We say “I had a dream last night.” But the day begins with the dream. We say that to force it into the past.
People become fearful of really feeling their strength, their passions, their creativity and their loneliness. So they make gestures towards them, as if that is enough. Would we still be afraid of feeling them, if we knew that they would neither destroy us, or go away?
The Traveler: Yes, people are caught up in their nearly infinite lives. They are not paying attention to my narcissism.
The problem with the world is our response to it.
Grief is joy – proof of feeling.
Science posits we are in The Multiverse: An infinite number of universes, each like a bubble in an infinitely large, infinitely shook up, bottle of champagne. There is a world exactly like this one, then, where you have made other choices. For anything, though, you would still be here.
“If you do not assume compassion, they will win.”
There is one way to Infinity.
“Even a single sub-atomic particle interferes with itself.” -Paul Dirac
The kids on the street in black, bonding with each other over the world’s hypocrisy – to be young and depressed again!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Aphorisms & c. (3)
The sight of the ocean fills us with gratitude and possibility, if we are not too close.
Two hundred years ago we changed the physical world with chemistry. Art responded with a depiction of the spirit. One hundred years ago we changed our place in the universe with physics. Art responded with the art of the gesture. Now we will change ourselves with biology – our personhood and rights. We look out on a hundred kinds of selves, a hundred worlds. Art may not respond – it may return from these worlds with news.
After 100 years, the self is no longer in crisis. There are a hundred worlds around the self, all in crisis.
The mind of the invisibly-propelled Internet is the invisible connections among us.
We seek the world of the invisible beyond the invisible. The gods have returned.
The urge for more – annihilate the past, feed the addiction to transformation. The opposite of speed is impatience.
Art has become journalism. The News: Africa is a place of pain, the career of Michael Jackson is strange, and America over consumes. It is the journalism of sadness, injustice and bewilderment, endorsed by glamour. It says the forbidden news in a place where it won’t reverberate – the museum.
It has become impossible to converse with Michelangelo. It is not impossible to converse with Rembrandt.
The wealthiest people of our time make a fortune from turning our lives into science projects, so that they may be more than science projects. They spend their money on science projects of fantasy, to make them real. Cheap spaceflight has replaced building libraries.
“I was entertained, in a culture of entertainment, for long enough that it was strange when I realized I had been waiting for my life to have more meaning. Even as my life passed, which was its meaning.”
And still, walking through the ice-covered evergreens is like walking through music.
Two hundred years ago we changed the physical world with chemistry. Art responded with a depiction of the spirit. One hundred years ago we changed our place in the universe with physics. Art responded with the art of the gesture. Now we will change ourselves with biology – our personhood and rights. We look out on a hundred kinds of selves, a hundred worlds. Art may not respond – it may return from these worlds with news.
After 100 years, the self is no longer in crisis. There are a hundred worlds around the self, all in crisis.
The mind of the invisibly-propelled Internet is the invisible connections among us.
We seek the world of the invisible beyond the invisible. The gods have returned.
The urge for more – annihilate the past, feed the addiction to transformation. The opposite of speed is impatience.
Art has become journalism. The News: Africa is a place of pain, the career of Michael Jackson is strange, and America over consumes. It is the journalism of sadness, injustice and bewilderment, endorsed by glamour. It says the forbidden news in a place where it won’t reverberate – the museum.
It has become impossible to converse with Michelangelo. It is not impossible to converse with Rembrandt.
The wealthiest people of our time make a fortune from turning our lives into science projects, so that they may be more than science projects. They spend their money on science projects of fantasy, to make them real. Cheap spaceflight has replaced building libraries.
“I was entertained, in a culture of entertainment, for long enough that it was strange when I realized I had been waiting for my life to have more meaning. Even as my life passed, which was its meaning.”
And still, walking through the ice-covered evergreens is like walking through music.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Aphorisms & c. (2)
The only truth is vulnerability, with its permission to feel.
Love and forgiveness promise the world will be sensible. Hatred is dissonance. Which is true, since we know that Nature wants both complexity and chaos?
We must accommodate our tragedies.
How grateful I am for The Method! Technology has so fully embraced and controlled the visible world – now with the force of a global mind of fiber and light. Hail software!
But software is a series of propositions about how the world might be arranged, this step following the one before, in preparation for the next. The force driving our visible world today is itself invisible, a series of propositions.
We want love the way we want to be loved – eternally, entirely, transcendent. That is, inhumanly.
