“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
Quotes
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography
“What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”
On support and attribution..
“Yes. Please, please support the artists who make the songs and stories and pictures and dance and theatre that move you. If you appreciate their art, and you can afford to do so, please *buy* that art. But even if you can’t afford to buy their work, then talk about it, share it, celebrate it in some fashion that respects and values the artist as well as the art. Give them credit. Say their names.”
Thoughts on Doodling
“…keep drawing, make A LOT of drawings, and don’t worry about making bad drawings.”
Brian Eno on Art, Confidence, and How Attention Creates Value
“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.”
The Wizarding Way
“DRAW FROM LIFE. All the time. Draw naked people. Draw clothed people. Draw pets and buildings and teacups and trees and draw all of it all the time. Put it in a book that you keep in your pocket. Steal life from the realm of the living so that the worlds you create might also live.”
1975, talking to Michael Sragow, then the film critic for the San Francisco Examiner.
“I think we all have this little theatre on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inexorably mixed. What makes each one of us unique is the potency of the individual mix.
“We can make our lives only when we know what our lives have been. And drama is about how you make the next moment. It’s like when you’re watching a sporting event, like a soccer game here; when it’s going on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But all the rules are laid down.
“I don’t make the mistake that high culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too. When people say, ‘Oh listen, they’re playing our song,’ they don’t mean, ‘Our song, this little cheap tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish is what we felt when we met.’ What they saying is ‘That song reminds us of the tremendous feeling we had when we met.’ Some of the songs I use are great anyway but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David’s Psalms. They’re saying, ‘Listen, the world isn’t quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,’ ‘There’s you and me in it’ or ‘The sun is shining in it.’
“So called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound a depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. And anyone who says different is a fascist.”
“…Let me explain this slowly”
“He claims that I criticised the new grammar test because there is “no such thing as correct grammar”. No, I criticised it because a) it was brought in without any evidence that it would help children write better, b) that Year 6 is too early to tackle grammar in any useful way, c) the kind of grammar being tested was resulting in it being taught out of context of real speaking, writing and reading, d) questions about grammar are not simply a matter of “right and wrong”.”
‘one of the few English books written for grown-up people’
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
Paul Greer 