Cosmetics and Costumes

Our cosmetics and our costumes are so familiar to us that it is difficult to see the singular strangeness in the ways we make ourselves up. We emerge, all of us, out of our little night chambers, wherein we have temporarily lost our bearings in uncharted sleep, into the light of day, pausing to arrange our faces and clothe our bodies in a way that will naturalize us for the human company we intend to keep. Every day we achieve this dramatic transformation from nakedness into a socially serviceable appearance. Some days require several or even many changes of costume and of face, depending on the roles we are called upon to play.
In all of this we choose and select- grooming our bodies with more or less attention to the art of managing appearances. But our choices are always constrained by the affordances of our closets and cosmetic cabinets. These, in turn, are supplied from the vast but particular cultural wardrobe that is part of the large theater of our secular existence.

Boredom

To reject the practical, to change the purposeful into the purposeless, the necessary into the arbitrary, and to do it in such a way as to cause no harm, by simply imagining it, out of sheer playfulness, affords joy and pleasure, because it frees us for the moment from the fetters of the necessary, the purposeful, and the practical.

The Drama of Everyday Life

No fixed view of our reality can do justice to its features, for those features change in their meaning and significance depending on the perspective that is taken. This entire argument about a dramaturgical approach to psychology is nothing but a perspective, a particular point of view brought to bear on our subject matter -- ourselves and the world we live in. The special advantage of this perspective is that it enables us to see the intimate connections between the drama of everyday lives and our psychological processes-- our perceiving, thinking, social relations-- and our pathologies. An unsatisfactory view of reality is one that cannot shift perspectives-- so that one stands all of the time in the same box. No transformations, no drama, and the result is predictable and boring.

I have visited boxes of slam poets, square dancers, skeet shooters, schizophrenics, alcoholics, drug addicts, deconstructionists, missionaries, fishermen and farmers, football players, sports car buffs, bagpipe players, and country clubbers -- boxes of Carnaval-jumping Brazilians, fraternity pledges, and church deacons as well as psychologists and professors of various sorts. If you are blessed with a reasonabley long life, you will compile your own interesting list of boxes-- little theaters wherein the play is earnest and the players all convinced of their grasp on reality.

Robert G. Ingersoll

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural - that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling , the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world- not even in infinite space. I was free- free to think, to express my thoughts- free to live to my own ideal- free to live for myself and those I loved-free to use all my faculties, all my senses- free to spread imagination's wings- free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope-free to judge and determine for myself- free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past- free from popes and priests- free from all the "called" and "set apart"- free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies- free from the fear of eternal pain- free from the winged monsters of the night- free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought- no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings- no chains for my limbs- no lashed for my back- no fires for my flesh- no master's frown or threat- no following another's steps- no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain- for the freedom of labor and thought- for those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains- to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs- to those hose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn- to those by fire consumed- to all the wise, thoe good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it hight, that light might conquer darkness still.

The Gay Science

Origin of knowledge.— Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted—it was only very late that truth emerged, as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it, our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which "true" and "untrue" were determined—down to the most remote regions of logic. Thus: the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight; but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors, believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites: they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge; they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life. But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason as a completely free and spontaneous activity; they shut their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense, or owing to a desire for tranquility, for sole possession, or for dominion. The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people, too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence.— This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors, and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions, though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honesty and skepticism were innocent and happy like all play. Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, struggle, and lust for power [Machtgelüst] developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about "truths"; the intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified—: and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power, all "evil" instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful—and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good. Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power: until eventually knowledge collided with these primeval basic errors, two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. The thinker: that is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for the first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation?—that is the question, that is the experiment.

CANDIDE

In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom Nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and hence, I presume, he had his name of Candide. The old servants of the house suspected him to have been the son of the Baron's sister, by a very good sort of a gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that young lady refused to marry, because he could produce no more than threescore and eleven quarterings in his arms; the rest of the genealogical tree belonging to the family having been lost through the injuries of time.

The Baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle had not only a gate, but even windows, and his great hall was hung with tapestry. He used to hunt with his mastiffs and spaniels instead of greyhounds; his groom served him for huntsman; and the parson of the parish officiated as his grand almoner. He was called "My Lord" by all his people, and he never told a story but everyone laughed at it.

My Lady Baroness, who weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, consequently was a person of no small consideration; and then she did the honors of the house with a dignity that commanded universal respect. Her daughter was about seventeen years of age, fresh-colored, comely, plump, and desirable. The Baron's son seemed to be a youth in every respect worthy of the father he sprung from. Pangloss, the preceptor, was the oracle of the family, and little Candide listened to his instructions with all the simplicity natural to his age and disposition.

Master Pangloss taught the metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology. He could prove to admiration that there is no effect without a cause; and, that in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of all castles, and My Lady the best of all possible baronesses.

"It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best."

Candide listened attentively and believed implicitly, for he thought Miss Cunegund excessively handsome, though he never had the courage to tell her so. He concluded that next to the happiness of being Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, the next was that of being Miss Cunegund, the next that of seeing her every day, and the last that of hearing the doctrine of Master Pangloss, the greatest philosopher of the whole province, and consequently of the whole world.

One day when Miss Cunegund went to take a walk in a little neighboring wood which was called a park, she saw, through the bushes, the sage Doctor Pangloss giving a lecture in experimental philosophy to her mother's chambermaid, a little brown wench, very pretty, and very tractable. As Miss Cunegund had a great disposition for the sciences, she observed with the utmost attention the experiments which were repeated before her eyes; she perfectly well understood the force of the doctor's reasoning upon causes and effects. She retired greatly flurried, quite pensive and filled with the desire of knowledge, imagining that she might be a sufficing reason for young Candide, and he for her.

On her way back she happened to meet the young man; she blushed, he blushed also; she wished him a good morning in a flattering tone, he returned the salute, without knowing what he said. The next day, as they were rising from dinner, Cunegund and Candide slipped behind the screen. The miss dropped her handkerchief, the young man picked it up. She innocently took hold of his hand, and he as innocently kissed hers with a warmth, a sensibility, a grace-all very particular; their lips met; their eyes sparkled; their knees trembled; their hands strayed. The Baron chanced to come by; he beheld the cause and effect, and, without hesitation, saluted Candide with some notable kicks on the breech and drove him out of doors. The lovely Miss Cunegund fainted away, and, as soon as she came to herself, the Baroness boxed her ears. Thus a general consternation was spread over this most magnificent and most agreeable of all possible castles.

Geneology of Morals

28

Apart from the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal; "why man at all?"--was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater "in vain!" This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void--he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself: he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, "why do I suffer?"

Man, the bravest of animals and the on most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such: he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far--and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far: any meaning is better than none at all: the ascetic ideal was in every sense the "faute de mieux" par excellence so far. In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism. This interpretation--there is no doubt of it--brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.

But all this notwithstanding--man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense--the "sense-less"--he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hated of the human, and ever more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself--all this means--let us dare to grasp it--a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.

Geneology of Morals

PREFACE

1

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are constantly making for for them, being by nature winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit; there is one thing alone we really care about from the heart--"bringing something home." Whatever else there is in life, so-called "experiences"--which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time? Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us "absent-minded":we cannot give our hearts to it-not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: "what really was that which just struck?" so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, "what really was that which we have just experienced? and moreover:"who are we really?" and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being--and alas! miscount them.--So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law "Each is furthest from himself" applies to all eternity--we are not "men of knowledge" with respect to ourselves.

Ecce Homo

At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation--of selfishness.

For let us assume that the task, the destiny, the fate of the task transcends the average very significantly: in that case, nothing could be more dangerous than catching sight of oneself with this task. To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value--the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, "modesties," seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where "know thyself" would be the recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself. Morally speaking: neighbor love, living for others, and other things can be a protective measure for preserving measure for preserving the hardest self-concern. This is the exception where, against my wont and conviction, I side with the "selfless" drives: here they work in the service of self-love, of self-discipline.

The whole surface of consciousness--consciousness is a surface--must be kept clear of all great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great pose! So many dangers that the instinct comes too soon to "understand itself"--. Meanwhile the organizing "idea" that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down--it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as means toward a whole--one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, "goal,""aim," or "meaning."

