The Journal in a sense as a periodical mimeographed and circulated by mail with other writers comes from the Mission District circa 1992. My then roomate and friend published in APA 50. I joined this amateur press association and for a couple years politically and mockingly relied on the literary philosophical world to wage cultural war.
My arrow against Tyrants.
As myself I am traditional. Take the trail to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain’s full of strange sights
Men who go there end by being scared.
Water glints and gleams in the moon,
Grasses sigh and sing in the wind.
The bare plum blooms again with snow,
Naked branches have clouds for leaves.
When it rains, the mountain shines –
In bad weather you’ll not make this climb.
Our industrial times for six hundred years like a river flowing bring us to our hours. Or more, waterwheels in use in 960’s in England. It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover”, said Henri Poincaré, a famous French mathematician. Go for my authority to Braudel. Intuition is the civilizational cement. https://www.monaco-tribune.com/en/2020/07/fernand-braudel-and-the-idea-of-the-mediterranean/
Kazantzakis published a really thin volume called Ascesis: The Saviors of God. The subtitle is Spiritual Exercises. The book contains something like commandments, or simply rules that uncover Kazantzakis’ philosophical worldview and answer the question about the meaning of life.
Bellow I will drop some of the most interesting places from the Ascesis, that really knocked me down with their purity of observation.
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death.
Three commandements
1. To see and accept the boundaries of the human mind without vain rebellion, and in these severe limitations to work ceaselessly without protest – this is where man’s first duty lies… I recognize these limitations, I accept them with resignation, bravery, and love, and I struggle at ease in their closure, as though I were free… This is how, with clarity and austerity, you may determine the omnipotence of the mind amid appearances and the incapacity of the mind beyond appearances – before you set out for salvation. You may not otherwise be saved.
2. The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity…. “Heart, naive heart, become serene, and surrender!”…Yes, the purpose of Earth is not life, it is not man. Earth has existed without these, and it will live on without them. They are but the ephemeral sparks of its violent whirling.
3. The heart cannot adjust itself. Hands beat on the wall outside its dungeon, it listens to erotic cries that fill the air. Then, swollen with hope, the heart responds by rattling its chains; for a brief moment it believes that its chains have turned to wings. But swiftly the heart falls wounded again, it loses all hope, and is gripped once more by the Great Fear. The moment is ripe: leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward, take the third step. Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope. This is the third duty….I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.
In a book dedicated to Samuel Beckett, Les Cahiers de l’Herne there is a short text on Beckett by another great thinker: Eugene Ionesco.
Here is a part of it:
… It is not from the social and political condition that Samuel Beckett suffers but rather from our existential condition, from the metaphysical situation of man. This malaise is inherent in the human condition. All societies are bad, all of humanity, all of creation, have lived in misfortune since the beginning of the world. We cannot help but suffer from it if we realize it. If we don’t realize it, we still suffer, less consciously. To be born and to die and between birth and death to kill to eat is not admissible. I was going to say, this is not “natural”. Creation has failed. It has to be redone. Doesn’t the Holy Books tell us about a renewed world? This tragic situation of man, life’s anguish, is a fact that does not come from capitalism or from Judeo-Christian thought. The Hindus, the Chinese, the pre-Colombians, all the vestiges that remain to us of archaic, or so-called primitive civilizations, prove to us that this, at least uncomfortable condition, has always been denounced or detected. Social condition only alleviates a little or aggravates this basic uneasiness of being in the world so all life is suffering. The animals themselves suffer, the whole universe suffers: aggression, defense, that is the essence of life. We struggle, we fight, against each other, we devour each other, we have to kill to eat because we live in a closed economy and nothing comes to us from elsewhere. No being accepts his death. For each being, man, animal, plant, its own death is identified with universal death. Everyone is agonizing for everyone and for everything. Our molecules also devour each other. If you look at a drop of water or a drop of blood under the microscope, you see war, destruction, killing. An ant separated from other ants, feels the threat, is anxious, tries to escape its death individual. Insect battalions wage war, rage, hurt and kill each other. It is the law of nature, it is the law of life, this is what we are told, This is also what we do not accept, it is precisely against this law that I am insurgent. This is what must be the fundamental object of our revolt. And then, afterwards, if He wants to create a new world, at least do it differently. No economic or political revolution has succeeded in abolishing this existential tragicomedy. I believe in the irremediable bankruptcy of revolutions, they only push man deeper into his misfortune. Whether we like it or not, neither Beckett, nor the great writers and artists of our time and of other times, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Faulkner, nor philosophers like Nietzsche or Kirkegaard, can be understood without metaphysics or religion, without the essential problem that haunted them, that they could not solve and against which they came up against knowing they cannot solve it. Historical upheavals can therefore only lead us from bad to worse. We can also find in Marx and many Utopians the degraded myths of revolutions: new Jerusalem, paradise lost, going beyond history, progress, that is to say the myth of ascension, renewal of man in his transfiguration, to realize his transmutation. There is even in Marx the theme of fundamental, objective guilt, so much so that, in the so-called socialist countries, the sons of the bourgeoisie were, in the fifteen to twenty years of the beginning of the revolution, considered objectively guilty and could not pursue higher studies. The individual was born guilty. In short, all the Judeo-Christian mythology is there in Marxism, with the original sin that we must all assume.
xxx
Help the Journal continue up Cold Mountain to find Han Shan residing by the Hippocrene..
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
I just want to thank you for introducing me to many great minds I wasn't aware of but are within the sphere of my interest. 🙂
Hot damn.