Poly Quotes

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...

Love is being honest with yourself at all times being honest with the other person at all times telling, listening, respecting the truth and never pretending Love is the source of reality

This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy.

Love is . . . Being happy for the other person when they are happy, Being sad for the person when they are sad, Being together in good times, And being together in bad times. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF STRENGTH. Love is . . . Being honest with yourself at all times, Being honest with the other person at all times, Telling, listening, respecting the truth, And never pretending. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF REALITY. Love is . . . An understanding so complete that you feel as if you are a part of the other person, Accepting the other person just the way they are, And not trying to change them to be something else. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF UNITY. Love is . . . The freedom to pursue your own desires while sharing your experiences with the other person, The growth of one individual alongside of and together with the growth of another individual. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SUCCESS. Love is . . . The excitement of planning things together, The excitement of doing things together. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF THE FUTURE. Love is . . . The fury of the storm, The calm in the rainbow. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF PASSION. Love is . . . Giving and taking in a daily situation, Being patient with each other's needs and desires. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SHARING. Love is . . . Knowing that the other person will always be with you regardless of what happens, Missing the other person when they are away but remaining near in heart at all times. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SECURITY. LOVE IS . . . THE SOURCE OF LIFE!

Quick! Do a roly, roly poly!

Politics: “Poli” a Latin word meaning "many" and "tics" meaning "bloodsucking creatures".

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair and let us huddle together as darkness takes over. We are at home amidst the birds and the trees, for we are children of nature.

Politics. The word is taken from the Ancient Greek. “Poly” means “many.” And ticks are tiny, bloodsucking insects.

Ma vie est un désastre, mais personne ne le voit car je suis très poli : je souris tout le temps. Je souris parce que je pense que si l'on cache sa souffrance elle disparaît. Et dans un sens, c'est vrai : elle est invisible donc elle n'existe pas, puisque nous vivons dans le monde du visible, du vérifiable, du matériel. Ma douleur n'est pas matérielle ; elle est occultée. Je suis un négationniste de moi-même

What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

Ringo's chuckle got tangled up with a cough. He tossed back a shot, cleared his throat, and said, "Politics, from the Latin. Poly, meaning 'many.' Ticks meaning 'bloodsucking little bastards.

I fear that we shall be obliged to leave this pudding

Polyamory is differentiable from some other forms of nonmonogamy (including adultery) in that it is future-oriented. Poly relationships are not located solely in the moment, but have intentions (though perhaps tacit and vaguely defined) of at least adding to a base of experience possibly so far as signifying a life-long and emotionally attached commitment.

What else could I be? If I were a mono-thinker, I probably wouldn’t be an insomniac. How is a poly-thinker supposed to fall asleep, and more importantly, stay asleep, when thoughts just won’t stop darting! darting! darting! through my head?

The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.

Willie approached them solo at first, smiling and speaking Spanish. He asked them how they were doing and whether there were any hot chicks inside. Then he said, “Here, let me help you.” With that, he delivered an uppercut so strong it felt as if the punch ended only when it struck roly-poly’s backbone. Rufus came up behind the second guy and administered a kidney punch that would have the little fellow peeing blood for a month.

There was an old coddle so molly, He talked in a glot that was poly, His gaws were so gew That his laps became dew, And he ate only pops that were lolly.

Fine," he moped. "I hope you’re very happy together. Cute little hobbit couple with lots of roly-poly hobbit babies." Georgie turned back to him, but didn’t stop walking away. "I’m not hobbity.

Give yourself freedom to try out new things. Don't be so set in your ways that you can't grow.

And that’s a polycrab,” Conner said. “It has ten limbs and three tails,” Alex noted. “That’s thirteen appendages – why would you name it a polycrab? Poly means seven.” “Oh,” Conner said. “That explains why I failed that geometry quiz.

Political liberty,” what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the State and to the State’s laws... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.

The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.

Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy on suppressing the urge to tell some of the people who are staring at them that they do not eat as much and as frequently as they seem to.

Yeah, that’s her. Roly-poly little bitch. Fucked her in the ass the other day and, get this, she shit all over me. I’m talkin’, this wasn’t no little mess. This was Niagara fuckin’ Falls pourin’ outta her ass.

You can master tantric yogic poly-orgasmic Wonder Sex but you're still gonna die alone.

I LOVE YOU SO MANY REASONS ' --- Before i met you I spent a lot of time meeting all kinds of people i had a lot of fun and learned a lot Though each person I met had great characteristics something was missing No one person had all the qualities that I had hoped a person could have- someone whose every action and thought I could respect someone who was very intelligent yet could also be fun-loving someone who was sensitive, yet virile exciting and sensuous someone who knew what they wanted out of life. a beautiful person inside and out I could not find a person like this until i met you

YOU WILL ALWAYS BE THE ONLY ONE FOR ME ' -- I always want to be with you more than with anyone else. I always want to talk to you before anyone else. I always want to laugh with you * walk with you ? * read with you * play with you * be quiet with you * be noisy with you make plans with you discuss the past and future with you You will always be the person who makes me happy, content, excited and peaceful No matter how much time passes our love will not only prevail but it will be stronger than ever ..

That’s the beauty aboot being polis: it doesnae really matter whether or not everybody hates you, as long as they’re civil tae your face and can put up a good front. You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.

