Three, or two, or one

"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."

William Faulkner (1897-1962), interview in The Paris Review of 1956.

Something of meaning

 
"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."

Pearl S. Buck, novelist and Nobel laureate (1892-1973)



If you relate to this on every level, you're not "abnormal" or "inhuman". What Buck meant by this is that you're build differently. You're not a "cruelly delicate organism", you're hypersensitive. You pay attention, perhaps too much sometimes, but then again you can't help it. With age is honed the capacity to process more efficiently, to compartmentalise, and even though some will say it is a necessary dulling of the soul, others will say that they pour more of their sensitivity into their creative output, that they embed their feelings and emotions into that something of meaning. And that helps, a lot, because when you look at that creation, you will no longer need to hold these feelings and emotions inside of you, they're in every fibre of this creation.


Just be you, and all shall be well.

 

Brutes and beasts

 
He was silent for a long time.

“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he began, suddenly. “Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, ‘My Intended.’ You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this—ah—specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. ‘Mostly fossil,’ the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn’t bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this favour had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for one either—trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally. You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that’s difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was good enough to say himself—his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
 

In Depths

 

"Creativity -- like human life itself -- begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary."

in The Artist's Way (1992), by Julia Cameron, artist, author, teacher, filmmaker, composer, and journalist (1948-)

 

At the spectrum's ends

 

"A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself."

in Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003), by Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017), Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist, essayist and geologist.

Incidentally, I met the man when he came to my town for a lecture and to introduce this book which was just out. Fascinating person(ality) and thinking process (you could almost see the cogs spinning in his brain).

 

Fuel to the fire

 
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."

Haruki Murakami, After Dark (2004)

 

La agudeza para recordarse

 
“When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.”

Baltasar Gracián, Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher, (1601-1658), Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom) (1647)

 

De la dignité dans l'indignation

 
"La vie garde un prix tant qu'on en accorde à celle des autres, à travers l'amour, l'amitié, l'indignation, la compassion."

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion."

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), La vieillesse (1970)

 

Morally unethical

 

"In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary"."

Ellen Jane Willis, writer (1941-2006)


Very interesting read (source)

 

Lights and shadows

"I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality."

in the essay "Deeds Rather Than Words" (1963), by Walt Disney, entrepreneur and animator (1901-1966)

From the Pierian spring

 
"A polymath is someone who is interested in everything, and nothing else."

Susan Sontag, writer, critic, polymath (1933-2004)

 

Where are we?

 

An invisible bird flies over,

but casts a quick shadow.

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow

of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe.

A man sleeps heavily,
though something blazes in him like the sun,

like a magnificent fringe sewn up under the hem.

He turns under the covers.

Any image is a lie:

    A clear red stone tastes sweet.

    You kiss a beautiful mouth, and a key

    turns in the lock of your fear.

    A spoken sentence sharpens to a fine edge.
    

    A mother dove looks for her nest,

    asking where, ku? Where, ku?

Where the lion lies down.
Where any man or woman goes to cry.
Where the sick go when they hope to get well.

Where a wind lifts that helps with winnowing,

and, the same moment, sends a ship on its way.

Where anyone says Only God Is Real.

Ya Hu! Where beyond where.

A bright weaver's shuttle flashes back and forth,

east-west, Where-are-we? Ma ku? Maku.
like the sun saying Where are we?
as it weaves with the asking.

 

Rumi (1207-1273), in The Essential Rumi.

 

I am wrong.

 
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), in his keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987).

 

Steady flow

"Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness."

Brenda Ueland, journalist, writer (1891-1985)

 

Mirror, mirror

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

in On the concept of History, aka Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Here Are My Black Clothes

 

I think now it is better to love no one
than to love you. Here are my black clothes,
the tired nightgowns and robes fraying
in many places. Why should they hang useless
as though I were going naked? You liked me well enough
in black; I make you a gift of these objects.
You will want to touch them with your mouth, run
your fingers through the thin
tender underthings and I
will not need them in my new life.

in The House on Marshland (1975), by Louise Glück, American poet and Nobel prize in literature (April 22, 1943 - October 13, 2023)

 

The unlost and the unfound

 
“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

in Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (1929) by Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938).

Never discard the words of anyone whom you cannot say for certain if they are a genius or a mad person.

 

A measurement of discovery

 

"There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."

Enrico Fermi, physicist and Nobel laureate (1901-1954)

Apparently this is what these people have found out. They were scientists in their own rights, showing us that what we thought was obvious was indeed...a discovery several orders of magnitude less tantalisingly promising than they initially thought (Darwin Award for the win).

Coherence

 

"The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience… What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part."

in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

 

Through time, time (un)conquered

 

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

The Sound and the Fury (1929), William Faulkner (1897-1962)