hope you enjoy it.
I just read your book "The sacredness of questioning everything" Thanks so much for it. It made feel certainly less alone.
Great poem. Thanks!
And I'll check out the Radiohead stuff for my guy for Christmas! :)
we're sitting here over breakfast and deeply appreciating that poem. superb.
we didn't know about the Radiohead book or your chapter therein so we are looking forward to checking it out.
All this collective musing led Joel to recall a woman who worked as a censor in East Germany who struck a line out of the first page of the East German version of Eco's The Name of the Rose. he says she looked back with some small measure of nostalgia to a time and a place when people actually took books seriously... when ideas in print might be considered powerful enough that they could be dangerous...
here's to THIS Christmas. so very blessed by it and so much more yet to come.
c,xo
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