Ouabuko

Fred Leist composed this work one morning at 2am in 1942 overlooking the sea in Cornwall. He captures a moment when the world seems to be simplifying itself into light and shadow, losing substance and becoming dreamlike.

My quote of the day

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.

Thomas Paine

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Orwell

In 1872 John Atkinson Grimshaw was commissioned by the House of Commons to paint three views of the Roundhay Estate (of which this is one) in consideration of the Leeds Corporation Improvement Bill that proposed to turn this former private estate into a public park.

Photograph of a cloudy winter sky and below it, its reflection in a still lake. On the near shore, there are rocks, on the far left side, trees. In the background, hills and trees begin again. The photo was taken in color but it seems to only show whites, greys, silver, black and near-blues within those colors.

The words you speak become the house you live in.

Hafiz

Photograph of a path through a forest. Lush moss on rocks, wood chips from a rotted tree. A strange rock structure in the distant left side. A chasm creeping between the two sides of the ground.

Do not look either in front of behind, but within yourself. There is the point of departure.

Edmond Jabes

"People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten." Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Milan Kundera

Photograph of what remains of a marble statue from Greek or Roman times--unsure--at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. The sculpture to untrained eyes looks like a haggard but energetic, corroded female museum who seems to be caught mid-beseeching someone or warning them. Her arms are cut off between the elbow and shoulder. Her face is eaten by time and somehow it looks like her mouth is open and that she's an old woman with wide eyes. But that open mouth is likely just a wound of the stone. Her hair is fashioned in a casual style above her head with some sort of band holding it off her face. She probably isn't meant to look old. It seems in this light that her clavicles show and also a vein along her left bicep. Her outfit is tied interestingly around the solar plexus. To me she looks like an old woman who might have been in bondage, beseeching or crying a warning or a threat. She's remarkably "alive." At any rate, a historian or someone who'd read or photographed the plaque could tell who she really is believed to be, and what effects are those of time corroding art versus the original image. Behind and around her, there are other pieces of sculpture, and some vessels are behind her in a glass display. Something appears to be at her left side, part of her stonework.

Always loved this harrowing remnant (located at the Met).

Difficult Times / Schwierige Zeiten Standing at my desk I see the elder tree in the garden through the window And make out something red in it, something black And instantly recall the elders Of my Augsburg childhood. Then for several moments I seriously deliberate Whether to go to the table For my glasses, so that I might see Those black berries again on such delicate stalks. - Bertold Brecht

Difficult Times, by Bertold Brecht
(translated by Ron Slate)

DON'T HESITATE If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver, always on point.

I don’t understand tve phrasing here. If I send a letter “firing” someone I have no authority to fire, it’s just junk mail. Why isn’t Donald treated the same way?

"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

Photo of an outdoor art installation featuring a woodland with a magical looking doorway created by wood and twigs in the forest

Passage, 2007 by installation artist Cornelia Konrads #womensart #Beltane #May1st

Photo featuring four stylised odd ceramic figures

Sophie Woodrow, contemporary ceramics artist who creates unique ceramic figures #womensart

Something Caligari about that :)

Photo of a round woven basket with narrow base and wider top decorated with repeated triangular brown and black symbols in vertical lines

Louisa Keyser ( Dat So La Lee) (c.1829-1925) celebrated Native American basket weaver and member of the Washoe people in northwestern Nevada #WomensArt

happy bday English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, b1759, leader in advocacy for women's rights

“The beginning is always today.”

“Simplicity and sincerity generally go hand in hand, as both proceed from a love of truth.”

“All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience.

My brother said: The only language you have to condemn the crime
is the language of the criminal
and the language of the criminal
is a language invented to justify the crime

Athena Farrokhzad
excerpt from White Blight

Matinee BY ANDREA COHEN Today the part of love will be played by regret. Memory will be played by what if, tragedy by the saxophonist. Silence will be played by silence. There will be no intermission.

This actually crushed my heart today.

It’s strangely easy to quit Amazon and realize you don’t miss it—I thought it would be like tackling an addiction or be hugely inconvenient, but I quit in February and it’s been like removing shackles. Plus added to our savings.

I needed this, you may too.

Painting featuring a woodland scene with bluebell flowers covering much of the ground and a path with small figures

Bluebell Wood, 2016, by English painter Emma Haworth known for her parks and semi urban landscapes with a hint of magic #WomensArt

Albert Einstein on HUAC

“Every intellectual…should refuse to testify, i.e. must be prepared for jail & economic ruin…

If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them" ("Refuse to Testify," 1953)

“Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by…the self-righteous who…are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.”

~ M. Scott Peck

Painting entitled “Defeated. Requiem” from 1878 by Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.

T.S. Eliot

Digital art portraying sunset over the sea

Another day to unearth our true selves.

Book page and pencil. “it is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an”

Continuation of book page. “apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a thick crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventively, even the most, modest attempts to live within the truth.”

The act of living in the truth is a terrifying weapon in the eyes of a post-totalitarian regime, per Vaclav Havel:

This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. - Vaclav Havel

Vaclac Havel on why each of us, by not cowering and repeating the regime’s definitions of reality (LIES), has the power to end it.

Art by Vietnamese painter, Dao Hai Phong