Moon River: lines that made me ponder

Being as entropy

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 06:48:50 GMT

Rainer Maria Rilke

Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabits the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the further we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldy, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.

via

i want it all

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:17:43 GMT

Marian Bantjes: i want it all

La valise ou le cercueil

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:34:52 GMT

The title reads “Suitcase or Coffin”. These were the options faced by the Pieds Noirs (the European settlers), the Harkis (the Arab collaborators) and the Jews in Algeria in 1962, after France retreated from its former colony and Algeria was granted independence. More or less what Arabs are planning for Israelis Jews, and later on to the west if their abominable way won't be taken as the only way to exist. I've chosen this art project of Mona Hatoum, whom I adore.

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952. She has lived in England since the outbreak of civil war in Beirut in 1975. After graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1981, Hatoum embarked on a career as a performance artist.

"Inspired as much by her exile from war-torn Beirut as by her sensitivity to contemporary racial and gender issues, Hatoum's works are both deeply personal and quietly political. Without being didactic, she invites viewers to see the world through her eyes while also encouraging them to trust their own reactions to her evocative works"

This work represent many symbols, and above all these very days it represent for me how we are all entwined. yet, no solution is out there, before Terror will be eliminated, we will be all it's refuges.

Mona Hatoum, Traffic, 2002
Suitcases, metal, plastic, human hair

You are made in the image of what you desire.

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 16:18:48 GMT

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor form other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
- Thomas Merton
via wood_s_lot

most things look better when you put them in a circle

Thu, 04 May 2006 18:29:55 GMT

Banksy: most things look better when you put them in a circle. via kottke

made me think of these icons, what would you choose?

Raphael Madonna of the Chair

ANTARKTIS CIRCULAR MAP

Robert Smithson. UNTITLED (ANTARKTIS CIRCULAR MAP) 1967 cut map

Mandala of Evolution

The Mandala of Evolution from "Mandala" - Dion Wright

About Truth

Thu, 04 May 2006 12:39:47 GMT

"Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity". -Friedrich Nietzsche. via thenonist

Civilizations Are Creatures

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 20:14:01 GMT

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium -

"Civilizations are creatures. They are organisms that live very long and that spread very wide over the surface of the earth. Civilizations are beings that consume energy and produce ideas. These ideas materialize as cities, institutions, laws, art, books, and memories. A civilization may persist for thousands of years, evolving constantly. Compared to fleshy animals, or even the wet tissue of the human mind, civilizations are the fastest changing organisms on the planet...Today’s civilizations differ from those in the past by their greater degrees of complexity and their greater speed of transformation. ..Western civilization today possess an embryonic memory. It is called a library..For a civilization to survive ten thousand years requires a ten thousand year storage function -- a ten thousand year library. This is not the only thing a ten thousand year civilization needs, but it is a vital need. ..

Until recently a library seemed more dead than alive. Between rock-hard walls it housed old books, often ones that few people read, written by authors long dead...

Life, big and small, is distinguished in part by its ability to carry the past forward, to currently represent what happened before, in order to make advantageous responses about what will happen next. ..Biological creatures have memories of genes and memories of past stimuli. Civilizations have libraries. A library stuffed with tablets and scrolls of ideas and expressions from the past is an elementary memory, but it is an amazing improvement upon earlier methods of oral tales, narratives, and proverbs...

This memory is not static. The connections and associations between ideas/files are in constant flux. Books are updated, documents revised, ideas improved or discredited. The entire library is like one very large wikipedia article.

Finally, the mark of success for this library – for this memory of this organism called civilization – is the production of new ideas and new ways of knowing. What this means is that new levels of memory will arise. The organism may know and recall in ways we humans – mere nodes in the tissue – may find perplexing."

read all

ultimate dream

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 21:25:07 GMT

"Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream." - Chuang-Tzu, The Wandering Dance via huge-entity

Safely Insane

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:14:43 GMT

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

–William Dement via

This Planet Of Dreams

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 21:56:34 GMT

Surely you're aware that there are dreams all around you.

