"When the rain fell upon us at night, I did thus, while the rain fell: I lay, playing the goura, like //Kunn, the rain sorcerer.

"And when mamma rebuked me, I did not listen to her. For I lay, playing the goura, like //Kunn.

"And when she saw that I did… Read full post »

To the truly sick, even the most sensitive diagnosis may be experienced as savage ad hominem.

Even so, it remains to be seen whose failure is greater - that of patient or physician.

Preparatory human beings. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day—the… Read full post »

"[W]e don’t need a dialogue between religions (or civilisations), we need a bond of political solidarity between those who struggle for justice in Muslim countries and those who participate in the same struggle elsewhere.

...

"Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental labora… Read full post »

"The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guérins work, puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not a fixed, self-enclosed social system but… Read full post »

 Returning to the quite appropriate question, whether “new societies can grow by building democratic institutions” or only by totalitarian means, I think that honesty requires us to recognize that this question must be directed more to American intellectuals than to third-world ideol… Read full post »

Normal is getting dressed
in clothes that you buy for work
and driving through traffic in a car
that you are still paying for -
in order to get to the job you need
to pay for the clothes
and the car
and the house
you leave vacant all day
so you can afford to live in it.

- Ellen Goodman
… Read full post »

Once, in Istanbul, I met a man who said he knew beyond any doubt that God is a cat.

A lengthy pause arched its back and stretched out in the sun.

"How can you be so sure?" I asked - my questions in those days still as clumsy and groping as… Read full post »

[W]hat is “Spirit” at its most elementary? The “wound” of nature: subject is the immense – absolute - power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of “abstracting,” of tearing apart an… Read full post »

"In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as… Read full post »

The story is told that someone once asked Kafka whether there is any hope.

Without a pause, Kafka replied: "Hope? Oh, yes - there is hope. Infinite hope. But not for us."

People say to me (quoting Forrest Gump): "Life is like a box of chocolates."

I answer: "Actually, sometimes life is like a box of boxes."

In trying to think more deeply about - and hopefully come to understand better - the nature and source(s) of violence, as evidenced in the latest spasm of killings across the US (and in South Africa), I've been re-reading Rollo May's Power and Innocence. I thought this was worth sharing:… Read full post »

People say to me: "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

I answer: "Let's build a closer bridge."

“To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the world for the purpose of changing it.” – James Hal Cone Read full post »

"The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching." - from an Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BCE

People say to me: "Don't go there."

I answer:  "I live there." Read full post »

"Hell is already here. There are two ways not to suffer it. The first is easy for many: accept hell and become part of it to the point that you no longer see it.  The second is risky and demands constant attention and learning:  seek and be able to recognize who… Read full post »

"Democracy is as bare in its relation to the power of wealth as it is to the power of kinship that today comes to assist and to rival it. It is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any… Read full post »