Each sound is worthy of attention. Each moment presents unique experiences if we are open to them. John Cage was not a musician. He explored the realms of sound that humans perceive as well as remaining wide-eyed and open to the world in many other ways. Why not live each moment as if anything might happen?
“I got the kind of madness Socrates talked about, a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention. I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. After all, what is reality anyway? Nothing but a collective hunch.”
– Lily Tomlin
“. . . there Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .
– William Gass
“Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality, so the writer can escape the limits of reality.”
– William S. Burroughs
are many roads to space. To Achieve complete freedom from past conditioning is to be in space. Techniques exist for achieving such freedom. These techniques are being concealed and withheld. We must search for and consider techniques for discovery.” – William S. Burroughs, the Adding Machine
“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality”
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark .
– H.P. Lovecraft
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
-William Blake
“We are all living in fictions at the moment, one need not write about it; instead the task of the writer, or any astute inquirer is to uncover what is left of reality.” – J. G. Ballard
“In nature there is neither line nor color. Line and color have been created by man. They are abstractions. . . .The pleasures we derive in them are of a different sort, yet they are perfectly equal to and absolutely independent of the subject of the picture.”
I don’t need to know the words of this song to be in love with it. I don’t need to see the singer. Her voice and the song is all I need to make beautiful images in my mind.
There is a lot here about power structures and how they interact with populations as well as ideas about human collective agency, what we can accomplish together. I was left with more questions than answers, but for 14 minutes, this talk provides some interesting points of view with which to look at refugees, income inequality, and urban issues. I am still trying to figure out why her talk makes me feel optimistic.
There is a lot here about power structures and how they interact with populations as well as ideas about human collective agency, what we can accomplish together. I was left with more questions than answers, but for 14 minutes, this talk provides some interesting points of view with which to look at refugees, income inequality, and urban issues. I am still trying to figure out why her talk makes me feel optimistic.
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Myriad Ways 