Love has a thousand shapes.
-To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
"Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the
drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And,
resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which
traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general
question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as
these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood
over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of
life? That was all--a simple question; one that tended to close in on
one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great
revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily
miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark;
here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley
and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay
saying, "Life stand still here"; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment
something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to
make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the nature
of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal
passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves
shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay
said. "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all to her.
- To the Lighthouse
The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among
its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious
distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady
goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the
whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish;
on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the
letters together in one flash--the way of genius.
- Virigina Woolf, To the Lighthouse
The is Neither Life nor Death (1914-1915)
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity
- Mina Loy
"Why is it invariably I who swerves first? Why precisely me and not him?"
- Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
In Taiji (T'ai Chi) movement, follow the curve to be aware of the straight line.
- Master Wu Yu-Hsaing
“This is not two friends who engage in thought”, Deleuze and Guattari write; “rather, it is thought itself which requires this division of thought between friends” (WIP: 69).
This operation takes place as if the personae were so many divers, descending from the plane of immanence into the sea below, where singularities lie scattered like so many stray pearls. Braving the depths, the personae collect these shimmering ordinates (chiffres) and then return to the surface, where these singularities will be thrown on a table of immanence like “a handful of dice from chance-chaos” (WIP: 75). With each throw, we induce the features that will be arrayed, collected and diagrammed in the concept.
“Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
The speech of silence is achieved when words, and their potential ability to hurt meaning, are done away with. Words entrap meaning, torture it, slice it into pieces the way a butcher cuts the meat of a slaughtered animal and serves it to us...In silence, meaning is no longer heard, but felt; and feeling is the best hearing, the best instrument for recording meaning.
- Of Water and the Spirit, Malidoma Patrice Some
Genuine love neither presupposes a judgement nor is it a sentimentality. Its unique feature is that it is always love for a person; it is directed towards the person as reality. But what is reality? Certainly it is the other's physical charms, but also the other's mental-spiritual qualities, and over and above these there always remains that which is unfathomable. This is the true object of love. In proceeding towards its object love makes everything of value achieve the highest possible value ideally destined for it; and in this way it brings out the highlights of another's worth. Love elevates, it never degrades; at its highest pitch it is not love for something alien, but participation in it as something inalienable.
- Life of Naropa, Herbert Guenther
About a month ago, I watched King of Kong with my then 11-yo son. I think we both really enjoyed it. Billy Mitchell, the villain, is the teeth in the ass of the bear, Steve Wiebe, who is even too shy to correct the referee Walter Day on the pronunciation of his own name. Somehow, in some weird way, Steve needed Billy to motivate him on to break the records. They were connected like an assemblage, the crystalline and the organic.
Twenty-one years ago today, W.G. Sebald was driving to Norwich, the city explored in his internationally acclaimed novel The Rings of Saturn. He had just pulled on to the A-146 when his car “failed to follow the curve and drove straight into the opposite lane.”