Xn3cTs

wrote this circa 2004…

—

I think the better version of that witticism is “I’m a vegetarian not because I love animals. It’s because I hate plants.”

The anecdote might have been simply a hyperbole to convey what I think is a very wise teaching: should it ever come to a point when one’s uncompromising principles lead to the possible loss of compassion, better relax and compromise. I think the head-monk ate the meat not so much because he didn’t want to refuse the host but because his fellow-monks were berating the hotel staff.

Likewise, the “animal-loving misanthropist” bit simply referred to the abundant cases of eccentrics who get featured in the media who shun human society and spend millions of dollars for the upkeep of their pet cats/dogs.

I wasn’t all that concerned with vegetarianism per se.

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Tags: Conrad de Quiros, Elizabeth Chionglo, Graham Greene, Masada, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Vegetarianism
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Felix (d) Culpa (Cat)!

O Felix culpa! (“O Happy Fault!”) – St. Augustine

1. I love filipino komiks! I used to read Wakasan, Aliwan, Tagalog Klasiks, Superstar, Pilipino, and others whose names I forget at the moment. Of course, there was also Liwayway… =)
2. Myth is greater than fact. Fact is just, well, a fact. Boring.
3. That women are considered evil by men is just the fear/fascination they have for mystery/strangeness/otherness. What is strange/other is conveniently reduced to “evil.” But these are the “little men,” the “last men.”
4. As for me, I love women. Ergo, I love evil! Mwahahaha! Nietzsche: “What if truth were a woman?” Then the metaphysicians of old would grow weak and discouraged, their monolithic dick-truth going flabby and limping, sad… But not only is truth a woman (read: truth is a lie), life itself is woman!

felicitous and culpable,
ian

Tags: Evil, Filipino Komiks, Nietzsche, Women
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Mwahahahaha! Just had to let the cosmic laughter resonate, no, reverberate in my body…

Everything is grace! Even when shit happens… Divine piss, holy shit!

I have always been wary of spirituality/religiosity that denied/denigrated the body. Non summus angeli! (We’re no angels!)

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Tags: Authenticity, Books, Buddhism, Illusion, Masks, Movies, Philosophy, spirituality
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From “The Book of Lights” by Chaim Potok:

“From the age of fifteen until the age of twenty-one he lived in the apartment world of his aunt’s whispery talking and his uncle’s coughs and brooding silence, and he did not know which was more frightening. For a while after his cousin’s death he thought his family had somehow been singled out for a special curse. But he talked to friends and found that throughout the neighborhood ran a twisting river of random events: parents died in slow or sudden ways, children were killed, relatives slipped young from life. The world seemed a strangely terrifying place when you really thought about it. He tried not to think about it too often.

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Tags: , Art, Books, Chaim Potok, religion, Writing
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“… Listen to Me in the truth of your soul. Listen to Me in the feelings of your heart. Listen to Me in the quiet of your mind.

“Hear Me, everywhere. Whenever you have a question, simply know that I have answered it already. Then open your eyes to your world. My response could be in an article already published. In the sermon already written and about to be delivered. In the movie now being made. In the song just yesterday composed. In the words about to be said by a loved one. In the heart of a new friend about to be made.

“My Truth is in the whisper of the wind, the babble of the brook, the crack of the thunder, the tap of the rain.

“It is the feel of the earth, the fragrance of the lily, the warmth of the sun, the pull of the moon.

“My Truth – and your surest help in time of need – is as awesome as the night sky, and as simply, incontrovertibly, trustful as a baby’s gurgle.

“It is as loud as a pounding heartbeat – and as quiet as a breath taken in unity with Me.

“I will not leave you, I cannot leave you, for you are My creation and My product, My daughter and My son, My purpose and My… ‘Self.’”

—

The above quotation is from the last portion of Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God, Book 1.” I’m quoting it at length because I think it gives a general idea of what pantheism is all about.

Pantheism is, simply put, the belief that God is everything, or conversely, that everything is God. Of course, some philosophers have pointed out that pantheism is virtually an atheism. To believe that everything is God is to make the idea of “God” profane. If God is immanent (to the universe) and not transcendent, then why use the word “God” at all? The very notion of “God,” they argue, presupposes the idea of “transcendence.” Pantheism, insofar as it denies the transcendence of God, is virtually an atheism.

