30/1 – 5/2/23 – Her Mind, Vladimir Lenin & Gnosticism

Welcome to Monday’s News on the March – The week that was in my digital world.

She Speaks Her Mind
Poem by Theodora Goss

Theodora’s poems often pass this way. She wrote in her biography page:

If I were to teach an undergraduate class in poetry, I would not start with workshopping at all. No, I would say, first we’re going to start by doing exercises. You’re going to write poetry in different forms: ballads, sonnets, villanelles. Because when Picasso was your age, he was imitating Velasquez. That’s how he eventually became Picasso. And it’s going to be bad, because you’re all going to be terrible at writing formal poetry — most people are. But it’s going to make you better poets, whether you’re writing in forms or in free verse. And we’re going to study the history of poetry, particularly in English but also in translation because you need to look beyond your own literary tradition. In this class you’re going to work . . . That’s the class I wish I’d had, a class that would have taught me about poetry in a deep way. That’s the sort of class I think would have inspired me.

Now for her poem She Speaks Part of It (or part of it):

I am too old
to fall in love for the first time,
to scrape my knee on the slide or break my ankle
roller skating, although I once did these things,
too old to sit on the swings
in the playground failing to properly smoke
my first cigarette, or spend summer afternoons
lying on the grass in the back yard, staring
alternately at the sky and the veined insides of my eyelids,
dreaming of things that haven’t happened yet.

I am too old
to save my money for the popular brand of blue jeans
or long for the actors on the movie screens
of my childhood, for Peter Pan and Robin Hood
and the Scarlet Pimpernel, for the heaven and hell
of adolescence, too old for acne,
for making cassette tapes of my favorite bands.
Time slips like a slinky through my hands
and I can count the years I have left like the rings in a tree
core sample studied in biology class.

(Read the entire poem at Theodora Goss Poems)

Lenin & The Russian Revolution Documentary
Video documentary at The People Profiles

This was an excellent documentary; step by step historical insight into Lenin and what led to the implementation of communism in Russia. (View video documentary here)

Gnosticism in the Modern West
Audio presentation at New Discourses

Marxism is not a philosophy. Neither are its derivatives, like “Wokeness” (Woke Marxism). These are a strain within a broader category of cult religious movements that pose as economics, sociology, and politics. The broad name for these Esoteric cult religions is “Gnosticism,” but that’s a confusing label for a number of reasons. The first of these reasons is that “gnosticism” as a term, either as a descriptive or proper noun, means several things at once, which requires clarification. Another is that as economic, social, and political movements, they don’t look at all like the pre-modern spiritualist and mystical movements that go by those names. In this groundbreaking episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay clarifies the term “gnosticism” and unmasks what amounts to a huge “New Age” movement in the Middle Ages as the source of a thread of Gnostic cult belief that has shaped every facet of the West for at least the last three hundred years. He also explains how the shift from the Middle Ages to the Modern period included a shift in the Gnostic project, out of overt spiritualism and into exactly those society-building realms of economics, sociology, and politics. Join him to gain a completely new understanding of these dangerous movements and how they’re relevant to our lives today. (Listen to audio presentation here)

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand