Running is like breathing
men and women have always done it.
(…)
And like breathing,
running is not always noticed.



Benjamin Cheever

in Gregg Whelan ‘Running through a field’ in Performance Reseach Vol. 17:2


Georgia O'Keeffe, Light coming in on the plains no. II, 1917







When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gesture express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded and cut, and to the sound of chisel stokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: "Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music


AXEL:
Jag brukar säga
såhär: jag förstår inte varför människor är så angelägna om att
förstå sig själva,
och varandra.
Förståelse,
det är för veklingar
tycker jag. Människan
har alltid varit, och bör förbli,
ett mysterium.

Hjälp sökes! Kristina Lugn


(I tend to say something like this: I don't understand why people are so bent on understanding themselves, and each other. Understanding is for weaklings, I think. Human beings have always been, and should remain, a mystery.)

Ur Trötthetssamhället, Byung-Chul Han

(We have deep, contemplative attention to thank for mankind's cultural achievements, to which philosophy also belongs. Art prerequisites surroundings in which a deep consideration is possible. This deep consideration is now more and more being replaced by another form of attention, hyper- attention. A quick change of focus between different tasks, sources of information and processes characterizes this distracted attention. As it also has a very low tolerance of boredom it consequently has as low an allowance for the deep boredom which is not insignificant for a creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom "a dream bird resting on the eggs of experience". If sleep is the pinnacle of bodily relaxation, then the deep boredom is the pinnacle of the relaxation of the soul. Pure stress is unable to produce something new. It reproduces and accelerates what already exists.) 









Arnulfo wasn't being rude with his silence; I was being creepy with my questions.
To the Tarahumara, asking direct questions is a show of force, a demand for a possession inside their head.

Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.

― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby






















Most days, really. ( Here. )







Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.
Søren Kirkegaard