Considered in this way, my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual--above all, even contrary capacities that had to be kept from disturbing, destroying one another. An order of rank among those capacities; distance; the art of separating without setting against one another; to mix nothing, to "reconcile" nothing; a tremendous variety that is nevertheless the opposite of chaos--this was the precondition, the long, secret work and artistry of my instinct. Its higher protection manifested itself to such a high degree that I never even suspected what was growing in me--and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth in their ultimate perfection.

METAPHORS WE LIVE BY


We see a single human motivation behind the myths of both objectivism and subjectivism, namely, a concern for understanding. The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding- what the individual finds meaningful and what makes his life worth living. The experientialist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns. It offers a perspective from which both concerns can be met at once.
The old myths share a common perspective: man as separate from his environment. Within the myth of objectivism, the concern for truth grows out of a concern for successful functioning. Given a view of man as separate from his environment, successful functioning is conceived of as mastery over the environment. Hence, the objectivist metaphors KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and SCIENCE PROVIDES CONTROL OVER NATURE.
The principal theme of the myth of subjectivism is the attempt to overcome the alienation that results from viewing man as separate from his environment and from other men. This involves an embracing of the self- of individuality and reliance upon personal feelings, intuition, and values. The Romanticist version involves reveling in the senses and the feelings and attempting to gain union with nature through passive appreciation of it.
The experientialist myth takes the perspective of man as part of his environment, not as separate from it. It focuses on constant interaction with the physical environment and with other people. It views this interaction with the environment as involving mutual change. You cannot function within environment without changing it or being changed by it.
Within the experientialist myth, understanding emerges from interaction, from constant negotiation with the environment and other people. It emerges in the following way: the nature of our bodies and our physical and cultural envi9ronments imposes a structure on our experience, in terms of natural dimensions of the sort we have discussed. Recurrent experience leads to the formation of categories, which are experiential gestalts with those natural dimensions. Such gestalts define coherence in our experience. We understand our experience directly when we see it as being structured coherently in terms of gestalts that have emerged directly from interaction with and in our environment. We understand experience metaphorically when we use a gestalt from one domain of experience to structure experience in another domain.
From the experientialist perspective, truth depends on understanding, which emerges from functioning in the world. It is through such understanding that the experientialist alternative meets the objectivist’s need for an account of truth. It is through the coherent structuring of experience that the experientialist alternative satisfies the subjectivist’s need for personal meaning and significance.
But experientialism provides more than just a synthesis that meets the motivating concerns of objectivism and subjectivism. The experientialist account of understanding provides a richer perspective on some of the most important areas of experience in our everyday lives:

Interpersonal communication and mutual understanding
Self –understanding
Ritual
Aesthetic experience
Politics


We feel the objectivism and subjectivism both provide impoverished views of all of these areas because each misses the motivating concerns of the other. What they both miss in all of these areas is an interactionally based and creative understanding. Let us turn to an experientialist account of the nature of understanding in each of these areas.


Interpersonal Communication and Mutual Understanding

When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need patience, certain flexibility in world view, and in generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while deemphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experience. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and skill and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves-disembodies, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUIT metaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.

Self-understanding

The capacity for self-understanding presupposes the capacity for mutual understanding. Common sense tells us that it’s easier to understand ourselves than to understand other people. After all, we tend to think that we have direct access to out own feelings and ideas and not to anybody else’s. Self-understanding seems prior to mutual understanding, and in some ways it is. But any really deep understanding of why we do what we do, feel what we feel, change as we change, and even believe what we believe, takes us beyond ourselves. Understanding of ourselves is not unlike other forms of understanding-it comes out of our constant interactions with out physical, cultural, and out interpersonal environment. At a minimum, the skills required for mutual understanding are necessary even to approach self-understanding. Just as in mutual understanding we constantly search out commonalities of experience when we speak with other people, so in self-understanding we are always searching for what unifies our own diverse experiences in order to give coherence to our lives. Just as we seek out metaphors to highlight and make coherent what we have in common with someone else, so we seek out personal metaphors to highlight and make coherent our own pasts, out present activities, and our dreams, hopes, and goals as well. A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives. Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of your experiences to yourself. In therapy, for example, much of self-understanding involves consciously recognizing previously unconscious metaphors and how we live by them. It involves the constant construction of new coherences in your life, coherences that give new meaning to old experiences. The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself.
The experientialist approach to the process of self-understanding involves:

• Developing an awareness of the metaphors we live by and un awareness of where they enter into our everyday lives and where they do not
• Having experiences that can form the basis of alternative metaphors
• Developing an “experiential flexibility”
• Engaging in an unending process of viewing your life through new alternative metaphors


Ritual

We are constantly performing rituals, from casual rituals, like making the morning coffee by the same sequence of steps each day and watching the eleven o clock news straight to the end (after we’ve seen it already at six o clock); to going to the football games, Thanksgiving dinners, and university lectures by distinguished visitors; and so on to the most solemn prescribed religious practices. All are repeated structured practices, some consciously designed in detail, some more consciously performed than others, and some emerging spontaneously. Each ritual is a repeated, coherently structured, and unified aspect of our experience. In performing them, we give structure and significance to our activities, minimizing chaos and disparity in our actions. In our terms, a ritual is one kind of experiential gestalt. It is a coherent sequence of actions, structured in terms of the natural dimensions of our experience. Religious rituals are typically metaphorical kinds of activities, which usually involve metonymies—real-world objects standing for entities in the world as defined by the conceptual system of the religion. The coherent structure of the ritual is commonly taken as paralleling some aspect of reality as it is seen through the religion.
Everyday personal rituals are also experiential gestalts consisting of sequences of actions structured along the natural dimensions of experience—a part-whole structure, stages, causal relationships, and means of accomplishing goals. Personal rituals are thus natural kinds of activities for individuals or for members of a subculture. They may or may not be metaphorical kinds of activities. For example, it is common in Los Angeles to engage in the ritual activity of driving by the homes of Hollywood stars. This is a metaphorical kind of activity based on the metonymy THE HOME STANDS FOR THE PERSON and the metaphor PHYSICAL CLOSENESS IS PERSONAL CLOSENESS. Other everyday rituals, whether metaphorical or not, provide experiential gestalts that can be the basis of metaphors, e.g., “You don’t know what you’re opening the door to,” “Lets roll up our sleeves and get down to work,” etc.
We suggest that

• The metaphors we live by, whether cultural or personal, are partially preserved in ritual.
• Cultural metaphors, and the values entailed by them, are propagated by ritual.
• Ritual forms an indispensable part of the experiential basis for our cultural metaphorical systems. There can be no culture without ritual.


Similarly, there can be no coherent view of the self without personal ritual (typically of the casual and spontaneously emerging sort). Just as our personal metaphors are not random but form systems coherent with our personalities, so our personal rituals are not random but are coherent with our view of the world and ourselves and with our system of personal metaphors and metonymies. Our implicit and typically unconscious conceptions of ourselves and the values that we live by are perhaps most strongly reflected in the little things we do over and over, that is, in the causal rituals that have emerged spontaneously in our daily lives.

Aesthetic Experience

From the experientialist perspective, metaphor is a matter of imaginative rationality. It permits an understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another, creating coherences by virtue of imposing gestalts that are structured by natural dimensions of experience. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.
But metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect—it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc. These dimensions structure not only mundane experience but aesthetic experience as well. Each art medium picks out certain dimensions of our experience and excludes others. Artworks provide new ways of structuring our experience in terms of these natural dimensions. Works of art provide new experiential gestalts and, therefore, new coherences. From the experientialist point of view, art is, in general, a matter of imaginative rationality and a means of creating new realities.
Aesthetic experience is thus not limited to the official art world. It can occur in any aspect of our everyday lives—whenever we take note of, or create for ourselves, new coherences that are not part of our conventionalized mode of perception or thought.


