August 2011
1 post
A Love Supreme
Part One: Elation
The city seemed to move—swelling, as though engrossed and enraptured by its own primal rhythm. People, shapes—figures and cascading blurs wrapped among themselves—drifted and were shook apart as though figments of some imaginary lightplay, distant memories of a fleeting and forgotten past. His mind lingered and fell into the crowd. Shapeless figures, structures, bodies, minds; a...
June 2011
1 post
3 tags
The Dream
I have seen The sunken mysteries of my own mind spread out before me, enveloping everything, breathing sunlight from their ephemeral dew.
I have heard the silent rumblings of a desire yet unborn the faint, pitching melody of longing,...
March 2011
2 posts
tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
4 tags
Vancouver
The air shook with an unbearable lightness, The promise of protection hanging silently beneath a canopy of trees. Calm streets, swept of debris, lined with homes who sit quietly beneath an openness of drifting birds. Crows, whose nesting, recreational cries fuse lightly with the sightless initiative of the mind, stood frozen in the backdrop of immovable skies, its clouds a moving shadow which...
February 2011
9 posts
6 tags
The Role of the Scientific Revolution in...
(Grade 12 History AP Essay)
Explain how specific ideas and methods of reasoning led directly to new political and social ideas.
The Scientific Revolution spawned a wave of revolutionary new ideas and methodologies which would come to profoundly influence the course of Western Civilization. While the Scientific Revolution featured a wide variety of innovative ideas, they were linked...
4 tags
The Evolution of Deism
(Grade 12 History AP Essay)
Analyze the ways in which specific intellectual and scientific developments of the Scientific Revolution contributed to the emergence of the religious outlook known as “deism”.
The religious outlook of deism broke sharply with the prevailing religious dogma of its time by rejecting the notion of God’s intervention in day-to-day affairs. This bold proposition...
6 tags
Renaissance Education (D.B.Q.)
(Grade 12 History AP Document-Based Question)
The Renaissance, as its name implies, was a period of artistic and cultural revival in which European society cast off the shackles of medieval thought, ushering in a new era of cultural expression which transformed the underlying values and purposes of education. During the Renaissance, arts and culture took on a heightened importance, as...
5 tags
The Development of Protestantism as a Political...
(Grade 12 History AP Essay)
Martin Luther did not intend for his ideas to have widespread political consequences, let alone spark the social, political, and religious revolution that was the Protestant Reformation. Instead, his ideas were forced into an increasingly political direction by factors outside of Luther’s control. First, the involuntary politicization of Luther’s ideas was put...
5 tags
The Effects of Protestantism on Economic Growth
(Grade 12 History AP Essay)
The Protestant Reformation represented a decisive shift away from the rigidly-enforced dogma of the Catholic Church, which had had a growing role in influencing the course of economic, social, and political life in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. This profound shift was made possible by the revolutionary religious reforms put forth by Martin Luther in the...
5 tags
The Gin Act of 1751 (D.B.Q.)
(Grade 12 History AP Document-Based Question)
The arguments for and against the introduction of the Gin Act of 1751 can be separated into two distinct camps: those supporting the motion as a means of counteracting the tremendous social impact caused by the overconsumption of gin, and those opposing the motion due to its predicted negative impact on the nation’s economy and internal...
5 tags
Alienation and Convention in A Doll's House
(Gr. 12 English AP Essay)
The characters of A Doll’s House are socially alienated from one another. This alienation manifests itself in an exaggerated emphasis placed on social decorum and respectability, which contributes to the poor treatment of many of the play’s characters. Throughout A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen uses his characters’ experiences as a means of warning against the...
5 tags
The Steinbeck Manifesto
(Gr. 12 English AP Essay)
The publication of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in 1939 caused a wave of controversy that spread across American society. Though it was praised by some, much of the initial criticism of the novel revolved around its perceived political agenda, with some critics going as far as to label it as Communist propaganda. While much of this initial hysteria...
4 tags
Sympathy for Oedipus
(Gr. 12 English AP Critical Response Essay)
How do you feel about the character Oedipus? Do you feel sorry for him? Or did he get what he deserved? Explain.
The root cause of Oedipus’ tragic and grotesque circumstances is not so much his own personal flaws as it is the involvement of the gods who crafted his destiny. Oedipus, a strong and independently-minded character who admits to being...
