Photo by Duane Michals. This life is bittersweet.
“Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep — he hath awakened from the dream of life. ‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.”
-Shelley
The cutest scene from Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.
“The moment, the instant of the act does not renew itself. It exists by itself: to repeat it is to give it a new meaning. It does not have any signs of the past experience. It is another moment. At the same time in which it happens it is already a thing in itself.
Only the instant in the act is alive. In it the “coming to be” is increased. The instant in the act is the only live reality in ourselves. To be conscious is already the past. Plain perception, the act, is the future making itself. The present and the future are connected in the present-now of the act.”
-About the Instant, Lygia Clark, 1965
“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.” The best example of this is the so-called oddball effect—an optical illusion that Eagleman had shown me in his lab. It consisted of a series of simple images flashing on a computer screen. Most of the time, the same picture was repeated again and again: a plain brown shoe. But every so often a flower would appear instead. To my mind, the change was a matter of timing as well as of content: the flower would stay onscreen much longer than the shoe. But Eagleman insisted that all the pictures appeared for the same length of time. The only difference was the degree of attention that I paid to them. The shoe, by its third or fourth appearance, barely made an impression. The flower, more rare, lingered and blossomed, like those childhood summers.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger
“But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? … a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
-CSL
“At times I think that before we are born we are like a closed fist which opens its first finger when we are born and is opened internally like the petals of a flower as we discover the meaning of our existence, for us a at a certain moment to become aware of this plenitude of a full-emptiness (interior time).
At that moment we achieve an awareness of an ethico-religious conception which goes against the whole existence of a God external to us: He is within us and is the best thing we have; the idea of life and death abandons us. This polarity no longer exists. That which we are able to transmit in a work of art is no more than a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going. It is a flash of that infinite materialised in the finite. As if it were a stopping in time. It is a piece of eternity. Man seeks out his inner time and when he finds it he lives out his whole origin. It is at that moment that he goes beyond the life-death frontier. The anguish of the exterior time (one day after another) which is connected to the same existential anguish (the reason for things in relation to it) disappears, because he then begins to abstract himself from that outer reality. It exists, but man is no longer invaded by it in the practical-mechanical sense. He and it one unit, in its deep existential sense. Reality becomes a support for meditation or a magnetic field in which he, the artist, identifies himself with the times. At that moment he travels through his whole origin. The life “beginning” and death “end” has finished. The work of art is the materialisation of this fusion. This is what makes it eternal or transcendent. Other, less creative people will feel this moment, through the artist’s work, as a response to an issue of universal meaning. Life only exists in relation to polarities. There begins the relationship between life and art.”
-O Vazio-Pleno, Lygia Clark, 1960
http://isabellofgren.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/lygia-clark-full-emptiness/
-Yayoi Kusama
“That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time. In kairos we are completely unselfconscious, and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we’re constantly checking our watches for chronological time.
In Our Town, after Emily has died in childbirth, Thornton Wilder has her ask the Stage Manager if she can return home to relive just one day. Reluctantly he allows her to do so. And she is torn by the beauty of the ordinary, and by our lack of awareness of it. She cries out to her mother, ‘Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me… it goes so fast we don’t have time to look at one another.’
And she goes back to the graveyard and the quiet company of the others lying there, and she asks the Stage Manager ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?’ And he sighs and says, ‘No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.’”
-Madeleine L’Engle
On wealth:
“I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money bags of Carnegie?”
On the world as he sees it:
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves… The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed to me empty. The trite objects of human efforts–possessions, outward success, luxury–have always seemed to me contemptible.”
Thanks, M.
Scanned vintage microscopic prints from Junk in Williamsburg.
It’s pretty depressing sorting through other people’s old photos. All those lives lived, faded memories piled in a bin… mine now.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”
“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”
“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”
-P. Smith
and counting.
“Every time I cried, my father would imitate me on his fiddle, just to drive me nuts. One day I got fed up and I knocked him out.”
“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.”
-Maude
Harold is my dream guy. Oddly attractive and super hilarious.
