quotes
Here's a bunch of quotes, from the last few years. I think quotes are great, they become points of reference, mental objects we can anchor to and from. Summarisations of complex ideas, doors into new worlds.
"we move the mouse through our world, and the mouse moves us through its world"
Emma Rae Bruml - Complication of the Computer Mouse, the mouse holds us
The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that you may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. Now, that’s a two-way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than one sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.
“Takuboku wrote that poetry itself was a report in detail of changes in an individual’s emotions. His diaries and his poetry are permeated with a sincere and searching self-examination.”
He turned over on his side with his one year
Red as a wound
He turned over as if he could be sorry for this
And out of his eyes two great tears rolled like stones,
and he died.
"the idea of a textile that should not block the light but be itself reflective was generative, producing numerous different permutations that can be seen in dozens of small samples"
"In Alber's hands, weaving became an exemplary modern form of artitic participation in life and a means to make work in which new ways of living could be articulated"
"Again, we are here led away from pronounced lineation and contours toward a surface active only through the slight optical vibration of intersecting raised and lowered threads-shiny and dull, lighter and darker, tan and white. This material will be quiet yet alive ..."
"The aim of art is to gratify our lasting needs and it absorbs and passes beyond the imprints that temporal influences may have on them. It transcends the merely personal in our desires. And though most art can be classified as belonging to a specific time and place and though it often has the stamp of a definite author, still, great art is in essence unaffected by subjectiveness, by period and location and does not pass through the cycle of rise and fall ... Layer after layer of civilised life seems to have veiled our directness of seeing. We often look for underlying meaning of things while the thing itself is the meaning ... The reality of art is concluded in itself. It sets up its own laws as completion of vision. Art is constant, and it is complete."
"there is a romantic overestimation of handwork in contrast to machine work and a belief in artificial preservation of a market that is no longer of vital importance"
How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? "Accidentally." Something speaks to us, a sound, touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. We are finding our language, and as we go along we learn to obey their rules and their limits.... Students worry about choosing their way. I always tell them, "You can go anywhere from anywhere" - Anni Albers, from the panel "The Art/Craft connection: Material as a Metaphor"
In a 2018 study into mindfulness by consultants McKinsey, the anonymous authors buried their most problematic conclusions in an appendix. They found that a relatively superficial engagement with mindfullness did indeed improve performance amongst office workers. But too much mindfulness and you run the risk that employees will start to think their jobs are actually meaningless, and their work is mostly bullshit. Such revelations lead to dissillusionment, demotivation, and higher churn rates as more people quit.
The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. – Daniel Kahneman inThinking, Fast and Slow
33> A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, 34and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and need like a bandit. - Proverbs 24:33
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass
What new mystery is this? In overflowing emptiness! The invisible is seen among the shadows and the mist Before my doubting eyes The infinite appears this time The unquestionable is questioned But makes no reply!
Hand weaving is included in the curriculum of many art schools and art departments of colleges and universities, as an art discipline able to convey understanding of the interaction between medium and process that results in form. - Anni Albers, On Weaving (emphasis my own)
does my misery feed a metaphysical need
That’s long since passed me by?
"Everything is a false cognate if you think about it. We're destined to fail, if you think about it literature is destined to fail ... You're not going to be able to realise that beautiful, perfect, platonic ideal of a story that is in your head in the very material language, the very profane language, that is necessary for publication"
Our freight.
The bringing together of what has been parted
makes a language quiver.
Across millenia and the village street
through tundra and forests
by farewells and bridges
towards the city of our child
everything must be carriedWe carry poetry
as the cattle trucks of the world
carry cattle.
Soon in the sidings
they will sluice them down.
Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another personm or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in struggle. This joy needs to be documented. - Luther Smith, Spirituality Out On The Deep
I learned a lot about pedagogy while designing, developing, editing, and reading Digital Pedagogy. I also learned a lot about myself. For instance, I was initially tempted to do all the things. What if we added X, or readers could do Y? I gather this temptation is common among web-based projects, “unbounded” such as they may be, and thus I spent nearly a decade educating myself about scope and feature creep.