January 2011
1 post
4 tags
Crocodylia
He sat heavily on the cushioned surface, eyes jittering out the window. Inside, a warm room, its low-lit scenery accented by the blue-cold glare emanating from beyond café windows, those moderating view-panes and embassies to the external. Outside, cool air shifted imperceptibly in convective motions, as visibly all was still and unmoving as morning air. Coffee cups lay on the tables. The...
December 2010
6 posts
Hip Hop
Hip hop is the coalescence of the lock and the load. Jazz breathing from New World Rhythms; work songs, blues, interwoven with Old World melodies—a classical strain; the high and the low; primordial pulse caught in the convective cross-convergence of the blood-swelled trade winds. A voice of European classicism, filtered through Jazz; a rhythmic pulse—Love, Supreme—born of blues, grown and severed...
Leaders of the New
We were the leaders of the new, our closed travels brimming, enraptured, in the allure of the ancients, whose simple times—baked in violence—shook us from our desert comas and outward, onward onto uneven sands; ours was the flight and passage of a bygone time, flirting with eternity on the threshold of creation: surveying it all, collecting it all, knowing we would never have to survey the...
Little Cosmos
There is silence in the void. A man, in his chair, is seated—face forward—gazing through a clear pane out onto the colossal globe rotating beneath him. He holds a book and pen in his hands. His fingers, part curled around the pen’s circumference, give voice to atoms through ink and paper, raining hieroglyphic meanings in the form of words. His handwriting speaks: lending itself to the emptiness of...
Angels and Albatrosses
What is the true nature of the Universe? Are we its true nature? Is ours the inevitable path of biological intelligence?
The miracle of nature is that it does not require miracles. ——————— why, then, do we?
Universal Everything
“ The sun swept high in the sky of the metropolis – dreaming, like ‘who on top of this?’ “
The sun beats down on sheets of metal. Stone-cold metallics; a contour of industrial mass. The sun does not warm the bolts and steel, which bead with particle evaporation, creating a layer of wetness which sits atop the striking permanence of celestial rigidity.
The beams of dense metallurgy sit...
Logic / Illogic
Sand melting off of walls. A still wind, moved by convection, shifting nowhere; into itself. A sun beats down, awash in gamma rays.
Elsewhere, a chimp’s hallucinations send rippling showers reverberating throughout a colourless void. There is no life here; no compounds to thrust and form: phoenix-like greases in the wheels of Infinity.
So sits the deserted world, its silent sands lifted and...
November 2010
6 posts
6 tags
'A Passage to India' Explication
(Gr. 12 English AP Explication Essay)
”A mosque by winning his approval let loose his imagination. The temple of another creed, Hindu, Christian or Greek, would have bored him and failed to awaken his sense of beauty. Here was Islam… an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home.” (41)....
7 tags
The Tao of Hamlet
(Gr. 11 Literature 12 Essay)
Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
— Lao Tzu
Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, teaches that the way to overcome suffering is by addressing it at its source. Hamlet’s failure to live by this principle leads him down a destructive path of loneliness and obsession, culminating in his...
6 tags
Matured Imagination in the Poetry of Wordsworth...
(Gr. 11 Literature 12 Essay)
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘imagination’ as “the ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful”. As children, we are all born with highly imaginative minds. As our minds grow and develop in practical sophistication, however, the impulse to think imaginatively begins to fade, as knowledge and rationality take their root. As adults, there is a tendency to...
6 tags
Relationship Dynamics as Spur of 'Macbeth'
(Gr. 11 English essay on Macbeth)
The relationship of the Macbeths is based primarily on interdependence and a shared desire for power and control. Albeit for different reasons, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth rely on one another in order to pursue this goal. This arrangement, and its gradual deterioration over time, serves as the driving force behind much of the play’s events.
The...
7 tags
Themes of Power and Colonization in "The Guest"
(Gr. 11 English essay on Albert Camus’ “The Guest”)
By its very nature, colonialism requires that some people be defined as ‘colonizers’ and others as ‘colonized’. Inherent to this structure is an imbalance of power, granting colonizers the power to rule over and subjugate the colonized—making them guests in their own land. This structure is not...
8 tags
Roots of Dystopia
(Gr. 11 English essay on Oryx and Crake and Brave New World)
Although on the surface they have very little in common, the societies portrayed in Oryx and Crake and Brave New World share one all-important characteristic: their citizens are internally without balance. This lack of internal balance manifests itself externally in ways that give both societies their dystopian feel. Although...
