Fight for beauty. Singer, writer, composer. ✉️ [email protected] Join me here:
Los Angeles, CA
Joined November 2015
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Creative projects I'm up to (ongoing thread):
Classic Gregorian chant:
open.spotify.com/album/2OsCy…
Please don't give up. You shatter the world behind you.
I lost my brother-in-law to suicide today.
My sister asked me to pick up her two boys from school because she was too wrecked to drive. I knew they’d wonder why I was picking them up in the middle of the school day, and I had a 30-minute drive home to get through with them.
On my way there, I prayed hard for the strength to keep it together and for the right words if they started asking questions.
I stopped at the middle school for the youngest before heading to the high school for his older brother. When he climbed into the front seat of my car, he pulled out his phone and read a text from his dad out loud. His dad had told him that he was sorry for the mistakes he’d made and to remember how much he loved him.
My little nephew had no idea he was reading his dad’s final goodbye, but I did.
It took everything in me to hold it together right then. I knew what I was taking him home to and what my sister was about to have to tell him and his brother.
I sat next to them on the couch when she told them the news. The grief that followed felt like watching a heavy bone china bowl fall in slow motion and shatter into a million pieces in the middle of the room. There was no fixing it. I wanted so badly to say something that would make it hurt a little less. All I could do was sit there with them.
It was a gut-wrenching day.
Kay Clarity retweeted
What's crazy is that music like this could have been played for centuries, just no-one thought to do it. What else are we missing?
And yes, I've already been laughing about the unbelievable mimesis happening around Girard's thinking recently.
Often the case for the greatest minds. Thrown into the horrible fate of the cliché! A sign of your work mattering as you hope and simultaneously a horrible and hilarious irony.
I wrote about it here about T.S. Eliot:
theimaginativeconservative.o…
Often the case for the greatest minds. Thrown into the horrible fate of the cliché! A sign of your work mattering as you hope and simultaneously a horrible and hilarious irony.
I wrote about it here about T.S. Eliot:
theimaginativeconservative.o…
“Girard devoted his life to exposing the lies behind fashions and trends. And now, after his death, he is fashionable and trendy. It’s almost like some kind of punishment.”
— Ted Gioia @tedgioia
That images speak to us to viscerally is absolutely fascinating to me, as is the fact that artists have a profound innate sensitivity to this inherent meaning.
Language.
A long time ago, concerned about my potential tendency to vanity, I asked God what the purpose of beauty was. I sensed Him say: "It's for others."
If true, it changes the whole way we approach the use of the gift, like any other gift.
I am not opposed to women enjoying their beauty. Women have used beauty and femininity to gain leverage in a man’s world for millennia. There is nothing new or revolutionary about that. But I am tired of the framing. And I am discontent with temporary concessions, gazes and trinkets.
When beauty is primarily described as a tool to utilize or exploit or manipulate others with, it keeps women in a survival mindset. It assumes the world is fundamentally male, competitive, and unequal, and that our bodies are strategic assets within that structure. That may be pragmatic, but it is not liberating.
The unique and beautiful parts of being a woman are not merely instruments for navigating a man’s world. They are a perspective of their own. A way of being. A value system. A creative force and artistic expression. I want a world where womanhood is not primarily defined in relation to men at all. A world in which a woman’s beauty and being inspires the world to slow down.
Enjoy your youth. Enjoy your beauty. And enjoy it because it is yours, not because it is leverage. The less a woman sees herself as a victim fighting for survival in a rigged system, the less she will view her body through the eyes of others and in purely utilitarian terms.
There is something deeper available to us than optimization. And I think many of us, men and women alike, are longing for that.
Kay Clarity retweeted
Con 28 años fallecieron mi mujer y mi hija. Hasta los 30 estuve en la más absoluta mierda.
Después del entierro intenté matarme con el coche, después pastillas, venas, todo lo que se me ocurrió.
Terminé metiendome en peleas heavy, pero heavys de verdad, con el único objetivo de que mataran. No hubo un día que no estuviera borracho. Me levantaba con pesadillas por la noche y me cogía tal cogorza que me caía y me abría la cabeza. Cuando me despertaba me grapaba yo la cabeza para no tener que salir y poder seguir bebiendo.
Perdí amigos, trabajo, mi vida, todo... 30 kilos.
Yo tenía la vida soñada (para mí), buen trabajo, buen sueldo, buena casa,una mujer que me llenaba de una manera que no se explicar, una hija que era el centro absoluto de mi mundo.
Tras esos dos años oscuros, la única persona que siempre estuvo ahí, sin importar la hora, sitio o incluso país, fue mi suegro. Él me sacó de esa mierda y gracias a él soy lo que soy hoy.
Ese hijo de puta y yo ni si quiera nos llevábamos bien antes. Él siempre me dijo que lo hacía por lealtad a su hija. No he aprendido nada más valioso en mi vida. Y cuanto más tiempo paso con él y más le conozco, más entiendo por qué mi mujer era una persona tan increíble.
Han pasado ya siete años y estoy aprendiendo a vivir otra vez, nunca va haber otra, ni la quiero. Pero soy capaz de seguir y estar agradecido por ciertas cosas.
Hoy tengo un trabajo increíble, gano mas dinero del que jamás podré gastar, vivo donde quiero, estoy sano y bien, y mi compañero de vida es mi suegro, todo es para el y sus otras hijas. Y estoy muy agradecido por tenerles. Nada me las va a devolver, y ese hueco no se va a llenar. Pero hay que seguir.
