Dokkōdō

1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.^[1]
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the Way.

Read in

February

·        Sam Harris – Letter to a Christian Nation

·        James Joyce – Dubliners

·        Samuel Beckett – Endgame [text; video production (Hamm - Michael Gambon; Clov - David Thewlis)]

·                 ‘’         – Act Without Words [text; video production (Mime - Sean Foley;
Director - Karel Reisz)]

·        Jiddu Krishnamurti – The Urgency of Change

·        Terence McKenna – Evolving Times [audio lecture]

·        Ernest Hemmingway – The Old Man and the Sea

·        Baraka [film] x2

·        Rabindranath Tagore – Gitanjali [1912]

·        Franz Kafka – In the Penal Colony

·        Helen Keller – Optimism [1903]

·        Woodrow Wilson – When a Man Comes to Himself  [1901]

·        Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Kubla Khan  [1797]

·        Philip K. Dick – The Eyes Have It [1953]

·                 ‘’         – Beyond the Door

·                 ‘’         – Beyond Lies the Wub

·                 ‘’         – Piper in the Woods [Feb 1953]

·                 ‘’         -- The Crystal Crypt [Jan 1954]

·                 ‘’         -- The Defenders [Jan 1953]

·                 ‘’         -- The Gun

·                 ‘’         -- The Skull

·        Bram Stoker – A Star Trap

·        Alfred Jarry – The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race

·        H.P. Lovecraft – The Disinternment

·        Guo Jijeng – The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars

·        Russell H. Conwell – What You Can Do With Your Will-Power

·        Herman Melville – Moby Dick; or, the Whale

·        H.P. Lovecraft – The Silver Key

·        The Teaching Company (James Hall) -- Philosophy of Religion [audio lecture series]

·        Jonathon Edwards – Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

The earthen vessel lets a sweet aroma, and it is pleasing to the LORD.

Callum van de Sheep-skin.

Callum! -- Friend, and long-time friend, known in stead of years; if you, now, for all the sped vicissitudes which fresh assail you, in this, the exciting time of this your transition -- not into adulthood, surely; who can say, for the obscuring shade of your natural affect and air, or, and this option more obstreperously true to me, though not in least to the diminution of your inveterate  good-gilt soul; or for your roving wide-world adventures, who can say when you strove strident through the bullwarks of self-sufficiency --

Tired. Callum, friend through course of long, sure years, it would please me greatly if you would disclose to me your email address. I would be more than glad -- indeed, glad for myself, in the simple pleasure of reading the wrought exertions of a brilliant intellect, and glad, too, for you, for I feel my help -- and I say this without condescension or glib, affected grace -- can, and will, due to trial and result, improve the heady capacities of your writings, and your skill to write. If you'd prefer to leave the past behind you, then this sentiment I duly comprehend, and to it, if it blooms, I shall quickly acquiesce -- yet though still alert me with a salutory address!

post-script
Please, also, could you give me, if you have it, Callan's email address. I dearly want that boy to succeed, for I saw great promise in him when I knew him; a promise that tore violenty through as much in the virility of his comfortable demeanour as in the one small, stately film of his I saw. I wish to help him grow, and exchange magnanimous advice -- and if I cannot give advice, then I shall take it, and go away, and bother him no more with my inane and premature words. But for even this to happen, I need his digital details, and so I beg, of thee, of ye! ah! please. pl0x.

I am a schizoid.

But, then, so too was Confucius.

'Very few will have been at this point of saturation, penetrated right to the marrow by the absolute void of every human aspiration. The universe is merely a chance arrangement of elementary particles[2]. A transitory image in the midst of chaos. Which will end with the inevitable: The human race will disappear. Other races will appear, and disappear in turn. The heavens are cold and empty, traversed by the faint light of half-dead stars. Which, also, will disappear. Everything disappears. And human actions are just as random and senseless as the movements of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, fine sentiments? Pure “victorian fictions”. There is only egotism. Cold, undiluted and dazzling.

'Lovecraft is well aware of the depressing nature of these conclusions. As he wrote in 1918, “all rationalism tends to minimize the value and importance of life, and to diminish the total quantity of human happiness. As he wrote in 1918, "all rationalism tends to minimize the value and importance of life, and to diminish the total quantity of human happiness. In some cases the truth could cause suicide, or at least precipitate a near-suicidal depression." ' - Houellebecq. 

Thrice have the subterranean glooms of ultimate nihilism subhumed me. The only cure for such an ailment is time spent in silence, away even from oneself. If the existential void reflects no human light, let your own self give nothing, not least to the void. All soon fades out of sight, and there become no holes to tread in.
 
I have spent months in this state of extreme apathy, whereas Lovecraft remained in bleak torpor for more than a decade. That so beautifully sensitive a creature should feel so little is truly a fascination.

'He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!'

H.P. Lovecraft, 'Pickman's Model'.