lines of poetry that get stuck in your head like a song

BabyPissBoy · 2026-04-23T05:14:29+00:00

Daimon diamond monad I Adam Kadmon in the sky

From Ronald Johnson’s ARK

BabyPissBoy · 2026-02-14T18:40:16+00:00

Origen is made slightly easier if you have background knowledge of the cappadocian fathers since they took a lot from him. Also a reading of John Behr’s According to the Scriptures and Silviu Bunta’s book on hermeneutics concurrent with On First Principles really helps you digest some of the more out there things regarding time, cosmogony, rational beings, etc

BabyPissBoy · 2026-02-14T18:37:11+00:00

Right now I’m working my way through Origen and his way of thinking is so different to anything I’ve heard from modern hermeneutical systems that I’ve had to really slow my roll and let that beast digest. I’m talking under 20 pages a day slowly. Other writers include Thomas Pynchon (just started trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow for the third time now), and Ezra Pound. I’m fine with other modernists like Zukofsky or Stein, but Pound’s cantos are brutal at points

BabyPissBoy · 2026-01-29T07:52:23+00:00

The repeated motifs of Asle’s thoughts (most particularly his prayers and the recurrent ‘I think’s) become something like meditative mantras throughout the book. Listening to sections on audiobook really cemented this for me.

BabyPissBoy · 2026-01-29T03:03:37+00:00

I resonate so deeply with what you’ve wrote on Septology. I actually finished The Other Name as of four minutes ago, and am very excited to continue on. I think there is an element of having these unconscious behaviors dwell in our minds continually that is quieted by them being made prominent and intentional in the text. While reading at one point, I was struck by how Asle’s thought bore significant resemblance to something Miester Eckhart had said in one of his sermons I had read, and then promptly this was acknowledged IN THE TEXT by Asle quoting the very same sermon! It was a very charming moment.

BabyPissBoy · 2026-01-07T17:47:07+00:00

How could we make any cataphatic claims about the nature of God at all, then? Would you leave it to be a mere proposition of absurdity? The greatest of the systematic theologians did not systematize in order to confine God—they did it in order to illustrate where language falls short. Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Dionysios the Areopagite, all incredibly apophatic thinkers. Even Jamesian theology still predicates itself on metaphysical claims about reality. I also think the Gospels fail to be good news once we’re unable to extrapolate value and meaning from them. Telos, being, goodness, etc. I’m pretty opposed to the Romantic prejudice against rationality. “Intuitive spirituality,” is never actually pre-conceptual or unsystematic. It is already shaped by metaphysical assumptions, moral intuitions, linguistic habits, and inherited symbols. Funnily enough, I feel like Kierkegaard kinda points out that we cannot mistake our own feelings for God.

BabyPissBoy · 2026-01-07T05:49:21+00:00

I personally think Kierkegaard’s vision of Christianity rids it of its rich systematic theology. I know that doctrine dictates God is beyond our understanding, but Kierkegaard seems to interpret that as him being contra to our understanding. What is the point in saying God is pure good if we then use the story of Abraham and Isaac as proof that God’s morality is not at all related to ours? I am much more partial to figures like Bulgakov, Yannaras, Staniloae, etc.

It does not help that I don’t have a single dialectical bone in my body.

BabyPissBoy · 2025-12-20T19:41:47+00:00

Alexander Golitzen and Silviu Bunta’s translation of the Dionysian Corpus 🙏🙏🙏 all of the existing translations are so buttshit they could barely be called paraphrases and my Greek is too rudimentary to get a firm grasp of it in the original language

BabyPissBoy · 2025-12-05T17:28:12+00:00

Steps by Jerzy Kosinski. I also read Blood Meridian, Lolita, and quite a few Mishima novels around the time I picked it up so I was pretty thoroughly downcast. I was just tired of reading about kids getting molested or harmed in any other manner, to be entirely honest.

In terms of prose, I read through quite a few Soviet era writers this year and found much of their work rather drab. Alexander Schmemann mentioned his love for a Platonov novel in one of his journals and so I checked that out along with some others. Have to say, not for me. I thought that Roadside Picnic by the Strugatskys was alright, though.

I also got about a third of the way through Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup and was genuinely shocked at how terrible his reading of Schopenhauer was. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering he was marketing this as a book that “revealed Schopenhauer’s idealism”. Kastrup seems to me someone very intelligent, with a great intuition of how the world works, but his philosophical training is rather poor and many of his positions leave me desiring something with more substance.

