The self is not an isolated atom; it is only a self in relation to others and to the world; it is not a state, an identity, but a locus of interdependent experiences where the external commingles with the internal, a process in which both are modified. It is modern madness to confuse self with personhood. For it spells our isolation from other people as well as the world, cutting us off from life and its flow. The psyche is not merely individual, but the individual is an expression of it, which makes the psyche communal, .incorporating even nature and the inanimate. Therefore our modern psychological diseases are not problems occurring only within us, but we are the site in which what is ill in society and our way of life expresses itself.
To the modern madness we must oppose: myth and poetry.
Tag: Modernity
Everywhere I Look
Everywhere I look
I see people living
with borrowed faces,
their lives borrowed
and their souls,
speaking borrowed words
and craving feelings
that are not their own.
Everywhere I look
I see pettiness
and people dying
for an hour’s fame;
everywhere I look
I see addicts
and people enslaved
to their little phones.
I look around and I see
that the zombie apocalypse
so much prophesied
has already happened,
it is nothing more
than the regular individual
filled to saturation
with a content
that is not his own.
Wandering Thought # 89
A summary reading of the history of myths teaches us how religious even the most atheist of us remains; how the religious lives on in us, in our imagination, ideas, impulses, emotions, motives, narratives of life, etc., irrespectively of what our rational mind believes. We remain worshipers in a temple we no longer believe in its existence. We remain idolators of a power in which we ceased to believe, at the very thought of which we cannot hold our laughter, our cynicism — and what is cynicism if not the pain of a wound? We may know a lot more, we moderns, but we feel a lot less and less profoundly, and the world of our feeling, intuition, and imagination has shrunk in proportion to the horizons which our minds have widened. We know no reverence; we are deeply irreverent. The sacred has been expunged from our rational world, and that is a direct correlation with the way we are handling our planet and ourselves.
Wandering Thought # 79
We are creating for ourselves a world in which it is impossible to live; and even if life was still physically possible, it would be undesirable.
~ ~ ~
Once it is over we’ll discover it — modernity was a big lie. Modernity — an incredibly rich soil that nonetheless did not allow the growth of anything great.
~ ~ ~
Thirty six; the year I discovered the truth about myself.
Haiku # 77
Waves lapping feet
in the sand sinking,
clouds over the sea.
~
Clouds of smoke
blacken the blue sea,
a city breathing.
~
A swarm of fish
as one swerving,
the lonely crowd.
Rooted in Love 