“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.” ― Rachel Cusk, Outline
Tannin stained water pulls across the tops of my feet with a kindness that seems inconsistent with millions of years of merciless slicing.
Newness is gone when thingness is found
You can look out and under the roofline at the towering bulk of the mountain, or you can look directly into the beginning of the universe
“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” ― Nietzsche
"I dont like the sort of alarming, incongruous change of texture that happens when you're eating a cucumber and you get to the middle of the cucumber"
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away"
If the idea of self-studying 9 topics over multiple years feels overwhelming, we suggest you focus on just two books: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective and Designing Data-Intensive Applications. In our experience, these two books provide incredibly high return on time invested, particularly for self-taught engineers and bootcamp grads working on networked applications. They may also serve as a "gateway drug" for the other topics and resources listed above.
There are four key steps to the Feynman Technique:
- Choose a concept you want to learn about
- Explain it to a 12 year old
- Reflect, Refine, and Simplify
- Organize and Review
Material form becomes meaningful form through design, that is, through considered relationships. And this meaningful form can become a carrier of a meaning that takes us beyond what we think of as immediate reality. But an orderliness that is too obvious cannot become meaningful in this superior sense that is art. The organization of forms, their relatedness, their proportions, must have that quality of mystery that we know in nature. Nature, however, shows herself to us only in part. The whole of nature, though we always seek it, remains hidden from us. To reassure us, art tries, I believe, to show us a wholeness we can comprehend.
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
Absence came to visit
Presence up and died
This empty font
is filled with want
Apples go inside
"That negotiation with time to ensure the sustainability of love. A precarious reasoning of how to love a lot, but for a long time."
"we missed you! It feels like a lot of pressure leading up to the day, but I think you'd be surprised at how even the smallest thing yields discussion and development."
Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.
A final secret stands behind our shifting views, and the light of intellect gutters and goes out.
“You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”
“It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.”
Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint. "I have been harmed." Take away the complaint, "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken away. - Meditations 4:7
The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn’t understand (I’m not sure I do either).
Unfortunately, what the so-called spatial arts have long succeeded in accomplishing, what even the temporal art of music has achieved so eloquently in polyphony, this simultaneous view of many dimensions which is the foundation of the great climaxes of drama, is unknown in the realm of verbal explanation. Contact between dimensions must be made outside this medium; and afterwards.
Feels weird, what has been purely imagination for the last couple of months must now become real.
Man is not finished. One must be ready to develop, open to change; and in one's life an exalted child, a child of creation, of the Creator.
The power of creativity cannot be named. It remains mysterious to the end. But what does not shake us to our foundations is no mystery. We ourselves, down to the smallest part of us, are charged with this power. We cannot state its essence but we can, in certain measure, move towards its source.
Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible. The very nature of graphic art lures us to abstraction, readily and with reason. It gives the schematic fairy-tale quality of the imagination and expresses it with great precision. The purer the graphic work, that is, the more emphasis it puts on the basic formal elements, the less well-suited it will be to the realistic representation of visible things.
All becoming is based on movement. In Lessing's Laocoon, on which we wasted a certain amount of intellectual effort in our younger days, a good deal of fuss is made about the difference between temporal and spatial art. But on closer scrutiny the fuss turns out to be mere learned foolishness. For space itself is a temporal concept. When a point turns into movement and line - that takes time. Or when a line is displaced to form a plane. And the same is true of the movement of planes into spaces. Does a picture come into being all at once? No, it is build up piece by piece, the same as a house.
A sleeping man, the circulation of his blood, the measured breathing of the lungs, the delication function of the kidneys, in his head a world of dreams, related to the powers of fate. An interplay of functions, united in rest.
The relation of art to creation is symbolic. Art is an example, just as the earthly is an example of the cosmic.
The liberation of the elements, their arrangement in subsidiary groups, simultaneous destruction and construction towards the whole, pictorial polyphony, the creation of rest through the equipoise of motion: all these are lofty aspects of the question of form, crucial to formal wisdom; but they are not yet art in the highest sphere. A final secret stands behind our shifting views, and the light of intellect gutters and goes out.
- but for a few moments on the plate, the mushrooms are sublime.
perhaps we write toward what we will become from where we are
we go up to heaven and down to hell a dozen times a day
Connection is the only reason to exist
"And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning."
