PARIJAH DIARIES 11 “Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” ― Jacques Derrida After their gig the Philippinoes like to go skate-boarding at midnight down on the beach road. It’s their new craze, and a great way to […]
COFFEE WITH GIOVANNI, Brixton 2014 I’m sitting outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, one of the few places in London I enjoy. I lived here in the early eighties, when the immigrant population was still predominantly Caribbean and Portuguese. Thirty years on, I’m waiting for my daughter, all grown up and successful now. She slept […]
“When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name — hallucinations?” […]
“Science isn’t really about truth, it’s about power.” This comes close to an admission that his own mechanistic-materialist outlook, too, is predicated not on science but on power. And when he announces in this grandiose and scientistic fashion the end of soul, spirit and free will, he is speaking not for truth but for power.
“It’s the end of the world, my friend,” said Muhammed Zafrul Yilmaz. The road was fast and empty, long bends snaking between dark, forested hills. The half-moon, floating on its back, scudded through cloud in a halo of petroleum colours; seeing the moon at this angle always reminded me that I was half a world […]
‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible.’ David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 1947 Whenever I get into a deep conversation with someone, where we’re exploring what is and isn’t in this world, as we go deeper and deeper into the subject, sooner or later we hit bedrock — the point where rational argument takes […]
“The Okhrana, the secret police of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; […]
Eichmann is everywhere; not Everyman but Nowhere Man, someone we have all come across in our daily lives. For Arendt it was his bland normality that made him so terrifying.
A hamadryad (Greek: Ἁμαδρυάδες, Hamadryádes) is a Greek mythological being that lives in trees. They are a particular type of dryad, which are a particular type of nymph. Hamadryads are born bonded to a certain tree. Some believe that hamadryads are the actual tree, while normal dryads are simply the entities, or spirits, of the trees. If the […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 13 It wasn’t fun, exactly, but I wouldn’t have missed it. A bad trip is still a trip; and quite a trip at that. My friend Jim worries about me doing this. Jim makes fine guitars; I call him the Just Artisan; he’s always saying ‘I’m just an artisan, but…’ before coming out with […]
the lethal text 