Politics: A combination of "poli" meaning many, and "tics" meaning irritating little bugs.

Politics.  From the Latin poly, meaning many, and tics, meaning blood-sucking parasites. That may be incorrect, but it’s not wrong.

Any polis which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness. Otherwise, political association sinks into a mere alliance.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from polyamory, it’s that the quickest way to destroy a relationship is to try to make it into something it’s not, to force it into a box that it doesn’t really fit in, and to slap labels on something and assume that those labels give the relationship value. No, no, and no. What you end up with is damaged goods in a mislabeled package that end up absolutely where you didn’t want to send the damn thing in the first place.

It's possible to be single and poly. It's possible to have only one partner and be poly. If your intention is to remain open to the possibility of multiple romantic relationships, you are polyamorous regardless of your current relationship status. Indeed, if polyamory is part of your identity (for some people, it is; for others, it isn't), you might be in a monogamous relationship and still be poly.

Do you know where 'policeman' comes from, sir? ... 'Polis' used to mean 'city', said Carrot. That's what policeman means: 'a man for the city'. Not many people knew that. The word 'polite' comes from 'polis', too. It used to mean the proper behaviour from someone living in a city.

Mon sort est-il donc de passer ma vie entre des légitimistes fous, égoïstes et polis, adorant le passé, et des républicains fous, généreux et ennuyeux, adorant l’avenir ?

I’m a writer I guess....I’m still waiting for the big one!” Breakfast at Tiffany’s Learn by doing! A cal poly motto quote

of unquenchable sparkle and dream as ever. Behind her, in the hammock, Rilla Blythe was curled up, a fat, roly-poly little creature of

It has ten limbs and three tails,” Alex noted. “That’s thirteen appendages—why would you name it a polycrab? Poly means seven.

Türk genci, devrimlerin ve cumhuriyetin sahibi ve bekçisidir. Bunların gereğine, doğruluğuna herkesten çok inanmıştır. Yönetim biçimini ve devrimleri benimsemiştir. Bunları güçsüz düşürecek en küçük ya da en büyük bir kıpırtı ve bir davranış duydu mu, ‘Bu ülkenin polisi vardır, jandarması vardır, ordusu vardır, adalet örgütü vardır.’ demeyecektir. Elle, taşla, sopa ve silahla; nesi varsa onunla kendi yapıtını koruyacaktır. Polis gelecek, asıl suçluları bırakıp, suçlu diye onu yakalayacaktır. Genç, ‘Polis henüz devrim ve cumhuriyetin polisi değildir.’ diye düşünecek, ama hiç bir zaman yalvarmayacaktır. Mahkeme onu yargılayacaktır. Yine düşünecek, ‘Demek adliyeyi ıslah etmek, rejime göre düzenlemek lazım.’ diyecek. Onu hapse atacaklar. Yasal yollarla karşı çıkışlarda bulunmakla birlikte bana, başbakana ve meclise telgraflar yağdırıp, haklı ve suçsuz olduğu için salıverilmesine çalışılmasını, kayrılmasını istemeyecek. Diyecek ki, ‘Ben inanç ve kanaatimin gereğini yaptım. Araya girişimde ve eylemimde haklıyım. Eğer buraya haksız olarak gelmişsem, bu haksızlığı ortaya koyan neden ve etkenleri düzeltmek de benim görevimdir.’ İşte benim anladığım Türk genci ve Türk gençliği!

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. "Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth." "Right, like geologists." "Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..." "So, it's like oceanography or hydrology." "And the atmosphere." "Meteorology, climatology..." "It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet." "How is that different from ecology or environmental science?" "Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--" "Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci." "Some geographers specialize in different world regions." "Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department." "They're not." (Long pause.) "So, uh, what is it that do study then?

Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

They say that in D.C., all the museums and the monuments have been concessioned out and turned into a tourist park that now generates about 10 percent of the Government's revenue. The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry weirdos -- people who majored in tap dancing. Feds aren't like that. Feds are serious people. Poli-sci majors. Student council presidents. Debate club chairpersons. The kinds of people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet. The kinds of people who feel most at home on the dark side of a one-way mirror.

I used to be a blanket - without seams - a silk cocoon of happy dreams. Now I'm a quilt, no square the same a patchwork of pleasure and pain

Love is cursed by monogamy

let us collect our property - and other people's - and depart at once

I am persuaded that the knots would have proved indigestible, whatever you may urge to the contrary.

What a thing it is to have an unruly family!

Válka, to je hlavně velký zmatek, na poli i v lidských hlavách: často člověk ani nechápe, kdo vlastně vítězí a kdo prohrává, o tom pak rozhodnou generálové a ti, co píšou dějepisné knihy.

Mister Rob Anybody and sundry others?" said one of the figures in a dreadful voice. "There's naebody here o' that name!" shouted Rob Anybody. "We dinna know anythin'!" "We have here a list of criminal and civil charges totaling nineteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three separate offenses-" "We wasna there!" yelled Rob Anybody desperately. "Isn't that right, lads?" "-including more than two thousand cases of Making an Affray, Causing a Public Nuisance, Being Found Drunk, Being Found Very Drunk, Using Offensive Language (taking into account ninety-seven cases of Using Language That Was Probably Offensive If Anyone Else Could Understand It), Committing a Breach of the Peace, Malicious Lingering-" "It's mistaken identity!" shouted Rob Anybody. "It's no' oour fault! We wuz only standing there an' someone else did it and ran awa'!" "-Grand Theft, Petty Theft, Burglary, Housebreaking, Loitering with Intent to Commit a Felony-" "We wuz misunderstood when we was wee bairns!" yelled Rob Anybody. "Ye're only picking on us 'cause we're blue! We always get blamed for everythin'! The polis hate us! We wasna even in the country!