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
John 11:35 - Jesus wept
Os meus cachos começam quando tenho mais o menos dez centimetros de cabelo.
I woke in tears this morning. I wonder whether it is possible at nearly sixty to change oneself radically.
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
There is really only one possible prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence.
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. — Zen Kōan
The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a human native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai's mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by a lack of understanding of their culture. Individuals on Gethen are ambisexual, with no fixed sex; this has a strong influence on the culture of the planet, and creates a barrier of understanding for Ai.
“To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
“But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord."
"It might to keep it open.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. — John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
All the mental vibrations of petrified men
Action translation my gun to a pen
And the movements of underground plates
Do nothing to bridge or exacerbate
Oceans between us
My brain split in two, it's rainin' a bit
I hope it's a monsoon, my face in the sink
I'm seein' my mom soon, I'm faded, I stink
Stay in it, alright?
I remember Jean Dominique, old and blind, saying to me, "On attend toujours." I was under thirty then and she was over sixty and I was amazed to think that someone so old could still wait for someone so intensely. But now I know that one does so all one's life.
I prove a theorem and the house expands: from Geometry by Rita Dove
Write a function that takes a string of slashes (\ and /) and returns all of those slashes drawn downwards in a line connecting them.
Things need to be small, otherwise
- I lose energy.
- I lose focus.
- It takes to long to make.
We don't need big things. Big things are made from small things. Small things done well.
- Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
- Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
- Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
A lake to cross,
mountains to climb
Jacob's ladder
Many coloured rainbow
Symbol of hope
Do you love this shit? Are you high right now?
Do you ever get nervous?
Are you single? I heard you fucked your girl, is it true?
You getting money?
You think them n****s you with is with you?And I say hell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah
Fuckin' right, fuckin' right, alright
And we say hell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah
Fuckin' right, fuckin' right, alrightI know I've caused you trouble
I know I've caused you pain
But I must do the right thing
I must do myself a favor and get real
Get right with the LordI know I've lost my conscious,
I know I've lost all shape
But I must do the right thing
I must do myself a favor and get real
Get right with the LordI know I've always loved you
I know I've always been
But I must do the right thing
I must do myself a favor and get real
Get right with the Lord
At first I thought: "a verb has forms, moods, tenses, and grammatical persons and numbers. These are chained together, and you drill down into them to finally get to conjugations, sitting like grapes at the end of a vine."
But this was awkward to work with, and felt like a lot of structure abstracting away the actual conjugations.
Then I thought "a verb is a collection of conjugations, and each conjugation has properties. Conjugations can be grouped and sorted by their properties." And this has been a far more fruitful concept.
For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together. - Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo, found thanks to Quote Investigator
La contrainte est l’énoncé d’une énigme ; le texte est une réponse, ou plutôt une des réponses, car en général il y en a plusieurs possibles. Une contrainte oulipienne doit pouvoir servir à d’autres, ce qui implique des exigences de clarté de l’énoncé (formalisation). La contrainte est altruiste
(Translated with google translate) The constraint is the statement of a riddle; the text is an answer, or rather one of the answers, because in general there are several possible ones. An Oulipian constraint must be able to serve others, which implies requirements for clarity of the statement (formalization). Constraint is altruistic. - Jacques Jouet, Avec les contraintes (et aussi sans) in Bénabou, Jouet, Mathews et Roubaud, Un art simple et tout d’exécution, Circé, 2001, p. 33-34., found on the french language wikipedia page for Littérature potentielle
I always suggest this when people say "I want to do this, I want to do that. I want to write this, I want to write songs, write movies and dadada ... It was too many moving parts." You have to start with insanely short things. And you learn about the process because you get to everything.Learning, instant learning. And then you gradually increase the length from there. - paraphrased from a Bill Wurtz interview
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will. But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outer space of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking… What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? - Chapter 1, The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
every word when you blog, no matter how throwaway, is a beautiful ode and capsule to the life you live. it's magical that what once was private and precious can be shared intimately and still be precious. i love it when i read viscerally raw and honest things about this world, even if naive or childish — i love documented encounters of struggle, introspection, renewal, mundane, feelings. writing about the small to large a casual blog entry is as important as the text in a novel that is, when i see someone articulate, even in passing, a 'naive' feeling or a thought i had when going through life it feels far less lonely. sometimes i write and lament that no one has ever felt this way and realize that this is so far from the truth, that there are others who appreciate my line of thinking and want to feel it out with me. knowing how you felt and judged a moment is going to be harder and harder the farther you've departed from it, so blog and stay a while - Reasons to Blog by Chia.
