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| Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade (1981) |
27 December 2011
12 December 2011
02 December 2011
17 September 2011
Ain't no use jiving. Ain't no use joking.
God created the world by forming vessels of light to hold the Divine Light. But as God poured the Light into the vessels, they catastrophically shattered, tumbling down toward the realm of matter. Thus, our world consists of countless shards of the original vessels entrapping sparks of the Divine Light.
15 September 2011
You're literate, so words are what you feel.
They Accuse Me of Not Talking, by Hayden Carruth
North people known for silence. Long
dark of winter. Norrland families go
months without talking, Eskimos also,
except bursts of sporadic eerie song.
South people different. Right and wrong
all crystal there and they squabble, no
fears, though they praise north silence. "Ho,"
they say, "look at them deep thinkers, them strong
philosophical types, men of peace."
But take
notice please of what happens. Winter on the brain.
You're literate, so words are what you feel.
Then you're struck dumb. To which love can you speak
the words that mean dying and going insane
and the relentless futility of the real?
from Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 1992.
09 September 2011
24 July 2011
The emanation of worlds
15 July 2011
30 June 2011
24 June 2011
17 June 2011
15 June 2011
26 May 2011
14 May 2011
Our world contains fragments of the divine light.
It would be difficult to come up with a better description of the method this blog is trying to employ than that described in the last two minutes of this fragment of a film about Walter Benjamin:
13 May 2011
04 May 2011
Most of us have effects too diffuse to measure . . .
Jane Austen, Middlemarch:
[T]he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
02 May 2011
We can make our own maps.
Despite their unassailable secrecy, UX still have something to offer the rest of us, trapped on the far side of the smokescreen. . . .
The organization simply tries things. If one idea doesn't work, they move on to the next. And whereas doubt inhibits, precedents inspire new experiments. . . . We cannot join UX. They will not tell us who they are, or what lies at the heart of the maze. But we can do as they did. We can make our own maps.
30 April 2011
25 April 2011
24 April 2011
15 April 2011
The Late, Late, Late Show
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| Jeff Spaulding, Raft |
A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this glass -- not that you'd ever know. These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. It's part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste.
11 April 2011
01 April 2011
Everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow:
. . . and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . .
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| Yvette Mattern, Global Rainbow, Berlin, February 2010 |
30 March 2011
Distortions
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| André Kertész, Underwater Swimming, August 31, 1917 |
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| David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971 |
29 March 2011
I feel certain that I am going mad again.
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
20 March 2011
15 March 2011
06 March 2011
03 March 2011
Georges Perec died 29 years ago today.
My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today.
23 February 2011
Science is a continuing exploration of mysteries
Freeman Dyson:
Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices.
El Chalten, Argentina
05 February 2011
We have, on the one hand, imagination . . .
Lewis Hyde, The Gift:
We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use value, and gift increase, all of which are linked by a common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, "shaping into one." And we have, on the other hand, analytic or dialectical thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of logos, of differentiating into parts.
Ross Bleckner, Circle of Us
04 February 2011
31 January 2011
The Monkey
The monkey is reaching for the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him he'll never give up.
If he'd let go the branch and disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine with dazzling pureness.
29 January 2011
26 January 2011
If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dream . . .
Liel Leibovitz on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks:
[N]o other album, I believe, surpasses the audacity, the wonder, the desperation, and the joy of Astral Weeks. It is of all musical genres and of none at all, and its lyrics—with lines like “If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the viaducts of your dream”—are as close as pop would ever get to closing its eyes and dreaming. For spiritual seekers, people willing to wander for a few decades in the desert because they know for certain that the promised land awaits, there can be no better companion than this record.
Lester Bangs, perhaps the finest rock writer who ever lived, was one of those seekers. “Van Morrison was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when he made this record,” Bangs wrote. “There are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.”
12 January 2011
Good art comes from the art's heart's purpose. It's got something to do with love.
David Foster Wallace:
I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent. . . .Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.
11 January 2011
Just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
From "The Truth Effect," by Jonathan Lehrer:
This model is wrong
Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
09 January 2011
Do I contradict myself?
Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more.
It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
Nature is not economical.
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| Leaf Collage, Milvi Gill |
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?
- Annie Dillard
04 January 2011
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