BDSM stands for Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism. Yeah, it should really be BDDSSM, but BDSM looks less like a cat sitting on a keyboard, so they went with that.

sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet’s surface;

— Ya estás acosándome otra vez, ¿no? ¿Tengo que llamar a la poli para que te ponga una orden de alejamiento? —Ni en sueños, gatita. —Sonrió—. Ah, espera, que ya salgo en ellos, ¿verdad? Puse los ojos en blanco. —Más bien apareces en mis pesadillas, Daemon.

One of the leading causes of obesity is the misbelief that, when it comes to juice, ‘100%’ means ‘sugar-free.

Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

(...) polisten dayak yiyenlerin veya başka türlü eziyet görenlerin büyük bir çoğunluğunun sonunda hiçbir suçu olmadığının anlaşıldığı tespit edilmiştir.

he was a roly-poly elderly man with a stoop and a waddle—

Of course I do,' said the Roly-Poly Bird. 'It's no good going to a country and not knowing the language.

Bu kutsal bir sözdür, iyi bilirim: polis hata yaptığında iz üzerinde olduğunu söyler, hükümet de, polisin süklüm püklüm gelip izin yok olduğunu söyleyeceği güne kadar sakin sakin bekler.

— Yuv fucked this one up, ya daft cunt, the man said to him, raising a pint of eighty shillings to his lips. — Eh? What? Boab was surprised again. — You, Boab Coyle. Nae hoose, nae joab, nae burd, nae mates, polis record, sair face, aw in the space ay a few ooirs. Nice one, he winked and toasted Boab with his pint. This angered, but intrigued Boab. — How the fuck dae you ken? Whae the fuckin hell ur you? The man shook his head, — It's ma fuckin buisness tae ken. Ah'm God.

Quien bien te quiere te hará llorar, dice el refrán. Yo soy la prueba viviente de que es lo mejor. A ver, que a mí nunca me verás tener problemas de ninguna clase con la poli desde hace ya mucho. Me aprendí la puta lección: no me meto en líos y los evito todo lo posible. Lo único que le pido a la vida es beber un poco, el fútbol y echar un polvo de vez en cuando.

I know that where you come from, maybe someone who goes to poly or ITE is considered a failure. But who's to say that going to poly or ITE can't be another person's dream? Maybe you think that we're not ambitious enough. I don't know. But where does it say that only going to JC or university can be considered an ambition? Everyone has their own goal to work towards. And even if our goals are different, that doesn't mean that we don’t have to work hard for them, or that we don't struggle to reach them too.

Why was he doing this? So that life could continue in the metro? Right. So that they could grow mushrooms and pigs at VDNKh in the future, and so that his stepfather and Zhenkina’s family lived there in peace, so that people unknown to him could settle at Alekseevskaya and at Rizhskaya, and so that the uneasy bustle of trade at Byelorusskaya didn’t die away. So that the Brahmins could stroll about Polis in their robes and rustle the pages of books, grasping the ancient knowledge and passing it on to subsequent generations. So that the fascists could build their Reich, capturing racial enemies and torturing them to death, and so that the Worm people could spirit away strangers’ children and eat adults, and so that the woman at Mayakovskaya could bargain with her young son in the future, earning herself and him some bread. So that the rat races at Paveletskaya didn’t end, and the fighters of the revolutionary brigade could continue their assaults on fascists and their funny dialectical arguments. And so that thousands of people throughout the whole metro could breathe, eat, love one another, give life to their children, defecate and sleep, dream, fight, kill, be ravished and betrayed, philosophize and hate, and so that each could believe in his own paradise and his own hell . . . So that life in the metro, senseless and useless, exalted and filled with light, dirty and seething, endlessly diverse, so miraculous and fine could continue.

Extreme versions of DID occasionally develop in response to particularly horrific ongoing trauma (e.g., children exploited through involvement in years of forced prostitution), with so-called poly-frgamentation, encompassing dozens or even hundreds of personality states. In general, the complexity of dissociative symptoms appears to be consistent with the severity of early traumatiation. That is, less severe abuse will result in fewer dissociative symptoms, and more severe abuse will result in more complex dissociative disorders.

If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community. 'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.

Bazen Komyagin içinden şöyle düşünüyordu: Bir ya da iki ay sonra yeni bir hayata başlarım, resimleri bitiririm, şiirleri tamamlarım, dünya görüşümü baştan sona gözden geçiririm, dokümanları hale yola koyarım, düzgün bir işe girerim, örnek işçi olurum, bir kadın-arkadaş sever ve evlenirim... Bir-iki ay kadar sonra zamanın kendisinde de özel bir şey gerçekleşeceğini ve duraklayıp kendisini hareketinin içine alacağını umuyordu, oysa yıllar penceresinin önünden dur durak bilmeden, mutlu bir tesadüf denk gelmeksizin geçip gidiyordu. O zaman Komyagin yatağından kalkıyor ve polis dayanışma görevlisi sıfatıyla millete kalabalık mahallerde ceza kesmeye gidiyordu.

