The Diary Game (6/10/2020)

yahialababidi (68)in #the100daysofsteem • 4 years ago

I start my day by taking a photograph of the accidental art in my balcony ... a silhouette through the screen of a giant bird sculpture that was, recently, gifted to us.

Then, sipping on my mint tea I turn to poetry and philosophy for inspiration. Here is a quote by a philosopher and mystic to start/inspire your day:

Go back inside yourself and look: if you do not yet see yourself as beautiful [i.e., as participating in the Idea of Beauty], then do as the sculptor does with a statue he wants to make beautiful; he chisels away one part, and levels off another, makes one spot smooth and another clear, until he shows forth a beautiful face on the statue. Like him, remove what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, clean up what is dark and make it bright, and never stop sculpting your own statue, until the godlike splendor of virtue shines forth to you…. If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed with your self… if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become a vision.

Plotinus

Art by Bobbie Carlyle Sculpture

Here, in the US (despite the pandemic lockdown) the race riots over the murder of George Floyd are still persisting ... nearly 2 weeks, now. So, to better educate myself on racism in America and police brutality, I made time to watch an excellent documentary called I'm Not Your Negro, based on the work of American writer/activist James Baldwin.

Below, are some of the quotes that I found particularly striking and illuminating:

No kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates think in fact it does.‬

‪It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of the adversary.‬

‪On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of the adversary.‬

Any white man says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds.

When a Black man says exactly the same thing...

he’s judged a criminal, treated like one & everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigga, so there won't be anymore like him.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America... It is not a very pretty story

I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.

To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep.

You can't lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, to put it very brutally, we literally are criminals.

—-James Baldwin

Otherwise, for aesthetic pleasure, I'm reading one of the classics of Russian literature, The Master & the Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

It's difficult to summarize this novel, other than to say it's about the devil and wicked fun. I recommend that you read it and find out for yourself :)

Might go grocery shopping in a little bit, which means putting on my full Martian gear and, if we're lucky, my wife and I drive by the beach (which is only 5 minutes away from where we live, in Florida). No sunbathing is permitted, still, but I can get in the water, briefly...