vertov and mango

a journal (of sorts).

[vertov-mango]

“In my life, as I’m sure in your life, when one is young, one supposes that there is some way to avoid disaster. When I was a little boy, for example, I used to tell my mother: ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. I’m going to go here. I’m going to go there. I’ll be a writer. I’ll be a fireman. I’m going to do! Do! Do! Be! This!’

And momma would look at me and say: ‘It’s more than an ocean.’

It took me a long time, a very long time, to begin to realise that she was right and to realise what she meant. I, like all of us, thought I knew what I wanted and thought I knew who I was and thought that I could do it — and we all do this — without paying my dues.”

— James Baldwin

[vertov-mango]

“I visited my doctor recently, and as I was getting dressed, he said, ‘You know, in the 19th century, most people your age were dead.’ And I’ve thought of that remark on many different levels, and I realise culture is a con game designed to bewilder you for 35 to 40 years. And then if, by some miracle, you can outlive that span of time, a strange realisation will begin to dawn as you sit at the poker table. You’ll realise, ‘This is a—this is a bunch of crap!’”

— Terence McKenna

[vertov-mango]

And what is the prophet to do after the exhaustion of the visions, of the richly spiritual inner world that drove his work? What are they to do once the psyche has fallen silent, once the tether to a higher realm he had so come to adore has ruptured?

[vertov-mango]

Perhaps to begin to see that the supposedly higher realm was entirely immanent in this one, in this one, in this one. The one so oft maligned as ordinary.

[vertov-mango]

And what is the prophet to do after the exhaustion of the visions, of the richly spiritual inner world that drove his work? What are they to do once the psyche has fallen silent, once the tether to a higher realm he had so come to adore has ruptured?

[vertov-mango]

“Whether the person in question is rich or poor, has family and social position or not, alters nothing, for outer circumstances are far from giving his life a meaning. It is much more a question of his unreasoned need of what we call a spiritual life, and this he cannot obtain from universi­ties, libraries, or even churches. He cannot accept what these have to offer because it touches only his head, and does not stir his heart. In such cases, the physician's recognition of the spiritual factors in their true light is vitally important, and the patient's unconscious helps him in his need by producing dreams whose contents are undeniably religious. Not to recognise the spiritual source of such contents means faulty treatment and failure.”

— Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of Meaning.

[vertov-mango]

"A person's energy is always revealed by his activity; that is his light. His shadow lies in his reactions."

— Carl Jung, The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C.G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915-1916, p. 167.

[vertov-mango]

"What a writer is obliged, at some point, to realise is that he's involved with a language which he has to change. For example, for a black writer, especially in this country, to be born into the English language is to realise that the assumptions of the language, the assumptions on which language operates, are his enemy.”

— James Baldwin, 1979 Lecture at the University of California Berkeley.

[vertov-mango]

“You are constantly, and this is part of the democratic legacy, we are constantly told ‘you’re not special. Special isn’t special; anybody could do it.’ […] It is yourself that is the final arbiter, and recognising this makes one less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion.”

[vertov-mango]

"This is why psychedelics are illegal; they don't care whether people jump out of windows or any of that. They're not interested in public health. They do not want people to take back their minds!" — Terence McKenna

[ravruerr]

turn away, run away

[vertov-mango]

"At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an “open sea” exist."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Book V, Aphorism 343).

[vertov-mango]

“And now the task changes. It's a completely different kind of spiritual universe that you live in after you've found the answer. Because the task becomes facing the answer. Facing it. You now have it, it's no more about disciplining the passions and all that. No, no, it's now been handed over. And so, what are you going to do with it?”

— Terence McKenna

[petaltexturedskies]

Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her mother Aurelia, written c. August 1954, from Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963

[vertov-mango]

“Life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.”

— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies.

[vertov-mango]

Can’t stop the spirits when they need you.

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

[nomeusstuff]