what kind of knowledge can art give us?

Art gives us the knowledge that many have gone before, and had the same strange feelings and the same unanswerable questions, and that we are not alone in the art-endeavor, let alone life. It gives us the knowledge that people have always been stupid and violent and cruel, and compassionate and confused and curious and wondrous and astonished and tired. What it does not give us is answers. It gives us instead a picture. It does not ask that we analyze the picture, but that we stand before it and look, in the hope that looking might turn into gazing. For gazing will hold our attention for a very long time.

Mary Ruefle (interview)

how easy it is

Each person is a great mystery, to himself and to others. We see the ever-changing play of light and shadow upon the superficial aspects of ourselves, but of the endless depths that lie beneath we are for the most part ignorant or unconscious. At any time, however, currents flowing from these depths may sweep us unexpectedly into thoughts, actions, or even lifestyles we would now find inconceivable. We may then rise to heights of achievement or fall far below what we would have believed possible in others. Yet how easy it is to pass judgment based on what people manifest of themselves outwardly at any given time, as if this could approach the totality of who they really are.


Sarah Belle Dougherty (via)

accurate

Your voice sounds completely different in different languages. It alters your personality somehow. I don't think people get the same feeling from you. The rhythm changes. Because the rhythm of the language is different, it changes your inner rhythm and that changes how you process everything.

When I hear myself speak French, I look at myself differently. Certain aspects will feel closer to the way I feel or the way I am and others won't. I like that—to tour different sides of yourself. I often find when looking at people who are comfortable in many languages, they're more comfortable talking about emotional stuff in a certain language or political stuff in another and that's really interesting, how people relate to those languages.



François Arnaud (via interview magazine)

where things are felt

Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain. I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it. It was a quiet process: going from inside me to the screen. I’d get something on film, get it paced a certain way, add the right sounds, and then I’d be able to say if it worked or not. Now, just to get to that point, there’s a million times more talking. And in Hollywood, if you can’t write your ideas down, or if you can’t pitch them, or if they’re so abstract they can’t be pitched properly, then they don’t have a chance of surviving.

David Lynch

revisiting myself with wallace

The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

from an online interview

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, David Foster Wallace

(...) in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight — “I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore” — which evidently makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully. Somehow, in other words, my reducing the statement to its bare propositional content “sends a message” that is itself scanned, sifted, interpreted, and judged by my auditor, who then sometimes never comes back. I've actually lost friends this way.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace

don’t poison everything

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don’t cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

Herzog, Saul Bellow

fleeting and temporary

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.


Daniel Gilbert (via)

the stars died so you could be born

A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.

Lawrence M. Krauss

separated by valleys

It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens.

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński

life is beyond reason

The only reason for life is life.
There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason.

by George Lucas (via)

the fear of being hurt

the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. the one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. it is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.


The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton

Forget everything.

Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don't find yourself.

Diaries, 1910-1923, Franz Kafka

a desire to be whole

To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics by Rebecca Solnit

Unconscious Social Biases

Good people are not those who lack flaws, the brave are not those who feel no fear, and the generous are not those who never feel selfish. Extraordinary people are not extraordinary because they are invulnerable to unconscious biases. They are extraordinary because they choose to do something about it.

Shankar Vedantam (via)

You exist, and therefore, you matter.

Your worth isn't contingent upon other people's acceptance of you — it's something inherent. You exist, and therefore, you matter. You're allowed to voice your thoughts and feelings. You're allowed to assert your needs and take up space. You're allowed to hold onto the truth that who you are is exactly enough. And you’re allowed to remove anyone from your life who makes you feel otherwise.

by Daniell Koepke

I will always scare

I cannot say I feel serene and happy. Happiness only in a sense, and never serenity,
because I will always scare; and more than anyone else - myself.

Letters To Milena, Franz Kafka

a paradoxical release of the spirit

When you accept the state of being a stranger, you are no longer a stranger. I have been an exile when everything around me seemed strange and everybody was a stranger. Once I accepted that I didn't have to belong and I didn't have to be part of the world, then I was free to be part of it. There was a paradoxical release of the spirit. The world became mine when I was no longer holding on to it.

by Satish Kumar (via)

Forgotten wounds can't be healed

Healing is a challenge in life. It's a victim's sole obligation. By healing, you resist oppression. But when I'm hurt over and over again, I forget the wounds that rule my life. Forgotten wounds can't be healed. So I film to heal. I know they may knock at my door at any moment. But I'll just keep filming. It helps me confront life. And survive.

by Emad Burnat

Simone de Beauvoir

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.

starting point

Art can't fix anything. It can just observe and portray. What's important is that it becomes an object, a thing you can see and talk about and refer to. A film is an object around which you can have a debate, more so than the incident itself. It's someone's view of an incident, an advanced starting point.