BUY FOR THE KINDLE READER:

NIGHT THOUGHTS

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AN ILLEGAL DAY IN THE HISTORY OF A SOUL

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The manuscripts are under $6.

THE SHORT, HAPPY HISTORY OF A WRITING LIFE by David Eide:

There are significant tribes in America; one of them is the critical tribe that exists in media and the university. Then there is the creative, building tribe that includes makers of poems, music, as well as bridges and computers. And then there is the mainstream tribe who carry, collectively, the burden of society, develop its market values and drive the political values.

I always alternate between loyalty and disgust for those tribes that demand my allegiance or attention.

Once I was divested of the critical tribes’ hold over me I lost a certain automatic scorn for the mainstream and, in fact, learned a great deal in that tribe. After all, the only way to learn something is to travel through it all the way and peek your head out the other end. Both the market and politics that come out of the mainstream can be eviscerated but it is far better to build according to principles of truth. Much better, much healthier.

Apothegms for the Times:

There is a shadow to individuality; there is light. The light emerges when one is doing their very best at their chosen activities and live with the results.

If you go through change or transition and people don't help you, drop them. Cut them loose because you always need positive energy when going through a change or transition.

Who would destroy the fruits of the fathers labor deserves the black hole they will sink into. And that goes back a good many generations.

The weak adhere to collective myths that appeal to their prejudices or abysmal desires. Be very aware of this and put a staying hand to it.

I can admit to the problems of dealing with (1) philosophy (2) poetry (3) spiritual

Are they three separate domains or simply impossible to grasp by one consciousness fully since they include and exclude along different pathways? I think what one has to admit is that at different times those three activities are sufficient; they are needed at different periods of time during any persons development.

The personal question is, what emerges out of the interplay with these three dimensions? What, then, is the new horizon?

Philosophy was necessary to deal with the overwhelming nature of the physical world, including political/economy, science, technology, etc. I felt the path to truth came more through the spiritual, with poetry a kind of mid-wife, sometimes bursting into a thing itself. Left to itself human nature repeats again, again, and again with seizures of the irrational thrown in for good measure. However, the spiritual forgave human nature and offered imaginative constructs that would allow for a greater humanity, a greater self.

The reader of philosophy, poetry, and the spiritual learns after awhile that it was the form of expression that was the key, including the form of personality that did the expressing.

History and memory were another large category.

However, a man can enact well in only one thing. He can and should try a lot of things when young. And then he settles on the one thing he does very well or better than the other paths he chooses.

We focus on the self because there is the constituent element; just as the quark is the constituent element in the construction of physical space. Or, whatever it may be at any give time. The string, for instance.

Ride through perilous waters and you'll see a lot of cargo go overboard.

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