Friday, December 18, 2009

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky


Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

8 comments:

human being said...

nonsense is when we want to say, it's none of your business... when we want to be oursleves without trying to justify what we say...
+
climbing through windows is a nonsensical behavior...
+
the child's crisis ends when s/he comes to this realization that this is the mother who is separated from her/him...
+
'nothing' is everything considered together...
+
the hollywood culture teaches us to see things separately... the consequence is that the more we have, the more we want...

=

stop watching films... kiss your mother goodbye and talk nonsense while hitchhiking...

-->

you'll have nothing... which sums up to everything...

:D

that was the lesson i learned here, dear yogi...

Silliyak said...

I'll settle for wanting everything I have.

christopher said...

I quite liked the drunk bear story, though that's so completely a Jimmy Buffett song that I have to wonder if its real.

The song is "God's Own Drunk" and I would post the lyrics here, but they are quite long, because this is a great story song. I often quote, "Mr. Bear, I love every hair on your twenty seven acre body..." Because that is one of the nonsenes things I do.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/j/jimmy_buffett/gods_own_drunk.html

RB said...

i always feel like the hardest thing about life is that when we feel really intense joy--we feel the opposite as well: we'll eventually lose it.

I guess the idea of non-attachment has helped me to deal with the feeling that something is lacking. But our society is geared to make us think every moment is inadequate--just a step to something better that never comes...

14theroad said...

The crisis ends only when we surrender to the right hemisphere of the brain which knows only the present moment and oneness with the universe. Say during a stroke on the left side of the brain (the part endowed with language, concepts of past, future and separateness) allowing the right hemisphere to take over without the mental chatter. And then there's always yoga...

earthtoholly said...

Sharing your day with George Harrison is veeery cool, drjay.

Hmmm, I lived my first few years mostly away from my mother, however, I see her as the "autonomous, lonely being" rather than myself. Not that I'm normal...

Heh, heh "...Pink Floyd played here..." Still laughing.

the walking man said...

having enough is in fact enough

Edward J. Taylor said...

I had a parallel experience to your one in Pompeii. During my Japan years, I found myself as a national finalist at a martial arts demo. Standing on the floor of the Budokan beside the other finalists, who seemed proud to be representing their home prefectures, I found myself thinking, "wow, The Beatles played here, man! And Dylan, Cheap Trick..."