Wenn du ein Beziehungsprobleme hast, dann tust du mir echt Leid, Junge.

Ich habe neunundneunzig Probleme, aber die Schlumpf ist keins davon.

Knusper, knusper, knäuschen—
wer knabbert an meinem häuschen?

Nibble, nibble, gnaw—
who is nibbling at my little house?

—the witch, Hansel and Gretel

Wer, wie, was;
der, die, das;
wieso, weshalb, warum;
wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm.

Who, how, what;
the, the, the;
why, why, why;
who doesn’t question, stays dumb.

—Sesame Street

Tausend schöne sachen
gibt es überall zu sehen;
manchmal muss man fragen
um sie zu verstehen.

A thousand beautiful things
are everywhere to see;
sometimes you must ask
in order to understand them.

The dark one had sunburned skin, warm, with the bronze reflections of the women of sunny lands; her movements were quick and feline, with the lissomeness and grace of a panther; all the strength and splendor of muscular beauty, and that perfect equilibrium, that simplicity of bearing which makes great gesture. At that time I was working on my statue Eve.

Without knowing why, I saw my model changing. I modified my contours, naively following the successive transformations of ever-amplifying forms. One day, I learned that she was pregnant; then I understood. The contours of the belly had hardly changed, but you can see the sincerity with which I copied nature in looking at the muscles of the loins and sides. It certainly hadn’t occurred to me to take a pregnant woman as a model for Eve; an accident—happy for me—gave her to me and it aided the character of the figure singularly. But soon, becoming more sensitive, my model found the studio too cold; she came less frequently, then not at all. That is why my Eve is unfinished.

—Auguste Rodin, explaining himself to Henri-Charles Dujardin-Beaumetz

… the beauty of the metric system is that if the units you’re working with start to need dividing, you can simply slide down into the next unit level and viola! You’re working with whole numbers again. It’s a different way of thinking: you’re not working so much with pieces and parts, but rather with a sort of layered mesh of wholes, through which you can move as needed. Which is fine for distance or weight, but not so good for discreet objects like eggs or minutes.

— Heather McDougal’s Cabinet of Wonders

Falling asleep, with a vague impression of anti-aircraft guns firing, found myself mentally back in the Spanish war, on one of those nights when you had a good straw to sleep on, dry feet, several hours rest ahead of you, and the sound of distant gunfire, which acts as a soporific provided it is distant.

—George Orwell, his diary 8-31-40

—William Faulkner

source similar

Exile’s Letter

From the Chinese of Li Po, usually considered the greatest poet of China: written by him while in exile about 760 A. D., to the Hereditary War-Councillor of Sho, “recollecting former companionship.”

So-kin of Rakuho, ancient friend, I now remember
That you built me a special tavern,
By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.
With yellow gold and white jewels we paid for the songs and laughter,
And we were drunk for month after month, forgetting the kings and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in, from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially, there was nothing at cross-purpose;
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship.
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds and without regret.
And then I was sent off to South Wei, smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories between us.
And when separation had come to its worst
We met, and travelled together into Sen-Go
Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters;
Into a valley of a thousand bright flowers that was the first valley,
And on into ten thousand valleys full of voices and pine-winds.
With silver harness and reins of gold, prostrating themselves on the ground,
Out came the East-of-Kan foreman and his company;
And there came also the “True-man” of Shi-yo to meet me,
Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.
In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us more Sennin music;
Many instruments, like the sound of young phœnix broods.
And the foreman of Kan-Chu, drunk,
Danced because his long sleeves
Wouldn’t keep still, with that music playing.
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,
And my spirit so high that it was all over the heavens.

And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars or rain.
I had to be off to So, far away over the waters,
You back to your river-bridge.
And your father, who was brave as a leopard,
Was governor in Hei Shu and put down the barbarian rabble.
And one May he had you send for me, despite the long distance;
And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going
Over roads twisted like sheep’s guts.
And I was still going, late in the year, in the cutting wind from the north
And thinking how little you cared for the cost and you caring enough to pay it.
Then what a reception!
Red jade cups, food well set, on a blue jewelled table;
And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning;
And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle,
To the dynastic temple, with the water about it clear as blue jade,
With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,
With ripples like dragon-scales going grass-green on the water,
Pleasure lasting, with courtezans going and coming without hindrance,
With the willow-flakes falling like snow,
And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,
And the waters a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows—
Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight,
Gracefully painted—and the girls singing back at each other,
Dancing in transparent brocade,
And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,
Tossing it up under the clouds.

And all this comes to an end,
And is not again to be met with.
I went up to the court for examination,
Tried Layu’s luck, offered the Choyu song,
And got no promotion,
And went back to the East Mountains white-headed.

And once again we met, later, at the South Bridge head.
And then the crowd broke up—you went north to San palace.
And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end, confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking—
There is no end of things in the heart.

I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,
And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.

(Translated by Ezra Pound from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the Professors Mori and Araga.)

Bruce Sterling, photo by kandinski

This unorganized lump of speculation is more or less a dump of my brain’s activity after I read Bruce Sterling’s talk, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” which he gave at Transmediale 10, Berlin, Feb. 6, 2010.

A few quotes:

Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.

and

Yes, you will look ridiculous. But by what standard? By what standard can you be held to be ridiculous? Why not just go and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Gandhian dedication, and see what happens?

and

Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.

Of course you should read the transcript to get a proper sense.

But what he proposes isn’t true atemporality: even if we glean data from various time periods, even if we transport ourselves, as in Borges’s famous story, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, through experience and force of will, and in our minds recreate a former time, we still live and act in a sequence; we haven’t shimmied out of time entirely. If we were to break out of chronology (if such a thing were possible) we would need to write a new method of thinking onto our brains, to use the same hardware for an unintended but feasible purpose, like using a bobbypin to pick a lock. In fact, the act of escaping time and reprogramming ourselves is the same: as we are now, we assume relationships between the moments we see. But if that were not true, what sorts of thoughts could we have? Would they be discrete, or would all the thoughts we had and ever would have coalesce into an amalgam of experience, sensation, and intention? Is that how to know an atemporal being, by the shape his thoughts and acts make as he slides through a cross-section of time, like the Sphere in Flatland, projecting the dimensions of his character onto a sequential topography?

Cross reference this TED talk by Daniel Kahneman about memory and happiness, in which Kahneman says, “We think of our future as anticipated memories,” and explains the differences between the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self.”

So then, what defines our culture’s collective remembering self? Is it simply the consensus between members? I don’t think the experiencing self exists from the collective point of view, because currently—and I say “currently” in view of Sterling’s talk, with a loose grip on my map of how any given process executes in our transient society—our culture assembles its collective consciousness through transmissions of stories from one person to another. If we can each become neurons, then we will have some collective identity and function, and perhaps spawn a collective experiencing self.

To quote Borges from Pierre Menard again, “Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.”

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiperactivo/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Yes, I made that.