Old Blog
Keeping this around for memories, but I want to start over.
http://heyyoupunk.tumblr.com
http://heyyoupunk.tumblr.com
Changing tumblrs, just like I changed colleges. Funfunfun.
C.S. Lewis (via franceshasasoul)
This is me exactly.
Because the world is round it turns me on
Because the world is round…aaaaaahhhhhh
Because the wind is high it blows my mind
Because the wind is high……aaaaaaaahhhh
Love is old, love is new
Love is all, love is you
Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry
Because the sky is blue…….aaaaaaaahhhh
Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh….
Friggin awesome movie. 3 hours, but still awesome. Now if only I didn’t still have that 10-page paper…
Sunday Dalí: The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas. 9.5” x 13”. Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
One of Dalí’s most famous paintings, it was first shown at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris in June 1931, and caused a sensation when it was included in a group show of Surrealist work at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932. The enduring fascination generated by this enigmatic image is due to the way it fuses the banal and the fantastic, the symbolic and th irrational, inviting yet resisting interpretation. Dalí’s observation that “the soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, and solitary paranoic-critical camembert of time and space” is similarly ambivalent, referring to the painting’s genisis and also to its tantalizing significance.
Essentially the soft watches demonstrate that one aspect of the paranoiac-critical method is its capacity to link objects to qualities normally associated with other, completely different, elements. Dalí painted the setting first, a deserted landscape at Port Lligat where he and Gala had bought a fisherman’s hut the previous summer. Initially he had no idea who to develop the picture. Inspiration came unexpectedly. About to retire to bed, he glanced at the painting; suddenly the memory of the softness of the camembert he had been eating earlier projected itself into his imagination, attaching itself to and transforming the idea of watches in his mind. He instantly and faithfully transcribed the resulting image, draping a watch over the branch of an olive tree. The other elements in the painting show how this irrational idea was then developed and invested with significance. In the foreground the self-portrait motif reappears in the form of a fetus abandoned on a beach. This refers to Dalí’s professed memories of intrauterine life and suggests the trauma of birth. A watch sagging across the fetus and another hanging from a plinth evoke the feelings of timelessness associated with the experience of pre-birth. The title of the painting thus refers to prenatal memories and its subject is “the horrible traumatism of birth by which we are expunged from paradise.” The title also relates to Gala’s response when Dalí asked her whether in three years time she would have forgotten this painting. She replied, “No one can forget it once he has seen it.”
Moorhouse, Paul. Dali. London: PRC Publishing Ltd, 2001.
There’s a difference between not wanting to live your life that way and looking down on others because they do want to live their lives that way. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people are angry at Christianity and the hypocrisy they see there in their own lives and they take their frustration out on organized religion as a whole. The problem with that is that viewpoint is just as narrow as the person who is blindly religious. It’s just as hypocritical. Yet many people look down on religious people simply for being religious. They say that “Intelligent people don’t believe in God” and “All thinking men are atheists”. Why can’t they say “Different strokes for different folks”? Why must they be so hostile? After all, frustration with the behavior of people is different than frustration with the ideas themselves. Religious ideas are mostly taken out of context by people. The ideas are not bad or wrong within themselves. It is the society that is built up around those ideas that is flawed. But that isn’t the fault of religion. Society will always be flawed because people are always flawed. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to their beliefs without being looked down upon or judged by other people. Just because you think someone judges you is not a reason to judge them back.
This is what I don’t understand.
A) I don’t understand what people mean when they say they love God. I had a long talk about God with David (I almost wrote “about David with God”. Lol.), and we decided that God is the expression of existence. So how do you love something like that? If God isn’t a being, which I don’t think He is, and I’m not sure anybody at Orayta thinks He is (yes I’m grouping you all together as one entity), then how do you express love towards that thing? Does that mean you love life? The world? Other people? The universe as a whole?
B) So we’ve established that God is existence and He causes things to exist by existing Himself in that form. Great. That’s what I thought before, but someone at Harova told me I was a Pantheist. And I was like, “no, I’m Jewish!!”. But then I talk to David and it turns out that Judaism at the core is Pantheist!! So what gives?? Then what is monotheism? I thought that Avraham was trying to spread monotheism. But all of a sudden Judaism isn’t monotheistic. Is it that at the time, monotheism was what the world could understand as truth in opposition to paganism? But then does that mean there’s no such thing as ultimate truth? Or does that mean that the world is still not at a point where it can handle the ultimate truth?
C) I feel like within Orthodox Judaism, I’m never going to be as satisfied as I’d like to be with myself as a woman. I don’t want to cover my hair, I don’t want to sit on the other side of the mechitzah, and I don’t want to hide my body. I want to feel liberated sexually and I want to participate FULLY in what Judaism has to offer. I want to feel completely separate but at the same time intellectually equal to men. I want to read from the Torah and wear a miniskirt (not at the same time, but you get the point). And I’m sick of the excuses I keep hearing for what I feel really is unacceptable inequality. I don’t care if women are holier than men. I’m not satisfied with that answer. I want to be “one of the boys” and yet still be as completely different from them sexually as I possibly could be. It’s not ‘penis envy’ or really wishing I was a man or whatever. It’s completely valid spiritual and physical frustration.
The only thing is that the answer to that question is to explore outside the confines of Orthodox Judaism. But the problem is that I’m not satisfied with the more liberal strands of Judaism either. I’ve had quite a lot of experience with those (if you know my extended family at all, though I don’t think any of you do) and I feel that to really be in touch with them, you have to have a very touchy-feely brand of spirituality. I don’t have that. I wouldn’t say I’m completely the opposite, but I have enough of both to feel like I don’t belong in strictly either group. It’s like the Talmud vs. the Kabbalah. Or maybe the Talmud vs. Mussar. I don’t know. All I know is that at Harova, things got very Mussar-y and that was one of the reasons I felt like I didn’t belong there, but at the same time I still desire to be on a higher spiritual plane. I still want to know the secrets of the universe. But at the same time, I feel like some of my Rabbis from Harova tried to give me the secrets of the universe from the Kabbalah and such, but I didn’t like those answers either. Yet I’m reticent (hope I’m using that word in the right context) to say that the problem is with me. I feel like that’s the easy way out of answering what I feel are valid questions.
It’s like every time I go to a seminar on the issue of girls learning Gemara or whatever I just get more and more upset and dissatisfied. Why can’t we say that the world used to be a lot more chauvinist? I don’t have any hard feelings towards the Rabbis in the Gemara that said that girls shouldn’t learn Gemara. For their era, that was a widely accepted view and that made a lot of sense. I mean, Winston Churchill was a chauvinist and I still have a lot of respect for him. I don’t have to agree with everything he says, and I don’t. In the same way, I don’t agree with everything every Rabbi in the Talmud says, yet I still have a great deal of respect for them. But nobody within Orthodoxy seems to like that answer.
D) At Harova, I felt like I was only looking at the world through a microscope. At college, I feel like I’m looking at it through a telescope. On the one hand, I’m not happy being completely absorbed and surrounded by one tiny microscopic view of the world. On the other hand, I’m not happy being so removed from the world and looking at human beings from a completely scientific view, as though I’m not human also. There must be a way to reach the ultimate truth through methods other than Judaism, because that wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the world otherwise. But there must also be something about Judaism that makes that process more fulfilling when done through it. Yet those two ideas are still contradictory. I hope that makes sense.
