The most beautiful portrait of an insane person ever put to film; with the most beautiful conclusion you could possibly imagine.
Kinski - Butterfly
bauldoff: Flower Girls by Elsa Mora. Mental note: show daughter. (via Neatorama)
My mom makes decorative shoes to toss to parade-goers as a member of the totally awesome Krewe of Muses, and not long ago she discovered the work of Michael Tcherevkoff (through Apple’s profile of him). He makes shoes as well, but his are constructed from flowers:
I think she’s going to really love the flower girls above, and so I’m willing to endure whatever scorn the hyper-masculine, roughneck, ‘roid-raging Tumblr dudes want to heap on me for having all these beautiful little creations on here.
There’s absolutely no reason to take seriously someone who says, ‘I believe it because I believe it.’ God either exists or he doesn’t. It’s a matter of the truth.
Richard Dawkins (BBC NEWS | UK | ‘Respect atheists’, says cardinal, via sarahchristine).
I don’t mean to be so predictably reactive, but I thought someone should note that there are many reasons to take such a person seriously, several of which are spelled out in the cardinal’s very reasonable address.
Among them, chief for me is this: I take seriously the efforts of human beings to find meaning and strength in a world of loss and heartbreak. Part of this is taking seriously the construction of poetic, metaphysical, and moral (but not scientific) systems of meaning. As I beat to death previously,* if your only criterion for something’s value is its adherence to scientific accuracy (or falsifiability), you’re omitting a great deal of deep significance and value to human life.
(As a note, sds linked to an interesting exploration of the mind/will problem in a religious text in reblogging something I expressed with less concision. I thought it was an excellent example of how various religions codify human wisdom, attach it to supernatural ‘ultimate consequences,’ and give form and purpose to many people’s lives. I myself am not religious, but where Dawkins and I part is that I think it is petulant and indefensibly silly to go about saying we ought not take seriously people for whom faith is a meaningful form of epistemological justification).
*Interestingly, several atheists and believers found that article unsatisfying in its evasion of the question of God’s actual existence, which remains to me the least interesting and important part of the entire issue.
‘A 3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica.’
Inspired by the Nazi Luftwaffe’s bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso’s Guernica mural is probably his best-known work.
Lena Gieseke created the 3D extrusion above, which I think is fairly interesting. You really should see the higher-resolution version here, if possible.
Tonight I’ve written and discarded more text than at any other time I can recall; I have no idea what is wrong with me, but I am restless, enervated from spending two hours ruminating on the loneliest and saddest themes of interest to me as I struggled to write something worth a damn, only to fail and now have to try and get to sleep with all this garbage sloshing around in my brain.
But I like this song. White Summer / Black Mountainside - Led Zeppelin.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via minuswell, who probably likes this for the same reason I do).
Nietzsche tried hard to communicate why systematization of thought was detrimental to philosophical integrity. Look no further than Hegel, whose system is complete enough to swallow the whole universe of inquiry but leaves man shivering and alone, waiting for the Existentialists’ rescue.
Systematization of thought, the imposition of consistency and the extension of ideas to their limits, is an urge we all have; it’s particularly destructive politically, in governmental and private organizations. The application of Marxism to art and music, or the manner in which companies begin to stupidly force the latest business-speak stratagem from their CEO on the most minute details of their operations, exemplify this.
We all like to logically abstract our principles and then instantiate them in the areas of our lives; we seek consistency, formality, codification, standardization, and the smooth, clean system of the purely logical world. We subordinate reality to this vision: everything we see reminds us of our favorite candidate’s ideas, our favorite author’s theses.
The flaw inherent in seeking consistency or systematization is that you place a higher value on those qualities than on the inherent properties of whatever you’re systematizing. If we are trying to construct HR policy that is “fair and just,” but begin to overly standardize its processes and remove autonomy from managers, we have have reduced its fairness and justice in the interest of consistency.
The search for a truly full system in any field or endeavor, one both complete and coherent, was dealt a blow first by Wittgenstein and then by physicists, but it persists. It persists despite the fact that we all know what works: inconsistency, decentralization, flexibility, local implementation of ideas and communities, policies at the individual level, and so on. It’s why we want to work for start-ups and not monoliths.
But still, every damn day in meetings, I hear, “Well, we have to be consistent.” No, we don’t.
(Note: it is important to observe the word “foolish” in the quote; not all consistency is foolish, of course).
She sacrificed many things for me and gave me one of the best childhoods one could hope for.
Sydvish: Why/How I Love my Mom. Great post.
I don’t think the rather phony upcoming holiday has much to do with it, but for whatever reason I’ve had a lot of conversations about mothers lately. My mother knows I love her, I think, but it’s rather difficult for me to write about why without become sentimental; at best, I’ve been able to allude to some of what I admire about her while talking about other things.
Since she’s not a fan of the greeting cards and the routinized, capitalized rituals surrounding ‘Mother’s Day,’ I’ll just note here: I love you, mom!
A Dream of Flight
After lovepuppy asked whether flight or invisibility was preferable as a superpower, katydid offered one of the most uniquely amusing and quirky answers I could have imagined:
My immediate response is invisibility. Wouldn’t it be funny to see a car driving around with what looks like no driver? You could put your dog on your lap and it would be even funnier.
While I agree with Katy that the comic value of invisibility would likely exceed that of flight (though the latter isn’t without its pranking possibilities), the whole question gave me momentary pause.
