Galaxy Theater: Southern California, 01.30.04
Some nice shots taken by our friend of the band, DD.
"...with my arms to the sky..."
Life After Darla lyric sparks reflection
One of my favorite lyrics penned by my talented friend and vocalist, Elevator, reads as follows:
"...we could walk the same paths in life,To me this deceivingly simple lyric describes one of the most fundamental struggles of existence: being alone. No matter how intimate a friendship, no matter how close the connection to our families, no matter how deep and true a love might be, we are, as humans, created as a singular entity.
but we might never cross..."
As singular entities we cannot share the thoughts of others. Therefore, our struggles, our fears, hopes, dreams, passions, anxieties, realizations, and perceptions are confounded "within" our hearts and minds. As an example, imagine your first kiss. You had emotions, sensations and thoughts that were very real and palpable to you. But how did the other person feel? Did he/she feel the same way? You might answer yes. Did he/she have the same sensations, the same thoughts? The answer is simply no. He/she had their own experience, their own sensations. No matter how close his/her experience was to your own, it was different, it was unique, it was theirs. They had no more power to express to you their experience than you had to express to them yours. The connection (if any) was imperfect; flawed. This is being alone. This is walking the same path as another, yet never crossing.
Unique are our thoughts, singular are our doubts, in solitude do we perceive the world around us (usually hoping/imagining that our perception is true and shared with others), but even with this hope all we have is but faith, faith that we, in fact, do share this world with others and that one day we might be able to truly share our lives.
Don't accuse me of supporting any sort of existentialism, nor being too fatalistic. I happen to have convictions that account for the fundamental awareness mentioned above, yet even my convictions can only bridge the gap so far; it's this remaining gap that I speak of. Of course, this is a gap, mind you, that most people spend their entire lives in. The gap is only real (and apparent for that matter) from the horizontal perspective, i.e., the relationship between oneself to everybody else.
The horizontal perspective shows us as weak, contained (at least to our bodies), and mortal. Moreover, and what Elevator's sublime lyric brings out, is the horizontal inability to perfectly connect with another. This reality, from the horizontal perspective means that we might walk the same paths as many around us, and many that have come before us, yet, indeed, we might never cross.
Where does the answer lie? If the awareness written about above isn't fatalism, if it isn't existentialism, how do we avoid melancholy or worse, depression?
Dostoyevsky wrote that we can never truly understand joy unless we have acquainted ourselves with suffering. So too it seems that living a life as a singular entity makes us appreciate and truly enjoy all the more those moments where a connection is expressed in word and action. When I hug my wife and she responds with kind words, though there may not be a perfect unity there is still a great joy and comfort. Without being created as a singular entity would our love relationships be rewarding? Would hugs, kisses and kind words mean anything at all? Perhaps Dostoyevsky is correct, perhaps without the struggle of our solitary existence we would never be able to know the joy of being close.
A couple looks at beauty
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God. ~~ Jean Anouilh
Churchillian legs
hair barely there
the harsh truth of the camera eye
Your eyes signal pain
because of the strain
of smiling
the harsh truth of the camera eye
telling you all
that you never wnated to know
showing what
you didn't want shown
My so friendly lens
zooms into
"the inner you"
and it tells the harsh truth
and nothing but
Laugh with us all here
that's if you can
then take the pictures home
and scream
telling you all
that you never wanted to know
showing you what
you didn't want shown...
"Oh, I don't want
to be judged anymore
I don't wnat to be judged
I would sooner be Loved
I would sooner be
just blindly Loved..." ~~Stephen Patrick MorrisseyAnything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise. ~~ Marcus Aurelius
This Lizaveta was a dwarfish creature, “not five foot within a wee bit,” as many of the pious old women said pathetically about her, after her death. Her broad, healthy, red face had a look of blank idiocy and the fixed stare in her eyes was unpleasant, in spite of their meek expression. She wandered about, summer and winter alike, barefooted, wearing nothing but a hempen smock. Her coarse, almost black hair curled like lamb’s wool, and formed a sort of huge cap on her head. It was always crusted with mud, and had leaves, bits of stick, and shavings clinging to it, as she always slept on the ground and in the dirt. ~~ Dostoyevsky
love at first sight
may sound trite
but it's true, you know
I could list the details
of everything you ever wore
or said, or how you stood that day
~~ Stephen Patrick Morrisseybeauty is both mysterious and terrible, G-d and the devil having it out and the battlefield is man's heart. ~~ Dostoyevsky
some new pictures
Enjoying a Cuban (thanks Dad!)
Taken at my last gig at the Coach House (01.09.04)
waiting...
"The greatest power is often simple patience." ~~ Joseph Cossman"Patience with others is Love, Patience with self is Hope, Patience with God is Faith." ~~ adel bestavros
"Infinite patience brings immediate results." ~~ Wayne Dyer
"Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience." ~~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"With love and patience, nothing is impossible." ~~ Daisaku Ideda
"I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress." ~~ Elizabeth Montagu
"If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow." ~~ Chinese Proverb
"There is nothing so disagreeable, that a patient mind cannot find some solace for it." ~~ Seneca
patience is better than pride. ~~ Ecclesiates 7:8
Lyrics to my current favorite song
The band is called Mineral. The album is called End Serenading. The music is deliciously moody and beautiful. The song I have on mandatory rotation is called "The Last Word Is Rejoice"
How will I drink from that streamSeem simple enough? You must hear it to understand. Here's a late, related article. And, you can buy it here.
How will my heart sing your praise
How will I lay down in green grass fields
When my soul is so afraid toRejoice.