October 2010
10 posts
Aesop's Underground
Constantine’s last day on Earth was plagued by fire, lifted by mind, quenched by water that never came—evaporating on the banks of the Bosphorous. On the frontier, there is no feed-back; there is only feed-forward. Heaven lifted and shook and revealed a paralyzing calm; through the ancient clouds came a startling rhythm, older and wiser than Man’s creation, which shook with light primeval...
I am Ozomandias
I am Ozomandias, King of Kings; look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair. I exist in the shadow of empires, on that frontier at which there is no feedback, but only feed-forward. I am an inconceivable rhythm, piercing through the ancient clouds, older and wiser than the idols and artefacts which are cast to an all-encompassing brightness by my primeval influence. I am that all-pervasive...
Illuminating Sol
The road to Damascus was long and winding. Sucsamat ot doar eht. A long and narrow road, dust-blurred, its edges indistinct. Its surroundings—cracked earth, curst dust, hardened, airborne powder, carried by wind—a hard storm of small orange fragments, streaked in diagonal beams illuminating Sol. Sucsamad et doar eht, Tcnitsidni, segde sti ot derrulb Taps enrobria redwop, dniw yb...
Olympus / Apollo
Leaves fell and clustered on Olympus. Wind-tossed branches, sliding in puddles down steep paths, into gorges, rivers, dams, floods. The whole Universe was moisture. Water clung to water clung to toes, stones, pebbles—all pulled down. One great, huge Hydrogen bond of precipitation. The world above water looked trapped and helpless. Beneath it was chaos and movement in disarray. From the top...
Superchimp
Chernobyl courtyard. Guard towers—four corners. Graying grass; dust, woodchips in the air. A layer of airy frost hangs over the damp soil, which lets out a soft, padded crunch under pressure. A woman paces along the breadth of the courtyard in swift, angular motions. Later, she leads you into a stretch of open grasslands overlooking a steep valley. Nestled between the valley and the sea,...
24 Hominids
What a fascinating sight: 24 hominids face-down, writing—give or take a few, who stare onward, indecisive—probing our mental reserves, inciting our imaginations. Each is a world unto itself. You, who are a pre-requisite of lust, infatuation, and possibly love. How fortunate, that each inconspicuous unit, seated upon our inconspicuous blue dot which floats invisibly amidst a sea of...
Endosymbiosis
It is said that the evolutionary leap from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells took two billion years to complete. It has recently been proposed that, during this two billion year-long interval, specialized bacteria formed symbiotic relationships with prokaryotic cells. Eventually, the individual bacteria lost their autonomy, becoming intrinsically bound to their “host” prokaryotic cells. In...
Singularity
The Universe is born from a soft fabric of coexistence between space and time. Gone are the days of drifting particles, celestial mass unleashed by the vast brandishing of potential unleashed by the Big Bang.
A young species sits brooding, applying boot-strap solutions to problems born from neglect. A restless species, though prone to stagnation and decay.
Still, an old force that rests within us...
Stonehenge
I am Ozomanthius, King of Kings, ruler of Man and of Nature. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair. _______________________________________________________________________
My appetite is deep and ravenous. Like Nature herself, I am insatiable.
I hold deserts and jungles of Mind within my borders, flanked on all sides by tumultuous seas.
Storms rack, sweep my land; seas of rock and...
Apophis
The milk tasted soft and metallic. Laying down the cold bowl brought light vibrations, which echoed throughout the vacuous surroundings. The air was empty, filled with the ominous hum of soft-lit machinery. Machinethought. The room was dark. Alone in a seat, all was wrapped in softening layers of grayful blue, the air thick with silent particles. At the end of the hall, a large window is poured...
September 2010
1 post
Desire
I am fascinated by the interplay between joy and suffering. To exist, to acknowledge–to bear witness to all that is around you–is to suffer. I love not Nature less, but Humanity more. What is this coexistence between beauty and misery? When one perceives sadness, desolation, misery, suffering itself… one can only experience such suffering up to a certain point, after which pain subsides into...
August 2010
1 post
Rapture
Particles rushed into focus, grains of dust veiling the vision of the ocular. Spacesand.
Re-focus.
Adjust. Adapt. Evolve.
Imagery.
