Dying is a wild night and a new road. Emily Dickinson
Think always of the margins, of the cold walks, and the lines that lead nowhere. T.E. Hulme
I was bothered by the noise of people below me and was unable to fall asleep until I discovered it was caused by horses. Jean Paul
Everything is permissible as long as it is fantastic. Carlo Mollino
A fine color or line are in fact the expression of the most absolute intelligence. Italo Svevo
We shall deal here with humble things, things not usually granted earnest consideration, or at least not valued for their historical import. But no more in history than in painting is it the impressiveness of the subject that matters. The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon. In their aggregate, the humble objects of which we shall speak have shaken our mode of living to its very roots. Modest things of daily life, they accumulate into forces acting upon whoever moves within the orbit of our civilisation. Siegfried Giedion
Look, this is your problem; this is the problem of the next century, the friction of all these millions of people rubbing together. John Cage (in conversation with Bruce Mau)
Every truth is always surrounded by many other truths which are worth being explored. Marcel Broodthaers
There are talents whose nature is so fertile, whose inner climate is so tropical, that they can create a whole series of important works merely by living through the most ordinary occurrences with the greatest possible intensity. They can be likened to those treeless islands in the south seas up which some fruit pits are left behind by ships’ passengers, and which not many years later are covered with dense forests. Georg Brandes
Sometimes new ideas need old buildings. Jane Jacobs
Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. Paul Goodman
The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, of like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
God lurks in the detail. Aby Warburg
Michelangelo: A good sculpture looks good at the bottom of the stairs after it rolls from the third floor.
Ettore Sottsass: So what will our modern architecture look like at the ground floor of time, after three hundred years of rolling down stairs?
The function of style is to give a feeling of the country behind the hill. Raymond Chandler
For I have been a boy and a girl and a bird and a tree and a mute fish in the sea. Diogenes Laertius
Charles Eames, 1970, on the aquarium project at the 901 Washington office, where they had clustering fish and invertebrates that didn’t like too much current, but then they had pelagic animals that need current: They’re dependent on change. Their whole idea of security is essentially when the current is flowing by them. … They’re very secure in change. And I have a feeling in a way that we as a society and as a group are gradually becoming pelagic in our feeling. That if anyone is going to really feel secure, he must not have an insistence on the status quo, but he must feel secure … in change. I think that we’ve all now experienced this in a sense, where if you recognize a change and it’s sort of like being in a place that you’ve never been before, and suddenly things become oriented, and a value appears that you’d never known before. And it seems to me that this is an aesthetic feeling.
Sacrifices but no compromises. Karl Lagerfeld
※
Now, on the afternoon in question I was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where I was waiting — I forget for whom. Suddenly, and with compelling force, I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost the sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I would instead speak of a labyrinth. I am concerned here not with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic center, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading into the interior. These entrances I call ‘primal acquaintances’; each of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met not through other people but through neighborhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such — hardly numerous — situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze. But since most of them — at least those that remain in our memory — for their part open up new acquaintances, relations to new people, after a time they branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the right, the female to the left). Whether cross-connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the intertwinements of our path through life. More important, however, are the astonishing insights that a study of this plan provides into the differences among individual lives. What part is played in the primal acquaintanceships of different people’s lives by profession and school, family and travel? And above all: Is the formation of the many offshoots governed in individual existence by hidden laws? Which ones start early in life, and which ones start late? Which are continued to the end of life, and which peter out? ‘If a man has character,’ says Nietzsche, ‘he will have the same experience over and over again.’ Whether or not this is true on a large scale, on a small one there are perhaps paths that lead us again and again to people who have one and the same function for us: passageways that always, in the most diverse periods of life, guide us to the friend, the betrayer, the beloved, the pupil, or the master. This is what the sketch of my life revealed to me as it took shape before me on that Paris afternoon. Against the background of the city, the people who had surrounded me grew close together to form a figure. Walter Benjamin {from the Berlin Chronicle of 1932}
I can’t resist quoting the next two sentences, which open a related story and are magnificently evocative: “It was many years earlier, I believe at the beginning of the war, that in Berlin, against the background of the people then closest to me, the world of things contracted to a symbol similarly profound. It was an emblem of four rings. This takes me to one of the old Berlin houses on Kupfergraben …”
※
To hammer a table together with painstaking craftmanship and, at the same time, to do nothing — not in such a way that someone could say “Hammering is nothing to him,” but “To him, hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing,” which would have made the hammering even bolder, more determined, more real, and, if you like, more insane. Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Consider the difference between the ‘suspended needle (xuanzhen)’ and ‘hanging-dewdrop (chuilu)’ brush strokes, and then consider the marvels of rolling thunder and toppling rocks, the postures of wild geese in flight and beasts in fright, the attitudes of phoenixes dancing and snakes startled, the power of sheer cliffs and crumbling peaks, the shapes of facing danger and holding on to rotten wood, which are sometimes heavy like threatening clouds and sometimes light like cicada wings; consider that when the brush moves, water flows from a spring, and when the brush stops, a mountain stands firm; consider what is very, very light, as if the new moon were rising at the sky’s edge, and what is very, very clear like the multitude of stars arrayed in the Milky Way — these are the same as the subtle mysteries of nature: they cannot be forced. Sun Guoting {calligrapher of the Tang Dynasty, 648-703 CE}
Dial-twiddling is an interpretative act. Glenn Gould
The Boredoms are like a moon on a lake. Only there is no moon and no lake. Only Boredoms. Yamatsuka Eye
※
Still, sometimes the best jokes work like a series of instructions which act remarkably lifelike. Which assemble in a reflective way, which can be read a myriad of ways rather than merely straightforward.
