Quinn Quote Saturday

“Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

A Poem From One of My Heroes

A poem from one of my heros:

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
... They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

One Of My Favorite Articles For 2012

One of my favorite articles of the year. And here is my favorite line:

"You and I," he finally said, "are very different, but we have the same enemy: monotheism."

I would've loved to have been on a bar stool near by to listen to the conversation that happened after that statement.

Guns and Penises

Quote from article: "A gun does not signify power, but the lack of power. Always.

"So, a gun is a symptom. But what is the cure for a gun? What would replace the gun and be real, have power? Why not a penis? Not the symbol of neurotic power but the means for being erotic, expressing love, incarnating desire, creating children, and offering pleasure. Maybe these qualities could be therapeutic for the gun. If everyone got serious about them, maybe they’d forget their guns.

"In these times when women are rightfully correcting an excess of the power-penis, it isn’t always easy to appreciate this aspect of the male body. Our imagination of its mythic properties has become too narrow, partly because of Freud himself. He was too narrow in his vision of myth and of Medusa, and he limited far too much the imaginal implications of the penis."--Thomas Moore

Quinn Quote Saturday

"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day."--Daniel Quinn out of the New Renaissance

Masculinity Quote

A quote that I pulled off from Wikipedia:

“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men."--Camille Paglia

A Demonic Child Killer in our Culture

The last 15 minutes of this interview with Michael Ventura and James Hillman gives us insight as to why children and adults are shooting up schools. From interview:

Michael Ventura: "Freddie Krueger is a contemporary myth of a demon that many, many, many children are feeling."

James Hillman: "So we are back at the beginning of what we're talking about. There is a demonic child abuser, a child killer, in our culture killing children."

Quinn Quote Saturday

"For some men--perhaps all men--it's almost a necessity to do insane things from time to time: to confront the wild boar alone, spear in hand, to see the world from the top of an unscalable mountain, to risk one's entire fortune on the turn of a card. I thinks it's true of all men, personally, though nowadays most try to get along on risks taken my deputies--deputies in the boxing ring and on the football field."

"You mean...they have to test their manhood."

"Oh, it's not as simple as that, Mrs. Kennesey. When a man sets out to do something like this, he's not testing his manhood. He's testing the universe itself--he's testing the gods, if you will. He's finding out where he stands in the order of things. To best the rabbit or the deer means nothing, tells him nothing. But while he stalks the boar, he puts his fate to the test: he lives in the hands of the gods."

"I don't understand."

"To die falling off a ladder or being run over by a drunk means nothing, But for the man who lives and dies at risk, who puts his fate in the hands of the gods, death is never meaningless."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 161, The Holy

Zen is American

"Zen is not Japanese and it's not Chinese. It is American. It didn't come from Asia; it has always been here. It is a way of using your mind and living your life and doing it with other people."--Gary Snyder

Concentration Camp Existence

"Concentration-camp existence...taught us that the whole world is really like a concentration camp...There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality, crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power."--Otto Friedrich, quoting the poet Tadeusz Borowski in The End of the World

Not so Fast

This thought sets the mind at ease to some degree:

"For a predominantly Eurocentric culture, the Greek/Roman patterns are the most relevant and most differentiated, and thus the most powerful. By powerful, I mean influential, authoratative, prestigious, controlling, and tyrannical. Even if these patterns of imagination that govern our thought and action are utterly patriarchal and therewith condemned as dangerously death-dealing, like a toxic dump of the spent fuel on which civilization has live for millenia, they are the roots. Inescapable. Multiculturalism cannot jump out of the melting pot that was cast in bronze in Greece centuries ago. So long as this culture is traditionally and officially committed to Indo-European languages and institutions of government and education, of family structures, and modes of thought that define the arts, sciences, religions, and human nature, we cannot change our minds, though we may beautifully extend them, revise them and reimagine them.--James Hillman, pg. 245, Kinds of Power

Reimagining the Boss

I ran across this quote in James Hillman's Kinds of Power. It gives us something to think about when it comes to our expectations of a boss, and also when we are bossing others.

"Enjoy, says the waitress; why not also the boss when you sit down to work? Not only to take pleasure in the work but to give pleasure, like a lover. Isn't this a capacity of power, as much as control, leadership or influence?"

My god, I'm 38 years old, and I don't think I've ever had a boss consider this.

Quinn Related Quote Saturday

"By disembedding humans from The Community of Life -- the basis of Takerism and civilization -- the only way to reconcile this condition of estrangement is through a God who gives freedom with one hand and offers salvation with another."-- Doug Brown, Pg. 123, Roadmap to Sustainability

Blake On Her Body

"The naked woman's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man."--William Blake

Depth and Mystery

"Why do we crave the sight of the human body? Why do men especially need to look at breasts and that part of the woman's body that not only has to do with intercourse but also with birth? It's a great mystery that probably shouldn't be expl
ained, but I think we can say this much: Men have identified with the hero. We have to be adventurous, fight and conquer. We have no time for the mysteries of nature.

"Fully occupied with their heroic quests, men haven't had an opportunity to consider the great deep mysteries of sex, life and death. But a woman's body forces us to consider them. We try to turn our eyes away from it, but we can't. Over and over again we want to see those objects that say so much about our sheer existence: breasts and vaginas, nurturance and continuing existence.

"Beneath all the display of nipples and crotches lies a desperate search for self-understanding. Where do I really come from and where am I headed? Men devote their lives to achieving a position at work, a decent bank account and the reputation of responsibility, and yet, as we have seen so many times, they risk it all on the sight of a woman's body or an hour of foreplay."-- Thomas Moore

Santayana on Fanaticism

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."-- George Santayana

I got the idea for this post HERE.

Diakrisis

Picking up old ideas out of Kinds of Power. This is one reason why I like James Hillman's writing. He is always bringing ideas that are thousands of years old to the table.

"The old theologians called this filtering diakrisis, discerning the spirits. Without discernment, they thought you could become a dupe of the devil. Discernment allows you to be more sophisticated about the forces, hearing them metaphorically and not yet literally, so that you do not become a mouthpiece of your mentor or a channel of visionary wisdom masking as genius."--Pg.143, Kinds of Power

Our Secret Companion

"What I am calling the 'angel' that was born with us and is our secret companion, Socrates called his daimon, who guarded him from wrong moves. The same figure appears in German thought as the Doppelganger and in ancient thought as the genius. Our birthday celebrations with cake and candles originate in a ritual honoring, not you, but your genius who was born with you. You are never a genius, can never be a genius, but you are guided and protected by a genius, and your life must be led so that the genius is not damaged. Damage to it through wounded reputation (and Cassio uses the language of wounding as Gaunt uses the language of shame) reflects especially on the family, for one's genius derives partly from the family and is generated in the family marriage bed (lectus genialis). Your genius or angel is concieved with you, descends into you through your generators and like an invisible twin at birth, part of your psychic inheritance."--James Hillman, pg.138, Kinds of Power

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment one at that. There simply is no such thing as nature--in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn't exist."--Daniel Quinn, pg.53, Providence