Sam Sheridan's Blog, page 3

Fish Canyon

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Fish Canyon

Rocky Mountain High

Heading to Colorado for my first Elk hunt!

Good ole Noam

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/...

Fascinating stuff, is he wrong?

Just started reading “Walden” by Thoreau

…and Wow am I underwhelmed. First of all, Henry David is only thirty when he writes it, and he says “I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.” Old age brings only loss, not wisdom, he belabors this point. Sounds like typical youth to me…

But the real stinker is this one: “I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, so as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver yourself!”

Uh, okay, I get your point, but really? Seriously? Do you sometimes whip yourself to death, physically? Trying to end slavery is frivolous?

And then comes the famous “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…” what is implied, of course, is that Thoreau DOES NOT, being wise and having seen the light. “But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear.” Thoreau, and just maybe the lucky reader are those special people with ‘alert and healthy natures.’

To be plain, I think Thoreau is simply wrong. The mass of men do not lead lives of quiet desperation, that is a callow conceit.

Anyway, I should probably keep reading.

Just started reading "Walden" by Thoreau

…and Wow am I underwhelmed. First of all, Henry David is only thirty when he writes it, and he says "I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors." Old age brings only loss, not wisdom, he belabors this point. Sounds like typical youth to me…

But the real stinker is this one: "I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, so as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver yourself!"

Uh, okay, I get your point, but really? Seriously? Do you sometimes whip yourself to death, physically? Trying to end slavery is frivolous?

And then comes the famous "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…" what is implied, of course, is that Thoreau DOES NOT, being wise and having seen the light. "But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear." Thoreau, and just maybe the lucky reader are those special people with 'alert and healthy natures.'

To be plain, I think Thoreau is simply wrong. The mass of men do not lead lives of quiet desperation, that is a callow conceit.

Anyway, I should probably keep reading.

The Survivor, by Terrence Des Pres

The basic structure of Western civilization or perhaps of any civilization, insofar as the processes of culture and sublimation are one, is the division between body and the spirit, between concrete existence and symbolic modes of being. In extremity, however, divisions like these collapse. The principle of compartmentalization no longer holds, and organic being becomes the immediate locus of selfhood. When this happens, body and spirit become the ground of each other, each bearing the other's need, the other's sorrow, and each responds directly to the other's total condition. If spiritual resilience declines, so does physical endurance. If the body sickens, the spirit too begins to lose its grip. There is a strange circularity about existence in extremity: survivors preserve their dignity in order "not to begin to die"; they care for the body as a matter of "moral survival."

For many among us, the word "dignity" no longer means much; along with terms like "conscience" and "spirit" it has grown suspect and is seldom used in analytic discourse. And certainly, if by "dignity" we mean the projection of pretense and vaingflory, or the ways power cloaks itself in pomp and ritual pride; if, that is, we are referring to the parodic forms of this principle, as men exploit it for justification or gain—just as honor and conscience are exploited and likewise parodied, although real in themselves—then of course the claim to dignity is false. But if we mean an inward resistance to determination by external forces; if we are referring to a sense of innocence and worth, something felt to be inviolate, autonomous and untouchable, and which is most vigorous when most threatened; then, as in the survivor's case, we come upon one of the constituents of humanness, one of the irreducible elements of selfhood. Dignity, in this case, appears as a self conscious, self-determining faculty whose function is to insist upon recognition of itself as such.

Certainly the SS recognized it, and their attempt to destroy it…was one of the worst aspects of the camp ordeal.

Thinking about Jones

What really impressed me about the Jon Jones fight was Jones' instincts. Yes, he's an incredible athlete with an amazing wingspan, but none of that means shit without the composure to utilize it. When he came out in that crawl–that spider-monkey-attack, fluid and athletic, not scared, never in danger, he started the process of throwing Rampage completely off his game and "mesmerizing" him, as Rampage later admitted. Jones would later say when pressed that he had a great outside single and thought maybe he could get it from there, but still….

That instinct was flawless. It was exactly the right thing to do. And that, at 24 years of age, is what really impresses about Jones. Not just the tools, but the 'composture,' as old boxing trainers sometimes say. His confidence and composure felt so complete…has the guy ever lost a round, or half a round?

Maybe, maybe Machida can somehow muster up enough elusiveness, clever striking, and speed to challenge Jones, but I don't see anyone else doing it. And I see him going to heavyweight in 2 years and taking that belt, too.

What I'm Reading

If there is any science man really needs it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man. —Immanuel Kant

I'm back on "The Denial of Death," by Ernest Becker…working on my book, trying to get somewhere on the fear of death in our society. Shocking, I'm not getting anywhere! But I think I will, when I get into it a little deeper.

Warrior

Warrior the movie will finally be released in September, on the 9th, I think. Something like that. It's gonna be great, and the reviews and reactions so far have been stellar.

I play myself, in a major acting stretch. Bryan Callen and I are the fight announcers. When they sent me the script, I nearly fell off my stool, because there was a lot of dialogue. But it all worked out and ended up being a blast. Thanks to Gavin and Anthony Tambakis!

The paradox of existence…

Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ehereality, this self –consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.

–Ernest Becker, "Denial of Death"