redrawblak

[ieseiesei-blog]

Like the Atman of the Vedas, like the Buddhist Mind, like Tao, the Great Spirit of the American Indian is everywhere and in all things, unchanging. Even the Australian aborigines—considered to be the most ancient race on earth—distinguish between linear time and a “Great Time’ of dreams, myths, and heroes, in which all is present in this moment. It stirs me that this primordial intuition has been perpetuated by voice and act across countless horizons and for centuries on end, illuminating the dream-life of primitives, the early Indo-European civilizations of the Sumerians and Hittites, the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, guarded by hidden cults in the Dark Ages, emerging as Christian, Hasidic, and Muslim mysticism (Sufism) as well as in all the splendorous religions of the East. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long a ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen (via ieseiesei)

[ieseiesei-blog]

Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere – in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that… leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him, though yet hidden from his sight.

Lama Govinda, "The Way of the White Clouds" (via The Snow Leopard)

[ieseiesei-blog]

All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them...not about their future but about their experience of the present moment.

"Slowness" -Milan Kundera

[ieseiesei-blog]

Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself. Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write). But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

[ieseiesei-blog]

[ieseiesei-blog]

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's hurting self through the world. But being--being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, on which the universe falls like warm rain.

Immortality, Milan Kundera

[ieseiesei-blog]

Path: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a path not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points it connects. A path is a tribute to space. Every stretch of path has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. Before paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and enjoy it. What's more, he no longer saw his own life as a path, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by even greater speed. Path and highway; these are also two different conceptions of beauty. When [a modern man] says that at a particular place the landscape is beautiful, that means: if you stopped the car at that place, you might see a beautiful fifteenth-century castle surrounded by a park; or a lake reaching far into the distance, with swans floating on its brilliant surface. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. In the world of paths, beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tells us at every step: "Stop!".

-Immortality, Milan Kundera

[ieseiesei-blog]

Very proud and excited about this video of the Quartet performing my composition 'Nomad' earlier this year in Houston, TX as part of the Artery Media Project. Featuring Oscar Rossignoli (piano), Trey Boudreaux (bass), and Sam Wiseman (dr).

Brad Walker: http://www.bradwalker.me

[ieseiesei-blog]

If you have a negative tendency and you deny it, then you’ve doubled it. If you have a negative tendency and you look at it, then the possibility exists that you can convert it.

-George Saunders (interview with NYTimes)

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Tito Mouraz - Open Office Space (2010-12)

[treybmusic]

Hi, friends. Coming to you now from Toronto, Ontario, where I am staying for a week in between tours (the ladyfriend resides here).

Before traveling here, I had the good fortune to tour with the Brad Walker Quartet/Quintet through Louisiana and Texas (Baton Rouge, Austin, Houston, Lafayette,...

[instagram]

[ieseiesei-blog]

Instagram at Chernobyl

[treybmusic]

Hi, friends. I’m working every day to expand the content of my website. In the meantime, enjoy this photograph of Punkin with a 60s Hagstrom H-II.

-T

[ieseiesei-blog]

...is not an event more significant and noteworthy the great number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

[ieseiesei-blog]

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me; yes, beyond a doubt, this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations...

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

[ieseiesei-blog]

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration...shining down from the heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgement, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects... All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Freidrich Nietzsche: _Human, All Too Human_

[ieseiesei-blog]

Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexpectedly. How can we bargain with it? The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day 'one who knows the better way to live alone.'

attr. to the Buddha, via _Bhaddakeratta Sutta_