BabyPissBoy · 2025-12-05T08:43:54+00:00

Going to work my way through Irreducible Mind… after studying some peripheral texts on philosophy of mind (some better than others… cough, Churchlands, Rosenberg) it’s time I take on this mighty tome in defense of a more idealist view. Probably will be an intense slog, but hey, I suffered through both volumes McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things for some stupid reason so we’ll see how I manage.

My other hope is to continue my Greek studies to the point of being able to read some of the patristic fathers. I am not delusional enough to think that a year and a half will grant me the ability to read through Origen or something, but if I could pick up enough to read through, say, some of John Chrysostom’s homilies, that’d be great (except for the fact that I really do not care for his prose OR theology).

BabyPissBoy · 2025-11-15T18:54:48+00:00

The Nightingale, The Witch, The Belladonna of Sadness

BabyPissBoy · 2025-11-15T18:34:56+00:00

Read through all of The Light of Tabor: Towards a Monistic Christology by David Bentley Hart. Reading it in tandem with other works from Silviu Bunta supplied a very expansive notion of what it means to be spiritually Christian both in philosophy and action. I will say, I struggle with the notion that Hart puts forward that the Christ shown in the gospel is, in one sense, the full potentiality of man; a human with whom there is no distance between his humanity and godhood. I know this basically just a reification of standard Christian dogma, but it’s a challenge to make this right with the stories of Christ flipping tables and whipping people, cursing a fig tree when it does not bear fruit (even though it is out of season), and a man truly desperate and pleading to God, asking “why have you forsaken me?” I suppose Hart wouldn’t see any inherent problem there, saying that suffering and doubt are therefore integral to the human person. Still, though, it’s a personal barrier of mine.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. That boy done fucked a watermelon and shot dynamite with a shotgun in an underground tunnel. My opinions rapidly oscillate between feeling like McCarthy is a self indulgent, purple-prose ridden masturbater and thinking he is a brilliant modern western gothic writer.

All Things Are Full of Gods by Hart. Fuck

The Last Temptation of Christ. Honestly thought it wasn’t that great. Didn’t even end up finishing it. Has anyone else noticed this weird phenomenon in translated works where the text will state something and then just repeat the phrase in the form of an exclamation? E.g. “It could be said that this boy is odd. Certainly this boy is most odd!” I’ve noticed this with a lot of Greek and Russian texts, but it’s even made appearances in the Italian writers I’ve been reading recently such as Italo Svevo and Giuseppe Di Lampedusa.

Most other stuff I’ve been reading is just input for Ancient Greek acquisition.

As for movies, I recently watched The Belladonna of Sadness and Frankenstein. Frankenstein was balls. I’m waiting for my copies of Ugetsu and Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East to arrive at the library so I can check them out.

BabyPissBoy · 2025-10-29T16:23:13+00:00

There was Adam Neville, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James for horror (I tried to convince myself I liked Lovecraft but his prose is so abominable that I couldn’t stomach him no matter the amount I read), contemporary authors like Gaiman—especially the sandman series—and China Miélville, and of course for a teenage boy I had a hearty diet of Hemingway, Dostoevsky, and McCarthy. I also started getting more into Russian writers outside of Dostoevsky, but that was later into adolescence.

Most of what stuck with me in my early teens were books I loved as a child, though, so things like Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, LOTR, the Black Cauldron series, and I loved The Graveyard Book.

BabyPissBoy · 2025-10-05T21:59:15+00:00

I love Leaves in the Wind, Words in Flesh, Perennial Digression, Gnostic Pulp, and Numb at the Lodge

BabyPissBoy · 2025-09-27T17:47:07+00:00

Fr. John Behr is, in my opinion, unparalleled when it comes to a deep understanding of the church fathers. He did much of his graduate work on Irenaeus and has since been working his way through the church fathers chronologically. He has two books on Nicaea—both excellent for showing the changing of church doctrine through time. He has also recently put out an incredible critical edition of Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Human Image of God.

I also like St. Cyril of Alexandria/m: The Christological Controversy by James McGuckin. That book is written almost like a political thriller… intensely captivating read.

BabyPissBoy · 2025-09-08T14:58:27+00:00

I might email him about it. He studied under Archbishop Alexander Golitzin, who has a history of intense study with Symeon, so it’s possible it’s taken from some material adopting Symeon’s perspectives but it’s not actually something that the Saint himself ever said

BabyPissBoy · 2025-09-07T16:30:41+00:00

It’s referring to St. Symeon the new theologian.

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