The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter’s blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. - from Bees of Eleusis by Franz Wright
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. - William Safire.
Traveling somewhere new for a reason - study, work, research, art etc - is the cake, and tourist attractions are the icing on the cake. I think the hyper-attractions of mass tourism is the cultural version of making the cake all icing. Travelling somewhere to gawk at stuff. "Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer" is not true, it doesn't have any inherent value now that you can jump on a plane and be anywhere in the world within 48 hours. "Travel is a thing you can buy".
3-2-1: Inspiration, getting started, and the power of cumulative action
Writing, as a process, is almost impossibly inventive. I know it, and know it, and am reminded so often, and yet – how on earth do new angles spontaneously emerge, from merely grinding through the words?
There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches.
A habit must be established before it can be improved. Start small. Master the art of showing up. - James Clear.
This leads not to a conciliatory knowing of unknowing, which is really a knowing of something that cannot be known. Instead, it is a negative knowing of nothing to know. There is nothing, and it cannot be known. - Divine Darkness by Eugene Thacker
Of course it, it follows that if you're not a mother you're not going to be a grandmother, but that's not something you think of in your thirties. So the loss keeps changing its shape.
It’s very easy to forget what it is you're doing with your life and it’s very easy to see mission creep seep in. I shave my head between every two and four days, and every time I do I take it as a moment for reflection on what is it that I'm doing this week, are there ways I could be using my power to advance these causes which I think are important, am I doing the best job and most of all am I sincerely trying to live a life in the service of others.
YOU ARE AFRAID.
AND YOU WILL DIE ALONE.So what, weirdo?
this is the world we live in
true.
we are in it and it is in us.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. - Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness.
If only I could tell someone. The humiliation I go through when I think of my past can only be described as grace
Appalling and incomprehensible mercy
The seeing see only this world
I never met a soul more affable than you, Butch, or faster than the Kid, but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where.
Book IV v. 34: Willingly give yourself up to Clotho, one of the Fates, allowing her to spin your thread into whatever things she pleases.
Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VII v59.
I really want to like Monocle, but sadly I feel frustrated and intellectually betrayed every time I buy and try to read an issue. The scope is interesting and ambitious, but the writing is smooth and superficial (making it very hard to read an article from top to bottom), and the solutions presented are a baffling combination of shallowness and pretentiousness (eg, one cannot judge the state of a nation by how fashionable its army uniforms are). If Tyler Brûlé got a tough editor-in-chief, this could become a great publication. For now, it's pretentious posing as discerning.
Is MONOCLE magazine's readership mostly gay/homosexual?
I think monocle's a turkey. its not smart enough for business readers, not cool enough for arty types, not clued in enough for the fashion crowd, its not a bit as insightful as it thinks it is, and what interest it reports is lost in pretension and vanity. its a shame, but I'd be a amazed if its still around this time next year in its current form.
Design wise, its far too one paced for a publication of that length. I have no objections to it's stripped down/no frills approach but please a big picture, a big headline SOMETHING to get the paces racing just a bit and break the monotony. monocle was supposed to be a celebration of print, it just feels like a poorly printed annual report. even the photography is uninventive and familiar.
Sii creo que cuando vine aca fue tipo un clave entre nosotros. Fue el período más largo en que hubimos estado separados.
Toma este puñal dorado
Y ponte tú en las cuatro esquinas
Y dame tú de puñala-, puña-, puñala- (puñaladas)
Y no digas que me ol-olvidas
La meta es el olvido.
Yo he llegado antes.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Quince Monedas - Un poeta menor
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.
nuestros recuerdos dependen de una cámara defectuosa en nuestra mente
Quería ser libre. Bueno. Qué concepto de mierda: la libertad: ¿Ser libre al final es ser un victimario sin culpa?”
I've been thinking a lot the last day about why I stopped updating, and how I can start again. I think the comic creation tool (forge) should be a standalone js app, hosted on the site. It exports through clipboard or download a csv file containing a r.h comic. This way you could use any browser, so long as you can later pass the file to the other forge.horse tools. I'm going to change the spec for a r.h file too.
Being a river without fish, I have been
And I go lined with foam and ice.
Drowned and broken I carry the entire sky
and the tree is delivered to me badly wounded
A gardener does not dig up a seed the day after it’s planted to see if it has grown. For many days, it will appear that you are giving such care to a pile of dirt, until one day, break-through happens. - Common Discourse, #055 Improvement
it is hard to be anywhere once and twice is a dream
I feel like something has changed but I don't know what it is?
The Louis that left is not the Louis that's returning
of course, you don't swim in the same river twice
exactly
The world as we know it has already come to an end
Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.
my therapist told me about someone she knows who believes that our spirits can only travel as fast as a horse can run. i use this as a metric when I am busy and running around out in the world. sometimes i need to sit for a while to let my soul catch up. - taylor ☧ on Are.na, in their channel "being // slow"
Y estes son perfiles que sigo que son buenos:
- https://www.are.na/laurel-schwulst
- https://www.are.na/agnes-cameron
- https://www.are.na/jack-wedge
y unos canales que sigo:
- https://www.are.na/chaski-_/weaving-cyberfem
- https://www.are.na/tess-murdoch/i-learnt-colour-but-did-not-understand-it
- https://www.are.na/nico-chilla/against-narrative-identity
The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Before I wrote the essays I did not believe many of the ideas espoused in them; when I wrote them, I believed what I wrote; subsequently, I have come to disbelieve some of these same ideas again - but from a new perspective, one that incorporates and is nourished by what is true in the argument of the essays. Writing criticism has proved to be an act of intellectual disburdenment as much as of intellectual self-expression. (emphasis my own)
Buying keeps me here, in a certain state, a state of waiting (for the thing to arrive), a state of limbo (between my life as it is now, and the life I imagine I will live once I have it), a state of unreality, of wishful thinking, of magical thinking (that my life will be different once it arrives), a state of disappointment (when the thing I bought is absorbed into my life like everything else, and does not distinguish itself as new), a state of need (to buy the next thing that will lift me out of this here.) But what is this place I am in, and trying to escape? What is this here, but shopping? My home, and the computer on which I write, and the phone in my pocket, everything around me—has become a shopping mall. I am here in a shopping mall and I can’t get out. I can only get out if I stop buying things.
A Common Seagull an essay about death, mourning, the artist Pierre Bonnard, and how to make a vital life out of repetitions and sameness, rather than newness and adventure. Published in December 2019. Delivered at the Tate Modern in Britain in March 2018.
We write as evidence of being alive. We write as a way of being alive, to attune us to our lives, rather than some imagination of eternal life through our writing. That writing has a purpose of paying attention to the world, rather than thinking it'll survive my own life.
To start from nothing and make almost nothing. The dream of a perfect content management system, a blank slate, a design process that barely creates or destroys but merely deploys the engine of a discourse, with a little waste heat. Still, it should look like something, glimmer in the light.
Remember that a painting, before it is a horse in battle, a nude woman or a sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. - New Theories of Modern Art and on Sacred Art, Mauric Denis
animated photographs are small wonders. We distinguish all the details... leaves quivering under the action of the breeze... It is an unimaginable truth - Henri di Parville in Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires 1896
A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance - Notes of a Painter, Henri Matisse
How could my thoughts of that week, in a way the most profound week of my life, be in relation to a rectangle, to a rectangular frame? That week does not even know what a rectangle is.
“Truth is like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold. You push at it, stretch it, it will never be enough. You kick at it, beat at it, it will never cover any of us. From the moment we enter crying to the moment you leave dying.”
