Showing posts with label absurdity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label absurdity. Show all posts

Thursday, October 6, 2011

The Clinically Depressed Trickster Figure


You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later...
Mitch Hedberg

...turning leaves, blankets and warmer clothing, and lotsa tasty stuff made from various forms of squash...shifting from that edgy, anxious spring-and-summertime depression to the more cozy, lethargic fall-and-winter variety...

We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

a mystic looks at the universe and sees mystery...an existentialist looks at the universe and sees absurdity...I look at the universe and see absurd mystery...or mysterious absurdity...

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Chuang Tzu

...would like to start a non-religion based around a clinically depressed trickster figure...offering annual, year-long retreats at the long-awaited Yoga for Cynics ashram...where the mountains kiss the sea and floppy-eared dogs wander among recycled building materials inscribed with inspiring words from Chuang Tzu, William Blake, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Mitch Hedberg....all specific commandments, sutras, and holy dogma written on any available outdoor surface in colored chalk, to be seen, or changed, or ignored, by anyone at any time, or simply washed away by the rain...

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
William Blake



*was looking for an image for this post and googled “trickster figure”...and what did I see but the cover of this obscure book of literary criticism called Trickster Lives, published a full decade ago, now, and happening to feature a chapter on a poet named Thylias Moss, written—in semi-fluent academic jargon—by none other than your humble author in PhD-student mode...never woulda imagined that was still in print...*

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Shuffling Through the Chaos


I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with the lost.
Anonymous (but quoted by somebody in my high school yearbook)

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan

Carolyn, the legendary laughing yogini, was kind enough to give this humble blog an award, referring to it as a "reality” yoga blog, and praising it for being honest and funny....to plagiarize my own comment on her blog, which I hope she’ll forgive me for (nobody said anything about being original)...I think reality, honesty, and humor go hand in hand...humorlessness pretty much requires you to impose a strict and all encompassing order on reality, denying absurdity...while humor is about looking at absurdity and saying if ya can't beat it, join it....

...of course one thing about absurdity is it’s hard to identify...I mean, just because something doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t necessarily make it absurd...though it might make me a bit absurd if it’s something everybody else seems to understand...which seems to be the case an awful lot of the time...

...I’m not really into the transmigration of souls thing...generally far more interested in finding out if there’s really life before death...nonetheless, I’ve read the Tibetan Book of the Dead...and suspect that if there really is a bardo...a place in between lives...there’s gotta be some kinda Bardo State College where they offer courses like How to Be a Functioning Human Being 101...and, if so, I must’ve been sitting in the back of the classroom drawing pictures in the margins of my notebook when I should've been paying attention, particularly during lectures like How to Make Sense of Other Human Beings...then, looking around, it appears at least I wasn’t alone back there...

...the things I do understand that a lot of people don’t tend to be unanswerable questions...or questions with so many conflicting answers that you certainly can’t come to anything like a definite conclusion ...except to say that there isn’t one...and that’s where I tend to be good...I get that both a and b are kind of true and kind of false and kind of neither...confusion is kinda like the air that I breathe...which might actually be a good thing...and a bad thing...and neither...