"One learns to swim in the winter and to skate in the summer ". -- William James

"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd, In one selfie place, but where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must be ever be." -- Marlowe

"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance." -- Ishmael in Moby Dick, "The Chapel"

"Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, accents of anger, words of suffering, and beating hands..." Dante, Canto III

Alchemical image in the sign of Scorpio: the will needed to separate and neutralize the venomous thoughts within.

Religion can be a very wishful and beautiful vision of otherworldly purity. This is a temporary balm for the spirit But sadly this purification often fails to penetrate the destructive illusions under which the believer is held captive, and helps perpetuate, here in this world.

Original famous painting in the High Museum. Fed into AI and now a tree grows in Antarctica.

High Museum trees

I typed in copilot: create an image of Dante guided by Beatrice in hell in the style of Titian. I love this image. It seems very much like what I would hope my next book project may mature into.

Of day dreams and night dreams:
"The castle in the air is not a stepping stone to the nocturnal labyrinth, if anything the nocturnal labyrinths lie like cellars beneath the daytime castle in the air " Ernst Bloch

And we live in the middle passage between.

The Courage to Question Your Doctor (when they're questioning your sanity)

A very nice article by Esme Weijun Wang, the author of The Collective Schizophrenias.

The Courage to Question Your Doctor www.reasonsforliving.co/p/the-courag...

Amazing paintings by Tom Feelings. The adjoining Shrine of the Black Madonna has a profound civic history

From the Black Holocaust museum in Atlanta. theatlantavoice.com/support-loca...

Walking trees 4 new items added to shared album

photos.app.goo.gl/kRd8miAK7yqF...

Deeply resonates with this poem to me, her voices become angels.

“I have been possessed
By a fire – by a true fire...
I will believe an angel ruled me thus."

Robert Browning, Paracelsus Aspires

Mad in America: Science News Science Podcast · 30 Episodes · Updated Weekly

This episode of Mad In America discusses the ways in which a biomedical mental disease model suffocates the existential dimensions of suffering.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

JUST A REMINDER ...

... of how close we are today ...

Exploding Myths About Schizophrenia: An Interview with Courtenay Harding The Vermont Longitudinal Study, led by Courtenay Harding, belied conventional beliefs about schizophrenia by showing remarkably good outcomes.

Exploding Myths About Schizophrenia: An Interview with Courtenay Harding - Mad In America www.madinamerica.com/2025/03/expl...

Why the US has birthright citizenship YouTube video by Vox

The legal consensus for the last 150 years since the CHinese Excluson Acts has been that anyone born in the land is a citizen. The popular consensus of course is 60/40. To an important extent, we are deciding if we are a nation of laws, or of majority opinion.
youtu.be/OBFX4EuAWHc?...

"If we were to use the metaphor of the balance or the scales, the result would be a scale with, on the one side, life. But at the other end, there would only be a hammer. That hammer does not outweigh the temptations, but smashes the whole scale so there is nothing left to weigh, and no balance.

"The incomprehensibility lies not so much in the complexity of the suicidal world, but more in the act which, although originating in a world, is directed at a non-world, at something that is not about life, something that has no content, is unknowable, & about which nothing
meaningful can be said."

"We live together, and the suicide of one person is also the burden of another. It hurts to see those close to you suffer, or to see them want to stop living, because those others are fundamentally us."

"Questions about the meaning & sense of life and death do not play a role in this analytical medical reasoning, & therefore it is possibly a candidate for replacement by AI systems, in contrast with the real care workers, the nurses, that can principally never be replaced by any kind of robot."

Dr. Wouter Kusters - Suicide and its prevention Philosopher and writer, The Netherlands Lecture Biography Wouter Kusters (1966) is a philosopher, linguist and writer. He wrote his dissertation in linguistics in 2003 on language change and societal ...

Wouter Kusters has a profound perspective on madness.

"In the scientific and medical language, the absurdity and paradox of the act of suicide... disappear. The problem of suicide ... ends up in the realm of disease patterns and symptoms."
suicide-and-its-prevention.eu/speakers/dr-...