only natural

Part of discovering the truth is the realization that it's not what you think it is. That realization is not something to be feared. It's liberating to break free from the illusion that we always know the truth when we see it - that judging the truth comes naturally. 

quotidian supernature

The thing that's interesting and mysterious about this idea of beginning a new life, which is also a continuation of your old life, is the reality that the two lives both continue. It's like there are two personas within the one person. 

That's something that I think confuses a lot of people. It confused me. When I first became a Christian, because of everything the Bible says about being a new creation, and being born again, and so on, I thought that, when I take that step and I actually become a Christian, the old me would be no more. That's why it was such a difficult step to take. 

But then when I did take the step, it was an anti-climax. Here I was - the same. It was a relief, but it was also a huge challenge, because now I had to do all the things that I thought a Christian does but with the same old nature that I had always had. 

La Vita Nuova

My experience with detox made certain spiritual concepts come alive for me. Like, how you can, on the one hand, be the same person you've always been, but, on the other, be a new creation. How is it possible to be both? I know now because I've experienced it.  

I had a conversation with the social worker early in my 10 day detox and she told me that, of course detox is going to be challenging because it was very literally the beginning of my new life - a life without alcohol and valium. That idea really stayed with me. I was beginning a new life. It wasn't just wishful thinking or some theological sleight of hand; it was a solid reality - the fact that I stopped drinking and thereby began a new life.

Before, I never imagined that I could be in the position I am in now where I just won't ever drink, ever again. It's not will-power or self-discipline. I don't have to resist temptation. I'm fortunate to have learned that drinking alcohol is incompatible with life for me. My biggest failures taught me that lesson. The first failure happened after I had stopped drinking previously for a couple of years. Someone was encouraging me to have a drink and I thought - what's the harm? I can just go back to not drinking tomorrow. But I didn't. I found myself back in the cycle of regular drinking. So, that's the first lesson. 

The second failure and major lesson was what led to me going to detox. I was tapering off Valium and my Doctor forced me to reduce a bit faster than I could handle. I thought about how I was going to cope and decided to drink to get through it - not excessively, just enough to manage. Just like it was a lie that I could have one or two drinks and then go back to sobriety, it was a lie that I could drink just enough to cushion myself from the suffering of a taper that was a little too fast. When you think about what valium and other benzos are, and what alcohol is, it makes sense that it wouldn't work. But to say that it didn't work is an understatement. It destroyed me. Alcoholism took hold real fast. I was drinking at least 2 bottles of red wine every day, and I needed to just to function - to do anything. I knew that it was killing me - destroying my mental and physical health - but I was stuck in the cycle. 

That lasted for 5 or 6 months, and then I went into detox, which saved my life. The staff at the detox facility I was at are amazing. I had more than one truly life-changing conversation while I was there. I started eating better. It was the beginning of my new life, as messy and terrifying and intense but exciting and joyous as new life is. 

duality

Because of the length of the Bible, one of the challenges is the dichotomy of working through the whole thing while also making sure that you're regularly engaging with certain parts. Like, obviously you're going to want to read the gospels frequently, and then also the epistles as well, but if you were to just read from cover to cover, starting in Genesis, if you read a couple of chapters a day, it's going to be nearly a year before you even get to the New Testament. So, the challenge is to systematically read through the whole book and, at the same time, be dipping into different parts. 

So I came up with a solution....I divide the Bible into 4 sections: history books, the prophets (+ psalms and proverbs), the gospels and acts, and then the epistles and the rest of the New Testament. I read a chapter from section 1, then a chapter from section 2, then section 3, then section 4, then back to section 1, the next chapter of, etc. 

second brain

Something I would do if I was going to do any more formal study, is to put my notes into some kind of system...like, for example, obsidian. 

Octopus watercolor tutorial: EASY/beginner. For Nature Sketch Crate step...

echoing through eternity

The circumstances in which Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address were hardly auspicious. It's short. It's lacking in drama or rhetorical fireworks. Yet, it's among the greatest speeches ever given. 

the way forward

The biggest personal change that I've ever made (I think) was three years ago when I made my daily goals non-negotiable. Until then I had thought of them as preferable but not essential, but when facing the challenge of tapering off valium - that grueling, long, painful, impossible process - I had the insight that the only way forward was to make these things essential. 

death of the pick me author

A good biography conveys the illusion that the writer is like a clear lens through which the reader perceives the objective reality of the subject's life. There's really an art to that. It's a kind of selflessness. Sometimes the writer imposes too much, though. They want to tell you about their connection with the subject, and they want to tell you about how this project - the biography they're writing - fits in with their life's work and what they were trying to achieve in writing it. I think it spoils their book. I'm interested in the person they're writing about, and only in them - the writer - insofar as knowledge of them sheds further light on the subject. 

