“The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge of lesser things.” St. Aquinas.
We don’t have a word in the English language for someone who thinks of “higher” things. Just that catch-all term, “philosophy” and all its conjugations. Melancholic doesn’t quite fit and puts a negative tone to it. Pensive seems too incomplete. Introverted really is about more than “thinking”. Overthinking, that’s just wrong and overkill. We don’t have a word for someone who thinks of higher things besides the academic, bookish, superior assuming word - “philosopher”.
I’m a thinker. People often think I must be a nervous type. They look at my nails and think, OMG! But I’m not a nervous type at all - I’m a kind of Michael Jordan playing on the court of my mind. In that concentration, just like MJ would have his tongue protruding, I nip at my nails. It is an expression of my mental focus.
I’m currently going through my 100s of notebooks (or at least the 30-40 here in Nicaragua) and putting some of my aphorisms into a book titled, “Fragments”. Subscribe and you’ll get a copy down the road.
In my 20s, I became addicted to Nietzsche. In a positive way. I loved the power of aphorisms or the thrust of feuilletons (short, reflective essays). In Nietzsche’s mind, there was (for me), an energy, a spirit that I found and was invigorated by. Pretty soon, I was reading and then writing my own aphorisms as I experienced the world and reacted to it. It’s really the same process with poetry. I’ll read, see, feel, experience something and then my reflective center kicks in. And out grow words on the page.
“Shorter and shorter. Until a few words says it all.” - A writer’s credo.
So, I just got off the toilet while browsing one of my notebooks for some material. I thought I’d share a few here with readers. Suck on them like a gumdrop - it’s a good exercise for our brain!
Kisses don’t make babies nor do words alone make sentences.
To read is to let someone else work for you. The most delicate and malicious for of exploitation.
Exile, self-exile, as a way of being nowhere, of constantly being able to start over. Exile as a vote for what is more possible, for more possibility.
A man who forsakes the world, to save the world. Megalomania. A terrorist whose revenge is his own presumed afterlife. Romantic suicide, a poisonous broth, stirred with the steady hands of hope against hope. Jesus is the first step. Now we must drink, he says.
A beggar without gratitude. Deserving. Could one exist, one that felt they weren’t being looked down upon but being given what they were entitled to?
A plane crashes. For a week, we are frightful when flying or don’t fly at all. How is it we walk out the door when 10s of 1,000s each day die of infectious diseases? Dying, death, as something we are conditioned to ignore and make banal.
Pushkin supposably started bawling his eyes out as a baby upon hearing the word, “Progress”. The Russian soul, “dusha” always stands still. Immoveable.
Jewish hunger. Does all need come from the fact there was once absence. It this “not” the birth point of our desires? If so, where and when was this absence, if need is so old? Does the older body force these things upon the mind? Are we all just victims of our history, our shared history, the automatisms encased in our bodies?
Suicide is not an escape from life but rather to throw oneself into life, completely, irrevocably.