stranger within

"Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely ironic mimetism - victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblamatic fragments."
- Susan Sontag



"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."
- Rem Koolhaas

I am not I
I am not I.

I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.
- Juan Ramon Jimenez



"Nor are we only ignorant of the dimensions of the human mind in general, but even of our own ... Therefore dive deep into thy bosom; Know thyself .... learn the depth, extent, bias, and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the Stranger within thee."
- Edward Young
1759



"Since any mental event enters awareness in a sensory-based form - that is, as an image of the world - it is not surprising that imagination takes place in an interior space. Thinking is a catchword for a broad range of mental activities, of which deduction and induction have been abstracted as formal techniques. As Kant maintained, the experience of space may be so primary that it is the condition for all other experience. Even pure consciousness - without contents - is sometimes described as an experience of empty space."
- Dan J. Bruiger



"The problem of self-observation's producing an infinite regression is phony. No one would say that a person cannot use his own eyes to observe his own feet. No one would say, moreover, he cannot use his own eyes, with the aid of a mirror, to observe his own eyes. Then why should anyone say a person cannot, at least in principle, use his own brain to observe his own brain? All that is required is that nature should have given him the equivalent of an inner mirror and an inner eye."
- Nicholas K. Humphrey



"The conventional thinking we are taught (and conditioned to think) employs what Edward de Bono calls 'rock logic'. Rocks being solid, hard, permanent, inert and unchanging. Like bricks, rocks can be added on top of one another to build structures. However there is also 'water logic'. This is fluid and flows according to gradient (context), and assumes form according to space (circumstance). If you add one rock to another, you get two; if you add water to water, it changes shape. Rocks analogous to a page of accounts and water to a piece of poetry.
The former has units which add up to a conclusion, the latter has images which conjure up a perception."
- Alan Fletcher



17.3.1974 7:25 p.m. Leeds-London train "The woman in the corner seat wears a green velvet coat trimmed with imitation fur, and knee-length maroon suede boots. She falls asleep, sinking into the corner of the seat. Her red velvet skirt slides up around her thighs; her mouth falls open and is reflected in the window, superimposed on the night landscape outside. The train runs parallel with a motorway: cars and lorries rush into her mouth, their headlights on full. She wakes up coughing."
- Ian Breakwell's Diary
1964-1985



"The thought and the thing thought about are one and the same."
- Parmenides



"We don't think in words. The temptation to equate thinking with language is because words are more palpable than thoughts. After all - I'm thinking - if I couldn't talk to myself how would I know what I was thinking?

Thinking is hard work; few engage in it.

For those who do there are a number of ways of sorting, each with advantages and disadvantages. They can be broadly categorized:

Natural Thinking. This is fluid and undirected, it wanders and meanders, is subject to repetition and generalizations. The sort of thinking that goes on when we don't think we're thinking.

Logical Thinking. This selects a route and follows it to its conclusion. With this approach the solution is largely predetermined, so if you head off in the wrong direction you can end up painting yourself into a corner.

Pattern Thinking. This confines thoughts to operate within given rules. Therefore solutions are limited by the possibilities available within the pattern.

Lateral Thinking. This is purposeful in intent without specific aim. Free-wheeling so it can reveal solutions which might have been overlooked in other approaches.

Grasshopper Thinking. Most of the time our thinking jumps around alternating and mixing between reasoning which adheres to measurable responses, and imagining which allows unpredictable currents to play around with data. Producing an electrico/chemical sludge."
- Edward de Bono
The Use of Lateral Thinking
I am Right You are Wrong



"The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses - not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the oboe solo like the flight of a bird, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef - just impulses."
- Diane Ackerman



"I become aware of the old Buddhist axiom of not striving. It seems clear that if I pour my energy into creating beauty and euphoria, this simultaneously creates an empty hole which I will subsequently experience as the opposite. The answer is equanimity - let things be as they are."
- Myron J. Stolaroff
Thanatos to Eros