Not terribly long ago, I was in Texas sitting on some cracked red rocks looking into the darkness over a nighttime plain. I suddenly thought that it would feel quite familiarly nice to surge up and forward, off of the ridge and into the air, and fly through the sky; it took perhaps a single second for this thought to trigger a terrible realization: I don’t know how to fly.
A few more moments of confused and despairing thoughts followed before I was able to coherently reflect that I’d never known how to fly and that indeed flying isn’t possible. The despair I felt was quite real, a shock of anguish that I couldn’t quite explain, and then I realized:
I had dreamt, some weeks or months before, that I could fly. In the dream, it was simply a matter of holding my breath in a particular way and willing myself forward, at first low and fast over the ground and between trees, but soon high above cities and seas. Every now and then, I’d lose my breath or forget which muscle groups to tense and would fall back to the ground, but without damage.
I’d had this dream and hadn’t realized on waking that it wasn’t true; I hadn’t remembered the dream and compared it to my waking life, and so had for weeks been living with an unconscious, unarticulated belief that I could fly, a buried delusion.
I know it’s silly, but the sudden recognition that it had been a dream was vertiginous and painful; I felt disoriented and irredeemably sad. This beautiful sense of freedom from the dream which I’d lived with was quite casually crushed by a drab facticity that was indifferent to my longing to fly.
So, as funny as invisibility might be, I choose flight: if you’ve ever known how to do it, as I think I did, you know it’s the most wonderful feeling imaginable.
![Today, despite spending literally minutes preparing for his visit, my team was stood up by an executive with a poor sense of his itinerary. Syd’s sign, which I made, reads “Fuck [name of VP].” You don’t want to step to this group. As corporate operations bureaucrats go, we’re like (Herbert Kornfeld) * (Pol Pot).](http://media.tumblr.com/2KfNZVJct8ot855v0k7tDcwl_r1_400.png)
Sunburn and Selfhood
When I spend hours outdoors with my dogs, they occasionally regress to their days as strays and begin eating the inedible: dirt, plants, garbage, cat shit. They do this despite inevitably vomiting every time they do so; they’re now seven and eight years old, respectively, and it’s clear they will never stop.
This is likely because, as dogs, they cannot make a causal connection between eating crawfish shells and throwing up on my carpet three hours later; it’s one of the most upsetting cognitive limitations they have, as far as I and my carpet are concerned.
But when I’m feeling particularly judgmental about it, I just reflect on my own persistent inability to enact the lessons I do learn. For example, while I know that staying in the sun too long will not only give me sunburn but will indeed destroy my skin over time and is completely pointless and superficial, I still do it every damn summer.
There are dozens of such examples: substantial sleeplessness will destabilize my mood and render me emotionally volatile, but I still stay up way too late if there’s anything even remotely interesting going on.
Most of us are defined as much by our failures to enact painfully acquired existential wisdom as we are by its acquisition. From knowing we should exercise and diet but just not doing so to repeatedly dating the wrong sort of person despite being fully aware not only of what sort they are but indeed why we’re dating them, we fail to put into practice what we learn.
What’s fascinating to me is how little effect cognition has on the will; we are aware of our bad habits, our self-sabotaging tendencies, yet at those moments of choice, those binary Y/N instants when we are ordering the desert, kissing the girl, choosing to stay at the job, etc., we utterly fail to implement what we know.
My dogs have an excuse: they don’t know. What is wrong with humans that we can be so fully aware of ourselves on the meta level and so incapable of actualizing that awareness? Why is the will so resistant to the intellect?
(Possible answers: because the will reflects honest desires; because the will relates to a short-term memory; because you don’t truly want to diet and stop dating lunatics).
What is most notable about this is how it demonstrates that your knowledge has little do with your behavior in many important respects; you are neither self-created nor self-directed. You do not reason your way through choices; you make choices and reason from them. Knowing rationally what to do makes as much difference to us as to my dogs.
Five’s attraction to beer pays off for Roman. My doppelganger had a swell party yesterday at which, as is often the case, his boy rather stole the show with his indefatigable energy. There are several other videos of significantly more general interest but I was threatened with legal action if I posted them, so this will have to suffice.
Beck - Blackhole.
Okay: I’ve heard and seen a lot of fascinating, beautiful things here in the last two days, but I don’t like having nothing but reblogged content (and I haven’t had time to post or write anything original). So I’m uploading this and linking to some of what’s struck me recently.
When I was much younger, this song used to bring me into a state of ecstasy (I intend its real etymological meaning here: a trance, a state outside of one’s self). I listened to it at all sorts of pivotal moments: road trips, sleeping on top of my car when it was parked in a field, snowed in, in the desert.
I never knew what the hell Beck was mumbling, and didn’t want to know because I assumed (correctly) that it wouldn’t be as resonant as the music was for me. The only part I could understand, and which I loved: “Little boy, little boy / Laying on a sleeping bag / Watching, watching / Through the cracks of his eyelids.”
I remember sleeping bags and staying up late and camping out and being a boy, and this song seems connected to that now.
Other things to see:
Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo
I can’t believe Yahoo! escaped. As a Flickr user, I’m rather happy about it, too.
“At the meeting, which also included Yahoo’s other co-founder, David Filo, and Kevin Johnson of Microsoft, Mr. Ballmer increased Microsoft’s offer to $33 a share, but Mr. Yang said Yahoo would not sell for less than $37 a share, this person said.”
It may go without saying, but that they couldn’t agree on a price need not have stopped Microsoft; their proxy battle would have succeeded in all but the most outlandish scenarios. It’s notable, then, that Ballmer evidently agreed with those who said that hostile acquisition and the difficult integration of Yahoo! with MS would have been a disaster.
Following:
