Frederic Edwin Church, Autumn Landscape. Circa 1860-1870. Brush and oil paint on cardboard. Via the Cooper Hewitt.
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Finely carved woman's hand, in the collection of tihngs.
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Rae Armantrout, "Crescendo."
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Detail of the eyepiece of Galileo's wood and leather telescope, 1609-1610: "In 1611, Prince Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, suggested calling this instrument telescopio [from the Greek tēle ('far') and scopeo ('I see')]."
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Manifesting, by and large, is a single-player sport. Most of what circulates online concerning how to manifest emerges largely out of the work of New Thought philosophers from the early to mid-20th century—American writers such as Neville Goddard and Florence Scovel Shinn, who mobilized biblical scripture in order to cast the argument that life as we know it is merely only a simulation, and that every individual around oneself is simply a non-playable character. To New Thought philosophers such as Goddard and Shinn, neither hustlenomics nor securing the bag were proprietary to neoliberal capitalism—getting what you want, seemingly, boils down singularly to your state of mind, the sheer vibrational force of your imagination. In order to believe in the full powers of manifestation, one has to foremost think that they are indeed the only person who exists, and that the world around themself is simply a mirror reflecting and reaffirming their self-concept—or as Goddard frames more simply, “Everyone is you pushed out.” However, instead of being reassuring, this sort of postulation makes me feel existentially insecure. If you are the only person who exists, why would anything—even, and especially manifesting—matter at all?
Gasira Tamir, "The Year of Magical Thinking." The New Inquiry, 9/13/2021.
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"His life was a mixture of realities and self-imposed fictions that were so potent that even he forgot who he was."*
Yet so blind are we to the true nature of reality at any given moment that this chaos—bathed, it is true, in the iridescent hues of the rainbow and clothed in an endless confusion of fair and variegated forms which did their best to stifle any burgeoning notions of the formlessness of the whole, the muddle really as ugly as sin which at every moment shone through the colored masses, bringing a telltale finger squarely down on the addition line, beneath which these self-important and self-convoluted shapes added disconcertingly up to zero—this chaos began to seem like the normal way of being, so that some time later even very sensitive and perceptive souls had been taken in: it was for them life’s rolling river ...
John Ashbury, from "The System," 1972.
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Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more. I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song. Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing? White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying. Fiery colors, like for instance autumn colors, are a shriek.
Robert Walser, translated by Damon Searles. "From the Essays of Fritz Kocher," The Paris Review, Issue 205, summer 2013.
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Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat, has no brain, no sense of sight or smell, but can solve mazes, learn patterns, keep time, and pass down the wisdom of generations.
Lacy M. Johnson, "What Slime Knows." Orion, September 2021.
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“We are all lichens,” the biologist Scott Gilbert and his colleagues wrote in a 2012 paper published in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” the paper argues that human bodies cannot be thought of as individual organisms. Rather, we are dynamic colonies housing a shifting community of trillions of bacteria and fungi that perform many vital functions and determine our health (including a “microbial cloud” that overflows our body, hovering, at all times, in the air around us). From this point of view, “I” has always truly been “we.”
Zoë Schlanger, "Our Silent Partners." The New York Review of Books, 10/7/2021.
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"A certain form of mysterious shimmering, soaring cloud is starting to appear more often in the night sky, and scientists are working to understand why."*
Benjamín Labatut, in conversation with translator Adrian Nathan West, about When We Cease to Understand the World (one word review: marvelous).
"On the morning after Juliane Diller fell to earth, she awoke in the deep jungle of the Peruvian rainforest dazed with incomprehension."(NYT)
What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants—because it needs!—to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.
Benjamín Labatut, in conversation with translator Adrian Nathan West, about When We Cease to Understand the World (one word review: marvelous).
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