Essays you like

[Sinny]

Culture Carriers in a Landscape of Language
BY JASUN HORSLEY

He wrestled with the words on the screen. It was literally as if some organism inside him were fighting against an awareness that was struggling to emerge. It was the awareness that language had him as its prisoner, and that it would resist, with everything it had, all his attempts to express that fact through language. Maybe even this was the final, the most advanced strategy of language: to imprison him via his very efforts to use it to get free of it?

What unfathomable cunning! As long as he believed that language offered the means to understand the nature of the matrix he was caught inside, he would continue tinkering away at the edges of the cage, convinced he was slowing wearing down the bars, when really he was only polishing them and making them shine.

And he was getting older with each passing hour. That was the nature of the prison: the mind continued as if it was immortal, whiling away the hours in fantasy realms of abstraction, oblivious—crucially oblivious—to the steady decay of the organism for which time was rapidly running out. And if the mind still held sway, in its eternal illusion of control, when the body died, then what he was—that organic awareness embedded inside the conscious system of existence—would find itself shackled to that hideous linguistic parasite even in death. The monkey would ride his awareness into the next life, and so on, maybe forever, each time its tentacles wrapped a little tighter around his slowly shrinking psyche. The end result would be—what? That an awareness meant to fill infinity would be reduced to a fictional character, printed in grungy black ink on the tightly bound pages of a pulp fiction novel, lost among countless boxes in the dusty attics of eternity.

He would be Philip K. Dicked out of existence, with just enough residual awareness to know it, to remember what he had lost.

Continued..

https://auticulture.wordpress.com/20...e-of-language/

[helium]

On Dumpster Diving by Lars Eighner

I find from the experience of scavenging two rather deep lessons. The first is to take what I can use and let the rest go by. I have come to think that there is no value in the abstract. A thing I cannot use or make useful, perhaps by trading, has no value however fine or rare it may be. I mean useful in a broad sense — so, for example, some art I would think useful and valuable, but other art might be otherwise for me.

I was shocked to realize that some things are not worth acquiring, but now I think it is so. Some material things are white elephants that eat up the possessor's substance.

The second lesson is of the transience of material being. This has not quite converted me to a dualist, but it has made some headway in that direction. I do not suppose that ideas are immortal, but certainly mental things are longer-lived than other material things.

Once I was the sort of person who invests material objects with sentimental value. Now I no longer have those things, but I have the sentiments yet.

Many times in my travels I have lost everything but the clothes I was wearing and Lizbeth. The things I find in Dumpsters, the love letters and ragdolls of so many lives, remind me of this lesson. Now I hardly pick up a thing without envisioning the time I will cast it away. This I think is a healthy state of mind. Almost everything I have now has already been cast out at least once, proving that what I own is valueless to someone.

Anyway, I find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy —we both know there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race millions who have confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.

I am sorry for them.

[MCIV]

Total Eclipse
Annie Dillard

What it's like to experience a total eclipse in exquisite, intense prose. If you've only ever experienced a partial eclipse, you have no idea.

I drove to the path of totality 2017 y'all. The prettiest day in August in Tennessee was nothing like winter in the Yakima Valley in 1980 for the record. Very untrippy road trip. just gorgeous

[jigglypuff]

good history / bad history
by tibor kalman, j. abbott miller & karrie jacobs

"a good history of design isn't a history of design at all."

i read this some time ago, and i still can't unsee/unthink what this essay says about "jive modernism" every time i come across something that strikes my gut as "bad art."

the one-sided, "parasitic" approach towards modernism / design history is so prevalent and actually it's an easy trap to fall into.

[jigglypuff]

the creative process
by james baldwin

i still find the ending a little strange (his way of expressing what i think he's saying might be of its time) but i love how he describes the relationship between artist and society as a "lover's war." that is exactly it.

[rokki balbotox]

Noel Gugliemi