Our mania for speed is a relic of the machine age. Now we hunger for presence – to be everywhere, to touch everyone.
Money is invisible. Technology is invisible. Language, software, intention, connection -- invisible.
Play is visible. Delight is visible.
The visible and the invisible have changed places.
Our lust for the visible world may destroy it.
Love and forgiveness promise the world will be sensible. Hatred is dissonance. Which is true, since we know that Nature wants both complexity and chaos?
We must accommodate our tragedies.
How grateful I am for The Method! Technology has so fully embraced and controlled the visible world – now with the force of a global mind of fiber and light. Hail software!
But software is a series of propositions about how the world might be arranged, this step following the one before, in preparation for the next. The force driving our visible world today is itself invisible, a series of propositions.
We want love the way we want to be loved – eternally, entirely, transcendent. That is, inhumanly.
Our mania for speed is a relic of the machine age. Now we hunger for presence – to be everywhere, to touch everyone.
Money is invisible. Technology is invisible. Language, software, intention, connection -- invisible.
Play is visible. Delight is visible.
The visible and the invisible have changed places.
Our lust for the visible world may destroy it.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Aphorisms & c. (1)
Still, we wonder why we are here. Perhaps it is to receive invisible worlds. Not just the freight of our histories, our stories -- invisible and essential. Also love, repulsion, and desperate belief, -- everything that signals the army to the field of death, and propels the mother to the dark surf after her child. Perhaps to manufacture dreams.
We say time traps us. We believe in a place where it does not exist, pray for this, and fear it. There are other worlds, and emotion is renewed in them.
The visible world is a false god of unlimited power. Alternative realities have always propelled us.
We awaken into a dream we must describe. We fear the next dream. In our desperation we ignore the infinite dreams around us.
The world is haunted and incomprehensible….so we start again.
Today we have built cities that look like the sets of model railroads, children’s clothing for adults, art with a job to shock and leave. Archeologists will exhume all this, too, someday, and wonder what terrified us.
The Traveler: “We lived – all over the world, as best we could, waking at 3 and 4 AM to be on the time zone of our destination, traveling with currencies for countries unstable enough that they carried images of no politicians, or even that nation’s historical figures. Too dangerous.
“We hoped we were stitching the world together – we hoped we had captured some of its magnificent explosion better than anyone before. That is, when we were not desperate.
There was a kind of immortality in knowing someone with the latest slang in St. Petersburg, dealing in dams and cotton in Cairo, hearing about the coup from the safety of the Shanghai disco, the pane crash, the true rate of infection. We were desperate for speed, in a world that spun faster, desperate for knowledge of power. Its scope promised a life greater than any that had come before, because the world had never been so baffling, and this was a promise of immortality, whatever we could claim of the eternal. There had been false promises before, but we believed. It was so good to believe, and hang on as the taxi sped past neon.”
“People need to learn that the marketing is sometimes infused with the result.” –Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
There is a War on Terror. We will know it is over when we are no longer afraid. Which leader has a stake in that?
We say time traps us. We believe in a place where it does not exist, pray for this, and fear it. There are other worlds, and emotion is renewed in them.
The visible world is a false god of unlimited power. Alternative realities have always propelled us.
We awaken into a dream we must describe. We fear the next dream. In our desperation we ignore the infinite dreams around us.
The world is haunted and incomprehensible….so we start again.
Today we have built cities that look like the sets of model railroads, children’s clothing for adults, art with a job to shock and leave. Archeologists will exhume all this, too, someday, and wonder what terrified us.
The Traveler: “We lived – all over the world, as best we could, waking at 3 and 4 AM to be on the time zone of our destination, traveling with currencies for countries unstable enough that they carried images of no politicians, or even that nation’s historical figures. Too dangerous.
“We hoped we were stitching the world together – we hoped we had captured some of its magnificent explosion better than anyone before. That is, when we were not desperate.
There was a kind of immortality in knowing someone with the latest slang in St. Petersburg, dealing in dams and cotton in Cairo, hearing about the coup from the safety of the Shanghai disco, the pane crash, the true rate of infection. We were desperate for speed, in a world that spun faster, desperate for knowledge of power. Its scope promised a life greater than any that had come before, because the world had never been so baffling, and this was a promise of immortality, whatever we could claim of the eternal. There had been false promises before, but we believed. It was so good to believe, and hang on as the taxi sped past neon.”
“People need to learn that the marketing is sometimes infused with the result.” –Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
There is a War on Terror. We will know it is over when we are no longer afraid. Which leader has a stake in that?
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