Politics

Political debate typically is concerned with issues of freedom and economics. But one can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence. We see the metaphorical concepts of FREEDOM, EQUALITY, SAFETY, ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE, POWER, etc., as being different ways of getting indirectly at issues of meaning of existence. They are all necessary aspects of an adequate discussion of the issue, but, to our knowledge, no political ideology addresses the main issue head-on. In fact, many ideologies argue that matters of personal or cultural meaningfulness are secondary or to be addressed later. Any such ideology is dehumanizing.
Political and economic ideologies are framed in metaphorical terms. Like all other metaphors, political and economic metaphors can hide aspects of reality. But in the area of politics and economics, metaphors matter more, because they constrain our lives. A metaphor in a political or economic system, by virtue of what it hides, can lead to human degradation.
Consider just one example: LABOR IS A RESOURCE. Most contemporary economic theories, whether capitalist or specialist, treat labor as a natural resource or commodity, on a par with raw materials, and speak in the same terms of its cost and supply. What is hidden by the metaphor is the nature of the labor. No distinction is made between meaningful labor and dehumanizing labor. For all of the labor statistics, there is none on meaningful labor. When we accept the LABOR IS A RESOUCE metaphor and assume that the cost of resource defined in this way should be kept down, then cheap labor becomes a good thin, on a par with cheap oil. The exploitation of human beings through this metaphor is most obvious in countries that boast of “a virtually inexhaustible supply of cheap labor”—a neutral-sounding economic statement that hides the reality of human degradation. But virtually all major industrialized nations, whether capitalist or socialist, use the same metaphor in their economic theories and policies. The blind acceptance of the metaphor can hide degrading realities, whether meaningless blue-collar and white-collar industrial jobs in “advanced” societies or virtual slavery around the world.


GEORGE LAKOFF
MARK JOHNSON

The idea the metaphors can create realities goes against most traditional views of metaphor. The reasons is that metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a matter of mere language rather than primarily as a means of structuring our conceptual system and the kinds of everyday activities we perform.
It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone do not change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.
The idea that metaphor is just a matter of language and can at best only describe reality stems from the view that what is real is wholly external to, and independent of, how human beings conceptualize the world- as if the study of reality were just the study of physical world. Such a view of reality - so called objective reality- leaves out human aspects of reality , in particular the real perceptions, conceptualizations, motivations, and actionas that constitute most of what we experience. But the human aspect of reality are most of what matters to us, and those vary from culture to culture, since different cultures have different conceptual systems. Cultures also exist within physical environments, some of them radically different - jungles, deserts, islands etc. In each case there is a physical environment that we interact with, more or less succesfully. The conceptual system of various cultures partly depend on the physical environments they have developed in.
Each culture must provide a more or less succesful way of dealing with its environment, both adopting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality.

What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant rolse in determining what is real for us.

A good thinker might teach one to be no more than what cultures, societies, religions, traditions and civilizations have always made one into, except they have only made one an automation.

What makes a thinker's task even harder is that he must say what he wants to the most by never saying it directly. It is a disability our use of language and the metaphorical-conceptual system acquired through its cultural implications given us. Every thinker -when not speaking in the strictest of scientific terms or introducing new and unfamiliar metaphors - must leave the original thought alone and touch only the ones standing next to it thus preserving its essence.

How "Thinking" progresses is by altering what was previously believed to be self evident, virtuous, the good, the truth. And any attempt to overthrow it, to even make the mildest suggestion against it gives the opportunity to wake up the "might is right " cow. It provides an opportunity to shake heads with the herd- to feel better by feeling belonged to something, anything.

There can not be one universal explanation or definition of the world around us. There can not be a morality universal to all. No set guidelines for how to behave. There is no starting point for thinking. No suggestions for what to read and in what order. No instructions on what to think and how to think it. Thought that is exactly how the world seems to work. A list of instructions for doing all of the above.
We are programmed to instinctively absorb information - or to go out seeking it - from our environment. Its mostly an automatic mechanism and usually that information is internalized for the purpose of utility that wither resembles most our individual natural instincts (virtues) or we've acquired them thought habit.

It does us benefit to keep in mind that our reasoning faculties are relatively new developments in our evolution. And perhaps the reasons they were allowed to evolve by the great evolutionary scheme was to serve the curiosity drive - substantiating our learning instinct for better genetic fitness- and even then on a very short leash. Our instinctual animal behavior is very efficient - millions of years of succesful breeding and the dominance of the planet has proved that so far- but our newly evolved conceptual system at many points seeks to experiment against the basic evolutionary guidelines but perhaps that is the requirement or rather the cost of consciousness.

While reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine today I found myself experimenting which led somewhere not very pleasant.
The experiment was to listen to different songs from different times in the past 7 years here and to see what memes they raise up. All was going well and playful until I played this song from back home, and all of a sudden the hell breaks loose.
It was a sadness that I have not felt in a very long time. Not even the restlessness of my dating experiences , of lonely days, of depression , of existential angst could match what I started feeling. I havent stopped smiling in the face of all kinds of trials and tribulations that life has thrown at me. Broken relationships, immigrations crap, tensions at work, I've been above them all , until now....
What...? Does Shoaib the great psychologist, the self proclaimed disisslussionist carrys unresolved feelings? Feelings so strong that he cant even smile? The door is shot to any happy thought as I take in the feeling. There probably wont be a later when I'll stand above this feeling and laugh.
There is a tempest in the tent. It must wait until I go back home.
It must be forgotten, burried, ignored.
The music must stop.

House Tips

I just started watching House about a month ago and between House and Firefly, I have had a slow epiphany. That I used to be like House but I am like Wilson now. Before the desire to wear my "universal love" for all things animate and inanimate on my face took over me, I was much more open in my dealings, or at least I did not constantly act like an emotional cripple which is how my vanity mixed with my romanticism had been trying to resolve the unresolved.
Of course one need not go around being a jerk all the time but perhaps it would be beneficial not to let one's deepest self steer the course of ones life in so ordinary a fashion. Though it does run the risk of making me socialy unpopular and a misfit... but.. wait... I already am socialy unpopular and a misfit :p

I write this with a certain irony of course :p a House like creature would never write this but as long as it serves the purpose to reminding me my resolve of being intellectually honest.




House from lines in the sands.

Dr. House: Why would you feel sorry for someone that gets to opt out of the inane courteous formalities which are utterly meaningless, insincere and therefore degrading? This kid doesn't have to pretend to be interested in your back pain, your secretions or your grandma's itchy place. Imagine how liberating it would be to live a life free of all the mind-numbing social niceties. I don't pity this kid - I envy him.

restless...

Safe Word

Stuck in this moment

my gods and yours

faces dry uncharted lands

poetic souls deaf and mute

life riddler on the farthest shore

healer lived right next door

non believer for the first thought

and second

and third

poetic souls deaf and mute

feelings misaligned with words and deeds

give forms to a silhouette

making shadows on the foggy floor

infinite jockey and the rotating square

in search of time

softness, crudeness, thought and mind

deceiving self into the other

dreaming into ever more

silly me...

Gentle Clusture by D Bolanos

With delicate consideration he pokes through
The shivering head numb to such light
Adjusts with weary eyes in an attempt
To work its way to freedom


He baths in the glow with calmness
For a moment the darkness forgotten
His breath licks the freshness of life
As he wonders how long he will survive

In this wondrous glow he embraces
He is blind to the shadow
Emerging beyond the clouds

AWAKE

He escapes back within his shell

Security, loneliness, carefully he searches
To hear if the sounds from above have gone

Where?

Has the danger disappeared?
The mind slips into eternal daze

He wonders

Was it ever really there?

The Layman Diaries

73. Organ for knowledge.

A human child is born bearing same genetic survival mechanisms as many other animals. The mechanism for imitative behavior for example helps a developing brain lay down neural pathways similar to parents since they have proven useful so far for survival.
Acquisition and use of language-as we grow up- draws its symbolic value almost identical to that used in the environment one grows up in. A succesful tradition already has its memes designed to have the maximum hold on the eager learning brain. The individual finds it comforting not to deviate from the norm and risk censure from peers . Even the so called non-conformist ideals of modern age cant help but operate within the sphere of accepted morality as the energy is driven towards giving the illussion of not belonging which works well for both the actor and the audience.


( first summary draft )

The Universal

This is the next century
Where the universal's free
You can find it anywhere
Yes, the future has been sold
Every night we're gone
And to karaoke songs
How we like to sing a long
Although the words are wrong

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go

No one here is alone, satellites in every home
Yes the universal's here, here for everyone
Every paper that you read
Says tomorrow is your lucky day
Well, here's your lucky day

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go

Well, it really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go

Just let them go

The Fear

I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don’t care about clever I don’t care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f*** loads of diamonds
I heard people die while they are trying to find them

I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
‘Cuz everyone knows that’s how you get famous
I’ll look at the sun and I’ll look in the mirror
I’m on the right track yeah I’m on to a winner

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
‘Cuz I’m being taken over by The Fear

Life’s about film stars and less about mothers
It’s all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic
And that’s what makes my life so f***ing fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption
And its not my fault it’s how I’m program to function
I’ll look at the sun and I’ll look in the mirror
I’m on the right track yeah I’m on to a winner

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
‘Cuz I’m being taken over by The Fear

Forget about guns and forget ammunition
Cause I’m killing them all on my own little mission
Now I’m not a saint but I’m not a sinner
Now everything is cool as long as I’m getting thinner

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
‘Cause I’m being taken over by fear.

violit hill

Was a long and dark December
From the rooftops i remember
There was snow
White snow

Clearly I remember
From the windows they were watching
While we froze down below

When the future’s architectured
By a carnival of idiots on show
You’d better lie low

If you love me
Won’t you let me know?

