Credibly Random

"Moments to remember are just like other moments. They are only made memorable by the scars they leave." - Chris Marker var sc_project=7178029; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="b0368bce";

[kpkelleher]

“A poet friend of mine explained my predicament rather vaguely by saying that ‘I was trying to find myself’. He may have been right. But if so, who is this self? Where shall I discover him amongst the many who cross my path, and by what sign shall he be known to me?” — Frigyes Karinthy

[kpkelleher]

A Myth of Devotion

When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added. Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting. A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn't everyone want love? He waited many years, building a world, watching Persephone in the meadow. Persephone, a smeller, a taster. If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all. Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night the beloved body, compass, polestar, to hear the quiet breathing that says I am alive, that means also you are alive, because you hear me, you are here with me. And when one turns, the other turns— That's what he felt, the lord of darkness, looking at the world he had constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind that there'd be no more smelling here, certainly no more eating. Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? These things he couldn't imagine; no lover ever imagines them. He dreams, he wonders what to call this place. First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden. In the end, he decides to name it Persephone's Girlhood. A soft light rising above the level meadow, behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.

                                         -  Louise Glück (from Averno)

[kpkelleher]

ceremony

[kpkelleher]

Do not forget that without lucidity nothing is possible... The magic we have called forth does not operate except by detachment. What makes the game possible is the lucidity of the witness, whereas identification with consensus reality, on the contrary, shrinks experience and reduces the realm of possibility. In dreams, as in daily life, the same laws operate: The more one is detached, the more one can enjoy perceiving all of existence as a vast playground. The less one is detached, the more life turns into a dead end.

- Alejandro Jodorowsky

[kpkelleher]

fleeting

[kpkelleher]

The Glimpse

"Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash - it's very tiny, very tiny, content. When I was painting those figures, I was thinking about Gertrude Stein, like they were ladies of Gertrude Stein. Like one of them would say, 'How do you like me?' Then I could sustain this thing all the time because it could change all the time. She could almost go upside down, or not be there, or come back again; she could be any size. Do you understand? Because this content could take care of almost anything that could happen, you know. And I still have it now from some fleeting thing - like when one passes something, you know, and it makes an impression."

"The real world - this so-called real world - is just something you put up with like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world. Then I'm in the real world - I'm on the beam. Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right. When I'm slipping, I say, 'Hey, this is interesting!' It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me. I'm not doing so good. I'm stiff. As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping, most of the time, into that glimpse. I'm like a slipping glimpser. I get excited just to see that sky is blue, that earth is earth. And that's the hardest thing: To see a rock somewhere, and there it is - earth-colored rock. I'm getting closer to that. Then there is a time in life when you just take a walk. And you walk in your own landscape."

- Willem de Kooning, interview with David Sylvester, 1960.

[kpkelleher]

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong... But I don't have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose. Which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell... When you doubt and ask it's gets a little harder to believe.

- Richard Feynman

[kpkelleher]

[kpkelleher]

after the fire, during the rain.

[kpkelleher]

I consider consumerism a worse fascism than that the classical one, because clerical-fascism did not transform Italians. It did not get into them. It was totalitarian but not totalizing.

- Pier Paolo Pasolini

[kpkelleher]

thataway

[kpkelleher]

We no longer understood how we'd gotten here. We couldn't grasp what had happened to us. We woke up one day and all the street signs had been stolen, all the navigation systems had shorted out. The car had no gas, the living room had no furniture, the imprint in the bed beside us had been smoothed over. 'I'm sorry' was all I could think of to say.

- Dennis Lehane

[kpkelleher]

It's big.

[kpkelleher]

People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

- Helen Fisher

[kpkelleher]

selfportrait in fog

[kpkelleher]

One aspect of what we could call the crisis of modern democracies is that the citizens feel they have more and more rights and fewer and fewer responsibilities toward the community... During the French Revolution there wasn't only a Declaration of Human Rights, but also, in 1795, a Declaration of the Duties of the Citizen... People are a lot less interested in the question of the citizens' responsibilities than in that of their rights. They're nevertheless two sides of the very same thing.

Jean-Francois Revel

[kpkelleher]

shadows