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“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.“ — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were. as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

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“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly, concocting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are. And just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build, we (unlike professional storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.”

— Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained

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Excerpt from Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

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I will give you my experience of life in a little pill, sugar-coated by poetry to make it go down.

Isak Dinesen • The Monkey

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Matsuo Bashō (poem, 1686) - dom Sylvester Houedard (translation, 1965), frog pond plop, Openings Press, Woodchester, Gloucestershire, 1965-1967 [John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester Library, Manchester]

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““What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.””

— The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco (via panicbeats)

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in a sea of souls swimmin towards a light that did misguide me

the moment where you feel like you know yourself the best and simultaneously do not understand yourself at all

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Hello. Mind thing blob that curates jumbles makes and destroys an almost infinite world outside every tiny fraction of time.

Everything is there but mind thing blob only gives you what it sees fit for you to have.

Goodbye mind blob thing I can’t think of you because thinking is you thing or me thing. You curate me a subset of everything.

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— @oblivion-wind / soul explorer

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You folded me that’s what happened. Neat tidy with edges tucked in. Folded inward into myself.

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“Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by the thunderbolt and it’ll just leave you stunned.”

— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

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Louise Glück, from The Wild Iris

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Backwards, Warsan Shire

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Not you,

Not me,

not anyone.

Someone else

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Barbara Kruger