28 April 2004

“In art the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which have passed through my head, and the less they understand me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited them as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.” --Pablo Picasso, Jardin des Arts (March 1964), trans.

via the Belgravia Dispatch. Gregory Djerejlan applies it it to life. He’s right - we must learn to look at ourselves that honestly.

( C: 2 )

Scribbled in my notebook - no guarantee of coherence or accuracy. Eat chicken.

The struggle of understanding existence is this: existence is both personal and impersonal. To know and study existence, it must be approached in a manner in concordance with the understanding sought - that is, to understand the personal, it must be approached subjectively [and personally]. To understand the objective, it must be approached objectively. But how does God fit into this? He is subjective - for he is personal. But he is objective - for he is unchanging. But he is both. He is beyond us - he is God.

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I’m in the midst of a book titled, “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity”. It’s a fascinating read so far, though I’ve only really read the first two chapters, and skimmed the third. This is a warning to you all. There will be, as I read through this book, discussion in this blog on the philosophy and physics of this book. If you have no interest in the theory of everything, you are welcome to skip those posts. pOE - you are not allowed to skip those posts. That is all for this post.

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27 April 2004

Continuing with the theme of, “Things People in the UK Think” (Why the UK, you might ask? Because these are links I happen to run across), 25% of UK’ers believe that Galactic Credits are a real currency. That’s, right - the currency from Star Wars.

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I’ve added some poems and a story to the non-blog sections. They are:

Narrative, a short story.

Lyrics to a song I may never write, named Just a Man

And three poems:

Death, a Rose
Can I Write...?
As a Child

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26 April 2004

“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation.....even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” - Leonardo da Vinci

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The most recent search for Noah’s Ark.

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25 April 2004

Children, especially the youngest of them, have little conception of time and space - beside the here and now. As their psyche develops, their conception of space and time increases - and, less and less, do they live in the moment... I wonder if there is more to this understanding than merely increasing our vision and forgetting that childlike view, which is no less wise or unsophisticated. I wonder if the next stage would be to comprehend this paradox as a whole - future, past, present; here and there; all appreciated for what they are, for their true importance.

( C: 1 )

24 April 2004

It’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay and is called, “First Fig”. I like it:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light.

( C: 2 )

Yes, I redesigned. It was about time, and I’d controlled my obsessive-compulsive creative instincts long enough. Enjoy.

EDIT: For the webheads (wonks? People interested in webdesign?) who hate spam, I’m, on the side bar, using a script which converts my email address to javascript code. The crawlers (which do not execute pages/scripts) only see a string of letters and numbers - complete gibberish to them. But the javascript executes when the page is loaded and voila, the email address is there... and spambot proof. It’s neat. And hopefully will cut down on my spam.

( C: 4 )

23 April 2004

4-23.
I’ve decided to perform something of an experiment. I’ve started a story. I have no idea how it will end, or what the plot will be. But I’ve resolved to add bits and pieces to it, as often as I can. Over this indeterminate period of time, I’ll finish the story, bit by bit, and we’ll all see how it ends together. I’ll bump the story to the top of the blog whenever I make an addition to it.

Is it acceptable to mention goals and motivations? Working on a story of a period of days (possibly weeks) will help me considerably, since I rarely can focus on anything for more than about an hour - which is why most of my stories end up fairly short. I’m also not writing in first person; I rarely write in third person, so this is gonna learn me, if you know what I mean. (If if you think, “He means -- he doesn’t know that “learn me” is incorrect English”, then you deserve a ‘F’ in knowing what I’m talking about) Finally, I’m interested in dialogue between multiple characters. Again, something I don’t often use, since I’m more often concerned with creating a mood, rather than telling a story or dwelling on characters.

Sean stuttered into the story.

Stuttered in. Stumbled in. Well, no – stumbling could imply an accident. Sean didn’t suddenly appear the way a stubbed toe normally appears: with an initial shock, muttered expletives, and a quick assessment of the damage. The initial shock was there. There were no known expletives and any assessment of the damage occurred far after the events had transpired.

His appearance in the story was more akin to that of an old film. The reel is fed into the projector, which slowly brings itself up to running speed. As the reels spins faster and faster, the light inside the projector flickers on – sending waves of non-particle particles though the cellophane. Some things travel quickly. Machines do not. As the spool spins with increasing speed, the sprockets grapple with the cellophane, and the machine speeds, images flicker to flat life. Shaky at first. Bit of jittering. Mere frames, or multiple frames. Darkness. Light. Shadow again. Another frame. Then an increasing consistency. The mechanism brings itself up to speed. Movement standardizes, and the movie plays in its linear way.

