Reckon | The Whole World's a Stage

I'm Chris: Poet, lover of academy and porch, sidewalk and turning row. I am looking for everyone discovering her hands and camera trying to overstand the in between.

Reckon

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"Civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy. As it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives....This new electronic environment itself constitutes an inner trip, collectively, without benefit of drugs. The impulse to use hallucinogens is a kind of empathy with the electronic environment." - Marshall McLuhan
psychology:

“In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.”

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Riazm (of No Correlation and these amazing photos) posted this quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.”

Nabokov was such a talented stylist it’s almost hard to bear; I could read this over and over. The “…darkly gesticulating trees,” the composition of the “awful messages” from nature, the world as cipher coding a message for oneself, the glass and the coats-as-lynchers: this whole passage ought to be required reading for students of psychosis, fear, and/or literature.

“He must…devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.”

(via mills)

Writers on suicide and why the Plath legacy lives »

dataxemotion:

psychotherapy:

It has been 46 years since Sylvia Plath gassed herself to death in her kitchen, and it was worldwide news when her daughter Frieda Hughes announced that Plath’s 47-year-old son, Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist in Alaska, killed himself last week.

Why, of all the stories of creative, brilliant people who have suffered from fatal depressions, does Plath’s tragic legacy resonate so widely? Here, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew Solomon and Elaine Showalter offer their thoughts.

Beauty and the Brain »

roamin:

SEED Magazine/ Moheb Costandi

“Why is something beautiful? David Hume argued that beauty exists not in things but “in the mind that contemplates them.” And everyone has at some point heard the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But Plato had a fanciful answer made to argue for a universal truth: In his world of forms, he claimed there existed a perfect Form of Beauty, which was imperfectly manifested in what we call beautiful. Despite the allure of Plato’s metaphorical claim, students of aesthetics have struggled to substantiate it. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that there exist quantifiable, describable, universal aspects to the human capacity for appreciating beautiful forms, perhaps originating in our ancestors’ experience on African savannas or in the need to find suitable mates. They have not solved the problem. However, recent work by several researchers at University College London…”

“

The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is “her home,” nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:

“This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.”

But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: “I’d say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They’ll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it’s going to be interesting. It’s not predictable that it’ll go well.”

”

—The Creative Personality

“

Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

”

—Psychology Today: The Creative Personality