speaking from silence

Secrecy and silence is often the best to express oneself. Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling under the psudeonym Johanne de Silentio. He wrote as a poet, as one who claimed to have no faith, writingabout faith. He used the old Socratic technique of claiming ignorance. Ignorance is always safe to claim. Usually it's the one thing we're right about.

It often seems as though speaking from the silence of the grave is often the only expression one gets. Think of the Count of Monte Cristo, who was only free to live his life and get his bitter-sweet revenge after he was considered dead. Think also of Huck Finn, who killed a pig and spread its blood on the floor, making it look as though robbers had killed him in order to begin a new life away from his psycho father. I would prefer to speak while alive. I would prefer to live my life while alive, and not wait until after death to live. I have much better things to be doing when I'm dead.

Comments

smelly things

remember those scratch-and-sniff things? of course they still exist, but i haven't smelled one in a while. now all we have are those horrid cardboard car scents: those leaves of aesthetic tragedy. the one i'm thinking of has a strawberry scent. it might have been strawberry shortcake - that little red-headed girl with strawberries painted all over her ginormous hat, a hat ten times the size of her head. this reminds me of those markers you can buy that smell, too, often like berries of some sort. i can remember the blueberry ones the best. which scents do you remember? when Jodi and i (and sometimes Justin, Dan, Kaia or some other participant) would take empty milk jugs and stealthily place them on Mark Vust's doorstep (our Resident Director), i would sometimes smell the rotting milk. it didn't smell good. i'll give you that. but it was certainly a powerful scent. smelling things reminds me of how much i love life. like when i'm in a forest ...

Bye-bye Bible

Perhaps we should all be Jedi Knights. Their principle of non-attachment, which is strikingly like the Buddha's attempt to rid himself of earthly desires, is very appealing. "We will have to find out the cause of sorrow and the way to escape from it. The desire for sensual enjoyment and clinging to earthly life is the cause of sorrow. If we can eradicate desire, all sorrows and pains will come to an end." This makes a lot of sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense. He is right. It can be scary admitting Buddha is right, because what if he's right about everything? Well, even in this case, perhaps he is only right insofar as what he says is true. Does that mean his route is the best path to take on the proverbial road to enlightenment? Right now it might appear that way. You see, I realized recently that I became very attached to something I owned. It's my Bible. Or, was my Bible. (Give me a moment to regain my composure...) I had my NIV study Bible for at least ...

watch my language?

i have to say, sometimes swearing is so ridiculous it's downright humorous. one is particularly aware of this as a Christian. countless times people have apologized to me for swearing in my presence, as though i'm so holy that i can't be in the presence of such talk or i'll melt. at the same time, this is usually a relief, because it's difficult to communicate when every other word contributes nothing to the conversation except to make me well aware that the person i'm talking to has a vocabulary less than that of a three-year-old. then there's the other side of the coin - people who swear around me purposefully because i'm a Christian. somehow, one of the guys on my highschool bus in Northern Ontario learned that i had never used profanity, and promptly felt called to dedicate his life to causing me to curse. "just once, come on," he'd say. i could do nothing but smile. there was absolutely no reason that i could think of why i would want ...

random anxieties of existence

Search This Blog