Steven Wright: I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don’t know what to feed it.
It’s a little life machine. A machine where life is different. It’s kind of funny because it only takes such a small machine to create such a world. _why?
※
Dawn is the best time to locate ruins. Eliot Noyes (Okay, this is out of context — it’s from a letter Noyes wrote when he was participating in an archaeological dig as an undergrad, doing flyovers — but isn’t it a beautiful phrase? The obverse of the owl of Minerva flying at dusk?)
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential death in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters. Henry James, Sr. {from a letter written to his sons William and Henry, Jr.}
I love things complexly because they are complex. Jerry Lettvin
Live like the wind and the clouds, and then die. Naong (Korean Buddhist monk, 1320-1376)
I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride. William James
In the long run we are all dead. J.M. Keynes, “Tract on Monetary Reform,” 1923
The story is your laboratory, reading is your research, and writing is your experiment. Matt Webb
I had to live from day to day and I went on like that until my meeting, through Nanda [Fernanda Pivano], with Hemingway and later with Ginsberg and the American literature of solitude, confirmed — and this time really did explain almost without words, through poetry, music and friendship — that life could be lived as a continuous story, like a river, not as a story aimed at perfection and progress. They bore out the permanent fragility of the history we live in, of the things people do, and of the things that may possibly be thought. It was a time of total ideological passion, as in the enlightenment of a thought or situation. I understood you could get to the bottom of something without hoping this would become a stone monument, because everything brings fragility with it. An attitude of this kind makes you live with modesty and doubt, but also with great concentration and intensity. Ettore Sottsass
Old Khanty storytellers would keep going in the evenings until everyone else was asleep, so that no one would ever know how their stories really finished. Natalia Novikova {Russian anthropologist, on the Khanty of western Siberia}
The stories told by Orochon hunters, on returning every evening to the encampment, rarely conclude with the death of the prey, but rather elaborate on everything of interest witnessed or encountered along the trail. Stories, for the Orochon, should not end for the same reason that life should not. They are rather carried on for as long as the saddle, the embodiment of the unison of a man and his riding deer, continues to thread a path through the forest. And since saddles are inherited, each generation takes up and carries on the stories of its predecessors. Tim Ingold {from Lines: A Brief History}
No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. Norbert Wiener
My main goal and motivation is “What can I do to make things interesting for myself and everybody else with the least amount of effort?” Stewart Brand
The Viennese logicians worked out a system wherein everything is, as far as I understood it, a tautology, that is, a repetition of premises. In mathematics, it goes from a very simple theorem to a complicated one, but it’s all in the first theorem. So, metaphysics: tautology: religion: tautology; everything is tautology, except black coffee because the senses are in control! The eyes see the black coffee, the senses are in control, it’s a truth; but the rest is always tautology. Marcel Duchamp {in interview with Pierre Cabanne}
You shouldn’t mix up fact and truth. I do not trust facts so much as I trust human ecstasies. Werner Herzog
※
When Raymond Carver died, this list was found in the breast pocket of his shirt
Eggs
peanut butter
hot choc
Australia?
Antarctica??
