The Blue Cliff Record is a translation of the Pi Yen Lu, a collection of one hundred Zen koans accompanied by commentaries and appreciatory verses from the teachings of the Chinese Zen masters. Compiled in the twelfth century, it is considered to be one of the greatest treasures of Zen literature and an essential study manual for students of Zen.
“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”
In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.
Between 1835 and 1850 Froebel worked on his “Gifts and Occupations” — a set of geometric blocks (Gifts) and basic craft activities (Occupations), that would become the centerpiece of his pedagogical theory. The Gifts and Occupations were introduced in a highly ordered sequence, which began in the child’s second month and concluded in the last year of kindergarten.
- Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand
- I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect
- Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep
- Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts
- The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved
- Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide
- I Love To Be Alone
- A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows
- Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House
- The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed
- After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying
- The Sun Is But A Morning Star
- A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing
- As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending
- A Sullen Rush And Roar
m o t i o n l e s s
m o t i o n l s e s
m o t i o n s l e s
m o t i o s n l e s
m o t i s o n l e s
m o t s i o n l e s
m o s t i o n l e s
m s o t i o n l e s
s m o t i o n l e s
s o m t i o n l e s
s o m t i n o l e s
s o m t n i o l e s
s o m n t i o l e s
s o m n t o i l e s
s o m n o t i l e s
s o m n o t l i e s
s o m n o l t i e s
s o m n o l i t e s
Why am reaching again for the brushes?
When I paint your portrait
God, nothing happens
But I can choose to feel you
On my senses' horizon
You appear hesitantly like scattered islandsIt's standing here, peering out
I'm all the time seen by you
A chorus of angels use up all of heaven
You're living in your very last house
You're living in your very last house
You're living in your very last house
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
There is a story of Rikyu which well illustrates the ideas of cleanliness entertained by the tea masters. Rikyu was watching his son Shoan as he swept and watered the garden path. "Not clean enough," said Rikyu, when Shoan had finished his task, and bade him try again. After a weary hour the son turned to Rikyu: "Father, there is nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time, the stone lanterns and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and lichens are shining with a fresh verdure; not a twig, not a leaf have I left on the ground"
"Young fool," chided the tea master, "that is not the way a garden path should be swept. "Saying this, Rikyu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikvu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also.
Example of a standardized field data collection form used to record all the fossil bones encountered along a transect.
Informally I refer to these as “bonewalks.”
Like crustaceans we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic cities and houses filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past. Our ways of describing this visible past are still most awkward. The systematic study of things is less than five hundred years old, beginning with the description of works of art in the artists' biographies of the Italian Renaissance.
And as it blooms here
Somewhere else breaks
The world is always half asleep and half awake
And when it aches here
Somewhere else blooms
The light I see reflected off the darkest moon
There are in the world of manufacture, and not only in that of metaphysics, certain Ideas of which the things we make are necessarily imperfect copies. Nothing has ever been square become nothing has ever been straight, nor has anything been flat, nor spherical, cylindrical, cubical.
Socrates, in the Phaedo, maintains that the idea of absolute equality is suggested to us by the sight of things which appear to be approximately equal, because they remind us of something our souls knew before we were born...I prefer another explanation...Whenever we make something 'flat' and find that it is not flat enough, we always find that by taking more trouble we can make it still flatter: or we have always been able to do so hitherto: and so we find it easy to imagine we are approximating to a perfect flatness which it is just beyond our powers or patience to reach.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
When we try to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles we fool ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr has called this particular self-deception, “The doctrine of salvation by bricks.”
A sixty ton angel falls to the earth
A pile of old metal, a radiant blur
Scars in the country, the summer and herAlways the summers are slipping away
Find me a way for making it stay
the authenticity of the gesture
as if the air had taken on substance
representation and re-presentation
a first order of presence
this painterly game of pick-up sticks
Irwin's "fetish finish"
questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them
the art is what has happened to the viewer
an art of things not looked at
a dialogue of immanence
the information that takes place between things
your house is the last before the infinite
his "project of general peripatetic availability"
that shiver of perception perceiving itself
a desert of pure feeling
I Swear I Use No Art at All surveys the career and sensibility of graphic designer Joost Grootens, charting the first 100 books designed by Grootens over the past ten years.
Phonaesthetics is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic").
A lacuna is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or musical work. A manuscript, text, or section suffering from gaps is said to be "lacunose" or "lacunulose".
Weathering, decay, and other damage to old manuscripts or inscriptions are often responsible for lacunae - words, sentences, or whole passages that are missing or illegible. Palimpsests are particularly vulnerable.