Was a long and dark December
When the banks became cathedrals
And the fox
Became God

Priests clutched onto bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And the cross was held aloft

Bury me in armor
When I’m dead and hit the ground
My nerves are poles that unfroze

If you love me
Won’t you let me know?

(Guitar Solo)

I don’t want to be a soldier
That a captain of some sinking ship
Would stow, far below

So if you love me
Why’d you let me go?

I took my love down to violet hill
There we sat in snow
All that time she was silent still

Said, if you love me
Won’t you let me know?

If you love me,
Won’t you let me know?

Life in Technicolor ii

There's a wild wind blowing
Down the corner of my street
Every night there the headlights are glowing

There's a cold war coming
On the radio I heard
Baby it's a violent world

Oh love don't let me go
Won't you take me where the streetlights glow
I could hear it coming
I could hear the sirens sound
Now my feet won't touch the ground

Time came a-creepin'
Oh and time's a loaded gun
Every road is a ray of light
It goes o-o-on
Time only can lead you on
Still it's such a beautiful night

Oh love don't let me go
Won't you take me where the streetlights glow
I could hear it coming
Like a serenade of sound
Now my feet won't touch the ground

Gravity release me
And dont ever hold me down
Now my feet won't touch the ground.

us

oh lovers, oh you artists
turn up the volume
out here on the farthest shores of the galaxies
I can barely get the signals
I can barely hear your voices
and I am the child of the ages
I was born amongst you
now here I sit, on my watch of the horizons
And I wait
wait for signs, for any sign at all
and sometimes I get nervous, and I get lonely
at others I am immersed in joy and I wish to forget
even of home
for may be I now see the signs on the horizons, I hear the bells too loud?
for now I can not hear your voices anymore
to remind me of my strings, or to teach me words
words that we would both understand

Mourning Glory by K Lecker

looking in the mirror again- forehead on cool
glass- twisted brambles behind her, begging
the reflection to tell her what it sees
waiting hours gathering behind her-a gossamer
hurricane of time hurling between patience
and pensiveness brittle sighs falling on
the bathroom tiles- a soft clicking- then
nothing- and the light dims a strongman from
the circus,arms wide and looming now sunk
into a comfy chair, swallowed in a lazyboy-
no more carnival and the light dims- a soft
petal touch on her neck, sapphire lips and
hazel laughter chameleons embrace to match
her mood- now a razor scratch of airy cotton,
an empty bed, unrelenting bold colors of
insomnia- and the light dims- one ticket to
cradle the strongman, one for the freakshow
of her bed, head against the mirror, can't
afford the fairs' fare- cold night wakening
and the light dims

Stolen Thought.

In lieu of years of turmoil and criticisms of which my crippled remnant had endured, the very purpose of which I had lasted to this very point is to be materialized of the very essence of euphoria; the culmination of an individual’s very breath, in a physicality before one’s self. Within such, an “oxymoric enigma” of which truly exists and yet is debatable towards its validity as a whole, the singularity of innovation, integration, and imagination intersect within a single point of which encompasses this veil of reality those whom travel.
It is the sort of place of where one may through the direct control and dictation of matter and energy of its more precise scrutinizations, materialize that which exists beyond the physicality and direct tactile sensory world these creatures known as humans perceive and of the ideologies, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and wishes our simplistic central nervous systems can summon. A place such as this need not be static and stationary, but of an ever changing wish, like a wondrous piece of ornamental glass, viewed in a different light. Deep from within the essence of thought and imagination, can a person truly realize the scale and power behind a single thought in a living work of beauty and the potential of probability and possibility make itself known to those with open eyes?
Such a power of an entire universe contained within the very walls of a lone structure may indeed carry the very weight of a select few or of existence in itself, upon the universe’s bosom. Such a surely intangible ideal could never exist within a physical form, could it not? Fundamental mechanics of which have dictated the very path of experience’s journey would smother a description of an eternity of pre-anticipated stability and determinism. I must only mutter the question, if our society and planet as a unified force could place and shake a universe in a snow globe, what shall become of ourselves, as we watch the glistening snow fall in silence?

On Thinking

I speak of thinking in its philosophical sense, in the sense that Nietzsche or Heidegger or many other spoke of it.
And how I understand it is different from putting before one's self some mathematical or social problem. Though all philosophers have only tackled all that has existed in the realm of ideas that gave birth to our varied social conditions,in their writings they ultimately speak of something much more than what sum of their words can capture.
Thinking as it commonly exists in the academia today is thinking within the framework of the given discipline - that is> holding onto one strand of thought bound by a logic and always within the spectrum of that discipline, and noble as it is , does not come close to the essence - the essence of thinking in the sense that one's entire nervous activity is governed by the right hemisphere ( to take one of the most recent empirical reports of the feeling ) - or that the right hemisphere of our brains is the prime operative merely calling the left to its serivce to test how the concepts under considerations play out when subjected to temporality and arbitrarily assigned ( though may be evolutionarily justified) values.
Thinking understood where one is so displaced from one's prejudices that what one comes across does not find its parallel in human language and continues to allude any kind of framing. And when one does succeed in somehow finding remotely appropriate words to explain or describe it, it is too tainted to have retained any true value or its original essence.

To me there is a difference between seeking knowledge>understanding and being in a state of consciousness where we are one with all that surrounds us.
Then I can not help but ask, why do we attempt to gain mastery in this subject or that if not to attempt to grasp some higher truth. Are we just keeping busy ? Do we seek better understanding of this or that so as to be
able to introduce new words therefore new feelings attached to those words in our everyday usage of them ? while hoping that some day enough of us will share that feeling and that will probably help distance us enough from our
animal/instinctual selves that we will care the same for any other if not more.
I think the only thing that can justify the existence of our educational institutions is, not the teachers who "teach" (tell ? ) students what have already been found, but teachers who try to give life to our curious selves. Once that self is activated and running, it itself will make use of the data banks of experiments and observations without having to worry about the social implications and economic gains they will somehow provide to other institutions
controlled by individuals in whom the will to power manifests itself in seeking more and more physical comfort only.

There is no end point for a curious spirit except to become a free spirit. Free spirit , as I understand it, is a self -prisoner as it may be to its own physiological and psychological limitations- that never stops pushing
against any and all walls that surround it. An intellectual found in the university may be a free spirit in that he/she pushes against the boundaries of ignorance but at the same time allows himself to be fettered by something that his newfound knowledge has only helped strenghthen.

You think you would know when you met an Einstein? When he produced his theory of relativity no one believed him. A genius is a genius only if he can produce an empirical truth or a work of art that finds rapport with enough number of people. Every truth seems evident "after" it has been discovered. A genius's ( genius to me is a misnomer) problem is not to find something grand but to find a mind that understands it.

Uberman of the Matrix

Beckham is the über-metrosexual, not just because he rams metrosexuality down the throats of those men churlish enough to remain retrosexual and refuse to pluck their eyebrows, but also because he is a sportsman, a man of substance--a "real" man--who wishes to disappear into surfaceness in order to become ubiquitous--to become media. Becks is The One, and better looking than Keanu--but, be warned, he's working for the Matrix.

Patterns in the Void 0.5

I see following patterns around me. This does not mean I am labeling or stereotyping. Its just random observations as I, like alot of other people, try to make sense of the world around me and forgive me if its not always politically correct or adhering too close to the norm, or the accepted standards of thought.

