Cody Trepte

I saw this wonderful artist's work at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Fair this weekend and I really loved it.

http://www.codytrepte.com/2009/everything-has-always-already-begun/

It's beautiful and scientific and it made me happy that he was from Austin, Texas so I wanted to throw him a nice shout with this posting.

Rotating and Running Out

Hey Friends,

It's been a long week and I've had a lot of reflections and epiphanies. MLK day started it off and it was interesting to think about who today is our MLK, jr. I wish I knew them and maybe I do. I wish I were him or that one...

http://www.youtube.c

om/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8

"In ‎the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.

And yesterday we were reminded by JFK that we have to have a sort of patience to be alive and to take this life for just a piece of the world's history

"All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days; nor in the life of this administration; nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." - JFK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLmiOEk59n8

SOOOOO.... I've decided to really use this blog that I initially set up for a class on the Conquering of the Americas by the Spanish and the theories around cultures' and their life spans. Somehow, I feel it will all be related anyways. So my first blog will be a song I heard this morning driving... I drive a lot in LALA, at least, 100 miles a week... at least and I have given up, for the most part on road rage, I have now given in and decided to JAM my big heart out and have a good time...

The Scissor Sisters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wqez-6VGRY

"Running Out"

1 2 3 4 gimme more cause I think were going down
What you need it for?
We gonna rub that to the bottom-line
Now you should save yourself
I'm on my own not used to no one else
Cause every time I think I'm fine you keep on dreaming of
A hundred different ways to cause hysteria
Am I insane am I blind I just cant seem to trust
Too many regulations coming back at you

Were running out of money, of love, of luck
Were running out of language of fame of bread
Were running out

Something tells me that I'm fine but when I get enough
Another one...wouldn't be too much
But still I chew it up and spit it out it's too big to swallow
Gotta enough for everyone so here we go ooh
Lets see how far that we have run before this gig is over
I hear the warning signs on every body's stereo
Do you love what you like or would you do for more?
You keep on dancing underneath the burning floor

We re running out of money __ of confidence
Were running out of drugs, of patience of air
Were running out

Were running out of money of love of luck
Were running out of fame of language of bread
Were running out of money of __ of confidence
Were running out of drugs, of patience

Simone Weil: Attention, The Great Beast, War, Hierarchy, and More

Simone Weil was a philosopher, theologian, critic, sociologist, & political activist. I have been randomly assigned to present on her in my summer course "Armies of God: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas," and I feel fortunate because as I read her works her words speak directly to many of the philosophies I myself have embraced or attempted to explore.

Simone Weil (pron. "Vey") was born in Paris on February 5, 1909 and died at the age of 34 of heart failure in an English sanitorium on August 24, 1943.

Let me just say that as any person who believes in something bigger than myself, in the context of Weil's work when she speaks of "God" I don't necessarily perceive it as a God of a religious orthodoxy, in fact, Weil was never baptised although spiritual and related to religion. For me "God" is whoever you feel in you "Allah, Muhommad, God, Dios, Buddah, etc." Its the force and in no way is this blog restricted to one form of God for I feel to do so would to be to put that feeling in the Cave of unenlightenment.

Weil on Attention

"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it. All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style and all faulty connection of ideas... all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search."

"Absolute unmixed attention is prayer. "

Morality ... Internal

"Where as the desire for gold is not gold, the desire for good is itself a good -- our only task is to desire the good."

The Great Beast

The Great Beast is introduced in Book VI of The Republic. It represents the prejudices and passions of the masses. To please the Great Beast you call what it delights in Good, and what it dislikes Evil. In America this is called politics. (Below Weil's Cave of The Great Beast.")

"The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself. If we could be egoistical it would be very pleasant. It would be a rest. But literally we cannot.

It is impossible for me to take myself as an end or, in consequence, my fellow man as an end, since he is my fellow. Nor can I take any material thing, because matter is still less capable of having finality conferred upon it that human beings are.

Only one thing can be taken as an end, for in relation to the human person it possesses a kind of transcendence: this is the collective. The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition; power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice or ambition. Yet the social element is not absent from love (passions excited by princes, celebrated people, all those who have prestige...)

War and "The Illiad or the Poem of Force"

"It is the most powerful argument 'not to admire force not to hate the enemy and not to scorn the unfortunate. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then stung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn renitroduces each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own 'war aims.' It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. "