Marcus Johnson

“I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity—destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it’s only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction.”
― Supervert, Necrophilia Variations

“Try repeating “man is an animal" a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds. There seems to be no way to get this idea into our heads, except by long rumination over the facts of evolution or perhaps by exposure to a primitive tribe or by being raised on a farm. Primitives sometimes see little difference between themselves and the animals around them. Karl von den Steinen was told by a Xingu that the only difference between them and the monkey was that they monkeys lacked the bow and arrow. And Jules Henry observed on the Kningang that dogs are not considered pets, like some of the other animals, but are on a level of emotional equality, like a relative. But in our own Western culture we have, for the most part, set a great distance between ourselves and the rest of nature, and language helps us to do this. Thus we say that a sheep “drops" its lamb, but a woman “gives birth"—it’s much more noble. Yet we have the right to make such distinctions because we assign the meaning to the world by naming names of things; we inhabit a different sphere and we capitalize naturally on the privilege.”
― Becker Ernest, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

“The only thing we accomplish by accenting the child’s constitution, his temperament, his natural dilemmas and his own synthesizing activity, is to take the parents “off the hook" of their own burden of guilt for how their children turn out. But why should they have such unreasonable guilt anyway? Didn’t Nietzsche point out that the only creatures who deserve to feel guilt (or pride) are gods, since only they have undisputed freedom of action? Perhaps we could say that if parents want to feel a bit godlike they are entitled to feel a little guilt; and if they were gods they would deserve to feel plenty.”
― Becker Ernest

“It’s not God I want, it’s someone in skin!" a child once cried out to his mother. With an almost unbearable honesty, he expressed the extravagant—and even sacrilegious—nature of parent-child love. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me," God boomed in the desert. But parents and children do have a way of filling the universe with each other.”
― Noelle Oxenhandler, The Eros Of Parenthood: Explorations In Light And Dark