Monday, August 17, 2015

Sound Bites



American consciousness, properly understood, is a very specific (and potentially salutary) form of insanity, richly imaginative, rapid and inventive, its thought graced with riff notes and ellipses, its social and moral realizations, tardy though they often may be, exemplars nonetheless of stuttering magnificence.

       In making political choices I tend to favor the alternative more likely to bring us to the inevitable catastrophe least rapidly.

       "Dogma is a thought structure deemed essential to the attainment of a specific psychic good posited as otherwise unobtainable. Knowledge received of and transmitted solely by authority, it can only be (and therefore must be) validated by individual experience, a validation the result of which is individual assent and as such is itself exclusively a psychic reality that therefore falls outside the ordinary boundaries of communal fact. It is communicable only inwardly as the solitary conversation of the soul with itself or directly soul to soul from the depths of shared silence." Zadecki, Melvin K. In the Lee Spaces. New Jersey: Augustinian AeroPress, 1998. Print.

The only dream worthy to be called the American dream is the dream of a utopian community in a world at peace.

"The question of weapons of mass destruction is perceived as a crucial moral question particular to our time. Let us be clear, however, for clarity of thought and expression is among the highest of our obligations as military men: in war, unless you are speaking of individual hand-to-hand combat, you are, by definition, talking about weapons of mass destruction. The history of warfare as such is in fact entirely the history of the "improvements" in  such weaponry." Commencement Address, Universitatis Pacificus,  June 2013, General Pensativo "Merc" Guerrer, USAF (Ret.).

Politics, once the art of confirming destiny, has in our age devolved to the applied science, rote and mechanical, of fabricating chronological time.

"A reminder to the more rabid of our conservationists: there is no evolution without extinction, otherwise we would be able to see a dinosaur at our local zoo and meet a Neanderthal at our local pub. And to our social Darwinists awakened to a Malthusian nightmare: one best be extremely cautious and entirely committed when applying the principle just enunciated to the swell of one's fellow man." Brakwynd, Reverend R. Hamilton Imprecations Secular and Divine. Des Moines: Second Chance Press, 2002. Print.

The mind is the "sensory" organ of the soul, at one and the same time its voice and its ear, its speech and its hearing.

"His sense of self worth is so grossly inflated that  he reads Scripture as autobiography." (Overheard in a conversation between a cleric and a nun in a coaster line at Cedar Point, Ohio).

"If philosophy is understood to be the love of wisdom, then its role as psychological function (and thus the root of its necessity and justification of its utility) lies solely in the navigation between the primal human questions Why? and Why Not?" Rambelon, Henri. "Nightcaps, Norms, and Nocturns." American Megalopolis Jan. 2012: 41-48. Print.

Love liberates the beloved and incarcerates the lover. (Written on the restroom wall in The House of Swing, South Euclid, Ohio)