Raskolnikov...he did have feelings too
How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the same moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came into her eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and that at last the moment had come. . . .They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.
They resolved to wait and be patient. They had another seven years to wait, and what terrible suffering and what infinite happiness before them!
Fyodor Mikhaylovich
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
To live without Hope is to Cease to live.
found one of my old skeletons...
Although I forget how, I came across one of my old websites. Interesting to think that this thing still exists out there somewhere in cyber-space...here to be exact:
www.geocities.com/stock_jeremy
“…there are people who feel very deeply, but are somehow held down by force of weight…”“…take the example of adults who go to the theater: at the theater the adventures of all kinds of heroes are also represented, sometimes with robbers and scenes of marital conflict-- so is not that really the same thing, in its own way as it were? Young people who play at marital conflict in their hours of recreation, or who play at robbers…they are, after all, also engendering a kind of art, and a need for art is being engendered in their young souls, and these games are sometimes even more harmoniously composed than the spectacles one may see at the theater, the only difference being that people go to the theater to see actors, while here the young folk are themselves the actors…”
“it appeared that the entire problem with his character was that he had a somewhat higher opinion of himself than his real merits would permit.”
“…then I suddenly took it into my head that the girl was tenderly disposed towards me-- my heart caught fire at such a dream. I later perceived and fully realized that it was possible I had loved her with such passion not at all, but had simply revered her exalted intellect and character, something I could have hardly failed to do…wretched and dreadful did it seem to have to say goodbye to the temptations…”
“…also something more, gentlemen of the jury, something that clamors in the soul, hammers untiringly in the mind, poisoning his heart to death; that something is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, its judgment, its terrible gnawing!”
“…with many hopes, though he knew not of what, expecting much, far too much, of life…”
*all quotations from Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky's Mentor (in certain ways)
Here are some quotables I've come across thus far in my reading of Dickens' admitted favorite child, David Copperfield.
But fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why , or how, and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how. Everything is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that point of view.[he was] as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him
(speaking of a brutal school master who used to beat the school boys) ...it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great trust he held, than to be Lord High Admiral, or Commander-in-chief; in either of which capacities, it is probable, that he would have done infinitely less mischief. (this one makes me think of how much damage our public schools are currently doing)
Dostoyevsky on the Final Judgment
In my humble opinion, one of the most powerful and deeply moving bits of prose ever written...
The man speaking is a drunkard husband and father who has effectively abandoned his family: his deathly ill wife, malnourished, young children, and a teenage daughter. The daughter, who has resorted to prostitution in order to make up for the father's desertion, is a Christian. Just prior to this monologue the drunkard asked his daughter for the very money that bought his booze this day. He has spent every penny, just having finished his last pint when he begins...
“Why am I to be pitied, you say? Yes! There’s nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified, not pitied! Crucify me, O judge, crucify me, but pity me! And then I will go of myself to be crucified, for it’s not merry-making I seek, but tears and tribulation!…Do you suppose, you that sell, that this pint of yours has been sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and tribulation, and found it, and I have tasted it; but He will pity us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all things, He is the One, He too is the judge. He will come in that day and He will ask: ‘Where is the daughter who gave herself for her angry, consumptive stepmother and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?’ And He will say, ‘Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once…Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee, for thou hast loved much…’ And He will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive, I know it…I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now! And He will judge and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek…And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. ‘You too come forth,’ He will say, ‘Come forth, ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!’ And we shall all come forth without shame and shall stand before Him. And He will say unto us, ‘Ye are swine, made in the image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!’ And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, ‘O Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?’ And He will say, ‘This is why I receive them, O ye wise, this is why I receive them, O ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.’ And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before Him…and we shall weep…and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all!…Lord, Thy Kingdom come!”~~ Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, a.k.a., The Author
Reflection on life...
"Even with sorrow, life is sweet; it's good to be alive, no matter how."~~ Notes from Underground, page 107
Indeed.
Second Semester Begins
Today I embark on the second enstallment of my first year of law school, otherwise known as second semester.
Last semester I was enrolled in 15 units comprising
Contracts IThis semester I am enrolled in all five of those courses (with a II at the end of each) plus an additional, brand-new course, Criminal Law. All totalling 18 units.
Property I
Torts I
Civil Procedure I
Legal Research and Writing
In short, this semester is sure to prove to be just as challenging as last, if not more so.
However, I do plan on maintaining my sanity. I shall continue to exercise my creative energy with Life After Darla; I shall continue to spend time each night before bed doing "pleasure reading" (which is currently The Two Towers, and Dickens' David Copperfield); I shall continue in the preparation phase of Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game; and finally, I shall continue to thank God for all that He has blessed me with.
It was a fantastic night!
Thanks to Martin at Live Magazine, Life After Darla performed tonight at The Coach House in San Clemente. We opened for a band called Scarlet Crush. What could have very easily been a regular show turned out to be one of our best nights ever.
We performed in front of a nearly sold out audience (most of which was Scarlet Crush's audience) such that approximately 250 new people heard our music tonight. The best part about so many new people hearing our music is that we didn't just perform in front of them; we actually performed for them--we actually won them over!
It was clear from the audience response, both during and after the show, that the audience really appreciated our energy, enthusiasm, and our overall performance. We were signing autographs after the show; taking pictures with people who actually wanted to be photographed with us (imagine that), and the like. All in all it was one of the most successful nights as a band to date.
We were able to make some connections with Crush (we're playing another gig with them in a month or two) and we also made some connections with Crush's manager and producer. Hopefully, things will build from here.
I'd like to thank all of those people who came to support our band; I hope that you enjoyed the show at least half as much as I did, and I look forward to seeing you at the next gig.
God is good.