Maestro Without An Orchestra

This is easily one of the CRAZIEST videos I've ever gotten. I was rafting down a river when a Yellow Jacket came, landed on my bright pink waterproof phone pouch, and started drinking from the water droplets that had gathered there.

“A world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses — a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame — will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.”

“Everything Thérèse achieves at the supernatural level is rooted in something she has experienced at the natural level. Nothing moved her more, perhaps, than the experience of being loved by her father and mother; consequently her picture of God is colored by a child’s love. And it is to Louis and Zélie Martin that we owe the doctrine of the ‘little way’ and of ‘spiritual childhood’, for they allowed the God who is more than father and mother to find a dwelling in the heart of Thérèse of the Child Jesus. And, unlike the great Teresa, she was never stirred by a suitor. When she calls Jesus her Bridegroom, the expression sounds as flat and empty as the mouth of a child can make it; it is simply another sweet name for Jesus that she repeats, thankful to have found a new name for her Beloved.”

Memory was not for Vico a merely passive record of experience but an active and dynamic force that opened rather than restricted the imagination. William Blake despised “the rotten rags of memory” precisely because he believed that this narrow realist version of it precluded imagination and creativity in favour of an empirical epistemology. Vico believed that memory involved imagination, ingenuity, even invention: “Memory thus has three different aspects: memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship.” That understanding informed Vico’s distinctive style: not the linear, discursive method favoured by the mainstream enlightenment but a spiral of connectivity, a recursive, clotted, elliptical matrix.

"Polar Playmates"