Rotating Pilgrim

The Early Purges

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:20:32 +0000

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Don Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,
Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.
‘Sure isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.
Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung
Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.
Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,
I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:
‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
–Seamus Heaney

Terry Eagleton on Cultural Theory

Rotating Pilgrim — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:52:29 +0000

“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.” After Theory by Terry Eagleton, 2003.

Ode to a Cat

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:04:46 +0000

An excerpt from a Spanish poem dedicated to a cat, translated into English (sloppily):

Oh little
emperor without a sphere of influence
conqueror without a country,
smallest living-room tiger, nuptial
sultan of the sky,
of the erotic roof-tiles,
the wind of love
in the storm
you claim
when you pass
and place
four delicate feet
on the ground,
smelling,
distrusting
all that is terrestrial,
because everything
is too unclean
for the immaculate foot of the cat.

Oh independent wild beast
of the house
arrogant
vestige of the night,
lazy, gymnastic
and alien,
very deep cat,
secret policeman
of bedrooms,
insignia
of a
disappeared velvet,
surely there is no
enigma
in your manner,
perhaps you are not a mystery,
everyone knows of you
and you belong
to the least mysterious inhabitant,
perhaps everyone believes it,
everyone believes himself the owner,
proprietor,
uncle
of a cat,
companion,
colleague,
disciple
or friend
of his cat.

Not me.
I do not subscribe.
I do not know the cat.
I know it all, life and its archipelago,
the sea and the incalculable city,
botany,
the gyneceum and its frenzies,
the plus and the minus of mathematics,
the volcanic frauds of the world,
the unreal shell of the crocodile,
the unknown kindness of the fireman,
the blue atavism of the priest,
but I cannot decipher a cat.
My reason slips on his indifference,
his eyes have golden numbers.

“The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”

Rotating Pilgrim — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:15:16 +0000

“So I resolved to do a very peculiar thing. I resolved to keep death in view–constantly, daily. And if you’ve read a lot of my work on this blog, then you know how I continue to work through the dynamics of holding onto faith while simultaneously refusing to allow faith to repress death anxiety. I try to hold both–faith and death–firmly in view. And why, you might ask, would I intentionally engage in this odd and existentially unsettling activity? Why not let faith eliminate or repress my death anxiety? Because this path of mine is the only way I know of which can assure me that my faith isn’t, to use Sartre’s term, bad faith, that my faith has nothing to do with repressing death anxiety or awareness.”

“I might sound morbid, dwelling about death all the time. But I’m not depressive. The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness. Poignancy is the feeling I have when I tuck my boys in at night. Life is so short and I have no way to know how much time we will have together. It was poignant to drive my mom to MD Anderson. And it was poignant to wait for her during her appointments. I find everything, because the North Wind is with me, poignant. It is poignant to go to work. I is poignant to come home.”

From Experimental Theology:
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2010/04/george-macdonald-at-back-of-north-wind.html

Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

Rotating Pilgrim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:13:45 +0000

From The Onion:

Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

He turns on to 13th & Willamette, but so does the woman in the car.

Rotating Pilgrim — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:05:48 +0000

“Chances are we’ll each be lost to time. 100 billion people have been born before us. Most of them no longer exist as individuals in our memories. No names. Faces only reflected in our own and not in any way that really matters.

But not us. We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won’t be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they’ll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we’ve entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed.

We won’t matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names. $viewcount++.

Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade.”

- Joel Johnson
http://gizmodo.com/5491404/raiding-eternity

***

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.
- Woody Allen

Brother, Sister

Rotating Pilgrim — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:59:52 +0000

“Hallelujah, I have a sister. Hallelujah, I have a brother.” Don’t let the profundity of those words slip past you. Don’t let it be as plain as it may sound coming off your tongue. It is a sheer and raw fact. It is defiant. It is obstinate. It shall smack you in the face, as surely as the fact that you will die someday.

Someone you did not choose and could never have designed, requested, or planned for is there. From when simple camaraderie infects your interactions and takes you to where you are home, to when greatly beyond all others they have gotten on your nerves and upset you – ponder the miracle bestowed upon you.

Whatever you do, don’t be indifferent. Don’t be modern (read: bored). What would it take for this to hit you? The threat of their absence from your life? Well that threat is quite real and certain. It will happen eventually.

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” – GK Chesterton

What’s to come?

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:48:54 +0000

What to write about? I’m brainstorming some topics I can write about but I just haven’t made time for reading/writing like I used to enjoy in college.

I have some essays and books I’d like to discuss and dissect. Hopefully I can put something together for the next week.

I can’t hardly expect to draw any sort of audience if I’m not producing content. So, enough talk. Hope to have something to show for it soon.

Testing MacJournal

Rotating Pilgrim — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:05:27 +0000

Testing out publishing to wordpress from MacJournal.

A thought about education.

Rotating Pilgrim — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:48:54 +0000

The modern theory of education, heavily influenced by the captains of early 20th century industry, calls for indoctrination to factory standards: sitting still for long periods of time, remaining quiet in group situations, responding to bells, obedience within a linear hierarchy of absolute authority, acclimation to a high degree of control and constraint. In the last 10-20 years we have increasingly adopted a “prison model” atop the “factory model” as well, with locker searches, drug dogs, etc

The structure of education is teaching children just as much as the content of their textbooks … it is forming their lifelong impressions of their relationship with society.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss…