The Monkey

Hakuin Ekaku:

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.

A Book About Death

Chris Coffin

Yayoi Kusama: "Polka dots are a way to infinity."

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.”

The Name of the Rose

Butt Johnson, The Name of the Rose

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.

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.

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.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow:

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.

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

Mondrian, Gray Tree

Gaudi, Park Güell, Undulating Bench