Quinn Quote Saturday

“Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.”--Daniel Quinn out of his novel Ishmael

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Surrounded by forces utterly beyond their control, children automatically take up magic. This is something that doesn't need to be explained or thought about; it's as instinctive in humans as nest-building in birds. In its simplest, truest form, magic is performed as a demonstration, to show the universe what's expected of it. If you want it to rain, for example, you go out and sprinkle things with water. If you want it to stop raining, on the other hand, you make a fire and start drying things out."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.25, Providence

Burning and Baseball Season

I haven't been posting much lately. I suppose if I would have been it would be quotes from either James Hillman's Blue Fire or Revisioning Psychology. I've spent my mornings the past couple of week reading those works. I had a big event in my life happen yesterday: I started my first fire of the burning season in the masonry stove. Two hundred and some odd days and close to four hundred fires until next baseball season. It's come down to burning season and baseball season.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"It's a sign of our cultural collapse that supporting our vision has come to be seen as wicked, while undermining that vision has come to be seen as noble."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.50, The Story of B

The Gods are Eternal

It's good to hear from a soul doctor that whatever happens with industrial civilization that the gods are eternal:

"For civilizations do eventually decline and perish. Cultures, by existing always in decay, in disorder, may continue beyond the civilizations that seem to hold them. In the shadows of the gods are the very gods themselves, their myths in the midst of what survives because it will not go away."--James Hillman, Pg. 165, A Blue Fire

And, as he says, we're created in their image:

"It may be surprising to associate the diseased with the divine and culture with deformity. We do so want the gods to be pristine, models in marble on Olympus, pure as driven snow. But they are not without their shadows, their afflictions and infirmities. As they are beyond time (athnetos, 'immortal'), so these shadows of disorder that they portray in their myths reappear in those human events that created in their images, we can only do in time what they do in eternity. Their eternal afflictions are our human infirmities."--James Hllman, Pg.164, A Blue Fire

Quinn Quote Saturday

"My frame of reference is that of a Martian anthropologist. I'm like someone who has traveled millions of miles to study a species of beings who, while supposedly bring rational, are destroying the very planet they live on."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.5, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways