I walked through the city today and brought along an old friend, my Nikon D700. I have not used it in a while, but like many old friends, I still knew how to turn it on and what buttons to push.
Like most Sunday mornings, there were not many people around, which made it easier to ignore them. People are interesting, but I prefer the spaces they leave behind. The empty streets with all that is left tell many stories; I don’t need the noise from whoever left it.
26 Animals and morality. – The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank – all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world – and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one’s pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one’ s prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their colouring to the colouring of their surroundings (by virtue of the socalled ‘chromatic function’), pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colours of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate ‘mimicry’). Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘man’, or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place:
I just like to look at the one that supports me
Just focus on yourself
is what they say
don’t look behind
secure yourself
wisdom for the ones
who are alone
and dream about nothing
We talk to each other
turning on and off
feeling control
power
but does it ever end
do we ever turn the other on
is there any power
or are the switches there just
to keep the illusion
of a feeling
of control
alive
We all have to come together, they say sometimes.
To stand up against forces going backward or forward too fast or that go nowhere.
But when are there too many together, holding hands, intertwining into a fence?
Do we want to become a fence that, at time, someone else has to cut?
Can you stop when time is unavoidably against you?
Or is there no time in politics?
I see an empty space
it feels empty because something is missing
but not because there was never something
and what I wonder fits
We all walk in mist
into the mist
used to the closeness
of what we step on
the outlines
of where we think
we are going
20.
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism . Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions — they are both décadence religions — but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India. — Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity — it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.
Some levers you just want to use
to see the effect
even if you know it
That what brings you around
can also protect you from impacts
Is it the color
is it the crooked
is it the number
is it decay
did you choose
or did the choice choose you
The handle only turns itself loose
while the waters drain my empty inside
I keep turning with hope
but should let go
get a grip
on what is loose
You don’t drown in the darkness of shallow waters.
And while you have not let yourself to be filled in a long time.
You can see all around where your waters were once.
Just enjoy the moving reflection on your darkness whenever the light rises and sets again.
When you look down at the reflection of the sky in barely frozen water.
I will stay a little longer, till it moves — me.
1. The true world, attainable for the wise, the devout, the virtuous—they live in it, they are it.
(Oldest form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrase of the assertion, “I, Plato, am the truth.”)
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the devout, the virtuous (“to the sinner who does penance”).
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more devious, more mystifying—it becomes woman, it becomes Christian . . .)
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but a consolation, an obligation, an imperative, merely by virtue of being thought.
(The old sun basically, but glimpsed through fog and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pallid, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world—unattainable? In any case, unattained. And if it is unattained, it is also unknown. And hence it is not consoling, redeeming, or obligating either; to what could something unknown obligate us? . . .
(Gray dawn. First yawnings of reason. Rooster’s crow of positivism.)
5. The “true world”—an idea with no use anymore, no longer even obligating—an idea become useless, superfluous, hence a refuted idea: let’s do away with it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens [good sense] and cheerfulness; Plato blushes; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. We have done away with the true world: what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe? . . . But no! Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent!
Nochrisis 