The question is do I care. I think the answer is no. If could do a Doolittle and talk to the sums, they'd talk back, say things like He has to be one of those retarded boomers and go on to say incomprehensible things like Have you checked the compatibility of your browser and the platform you're downloading to. The answer to that question is I don't know how to. Always tempting to open a window and start throwing things out of it. The sooner I achieve nothingness the more at home I'll be
Creative Is.
The Bean with the beautiful name
Yes always sounds about right, unless the question is "Have you found your ending yet?" My favorite answer to that question is "It's not a craft, I don't do product, it doesn't need an ending." Creative Is my friends. Think of it as a journey into the future, a communion of wish, beyond consumption, fundamentally useless and yet it's work, and like pornography you know an end when you see one
The Welsh Bards
Milkweeds
Maybe Taliesin needs an explanation? We're talking the years of our lord 500 to 600 after the birth that gave us a renaming of the Winter Solstice. At that time the Roman Legions had runaway and The Welsh, The Compatriots or The Cymry, comprised the remnants of the Old Britons who had occupied the islands of Britannia in the years prior to the Roman Arrival in 55 BC, a tumult which would have had included Boadicea, or, if you still have a grudge against Rome, Boudica. The Welsh included Romanized Britons, some of whom could have read Latin, there were Christians as well as a reemergence of Celtic Gods, including a rather glamorous Irish Sun Goddess who had a knack for avoiding the attentions of powerful men. Along the East of the Islands, Saxons, Angles, Picts, Jutes and other savages were arriving in increasing numbers. The Welsh themselves were a long way from maintaining a Welsh Peace in Britannia. No. Instead they were setting the tone for the post-roman British Isles, they were a bunch of relatively civilized quarreling Kings and Princes. And yes, they had slaves, they had Saints, wise-men and a bardic tradition which went back two thousand years, and might have witnessed the long drawn out building of a structure called Stonehenge, off the A 303 in Wiltshire. Bards of the old tradition composed the poems, their role was to memorize and when called upon to recite the poems that came before them. They were the performers who carried history, praised kings, composed eulogies, gave powerful men and women something to live up to by giving them an existence in words after their death. Then around the year 900 or so parchment became more available, by 1300 paper had arrived in parts of Britain. And lo, the oral tradition was fading, any Tom, Dick or Harry could read a poem. Taliesin was one of the the first Old School Bards to be written about by monks. He was a rock star who did stuff like hang out with King Arthur and accompany a Giant called Brân the Blessed, which translates as Blessed Crow. Blessed Crow was a genuine Welsh king in the Pendragon tradition. And like many super heroes Taliesin was found by accident, raised by the son of a powerful Lord. He wasn't found in the bulrushes although some propagandists have suggested he was found in coracle, he was in fact found under an Elm Tree, so there! In another story, as a child, Taliesin ran away from fairyland where his job as a child slave was to stir the Cauldron of Inspiration.
Truth in Being and Taliesin
Milkweed Bloom
"Truth in Being." You can turn upside down trying to work out why. One of the great minds of the 20th Century, when the French investigators looked into why he was a member of the Nazi Party, classified him as a Fellow Traveler. A verdict that made him a dip-shit in a large number of minds. He didn't deny it and he made no excuses for it, and in 1949, so long as he reached no position of authority he was allowed to start teaching again at his old university in Freiburg. His idea of "Truth in Being" was his version of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, there'll be debate about whether I know what I mean, but we're not locusts, and, as yet, we're not mechanical devices either. There's more to us than being an abacus, which doesn't mean that being un-blessed by the ability to add up makes us any more or less human. It's strange, even here where I currently live, a good chance the odd eyebrows were raised when they read Hannah Arendt's short book on the Trail of Eichmann. Eichmann's defense was to claim he was doing what he was told. Hannah Arendt's defense against the critics of her book was to make a joke about how easy it was to tell when a critic hadn't read her book. Evil, she claimed, was fundamentally banal. The Devil was boring as hell. For one of Arendt's sources of inspiration this idea of "Truth in Being" was the concealed waiting to be unconcealed. Made sense from him, our finite world was an unfolding of meaning. It certainly happened. A revelation occurred. And Maybe for Heidegger the finitude of existence was a good reason for a great mind to let it be, the resounding silence of who am I to care what people think, sat well enough in him. But you have to think about Taliesin, 550 anno domini into 600, the Greatest Bard of Wales whose poems of praise fed him well, bread, butter and mead came his way until he said something nice about a rival Prince. Taliesin made amends for his fickleness by praising his patron's brave son who'd died in battle. A death that broke the old man's heart, without Taliesin's poem of praise to his son and his kingdom, he'd lost his heritage. I have the feeling we've got a whole bunch of "Truth in Being" people, they've stopped trying basically, they'll wait and see, and I suspect there are a good few very fine masked Taliesin's swishing around in front of mirrors whose poems probably won't last.
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