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Nothing creative or artful ever came out of being conservative, the essence of which is restraint and "holding back" and protecting traditional values. If he was ever creative at all it was because he expressed and released himself liberally and fluently---a superpower exercised in total defiance of any stultifying conservative values.

(May 5, 2026 09:39 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Nothing creative or artful ever came out of being conservative, the essence of which is restraint and "holding back" and protecting traditional values. If he was ever creative at all it was because he expressed and released himself liberally and fluently---a superpower exercised in total defiance of any stultifying conservative values.

You're an ignorant bigot. Just because most conservatives do more productive things, like have families and provide for them, create companies and jobs, etc., doesn't mean they are devoid of creativity. As I've said before, I'm an artist, poet, and writer. There's nothing inherently stifling about conservatism... aside from your warped and biased opinion of it.

I as well as CC and Yazata once knew of a poster named Smokey Jack when we all were on Webtv years ago.. He was quite conservative in his politics while also being a staunch atheist of the Randian type. As time went on he discovered a new and lively side of himself by watching the movie "Chocolat", which he loved, and by seeing and marveling at the Broadway show "Riverdance". It was as if his long repressed inner child had been finally set free. Then one day he suddenly died, even as he was posting online they say. A bittersweet tale to be sure. How people isolate themselves with their own defunct belief systems. Hopefully someday you'll have your own "liberating" epiphany long before he ever did.

Hopefully someday you'll quit being a loveless hermit and take a chance on having a real relationship with a human being. Maybe it would temper your ignorant bigotry that seems to assume life is so black and white.

Remember, I use to vote Democrat. I've seen both sides, from the inside. I haven't been a conservative all my life.

Good vision is when you can see what everybody else sees. Great vision is when you can see what nobody else sees.

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Your reflection in your bathroom mirror is in every possible sense exactly like you. It looks and moves exactly like you. It dresses like you. It makes facial expressions like you. It even tells you exactly what you look like. And yet it is no more you than your shadow is. Speak and it will have no voice. Touch it and it will have no warmth. It is your own creepy doppelganger haunting the interface between light and glass. And if it could ever leap from its cold silvered prison you can bet it would hungrily replace you in a minute. Indeed, perhaps it already has. When you think about how you look, are you not in fact only remembering your reflection in the mirror?

Perspective is only a matter of sight and not thought. Thus a point of view is only a crude optical metaphor quaintly relativizing our thoughts into a mere opinion or subjective frame of reference. A thought-terminating cliche requiring no further discussion. In reality what we think about something is nothing like a perspective or point of view. It is not a mere geometric trajectory extended in physical space. It is a holistic grasp of the thing-in-itself beyond our just seeing it. It is the intuitive containment of the invisible whole towards which all possible points of view "point" and coalesce as. The noumenal being or truth behind what it is merely appearing as.

A man standing in the center of a circle, circumscribed all around by one curving line, can either see this as his imprisoning perimeter or as his beckoning horizon. The choice is his.

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Thinking is to the mind what examining is to the eyes and the hands. In thought we seek to replicate ideationally what we do quite effortlessly when examining a large jewel, holding it up to our eyes, peering thru it's tinted depths, and rotating it all around to reveal all its light-catching facets. Thus does thoughtful consideration always fall back on intuitively-felt metaphors of movement and sight in its quest for truth so as to reproduce as closely as possible the manifesting character and quasi-dimensionality of the freely-observed and evaluated.

Sometimes, though, one is wounded for love. The purplish bruise of a neck hickey. The resurfaced stigmata of some forgotten passion play. The gnarled and callused hands of an aged parent.The faded tattoo of a lost child's name. The embodied heart too bears its own wounds, only in secret..
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"The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars."---Bertolt Brecht



"Memory, if one allows it a touch of theatrical indulgence, is a slightly malicious tailor who keeps only the garments that itch. It politely misplaces the silk and insists on preserving the wool that scratches the skin of thought. One begins to suspect it of aesthetic bad manners.

A kiss is a brief conspiracy between two surfaces of the world. It happens with the discreet audacity of a footnote that forgets to refer to anything. It leaves behind no object, no residue worthy of inspection, only a faint grammatical tremor in the air of the day…

A wound behaves like a clerk who refuses to leave the office. It sits at the desk of the body with infuriating punctuality, stamping every hour with the same ink. It does not require remembrance. It performs continuity as a profession. Even when ignored, it continues its bureaucratic monologue in silence.

Kisses are poor witnesses. They refuse to testify. They prefer evaporation to evidence. One might almost accuse them of aristocratic indifference to documentation.

Wounds are vulgar archivists. They insist on filing themselves in triplicate. They enjoy their own legibility. They are the kind of presence that clears its throat before entering the room.

And yet the scandal lies elsewhere. The delicate things never disappear. They simply change their address. They take up residence in the margins of behavior. In the way a hand pauses for a fraction too long near a doorknob. In the unnecessary softness of a word chosen when a sharper one was available. In that faint hesitation of posture that resembles nothing so much as a private joke the body refuses to explain.

Meanwhile, pain continues its bureaucratic career, filing itself neatly under “available evidence.”

So the question, rather impertinent in its simplicity, remains:

What does the mind keep in its most reliable drawer, the quiet insolence of what vanished without permission, or the persistent paperwork of what refused to leave?"

@top fans
Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova
Mosaic of Text NG
https://www.facebook.com/MosaicOfTextNG

I will never go see Mt. Rushmore. I might've before it was "defaced" with the garish carvings of what the populace traditionally regards as "great" leaders. But in fact it is little more than an arbitrary superimposition of an ideology of hero-worship upon nature's wild and pristine state. To me it is little more than childish vandalism or grafitti in promotion of blind patriotism. Shall I wave a flag while there? Dance a salutatory jig? No. You can keep all that. Call me a spoilsport but I will continue to derive all my awe and inspiration from the untouched grandeur and majesty of the forests and the mountains and the cliffs themselves. Now I might stay at the nice lodge they have there. Sip a hot latte from their presumed espresso bar. Maybe even watch "North By Northwest" on my room's TV. I just won't look out the windows.

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I didn't just take a bite from the fruit tree of knowledge. I harvested all the fruits from that tree, extracted their seeds, and planted a whole orchard of them I now call my life. And that fast talking snake? I took him on a road show and we both made a fortune. That is, until he came down with a permanent case of laryngitis. I suspect he's faking it though.