"I have said that my problem is I am too old, too burdened by experience. But that is a lie. In reality, I am too young, chronically a naive child of wonder with a primitive lack of understanding; I am blind, helpless, forever newborn. I look at the world with wide, uncomprehending eyes, neither trying to classify its contents intellectually, nor trying to achieve technical mastery for some practical purpose. I feel a sympathy for all that is, without understanding my own place in the time and space in which I live. I have the savage's dread of unseen foes. And like the primitive who stands for the first time before a giant Sequoia or at the oceans edge, I am again and again filled with awe by experiences of a world which my mind cannot encompass."
- Sheldon Kopp



"His personal anguish and insane solution
Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years
are one vast poem drunk with the wine
of his blood."
- Robinson Jeffers

I Believe in the Afterlife Called Literature



"I'm breathing . . . . Are you breathing, too? It's nice, isn't it? It isn't difficult to keep alive friends, just don't make trouble or if you must make trouble make the sort of trouble that's expected."
- Sir Thomas More



If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don't want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don't want my heritage of joy to die.
Don't call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.
- Pablo Neruda


<°))))><

"The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there."
- Yasutani Roshi



At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
- T.S. Eliot



"Just as space appears to the concrete mind . . . as something filled with hills, lakes and plains - in each of its parts open to different possibilities - so time is here taken as something filled, pregnant with possibilities, which vary with its different moments and which, magically as it were, induce and confirm events."
- Helmut Wilhelm



"Human beings are all right for as long as they are ignorant of ignorance; this is our normal condition. But when we know we don't know, we can't stand it."
- Lewis Thomas



"If you ask me whether there is another world, well, if I thought there were, I would say so. But I don't say so. And I don't deny it. And I don't say there neither is, nor is not another world. And if you ask me about the beings produced by chance; or whether there is any fruit, any result, of good or bad actions; or whether a man who won the truth continues or not after death - to each or any of these questions do I give the same reply."
- Sanjay Belatthiputta



walk a new ground "Your brain changes. Three pounds of meat changes. It changes a little bit every time you see an image or hear a sound or feel a surface or taste a flavor or walk a new ground. Everything you sense changes your brain. Your brain measures things and those things change your brain. It learns new changes and forgets or unlearns old changes. A single photon of light changes your brain. TV ads and movies and books and talks and ad jingles and all the stuff that your mind eats changes your brain. It changes right now as you read this. Your brain starts out with about 100 billion neurons or brain cells and ends up with several billion fewer. That's about as many stars as are in the Milky Way galaxy or as many galaxies as are in the known universe. The neurons do not act as computer memory sites. No cell holds a picture of your mom or the smell of lime or the idea of God. You can pull out any cell in your brain and your mind will not change. You could pull out a few million cells at random and not miss them. Pull a few wires or circuits out of a computer and it crashes. What counts is the wires between cells. They count for about 40 percent of your brain mass. We call these wires synapses or neural connections. Each neuron in your brain can connect up to 10,000 other neurons. That gives us synapses in quadrillions. Learning and memory lie in the great tangled webs of synapses. Not in cells, in webs. Take a drink of scotch and lose a few hundred neurons and a few million synapses. Learning is change."
- Bart Kosko
Fuzzy Thinking



Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt - ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
- William Stafford



"An earthquake, a toothache, a mad dog, a telephone message -
and all our house of peace falls like a pack of cards."
- Reginald Horace Blyth



There's an anecdote about Kierkegaard standing rapt in thought in a municipal flower bed. An irascible park keeper arrived and demanded to know what he was doing there. "What are any of us doing here?" replied the sage.