When I was in college, the board game RISK was popular for a while. We’d get stoned and I’d stare at the little plastic pieces moving across the territories and get utterly confused about allies and enemies, arguing that nothing could be that black and white, complicating the whole notion of the game. But I understand that estrogen is my enemy now, the very thing that made me big-busted and fertile and a terrific nurser, has turned on me, inside my milk ducts where my body incubated nourishment that made my babies pink cheeked and roly-poly thighed. It’s all so twisted and ironic and confusing. Tamoxifen, a hero and a hazard, my breasts, a giver and taker of life, and I, the protagonist and the antagonist in this story

The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up. Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis.

Günün yerinde alışverişini yapmış, polis merkezinin önünden geçmekteymiş ki çılgın, katil bir zenci bilinçsizce kendini en üst kattan aşağıya atmış ve her nasılsa düşerken de bütün tırnaklarını sökmeyi ihmal etmemiş. Benim masum ve talihsiz amcama çarpıp onu ölümüne yaralamış. Zavallı amcacığımın hastanedeki son sözleri "Tanrım pezevenkler uçmayı da öğrenmiş" olmuş, girdiği koma bu sözlerine noktayı koymuş.

Günün birinde alışverişini yapmış, polis merkezinin önündeki kaldırımdan geçmekteymiş ki çılgın katil bir zenci bilinçsizce kendini en üst kattan aşağıya atmış ve her nasılsa düşerken de bütün tırnaklarını sökmeyi ihmal etmemiş. Benim masum ve talihsiz amcama çarpıp onu ölümüne yaralamış. Zavallı amcacığımın hastanedeki son sözleri "Tanrım pezevenkler uçmayı da öğrenmiş" olmuş, girdiği koma bu sözlerine noktayı koymuş.

Susan Baker and the Anne Shirley of other days saw her coming, as they sat on the big veranda at Ingleside, enjoying the charm of the cat's light, the sweetness of sleepy robins whistling among the twilit maples, and the dance of a gusty group of daffodils blowing against the old, mellow, red brick wall of the lawn. Anne was sitting on the steps, her hands clasped over her knee, looking, in the kind dusk, as girlish as a mother of many has any right to be; and the beautiful gray-green eyes, gazing down the harbour road, were as full of unquenchable sparkle and dream as ever. Behind her, in the hammock, Rilla Blythe was curled up, a fat, roly-poly little creature of six years, the youngest of the Ingleside children. She had curly red hair and hazel eyes that were now buttoned up after the funny, wrinkled fashion in which Rilla always

There were two views of how a polis was formed. The first was military: a scattered group of people came to live in one city behind a set of protective walls. The other was political: a group of people agreed to live under one authority, with or whithout the protection of a walled city. Synoikismos, or 'Living together', embraces both. Any political entity implies a population that recognizes a common authority, but the first 'city-states' were not always based on a city. Sparta makes the point. We think of Sparta as a city, but the Spartans were proud of the fact that they lived in villages without protective walls: their army was their wall and 'every man a brick.

I was terrified of opening my marriage to outside influence. Because it was the center of my life and meant more than anything. But as I thought through my fears, I realized something: Testing that bond was a win-win scenario. Best case, we would weather the challenges, and I would have a wealth of experiences and emotional bonds with others that could complement my life. Worst case, I was wrong about the strength of what we I had together, and it would tear us apart. But if what we had were that easily ruined, was it really all that great in the first place? And wouldn’t I want to know now, 4 years into the marriage, rather than another 20 or 30 years down the road?

For three thousand years it had been the concent’s policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, hand-carved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal, and plaited grass. Tabletops could be made of old-growth lumber, particle board, extruded titanium, recycled paper, plate glass, rattan, or substances on whose true nature I did not wish to speculate. Their lengths ranged from two to twenty-four feet and their weights from that of a dried flower to that of a buffalo.

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time.

C’est alors que tout a vacillé. La mer a charrié un souffle épais et ardent. Il m’a semblé que le ciel s’ouvrait sur toute son étendue pour laisser pleuvoir du feu. Tout mon être s’est tendu et j’ai crispé ma main sur le revolver. La gâchette a cédé, j’ai touché le ventre poli de la crosse et c’est là, dans le bruit à la fois sec et assourdissant, que tout a commencé. J’ai secoué la sueur et le soleil. J’ai compris que j’avais détruit l’équilibre du jour, le silence exceptionnel d’une plage où j’avais été heureux. Alors, j’ai tiré encore quatre fois sur un corps inerte où les balles s’enfonçaient sans qu’il y parût. Et c’était comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur

Abraham Lincoln has crossed my path, when I was a little boy in school. He was pointed out to the schoolchildren as the model of a citizen, who has devoted his life to the welfare of his country—very much in the same way as those great men – bene meriti de patria – of the Roman republic and the Greek polis. Thus Abraham Lincoln has remained since my early days one of the shining stars in the assembly of immortal heroes. Is there greater fame than to be removed to the timeless sphere of mythical existence?

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed. Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

Eğer bir polissen ve barışçıl göstericilere vahşice saldırma emri sana verilmişse, sadece tek bir seçenek seni ‘insan kategorisinde’ tutar: Emri reddetmek ve istifa etmek! Her zaman vicdanının sesini dinle! Kötülerin kötü emirlerini reddet! Bu sana iyi bir şeref getirecektir.