Of course there's an irony here, because the more they impose their self into the picture, the less they cast their self in a positive light. The more they illuminate the life of the subject, the more they actually shine a light on their self. 

i am bic

Since stopping drinking, I get addicted to other things, like honey and lemon soothers. 

visualizing progress

A few years ago, not long after I decided to get serious about tapering off valium, after a couple of months I had reduced from around 50 x 2 mg tablets a week to 29 x 2 mg tablets. That number stuck in my mind because, as I was walking home from the chemist that day, I passed a house with a big '29' on it. 

Now I'm down to 5 x 2 mg a week, and I still pass that same house on my journey to and from the chemist. It makes me think about how far I've come. Then, the other day I had the idea of counting the houses off and seeing, in terms of my walk down that street, the corresponding progress made on my taper. It was encouraging because no. 5 is right near the end (or beginning) of the street. For all intents and purposes, it's basically the end. It's just a few steps until the end. So that's where I'm at. It sometimes seems like this taper drags on forever and I'll never get through it. It still really affects me. I encourage myself that I've made a lot of progress, but I still feel like I have a way to go. Seeing it visually like this really helps me to grasp that, it's not just wishful thinking - I am actually at or near the end. It's a fact. 

Then today I had the idea of counting the other way - after passing the no 29, counting upwards and getting a sense of the progress I made between when I started and when I reached 29. It gave me a sense of the progress I've made since the beginning. It puts in terms of a distance walked. An interesting thing is that the final number on that street (at least on that side) is 47, which represents around when I started my taper - around 47 x 2 mg a week. So that road is, funnily enough, a real representation of my taper. I started at the start of the road and now I'm basically at the end. 

working with flooring

I like lino cut printing because it's an easy process, with no messy chemicals, but it has unlimited potential. It's a good example of how limitations can produce creative results. You have to do simple designs because you can't really carve a complex design into lino, but that gives lino cut prints that special look they have. 

heavy

you went into a gesture drawing frenzy and 

broke my skin

and I fell out

bbt

I watched an interview of the cast of Big Bang Theory and Jim Parsons talked about how he often asks Mayim Bialik what Sheldon's lines mean, because she's much closer, in terms of academic achievement, to Sheldon than Jim Parsons is. 

completion

Some things may or may not be done with malice or negligently, but there's no coming back from them. A small thing or a big thing can presage an irrevocable and permanent change, and no explanation is relevant or necessary. 

re

One of the keys to overcoming depression and anxiety is learning not to react. It's hard to learn. It's not the sort of thing you can achieve by trying to do it. It's more like, as you make progress, you realize that that's what you're doing. 

apprehension

My favorite play is Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Before watching it I didn't realize how much I actually knew about the witch trials. Or maybe I didn't know it. There's that phenomenon where, when you encounter profound truths, you feel like you already knew them. You know - yes, that's true - because you already knew it, or at least it resonated with what you already knew and adds stuff you didn't. 

making tradition

When the young Harold Bloom took the manuscript of The Anxiety of Influence to show his colleagues, they told him absolutely not to publish it. Whatever it was, it wasn't literary criticism - it wasn't the work of a respectable scholar. But he did publish it, and it's one of the greatest works of literary criticism of the twentieth century. 

enigma

What keeps me watching Riverdale, even more than the story, is the use of color. The different colors and lighting always have a meaning - every color in every scene. It's like a constant puzzle to be savored throughout every episode. 

destinatum

The best topics are the ones where you can keep learning indefinitely, but you never get to a point where you know all the answers, because, at that point, the topic holds no interest. 

goodness

I have no sense of what is good and what is not good poetry. I know some things that I like in good poetry. It's such a clear thing to the experts. Like it's almost universally acknowledged that Wordsworth had a good decade but outside that his poetry was poor. I guess I could study it and get a sense of the difference, but just reading the poems, I don't see it. 

arte

In the tradition of some of my art heroes, I've started making postcards. I'm going to make hundreds of them. So now I do digital art and postcards. I'm also starting to experiment with different kinds of printmaking. Digital art, postcards, then....canvases? clothes? art journals? we'll see

frisson

I saw a painting by Glenn Brown where he fuzed the figure of a person - the whole body - with a face, and you could see both very clearly in the image and they complemented each other. 

vvvv⋀⋀⋀vvv

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 

the morality of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Some modern art is worthless trash....like Richard Prince blowing up other people's instagram images and framing them, and Marcel Duchamp's infamous urinal. The problem with works like that, I think, is that they involve no creativity. They are not 'made things'. They are 'found things'. It wouldn't be so bad if there was some meaningful editing or adjustment - some augmentation - of the found things, but there isn't. 

