Epigraphs

These are my contenders for summative quotes from this week’s group of readings to stand as epigraphs for this course.

“We need to invent fire once more, to settle down once again to the job of appeasing the body’s hunger.” Camus, p 140

“If (s)he is hungry for bread and heather, and if it is true that bread is the more necessary, let us learn how to keep the memory of heather alive.” Camus, p 142

“His long stubbornness has more meaning than his revolt against the gods.” Camus p 142

“Death lies not

in not being able to communicate

but in no longer being understood.” Pasolini, p. 333

“Yeah (I have to admit),

I’m in a state of confusion, Miss.” Pasolini, p 349

“The point was to humiliate a humiliated man...illness.) Pasolini, p 351

“Action is a WE not an I.”

“That is a real problem of every philosophy or history: How it is possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it [history] couldn’t have happened otherwise? Arendt p. 56

“ Where Hannah Arendt, for example, is able to fluidly cross between German, French and English she will still miss aspects of the intricacies of other languages, as does English within her interview.”

Arendt refused to be filmed for the interview [at home]?  I know I hate being seen on film, especially seen and heard on film because it causes a jarring encapsulation of a thought precisely to the words spoken NOT necessarily what was meant or what was understood at the time, between those people.  Truth is NOT the understanding of each word in itself or in its sentence but is somewhere in truth in time and may come around again to the truth.  Do writers believe more or less in the infallibility of a word.  There is always a translation between thought and words.  The language you use is indicative of the way and place and time in which you are reared.  Of course I do not understand what you are saying but can get a glimpse of it, a mirror reflection, an echo of the silence that points to a direction of communion if not communication with the other.

Prometheus in the Underworld:

P 139

Choose hell over quest for beauty because get caught up in the delusions of tyrants and madmen. And don’t realize until you are already on the path- wait what have I done? “Who shouted, it was the sun, Slapping Chen, NO HOPE”

“I took my place i the queue shuffling toward the open mouth of hell. Little by little, we entered.  At the first cry of murdered innocence, the door slammed shut behind us.”

P 141

“...blind justice does not exist, that history has no eyes, and that we must therefore reject its justice in order to replace it as much as possible with the justice conceived by the mind. This is how Prometheus returns in our century.”

We are in a new century. I’m afraid that western politicians have forgotten the horrors of war; they seem to be flirting with war for the glory and status like a bully picking a fight that they “know” they can win.  Eventually the bully gets knocked down- either by the pipsqueak who has nothing to lose and plays by different rules or by a bigger bully.  Hermes mocks Prometheus, “I am amazed that, being a god, you did not foresee the torment you are suffering.” “I did see it,” replied the rebel.”

Artists are the rebels.  Artists can accept this challenge from the Prometheus.  

“I promise you, O mortals, both improvement and repair, if you are skillful, virtuous, and strong enough to achieve them with your own hands.”

P 142

“...any mutilation of man can only be temporary, and that one serves nothing if one does not serve the whole man.”

Bernie over Hillary.  Hillary tried to feed the body first, to be a pragmatist,  to be reasonable.  Bernie was virtuous and strong but not skillful enough to take on the machine of shuffling civil servants en queue to Hell.

Mass incarceration, public education, health care.

Arendt, last interview

P 53

“See, this is not a nation-state, America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time to understand the simple fact which, after all, they could know theoretically; it is this country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the from the same... There are no natives here.  The natives were the Indians. Everything else are citizens and these citizens are united only by one thing and that's a lot: that is, you become a citizen in the United States by simple consent to the Constitution.” republic

P 54 Constitutional crisis of a head-on lash between the legislative and the executive offices.

Greatest danger of tyranny is of course the executive. A republic not a democracy- in order to preserve the voice of the minority and the plurality of opinion. TYranny could be the majority- majority rules but there is always opposition.

“I felt the Gods were lacking as long as there was nothing to oppose them.

Lucian, Prometheus in the Caucasus”

Opening quote from Prometheus in the Underworld

P 55

“They took it because they didn’t have any other framework.”

Why we suffer fools.  Because they are foolishly willing to lead even if they know there udea is not going to work.  Willing to fail, but try, Churchhill-  Democracy is a failure but it is the best I can find.  

P 56

We don’t know the future- too many contingencies.