But stuttering starts it all.

Sean stuttered into the story.

( C: 3 )

21 April 2004

I now have a Amazon.com Wishlist.

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Blue, I suppose, is the color of the room. That’d be my first guess – though my second guess would be black. I’m not quite sure. The walls are dark, and that’s all I know. Even if the walls were black, how could I classify them as a color? I’ve heard somewhere (from some authority on the matter, I’m sure) that black isn’t really a color. I’m not sure about that. How can black not be a color, if it is the combination of all other colors? But an authority says so. I lack the skill to know one way or the other.

I don’t know whether the walls are blue or black. As a result, I’m not able to classify the walls as either a color or a non-color. The walls are dark. As is the rest of the room.

I sit on a chair in the center of this room. I don’t remember how I came to sit here. Or do I? I have something of a memory of how I arrived here: Read on...

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20 April 2004

Why do we treat “little” sins as if they hold no significance? This is something I do not understand - isn’t every action indicative of the inner man?

In the garden, the eating of the fruit might have been regarded (rationalized) as little or insignificant. After all, God had given permission to Adam and Even to eat of the other fruits - what would be wrong with this one? They merely were acting on their nature; they couldn’t help it. Adam and Eve were created to eat of the fruit of the garden. The physical act was coherent with what they were designed to do. And it was a little act. Only a piece of fruit.

Yet the act seperated them. Why? Because it was a direct act against God - as any act of disobedience is, no matter how small. The act altered their character in such a way that they became contrary to God - abhorrent to him. It was an immediate wall between man and God. Such a small act - excusable, nothing out of the ordinary, seperated them from God.

Why would our small things be any different? We treat sins such as adultery as somehow especially seperating. But it is not a specific act which seperates us - it is the problem of sin itself. And any act of sin, no matter how small, builds that wall. Why don’t we treat our small sins for what they are - except that we prefer to think ourselves fine?

( C: 3 )

19 April 2004

EDIT: What double post? ---- back to ripping all my CD’s to mp3.

Turns out, the neighbors (well, two blocks from me) found the most important CD case under some of their shrubs - so I got the majority of my CD’s back, which makes me happy. Unfortunately, the neighbors new the CD’s were mine because they were next to some soaked, ruined books, which had my name written inside the cover (I knew that would be useful someday). I hadn’t realized books were stolen and, oddly, I’m more upset about the books being ruined and tossed than the laptop being stolen. Perhaps it is because I had expected to replace the laptop someday. Electronics are inherently transient; there is no use in getting attached to them, since they will soon be replaced. Books, however, are more permanent - the books I buy today will probably remain with me the rest of my life. So I expect them to. It’s a grave loss, made worse since I don’t know which books were taken.

I suspect one of them was a 50’s or 60’s edition of Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s “Cost of Discipleship”. Apparently, not the type of book the typical thief is interested in.

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17 April 2004

Well, it’s been an odd several weeks.

First, I nearly got arrested filming a movie for a friend’s youth group (apparently, people are suspicious when men in trench coats are running around punching people and stabbing with swords - even though they [the stab/punchees] are getting helped up, and there is a camera running, and the same scene being repeated over and over). Suffice to say the guy with the sword, me, got cuffed and shoved in the back of a squad car. That was police incident Number One.

Number Two occurred when I was driving out of a town, and was pulled over for doing 63 in a 35. I was given a verbal warning.

Number Three was about five days later, when I was given a parking ticket.

Number Four occured when I was rushing to a store, in order to arrive before it closed. I was pulled over for a) blowing a stop sign b) having a tail light out and c) doing 70 in a 55. I received a nice speeding ticket. Quote: “You know I could write you up for three seperate accounts, right?” “Meh.”

Police incident Number Five occured yesterday when I went out to my car - which was sitting my nice, safe rural driveway - and discovered to my surprise that the headdeck was sticking out of my dashboard. I was briefly confused and looked around to discover that all of my CD’s were missing. All of them. 50 or so of them. At that point I realized that I had been thief’d. So, I called the police to report this and, upon the officer’s arrival, received the expected news: “There’s little we can really do about this.” “Neat!” I thought to myself.

Today, I realized that my laptop was also gone. I’d be really upset about that if I didn’t keep copies of all the important files (stories, a year’s worth of journals) on my PC. But still...

Interesting several weeks, it’s been.

( C: 6 )