An ellipse bleeds light down-cylinder, shakes, reforms. It looks obscure. Shy, almost, in the night sky. A circle forms, its contours brimming wildly.
Rapture.
March 2010
14 posts
Hashish
Closing her eyes, she breathes. Hashish smoke in Roman slums, muttered speech, indecipherable Latin flow through her, carried by the breath. Looking down at her clasped hands, cold and huddled,
Exhale.
Thus Flows the Seine
Thus flows the Seine, it which ebbs with such powerful narcotics. Thus flows the Seine, its sky stirred to a Starry Night; the blood-inheritance of great vengeance flowing forth as a mighty fire. Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, or Death! (The latter being all the easier.) So sits Sydney, just like him, directionless man of destiny; uninspired inspiration to the dead and dying, unlikely...
Cello
Reserved, good posture, eyes glow as she leans forward and smiles, “Nangi-aka! Can you hear me?” The voices come in rapid succession, but rarely overlap; a conversation. A dark piece; the wood tuned down; an 18th-century Jazz. “I mean, the war is over, right?” I drown in the notes, powerless in the grasp of the Cello, and am thrown to and fro, stroke by stroke. The...
The Proper Study of Mankind
Head-first into the pornographic undercurrent of subterranean void, feet first onto the streets of cobbled cobble. Heart-first into sheets of sound, Buddha-nature un-branded; the mighty colossus, the sinking ship; blue lines and brown eyes. Hues — Black, Brown, and Beige. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; the Cold Sweat: Blues. Fresh rain on mind’s concrete. The promise of...
Access
She leaned back, frowning in a satisfying grin that glimmered with nostalgia. “You know, I think it’ll be really a lot better the second time around. In my independent travels, I tend to end up just buying lots of candy and sitting on a bench, watching people.” It was annoying traveling, those days. We were a generation born to a more connected world; syndicated, sound-byte...
Candide, en route vers Constantinople
L’océan noir tournait brusquement, tiré par des courants profonds, en supportant le navire du jeune Candide, qui se jettait en pleine forme dans des raisonnements sévères avec Martin, fidèle accomplice, sage, déprimé, résolu. Candide, en gesticulant passionnément, dit à Martin : « Pourtant Martin, il ne peut pas y avoir que du mal dans ce monde; le fait que nous sachions ce...
J'accuse !
5th of July, 2009, 2:30 am Les Aurores Montréalais is a book of short stories that attempts to convey the underlying spirit of Montreal through its fiction, and whose description I now cut abruptly short due to my role in the momentary and blinding snuffing-out of the life of a common house moth, which had rudely invaded my peripheral vision in a time of silent contemplation. It is indeed true...
18th of August, 2009
All of the varying scraps of information that have poured into my mind in the past 20-odd hours:Spielberg. Munich. Blood. Monopoly. Chocolate covered ice cream. Procedurally generated, algorithmic math music. Sleep: {murder; jumping dogs; ice sheets; friends}. Waking, startled. Orange & Pomegranate juice. Outside, the sun shines: ‘Starbucks’. Bus stop. Waiting. Rude. Arrival. Over-priced...
Wall Street
It is past midnight, but the lone customer of the bar refuses to budge. He has come by chauffeur—driven Mercedes, which is parked outside. His was the world of missile crises and Margaret Thatcher. He had made four thousand dollars one summer of his youth selling packaged pork to Wall Street bankers, and eighteen million via military procurement contracts supplying factory-made M16s to the...
Cold Morning
Blood, bones, assembled instruments of assorted organics, wrapped in tissue, bearing liquids, clothed in skin; looks through glass pane, mounted windowsill — cold, and holding water — through which, and far beyond, rest the humbling expanses of the cold, Pacific dawn.
Chinatown
The sky over Chinatown breaks open; sheets of rain falling from the open, blue sky alongside a passing heat wave. People pause and turn, pace sideways, tumbling, troubled by the heavy heat and stark contrasts. Many take to the shade, joining others in cramped, low-lit restaurants that serve ‘American Food’: French toast that’s deep fried with syrup and a thick slab of butter on...
Holden
Through the stifling cold I walk briskly and with purpose. My left is flanked by large Pine trees, unshakable in their imposing permanence. All around me, the ground is frozen stiff and still with frost. I board the #4 bus, heading downtown. On the bus, my forehead pressed up against the foggy glass pane, I look out the window. The light filtering through it is multicolored and vibrant—blurred...