Posts tagged Invisible Connections

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in —not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation… His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his “private religion,” as [Otto] Rank put it.
Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, Eloquently expanded upon by Mills Baker here.

mills

Our whole is the organization of billions of tiny parts, most invisible to the eye, but all absolutely essential to who we are. ~ü [Image: Imogen Cunningham]

Our whole is the organization of billions of tiny parts, most invisible to the eye, but all absolutely essential to who we are.

~ü

[Image: Imogen Cunningham]

timeimmemorial

White Spaces (extract)

To think of motion not merely as a function of the body but as an extension of the mind. In the same way, to think of speech not as an extension of the mind but as a function of the body. Sounds emerge from the voice to enter the air and surround and bounce off and enter the body that occupies that air, and though they cannot be seen, these sounds are no less a gesture than a hand is when outstretched in the air towards another hand, and in this gesture can be read the entire alphabet of desire, the body’s need to be taken beyond itself, even as it dwells in the sphere of its own motion. 

On the surface, this motion seems to be random. But such randomness does not, in itself, preclude a meaning. Or if meaning is not quite the word for it, then say the drift, or a consistent sense of what is happening, even as it changes, moment by moment.

In the realm of the naked eye nothing happens that does not have its beginning and its end. And yet nowhere can we find the place or the moment at which we can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is where it begins, or this is where it ends.

~ From Disappearances – Selected Poems (1988) by Paul Auster

silencesounds

The elements of nature reenforce one another. ~ü [Image: E.M.Quinn]

The elements of nature reenforce one another.

~ü

[Image: E.M.Quinn]

darksilenceinsuburbia

Divided, how can one pray? How can one pray when another oneself would be listening to the prayer?—That is why one should only pray in unknown words. Render enigma to enigma, enigma for enigma. Lift what is mystery in yourself to what is mystery in itself. There is something in you that is equal to what surpasses you.
Paul Valéry, from “How Calm the Hour Is” in Selected Writings, trans. Louise Varèse (thanks Time Immemorial)
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. ~ Simone Weil. By way of The Sun Magazine.  (via crashinglybeautiful) [Image: Kelly Monson Suction. (Deformities)]

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

~ Simone Weil. By way of The Sun Magazine.  (via crashinglybeautiful)

[Image: Kelly Monson Suction. (Deformities)]

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass:

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed;
The Asiatic and African are hand in hand.. the European and American are hand in hand,
Learned and unlearned are hand in hand.. and male and female are hand in hand;
The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover…. they press close without lust…. his lips press her neck,
The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with measureless love,
The white hair of the mother shines on the white wrist of the daughter,
The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man…. friend is inarmed by friend,
The scholar kisses the teacher and the teacher kisses the scholar…. the wronged is made right,
The call of the slave is one with the master’s call.. and the master salutes the slave,
The felon steps forth from the prison…. the insane becomes sane…. the suffering of sick persons is relieved,
The sweatings and fevers stop.. the throat that was unsound is sound.. the lungs of the consumptive are resumed.. the poor distressed head is free,
The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and smoother than ever,
Stiflings and passages open…. the paralysed become supple,
The swelled and convulsed and congested awake to themselves in condition,
They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night and awake.

hateshiploveship

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
Oscar Wilde
s33: I’ve seen this before, and I like it both for it’s message and for how it reveals the limitations of the materialist worldview. My response on FB: “The arrangement isn’t gone, nor was it ever there to begin with. You can still make a house in the same arrangement out of Legos, Cheetos, bricks, lines on paper, anything. The Legos don’t matter, it’s only their capacity to be arranged that is worthwhile.”

s33:

I’ve seen this before, and I like it both for it’s message and for how it reveals the limitations of the materialist worldview. My response on FB: “The arrangement isn’t gone, nor was it ever there to begin with. You can still make a house in the same arrangement out of Legos, Cheetos, bricks, lines on paper, anything. The Legos don’t matter, it’s only their capacity to be arranged that is worthwhile.”

ageofreason

My views on sexual ethics are against all the views that have been held up to now. They were all repressive of sex; they were condemnatory and created a split in the human mind. The whole schizophrenia and all the perversions of man are rooted in those wrong sexual ethics. I conceive of sex as a natural phenomenon. There is nothing profane in it and there is nothing sacred in it. It is purely natural life energy of tremendous importance. If you cannot sublimate it, it can destroy you; and it has destroyed humanity. It is the energy man is born out of; everything is born out of it. Naturally there is no higher energy than sexual energy, but biological reproduction is not its only function. The same energy can have different creative dimensions. The same energy, joined with meditative practices, can be sublimated to the highest peak of consciousness — what I call enlightenment. My sexual ethics is not a law, it is love. To me, if sex is the creative force in the world, it must be nearest to the creative center of the world — whatever name you give to it. Creative energy must be closest to creation, to the creative source of it all. People should be taught the art of converting sexual energy into spiritual enlightenment.
Osho