"It is all a matter of taste, isn't it?"
"...and taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore not a question of morals, is it?"
- Crassus, Kubrick's Spartacus (1960)
it can be difficult to combine some things
combining different ideas, different voices
different loves and different ways of loving
different visions and different understandings
imagine what it must take to combine different people
to combine them into a single understanding
it's been tried for so long
To be properly educated, you need to know how to focus your attention. But to learn, you need to know how to let your mind wander. Isn't understanding about discovery? Isn't discovery about exploration? Isn't exploration about wandering? Granted, this probably depends upon the scale of which you're trying to learn. To answer specific questions, to solve little problems, and to gain pieces of information, yes, it might help to be educated. But writing 5-paragraph essays or using the scientific method or sitting attentively at a desk for hours at a time can surely only go so far when it comes to true learning, when it comes to learning how to learn, right?
I do not want to know how you fit in,
I want to know YOU
where do you find beauty?
do you see beauty in serenity? do you see it in brutality?
in love, in fight, in war, in peace?
please,
don't mistake these questions for challenges
I am only curious
I am here to learn
you will never know of my intentions
I never got stuck in the meaningless frenzy
but I did find the apathy,
and I was watching my own back so carefully
that I didn't need protection until
I needed protection from myself, and
needless to say,
drugs did not work that way
I remember my own schooling. My own desks, that absorbed so much patience. My own wall clocks, which were watched and obeyed so carefully. My own notebooks, sorted and unsorted, packed and unpacked. And my own peers. I remember so much sexual tension, especially for the time in our lives, from which I felt so unapart, so disengaged. I remember certain faces and voices, and I think of what I might say to them. But only of the things I would say in the deepest of confidence and privacy.
I thought I saw you
lurking in the shadows like me
I thought you were looking up to me
I thought I saw you trying to reach me
(gracelessly and disrespectfully as it was),
I was something you were willing to want
but by the time you grow comfortable with someone
you become just another bully, don't you?
I fear what I've seen in you
I fear what I've seen of myself when I look at you
but I do not fear what will become of us
nor do I fear that we will get what's coming to us
I've come to hate bullies. I mean, who doesn't, to be fair. But I've learned that the worst bullies are not the people that hate you, or that terrorize you, but the people who are truly your friends and yet they bully you. Just from time to time. I don't mean jabbing at someone, I don't mean poking fun. I mean the friends who genuinely shove you down. I do not believe in rites of passage. I do not believe in treating others as you've been treated. I believe that all people are people. I believe that if you have enemies then you shouldn't have friends, and vice versa. And yet, it seems like in this world full of people that to have friends you must be willing to take on enemies, and vice versa.
"We cannot comprehend the design. A raindrop cannot comprehend a river valley."
-Illaoi (a video game character)
I dream of these institutions breaking. Like half-destroyed classrooms from war-torn parts of the world, scenes that are typical of Fallout games or war movies. Physical destruction probably won't bring about much change. But think of how appalled we are to look upon common medical practices or standards of food quality or industrial working conditions as recently as 100-150 years ago. Will we ever be able to look back on the current standards of education with the same disdain, or will it see as few and as gradual changes over lifetimes as governmental systems or religions?
you can learn how to seek, you can learn how to see
you can learn how to fight, and you can learn how to love
but these things can be hard to re-learn if you should lose them
when you lose the will, you lose the knowledge
and you must regain the will in order to regain the knowledge
some day
they will call this crumbled foundation beneath you the school of loss, but believe me:
everybody is missing something
Ash. I wanted to give you these gifts. I wanted to give you more than you could handle, maybe I even wanted to confuse you. But more and more I find that I'm making these gifts for myself, which is truly what I wanted most. To be motivated to create, just for myself.
we'll be laughing
at the peak of our black mountain
beneath the black ceiling of a black universe
playing cards and eating grapes and humming songs
looking down on those judgmental gods
I hope they stumble upon our dark secret books
after we're long dead and I hope they find them
to be utterly tasteless