It ever was, and is, and shall be,
ever-living Fire, in measures being
kindled and in measures going out.
-Heraclitus
G r e e t i n g s , n o b l e w a y f a r e r !
Inasmuch as you're here, doubtless you are filled with an uncontrollable desire to know that I, your host and possible illigitimate love child, am 21, male, and an avid reader and music lover. In addition, I live in Southern California, approximately one hour from Los Angeles - damning evidence indeed.
Brevity is a virtue, but as a matter of explanation, my username is the musical monogram of the composer Dmitri Dmitryevitch Shostakovich (1906-1972): D S C H, the Germanic note-names for D Eb C B. This musical monogram features rather prominently in his later work, most famously in the 8th string quartet.
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
- W.S. Merwin
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." - Charlie Parker (1920-1955)
"If you want to rule the world, you must keep it amused."- Ralph Waldo Emerson * (1803-1882)
"Apart from the minuteness and brevity of human species, I cannot feel that it is a worthy climax to such an enormous prelude. There is a rather repulsive smugness and self-complacency in the argument that man is so splendid as to be evidence of infinite wisdom and infinite power in his creator. Those who use this kind of reasoning always try to concentrate our attention on the few saints and sages; they try to make us forget the Neros and Attilas and Hitlers and the millions of mean poltroons to whom such men owed their power. And even what is best in us is apt to lead to disaster. Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction. I can imagine a sardonic demon producing us for his amusement, but I cannot attribute to a being who is wise and beneficent, the terrible weight to cruelty, and ironic degradation of what is best that has marred the history of man in increasing measure as he has become more master of his fate."
-Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), from The Faith of a Rationalist.
"It is only the gods who taste death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us."
-Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
we must listen with educated innocence
For my part, I have walk'd about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night,
And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone;
And when the cross blue lightning seem'd to open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even in the aim and very flash of it.
- William Shakespeare; Julius Caesar, I, III.
Over the Earth he flies
and the loud-echoing salt-sea.
He bewitches and maddens the heart
of the victim he swoops upon.
He bewitches the race of the mountain-hunting
lions and beasts of the sea,
and all the creatures that Earth feeds,
and the blazing sun sees -
and man, too -
over all you hold kingly power,
Love, you are the only ruler
over all these.
- Euripides, Hyppolytus
La Croix du Sud (The Southern Cross)
The women with gestures of madrepores
have hair and lips as red as orchids
The monkeys at the Pole are pure albinos, amber
and snow,
and leap, arrayed in the aurora borealis.
In the sky is an advertisement for Oleo
margarine.
Here is the quinine tree
and here is the Virgin of Sorrows.
The Zodiac turns in the night of yellow fever,
the rain encloses the tropics in a crystal cage.
like a zebra towards the Isle of days gone by
where the murdered women are awakening.
- Jose Juan Tablada, (1871-1945).
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." - Alexis de Tocqueville
(this meme does not exist)
"We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance." -Warren Weaver
"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Oh, Bach!" she exclaimed,"What a big canon!"
"You know," said Kellogg, "I really can't get into this serial music."
"The realm of thought is not a democracy, where the majority rule; it is not a republic. It is a country with one inhabitant. This brain is the world in which my mind lives, and my mind is the sovereign of that realm. We are all kings, and one man balances the rest of the world as one drop of water balances the sea. Each soul is crowned. Each soul wears the purple and the tiara; and only those are good citizens of the intellectual world who give to every other human being every right that they claim for themselves, and only those are traitors...who abandon reason and appeal to force.
"...No man can open his mouth against the freedom of speech without denying every argument he may put forward. Why? He is exercising the very right that he denies."
A man says to the universe, "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replies the universe, "that fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
- Stephen Crane