Tales of Ordinary Madness.

"The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them." 

Charles Bukowski (Tales of Ordinary Madness)
 

If you're going to try.

 "If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is." 

Charles Bukowski - Factoum

 

Live in Love

  We should honestly recognise life’s absurdity and then live in love

for one another

Albert Camus

 

Clean and Bright

 

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

George Bernard Shaw

World At Large

Each one of us is potentially mind at large. We live together, we act on and react to one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. Embraced the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self, transcendence in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies, all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pull information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves, from family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Unknown source. Sounds very Humian, will endeavor to find out where I wrote it down from. I have a feeling it was from a poetry shrine in the Algonquin Hotel (Manhattan) dedicated to the poets of the Round Circle circa 1920s. Dorothy Parker I believe her name was. We shall see how my investigating skills go.

The Dodos, Love

TO THE ONES WHO DRINK THEIR WINE, WHILE THE REST OF US JUST DIE

Today

AND NOTHING IN THE PAST OR FUTURE WILL EVER FEEL LIKE TODAY

Image unknown

D E A D M A N

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.

  - William Blake, A Memorable Fancy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 

Words and Words

Some people are so good with words. Like these little notes of inspiration - they just appear so innate to the person who has written / spoken them.
I would like to be good with the written word. I think they express so much more than the spoken word.

Images from http://julia.blogg.se / http://somuchtotellyou.co.nz/ http://yespleasemademoiselle.blogspot.com/

Love, Knowledge and Pity

Bertrand Russell – What I have lived for. (British Philosopher and Logician)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
 I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
 With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
 Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
 This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Bertrand Russell is one of my favourite Philosophers. Not only because I have mad respect that he (and Frege) revolutionised 20th cent Logic (which had ceased to evolve since the time of Aristotle), but that he was so passionate about his life and his work and the value of Philosophy in general. Amazing. 

PULP

Charles Bukowski - Pulp, possibly one of my favourite novels. If not, its a good read anyway. His work is characteristically dark, misogynist, humorous, apathetic, pathetically self-destructive and  uncontrollably hedonistic. Pulp was his last novel (1994) and is slightly less characteristic of his style, maybe why I like it. But I do love the rest.      

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." 

 

Highway

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

-   T.S Eliot ‘The Four Quartets’

Photo taken in Quebec, Canada

Purienne

Henrik Purienne is a Fashion Photographer from South Africia

His shots are characterised by soft porn-esk, sexy girls and youths. This one from 2008 was a little more tame, but I like the attitude

I very much like the answer he gave in an interview on what inspires him...

‘The dream of living in a self-sufficient commune in a future where society realised that ‘multi-media’ was just a horrible phase invented in the mid-90s by tertiary institutions and out of touch creatives.’ Henrik Purienne.  

Amazing.

All images taken from http://we-are-awesome.com

Beauty

“I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.”                - Henry Miller

Image unknown source

To Bridge the Void

Failed dreams of completion – we inevitably are unable to bridge the void between an otherwise unbridled range of thought and the all too constrained action; between being and the nothingness that inherently co resides in our self. 

                               - J.P Sartre

Not with a bang but a whimper

 This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

 This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper

 - T.S Eliot

We’re Howling Forever

Seven posters from The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl by Allen Ruppersberg, 2003
Howl is a great poem, it encompasses the whole beatnik generation which Ginsberg helped define in the 1960s
I’m not too sure about the broken pronunciation, but I do like the typeface

Images taken from http://bombsite.com/issues/109/articles/3330

I'm out in the woods, I'm lost in my mind

NATURE

There is a delight in the
Hardy life of the open
There are no words that can
Tell the hidden spirit of the
Wilderness that can reveal
Its mystery its melancholy
And its charm
The nation behaves well if it
Treats the natural resources
As assets which it must turn
Over to the next generation
Increased and not impaired
In value
Conservation means development
As much as if does protection

 - Theodore Roosevelt

  I love nature, it's pretty freaking amazing.

Here is a quote from Teddy Roosevelt... 26th President of the United States. It is inscribed in stone inside the Natural History Museum in NYC... right next to the T. Rex skeleton

All images taken from http://julia.blogg.se 

Young Blood

"In these mountains, I remember, were a group of caves cut high into a steep hillside and overlooking ridges and valleys of conifer forest which stretched to the coast. A few young people lived in the caves year-round, subsisting on wild herbs and brown rice, and on weekends adolescents from the city below gathered to make love and conversation and take drugs. There was something primitive to it, and as one listened to them murmuring around their fire at night, one thought, of course, of tribal rites. What they had done, unconsciously, but precisely, was to reproduce for themselves a common rite of initiation and isolation - as if, through the silence of the hills and temporary exile, they could come to terms with themselves. When they spoke there was a slow thoughtfulness to what they said, a solemnity - as if their distance from the urban sprawl below, the flatland, allowed them to sense the dimension of their own manhood."

 

This little gem of a book was given to me by a man whos bookstore was closing down

Its called  - The Free People, a photo essay of the Woodstock festival, with photographs by Anders Holmquist and one of the best introductions I have ever read (a snippet above) by Peter Marin. I wish I could include the entire 7 page rant... this was someone who really enjoyed the 60s.

Nouvelle Vague

LE PHILOSOPHE ET LE CINEASTE ONT EN COMMUM UNE CERTIANE MANIERE D’ETRE, UNE CERTAINE VUE DU MONDE, QUI EST CELLE D’UNE GENERATION.

      - JEAN-LUC GODARD

(The vision of the philosopher and the director is the same, and that is the vision of a generation)

This is from one of Jean-Luc Godards later French new-wave films, Masculin Feminin, by far my favourite of his (next to A bout de souffle perhaps)

I first came across this quote when I studied philosophy and film.. so it seemed rather appropriate that the vision of the two had some similarity (Godard often cites existential and Marxist philosophy and political ideals in his work.. as well as an avid knowledge of film history).