It’s absurd. All of it. And the only thing to do, perhaps, is to point it out. So to liberate ourselves from all this... foolishness. Or, at the very least, to better laugh at this—what’s ahead, behind, left, right, above, below: Our Stupendous Folly. How is the world better off?
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Showing posts from December, 2005
“Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals…Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations…represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being .” “The suffering of being: that is the free play of every faculty. Because the pernicious devotion of habit [paralyzes] our attention, drugs those handmaidens of perception whose cooperation is not absolutely essential.” —Excerpted from Samuel Beckett’s essay on Proust (via Esslin’s “The Search for the Self”)
Him: (He leans forward.) Tell me. Tell me your passions. Her: Why? —No . I’ll tell you why. It’s because— Him: (His smile grows.) Because , I’m interes — Her: Because, you want to get into my pants. That’s why. (Pause.) Him: (He leans back.) I will love you in any way you see fit. Her: Will you? Him : (His smile wilts.) Yes. What other choice have I? Her: They say: “ Attraction is not a choice.” But Love? You may have a choice with that . Considering how one will fall In, and then, Out.
Whilst The “Engine” Idles
You’re there, at a downtown cathedral, attending a funeral. You’re sitting in the second pew closest to the pulpit. And you’re watching Father Boivin carry out all the necessary Roman Catholic rituals. And you’re thinking: This is what I should be doing. The great escape into Ritual. Indeed, one possibly liberating—yet also possibly limiting—aspect of organized religion is the organization itself. One needn’t think, one simply does. God will fill in the blanks. Time will not sink its claws, so long as one is occupied—with Ritual—with relevant Ritual. After all, nothing soul-destroys quite like hollow Ritual. And the Religious Practitioner, of course (as opposed to the more prosaic rituals practiced by the factory worker, the stock-boy, or the book-keeper), is charged with effectuating ceremonies of Divine Magnitude. Thus, it is safe to suggest that there is next to nothing Holy about stocking shelves with Campbell’s soup—although, Sam M. Walton and Douglas R. Conant might disagree. Ano