Sé que cuando las vuelva a ver ella estará cogiéndola en brazos y mirándola con esos ojos increíbles. Ése era mi universo. Y a él volveré.
Si estás en la absoluta mierda, levántate, pegate, mójate, llora, grita, lo que sea, pero empieza de cero. De todo se puede salir. Coge rutinas, sal a la calle, come bien, dúchate. Cada pequeño paso que des, por pequeño que sea, es un logro. Odiate, sufre, vívelo y enfrentalo. Y cuando mires atrás sabrás de dónde vienes.
Si esto lo lee alguien que está en la basura, mis dm están abiertos. No estás solo.
En fin menuda chapa
Kay Clarity retweeted
Ordo Amoris.
Friends, what is chastity—the second of the evangelical counsels?
Though the clergy and religious practice chastity through celibacy, the virtue itself is just as applicable to the laity.
Chastity simply means sexual uprightness or a rightly ordered sexuality—and this means bringing one’s sexual life under the aegis of love.
As Thomas Aquinas taught, love is not a feeling but rather an act of the will—more precisely, willing the good of the other. It is the ecstatic act by which we break free from the ego, whose gravitational pull wants to draw everything to itself.
Notice how the Church’s teaching that sex belongs within the context of marriage is meant to hold off this negative tendency. In saying that our sexuality should be subordinated to unity (the radical devotion to one’s spouse) and procreation (the radical devotion to one’s children), the Church is endeavoring to bring our sex lives completely under the umbrella of love.
What would our country look like if, starting today, every Catholic lived out the counsel of chastity? We would make an enormous dent in the pornography business; human trafficking would be dramatically reduced; abortions would appreciably decrease; and families would be significantly strengthened.
Very often true. At least: be honest about what truly drives you (hard) because it will affect whether you can be effective.
The only people who should try to solve the world’s problems are those who have been able to cultivate good lives and strong relationships.
Kay Clarity retweeted
The most important thing that being unconditionally loved by a man taught me was that love wasn't enough to fix me. He was the knight I'd always dreamed would reach down from his horse, extending a gloved hand to pull me out of the mud. And he whisked me away from my life, loved me, fed me, gave me space to write, anything I wanted, and asked for nothing but my own happiness. Oh, how badly I'd hoped he would come to save me all those years. He was the mother who should have comforted me. He was the father who stayed. He was everything I'd dreamed of become manifest.
And I was still miserable. I felt lonely. Unloved. I would lash out in a rage, because I thought he was wanting. That if only he loved me harder, I would be saved.
Nobody can save you. They can open their arms, inviting you into heaven, into the life you always wanted, but you still have to walk toward them.
Only when I realized that did I finally begin to heal. Only when I realized that did I discover the loneliness I felt was created by my false belief that my knight in shining armor could carry the one thing nobody can carry for you.
And to this day, when I tell people this, that they are the ones they will burst into tears. They scream. They rage. Just as I once did. "Why are you so mean? Why are you selfish? You're just like my abusive father. You want to see me suffer."
They cry, "Why don't you just pick it up and save me? Can't you carry me?"
But I can't. I can't, no matter how much I want to. We all have to bring ourselves toward redemption.
There is no knight in shining armor coming to rescue you from the dragons in your own mind. if you want deliverance you will have to become your own hero, the only one that will fight for you to the bitter end because they have no other choice but to win. its your skin in the game, nobody elses, and that means embracing the weight of it, the responsibility for it, taking the sword in your own hand and saying i might die today but at least i will die mine.
Kay Clarity retweeted
Filiation and love are better than will to power. Memory and continuity are better than revolution. The Son is loved by the Father and the Son does the will of his Father who then gives his Son the throne. This is the ideal we should strive towards. The freudian oedipal structure and the nietzschian ubermensch are not primordial, but fallen.
Kay Clarity retweeted
Life is pregnant with loss. Life’s background suffused with grief, with suffering. The trap: your deeper involvement.
The more you care, the more you intensify your grief and pain. But life cannot be lived without involvement. All that you gain, you will lose. But these constraints create space for revelation and love.
Those with much walk a high precipice and will fall. The “camel entering the eye of the needle” recognizes this. Investment in the world, gain and acquisition, deepens inevitable implacable loss and also places obstacles.
But one may approach the challenge, thusly:
Think on the reality of your own death. Deepen your own suffering and let it digest and bleed within you so that you find the gratitude and humility at the bottom of all pain.
Kay Clarity retweeted
It is an extremely insidious and perverted aspect of this platform that people can build visibility and engagement by deliberately posting offensive and disingenuous takes, that is, positions in which they don't actually believe and for which support fails (AKA "trolling"). You wouldn't do this IRL except in the context of gameplay. It erodes trust at scale.
The crux of it all, right here.
When you fall in love with someone you realize they contain infinite selves. People who have only been in 1-3 year relationships often talk about getting "bored" of each other as an inevitability, but if you maintain your curiosity and stay with someone for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, you realize that you never have to get bored, never have to subsume to tedium, and can continue to reinvent and discover each other over and over again. Even a tiny speck of dirt contains all infinity within it. The person you love is much more than that - a universe of potentiality, an ever present and unyielding depth. It can go on forever if you let it, if you allow yourself to not be easy prey to the "boredom" that is closing yourself off from possibility.
Your life really is just your days, and your days are really just moments. Fill up the moments.
This isn’t silly fairy stuff. This is violence against the storm.