Will to be good, to improve one's self : I see alot of people saying they continuously want to better themselves. Now there are different kinds of bettering one's self. A thief wants to better his technique and so does a monk. A salesperson wants to improve his pitch and so does the stranger who feels the infinite love in his heart for everyone and everything around him and just wants to connect to any one person that he can. We are all an amalgamation of desires and doubts no question about that. I wonder if there is a secret key, or a way of being that is better then the rest. One that makes it easier to find common ground with others who are also willing. A common ground that reduces feelings of tension and stress and unnecessary competition. A feeling where our everyday bartering selves - always weighing loss and gain, and for good reasons sometimes- can forget all that differentiates us and somehow hold on to that blissful way of being, of security and trust while in presence of another.

Patterns in the Void

So, I wondered again, how is it that two people who both see themselves or define themselves or describe themselves as Intellectual, kind, loving, philosophical and compassionate, can find it so difficult to feel that connection. Not just that spark that you feel for the one you are going to love or want to love for the rest of you life but just that feeling of universal love, that feeling that the other is as much human as I. And as full of flaws- though there are no inherent flaws since there are no truths, or the right way of being, of behaving- as I.
Where was it the meaning of kindness and compassion differed between any two. Was the difference greater than the understanding of the concepts supposedly as universal as Love. Is is something one said that we did not expect? Is it someone's music choice? Is is how often one takes a shower? Or whether remembers to bring me my favorite flavor of icecream?
In the end I find myself enormously selfish to wish to mold the other the way I wish them to be. Namely, the way that makes "me" happy. But there a million ways any one person can perceive any action or word. Are we better off expecting from our husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, romantic-partners and friends things that we learned to expect from the tv-show we watched? the magazine we read? the evolutionary science article we are subscribed too? what the priest told us?
Then I find myself giving others only as much liberty of thought and action as I want for myself, which is, complete. But just because one can do something, does not mean one must do that thing. So we all have our natures and our choices. Some like to stay at home and read, some like going bungee jumping every other month, some find joy in other's company, some need just one.
As we eye a person to see how much investment of time and emotion we can make in them, how would their way of being, the way they distribute their time and energy, help me grow.

Nietzsche

2

Thus I invented, when I needed them, the "free spirits" too, to whom this heavyhearted- stouthearted book with the title "Human, All Too Human" is dedicated. There are no such "free spirits," were none--but, as I said, I needed their company at the time, to be of good cheer in the midst of bad things (illness, isolation, foreignness, sloth, inactivity); as brave fellows and specters to chat and laugh with, when one feels like chatting and laughing, and whom one sends to hell when they get boring--as reparation for lacking friends. That there could someday be such free spirits, that our Europe will have such lively, daring fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, real and palpable and not merely, as in my case, phantoms and a hermit`s shadow play: I am the last person to want to doubt that. I already see them coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I am doing something to hasten their coming when I describe before the fact the fateful conditions that I see giving rise to them, the paths on which I see them coming?

3

It may be conjectured that the decisive event for a spirit in whom the type of the "free spirit" is one day to ripen to sweet perfection has been a great separation, and that before it, he was probably all the more a bound spirit, and seemed to be chained forever to his corner, to his post. What binds most firmly? Which cords can almost not be torn? With men of a high and select type, it will be their obligations: that awe which befits the young, their diffidence and delicacy before all that is time-honored and dignified, their gratitude for the ground out of which they grew, for the hand that led them, for the shrine where they learned to worship--their own highest moments will bind them most firmly and oblige them most lastingly. For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out--it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in all the senses. "Better to die than live here," so sounds the imperious and seductive voice. And this "here," this "at home" is everything which it had loved until then! A sudden horror and suspicion of that which it loved; a lightning flash of contempt toward that which was its "obligation"; a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy: a hatred of love, perhaps a desecratory reaching and glancing backward, to where it had until then worshiped and loved; perhaps a blush of shame at its most recent act, and at the same time, jubilation that it was done; a drunken, inner, jubilant shudder, which betrays a victory -a victory? over what? over whom? a puzzling, questioning, questionable victory, but the first victory nevertheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great separation. It is also a disease that can destroy man, this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorization, this will to free will: and how much disease is expressed by the wild attempts and peculiarities with which the freed man, the separated man, now tries to prove his rule over things! He wanders about savagely with an unsatisfied lust; his booty must atone for the dangerous tension of his pride; he rips apart what attracts him. With an evil laugh he overturns what he finds concealed, spared until then by some shame; he investigates how these things look if they are overturned. There is some arbitrariness and pleasure in arbitrariness to it, if he then perhaps directs his favor to that which previously stood in disrepute--if he creeps curiously and enticingly around what is most forbidden. Behind his ranging activity (for he is journeying restlessly and aimlessly, as in a desert) stands the question mark of an ever more dangerous curiosity. "Cannot all values be overturned? And is Good perhaps Evil? And God only an invention, a nicety of the devil? Is everything perhaps ultimately false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? Must we not be deceivers, too?" Such thoughts lead and mislead him, always further onward, always further away. Loneliness surrounds him, curls round him, ever more threatening, strangling, heart-constricting, that fearful goddess and mater saeva cupidinum --but who today knows what loneliness is?

4

It is still a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these experimental years, to that enormous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an instrument and fishhook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of the spirit which is fully as much self-mastery and discipline of the heart, and which permits paths to many opposing ways of thought. It is a long way to the inner spaciousness and cosseting of a superabundance which precludes the danger that the spirit might lose itself on its own paths and fall in love and stay put, intoxicated, in some nook; a long way to that. excess of vivid healing, reproducing, reviving powers, the very sign of great health, an excess that gives the free spirit the dangerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally and to offer himself to adventure: the privilege of the master free spirit! In between may lie long years of convalescence, years full of multicolored, painful magical transformations, governed and led by a tough will to health which already often dares to dress and disguise itself as health. There is a middle point on the way, which a man having such a fate cannot remember later without being moved: a pale, fine light and sunny happiness are characteristic of it, a feeling of a birdlike freedom, birdlike perspective, birdlike arrogance, some third thing in which curiosity and a tender contempt are united. A "free spirit"--this cool term is soothing in that state, almost warming. No longer chained down by hatred and love, one lives without Yes, without No, voluntarily near, voluntarily far, most preferably slipping away, avoiding, fluttering on, gone again, flying upward again; one is spoiled, like anyone who has ever seen an enormous multiplicity beneath him--and one becomes the antithesis of those who trouble themselves about things that do not concern them. Indeed, now the free spirit concerns himself only with things (and how many there are!) which no longer trouble him.

5

Another step onward in convalescence. The free spirit again approaches life, slowly, of course, almost recalcitrantly, almost suspiciously. It grows warmer around him again, yellower, as it were; feeling and fellow‑feeling gain depth; mild breezes of all kinds pass over him. He almost feels as if his eyes were only now open to what is near. He is amazed and sits motionless: where had he been, then? These near and nearest things, how they seem to him transformed! What magical fluff they have acquired in the meantime! He glances backward gratefully--grateful to his travels, to his severity and self-alienation, to his far-off glances and bird flights into cold heights. How good that he did not stay "at home," "with himself" the whole time, like a dull, pampered loafer! He was beside himself: there is no doubt about that. Only now does he see himself--and what surprises he finds there! What untried terrors! What happiness even in weariness, in the old illness, in the convalescent`s relapses! How he likes to sit still, suffering, spinning patience, or to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness of winter, the sun spots on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, the most modest, too, these convalescents and squirrels, turned halfway back to life again--there are those among them who let no day pass without hanging a little song of praise on its trailing hem. And to speak seriously, all pessimism (the inveterate evil of old idealists and liars, as we know) is thoroughly cured by falling ill in the way these free spirits do, staying ill for a good while, and then, for even longer, even longer, becoming healthy--I mean "healthier." There is wisdom, practical wisdom in it, when over a long period of time even health itself is administered only in small doses.

6

About that time it may finally happen, among the sudden illuminations of a still turbulent, still changeable state of health, that the free spirit, ever freer, begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory. Perhaps for a long time he hardly dared ask himself, "Why so apart, so alone? Renouncing everything I admired, even admiration? Why this severity, this suspicion, this hatred of one`s own virtues?" But now he dares to ask it loudly, and already hears something like an answer. "You had to become your own master, and also the master of your own virtues. Previously, your virtues were your masters; but they must be nothing more than your tools, along with your other tools. You had to gain power over your For and Against, and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment. You had to learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against; to grasp that injustice is inseparable from life, that life itself is determined by perspective and its injustice. Above all you had to see clearly wherever injustice is greatest, where life is developed least, most narrowly, meagerly, rudimentarily, and yet cannot help taking itself as the purpose and measure of things, and for the sake of its preservation picking at and questioning secretly and pettily and incessantly what is higher, greater, and richer. You had to see clearly the problem of hierarchy, and how power and justice and breadth of perspective grow upward together. You had to--." Enough, now the free spirit knows which "thou shalt" he has obeyed, and also what he now can do, what he only now is permitted to do.