The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this
something not so insistent -
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
- Robert Creeley



Buddhists observe Buddha's historical birth on April 8, [1029 BC], although the exact date remains a mystery. He was born in India 3,000 years ago, in the foothills of the Himalayas south of what is now central Nepal.
Mahamaya, Siddhartha's mother, had a premonitory dream before giving birth to him: A magnificent white elephant with six tusks descended from the heavens surrounded by a chorus of beatific praises. The elephant approached her, its skin white as mountain snow. It held a brilliant pink lotus flower in its trunk, and placed the flower within the queen's body. Then the elephant, too, entered her effortlessly, and all at once she was filled with deep ease and joy.
Mahayana Buddhism teaches that there were many Buddhas before this historical Buddha, and there will be many [thousands] after this one. In some dark ages, there is no Buddha to guide humanity, so we are fortunate to be born in a time when there is a recognized Buddha, and the teachings are available.



Otherwise
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
- Jane Kenyon



"[W]e feel [resentment] for our own bodies cloddishness, limitations, and final treachery: their mortality. Reality is death. If only we could, we would wander the earth and never leave home; we would enjoy triumphs without risks, eat of the Tree and not be punished, consort daily with angels, enter heaven now and not die."
- Michael Benedikt



"Then there is the BIG PROBLEM - who are you? There is an endemic human tendency for self-deception. We all think we're one kind of person when we're somewhat different (especially viewed by others) than we imagine we are. You - the reader - no doubt feel you're an exception."
- Alan Fletcher
the art of looking sideways


><((((º>

Borrowed Love Poems

1)

What can I do, I have dreamed of you so much
What can I do, lost as I am in the sky

What can I do, now that all
the doors and windows are open

I will whisper this in your ear
as if it were a rough draft

something I scribbled on a napkin
I have dreamed of you so much

there is no time left to write
no time left on the sundial

for my shadow to fall back to the earth
lost as I am in the sky

2)

What can I do, all the years that we talked
and I was afraid to want more

What can I do, now that these hours
belong to neither you nor me

Lost as I am in the sky
What can I do, now that I cannot find

the words I need
when your hair is mine

now that there is no time to sleep
now that your name is not enough

3)

What can I do, if a red meteor wakes the earth
and the color of robbery is in the air

Now that I dream of you so much
my lips are like clouds

drifting above the shadow of one who is asleep
Now that the moon is enthralled with a wall

What can I do, if one of us is lying on the earth
and the other is lost in the sky

4)

What can I do, lost as I am in the wind
and lightning that surrounds you

What can I do, now that my tears
are rising toward the sky

only to fall back
into the sea again

What can I do, now that this page is wet
now that this pen is empty

5)

What can I do, now that the sky
has shut its iron door

and bolted clouds
to the back of the moon

now that the wind
has diverted the ocean's attention

now that a red meteor
has plunged into the lake

now that I am awake
now that you have closed the book

6)

Now that the sky is green
and the air is red with rain

I never stood in
the shadow of pyramids

I never walked from village to village
in search of fragments

that had fallen to earth in another age
What can I do, now that we have collided

on a cloudless night
and sparks rise

from the bottom of a thousand lakes

7)

To some, the winter sky is a blue peach
teeming with worms

and the clouds are growing thick
with sour milk

What can I do, now that the fat black sea
is seething

now that I have refused to return
my borrowed dust to the butterflies

their wings full of yellow flour

8)

What can I do, I never believed happiness
could be premeditated

What can I do, having argued with the obedient world
that language will infiltrate its walls

What can I do, now that I have sent you
a necklace of dead dried bees

and now that I want to
be like the necklace

and turn flowers into red candles
pouring from the sun

9)

What can I do, now that I have spent my life
studying the physics of good-bye

every velocity and particle in all the waves
undulating through the relapse of a moment's fission

now that I must surrender this violin
to the sea's foaming black tongue

now that January is almost here
and I have started celebrating a completely different life

10)

Now that the seven wonders of the night
have been stolen by history

Now that the sky is lost and the stars
have slipped into a book

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

Now that there are no blossoms left
to glue to the sky

What can I do,
I who never invented anything

and who dreamed of you so much
I was amazed to discover

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor
- John Yau