August 31, 2010

I cannot be pinned down here and now
because I live as well with the dead
as with the unborn
somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual
but still not close enough.


(inscription on Paul Klee's tomb)
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

August 30, 2010

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being [die Nahe des Seins], he must first learn to exist in namelessness [Namenlosen]. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.


Martin Heidegger

August 29, 2010

The self and things are mutually responsive to each other; things do not move the self nor vice versa. There is only one world, one scene. 


Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, pg. 32

August 28, 2010

Study self-pity seriously -- it finds us out in our most puerile parts. 


Jane Heap

August 27, 2010

Under every deep, another deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

August 26, 2010

Everywhere we encounter things,
yet we only ever find the absolute.

August 25, 2010

Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

August 23, 2010

One doesn't enter Nothingness, one becomes it.

Roger Munier

August 22, 2010

the water's void
takes shape as a fish
Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words. 


Rilke, Letters on Life, pg. 3

August 21, 2010

In time there is no present, there never has been one, and there never will be one.


Michel Henry, I Am the Truth, pg. 19

August 20, 2010

Givenness can be understood [...] as the yielding of the self to the allure and turning toward it attentively.


to let the world

August 19, 2010

each thing
its infinity
To be in this world is to be ever entering a material space of radiance.

Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, pg. 1
The present, while being determined, is something whose determination should be denied. What is made, while being something that has gone by, goes to make what makes. Here we find the continuity of discontinuity, the self-limitation of nothingness. . . . The individual formation of the self is not a continuity from act to act but, rather, should be a continuity from what is made to what makes. In other words, it must be a historical continuity.

Nishida Kitaro

August 18, 2010

Somewhere, there must be a realm between, a realm akin to that ultimate realm where motion becomes rest and rest motion.

Suppose I flay about me with my arms. As I do so, I lose a certain amount of intellectual blood. Suppose I allow myself, however briefly, to think before I strike. At that moment, my blow is doomed to failure.

Somewhere, I told myself, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them.

That principle, it occurred to me, was death.

And yet, my idea of death was too mystical; I was forgetting the plain, physical aspect of death.

Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, pg. 92
For Bushido it is the good will in-itself which has an absolute value. And it does not matter if it is an unsatisfied will, an unrealizable ideal --the life of misfortune and sadness, "the disconsolate empire of thirst and grief," in sum, that "time lost" perpetually repeating itself. Confront transmigration without fear, valiantly. Pursue perfection while maintaining a clear consciousness as to its "deception." Live in perpetual time, in Endlosigkeit, to use Hegel's terms. Find Unendlichkeit in Endlosigkeit, infinity in endlessness, eternity in succession without end.

Kuki Shuzo

August 17, 2010

Spiritual acts do not stop as events within the mind but must seek expression in the body. Expressive movements are not external signs of spiritual phenomena but are states of their development and completion. The spiritual act and the expressive movement are one act internally. Thus, our language is not a sign of thought but is an expressive movement of thought. Thought perfects itself through language. However, our world is not merely one that has been expressed by thought and language. Our spiritual acts are infinite activities, and each possesses its own world of expression. As the act of pure visual perception develops into language, it naturally moves our body and develops into a kind of expressive movement. This is the creative act of the artist. From this standpoint the world of concepts suddenly dissolves, and the prospect of a world of infinite visual perception opens up.

Nishida Kitaro
as quoted in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, pg. 291

August 16, 2010

We don’t need to cling to the self to enjoy life. Life is naturally rich and abundant.

Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through, pg. 11



Does "life" exist? I see only a desperate, unbridled will to survive.

Roger Munier, Le Su et L'Insu, pg. 48