7

That is how the free spirit answers himself about that mystery of separation and he ends by generalizing his case, to decide thus about his experience. "As it happened to me," he tells himself, "so must it happen to everyone in whom a task wants to take form and `come into the world."` The secret power and necessity of this task will hold sway within and among his various destinies like an unsuspected pregnancy, long before he has looked the task itself in the eye or knows its name. Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present. Granted that it is the problem of hierarchy which we may call our problem, we free spirits; only now, in the noonday of our lives, do we understand what preparations, detours, trials, temptations, disguises, were needed before the problem was permitted to rise up before us. We understand how we first had to experience the most numerous and contradictory conditions of misery and happiness in our bodies and souls, as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world which is called "human being," as surveyors of every "higher" and "one above the other" which is likewise called "human being," penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, scorning nothing, losing nothing, savoring everything, cleaning and virtually straining off everything of the coincidental--until we finally could say, we free spirits: "Here is a new problem! Here is a long ladder on whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed, and which we ourselves were at one time! Here is a Higher, a Deeper, a Below-us, an enormous long ordering, a hierarchy which we see: here--is our problem!"

8

No psychologist or soothsayer will have a moment`s difficulty in discovering at which place in the development sketched out above the present book belongs (or is placed). But where are there psychologists today? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; surely not in Germany. There are sufficient reasons for which the present-day Germans could esteem it an honor to be such; bad enough for a person who is constituted and has become un-German in this respect! This German book, which has known how to find its readers in a wide circle of countries and peoples (it has been on the road for approximately ten years), which must understand some kind of music and flute playing to seduce even unreceptive foreign ears to listen--precisely in Germany has this book been read most negligently, heard most poorly. What is the cause? "It demands too much," has been the reply, "it addresses itself to men who do not know the hardship of crude obligations; it demands fine, cosseted senses; it needs superfluity, superfluity of time, of bright heavens and hearts, of otium in the boldest sense--all good things which we Germans of today do not have and therefore cannot give." After such a polite answer, my philosophy counsels me to be silent and inquire no further, especially since in certain cases, as the saying suggests, one remains a philosopher only by--being silent.

Nice, Spring, 1886.

Spaceman...?

We live scattered in space, united in time. Can you envision a reality scattered in time but united in space?
Imagine a contextual reality in which all beings are present in the same space at the same time - as all of us in this world are present in the same time at... ummm... the same time, I suppose. ;-) Time would remain a fixed variable environment as space is here, and people would interact with their world by moving through time instead of through space.

What do you think such a thing might be like?

Bittersweet

WANDERER:- Are all these answers we make?
Just another means of getting high.
Your daily cigarette
Your daily sexaholics meeting
Your daily poker game
Your heroin, your addiction, your lies.
What is this. Ive never felt like I was more insane in my life but honestly, Im happier this way.
Do you get off on making everyone compete to get the best answer and to give away opinions not facts to people all around the world.
Whats wrong and what is right. Morals are out of the picture. You have to be insane to be normal. You have to be normal to be moral.
Being insane is being moral for the most part without getting technical.
Really you guys. Im looking for love in all the wrong places
Obviously that is what this is. A search for a different kind of love.
I want you to love me. Then I want you to love your neighbor then I want you to put your grudges in the disposal. Ive never seen you so happy.
You all look better now!

THE SHADOW:-We are social animals. We hate to be alone, well most of us, most of the time. We come here for all of the above metaphorical reasons. We answer to learn. We answer to repeat to ourselves our oh so dear convictions. We answer because we wish to feel connected. We answer because someone is asking a question. Is it the war of the ideas?, or war of the confused minds?

I understand humanity is at a critical stage, just like it has always been. But now the pace has been quickened. Before we would write a letter, which will take weeks to get to its destination. Language was more firm back then. The comprehension of concepts was not as complex as it is today. Life was, well, slow.
But with this haste of our age, comes doubt ( or rather a skeptical attitude ). We wish to do away with the tradition and the morality. We do not want people around us to tell us what is normal and what is not. Our natures want to come out, blossom out, in all its variety without fear of reprehension. But what is lacking? Self Mastery? Self Knowledge? A Moral Code? A Value System?.

Oh but there are no morals and values. There is only this battle for survival among the best of us. Morality is what they tell us exists only to fetter us while each one of has makes our morality as we go along in life.

Chomsky has been trying to teach the world "facts" all his life. He has not been heard outside the linguistics department. All we are left with is opinions. And they seem to me to be useful seeing how facts dont resonate much with our life plans. Opinions are like gentle hooks that take what we already believe and steer it in its direction. Again, we ARE social animals and we DO have Language and a wish to keep our vanity polished.

There is Love, but there is also grudges. But my grudges are not outside of the sphere of my Love. They both belong to me and I distribute them out to other people as I see fit. Once you realize that we all are fettered by same shackles, we all are prone to same dangers, you cant be anyone but Yourself. and Yourself is nothing without others.

good and evil

What is good and evil, other than the untruth of them being polar opposites settled through a subjective or objective form to do the better that is of existence? They are but terminology thrown down for the analytical purpose of establishing suppression.
The terminology good and evil are untruths; they are too subjective to diagnose right actions and virtue for the objectivist in normative ethics. For example, water is not hot nor cold but to the individual who senses it; while one finds the water hot one may find it cold, a lack of an absolute. For any coherence in what the water or moral is requires measurements to be made for an understanding that can be universally interpreted, a present absolute. Humans cannot measure morality as it is beyond human comprehension. Humans can only see the phenomenon, so humans can only perceive their existence as they know it; ethics requires the consideration of all meaning, which cannot be done.
In essence, morality is transparent as its originality of its value comes from a forgotten or misleading establishment, a church or state for relation to such, and it imprints from an individual’s upbringing. Morality becomes an established necessity; when really a moral was a means or mean for an agenda of a majority, the establishments attempt to suppress the minority from his desired actions. Unfortunately the naive individual takes the untruth of morality as a truth, as the rest of humanity goes as follow.

the everydayness of life

I am love, from head to toe. Of course the everydayness of life takes it toll. With our predispositions for love or repulsion. The essence remains the same. There is more in us that is similar then there is different. The world and its drama is a veil that is pulled before our eyes by the embraced necessity of our very own selves. The alternative, the being , manifested in its purity is hidden by the urgency of feeling secure and invulnerable. We love ourselves before we love anyone else, before we love the other. The other, the great fantasmagoria ever created by the self vanishes whenever the being comes in contact with its self. In music, In art, In being in love, In letting yourself being completely vulnerable to the other. The deep love and knowledge of one's self is the key to experiencing the Da'sein, the being as it is.

We, as human, are certainly capable of more than we know, more then we would like to know, more then we would like to tell ourselves.The veil persists but it never stops dreaming of liberating itself from our active consciousness. It wants to be loved, it wants to be understood, it wants to be acknowledged. All it needs to truly let the spirit of one's self fly free is a little knowledge of itlself and perhaps a stroke of luck.

Wanderer and his Shadow 2.1

Wanderer- Where does a thought come from?

The Shadow- How is it that you always forget to ask this question when you are happy.

W :-Well I am asking it now.

S:-Are you happy right now?

W:-Hhmm Not really. But I am not sad either. Just content I guess. But hey, would you stop answering my questions with questions of your own.

S:-Why? Do I remind you too much of Socrates?

W:-That also sounds like a question.

S:-I thought you trusted me. And after what I did for you today.... Are you sure you are not agitated?

W:-"Sigh". Ok fine. Now would you answer my question please?

S:-Havent I already?

W:-Hhmmm. I see your point. But that only shows how one thread of thought leads to another thread of thought. I wish to know where does the first thought come from. Any thought that just comes out of the blue. Like when I am driving and I suddenly think of the George Carlin kitten video that I enjoyed watching so many times a few days ago.

S:-I can answer your question, but if you know me, as I am sure you are getting to, it wont be a straight one.

W:-Why is that? Why cant I get a straight answer to my question? You think I am stupid?