Halbuki komünist değildi Selim. Düşünmemişti komünizmin ne olduğunu bile. O sadece on sekiz yaşındaydı ve yirmi beş kuruş yerine elli kuruş istiyordu ve on dört saat yerine on saat. Polis bu kanaatta değildi fakat. Yatırdılar Selim'i yere. Selim kalktığı zaman basamıyordu döşemelere. Yatırdılar Selim'i yere, Selim kalktığı zaman göremiyordu önünü artık. Yatırdılar Selim'i yere, Selim kalktı ve yığıldı. Selim'in koltuklarına girip karanlık bir odaya götürdüler. Ve duvarda bir çiviye bağladılar saçlarından, o suretle ki döşemeye ancak ayak parmaklarının ucu dokunuyordu. Bir tramvay geçti sokaktan gıcırtılarla. Yakın bir yerde yatsı ezanı okunuyordu. Çözdüler Selim'i çividen, yatırdılar Selim'i yere. Ve Selim kalktığı zaman bir pencere gördü uzaktan çok uzaktan ama perdesiz karanlık bir pencere. Atıldı ona doğru. Camlar kırıldı şangırdayarak. İlk önce kayboldu bir insan başı sonra kayboldu iki ayak.

So it’s important to keep your commitments, to show up—not just physically, but with your whole heart. When you’re with someone, work on being present with her. She will feel it if you’re not, and if it happens enough, it will damage your relationship with her. Maybe someone else is on your mind, but the person you’ve committed your time to is in front of you right now. This is essentially a practice of mindfulness—being fully present with each of our loves, and open to the person we’re with in the moment—and it’s an advanced but essential poly skill that isn’t often discussed. It takes years to become good at. But it makes us better partners.

Kaç tanesiyle karşılaşmıştı bu profesörlerden. Görevini yapmasını engellemeye kalkışmışlardı. Hepsi de kendilerini dev aynasında gören, ukala heriflerdi. Hele, “polis” denildi mi, karşılarındaki bir hamamböceğiymiş gibi tiksintiyle yüzlerini buruşturmaları, bir havadan bakışları vardı ki, insanın tepesinin atmaması olanaksızdı.

My seventeen-year-old son, Chase, and his friends are in the family room watching a movie. I’ve been trying to leave them alone, but it’s hard for me. I understand that most teenagers think their moms are uncool, but I am certain I’m the exception. I stand at the door and peek inside. The boys are draped all over the couch. The girls have arranged themselves in tiny, tidy roly-poly piles on the floor. My young daughters are perched at the feet of the older girls, quietly worshipping. My son looks over at me and half smiles. “Hi, Mom.” I need an excuse to be there, so I ask, “Anybody hungry?” What comes next seems to unfold in slow motion. Every single boy keeps his eyes on the TV and says, “YES!” The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial. Somehow the collective silently appoints a French-braided, freckle-nosed spokesgirl. She looks away from the faces of her friends and over at me. She smiles politely and says, “We’re fine, thank you.” The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves. We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. This is why we live hungry.

The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself—the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch, “the gods who make us live and nourish our body”19—which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others. That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household therefore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it. The realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis.

Alors il peut sans doute recommencer à y croire, à les aligner, les ordonner élégamment les uns après les autres, insignifiants, sonores et creux, dans d’élégantes phrases insignifiantes, sonores, bienséantes et infiniment rassurantes, aussi lisses, aussi polies, aussi glacées et aussi peu solides que la surface miroitante de l’eau recouvrant, cachant pudiquement…

A pluralistic society even in its beginnings, America could agree on no national establishment of religion; the Greeks would have been astounded that such a nation-state, unconsecrated to the gods, could endure for a decade. Yet in another sense, repeatedly pointed out by Alexis de Tocqueville, America was held together by a religious bond stronger than any the Greeks or the Romans had known: by a Christian faith that worked upon individual and family, rather than through a state cult. The failure of the Greeks to find an enduring popular religious sanction for the order of their civilization had been a main cause of the collapse of the world of the polis. The power of Christian teaching over private conscience made possible the American democratic society, vastly greater in extent and population than Old Greece.

