James Baldwin on race, film, children and our shadows in The Devil Finds Work (in the Atlantic)
For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. The devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.
The mindless and hysterical banality of evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children— can call them on this lie, he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.
“At one time, irony served to challenge the establishment; now it is the establishment. The art of irony has turned into ironic art. Irony for irony’s sake. A smart aleck making bomb noises in front of a city in ruins. But irony without a purpose enables cynicism. It stops at disavowal and destruction, fearing strong conviction is a mark of simplicity and delusion.”
rebecca solnit on our homes : cultivating a sanctuary or an image? (brainpickings):
“Artists have a different relation to the material, since, after all, the main animosity toward the realm of substances and solid objects is that they distract from the life of the mind or spirit; but it’s the job of artists to find out how materials and images speak, to make the mute material world come to life, and this too undoes the divide. Words of gold, of paint, of velvet, of steel, the speaking shapes and signs that we learn to read, the intelligence of objects set free to communicate and to teach us that all things communicate, that a spoon has something to say about values, as does a shoe rack or a nice ornamental border of tulips or freesias. But just as passion can become whoredom, a home becomes real estate, so the speaking possibility of the material world can degenerate into chatter and pitches… Desire is easy. And everywhere.”
“From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942:
‘The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.’
Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.”
“How can man know himself? It is a mysterious business: if a hare has seven skins, a man may skin himself seventy times seven times without being able to say, “Now that is truly you; that is no longer your outside.” It is also an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being. How easy it is thereby to give oneself such injuries as no doctor can heal. Moreover, why should it even be necessary given that everything bears witness to our being — our friendships and animosities, our glances and handshakes, our memories and all that we forget, our books as well as our pens. For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects, see how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another; how they form a ladder on whose steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far; for your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your I.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, in the essay Schopenhauer as Educator
Photo: Paul Garcia
rebecca solnit on reading from brainpickings
“The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. ”
cecily brown on getting artistic approval on instagram (vulture):
“When I first started, I was private. I knew my followers, so then I might post, half in jest, “Better before?” I’d say, “Should I stop?” People would be like, “No, go on.” Others would be like, “Stop!” It’s like when you invite your friends over and you’re not sure if something is finished, and you find out whether it is by who you actually want to listen to. I totally know what your friend means. Now I’m public, just recently, so I have lots of followers who are young artists, and they’ll be like, “Gorgeous!” Yeah, you could just sit there letting your head get bigger because some random person in Australia or Iran says that’s a beautiful painting. But in the end, you can’t take it as serious criticism. The image is teeny-tiny. Everything looks good on there. The scary thing is it often looks better. I had my German dealer come over, and she was like, “Where’s that one you posted?” I was pointing at it, and she’s like, “Oh.” But real life is real life — you see the history, where the paint didn’t dry right. Real life is warts and all. On Instagram, everything is glossy and gorgeous.”
“Fame seems a very flimsy thing to die for. And where we find an idea that is both pervasive yet flimsy, it suggests that there is something deeper at work, some inescapable oddness – or error – in the way we see the world.” (aeon magazine)
moral character as the key to identity in aeon:
“I inquired what kind of change would render her unrecognisable. My friend responded without hesitation: ‘If she stopped being kind. I would leave her immediately.’ He considered the question a few moments more. ‘And I don’t mean, if she’s in a bad mood or going through a rough time. I’m saying if she turned into a permanent bitch with no explanation. Her soul would be different. This encounter is instructive for a few reasons (not least of which is the intriguing term ‘permanent bitch’) but let’s start with my friend’s invocation of the soul…”
your desire to be famous and the problems it will bring you in the philosophers’ mail
image: Warren Beatty on Madonna in Truth or Dare
“One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense—as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us.”
how do our travel choices reflect our own internal worlds? (the philosophers’ mail)
“Unfortunately, we generally don’t quite know where we need to go on our inner journey towards psychological evolution – and rush out to destinations that have been foisted on us by the travel industry or some accident of logistics. We say – somewhat casually – that we’d love to see a desert – but we’re often not clear why desert scenes ‘move’ us. Yet to be moved by an image of a destination is, in essence, to recognise a congruence between a place in the world and a destination on our inner map. There is something in the scene we see outside that our inner eye knows we need inside.
Getting ready for a journey should involve working out what the next stages on our inner journey should be – and then taking these rather unformed, destination-free needs to a travel agent in order to find places in the world that could support them. We might also sit with postcards of possible locations and ask ourselves, from a psychological point of view, the only question that matters: ‘What is there here that I might be craving inside?’”
why walter white was so important to understanding our own moral ambiguity:
“When Walter finally admits that he did it all — the meth, the money, the murders — because he liked it, because it made him feel alive, that vanity motivated him more than charity, it reflects how our own ostensible altruism is often just the lie we tell ourselves to excuse our dirtiest deeds.”
“We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
-Roger Ebert
Film Still: The Deer Hunter. Dir. Michael Cimino (1978)
oliver burkeman on the overhyping of hope (the guardian):
“The Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön proposes a new fridge magnet: "Abandon hope”. It sounds like a grim joke. After all, if you don’t have hope, what’s left? I suspect she’d answer: reality. In other words, everything.“
“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
-Stanley Kubrick in 1968 Playboy interview (from Brainpickings)
oliver burkeman on “thin places” (the guardian):
We’re in the territory, here, of the ineffable: the stuff we can’t express because it’s beyond the power of language to do so. Explanations aren’t merely useless; they threaten to get in the way. The experience of a thin place feels special because words fail, leaving stunned silence. “Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation,” writes Roger Scruton, the philosopher. “Moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.”