and so

There are more songs in our souls than the tongue is able to utter. When detached from its original insights, the discursive mind becomes a miser, and when we discover that concepts bring no relief to our outraged conscience and thirst for integrity, we turn to the origin of thought, to the endless shore that lies across the logical.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951. 17

lovely disengagement

If one of the goals of a sabbatical is to work on one's big project, another is salutary disengagement from one's main pursuits. The success of James's year off can be gauged by the fact that among the slender sheaf of his writings for the year is a letter to a newspaper, in French, protesting the miserable, tomb-like conditions of French pigs, and a spirited letter to the editor attacking the new practice of binding periodicals with steel staples instead of the traditional stitching. He was not working on a book, and he turned out roughly a review a month, most of them quite short.

Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. New York: Houghton Miflin, 2006. 331

toward carmel

We do not know the names of these first Carmelites. But we do know their hearts. From the beginning this tradition rooted itself in the deep hungers of the human heart. These men could only have located themselves on this mountain and begun a life together in response to such hungers, such "deep caverns of feeling," later captured in the poetry of John of The Cross. Why else live where they lived?

We can assume they had tried to feed these hungers with the normal food which nourishes life: relationships, possessions, plans, titles, reputations. They probably found that their efforts and their control brought little peace to their lives. They had not found food sufficient to feed their hunger.

And so they laid their lives down and began again. Perhaps they were escaping more than simply restlessness. Perhaps lives had come apart in deep disappointment; perhaps they experienced unbearable losses; perhaps they were chased from other places, or even were escaping the law.

But it was more than escape that brought them to Mount Carmel. They assembled there because of a call. I would think they were people who were haunted in some ways and who found one another on a mountain which evoked their desires. People today come to this tradition because they, too, experience themselves as pilgrims on this earth, having deep hungers, and haunted by a call.

John Welch, The Carmelite Way: An Ancient Path for Today's Pilgrim. New York: Paulist, 1996. 8-9

consider this

: Dung literature appears with the life of
officials, with the advent of the officious, when
it is impossible to argue or to be kind in a
straightforward way. If one cannot anymore be
overtly kind, the expression of kindness
must become a guerilla affair. The official life,
the life of this empire, the life of rules, is a life
that does not readily allow the choice to be
kind: insurance companies find such choice
risky, and corporations find such choice costly.
Officiousness is not a thing, but the very action
that removes kindness. The purpose of
lampoon is, then, to show us that the
correct thing is often the improper thing. The
purpose of decent dung literature is, in part, to
show that the decorous action is often the
dangerous action. In
fact in such an age, in an age of militarism and
canned heroism, tragedy is the mere
commodification of suffering and the glue of
nationalism. A nation does not laugh, it grieves.
Yet it is a false grieving; the grief of nationalism
is merely a scrim to hide the buttocks of
revenge. America

does not know how to suffer because it does
not know how to endure. And it does not
know how to endure because it cannot laugh.
We need dung therefore. Like laughter, the
anus is innately disruptive. Dung is laughter.
The landbridge of laughter is a preposterous
isthmus leading to a seldom visited region of
purposeful metaphor, a region where cultural
and aesthetic politics matter. And, too, the idea
that the comic may be at once oppositional in
its uses and concordant in its pleasures is
something one may touch upon nicely here.

Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook. Champaign: Dalkey, 2007. 106-107

what we want

According to [Silvan S.] Tomkins, natural selection has favored distinct classes of affect for the preservation of life and for people. Tomkins argues that the "human being is equipped with innate affective responses which bias him to want to remain alive and to resist death, to want sexual experiences, to want to experience novelty and to resist boredom, to want to communicate, to be close to and in contact with others of his species and to resist the experience of head and face lowered in shame."

Kaufman and Raphael, Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives, 1996. 26

crack

"Anthem"
by Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, The Future (1992)

practically true

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto"