Damn the man. Save the empire.

In between your crown and your halo...
Jesse Schauben

The Conquest of Happiness

Notes from the conquest of happiness, the best help book I think I've read.

What I do maintain is that success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.

There are only two reasons for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

A child develops best when left undisturbed in the same soil.

What ever we wish to think, we are creatures of the Earth; our life is part of the life of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

Voluntarily or involuntarily, of choice or of necessity, most moderns lead a nerve-racking life and are continually too tied to be capable of enjoyment without the help of alcohol.
...worry could be prevented by a better philosophy of life and a little more mental discipline.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or if it is at night, about nothing at all.
It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.

The man who can center his thoughts and hopes upon something transceding self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist.
The nervous breakdown which appears to be produced by the work is, in fact, in every case tht I have ever known personally, produced by some emotional trouble from which the patient attempts to escape by means of his work.
Worry is a form of fear and all fear is a form of fatigue.

on envy
The habit of thinking in terms of comparison is a fatal one.

You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.

All bad things are interconnected, and any one of them is liable to be the cause of any other.

conscience - the fear of being found out.

It is in the moments when the mind is most active and the fewest things are fogotten that the most intense joys are experienced. The happiness that requires intoxication of no matter what sort is a spurious and unsatisfying kind. The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

on persecution mania
remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
don't overestimate your own merits
don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.
don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any desure to persecute you.
Whatever is to be done, can only be done adequately by the help of a certain zest, and zest is difficult without some self regarding motive.
No person should be expected to distort the main lines of his life for the sake of another individual.

very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have social relations, and more especially by those whom with they live.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, larely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.
The best way to increase toleration is ti multiply the number of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellow men.

On Happiness
there are two sources, of the heart and of the head.
The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success whereas the man who overestimates himself is pleasant, the latter is unpleasant.
Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in person and things.
The person whose attitude towards others is genuinely of this kind will be a source of happiness and a recipient of reciprocal kindness.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more that it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than possible.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, ad let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
zest is the secret of happiness and well-being.
The only sex relations that have real value are those in which there is no reticence and in which the whole personality of both becomes merged in a new collective personality. Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps most fatal to true happiness.

On family
I have the happiness of parenthood greater than any other I have experienced.
To be happy in this world, epecially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from one gem to the remote and unknown future.
To the man or woman who has children and grandchilden and loves with a natural affection, the future is important, at any rate to the limit of their lives, not only through morality or through an effort of imagination, but naturally and instinctively.
parental affection is a special kind of feeling which the normal human being experiences towards his or her children, but not towards any other human being.
Our parents love us because we are their children and this is an unalterable fact, so that we feel more safe with them than with any one else. In times of success this may seem unimportant, but in times of failure it affords a consolation and a security not to be found elsewhere.
The parent that genuinely desires the child's welfare more than his or herpower over the child will, if sufficiently intelligent, not need textbooks on psyoanalysis to say what should and what should not be done, but will be guided aright by impulse.
For important as parenthood is as an element of life, it is not satisfying if it is treated as the whole of life, and the unsatisfied parent is likely to be an emotionally grasping parent. It is important, therefore, quite as much in the interests of the children as in those of the mother, that motherhood should not cut her off from all other interests and pursuits.

Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
  hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
  fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the 
  starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
  supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
  cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
  staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
  sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
  on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
  wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt 
  of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
  purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and 
  endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
  leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
  tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
  enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
  blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
  winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
  mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
  Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought 
  them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
  all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
  through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
  crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, 
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
  to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
  escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
  anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
  brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
  picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
  China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
  ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
  lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
  because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
  who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural 
  ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse 
  of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
  soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
  and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
  the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
  fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
  with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
  hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze 
  of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and 
  undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
  wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before 
  the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for 
  committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and 
  intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
  waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
  screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
  Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
  public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
  ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
  a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to 
  pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
  of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
  womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
  and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
  package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
  along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
  a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
  sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
  were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
  the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
  secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
  the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
  backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
  with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
  & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
  too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a 
  sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
  over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
  & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
  waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
  heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
  son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall 
  be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy 
  bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
  and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
  build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
  tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
  the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
  of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside 
  of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next 
  decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
  were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were 
  growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
  amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
  ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
  ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
  by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked 
  away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
  soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
  jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the 
  street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
  records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
  key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
  and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
  hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
  had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
  & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
  Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
  is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
  tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a 
  second, 
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals 
  with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
  sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
  or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or 
  Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
  their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
  presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
  shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
  neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
  hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
  nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
  resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and 
  fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns 
  of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
  echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
  dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to 
  stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the 
  tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last 
  telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room 
  emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
  rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
  nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
  total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash 
  of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
  vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
  juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
  images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
  consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
  Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
  you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet 
  confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
  naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
  what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
  of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
  into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
  the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies 
  good to eat a thousand years.

Ginsberg

A kiss on the forehead

A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.

I kiss your forehead.

A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.

I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.

I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.

Magi

By Brenda Shaughnessy

If only you’d been a better mother.

 

How could I have been a better mother?

I would have needed a better self,

and that is a gift I never received.

 

So you’re saying it’s someone else’s fault?

 

The gift of having had a better mother myself,

my own mother having had a better mother herself.

The gift that keeps on not being given.

 

Who was supposed to give it?

 

How am I supposed to know?

 

Well, how am I supposed to live?

 

I suppose you must live as if you had been

given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance.

 

I cut off my hair, to sell for the money

to buy you what you wanted.

 

I wanted nothing buy your happiness.

 

I can’t give you that!

What would Jesus do?

He had a weird mother too . . .

 

Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if

it were given unconditionally, your birthright.

 

It’s a riddle.

 

All gifts are a riddle, all lives are

in the middle of mother-lives.

 

But it’s always winter in this world.

There is no end to ending.

 

The season of giving, the season

when the bears are never cold,

because they are sleeping.

 

The bears are never cold, Mama,

but I am one cold, cold bear.

life: the shit that happens while you're waiting for something to happen.

The Wire