Category Archives: Existential

21-Hail

MACBETH:
Speak if you can. What are you?
FIRST WITCH:
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
SECOND WITCH
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
THIRD WITCH
All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
BANQUO
Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair? I’ th’ name of truth, are you fantastical, or that indeed which outwardly you show? My noble partner you greet with present grace and great prediction of noble having and of royal hope, that he seems rapt withal.

MACBETH
Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more. A prosperous gentleman, and to be king stands not within the prospect of belief.
Witches vanish.
BANQUO
The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished?
MACBETH
Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted, as breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!
BANQUO
Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?
MACBETH
Your children shall be kings.
BANQUO
You shall be king.


It is the part of ourselves we do not normally admit to consciousness, let alone expression in action, that slips past the inner censor into our dreams and fantasies.

OUR REBEL EMOTIONS by Bernard Mobbs (1970)


This devilishly charming fellow is only a human nature characteristic. He is human nature itself; the corporeal personality honoring, respecting, reverencing, adoring and worshipping itself as king and as god in his own world.

THE WORD – A PHILOSOPHY (1958) by Edna Sarah Beardsley (re: devil)


12-Murk

Shadows

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

09-Bord

Tombstone

The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.

Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.

Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.

A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.

Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.

The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

07-Beon

Hymenoptera Apocrita

On our fence, near the trash cans, every year.

As you eliminate your body on the web, you recuperate it in your physical location.

Sometimes you have a body, sometimes you don’t.

If you don’t have a body, you’re not there.

If you have a body, you are so there that your relationship with the world is what I call proprioceptive. It’s tactile. It’s not visual as it was during the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance, what was your identity? It was the outer limit of skin, a head that processed information, a dumb universe shown as a spectacle.

Identity became a point of view.

Today, identity is a point of being. We add the new possibilities of mixed identities, collective identities, just-in-time identities, fabricated identities.

There’s great flexibility, but the core business of self remains, just extended all over the planet by electronic extensions.

Derrick de Kerckhove – Wired October 1996

pro·pri·o·cep·tiverelating to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially those connected with the position and movement of the body.

22-Went

Revolution

Dead & Counting

One hundred twenty loops around the glowing orb are what we get – give or take a decade or 10 depending on how well you attract lightning.

And that’s a generous estimate, mostly reserved for women living on some isolated island in Japan or Italy with simple diets and a daily glass of vino.”

~Mike Ricker, leafmagazines.com

09-Dent

Questioning

Students doing research on RIGHTS

Civil and Political Rights:

  • Freedom of speech, assembly, and religion
  • Right to a fair trial and political participation
  • Protection from arbitrary detention or torture

Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights:

  • Right to education, healthcare, and adequate standard of living
  • Right to work and fair wages
  • Cultural participation and intellectual property

Collective Rights:

  • Rights to self-determination and environmental protection