rolex time is over, welcome to hard times

I've heard it said and agree that 'to practice philosophy is a form of atavism of the highest order'. That's why I've grunted before about its overlap with another high order throwback, professional wrestling. One Mr. Chauncey DeVega comments on the same here. Hate to chuckle at the poor guy's job troubles but in framing them with `80s wrestling interviews ("Dusty Rhodes Declares Hard Times" & "Ric Flair Flossy") he hit the nail on the head regarding this economy. Go watch them fellow brutes.

Visionaries

We all know what Plato said to us ugly beastmen about life in the caves: it's all good fun as long as you never point out to your fellows about the sun. By doing so you risk death by their furry hands; perhaps even rightfully deserved death, for after all staring into the light can blind one and here you are promoting such insanity! For this reason we have to be grateful for the daring visionaries amongst us. They risked staring into that light, and then also coming back down into the caves to share. They are able to see past the puppetmaster's shadows to the potential & bright paintings we could put on our cave wall.

In that spirit I thought I'd share this, found by way of ManhattanKids. In it Martin Luther King, Jr, a true visionary, loosely predicts yesterday's inauguration of President Obama. Could you have foreseen this even a decade ago? Would you have shared such a conviction publically? Sadly, as per Plato's allegory, neither MLK nor RFK were tolerated for long by us primitive cave-folk.

entertainment means avoiding passivity/everyday I contemplate a sword

Awesome experience, I can't recommend it highly enough. If you are resolute about jumping then everything goes smoothly right up until they open the hatch. That's when the anti-evolutionary nature of your proposed action becomes most evident. However the act of literally tossing caution and prudence to the wind violently, and then the adrenaline rush of accelerating to 120MPH really isn't anti-evolutionary. Insects can be prudent but I don't think they can enjoy freefall. Although the instructor and photog insisted on me looking up for pics, I had a hard time peeling my eyes away from the onrushing ground. Also got some light rafting done out in the Poconos. Overall the weekend was a healthy and necessary dose of of action, and being outside the city.

It reminded me of this quote from Ghost Dog, which actually comes to me often as I amble through life.

The Way of the Samurai is found in death.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.
Every day, when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon
being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords,
being carried away by surging waves,
being thrown into the midst of a great fire,
being struck by lightning,
being shaken to death by a great earthquake,
falling from thousand-foot cliffs,
dying of disease
or committing seppuku at the death of one's master.
And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead.
This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.

“What Have We Who Are Slaves And Black To Do With Art?”

Up and down the ladder I go, chasing after 'truths' then grounding myself in realities. In that vein I ran into this interesting piece at n + 1 about Ralph Ellison, high art, and black culture. Even if you are unfamiliar with Ellison, as I am, it offers some worthwhile contemplations on the role and value of pursuing universal, humanistic truths and thought systems, particularly as a non-white. It caught my attention with this about one of my fave authors, Jorge Luis Borges. It seems impossible to read widely and deeply without coming across thinkers with beautiful ideas but odious, annoying prejudices so it didn't strike me too negatively (there's also something to be sid about context); anyway what caught my thoughts was the sophisticated excuse for Borges bias and what the article's author, as well as Ellison, have to say about it.

"Some time ago I came across a skinny little book bearing the title With Borges. It is the recollection of a brief stint in a young man’s life spent reading to the Argentine giant of letters, Jorge Luis Borges. Much in the book was familiar – Borges lived with his mother into his sixties, he devoured books with a fiendish voracity, his blindness in old age necessitated that others read aloud to him – but one tiny passage, an aside, was new and striking to me: in it, the memoirist notes that though the great cosmopolitan boasted a taste for everything under the sun, from ancient Nordic folk verse to kabbalistic number games to cheap Westerns and detective stories, Borges nonetheless remarked that there was absolutely nothing he could find of universal importance in American Negro culture. It was simply too provincial. And because, as he saw it, Negroes had failed to produce a “universal culture” – like that of the ancient Greeks, the English, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Jews – because they could offer nothing of equal worth to the rest of the world, they were therefore in a sense inferior. This was Borges’s view and it is something that I have come to think about often. "
- "What Have We Who Are Slaves And Black To Do With Art?”, T.C. Williams, n + 1