Sin quitarme los ojos de encima, acercó aún más su pupitre. - ¿Sabes una cosa? - ¿Qué? - Que he entrado en tu blog. Ay, Dios. ¿Cómo lo había encontrado? Un momento; la pregunta que debía hacerme era la siguiente: ¿por qué lo había encontrado? Mi blog no podía buscarse a través de Google...Estaba flipando en colores. - Ya estás acosándome otra vez, ¿no? ¿Tengo que llamar a la poli para que te ponga una orden de alejamiento? - Ni en sueños, gatita - Sonrió - Ah, espera, que ya salgo en ellos, ¿verdad? Puse los ojos en blanco. - Más bien apareces en mis pesadillas, Daemon. (pág.154) - ¿Me estás preguntando si me atraen las humanas? - dijo. El pelo le caía hacia delante en ondas. Unas gotitas de agua le recorrían los mechones y acababan salpicándome la mejilla - ¿O si eres tú la que me atrae? Con las manos apoyadas en la roca, fue acercándose a mí lentamente. Muy pronto nos separaban sólo unos milímetros...Sentía su respiración como si fuera la mía, y cuando movió las caderas abrí los ojos y ahogué un grito. Vaya que si funcionaba la cosa...Me despejó la duda de un plumazo. (pág. 240) - Sí que es importante el helado - dije. - Es mi vida entera.- Dee tiró el monedero a Daemon, pero erró el objetivo - ¡Y tú me lo has quitado! (pág. 258 NUNCA TE METAS ENTRE DEE Y SU COMIDA, Y MENOS SI SE TRATA DE HELADO) - ¿Lo estás pasando bien con...Ash? - ¿Y tú con tu amiguito el pulpo? Me mordí el larbio. - Qué simpático eres, como siempre. ... - Estás...muy guapa, por cierto. Demasiado guapa para estar con ese idiota. Me sonrojé y bajé la vista. - ¿Te has tomado algo? - Pues no, la verdad. ¿Por qué me lo preguntas, si puede saberse? - Porque nunca me dices nada agradable. - Touché. (pág. 303) - Recuérdame...que no te haga enfadar nunca más ¡La leche! ¿Eres agente secreto en tus ratos libres? ... Me recorrió la espalda con sus brazos y hundió una mano en los rizos que se me habían soltado del moño. - No me has hecho caso - susurró contra mi hombro. - Nunca te hago caso. (pág. 327) Daemon murmuró algo en un idioma desconocido. Era una lengua dulce y bonita. Mágica. De otro planeta. Podría haberlo despertado, pero no lo hice sin saber demasiado bien por qué. La emoción que sentía por el contacto con su piel era más fuerte que todo lo demás. Daemon tenía una mano en el borde de mi camiseta, y los dedos encima del pedazo de piel que había entre el borde de la camiseta y la cinturilla de los pantalones de pijama. La mano empezaba a abrirse paso por debajo de la camiseta, a través de mi estómago, en la parte en que este empieza a descender. El pulso se me desbocó. Me rozó las costillas con la punta de los dedos. Su cuerpo se movió y sentí su rodilla contra mí. (pág. 338) O.O o_O OMG - Gatita - Ni aunque fueras el último ser con aspecto humano sobre la faz de la Tierra ¿Ahora lo entiendes? ¿Capiche? ... - Ademñas, no me atraes nada - Mentira podrida - Pero vamos, nada de nada. Eres... De repente Daemon estaba delante de mí, a apenas un centímetro de mi rostro. - ¿Qué soy? - Ignorante -¿Y qué más? - Prepotente, controlador...-...- Y un...cretino. - Venga ya, gatita, seguro que puedes hacerlo mejor - ... - Todavía no me creo que no te sientas atraída por mí. (pág. 360) - Seguro que hasta sueñas conmigo - Bajó la vista hacia mis labios y sentí que se despegaban - Seguro que escribes mi nombre en tus libretas, una y otra vez, rodeado por un corazoncito. Me reí. - En tus sueños, Daemon. Eres la última persona a la que... Daemon me besó (pág.361) Una sonrisa pícara se le asomó a los labios. - ¿Te das cuenta de que me encantan los retos? Me reí entre dientes y me volví hacia la puerta mientras le dedicaba un gesto grosero con el dedo corazón. - Y a mí, Daemon; y a mí. (pág. 414)

hoşgeldin bebek yaşama sırası sende senin yolunu gözlüyor kuşpalazı boğmaca kara çiçek sıtma ince hastalık yürek enfarktı kanser filan işsizlik açlık filan tiren kazası otobüs kazası uçak kazası iş kazası yer depremi sel baskını kuraklık falan karasevda ayyaşlık filan polis copu hapishane kapısı falan senin yolunu gözlüyor atom bombası falan hoşgeldin bebek yaşama sırası sende senin yolunu gözlüyor sosyalizm komünizm filan.

What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical necessity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man-made violence.

Ot minderimle kerevet tahtası arasında sanki kumaşa yapışmış nerdeyse saydamlaşmış bir gazete parçası buldum. Geçmiş bir polis olayını anlatıyordu. Baş tarafı yoktu. Ama, olay herhalde Çekoslovakya'da geçmiş olmalıydı. Adamın biri para kazanmak için bir Çek köyünden ayrılmış. Yirmi beş yıl sonra, zengin olarak, karısı ve bir çocuğuyle birlikte köyüne dönmüş. Annesi kız kardeşiyle birlikte, doğduğu köyde otel işletiyorlarmış. Adam onlara sürpriz yapmak için, karısıyla çocuğunu bir başka otele bırakıp annesinin oteline gitmiş. İçeriye girince annesi kendisini tanımamış. O da, şaka olsun diye bir oda tutmuş, paralarını da göstermiş. Geceleyin, annesiyle kız kardeşi, paralarını almak için kafasına çekiçle vura vura adamcağızı öldürmüşler, cesedini de nehre atmışlar. Sabahleyin, karısı gelip olup bitenden habersiz, yolcunun kim olduğunu söylemiş. Ana kendini asmış, kız kardeşi de kendini kuyuya atmış. Bu öyküyü binlerce kez okudum sanıyorum. Öykü bir yandan gerçeğe uymuyordu, bir yandan olağan bir şeydi. Kısacası, bana kalırsa, yolcu bunu biraz da hak etmişti. İnsan hiçbir zaman böyle oyun oynamamalı.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

