NOOSPHE.RE

Cast your net wide. Speculate recklessly. Speak to the wide-eyed. Sink your ship. Build it anew. Burn your agreements. Watch the ashes rise.

The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one. If its "form" is bad it means that the form is too feeble in meaning to call forth corresponding vibrations of the soul. Therefore a picture is not necessarily "well painted" if it possesses the "values" of which the French so constantly speak. It is only well painted if its spiritual value is complete and satisfying. "Good drawing" is drawing that cannot be altered without destruction of this inner value, quite irrespective of its correctness as anatomy, botany, or any other science. There is no question of a violation of natural form, but only of the need of the artist for such form. Similarly colours are used not because they are true to nature, but because they are necessary to the particular picture. In fact, the artist is not only justified in using, but it is his duty to use only those forms which fulfil his own need. Absolute freedom, whether from anatomy or anything of the kind, must be given the artist in his choice of material. Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.

hominid (n.)

Inner letters dance and constellate, forming somatic cardinal directions.

ecstasy (n.)

This letter encircles the body. That letter enrobes it. And that letter embodies its full potential.

penumbra (n.)

The human species has changed its electromagnetic background more than any other aspect of the environment. For example, the density of radio waves around us is now 100 million or 200 million times the natural level reaching us from the sun. Nor is there any end in sight. When superconducting cables are introduced, they'll increase the field strength around power lines by a factor of ten or twenty. Electric cars, magnetically levitated transport vehicles, and microwave-beam satellites for transmitting solar power to earth would each add strong new sources of electromagnetic contamination. A proposed electromagnetic catapult that could shoot satellites into space from mile-long rails built up the side of a mountain would require the combined output of the country's thousand generating stations for the few seconds of each launch.

There is only one health, but diseases are many. Likewise, there appears to be one fundamental force that heals, although the myriad schools of medicine all have their favorite ways of cajoling it into action. Our prevailing mythology denies the existence of any such generalized force in favor of thousands of little ones sitting on pharmacists' shelves, each one potent against only a few ailments or even a part of one. This system often works fairly well, especially for treatment of bacterial diseases, but it's no different in kind from earlier systems in which a specific saint or deity, presiding over a specific healing herb, had charge of each malady and each part of the body. Modern medicine didn't spring full-blown from the heads of Pasteur and Lister a hundred years ago. If we go back further, we find that most medical systems have combined such specifics with a direct, unitary appeal to the same vital principle in all illnesses. The inner force can be tapped in many ways, but all are variations of four main, overlapping patterns: faith healing, magic healing, psychic healing, and spontaneous healing. Although science derides all four, they sometimes seem to work as well for degenerative disease and long-term healing as most of what Western medicine can offer.