For the layman to build their own Folk Interfaces, jigs to wield the media they care about, we must offer simple primitives. A designer in Blender thinks in terms of lighting, camera movements, and materials. An editor in Premiere, in sequences, transitions, titles, and colors. Critically, this is different from automating existing patterns, e.g. making it easy to create a website, simulate the visuals of film photography, or 3D-scan one's room. Instead, it's about building a playground in which those novel computational artifacts can be tinkered with and composed, via a grammar native to their own domain, to produce the fruits of the users' own vision. - from the afore mentioned Folk (browser) Interfaces
We must ask, what kind of culture or subculture is the ‘well-adjusted’ person well adjusted to? Adjustment is very definitely, not necessarily synonymous with psychological health.” Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 197.
I think there's some value in doing things the hard way
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
'Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.'
[this journal is] a tool for thinking better and reflecting more clearly on my life.
Truthful writing is more interesting to read — the descriptions are richer, the writing more specific. But I also think it’s important because writing is often best when it describes the Universal through the Particular, and to do that you have to be aware of your particular “truth,” or your perspective: The experiences, the references, the preferences, the worldviews, etc. that you bring with you when you put down something on the page.
To start from nothing and make almost nothing. The dream of a perfect content management system...
Every light-shedding device will also inevitably cast shadow, and a map (or any representation) is also a light-occluding device. - Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership
Chilean couple Augusto and Paulina have been together for 25 years, but Augusto was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease eight years ago. Both of them fear the day he will no longer recognize her.
life is much, much more than is necessary, and much, much more than any of us can bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything we have forgotten or don't know or haven't experienced, and on our deathbed, even that limited and erased "whole" becomes further diminished, if you are lucky you will remember the one word water, all others have been erased; if you are lucky you will remember one place or one person, but no one will ever, ever read on their deathbed, the whole text, intact and in order.
There’s a kind of defeat that resembles victory.
There’s a temple raised up only in the mindand another to be pulled down
in dream, arms wrapped around massive pillars
to tug and shatter the roof on guzzling lords.
Not by his arms, not by his gouty hands.But the phoenix spark sleeps in ash.
May 7. Feeling low. Saw M in the evening. May 10. Lasagna for dinner. The world is alive.
I could pretty easily spend half an hour
Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it.
Four
hundred
forty
five
pieces
of
lightnessMy work is about removing weight, like a cutter or a distiller. My job is thinning and squeezing things, making them thinner than onion skin and lighter than a feather. Sometimes I suspect that my work is still not light enough. A pixel on screen or a point on paper might still not be light enough. If I can make it lighter, I make it faster, until it becomes suspended ghost images. If I can not make it faster, I simply try to not make it happen, let it be an unspoken sentence staying on somebody's tongue, a gesture remaining motionless like a statue, an action waiting for consequences that will never happen. I keep thinking of a story I heard when I was a child: It was said that in Zhangzhou, China, a monk used a paint brush to draw plum flowers in the air every day. During his life, he never drew anything on paper at all. I always dream about doing something as light as the invisible plum flower he drew. - Weiyi Li, 2011
For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
But within that austere construct of buffudelment & recourse the ultimate weapon is neither gun nor bomb but the simple trangression of the impending question, "Can I?"
To which one is always course corrected to retract one's presumed personal freedom & replace that offense with the modal verb,
"May."
An overwhelming and oppressive feeling of insufficiency and It's not enough. It's never enough.
"Be ruthless about what you ignore. Time, energy, and resources are so precious. You have to be ferocious about cutting your priorities—more than you realize and certainly more than is comfortable.
You can only deeply commit to a few things. One or two? Maybe three?
Every pretty good, sorta nice, kinda fun thing you abandon is like shedding a weighted vest that lets you move at top speed. You were so busy focusing on how much you could carry, you never realized you could run this fast."
Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it? A bladeless knife. With no handle. - Hafiz, I heard God Laughing
Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. - Rainer Maria Rilke
My One Wish If I had one wish for all of my artist friends out there, it would be this:
Start off the new year by dedicating yourself to one thing:
One project, one series or one idea.
Then show up, begin and stay with it. Don’t look back. And see it through.
My guess is that you have lots of ideas for projects or paintings that you would love to get to some day.
So, my wish is for you to be able to block out all the noise that comes with a new year and commit to one new cohesive body of > work infused with your visual and narrative voice.