Once detachment, viveka, is interpreted mainly in this internal sense, it appears perhaps easier to achieve it today than in a more normal and traditional civilization. One who is still an 'Aryan' spirit in a large Eu­ropean or American city, with its skyscrapers and asphalt, with its poli­tics and sport, with its crowds who dance and shout, with its exponents of secular culture and of soulless science and so on-among all this he may feel himself more alone and detached and nomad than he would have done in the rime of the Buddha, in conditions of physical isolation and of actual wandering. The greatest difficulty, in this respect, lies in giving this sense of internal isolation, which today may occur to many almost spontaneously, a positive, full, simple, and transparent charac­ter, with elimination of all traces of aridity, melancholy, discord, or anxiety. Solitude should not he a burden, something that is suffered, that is borne involuntarily, or in which refuge is taken by force of cir­cumstances, but rather, a natural, simple, and free disposition, in a text we read: 'Solitude is called wisdom [ekattam monam akkhatarin], he who is alone will find that he is happy'; it is an accentuated version of 'beata solitudo, sofa beatitudo'.

Il Dr. Paul Arnheim non era soltanto un uomo ricco, era anche uno spirito superiore. La sua fama trascendeva il puro fatto che egli era l’erede di un giro d’affari di portata mondiale; nelle ore d’ozio aveva scritto libri che, nei circoli più avanzati, venivano giudicati straordinari. Le persone che fanno parte di tali circoli puramente culturali sono superiori al denaro e ai privilegi della borghesia; ma non si deve dimenticare che, proprio per questo, sono colte da un particolare entusiasmo quando un uomo ricco diventa uno dei loro; e, oltre tutto, nei suoi programmi e nei suoi libri Arnheim annunciava niente meno che la fusione di anima ed economia, vale a dire di idea e potere. Gli spiriti sensibili, dotati di un sottilissimo fiuto per il futuro, proclamarono che egli univa in sé quei due poli, nel mondo solitamente separati, e alimentarono la voce secondo cui stava nascendo una nuova forza, chiamata a dirigere ancora una volta verso il meglio i destini del Reich e, chissà, forse anche del mondo. Infatti, che i principi e i sistemi della vecchia politica e diplomazia stessero scarrozzando l’Europa verso la tomba era da tempo una sensazione universalmente diffusa, e s’era già iniziato in tutti i campi l’allontanamento degli esperti.

To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis, of home and family life, where the household head ruled with uncontested, despotic powers, or of life in the barbarian empires of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organization of the household. Aristotle’s definition of man as zōon politikon was not only unrelated and even opposed to the natural association experienced in household life;

Beni en çok meraka düşüren, yarın bizi bekleyen önemli olay. Yarın sabah saat yedide garip bir tabiat olayı ile karşılaşacağız. Yeryüzümüz Ay'a bindirecek... Ünlü İngiliz kimyacısı Wellington da kaydetmişti bunu. İtiraf ederim, Ay'ın narin, dayanıksız yapısını düşündükçe sonucu fena hâlde merak ediyorum. Ay genel olarak Hamburg'da yapılır, hem yapılışı da çok kötüdür... İngiltere'nin bu konuyla neden ilgilenmediğine şaşarım. Zaten Ay'ı yapan, Ay hakkında en ufak bilgisi olmayan, aptal, üstelik topal bir fıçıcıdır. Üstündeki ziftli halata zeytinyağı sürdükleri için, yeryüzünün her yanı bu kadar pis kokuyor... Öte yandan bu derece nazik, ince yapılı Ay, insanların orada barınması için elverişli değildir, sadece burunları yerleşebilir Ay'a... Zaten bu yüzden Ay'da bulunan burunlarımızı göremeyiz. Şimdi Ay'ın yeryüzümüz gibi ağır bir nesne altında kalmasıyla burunlarımızın nasıl pestil haline geleceğini düşündüm ve kuşkulandım doğrusu. Çorabımı, kunduralarımı giyerek doğru toplantı salonuna gittim. Polis kuvvetlerine yeryüzünün Ay'ın üstüne oturmasını önlemeleri için emir verecektim. Toplantı salonunda gene kafaları tıraşlı bir sürü soylu kişiyle karşılaştım. -Baylar! dedim. Ay tehlikededir. Yeryüzüne bindirecek... Kurtaralım Ay'ı! Bunu söyler söylemez zeki, anlayışlı İspanya soyluları emrimi yerine getirmek için hep birden öne atıldılar. Bazıları Ay'ı korumak maksadıyla duvara tırmanmaya başladılar. Ama tam o sırada salona başvekil girdi; herkes kaçıştı... Kral olduğum için orada tek başıma kaldım. Acayip başvekil sırtıma sopa indire indire beni odama soktu. İspanya'nın milli gelenekleri pek şiddetli doğrusu!

