Heidegger, what are you telling me?

When you want to, you can be incredibly obscure, but then that's the point of digging in mines, isn't it?

"  True, as we look through Being itself, through time itself, and look into the destiny of Being and the extending of time-space, we have glimpsed what 'Appropriation' means. But do we by this road arrive at anything else than a mere thought-construct? Behind this suspicion there lurks the view that Appropriation must after all 'be' something. However: Appropriation neither is, nor is Appropriation there. To say the one or the other is equally a distortion of the matter, just as if we wanted to derive the source from the river. What remains to be said? Only this: Appropriation appropriates. Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same. To all appearances, all this says nothing. It does indeed say nothing so long as we hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross- examination of logic. But what if we take what was said and adopt it unceasingly as the guide for our thinking, and consider that this Same is not even anything new, but the oldest of the old in Western thought: that ancient something which conceals itself in a-letheia? That which is said before all else by this first source of all the leitmotifs of thinking gives voice to a bond that binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of what must be thought."

From Time and Being by Martin Heidegger

We already know everything we need. 

Now all that is left is to remember it.

My Favourite Lines from "Griffin & Phoenix"

Go watch this movie. Please.

"While I'm out, what can I get ya?"

"everything."

"I'll pick some up on the way home."

"I don't need you for any of that. What I need is for you to be perfect. Because we were perfect, weren't we? We made a beautiful little lifetime together. Don't let that lifetime bleed into this."

"I want to stay here. I want to be anywhere you are."

  "I meet many people, both at home and abroad, who somehow believe they aren't good enough to read poetry. Often enough that's how they'll phrase it, meaning they don't believe they're sufficiently intelligent to read poetry.

  I find this profoundly sad, yet I think I know why they've come to such a conclusion. With some older folk it's because a teacher in childhood days, someone who didn't enjoy verse him or herself, took a mallet to hammer rhyming verse into pupil's heads. Little wonder they managed to turn their charges off poetry for ever.

  But more often than not it's because these individuals have read the kind of contemporary poems that are printed in the top literary journals. They've turned the pages again and again, feeling they should have had at least a couple of degrees and a doctorate to understand what's being said.

  I feel sadness and anger when I encounter such stories, and I do so on a regular basis. But I understand precisely what they are feeling, because as often as not my response is no different when I read such poetry. It comes across to me as similar to many of the cartoons that used to be published in the pages of Punch; bewilderingly obscure to leave the reader feeling foolish and the writer superior.

  But if a poem isn't communicating, then what is it doing? And if it isn't communicating something of worth and wisdom, then what is the point? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that our objectives have changed in this post-modern world. In the art gallery we are left wondering, with no context for interpretation, at small piles of brick dust or at light bulbs going on and off. We are making statements about things, nothing more than bald statements which are not intended for interpretation.

  For me, art -- and I think of the whole spectrum of the arts there -- is about asking questions of the society it is reflecting. If it answers those questions then it becomes didactic and polemic, but good art in every age has asked those questions to challenge and in order to move forward."   -- Kenneth Steven.

And best:

  "I have come to think of the poem as a butterfly; I mean the poem printed on the page. It's a beautiful thing, but it's pinned to the page. Think of it as a tortoiseshell butterfly with all those magnificent panes of colour. But the pins are there at the corners; it is being held down. It's only when the human voice comes to liberate the words that the butterfly truly flies again. And somehow every time that happens it will be new, for each time the words will be read a slightly different way, even by the poet."   -- Kenneth Steven.

I have no idea if I wrote this. I think I did. I don't necessarily agree with it anymore, which perfectly illustrates the final point. But I think it is beautiful.

"It is perfectly human to be crazy. Why do we strive towards perfection when man is flawed, or perfectly imperfect? Isn’t this like a circle striving to be rectangular? Wouldn’t it be better and more truthful for a circle instead to know clearly its limits; the curves to embrace and the circular logic to be wary of? The racecar thrives in controlled ellipses, but the branch will snap with too much bent weight.

Maybe we say things to test whether we mean them. Are we allowed room or leniency to test the weight of such experiments? Please don’t believe what I say right now. I’m just trying it out to feel how it sounds in the air. Just go along with it for a while, I may change my mind again."