Garcia Grisman Rice - The Pizza Tapes - Shady Grove

Beyond the apparent

"That man, especially when he slept, when his features were motionless, showed me my own face, my mask, the flawlessly pure image of my corpse […] in a state of perfect repose, this resemblance was strikingly evident, and what is death, if not a face at peace – its artistic perfection? Life only marred my double; thus a breeze dims the bliss of Narcissus; thus, in the painter’s absence, there comes his pupil and by the superfluous flush of unbidden tints disfigures the portrait painted by the master."

[Vladimir Nabokov, Despair.]

 

R. Buckminster Fuller: "You have to decide whether you want to make money or to make sense because the two are mutually exclusive."

 

"Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward."

 

 

Silent grip of time

why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,”

Looking at the looked at

The art of looking - “Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.”

Her approach is based on two osmotic human tendencies: our shared capacity to truly see what is in front of us, despite our conditioned concentration that obscures it, and the power of individual bias in perception — or what we call “expertise,” acquired by passion or training or both — in bringing attention to elements that elude the rest of us. What follows is a whirlwind of endlessly captivating exercises in attentive bias as Horowitz, with her archetypal New Yorker’s “special fascination with the humming life-form that is an urban street,” and her diverse companions take to the city.

A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things, irregular things, smelly things.

From sensory consciousness to cerebral understanding, to reason.

It is all the same way and it leads nowhere, when you realize nothing has any default purpose to lead anywhere, is when you feel the 'unbearable lightness of being'

 

They do not hail from pedigreed families, and like him cannot, through traditional political clout or monetary brawn, buy immunity from our wag the dog media or the prison cell.

Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?

This may strike you as very unlikely. But the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not. If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/is-the-universe-a-simulation.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

With the question of absolution, Critchley and Webster usher Hegel’s Romantic philosophy of the Absolute onto the stage. Hegel sees Shakespeare’s characters as “free artists of their own selves,” choosing who they are. In consequence, Shakespeare’s characters lack an absolute moral framework to justify their choices, leaving them existentially indecisive, torn by “a twofold passion which drives them from one decision or one deed to another simultaneously.” Hamlet ends by happenstance, a series of accidental deaths by poison, so while Hegel’s philosophy sees existence developing steadily toward the Absolute, a form of divine unity, Hamlet remains trapped in a contingent, fallen world. With this, we glimpse the “Hamlet Doctrine,” the melancholic knowledge of brute reality that smothers all will to act.

 

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion — that is the Hamlet Doctrine, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no — true knowledge, the insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. […] 

 “Existence seems to us ever more screened and distanced,” Critchley and Webster write, “an empty empathy for a suffering that we do nothing to stop and everything to abet in our passivity, dispersal, and narcissism. None of us is free of this. Maybe art, in its essential violence, can tear away one or two of these screens.”

 

Robert Anton Wilson described ego as social fiction with a qualification

How does one live antiartistically, like Ophelia, in the modern world? Do we have to go suicidally insane? Rend ourselves at the “limit between life and death”? Critchley and Webster never say. But Nietzsche, the madman they pair with Ophelia, might help us see the way. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes that believing in illusions is of “the highest value for all life.” “Untruth,” Nietzsche says, is “a condition of life.” We recall Hamlet’s call to the Ghost, “Stay illusion,” alongside Nietzsche’s claim that “action requires the veils of illusion.” If art is “a saving sorceress,” “the affirmation of life” after we peer into the abyss of our violent world, then art both rends the veil of illusions, revealing “true knowledge,” and weaves the veil back into place, replacing our illusions and thus enabling us to act.

"All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect merely a 'spiritual' influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naivete and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like anti-politics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious anti-materialism."- Christopher Hitchens: The Missionary Position

Love

I have infinite tenderness for you. I always will. All my life long.

Look at yourself like you are a love story, I said. 
This is self-indulgence, he said. 
Self-preservation, I said.