S:-What is stupid? Actually never mind. I cant answer your question directly because you are not asking me what country the wall of china is in. I have to take you through the maze, show you all the dead ends of thoughts before you find your way out to justify answering a question not only abstract but very elusive.

W:-Hhmmm. ok. I am ready.

S:-You are a multiplicity.

W:-Yes you told me that last time and I have been thinking about it.

S:-What have you found out so far?

W:-That the illusion of the unity of self called by many different names, Ego, I , Consciousness is a necessary one.

S-Very good , keep going. And keep in mind the example of Lassi and Yogurt from out last conversation. That one idea builds on the other and to understand the one on the very top, you must first climb all the lower ladders of ideas. Like if I tell you now that I can tell you the meaning of life and that it is 42.

W- Oh yeah, I remember that. A novice can never figure out the first time why it is 42. I have tried it.

S- So you were saying....?

W- Where was I. Yes... That we are a multiplicity posited as a unity. It goes parallel and was helped in understanding by Freud when he spoke of drives that live within us. They can be counted on fingers when spoken psychologically but going after their philosophical extensions, every moment in our minds there are countless ideas struggling to leap into our conscious mind from unconscious mind. With practice we can stop, if need be, any one idea from taking over our active drive mode and making us believe its absolute legitimacy. Necessary as it may appear at the moment that an idea or a thought has taken over our being, it can always be substituted by a different one because that illusion of necessity, of legitimacy, of importance that we feel about a thought is only a function, an essential function of that very thought. For a thought to successfully occupy our mind, it has to make us believe that no other thought would do at the moment.

S:- wow wow slow down...

W:- sorry. I guess the thought of explaining myself hijacked my mind, and left behind the other thought that considers brevity.

S:- You know its not easy being honest. The dishonest ideas are the worst pirates. Self deception, in our long evolutionary history may have been advantageous at times but in the absence of a sharp governing intellect the devil can make us believe that he does not exist while it steers our life away in any one direction and feed us dopamine and other people's admiration, keeping our vanity polished to ensure its invisibility and survival.

W:- How do I know you are not that devil. How do I know that you are not that one pirate idea that has hijacked my mind and will not let your competitor ideas and thoughts come forward?

S:- I knew you would ask me that question sooner or later. Did I not come to your rescue today when you were sad and anxious and restless. Was I not the one that put a smile on your face, scared away the anxiety and told you all was ok or will be ok? Have I not been your best friend in the past?

W:- You make a good case, but do not sit too easy. I am not done with you yet.

S:- You are a good student.

Wanderer and his Shadow 2.0

The Shadow -Are you busy?
The Wanderer- No, not for you. Just be careful.
Careful of what?
Careful not to disturb me while I am in my human drama.
Why not? Am I not yours?
Yes you are. But it hurts our standing to admit we have our shadows.
How so?
Arent I the one supposed to be asking the questions?
Yes you are. You asked for me?
Yes I did. Why does it hurts our standing to admit we have our shadows?
Hahaha, very nice.
I know.
Do you know what lassi is?
No.
Do you know what yogurt is?
Yes.
Lassi is watered down yogurt.
and....?
Would you know what lassi is if you did not know what yogurt is?
I think not. But what does lassi and yogurt has to do with my question?
This knowledge appears useless to you because you did not have a need to know what lassi is. You can only learn what something is if you truly have the need to know it.
Why cant I be good at mathematics then, or learn the intricacies of art?
How hard have you tried?
hhhmmm.....


The Wanderer- How is it that we do not admit to having any shadows but it is only our shadow that others see.
May be I am more interesting than you are.
But are you not Mine?
That I am.
Why the drama than?
Your history requires that you be posited as a unity. A shadow has many colors.
My history?
Your history.
But I am but 25 or 26.
But you speak.
I speak? What does my speech got to do with how I appear to anyone?
More than you think. Your language could be the filter through which others see me, your shadow. They may come wearing pink glasses though.

The Wanderer- Tell me... what is language...?

Wanderer and his Shadow

The Shadow: Since I haven't heard your voice in so long, I would like to give you an opportunity to speak.
The Wanderer: Someone said something—where? and who? It almost seems as if I myself were speaking, though in an even weaker voice than mine.
The Shadow (after a pause): Are you not happy to have an opportunity to speak?
The Wanderer: By God and all things, in which I do not believe, my shadow speaks; I hear it, but I don't believe it.
The Shadow: Let's accept it and don't continue to think about it—in one hour it will all be over.
The Wanderer: That's what I thought, when I saw two and then five camels in a forest near Pisa.
The Shadow: It's good, that we are both indulgent in the same way, if our reason stands still: thus we will not become annoying and press each other in conversation when something sounds incomprehensible to us. If one does not know how to answer, then it is already enough to say something—that's the reasonable policy under which I agree to converse. With longer discussions, the wisest one becomes once the fool and three times the dullard.
The Wanderer: Your modesty is not complimentary to your confessor.
The Shadow: Am I to flatter?
The Wanderer: I thought a man's shadow was his vanity, but his vanity would never ask: "Am I to flatter?"
The Shadow: Nor would man's vanity, as far as I know, inquire—as I did twice already—whether it could speak: it always speaks.
The Wanderer: Only now do I notice how impolite I am, my beloved shadow: I have not said a word about how pleased I am to see you as well as hear you. You should know that I love the shadow as much as I cherish the light. For facial beauty, clarity of speech, quality and firmness of character, shadow is as necessary as light. They are not opponents: they are rather affectionate, holding hands—and if the light disappears, the shadow slips away after it.
The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: the night; I love human beings, because they are devotees of light and I'm pleased when their eyes shine as they discern and discover knowledge—untiring knowers and discoverers that they are. That shadow, which all things cast, if the sunshine of perception falls upon them—that shadow am I as well.
The Wanderer: I believe I understand you, despite your somewhat shadowy expressions. But you were right: good friends give each other—here and there—a cryptic word as a sign of agreement, which should be a mystery to any third party. And we are good friends. Therefore, let's dispense with the preliminaries! A few hundred questions press upon my soul, and the time you have to answer them is perhaps only brief. Let's see what, in all haste and peaceableness, we can agree upon.
The Shadow: But shadows are shier than human beings: you won't tell anyone how we have spoken together!
The Wanderer: How we have spoken together? Heaven forfend! especially from long drawn-out literary discussions. If Plato had less desire to "spin" his readers, they would find more pleasure in Plato. A really amusing discussion—when written down—is merely a painting with false perspectives: everything is too long or too short—nevertheless, perhaps you'll allow me to indicate what we agreed upon?
The Shadow: I'm happy with that, since everyone will recognize therein only your opinions—nobody will think of the shadow.
The Wanderer: Perhaps you are wrong, my friend! Up to now one assumed in my opinions more of shadow than of me.
The Shadow: More shadow than light? Is it possible?
The Wanderer: Dear fool, be serious! My first question requires seriousness.

Khalil Jibran

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.


And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.


Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals.

Dead Poet's Society

The students quickly quiet down as Keating emerges from the other room,
whistling the 1812 Overture. He walks up the length of the classroom and
out the door without a word. The students look around at one another,
uncertain of what to do. Keating pokes his head back in the doorway.

KEATING
Well come on.

He gestures them to follow and the students, after some hesitation, grab
their books and follow Keating out into the main entranceway.

INT. ENTRANCEWAY - DAY

Keating stands before the school's trophy cabinets and waits until all
the boys arrive.

KEATING
"Oh Captain, My Captain" who knows where
that comes from?

Todd looks up as if he knows the answer, but says nothing. Spaz blows his
nose a little too close to Meeks for his liking.

KEATING
Not a clue? It's from a poem by Walt
Whitman about Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Now in
this class you can call me Mr. Keating. Or,
if you're slightly more daring, Oh Captain,
My Captain.

The students laugh slightly.

KEATING
Now let me dispel a few rumors so they
don't fester into facts. Yes, I too
attended Hell-ton and survived. And no,
at that time I was not the mental giant
you see before you. I was the intellectual
equivalent of a ninety-eight pound
weakling. I would go to the beach and
people would kick copies of Byron in my
face.

The boys laugh once again, while Cameron, obviously trying to write all
this down, looks around confusedly. Keating looks down at papers in his
hand.

KEATING
Now, Mr… Pitts. That's a rather
unfortunate name. Mr. Pitts, where are
you?

