constant escape

winter withered, warm
As a cautionary measure I advocate taking on an increasingly machinic ontology when dealing with it, but perhaps that isn't as effective a tactic as I make it out to be. Its in the interest of sparing yourself some bulk of psychic tension - also perhaps bolstered by a near-conviction that suicide isn't a way out, but would rather amount to some kind of shuffling of the deck, perhaps even in a way that is compatible with an otherwise materialist sensibility.

There is an infinite amount of information to be processed.

From the offset, the thing to develop an immunity against would be demotivation itself. What are the reasons, internally, that your momentum ceases? Exhaustion? Depression? Disillusionment? I believe these things can be minimized unto near extinction. They are artifacts that emerge within the nonessential bulk that is called the human.

It would involve reconciling science with the metaphysical. Scientism is an effective braking mechanism, built upon a sharp procedural strategy, but it has been operating way beyond its jurisdiction, effectively annexing the territory of the metaphysical - and I think you would agree, but I can't say for certain.

It feels as if some/most of the human experience needs to be foregone or sacrificed in the interest of furthering such a project, a project that could, perhaps, be politically manifest as a non-fascist administration of the evolution of intelligent matter.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's good to have faith sure, but it isn't always sustainable in the face of experience which can be brutal
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
It seems to demand extremities of passion that not all of us can muster, not all crucibles can contain. I'm among the first to lose track of that.
 

version

Well-known member
Have to say, if Ulysses is porn then it's not very good porn, although I haven't reached Penelope yet.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I read it about 20 years ago. I don't think I had a favorite section, but the girls on the rocks stuck vividly in my mind. I'll tell you more when I reread it, but at the moment I'm still in the 14th century.

Purely as writing I was in love with it.
 

version

Well-known member
I need to get a paperback copy. I have this clunky hardback edition which I cba with. Hate hardbacks.
 

version

Well-known member
I think it's good how humbling attempting to read this stuff is. I feel like a complete dullard reading Ulysses. I must be 'getting' about 20% of it, if that. The other day I looked up some Latin phrase in the notes and it wasn't just a Latin phrase, it was also a reference to a specific use of said phrase by Ben Jonson discussing Shakespeare. Mindboggling. Hadn't a chance in Hell of ever working that out on my own.
 

version

Well-known member
Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well, I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,

C. G. Jung
 

version

Well-known member
Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he's proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading that letter by Jung makes me wish I could devote so much thought and feeling to a book (if it deserved it). There's so many books to read, so many films to watch, and so on, I always feel my engagement with literature is fairly shallow and fleeting, and everything learned forgotten or rubbed out by something else learned (equally as briefly).
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's incredible to me that someone like Joyce could exist, having read so widely and deeply AND found the time to also write such complicated and beautiful books. Plus a day job, a family, a lot of booze.

I suppose cumulatively so many hours of my life must have been lost to social media, trash TV, porn and general lazing about that I could have fitted the western canon into my downtime.

Benefits of a Jesuit education.
 

jenks

thread death
Reading that letter by Jung makes me wish I could devote so much thought and feeling to a book (if it deserved it). There's so many books to read, so many films to watch, and so on, I always feel my engagement with literature is fairly shallow and fleeting, and everything learned forgotten or rubbed out by something else learned (equally as briefly).
I know Eliot was talking about being an artist but I think his lines work equally well for being a reader “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
(A snippet of stuff I'd highlighted on my kindle when reading Ulysses.)

Yellow highlight | Page: 18

Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love.

Yellow highlight | Page: 21

a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws.

Yellow highlight | Page: 22

Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds.

Yellow highlight | Page: 23

In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases.

Yellow highlight | Page: 23

God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead.

Yellow highlight | Page: 24

stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table,

Yellow highlight | Page: 24

Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
 
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