Sports Manship

“Some people talk about other people’s failures with so much pleasure that you would swear they are talking about their own successes.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: aphorism, aphorisms, condemn, criticism, criticize, deplore, enemies, enemy, envious, envy, failure, failures, gossip, humor, humour, jealous, jealousy, please, pleasure, quotation, quotations, quote, quotes, satire, success, successes, swear

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“We are sometimes dragged into a pit of unhappiness by someone else’s opinion that we do not look happy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: agony, anguish, aphorism, aphorisms, aphorist, aphorists, as-happy-as-a-clam, beaming, beatific, bliss, blissful, blissfulness, blithe, blue, broken-hearted, buoyant, carefree, chagrin, cheerful, cheerfulness, cheerless, cheery, chirpy, content, contented, contentment, dejected, dejection, delight, delighted, depressed, depression, desolation, despair, despairing, despondency, despondent, disconsolate, dispirited, distress, doleful, dolefulness, down, down-at-the-mouth, down-in-the-dumps, down-in-the-mouth, downcast, downhearted, ecstasy, ecstatic, elated, elation, enjoyment, euphoria, euphoric, exhilarated, exhilaration, exuberance, exultant, face, faces, forlorn, funny, gaiety, glee, gleeful, gloom, gloominess, gloomy, glum, glumness, good-spirits, gratified, grief, grinning, happiness, happy, heartache, heartbroken, hilarious, hole, holes, humor, humorous, humour, hurting, impression, impressions, in-a-good-mood, in-good-spirits, in-seventh-heaven, jocular, jocund, joke, jokes, jollity, jolly, jovial, joviality, joy, joyful, joyfulness, joyless, joyous, jubilant, jubilation, jumping-for-joy, lighthearted, lightheartedness, long-faced, low-spirits, lugubrious, malaise, melancholy, merriment, merry, miserable, misery, morose, mournful, mournfulness, on-a-high, on-cloud-nine, on-top-of-the-world, opinion, opinions, over-the-moon, overjoyed, pain, pit, pits, pleased, pleasure, quotations, quotes, radiant, rapture, rapturous, sad, sadness, satire, satisfaction, satisfied, smiling, sorrow, sorrowful, suffering, sunny, the-blues, thrilled, tickled-pink, torment, transports-of-delight, tribulation, unhappiness, unhappy, untroubled, walking-on-air, well-being, woe, woebegone, woeful, wretchedness

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“experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us. So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.2”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

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“Thought, too, while scattering its traces, leaves the literalness of the world intact, leaves intact the pure literalness of objects, though it sends their meaning up in smoke.
Shadowing the world - following the word like its shadow to cover up its tracks and to show that, behind its supposed ends, it is going nowhere.
It is in this way that thought connects up with the event of the world - not with the occurrence of a totality that is nowhere to be found, but with the occurrence of the world as it is, in its unpredictable coming-to-pass.
It is in this way that we attain to the literalness, the material imagining, of the world, by the elimination of whatever obstacle may be between the image and the gaze.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

tags: abra-los-ojos, imagination, materialism, shadow, simulation, thought

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“There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.

I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.

In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.”
― Alan Moore

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