※
Ibo singulariter donec transeam
I go my way alone Isabelle Eberhardt’s motto
Fidus in silvi silentibus
Have faith in the silence of the forest Viktor Schauberger’s motto
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter. John Muir
I shall always remember how, as we left the station, I lifted my left hand to see the time by my wrist-watch, and rode into the desert. Time was of enormous importance on the railway; and so was one’s luggage, and there were speed and noise there, among other worries; but in the desert there were only sunrise and sunset to notice, and noon, when all animals slept and the gazelles were not to be found. Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight
If the human species lasted long enough in its present state, a time would necessarily come in which even the lives of individuals would return in the same circumstances, down to the smallest details. I myself would return, to live once again in the city called Hannover, on the banks of the Leine river, once again busy studying the history of Brunswick and writing the same letters to the same friends. Leibniz
Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and like a pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors is again such a garden or such a pond. Leibniz (paragraph 67 of the Monadology)
Vitality shows itself not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over. F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you want to move forward into new territory, what you do is put yourself near that ragged edge, because that’s where things are moving the fastest. If you’re learning how to ski, the optimum learning rate is where you’re not standing up all the way down the hill nor are you totally wiping out every time, but where you’re right on that edge of being out of control but you’re just barely in control. If what you’re interested in doing is learning, then what you do is place yourself in that kind of situation. Russel Schweickart (astronaut, Apollo 9)
When we eat, the fork will tell us how thou didst desire us to hold it. Robert Walser
Between snowflakes and leaves there are resemblances. At the sight of snow falling one thinks that one is seeing small flowers that are falling from the sky. Why is foliage dying in the autumn secretly golden, and why does one think of springtime flowers having tongues, to shape some kind of conversation? Seeing leaves one thinks of hands, their fingerinesses are budlike. Birds’ feathers, leaves on a tree, the delicate feathery, fingery snowfall in winter — one rightly tells oneself that they are related. The wind seems to be an undependable blunderer; Its lull is as sweet as compliance, blissful in itself, flowing round itself, feeling itself beautiful. Does the wind feel that it is windy? Does the leaf know how beautiful it is? Do the snowflakes smile and do flowers charm themselves, and do curls know their curliness? A river in its motion resembles a limber wanderer in a hurry, the watery mass of a lake in its repose a beautiful woman in white gloves, with blue eyes. The profusion of leaves hides hides the enchanting finery of the branches. It is a pretty thought that pretty things exist. The shapes of waves and branches are snaky, and times do come when one knows that one is no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or, as it clearly longs now and then for release from its uncommonly graceful confines, the leaf. Robert Walser
the floor is a theorem
the obelisk is an enigma
the fountain is a voice
the stair is a whirlpool
the roof navigates in the sky, its keel up
the vault is a flight
the balcony is a sailboat
the window is a transparency (it is sight, life)
the room is a world Gio Ponti, “In Praise of Architecture”
Every day I set less store on intellect. Every day I see more clearly that if the writer is to repossess himself of some part of his impressions, reach something personal, that is, and the only material of art, he must put it aside. What intellect restores to us under the name of the past, is not the past. In reality, as soon as each hour of one’s life has died, it embodies itself in some material object, as do the souls of the dead in certain folk-stories, and hides there. There it remains captive, captive forever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free. Very likely we may never happen on the object (or the sensation, since we apprehend every object as sensation) that it hides in; and thus there are hours of our life that will never be resuscitated: for this object is so tiny, so lost in the world, and there is so little likelihood that we shall come across it. Proust, “By Way of Sainte-Beuve”
We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. R.H. Blyth
By doing we forego. — At bottom I abhor all those moralities which say: “Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!” — I am well disposed toward those moralities which goad me to so something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it! Whoever lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong to such a life drops off: without hatred or aversion he sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree; or he may not even notice that it takes its leave, for his eye is riveted to its goal, and forward, not sideward, backward, downward. “What we do should determine what we forego”—that is how I like it, that is my placitum [principle]. Nietzsche
If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but rather in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment. Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety. And no passer-by would guess that it is just here, in what is defective and censurable, that the fleeting darts of adoration nestle. Walter Benjamin {from Einbahnstraße, 1928, for Asja Lacis}
Even now, every year in the Government of Nizhni-Novgorod, an extraordinary festival takes place at which all the mystical sects assemble to dispute about God. This festival is bound up with a peculiar legend, which Rimski-Korsakov worked up into an opera: A prince is supposed to have built the town of Kitezh in the fifteenth century; when the Tartars invaded the country the town was engulfed in a lake, so says the legend. On the 23rd of June every year the sunken town becomes visible to the sectarians who have arrived at a true knowledge of God; they alone can see the town and hear its bells ringing. Every year the dispute between individuals sects is decided in this way. René Fülöp-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus {1926}
The architecture of virtual reality imagined as an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, shooting galleries, pinball arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with damp-stained years of men’s magazines, chili joints, premises of unlicensed denturists, of fireworks and cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, purveyors of sexual appliances, pawnbrokers, wonton counters, love hotels, hotdog stands, tortilla factories, Chinese greengrocers, liquor stores, herbalists, chiropractors, barbers, bars. These are dreams of commerce. Above them rise intricate barrios, zones of more private fantasy … William Gibson {from “Academy Leader” (1991)}