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Tags: Books, Conversations with God, Hegel, Life, Nietzsche, Philosophy, spirituality, Translation, Writing
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I am a Nietzsche fan. In fact, one of the things that drew me to him was the fact that he became insane. Mwahahaha! (SFX: Stinger from “Psycho”)A curious fact: When Nietzsche finally had a breakdown in 1888(?) in Turin, Italy, it was occasioned by his seeing a coach-driver cruelly beating up a horse. He ran up weeping to embrace the horse.

I know that Nietzsche has read Dostoyevski (his contemporary), but am not sure whether he has read “Crime and Punishment.” In the novel, Raskolnikov dreams of someone beating up a horse and him trying to stop the beating.

Is this a case of (an unconscious) life imitating art, or a simple weird coincidence? (Raskolnikov murdered an old woman. Nietzsche proclaimed the “death of God.”)

—

I also encountered a book by Joan Stambaugh, “The Other Nietzsche” where she discusses a slightly different, a mystic Nietzsche. She also sees an affinity between Nietzsche and Spinoza, who was a pantheist. (Nietzsche, a pantheist?) I know this might seem quite far-fetched but there are several scholars who are inclined to this interpretation.

I consider myself a pantheist now, so I guess I have to confess I am inclined to see Nietzsche in that light. (With apologies to hard-core atheists.)

best regards,
nietzsche-ian

Tags: , Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche
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Saw Cinema Paradiso years ago. In it, an old man tells a young man this beautiful story about the lover who on the eve of finally fulfilling his desire (i.e., getting his love), left, without so much as a word or explanation.

Why did he leave? Did he resent the fact that his love had to test his love? Did he get scared of the impending success of his quest? Did he tire of the waiting? Lost his love/desire? Gotten what he wanted (proven to himself that he had the capacity to suffer for his love)?

We do not know.

Why would we give up something/someone that we desire (with the whole of our being) just when we’re about to get it/her/him?

That story is what in the film made the deepest impression in me.

Many years later, I got to read this book by Roland Barthes, “A Lover’s Discourse” (1977). In the section entitled “Waiting,” we find this fragment:

“A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,’ she told him, ‘When you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.’ But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.”

Tags: Cinema Paradiso, Desire, Love, Roland Barthes, Waiting
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Books Liked/Loved:

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexander Dumas)
El Filibusterismo (Jose Rizal)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
The Favourite Game (Leonard Cohen)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra / Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Trial / Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
Doktor Faustus (Thomas Mann)
Cubao Midnight Express (Tony Perez)
The Alphabet of Grace (Frederick Buechner)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
Written on the Body (Jeanette Winterson)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevski)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
Personal (Rene Villanueva)
Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
Siddharta / Narcissus and Goldmund (Herman Hesse)
The Book of Lights (Chaim Potok)
Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
A Little Book on the Human Shadow / Iron John (Robert Bly)
It Is Here Now – Are You? (Bhagavan Das)
The Last Three Minutes (Paul Davies)
The Dancing Wu-Li Masters (Gary Zukav)
The Clowns of God (Morris West)
Zen Guitar (Philip Toshio Sudo)
Sophie’s Choice (William Styron)
The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron)
The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth)
Inside the Music (interviews with contemporary musicians)
Writing Down the Bones (Natalie Goldberg)
Ordinary People (Judith Guest)
The Teachings of Don Juan (Carlos Castaneda)

Tags: Art, Books, Life, Literature, Love, Music, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, spirituality, Writing
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“Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold, and I’m gettin’ old.”

– Neil Young, “Heart of Gold”

—

A few months ago, I met Lizza, who’s in her early 30’s. When she realized I was older, she talked about “feeling it.” The coming of age. Old age… and all its concomitant side effects.

I feel the same. There’s a certain wistfulness in the realization that time’s passing. And that sooner or later, time, my time, will be up.

Most of my friends and acquaintances merely laugh it off.

I don’t. (Or, I try to, only that I imagine hearing a faint echo, as if the grim reaper itself were Old Sir Mick singing “Time is on My Side.”)

I feel old. Even when I feel young inside, my body feels old.

Even what I used to think was this raging fire inside my soul seems to be just dying embers.

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Tags: Aging, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Life, Love, Love in the Time of Cholera, Milan Kundera, Mortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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