"We believed that we could change the world."

"And guess what?"

"We did."

John Kerry hit it out of the ballpark tonight.

The Kosmos In Sixteen Lines

Lyrics from Stuart Davis’ song, “Anesthesia Necrophilia”, from the album The Late Stuart Davis	My interpretation
you cracked that void	The eternal universal Self, or Spirit, created the cosmos by becoming form, thus losing its previous perfectly spiritual existence.
and let it leak
such a pervert	Einstein said, “God does not play hide and seek with the universe.” However, Spirit did perversely disguise itself as an individual awareness which is inside a human body-mind. (That’s you.)
playing hide and seek
who wandered off from home	God ate the map. That is, it deliberately stopped knowing that it was God. That’s why you think that you are a merely individual human body-mind. In Christian theology, the act of God emptying himself of divinity to become a human being is called kenosis.
and ate the map
now beg yourself	Deep down, all of your struggles—for pleasure, money, power, love—are disguised attempts to regain your lost divine heritage. In order to do so, you must genuinely submit to Spirit, to the All. You must overcome the individual, selfish ego, and painfully watch it be destroyed, by consistently doing the opposite of what it wants. Put differently, you must destroy the seperate, individual self, which is what you incorrectly take to be your true self, in order to fully become what is actually your true self—universal awareness. Spirit. God.
to take you back
spitting out white noise	If you created the entire cosmos, then you created all of the wonders and mysteries in it. “What unfolds” refers to evolution and development, which is what all activity and investigation ultimately is. Because you are Spirit, in any pursuit you are paradoxically both the one hiding the answers and the discoverer of those answers.
digging those black holes
shove that shovel
into what unfolds...
is but a laugh attack	And yet, if we are actually the universal eternal Self, then we don’t exist in time and space, and thus, in the absolute sense, this whole grand cosmic story of creation and destruction, of involution and evolution, never actually happens. All that ultimately exists, to use the title of a recent book, is “the simple feeling of being.” The story of your birth, life, death, and all of the melodramatic struggles of your individual body-mind, the entire universe of apparances—these are all merely waves on the ocean of consciousness, clouds floating across the sky of awareness, fleeting thoughts in the universal Mind. Life is not the tragedy that it feels like when you are trapped on the inside—it is a divine comedy when viewed from the perspective of eternity, which is the true perspective, since your true self is eternal.
about the fact it never happens
as the cause of all confusion
is the clues are all illusion

I was looking at a map of the US yesterday and came up with a list of favorite contemporary writers and the georaphical area that they are associated with.

Bloom	New Haven, Connecticut
Dillard	Tinker Creek, Virginia
Helprin	Hudson Valley, New York
Paglia	Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia
Jim Harrison	Northern Michigan
Berry	Henry County, Kentucky
Stuart Davis	Minnesota; Colorado
Wilber	Boulder, Colorado
Pirsig	Bozeman, Montana
MacLean	Montana
Feuerstein	Northern California
Easwaran	SF Bay area, California
Snyder	Sierra Nevada Mnts, California

Mostly, these are not urban places. Do I enjoy rural authors (whether despite or because of my suburban location), or do great authors tend to be inspired by rural locations? It would be interesting to map a longer list of authors and see which areas are covered.