Kasuri is thus a textile that appears to have been rubbed. Since the edges of the pattern do not align, they take on the nature of an odd number rather than an even number. Without this rubbing or smudging, kasuri could never have been. However, since it is precisely this misalignment and blurry effect that is the source of kasuri’s beauty, we are presented with an interesting problem. I will call this problem ‘the beauty of odd numbers’.
One way not to be there (without dying).
"Yes, we have felt happy and alive together."
The Finnish word loyly, meaning "the steam which rises from the stones" originally signified spirit, or even life.
The tradition of the great shade tree.
the symbolic weight of stairs
the regulation of obnoxious uses
a collector and transmitter of memory
Dubai is the world made Disney
people whose traditions and desires cannot be repressed by mere architecture
the annihilation of space by time (Marx)
Leave space between them for the things that words can't really say.
To suggest more than the words seem to allow.
Perhaps it renames the world.
The Anxiety of Sequence.
It was all change until the very last second.
The debris of someone else's thinking.
You'll never run out of noticings.
Names that announce the whatness of the world.
What were you trying to protect?
You were protecting the memory.
The tyranny of what exists.
Do any of them sound first?
It sets an echo in motion.
Try writing for the reader in yourself.
So call it "perfection enough".
Toward the name of the world—yours to discover.
'an unending rainfall of images' (Calvino)
a cancerous growth of vision
we are unable to see or imagine life behind these walls
the patina of wear
to carve a volume into the void of darkness
time turned into shape
The Busy Beaver function grows faster than any function that can be computed, and we know that because if a systematic method existed to compute arbitrary
BB(n)values, then we could use that method to determine whether a given Turing machine halts (if the machine hasnstates, just check whether it runs for more thanBB(n)steps; if it does, it must run forever). This is the famous halting problem, which Turing proved to be unsolvable by finite means. The Busy Beaver function is Turing-uncomputability made flesh, a finite function that scrapes the edge of infinity.
I walked around with a map, penciling in X’s wherever there was a barn or shed. For the next three days, I covered four kilometers in all four directions. Living toward the outskirts of town, there are still a good many farmers in the vicinity. So it came to a considerable number of barns—sixteen altogether.
I carefully checked the condition of each of these, and from the sixteen I eliminated all those where there were houses in the immediate proximity or greenhouses alongside. I also eliminated those in which there were farm implements or chemicals or signs that they were still in active use. I didn’t imagine he’d want to burn tools or fertilizer. That left five barns.
Five barns worth burning.
Certain things are only visible at certain frame rates. At certain times. In certain rooms. You found me, and I found myself. We became us. We became white foam when Cronos attacked his father. An airborne seed. A plastic bag. A parachute. A capsule. A file. A metaphor. A vocabulary. A thread. An environment. A contamination. A mantra we repeat to ourselves like the evening prayer I recited with my mother before sleep. A reminder of days, lunar cycles and Earth’s orbit around the sun. A practice expanding what the web is and can be. A web. A living web. All in plural.
Many wonderful things must have been seen by the alchemists in their mixings.
Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason.
- The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point
- Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed
- The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly
- Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context
- A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection
- An idea, if you consider it divine enough
A small corner of the world of things
This tactile form of doodling
The crowded past of reality
Infundibular cores
Whose form our hands have often grown to glove
An IPA inspired by years of accumulated experience, and an expression of both past, present and future.
Free from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression
Zach Hershey called to my attention a phenomenon about the relationship between speech and writing (and meaning) that I long suspected might well be true, and I even collected plentiful evidence in support of it, but I was never absolutely certain that it was true, namely, that in many cases speakers of Sinitic languages have in mind sounds over characters.
...Maybe this happens more than I know, but I immediately thought that it was fascinating that, in their minds, they like the sound of the name, but haven't put a meaning, much less characters, to the sound yet.
Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.
Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.
So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.
Storm Doris Mimecom Cloudbleed Athleisure Cromwell H7N9 Trappist-1 ... (+448)
Barthes's prose is all the time delighting in its own refinement. This is not to everyone's taste. As he asked (again in The Pleasure of the Text): "Why in a text, all this verbal display?" He goes on to say that the "prattle of the text is merely that foam of language." For his detractors this is not the foam of a tide or stream but of an overscented bubble bath to which one can develop an allergic reaction; for his admirers it is something in which to luxuriate.
- Sound Breaking Wall
- Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room
- False Silence
- Flayed Earth Flayed Self (Skin/Sink)
- Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care
There is some secret stirring in the world,
A thought that seeks impatiently its word.
This is how time is forgotten;
this is how work absorbs
the hours and days.
His whole creative history is that of great rivers running into the sand
Thus piece by piece I walked the crest of the dune, and each time the solution slipped on one side or the other I knew what to do to get back on the track.