the title is a brilliant phrase uttered on the intertubes by AdamSelene @ theoildrum.com. this space accumulates other such short, poetic, and found-elsewhere insights into the limits of human cognition. it is a project dedicated to Wes Jackson’s vision of an “ignorance-based worldview.” a brilliant phrase uttered by his friend Wendell Barry in a letter.
Archive for this blog
April 25, 2009 at 3:00 pm · Filed under meta, the cloud and tagged: hemingway, rushkoff, short stories, speculative fiction, the economy, this blog
btw, on the far right of this blog, i’m compiling a list of essays i think are very good, possibly earth-shattering. as you can see, the links also include a few words of commentary next to them. i’m treating these like mini blog posts (a fun challenge; Hemingway said his best work was this six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”; to read more very short stories, go here).
today, for example, i added Douglas Rushkoff’s essay Let it Die, which is about the modern industrial corporate economy, and has this as its first sentence:
With any luck, the economy will never recover.
April 18, 2009 at 1:39 am · Filed under art, meta and tagged: hope, monasticism, other blogs, the sea, this blog, visual art, water
i took a 900 pixel by 200 pixel chunk out of Caspar David Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer (monk by the sea) (1809-10), which i found at Marie’s blog At the Lighthouse. the painting in its entirety is more beautiful, and more hopeful (blue sky begins to appear.) i liked Marie’s comments on the painting:
The man in the picture looks so small in comparison to the vast sea, and of course the fact that he is a monk adds a whole extra dimension to the existential anxiety this painting inspires. The motif reminds me a great deal of the ending of Joyce’s The Dead, with the sea playing the same part as the faintly falling snow: Nature as a menacing force, something all-consuming that we cannot conquer, and thus a reminder of the terminality of our lives. Beautiful.
April 18, 2009 at 1:15 am · Filed under meta, the cloud and tagged: intentions, the basic problem, this blog
i found the phrase “the universe will not be controlled by the likes of us” here. what a poetic and concise summation of the basic problem! these are the two criteria i want to stick to: poetic and concise. everything else is allowed. philosophy, art, comments on my activity, pictures, things overheard – but all leading in a particular direction: toward Something As-Yet Unknown.
