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Category: Points

Vocabulary, word play, and the grains of bigger ideas.

The World Doesn’t Need Conquering

Published on July 24, 2025

You ever had that feeling when you wake up in the morning, full of energy and zest for living, rested in body and mind, ready to conquer the world? Not me. Well, at least not the “me” underlying the illusions of being we inherit at birth and continue to feed up to a certain point.

If it that WERE me, does the world need conquering? Does it want conquering? Why are even our initial waking existential notions so centered around the two towers of control and destruction? Conquer the world. Blow their minds. Blow them away. Rule the world. Take over. Beat the odds. Rock the house. Wow them. Bowl them over. Exactly who are we trying to impose hierarchical superiority on (or over, really)? Is all we want to imagine ourselves with the kind of blood-soaked, usurious, double-dealing, exploitative, imperialist nobility that makes the toils and troubles of this world mere notions, and the remainder of creation our tools and possessions?

The bottom line is this. Anytime we use an expression that involves the preposition “of the world” we have ventured into the swamps at the edge of La-La land. Pretend you comprehend the meaning of the expressions below, assuming that when you hear “of the world” you interpret it as “my world”, “the real world”, “the dream world”, “the next world”, “whole world”, “known world”, “our world”, and also the “unknown world”, because the world to its inhabitants always means at least one of these, simultaneously and often in conflict with each other.

Light of the world
Scourge of the world
Edge of the world
End of the world
Song of the world
Center of the world

Honestly, what business do you have “conquering” all of that?

24 JUL 2025

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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Salt Dolls in the Sea

Published on July 23, 2025

Like Sri Ramakrishna quipped (or maybe “quipped” isn’t quite the right word), we’re all just salt dolls sent out to measure the depth of the ocean. And you don’t need to drink more than a spoonful to figure out the whole thing is salty. Good thing, too, since our little buckets don’t hold all that much water. No matter where we kneel on the shore and dip our bucket, no matter what we call it out there and then when it’s in our bucket, no matter what the shrines we build there look like and who we think is right enough to get in, we’re all drinking the same Kool-Aid, ultimately. When we drink from the source, that is. Anything else is like decaffeinated coffee – brown disappointment water. But what we do on the shore doesn’t really matter in the long run. Because once we get out into the sea, and I don’t mean just a pinky-toe at the edge of the surf, or a brief jump off the boat for a cooling swim, but when you’re out up to your chest and can just feel the sand under your toes. That’s when it happens. You start to melt. Your salt and the salt in the ocean aren’t separate salinities trapped in different decorative shakers. Together, you and the sea are the record player capable of playing a record that contains the frequencies to disintegrate the record player. You never get more than one chance to make a first (or last) impression. You’re traveling at the speed of now. Nothing to prove and all night long to do it in.

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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Beyond the Sea

Published on April 19, 2025

If there is a distant shore strewn far across the vast and endless sea from the righteous land where the fascist and power mad make their camps and hawk their wares, that is where you’ll find I’ve pitched my tent. On the map, you may think it always on your left. And you may be right. But the world is a circle not well served by the illusion of two dimensional cartography.

If you look, I’m always just beside you. So close, and yet so far away.

19 Apr 2025

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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An Epitaph

Published on April 18, 2025

Spent his life exposing anyone he could to his art, until he went broke and died from doing it.

Worth every damn minute and every single penny. There’s no Nothing better. And if there was, no one could afford it.

So what’s the point of worrying about that? All that does is pay for a bigger stone to chisel words into like this, so people you don’t know or who don’t really remember what you were like most of the time, can read about you when you’re dead, in one of the few places on earth you can still go and find a little quiet.

And even then, somebody or something is always singing.

19 APR 2025

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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The levels of music

Published on April 18, 2025 
Not hearing 
not listening 
ignoring 
sensing 
noticing 
hearing 
listening 
responding 
writing 
practicing 
playing
memorizing 
performing 
recording 
remembering

18 APR 2025

© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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Dictionary Gloss: the E’s

Published on February 13, 2017

ebullient exuberant, bubbling over with high spirits

Beware the fool, whose loud ebullient laugh
jumps back and forth, like a cracked phonograph.
It’s not a truly happy sign at all;
more like the echo of a cattle call.

éclat conspicuous success, general applause or acclaim, elaborate display

Most public piety, with grand éclat,
convinces fools, while real saints turn away.

ectoplasm a substance supposed to be exuded from a spiritual medium during a trance

we paid our fifty dollars for a reading,
but got no ectoplasm, despite pleading.

emolument a fee received, a salary

What great emolument my service earned
in living costs and taxes was soon burned.

encomium high praise given in speech or writing

Leave off encomium, my cheering thralls;
hard cash seems much more useful, after all.

endogenous growing or originating from within

true moral strength, they say,
must be endogenous;
receiving it through discipline,
it dodges us.

ennui boredom

If you would fight ennui, don’t overtire,
else you just bore yourself ’til you expire.

equivocal able to be interpreted in two ways, ambiguous

Yes, truth and guilt can often seem
equivocal – part fact, part scheme –
designed to trick us from both sides
and leave chaos where they collide.

ersatz serving as a substitute, especially of an inferior kind

Wise men and fools alike believe
themselves led by the truth in things.
One sees a world that cannot be,
while one accepts an ersatz king.

euphemism a mild or roundabout expression substituted for one considered improper or too harsh or blunt

Don’t shuffle on or pass away,
give up the ghost or fade to gray.
Let euphemisms such as these
just die, expire and soon decease.

© 2017, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.

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