Action is a WE not an I. Tyrants and Zealots act for a foreseeable future.  The future is not known, living to be remembered or to dictate the future is not a worthy goal because you sacrifice the now and the integrity of basing your actions on what IS knows.

“This shows that things were still alrights even if they were wrong because bureaucrats (like McNamara) still wanted to learn from what happened even if it is “not pretty””

P 57

Political will to dominate and to “believe the image” not succeeded (1973) because “Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel perfectly free in this country”

Rene Char (mis)quote-

“Notre heritage n’est garanti par aucun testament.”

Accurate quote-

“Notre heritage n’est precede par aucun testament.”

“We are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and the thoughts of our past.”

“ Every human being as a thinking being can reflect as well as I do and can therefore judge for himself”

“ the only thing that can help us I think is really to rephrase left you and to always mean to think critically period and to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules General convictions exedra.

“ That is,  there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous Enterprise. I think non-thinking is even more dangerous.

Calvinist, student centered classrooms, teaching for liberation, ability to think at all is a freedom that balances justice.

P 60

“First of all a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny. I analyzed totalitarian government what is the new form of government that wasn't known before I tried to enumerate its main characteristics. One characteristic is entirely absent from all tyrannies today and that is the role of the innocent the innocent victim. Under Stalin you didn't have to do anything in order to be deported or an order to be killed. You were given a role according to the dynamism of history and you had to play this role no matter what you did. No government before has killed people for saying yes period usually a government kills people or tyron's kill people for saying no. Now I was reminded by friend that's something very similar has been said stop by some Chinese many centuries ago namely that men who have the impertinence to approve are no better and they Disobedience will pose. This of course is the quintessential sign of totalitarianism and that there is a Total Domination of men, by men. “

“The great Political Criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter.”

Arendt quote Brecht

Undermine the “greatness” of evil.  If he is a clown he will remain a clown no matter how many millions of people he kills. It is the ruling class allows a small crook to become a great crook. To undermine this you must keep your integrity by remembering your old way of looking at such things and laugh at the clown instead of fearing him.

Pasolini, tr. Stephan Sartarelli. A Desperate Vitality

P 331

“- I am like a cat burned alive crushed by a tractor trailer’s Wheels home by boys from a fig tree, But with 8 of its nine lives so left like a snake redo used to a bloody pulp a half-eaten eel.”

So many connections

The cruelty of man is without limit but nature, truth, justice are limited.

The pretty fiance that pulled the legs of the mosquito

The cat that ate her young.

Gassed prisoners

Crushed under a machines wheel

Tortured by innocents

There is not innocent bystander

From a fig tree- fig and grapes and heather

Liberty and beauty corrupted by the unlimited indifference of men

To kill

To kill without thinking

To kill as part of a machine is the same- not questioning, not critical not finding your moral compass for yourself

P 335

“How little it takes to shrink his snarl to the sulk of a mama's boy on death row .”

Like Arendt’s quote of Brecht laugh at the fool to undermine his power to perpetrate evil.

“Neo capitalism has won and I'm on the street as a poet, ah [sob] and as a citizen [another sob].”

America is a republic made up of citizens who consent to the constitution.  If Capitalism wins then we are no longer citizens just cogs in the wheel of the tyrannical machine steered by the dictatorship of the majority of the ruling class.

Capitalism is the rallying cry of the right.  Democracy is the cry of the left.  Isolationism and Nationalism is the cry of the alt right.  Freedom and Equality is the cry of the alt left.  There is opposition, but is the opposition creating such a rumble that a citizen cannot think?

Struggles when you know you will loose but you resist anyway, not to get somewhere but because it is the right thing to do according to your truth:

“A fascist victory! Write, write. Let them know (them!) that I know:

conscious as an injured bird that gently dies but never never forgives.”

“He took move it to his side and like a cracked skin up there in the world that precede life laid his hand on his head and altered the curse” whacky voice to text  353

“You shall descend into the world, be innocent and kind, faithful and fair;  you shall have an endless capacity for obedience, and an endless capacity for rebellion you shall be pure. For this I curse you”

“My God, then what have you got to show for yourself?...

“Me? -

Me? A desperate vitality.”

Is this a why bother statement?

Away from nihilism

Desperate vitality I know that it is hopeless (none of us are getting out of here alive!) but live fully nonetheless- is this absurd or spiritual?

BE HERE NOW

DO WHATS RIGHT (NOW)