#inthenoosphere

* * * * * …if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space via:: inthenoosphere

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

“Let’s contemplate the sky. Forget the crazy hammering heartbeat, don’t listen to it, don’t start counting, remember that there is a clever way of breathing that conserves oxygen as if you’re lying below the surface of a body of water breathing through a very thin straw but you can breathe through it if you’re careful, if you don’t panic; one breath and then another and then another, isn’t that the story of all lives? careers? Just a matter of breathing. Of course it is. But contemplate the sky, it’s there to be contemplated. 

A mild shock to see it so blank, blue, a thin airy ghostly blue, no clouds to disguise its emptiness. You are beginning to feel not only weightless but near-bodiless, lying on the earth like a scrap of paper about to be blown off. Two dimensions and you’d imagined you were three! And there’s the sky rolling away forever, into infinity — if ‘infinity’ can be ‘rolled into’ —and the forlorn truth is, that’s where you’re going too. And the lovely blue isn’t even blue, is it? isn’t even there, is it? a mere optical illusion, isn’t it? no matter what art has urged you to believe.”

High up in Pakistan's Indus Valley are some of the most intricate and diverse petroglyphs on earth. These are the ancient Shatial glyphs on the Karakoram Highway in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. Dating from the Stone Age to the birth of Islam, the glyphs cover boulders and boulders stretching for more than 100 kilometers. The writings and designs cover various languages, religions and the symbolism of peoples dating back 10,000 years.

[Historical Images]

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“You walk towards the edge of knowledge, and then you walk down the vertical plateau of curiosity.”

ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED by Jenny Holzer

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If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness.

Rowland Emett (1906-1990) Elevated train makes its way through Manhattan :: [Jill Carnes]

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“My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The Sun” by Edvard Munch 1911; oil on canvas :: [Gwyllm Llwydd]

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"While the square is closely linked to man and his constructions, to architecture, harmonious structures, writing, and so on, the circle is related to the divine: a simple circle has, since ancient times, represented eternity, since it has no beginning and no end. An ancient text says that God is a circle whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere.

The circle is essentially unstable and dynamic: all rotary movements and impossible searches for perpetual motion derive from the circle."

[Letters From An American]

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The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying. — Gilles Deleuze

 (via inthenoosphere)