Still, it's very lucrative. Richard Prince's blown up instagram images sell for around $100,000.00 each. 

impresszt

My art looks different to me, because I made it. Sometimes when something really comes together in a way that pleasantly surprises me, I think - wow, that's great - but then it doesn't get much of a response from people. Other times - not very often, actually - I'll have an idea and I will execute that idea, and it becomes a bit laborious, dotting all the eyes and crossing the tees, but people really like it. 

ambition

Something that I think is key to understanding Warhol's Campbell's soup can paintings - maybe the most important thing, even though it's easy to overlook - is the intense personal associations that Campbell's soup had for him. It wasn't just some mass-produced item, to him. 

That's what I notice about his art and films - what matters about them is what he thinks and feels. He doesn't cater to an audience in an obvious way. Like, with the Empire State Building film....it's just a shot of the Empire State Building that goes for 8 hours and 5 minutes. The only observable change is when it gets dark and the lights come on. He said himself that it was probably better to think about the film than to watch it. But he was making something that was interesting to him. 

It's not like he didn't care how his work was received, though. He really wanted to succeed at art and he did everything with that in mind. 

burn

It's discouraging to lose people - like, when people who were part of your life are no longer - but there's a positive way to look at it. You're becoming your true self, and those people know the old you. You've grown out of them. 

I can think of lots of ways that things could have worked out better. If I was normal, things would be very different. I always interpret that movement away from others as a fault of mine. I don't measure up. 

But maybe it's not that there's something wrong with me. It's like the tale of the ugly duckling, who was neither ugly nor a duckling, but something else entirely. 

Una nuova vita

It's a mystery how you can truly begin living a new life even while your old life continues. In a way, the new life isn't even real, but the truth is that it's your old life - which seems so real and substantial - that isn't real. 

of arms and the man

There's a whole series of battles that each of us fight that no one really ever talks about. It's probably the most challenging and noble endeavor that you are involved in, but it apparently doesn't rise to the level of content. 

we need another Byronic hero

I'm enjoying watching Riverdale, but I don't think Jughead should be dating Betty. Cole Sprouse is great as the moody, enigmatic, intelligent, rebellious, angry young man. He's so good as that. But then they're trying to make him soft and sensitive, and I don't think it works very well. 

brick by brick

I so much prefer the RSV translation of Proverbs 14:1, to pretty much all the other translations. 

The RSV reads:

Wisdom builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.

Every single one of the other translations - without exception, that I could find - refer to a wise woman or women, and I think that loses something because the verse is not about a woman or women, it's about wisdom. It is interesting that wisdom is designated as female, here and elsewhere, and that's something to really think about, but to make the verse about wise women vs foolish women - I think that misses the point. 

What brought this verse to mind was that I was watching a video about our current political moment, and the discussion centered on the way that humanity's baser tendencies, which seem to be winning out at the moment, are self-defeating. They tear themselves down. 

aimë

You have to make a whole new world, but it's not as hard as it sounds. It's really just a matter of going outside, and the world is all there. Where you are now is not the real world. You're living in a mansion you built to save yourself. 

universally acknowledged

You don't realize until you travel how inordinately strange the world is. Things you have always taken for granted, such as, not allowing animals to drive and not wearing a heavy coat in summer, are not universal. 

an example of the golden rule

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. 

                                        - Leviticus 19: 33 - 34

great American writers

William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, were all around the same age - all born within a few years of the turn of the century. They also died around the same age - in the 1960's, when Faulkner was 64, Hemingway 61, and Steinbeck 66. 

Something else they had in common is that they all won both the Pullitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

mediation

When we read books about history, we want an objective recounting of the relevant facts and developments. That's kind of what we expect - something bloodless and impartial, but interesting at the same time. History is interesting because of the facts and developments that make it up. 

The problem is that that idea - that a text can be absolutely transparent, a lens through which we can view the past or whatever is the subject of the text - is an illusion. To be effective - like, for example, to tell us about history - a text has to have a thesis. It has to be animated by some kind of argument or point - something the composer is trying to express. 

writing back

When we were colonized, our language was not the official language of the country we live in. Any kind of creative expression was unthinkable. In time, a hybrid language developed, and that became our means of creative expression. 

expurgation

Doris Lessing writes in the preface to The Golden Notebook:

This theme of 'breakdown', that sometimes when people 'crack up' it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self's dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me, since then. But this is where, apart from the odd short story, I first wrote about it. 