Pitts raises his hand while everyone around him snickers.

KEATING
Mr. Pitts, would you open your hymnal to page 542 and read the first
stanza of the poem you find there?

PITTS
"To the virgins, to make much of time"?

KEATING
Yes, that's the one. Somewhat appropriate,
isn't it.

PITTS
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old
time is still a flying, and this same
flower that smiles today, tomorrow will
be dying."

KEATING
Thank you Mr. Pitts. "Gather ye rosebuds
while ye may." The Latin term for that
sentiment is Carpe Diem. Now who knows
what that means?

Meeks immediately puts his hand up.

MEEKS
Carpe Diem. That's "seize the day."

KEATING
Very good, Mr.-

MEEKS
Meeks.

KEATING
Meeks. Another unusual name. Seize the
day. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Why does the writer use these lines?

CHARLIE
Because he's in a hurry.

KEATING
No, ding!

Keating slams his hand down on an imaginary buzzer.

KEATING
Thank you for playing anyway. Because we
are food for worms lads. Because, believe
it or not, each and every one of us in
this room is one day going to stop
breathing, turn cold, and die.

Keating turns towards the trophy cases, filled with trophies, footballs,
and team pictures.

KEATING
Now I would like you to step forward over
here and peruse some of the faces from
the past. You've walked past them many
times. I don't think you've really looked
at them.

The students slowly gather round the cases and Keating moves behind them.

KEATING
They're not that different from you, are
they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones,
just like you. Invincible, just like you
feel. The world is their oyster. They
believe they're destined for great things,
just like many of you. Their eyes are full
of hope, just like you. Did they wait until
it was too late to make from their lives
even one iota of what they were capable?
Because you see gentlmen, these boys are
now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen
real close, you can hear them whisper their
legacy to you. Go on, lean in.

The boys lean in and Keating hovers over Cameron's shoulder.

KEATING
(whispering in a gruff voice)
Carpe.

Cameron looks over his shoulder with an aggravated expression on his face.

KEATING
Hear it?
(whispering again)
Carpe. Carpe Diem. Seize the day boys,
make your lives extraordinary.

The boys stare at the faces in the cabinet in silence.


2.

Keating sits at his desk at the front of the classroom and opens up one
of his books.

KEATING
Gentlemen, open your text to page
twenty-one of the introduction. Mr.
Perry, will you read the opening
paragraph of the preface, entitled
"Understanding Poetry"?

NEIL
Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans
Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand
poetry, we must first be fluent with
its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech.
Then ask two questions: One, how artfully
has the objective of the poem been
rendered, and two, how important is that
objective. Question one rates the poem's
perfection, question two rates its
importance. And once these questions have
been answered, determining a poem's
greatest becomes a relatively simple
matter.

Keating gets up from his desk and prepares to draw on the chalk board.

NEIL
If the poem's score for perfection is
plotted along the horizontal of a graph,
and its importance is plotted on the
vertical, then calculating the total
area of the poem yields the measure of
its greatness.

Keating draws a corresponding graph on the board and the students
dutifully copy it down.

NEIL
A sonnet by Byron may score high on the
vertical, but only average on the
horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on
the other hand, would score high both
horizontally and vertically, yielding a
massive total area, thereby revealing the
poem to be truly great. As you proceed
through the poetry in this book, practice
this rating method. As your ability to
evaluate poems in this matter grows, so
will - so will your enjoyment and
understanding of poetry.

Neil sets the book down and takes off his glasses. The student sitting
across from him is discretely trying to eat. Keating turns away from
the chalkboard with a smile.

KEATING
Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J.
Evans Pritchard. We're not laying pipe,
we're talking about poetry.

Cameron looks down at the graph he copied into his notes and quickly
scribbles it out.

KEATING
I mean, how can you describe poetry like
American Bandstand? I like Byron, I give
him a 42, but I can't dance to it.

Charlie suddenly appear to become interested in the class.

KEATING
Now I want you to rip out that page.

The students look at Keating as if he has just gone mad.

KEATING
Go on, rip out the entire page. You heard
me, rip it out. Rip it out!

Charlie looks around at the others. He then looks down at his own notes,
which consists of drawing breasts.

KEATING
Go on, rip it out.

Charlie rips the page out and holds it up.

KEATING
Thank you Mr. Dalton. Gentlemen, tell you
what, don't just tear out that page, tear
out the entire introduction. I want it
gone, history. Leave nothing of it. Rip
it out. Rip! Begone J. Evans Pritchard,
Ph.D. Rip, shred, tear. Rip it out. I
want to hear nothing but ripping of Mr.
Pritchard.

Meeks looks around reluctantly and then finally begins tearing out pages.

KEATING
We'll perforate it, put it on a roll.

Keating sees Cameron still hesitating.

KEATING
It's not the bible, you're not going to
go to hell for this. Go on, make a clean
tear, I want nothing left of it.

Keating goes over to his room. Cameron turns around to Neil.

CAMERON
We shouldn't be doing this.

NEIL
Rip, rip, rip!

Neil makes Cameron turn back around.

KEATING (O.S.)
Rip it out, rip!

From outside the classroom, Mr. McAllister hears all the noise and sees
all the students ripping out the pages. He bursts into the room.

MCALLISTER
What the hell is going on here?

The boys all turn around in shock. Charlie stuffs a crumpled page into his
mouth. Keating emerges from his room with a waste paper basket.

KEATING
I don't hear enough rips.

MCALLISTER
Mr. Keating.

KEATING
Mr. McAllister.

MCALLISTER
I'm sorry, I- I didn't know you were
here.

KEATING
I am.

MCALLISTER
Ahh, so you are. Excuse me.

Mr. McAllister slowly backs out of the classroom.

KEATING
Keep ripping gentlemen. This is a battle,
a war. And the casualties could be your
hearts and souls.

Keating holds out the basket to Charlie who spits out a wad of paper.

KEATING
Thank you Mr. Dalton. Armies of academics
going forward, measuring poetry. No, we
will not have that here. No more of Mr.
J. Evans Pritchard. Now in my class you
will learn to think for yourselves again.
You will learn to savor words and language.
No matter what anybody tells you, words and
ideas can change the world. I see that look
in Mr. Pitt's eye, like nineteenth century
literature has nothing to do with going to
business school or medical school. Right?
Maybe. Mr. Hopkins, you may agree with him,
thinking "Yes, we should simply study our
Mr. Pritchard and learn our rhyme and meter
and go quietly about the business of
achieving other ambitions." I have a little
secret for ya. Huddle up. Huddle up!

The boys get up from their seats and gather around Keating in the center
of the class.

KEATING
We don't read and write poetry because
it's cute. We read and write poetry
because we are members of the human race.
And the human race is filled with passion.
Medicine, law, business, engineering,
these are all noble pursuits, and necessary
to sustain life. But poetry, beauty,
romance, love, these are what we stay alive
for. To quote from Whitman: "O me, o life
of the questions of these recurring, of the
endless trains of the faithless, of cities
filled with the foolish. What good amid
these, o me, o life? Answer: that you are
here. That life exists, and identity.
That the powerful play goes on, and you
may contribute a verse. That the powerful
play goes on and you may contribute a verse.

Keating looks up at Todd.

Keating
What will your verse be?
3.

The cafeteria is filled with students and teachers standing before the tables saying grace.

ALL
For what we are about to receive, may the
Lord make us truly grateful. Amen.

Mr. Keating and Mr. McAllister are seated next to one another at the table.

MCALLISTER
Quite an interesting class you gave today,
Mr. Keating.

KEATING
I'm sorry if I shocked you, Mr. McAllister.

MCALLISTER
Oh, there's no need to apologize. It was
very fascinating, misguided though it was.

KEATING
You think so?

MCALLISTER
You take a big risk by encouraging them to
be artists John. When they realize they're
not Rembrandts, Shakespeares or Mozarts,
they'll hate you for it.

KEATING
We're not talking artists George, we're
talking free thinkers.

MCALLISTER
Free thinkers at seventeen?

KEATING
Funny, I never pegged you as a cynic.

MCALLISTER
(taken aback by the comment)
Not a cynic, a realist. Show me the heart
unfettered by foolish dreams, and I'll
show you a happy man.

KEATING
But only in their dreams can man be truly
free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus
will be.

MCALLISTER
Tennyson?

KEATING
No, Keating.

Keating winks and Mr. McAllister can't help but laugh.