Befuddling One's Self Methodically

Metaphysics is a mirage. It is the art of befuddling one's self methodically. Karl Ludwig Michelet. Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen. Douglas Adams. What one human being can be to another is not a very great deal; in the end everyone stands alone, and the important thing is, who it is that stands alone. Arthur Schopenhauer. He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was "Yes". Douglas Adams. A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism. But depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Francis Bacon. Sorry for the inconvenience. (God's final message to his creation). Douglas Adams.

Anarchist Rat

A guide to cutting stencils:
The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.


Manifesto:
"Camp. I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Source: The Imperial War Museum.

~ Banksy

Justice beyond Despair

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins; all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

~ Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (Barnes and Noble, 1981) p.41.

The Five Deadly Sins

panatipata veramani-sikkhapadam samadiyami
i undertake to observe the precept to
abstain from killing living beings

adinnadana veramani-sikkhapadam samadiyami
i undertake to observe the precept to
abstain from taking things not given

kamesu michcacara veramani-sikkhapadam samadiyami
i undertake to observe the precept to
abstain from sexual misconduct

musavada veramani-sikkhapadam samadiyami
i undertake to observe the precept to
abstain from false speech

surameraya-majja-pamadatthana veramani-sikkhapadam samadiyami
i undertake to observe the precept to
abstain from intoxicating drinks and drugs causing heedlessness

The Seven Virtues

PRIDE is excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with
the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity. ENVY is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation. GLUTTONY is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires. LUST is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body. ANGER is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath. GREED is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness. SLOTH is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

MatchMaking

i can forgive
not because it feels good
not because it is written
in the commandments
but because not everything
can be learned
from others mistakes
and in time i am going to
make some of my own
and i would want you
to forgive me

i can love
because i assume
i am loving a human being
a fragile container
in search of
something warm to hold
and not some
piece of perfection
i saw on the
late night tv show

SpaceProgram

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