And then give yourself the gift of having the discipline and resiliency to focus on that one thing.
I’m going to sneak in a second wish here.
And that second wish is for you to set up a regular and consistent creativity schedule, right now.
And then fight like crazy to maintain that schedule until you have completed your project.
This will help you gain, build and maintain precious momentum so that you can be more productive.
The more art you make the more creative you will allow yourself to be, and the more confident you will become, and the more art you will make.
Declare right now what one project you are going to focus on to begin the new year:
What do you really want to create? What one thing do you really want to say, communicate or evoke? Then decide what a reasonable daily or weekly creativity schedule looks like for you. Then begin and pay attention to your project. And more importantly, pay attention to you. And then apply yourself.
Focus on your one project.
Create what you really want to create. Create the work you were meant to create.
What do you think might happen if you tried this? It’s worth a shot to find out.
You have creative work to do!
If you touch an idea too much without actually making it, just like a dough or plaster, it dies. I think it’s better to make and bake it and throw it away than to imagine how it would have worked or tasted. — Zeynab Izadyar
It’s very easy to forget what it is you're doing with your life and it’s very easy to see mission creep seep in. I shave my head between every two and four days, and every time I do I take it as a moment for reflection on what is it that I'm doing this week, are there ways I could be using my power to advance these causes which I think are important, am I doing the best job and most of all am I sincerely trying to live a life in the service of others.
And I think the truth is that I do not know any of them. I believe them, and I also believe the opposite. Some of my beliefs are more presentable to other people; so I am more to you if I say, “yeah I know I should spend more time with my kids” than if I say “I have a profound need to escape my kids”.
The way I am is that I see a bunch of conflicts, and I don’t know how to resolve them, and that’s just my ignorance. If I had knowledge, I would know how to resolve them. But what I at least try to do is not be under the illusion that I have the knowledge already.
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus. - Alexander Graham Bell
- 'Screw it, let's do it'
- Start sloppy
- Start small
O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.
Barred from understanding the sea change in her mother's behaviour - first by memory, which offered only this discontinuity, these two separate women; and now by a loneliness she would continue to inhabit until she aged amd died in her turn - she found herself experimenting with a new idea: I shouldn't have come here.
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.”
The idea of the form implicitly contains also the history of such a form. - F. Hall´e, R. A. A. Oldeman, and P. B. Tomlinson. Tropical trees and forests: An architectural analysis. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1978
If anyone speaks in a tongue ... someone must interpret.
⧉ dump
⚕︎ curation
※ inspo
⛓︎ vision boardfull stop . means completed
The illusion prevailed that the machine was a laboratory-made homunculus, and that it could do our labor instead of slaves. It is now time to correct this mistake and shake off the illusion that men are born to be slaveholders and that the only thing wrong in the past was that not all men could be equally so.
The idea of the form implicitly contains also the history of such a form.
it feels so embarrassing to be bad at poetry
rudiment | ˈruːdɪm(ə)nt | noun 1 (the rudiments of) the first principles of (a subject): she taught the girls the rudiments of reading and writing. • an elementary or primitive form of (something): the rudiments of a hot-water system.
Sometimes language must be used to closely circle something rather than to hit the target - Only then, the picture, association, and experience evoked can be precise enough.
Gradually I have discovered that by insisting on choosing a something over a nothing, and then one more something, a little gap can open in the world that was not noticeable before. There, I can slip in.
Conventionally art takes up a discernable medium and takes creative distance from ordinary communication or banal functionality, making an appeal to the senses that reroutes common sense
Last Day in Dreamlad, and that period in general, is an early example of the growing recognition of dilapidation within the UK's fairs, festivals, attractions and amusements - a society in miniature gone wrong.
We talked a lot and it wasn’t at all like the conversations I had with my father, because behind our words there was always a text that neither of us could read, which we would pore over and study without ever managing to decipher it. - from That Summer by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson
The whole town knows those trains and how to recognize them, and sometimes, waking with a start in the middle of the night, they’re gripped by a fear that the train that’s suddenly arrived is neither the Northern nor the Express nor the four-o’clock Combo, that it might be a New Train, coming in from the opposite direction, that stops in town, releases a long mournful whistle, and pulls slowly away, bound for the capital, and that it takes all of them away, again, forever. - from Passengers on the Night Train by Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, translated by Will Vanderhyden
The brutality of this world is a heavy coat.
