Wittgenstein wasn’t some obscure returning Cambridge student. On the contrary, from 1911 until just before the outbreak of the First World War, he had studied there with Russell and had quickly become a cult figure, known for both his obvious brilliance and his waywardness. “Well, God has arrived, I met him on the 5:15 train,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in a letter dated January 18, 1929.
TIME OF THE MAGICIANS
‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning’.
James Joyce
In addition to the traditional piano player, each (film) theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and “explained” the action to the audience. “Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,” he would declaim. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!” It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.
if you want a picture of the future, imagine humans having to face watching reboots – for ever.
As the ambient noise of sixties culture grew louder around him, the more he desired to block it out and hear only himself; the more he went inward.
COLTRANE: THE STORY OF A SOUND, Ben Ratliff
I’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.
Our minds are full of things that are dead and yet that we live for and couldn’t live without.
Biosemiotics is the idea that all life is involved in meaning making. It has been defined as ‘the study of distinctions that make organisms, what they recognize, what they intend, and what they know’. This happens at the level of single-celled organisms, which can collect information and make decisions. The plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, for example, is an amoeba-like cell with some surprising abilities. When presented with a maze in the lab, it can find the shortest route through it in a way that would be impossible were it only to be responding to basic environmental signals with behavioural reflexes. You could say that the plasmodium has its own perception of the world, composed of a wide array of information collected from the environment, which it evaluates and uses to make decisions for future behaviour.
PLANTA SAPIENS, Paco Calvo & Natalie Lawrence
We have to think into the experiences of other organisms dramatically different from ourselves, however rudimentary or complex they might be. So different in fact that their experiences might be generated without any of the familiar animal thinking machinery. No brains, neurones or synapses. I began to think about the sapience of plants. We are so entrenched in the dogma of neuronal intelligence, brain-centric consciousness, that we find it difficult to imagine alternative kinds of internal experience.
PLANTA SAPIENS, Paco Calvo & Natalie Lawrence
(The speculative realism crowd will have a field day with this, if they’ve pried themselves away from “ferreting out the specific psychic reality” of rocks.)
The work authored by Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore was truly substantial, running to more than two thousand pages, and the publisher in the brief foreword, rather unconventionally, did not concede to mandatory expressions of politeness praising those persons whose support had made the present volume possible; nor did he adhere to the custom of wishing to recommend, to a general audience, this lesser-known scholar to his readers’ distinguished attention, no, not at all; instead, employing a fairly harsh tone, the writer of the introduction objected to his readers’ potential accusations, according to which the whole thing would have been more comfortable, more easily navigable, as well as daintier, if it had been published in two volumes, and with this invective, thoroughly unjustified, presented with no explanation—not to mention the startling openness of its formulation or rather its unconstrained tone (almost continually employing such expressions as “go fuck yourselves,” “shit,” and “your mother’s cunt”)—the impression was created that the writer of this introduction was not any kind of separate personage but none other than the author himself…
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH,… Laszlo Krasznahorkai