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

Taking the Bible seriously should mean taking politics seriously. The major voices in the Bible from beginning to end are passionate advocates of a different kind of world here on earth and here and now. Many American Christians are wary of doing this, for more than one reason. Some are so appalled by the politics of the Christian Right that they have rejected the notion that Christianity has anything to do with politics. Moreover, the word “politics” has negative associations in our time. Many think of narrowly partisan politics, as if politics is merely about party affiliation. Many also dismiss politics as petty bickering, as ego-driven struggles for power, even as basically corrupt. But there is a broader meaning of the word that is essential. This broader meaning is expressed by the linguistic root of the English word. It comes from the Greek word polis, which means “city.” Politics is about the shape and shaping of “the city” and by extension of large-scale human communities: kingdoms, nations, empires, the world. In this sense, politics matters greatly: it is about the structures of a society. Who rules? In whose benefit? What is the economic system like?—fair, or skewed toward the wealthy and powerful? What are the laws and conventions of the society like? Hierarchical? Patriarchal? Racist? Xenophobic? Homophobic? For Christians, especially in a democratic society in which they are a majority, these questions matter. To abandon politics means leaving the structuring of society to those who are most concerned to serve their own interests. It means letting the Pharaohs and monarchs and Caesars and domination systems, ancient and modern, put the world together as they will. In a democracy, politics in the broad sense does include how we vote. But it also includes more: what we support in our conversations, our contributions, monetary and otherwise, our actions. Not every Christian is called to be an activist. But all are called to take seriously God’s dream for a more just and nonviolent world.

Patočka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whether it be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel polis. If Western young people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously because, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, since not everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an example of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now-but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves of it. In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening one's responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it.

The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological institution.16 It is in this sense, then, that the modern state is a parody of the church: “The body of the state is a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” (RONT, 182). As a result, while political rhetoric may suggest that the state is confined to a “public” sphere or that the reign of the secular is circumscribed, in fact the modern state demands complete allegiance, and the reign of the secular does not tolerate territories of resistance.17 The state is happy to absorb all kinds of private pursuits under the umbrella of civil society, but it cannot tolerate a religious community that claims to be the only authentic polis and proclaims a king who is a rival to both Caesar and Leviathan. In such a case, this community’s allegiance to its king ultimately trumps its allegiance to the state or empire, and its understanding of the nature of human persons does not fit the normative picture of liberalism. This the state cannot tolerate. It is in this sense that “every worship service is a challenge to Caesar.

Son muchos mis compañeros de profesión (quiero decir, mis compañeros de profesión novelística) que consideran a Galdós su maestro. Pero entendámonos, porque aquí siempre es difícil entenderse y todo se presta a malentendidos porque aquí todo el mundo piensa siempre automáticamente lo peor de todo el mundo, lo peor que puede pensarse y de la forma más retorcida y negativa posible y basándose siempre en la presuposición de que el otro no sabe, o es facha, o es tonto, o es un hipócrita, o dice lo que dice para joder, o para medrar, o para hacerse el gracioso, o para pagar una deuda secreta con quién sabe quién, presuponiendo siempre que hay motivos secretos, programas escondidos, conspiraciones, quién sabe qué, entendámonos, todos admiramos a Galdós, y yo también, y yo también considero que es un genio, y conozco, CONOZCO sus méritos, cojones, soy licenciado en filología hispánica y he leído a Galdós, mucho, mucho, no todo pero sí mucho, he tenido delante de mí a Domingo Ynduráin diciéndonos, cuando alguien le preguntó qué novelas de Galdós debíamos leer, diciéndonos: “¿cuántas novelas cree que podrá leer?”, añadiendo a continuación que, como es lógico, debíamos leerlas TODAS (yo no he leído todas), sí, soy bien consciente de la enorme importancia de Galdós, de su genio, de su habilidad como novelista (aunque eso de que es “mejor” que Dickens siempre me ha parecido una majadería) y, más aún, de lo MODERNO de su lenguaje y también, cielos, de su IMPORTANCIA como creador del moderno cursus de la novela en español y creador de la nada del estilo de los diálogos, innovaciones todavía hoy asombrosas. Y dicho esto: ¿cómo, cómo, cómo es posible considerar a Galdós el maestro, el epítome, el modelo? Galdós, del que he dicho ya suficientes maravillas, tiene sin embargo dos graves inconvenientes. El primero es quemurió en 1920. El segundo, que nació en 1843. Mil Ochocientos Cuarenta y Tres. ¡Claro!, me dice el listillo (que abunda), ¡y Cervantes nació en 1547! ¡Si nos ponemos así! Galdós no, por favor. Galdós no. Galdós no puede ser el modelo literario de nadie a no ser que uno sea muy muy muy muy muy muy muy muy muy viejo y no haya visto, oído ni leído nada interesante en todos los terrenos del arte y de las letras desde que nació. A no ser que todos los libros, películas, obras musicales, obras de teatro, espectáculos, muestras de todas las artes en todos los estilos, formatos, medios y todos los acontecimientos del mundo de la cultura, de la creación artística, de la especulación científica y filosófica con las que ha entrado en contacto a lo largo de toda su existencia, una existencia (he de añadir) llena de estímulos, de innovaciones, de medios nuevos, imágenes nuevas, lenguajes nuevos, sueños nuevos, pesadillas nuevas, descubrimientos, inventos, avances, retrocesos, avances, saltos cuánticos, cambios de paradigma, en combinaciones inesperadas y a menudo fascinantes de retro hiper post trans poli plus meta archi, si todo eso TODO eso no ha significado nada para esa persona, si todo lo que ha vivido en toda su existencia desde el momento de su nacimiento ha significado lo mismo que 0 + 0 = 0, sólo en ese caso Galdós puede ser su modelo en el año 2013 del siglo XXI. Galdós no, hombre, no. No jodas, tío. Galdós.