It's interesting....The Golden Notebook is famous as a feminist book, but Lessing points out that, when the book was published, no one saw what she identified above as the central theme that it is, because reviewers - both positive and negative - jumped to the conclusion that it was about the war between the sexes. 

rules

Imagine if we tried to teach kids to walk and talk in the same way we teach older kids to read and write....creating lesson plans and a syllabus and working systematically through the subject with learning activities to really embed the skills and knowledge.

There's got to be a lesson here for education - that kids learn perfectly well without all the structure and regimentation. 

wings

I read Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift when I was about 9. It was hard. I grew to hate it. But I was aware that it expanded my vocabulary like nothing else ever has. It had strange words that I know now but at the time didn't even know how to sound out in my head - words like 'whereas'. 

I also had no appreciation for its satire. I just read it as a fantasy story. But it's a brilliant piece of political satire. For example, Gulliver recounts that, in one of the lands he visits, there was a war between those who crack their soft-boiled eggs at the narrow end and those who cracked the wide end. 

I don't know why we feel like we have to adhere to one side or the other. 

or

Although the ultimate goals of alchemy - like, the elixir of life and turning other metals to gold - turned out to be chimerical, some very useful developments came from it. It led to the invention, in the early 18th century, of European porcelain, which, in many ways, was as good as making gold. Until then, the only place to get porcelain was from China. It was so valuable it was even called 'white gold'. 

social media

I don’t check who’s watched my story, liked my content or stalk those I shouldn’t for the same reason I don’t slash myself with paper cuts before dipping my body, sensually, into a clawfoot bathtub full of vinegar....

And I finally know that the most useful, fulfilling thing for my mental health is definitively not Tik Tok or Instagram or X. It’s Pinterest.

- Delaney Rowe, 'In defense of weaning yourself off social media' in Harpers Bazaar

in oars plak

Classic works of philosophy are endlessly surprising. Hobbes begins Leviathan by likening the human body to a machine:

For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts; but so many Wheeles...

Descartes too discusses the mechanics of the body and how blood flows through it, at length in his writing. 

I always enjoy these diversions and detours because they reflect the profound difference in worldview between the modern world and previous periods in history. 

possession

It's interesting to think about the way our impressions of the books we've read change with time. It's kind of like the way our memories and impressions of our own lives changes with time, but the beauty with books is that you can reread them and see what they actually say. 

Guerre et Paix

War and Peace is surprisingly readable but also authentically majestic. Tolstoy really does manage to capture the world and drama of the individual - the vicissitudes of personal life - and at the same time, sweeping historical themes. 

Has any writer done that as well as or better than Tolstoy? Maybe Shakespeare. Tolstoy famously hated Shakespeare - not him personally, but his work. He wrote an essay about it, and he focused on King Lear, as being Shakespeare's best work according to the leading critics. Tolstoy described Lear as "a very bad, carelessly composed production, which, if it could have been of interest to a certain public at a certain time, can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness."

What's going on here? How can this be possible? Harold Bloom's explanation is that it's an example of his anxiety of influence. That actually makes some sense. 

new interest

I'm interested in applying the ideas from literary theory, which I know something about, to art theory, which I'm just starting to learn about. There are so many common threads, which makes it truly fascinating. It's like exploring a whole new world but I understand some of its features because of my exploration of this other world. 

I think if I had had to study English, art and history in late high school, I wouldn't have been interested in them later. I did do English but only a bare minimum. I mainly did science and maths type subjects and after high school I didn't use any of it, ever. 

Only now, very recently, have I started to get interested in the theoretical aspect of art. 

3 Australian novels

The Vivisector by Patrick White 

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

Such is Life by Joseph Furphy 

spiritual food

Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.

                                                                      - Deuteronomy 8:1 - 5

This is God speaking to the Israelites but also speaking to us. Consider how God has led you through the vicissitudes of life. He leads us through challenges to humble and test us - to purify and refine us - to make us grow. He humbles us and causes us to hunger. 

For the Israelites, the passage is talking about literal hunger and how God fed them with manna, which was a kind of bread which came from the sky at night and they gathered each morning. But for us, it's talking about spiritual hunger, and the bread from heaven - as the Bible makes clear in other passages - represents Jesus and also the word of God - the Bible. In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as both the bread from heaven, and the word of God. So, through challenges, God causes us to hunger and then he feeds us with his word. 

before you accuse

fiction as a barrier between yourself and lies

fiction is the grime removed from the non-existent lens of the soul

the remainder after you rightly divided the word of God

rep || resent

Andy Warhol said that every artist just paints the same picture over and over. 

Every writer writes the same composition over and over. The books can seem very different, but they're about the same things - representations of the same world.