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Being Creative

To be creative means becoming more familiar with being a little lost. If we are always full of what we want to do, there is no room for the new.

Chapel Hill

An Elegy For Jesse Stroud

There is no precipitating event for this elegy. No anniversary. No birthday. No cause whatever, other than personal need. Jesse Stroud lived, struggled, and died. I do not purposefully vilify nor vindicate. Neither do I celebrate. Certainly not regret.

The End Of The Modern World?

Looking Over The Edge Of History With William Irwin Thompson

A new world order is going to require a new way of thinking. Just as our American revolution was preceded by a philosophical revolution, and the heritage of the Enlightenment, in the same way you can look out in the world now, you begin to see the ideological origins of the new world order revolution. We’re still in the stage where it’s for the most part myth, art, religion and philosophy, and we haven’t yet moved into the stage of politics, economics, organization, implementation. Everything, it’s been said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

Travel

Crete, Sunday School, a room full of Rembrandts

Sunbeams

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Voltaire

Sunbeams

One must have apocalypse in one eye and the millennium in the other, and as you look out through that double vision, the third eye develops and sees the resolution of tragedy and conflict and the rest of it.

William Irwin Thompson

Why Are We Still Around?

Laughing At Ourselves

There’s something about a “New Age Cultural Event” that asks you to put your brain on hold, a flavor of contrived holiness and assumed agreement that makes you twitch all over.

Finding Balladeer Ed

(A Childish Tale)

After long days and nights, after asking and following the advice of many strangers, our hero of medieval aspect and suitcase indestructible beheld from a hill his journey’s end, the village of Balladeer Ed.

Apocalypse Later

Turning The Vietnam War Into A Cartoon Lets Everyone Off The Hook

Years ago I read an essay by Hannah Arendt in which she said that the Nuremburg trials were necessary because they assigned responsibility for crimes to people who, in fact, had the responsibility not to commit them. Her concept was that if one declared everybody in Germany guilty, then no one was guilty — guilt became a condition of being, or something connected to the stars, a notion antipathetic to anyone interested in establishing a little decency on earth.