I think we’re way too quick to identify ourselves with long-term goals, especially when we’re not in the moment of being tempted. We can say “look, I know how I should really live. I know that I should read those books, and I should not eat the cookies, and I should be less stressed about these things, and I should spend more time with my family—these are things that I know”. And I think the truth is that I do not know any of them. I believe them, and I also believe the opposite. Some of my beliefs are more presentable to other people; so I am more to you if I say, “yeah I know I should spend more time with my kids” than if I say “I have a profound need to escape my kids”. But both of those things are true of me, and I think the violence to the self occurs as long as both are true of you. I think — but this is sort of just me agreeing with Socrates about something — that if you had knowledge, you would not have that conflict. A lot of people have the goal of mastering themselves, which is to say exerting enough violence over themselves to quiet that other voice, because they “know” the other thing. But the truth is the fact that the other voice is there means you don’t know it. The violence over yourself is trying to quiet it when it’s really there. Knowledge would mean that you unanimously and obviously in a very simple way did the thing you thought you should. - Agnes Callard’s Socratic framing of knowledge
Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. - Ursula K. Le Guin
Many bamboos undergo mass flowering after 30 or more years, with all the plants of a species flwoering simultaneously regardless of geographic location or climate, and then the plants die.
Malaise expresses a patient's uneasiness that "something is not right" that may need a medical examination to determine the significance.
Malaise is thought to be caused by the activation of an immune response, and the associated pro-inflammatory cytokines.
Plant blindness is a proposed form of cognitive bias which, in its broadest meaning, is a human tendency to ignore plant species. This includes such phenomena as not noticing plants in the surrounding environment, not recognizing the importance of plant life to the whole biosphere and to human affairs, a philosophical view of plants as an inferior form of life to animals, and/or the inability to appreciate the unique features or aesthetics of plants. - From Wikipedia
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
"When people say, ‘I’m the kind of person who,’ my heart always sinks. These are formulas, we’ve all got about ten formulas about who we are, what we like, the kind of people we like, all that stuff. The disparity between these phrases and how one experiences oneself minute by minute is ludicrous.” - Adam Phillips, Paris Review
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
And I find art is something that gives you something that you need for your life. Just as religion is something that you need even if you constantly find it denied today. - Anni Albers
I first created the world (the environment — feeling, constraints, audience, etc.), and then the writing came naturally.
For those of us who feel different, who don’t easily fit into structures of this society or this world, we have to make our own structures, definitions, and taxonomies to feel at home
A thoughtful question from author Morgan Housel: "What was true a generation ago that no longer is, and who is clinging to that old truth?"
History flows from geography like water from a well
Text fragments allow linking directly to a specific portion of text in a web document, without requiring the author to annotate it with an ID, using particular syntax in the URL fragment. Supporting browsers are free to choose how to draw attention to the linked text, e.g. with a color highlight and/or scrolling to the content on the page. This is useful because it allows web content authors to deep-link to other content they don't control, without relying on the presence of IDs to make that possible. Building on top of that, it could be used to generate more effective content-sharing links for users to pass to one another.
Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge is knowledge that is difficult to extract or articulate—as opposed to conceptualized, formalized, codified, or explicit knowledge—and is therefore more difficult to convey to others through verbalization or writing.
41 - Forty-one Sun / Decrease
The stoic Mountain drains its excess waters to the Lake below: The Superior Person curbs his anger and sheds his desires.
To be frugal and content is to possess immeasurable wealth within. Nothing of value could be refused such a person. Make a portion of each meal a share of your offering.
64 - Sixty-Four Wei Chi / The End In Sight
Fire ascends above the Water: The Superior Person examines the nature of things and keeps each in its proper place.
Too anxious the young fox gets his tail wet, just as he completes his crossing. To attain success, be like the man and not like the fox.
“as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past.” - What Is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
All receieved information should make us inverts sad. But before I finish I intend to celebrate our corner of Paradise, the part of the garden the Lord forgot to mention.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice,
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.