There are a number of things that I believe in. For the record and for whatever they’re worth, here they are:
G-d exists in some definitive form outside of human knowledge or full awareness. The presence of G-d can be felt on occasion the way a cat might walk past a mirror and get a glimpse of herself but not really know that it’s her reflection in the mirror.
It’s quite possible that G-d was once here and, at some point, abandoned us, as the ancient Gnostics believed.
History is very long and life is very short. It’s troubling that the present government has a strong, albeit ideologically driven, understanding of the historical past but no way to interpret it and no way to set new life and action into the world.
Light comes from exhausted souls who seek presence in our lives.
Human communication is necessarily frail, incomplete, and inherently tragic because everything that wants to be said to another cannot. At the same time, it’s all we have to go on and we truly should be thankful for all forms of language.
Being surprised is one of the last forms of expressed innocence we have as adults.
In many ways, belief is the opposite of expressed innocence; it is the internalized activity of true experience.
A series of lovely colds swept through the place last week, leaving my written logs incomplete. But I have a number of in-house redesigns I’d like to accomplish this week and only with you, my willful reader, will I perhaps have a chance at fulfillment thanks to the inevitable public humiliation that will follow if I dare not act:
Redesign the MANOVERBOARD.com home page to allow for more text and updates
Slightly revise the Deckchairs home page to allow for more color and variety
Push Ruth Root’s incredible paintings to MANOVERBOARD.net once and for all
Send out The Telegraph, which went sadly unsent the month of March
I promise not to drag this dead horse around another time, but I was glad to see that someone on Metafilter posted a heavily commented piece on the possibility of a real real estate bubble.
(I had forgotten how great Metafilter is; I hadn’t posted to it in a long, long time.)
I was perusing a slim little design catalogue today and came across this quote by Walt Whitman which stuck with me all evening: To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
I recalled this passage again as I watched my daughter draw aimless strokes around a piece of paper, her eyes intently focused on the task at hand. I thought of the hour in which we’re living and I recognized briefly that this was the only hour, the most precious hour of our ridiculously short lives together. And then I felt the space around her, the breath she was taking and letting out, and I watched her sing a little song while drawing. These un-selfconscious songs are composed of words she knows but doesn’t necessarily understand and they feel like little chunks of the universe falling back on me when sung. I think the words were something like this: “Daddy’s older, he’s nine, he’s older.”
Recently someone asked ol’ Deckchairs guy “how many rooms on [sic] titanic.” Well, they didn’t actually ask but they did type it into the search engine at left (or at the bottom as I’m having some CSS problems), replacing “the hell” with their request.
I did a little research and found a site that seems to offer an accurate deck composition on board the Titanic. The total number of rooms: 214 in First Class, 207 in Second Class, and 222 in Third Class. Grand total: 643 rooms.
I look forward to more queries about the Titanic through our full-featured search form!
I’ve always wanted to post something at 11:59 pm. I’m usually either fast asleep or in the throes of creative endeavor (or both).
I’ve been thinking a bit about the process or trajectory of death. I wonder if the transition between, for instance, sleep and the few moments before death and then full and utter death itself is one of comfort, repose, and certainty or instability, insecurity, and illusion. I think this is the thing that bothers me most about death — the very act of dying, the process by which one’s consciousness is sloughed off into another true state far from one’s experiences or expectations.
As a Jew and a naturalist, I do believe that death, in its finality, cannot be hellish. No G-d worth his salt would want people, animals, plants, or other living things to suffer in eternity — which is a very long time I’ve heard. But as a paranoic, or at the very least a modernist, I wonder if there a screech between the two states, a hurried and lousy rush of feeling, a tension among a million competing parts for the soul to be pulled out into nothingness (or everythingness). I guess I also wonder if that is felt always or sometimes, depending upon the state of the dying and the partiality or fullness of consciousness, which brings me back to sleep, which I must now do.
It’s such terrible weather outside right now. Cold rain, icy streets, dark clouds. The skies look as if they are falling in on the earth, the air outside is nothing but raindrops, the color of everyone is grey. The cats inside are blinking their tired eyes and, for some reason, the lightbulbs here are humming. I wonder about the animals and the people who are outside and who aren’t going home because they don’t have one. I’m thinking about how luxurious it is to write under artificial light, in dryness, and on a newish keyboard.
A number of years ago I re-visited Majdanek, the concentration camp of concentration camps. In the middle of the camp there is a large mausaleum, where thousands of pounds of cremated bodies lie open to the wind and the public. The camp stands today, idly and the town around it grows. When I was there, it rained and poured and I was drenched. The wooden barracks smelled of death but were dry.
The world is wet and it appears that our entire civilization is built around keeping some dry.