Proposed contest submission

David Hume: On Suicide

"David Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behavior, saying famously: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." (wiki)

At times, this book offers up paragraphs of glass, some that simply confuse and at times seem hard to penetrate, and some that at times, appear so clear and inspiring that they seem to reflect your own thoughts, in a way in which you'd find hard to articulate in any other way.

Hume's views of Tragedy and of the arts resonate with my feelings of the disparate nature of objects, and their relations with each other, especially within collage.

"Had you any intention to move a person...the best method of increasing it's effect would be artfully to delay informing him of it, at first to excite his curiosity and impatience, before you let him into the secret... difficulties increase passions of every kind." (p26)

"One of the most important thinkers ever to write in English, the Empiricist David Hume liberated philosophy from the superstitious constraints of religion; here, he argues that all are free to choose between life and death, considers the nature of personal taste and succinctly criticises common philosophies of the time."

(Penguin Great Ideas series)

A little drawing I did experimenting with the effects of placing a palm tree on what appears to be some sort of badly drawn accordion.

Compositions

Poem : The Potential of Escalator X

It's half past the last reflex

sat in a basement

with fingertips of white squares

built within the archives of angel heads

we crawl from our incongruent sunsets

and arrive at our feet.

We jolt

towards the first precautionary step

onto the stationary escalator

like the spontaneous awkwardness,

of waking from a falling dream.

These constructs spill over with the bland expressions of cotton.

We scratch at the surface with retail machinery,

and arrive at Desolation Peak

with broken minds and broken pens.

My natural abandon of ecstasy

is lost in the illumination of shitcom curses

and

your body,

curves with

metal drops draped over

the cold radiators of the soul.

They never seem to make a noise.

You are never realised,

your escalators lead nowhere.

You are an anagram of the retrospect

relying on vocabulary

of animals with default clipboard intellect,

salesmen gorging on ambiguous pictures,

whilst selling overpriced axioms

to the future.

We'll walk down the up escalators in an effort to live forever.

We'll seal it with the semantic gestures of an 'x'

because my love for the nowhere extends

to the genius of the intangible,

the incapacitating umbilical intellect,

the embracing suicidal paradigm

periodically producing algorithmic signs

from the refines of parallel musings

unseen

between disappearing staircases.

Happy Birthday

The Epicurean

New original collage series : Framed.

For details contact ventralisgolden@yahoo.com