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[riverbird]

"But just as paying attention to another person fosters intimacy and makes us feel less alone, perhaps scientific observation allows us to enter into a similar relationship across species. By listening, by returning to the grove time and again, by tuning our ears to the sounds of beings unlike ourselves, we begin to reenter what Thomas Berry, the Catholic eco-theologian, calls “the great conversation” between humans and other forms of life. This too can have a grounding effect, can help stave off a different, larger, and more gaping loneliness. If anything is sacred, it is this, I think. And by this I mean all of it: the salmonberries beginning to ripen in the bramble; the scratchy, scolding caw of the Steller’s jay that will nibble there; the long, straight trunks of the Pacific red cedars that rise into the sky’s blue cathedral. The web of life that too often capitalism seems dead set on dismantling." Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

[riverbird]

“Animals are not lesser humans; they are other worlds.”

— Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals

[riverbird]

"I don’t trust the truth of memories because what leaves us departs forever There’s only one current of this sacred river but I still want to remain faithful to my first astonishments to recognize as wisdom the child’s wonder and to carry in myself until the end a path in the woods of my childhood dappled with patches of sunlight to search for it everywhere in museums in the shade of churches this path on which I ran unaware a six-year old toward my primary mysterious aloneness" Anna Kamieńska, A Path in the Woods (trans. Grażyna Drabik and David Curzon)

[riverbird]

"A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished. He who is grateful for the existence of music. He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess. The potter, contemplating color and form. The typographer who set this page well, though it may not please him. A woman and man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto. He who strokes a sleeping animal. He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him. He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson. He who prefers others to be right. These people, unaware, are saving the world."  Jorge Luis Borges, The Just (trans. Alastair Reid)

[riverbird]

Mihkail Nesterov

[riverbird]

"Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain."

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

"Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude. (...) And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

[riverbird]

“This is also the message of classic horror: if the monster learns appropriate restraint, it becomes an angel.”

— Kirk J. Schneider, Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale

[riverbird]

“For solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight.” Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking (trans. John Howe)

[riverbird]

"Walking means precisely resigning yourself to being an ambulant, forward-leaning body. But the really astonishing thing is how that slow resignation, that immense lassitude give us the joy of being. Of being no more than that, of course, but in utter bliss. Our leaden bodies fall back to earth at every step, as if to take root there again. Walking is an invitation to die standing up." Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking (trans. John Howe)

[riverbird]

"Rituals are architectures of time, structuring and stabilising life, and they are on the wane. The pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of rituals. Work also has ritual aspects. We go to work at set times. Work takes place in a community. In the home office, the ritual of work is completely lost. The day loses its rhythm and structure. This somehow makes us tired and depressed.

In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful.

Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically.

Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society.

In my book I argue the case against the cult of authenticity, for an ethic of beautiful forms. Gestures of courtesy are not just superficial. The French philosopher Alain says that gestures of courtesy hold a great power on our thoughts. That if you mime kindness, goodwill and joy, and go through motions such as bowing, they help against foul moods as well as stomach ache. Often the external has a stronger hold than the internal.

Blaise Pascal once said that instead of despairing over a loss of faith, one should simply go to mass and join in rituals such as prayer and song, in other words mime, since it is precisely this that will bring back faith. The external transforms the internal, brings about new conditions. Therein lies the power of rituals. And our consciousness today is no longer rooted in objects. These external things can be very effective in stabilising consciousness. It is very difficult with information, since it is really volatile and holds a very narrow range of relevance."

- Byung-Chul Han being interviewed by Gesine Borcherdt, from "Byung-Chul Han: 'I Practise Philosophy as Art.'" Art Review, 2 December 2021.

[riverbird]

"You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start,  I don’t even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me; the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected turns in the path,  and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods; all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me.  You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at,  longing. An open window in a country house; and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon;  you had just walked down them and vanished.  And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and,  startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening." Rainer Maria Rilke, You Who Never Arrived, trans. Stephen Mitchell

[riverbird]

Jean-Jacques Henner, The Reader, 1883

[riverbird]

"Whatever else, the little smile on the face of the woman listening to a music the rest of us can’t hear and a sky at dawn with a moon all its own. Whatever else, the construction crane high above us waiting to be told how to do our bidding, we who bid and bid and bid. Whatever else, the way cook #1 looks with such longing at cook #2. Let’s not be too sad about how sad we are. I know about the disappearance of the river dolphins, the sea turtles with tumors. I know about the way the dead don’t return no matter how long they take to die in the back of the police car. I know about the thousand ways our world betrays itself. Whatever else, my friend, spreading wide his arms, looks out at the river and says, “After all, what choice did I have?” After all, I saw the man walking who’d had the stroke, saw the woman whose body won’t stop shaking. I saw the frog in the tall grass, boldly telling us who truly matters. I saw the world proclaim itself an unlit vesper candle while a crow flew into the tip of it, sleek black match, burning." Jim Moore, Whatever Else

[riverbird]

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end." — Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

"As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone, and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted."

— Hilary Mantel, from Reith Lectures, Resurrection: The Art and Craft

[riverbird]

"I am working out the vocabulary of my silence."

Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness

[riverbird]

"I am the tree that trembles and trembles." Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness

[riverbird]

"Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next."

- St. Teresa of Calcutta