You're moving through them everywhere you go. They're on every block and corner of the city you live in, and flickering behind the curtains and shades up and down every street. Open the Yellow Pages of your local phone book --what is that if not a catalog of dreams?

And beyond or behind all of those dreams just blooming or being born are millions --tens of millions-- of dreams that have not yet been recognized or realized, and dreams that are withering from neglect....

Brad Zellar, This Planet of Dreams

via wordshadows

to make the invisible visible

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 11:30:42 GMT

"To create, the painter needs paint, brushes, and canvas; the sculptor, wood, stone, or metal, and tools; the poet, words and a pen and paper - or computer; the composer, sounds, notes, paper. But for one awakened to the nature of Mind, the entire universe is the canvas; hands, feet, emotions, and intellect the implements. Each moment is joy ungrounded, ripe, and creative, when we are liberated from the enslaving notions of "This is my head, this is my body, this is my mind." Here, at the core of each of us, is creativity, here is the art of living. If the mission of the artist is "to make the invisible visible," in the words of Leonardo da Vinci.."
- Philip Kapleau Awakening to Zen via

An Utopia Realized: Cyber For All

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 07:49:22 GMT

I like to think (it has to be) of a cybernetic ecology where we
are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to
our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by
machines of loving grace.

-- Richard Brautigan

A Utopia Realized: Cyber For All

Life-streaming

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:26:24 GMT

"We crave even what we realize we cannot fully live through, and we are willing to accept a diluted version of it, just as long as it meets our media-driven perceptions of it...
Apparently contradicting the former point people seem increasingly obsessed with the ability to capture and keep track all they experience, often making it available to the public.
From weblogs to moblogs to Tivos the availability of cheap mass-storage devices to be filled with text, pictures, videos and audios is changing the way we relate to reality and memory.
Are we nearing a time when people will not be able to forget?" via freegorifero

How to Greet Something You Love

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 19:24:01 GMT

Kiss it. Touch it. Make it feel good.

Do not screw it. Do not make it come.

Kiss it. Touch it. Make it feel good.

Touch takes place on all four planes of existence.

Body Heart Mind and Soul
Child Woman Man and God

The four flows of touch are

You touching another for another.
You touching another for yourself.
Another touching you for themselves.
Anothing touching you for yourself.

All four flows much be In.
In means not Out.

Out means Enforced, Inhibited,
Not Fair Chosen, Not Optionable. GO

Magical origins of art

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:17:08 GMT

"It is to remember that all art is magical in origin - music sculpture writing painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more that Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end by itself. Like all formulae, art was originally functional, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formula. Take a porcelain stove and disconnect it and put it in your living room with ivy growing over it... it may be a good-looking corpse but it isn't functional anymore. Or take a voodoo doll full of pins - authentic West African, $500 on the 57^th Street - and hang it on the wall of your duplex loft. It isn't killing enemies anymore. Writing and painting were one in cave paintings, which were formulae to ensure good hunting"...Brion Gysin

Rememberance

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:24:15 GMT

Memory is dialectical. It suffers at the rejection of its own distance. Yet distance is its natural habitat. Memory traces. The ruins of memory...The “no longer” might well have never existed. Even the most “insignificant present” has a certain power of the full present, since it exists as the real. Yet the moment is gone: “Every evening we are poorer by a day.”

...A continuous identity, flourishing, reaching a peak, and then falling into irreversible decline. Memory, it seems, falls under the same delusion. Conferring a presence on the un-recollected past, we take it that memory guides itself in the dark, navigating itself toward the terrain of remembrance. The motion of memory, instead, reveals itself to be going astray, neither motionless in Bachelard’s term, not progressive in the Hegelian sense. Going astray means it runs off, beneath the threshold of recollection...."

via side-effects.blogspot

The Fragile Body

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 21:42:49 GMT

The body doesn't lie … Maps whose territories are named in languages which are no longer understood show where the passions are hidden.

-- Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity 6

Chemistry

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 20:11:06 GMT

possibilities are so chemically romantic <3

Solitude

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 18:10:44 GMT

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.” Octavio Paz

Now

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:12:16 GMT

Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once. Octavio Paz

The Philosophical Notebooks of Bianco Luno

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:32:37 GMT

The next best thing to silence is to open one’s mouth and say something no one can agree with.

The Philosophical Notebooks of Bianco Luno
Notebook XII the world is my Vienna (via love ecstasy crime)

INNER TENSION / IN ATTENTION

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 19:34:21 GMT

Consider the page not as a space but as a death occuring in the gap between 'writing' and 'wanting to say'

--Steve McCaffery

Diversité

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 08:41:50 GMT

Les mots diversement rangés font un divers sens. Et les sens diversement rangés font différents effets.

Pascal, Pensées (via miladus)

Femme

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 14:28:49 GMT

Un genou de femme bien rond est l'autre nom du Saint-Esprit.
Bohumil Hrabal (La chevelure sacrifiée)

~ Anaïs Nin

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 13:24:11 GMT

“I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux.”

Pascal, Pensées

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:58:48 GMT

En écrivant ma pensée, elle m’échappe quelquefois, mais cela me fait souvenir de ma faiblesse, que j’oublie tout à l’heure; ce qui m’instruit autant que ma pensée oubliée, car je ne tiens qu’à connaître mon néant.

Pascal, Pensées

The Thread of Thoughts by Roger Vieillard

לאיזה קורא אייחל

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:22:29 GMT

לאיזה קורא איחל? לקורא טבעי, ננוח.

רק בספרי הוא חי,

ואותי, ואת עצמו - את העולם כלו - קל לו לשכח.

יוהן וולפגנג פון גיתה
תירגם מגרמנית אריה ל. מוצקין

Only so many songs can be sung With two lips, two lungs and one tongue

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:42:29 GMT

via

empty bottle

a jew!

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:30:47 GMT

Go ahead, search Google for "Jew" -- no capitalization or quotes necessary -- then note the very first hit that comes up (at the time of this writing anyway): Offensive Search Results. This is a highly unusual "public service announcement" posted by Google itself. It begins... An explanation of our search results.

If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

via mysticbourgeoisie

Camille Claudel

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:57:48 GMT

il y a toutjour quelle que chose d'absent qui me tourment

TIME IS

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:01:10 GMT

...we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless -paul bowles.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
-Jorge Luis Borge

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
-Albert Einstein

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us.
-Charles Baudelaire

An inspirational piece,and it goes on...

by The Nonist

The Only Dream Worth Having

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 20:03:44 GMT

"The only dream worth having... is to dream that you will live while you're
alive and die only when you're dead... which means exactly what?'.. . To
love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get
used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never
simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect
strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand To . never
look away. And never, never to forget." -- Arundhati Roy via

So Easy

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:52:01 GMT

The easiest way to change your looks is to stand up straight and smile.

via

Making Reality

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 12:48:29 GMT

We erect our structures in our imaginations before we erect them in reality." --Karl Marx

Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve.

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 11:51:24 GMT

Rachel Naomi Remen

Night has a thousand eyes.

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:27:42 GMT

John Lyly, 1554 - 1606

David Hetland's art

I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:20:19 GMT

John Glenn

Anais Nin

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 21:15:54 GMT

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Robert Frost

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 19:42:40 GMT

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 19:10:06 GMT

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal. Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me, " he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift." The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away. Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, " I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

via cooltools

Credit & Copyright: James Behrens (IGPP, Scripps Institution of Oceanography) via Ami Ben Basat

"We Make the Road by Walking"

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:11:03 GMT

"When you aren’t looking, it’s like a wave. When you are looking, it’s like a particle."

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 22:46:52 GMT

sunlight

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 21:22:13 GMT

I'm sure I'm the first to notice this: it's only when you tell the complete and full truth that no one believes a word of it.

Makes you wonder what state of mind we walk around in.

via.

The Pursuit of Happiness and the Experience of Suffering

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 20:53:19 GMT

Our culture emphasizes happiness and pleasure; the natural tendency is to avoid suffering.

Unfortunately, happiness is a transient state that cannot be reached and kept. Happiness never lasts.

Robert Johnson, a Jungian oriented author, points out that the word "suffer" comes from the Latin sub plus ferre meaning "to bear or to allow." To suffer in this sense is to allow something to happen, perhaps, to allow ourselves to experience the responsibility for life choices which permits consciousness to grow. When we suffer in this sense we are opening ourselves to experience the fullness of life’s diversity as a natural process of growth. Such a "suffering" with life must occur for psychological and spiritual maturity to develop. The philosopher Alan Watts speaks to this point when he says, "Because human consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness." Life’s goal is to increase consciousness; so, the temptation to avoid life’s legitimate pain must be resisted.

http://www.lessons4living.com/happiness.htm

The Eyes Have It

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:10:42 GMT

In the end, the history of visualisation is the history of the tools that the human beings use to amplify their cognition. We take it for granted that human beings use tools (we call them technology) to extend our physical capacities. But maybe it's not so obvious that we are probably the only kind of animal that builds tools to amplify our thinking.
~Juan C. Dursteler

via leepotts

sadly, my faith is married to no god

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 22:33:22 GMT

..."i see how much less blame is thrown when there's no one up there, out there responsible for you.

but then again, my faith is an expansive feeling that lives in the little hollow that is myself. something beyond me, limitless, inside me. like i am this universe of trifles and minutiae and roundabouts and the literature laid out on my desk in perfect demarcations. sadly, my faith is married to no god—which, by society's standards, isn't any faith at all...."

"(when they ask, tell them that we have no power over the things that matter. only the silent windowsills will know how fiercely we loved, how fiercely we lived. never go gently.)"

quotings of a beatiful post of transience in her well writen blog, that touched me is so many way

Man must have Chaos in themselves

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 20:56:40 GMT

Quotations about Chaos (Translation from Japanese)

Scientists
- Maxwell "Matters and dynamics (1877)"
  There is a maxim in studying the physical phenomena, that is, "Same phenomena result in same." This is true in all cases.
  And there is another maxim, "Similar phenomena result in similar." This is appropriate for many phenomena too, but not all.
- Poincare "Science and methods (1908)"
  An initial small error will result in enormous difference. So no prediction is efficient and statistical phenomena appear.
- Li and York (1975)
  Period three implies chaos.
- Hajime MORI "Dissipative structure and chaos (1994)"
  With small perturbation, chaos is unstable and not reproducible. But a long-time mean on the path is stable and reproducible.
- Masaya YAMAGUCHI "An introduction to chaos (1996)"
  To explain the Oriental philosophy in European language is needed. Chaos is one of these languages. The symmetry causes only periodic motions (like duality), but non-symmetry (a property of Oriental philosophy) causes chaos. Chaos is a source of creation. It is a tradition of the human race before the Greek era.
Philosophers or Literary Men
- Lao Tzu, "The Tao Te Ching" (B.C. the 6th Century)
  The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.
- Gaius Petronius (the author of the Satyricon) (A.D. the 1st Century)
  Even a chance has causes.
- Jules Verne "From the Earth to the Moon" (1869)
  A three body problem (of the earth, the moon, and the rocket) is not integrable.
- Friedrich Nietzsche "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1883-85)
  I tell you:
  Man must have Chaos in themselves
  to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
  I tell you:
  You have Chaos in yourself.

From: Introduction to Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics

and some some Java applets that can simulate the well-known chaotic systems.

Mandelbrot Set

Georges Bataille on Eroticism

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 18:54:22 GMT

"Eroticism which is a fusion, which shifts interest away from and beyond the person and his limits, is nevertheless expressed by an object. We are faced with the paradox of an object which implies the abolition of the limits of all objects, of an erotic object"

Anais Nin

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 22:48:49 GMT

"We are going to the moon, that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself."

Anais Nin

If You Love, Love Openly (A zen story)

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:10:59 GMT

Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.
Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.
Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."

was taken from http://www.101zenstories.com/ where, 100 more delightful Zen stories are waiting.