what if?

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Perhaps we don't love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? 

Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?


—Franz Kafka
Letters to Milena

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No permanence is ours; we are a wave 
That flows to fit whatever form it finds: 
Through day or night, cathedral or cave 
We pass forever, craving form that binds.
 

—Hermann Hesse
from “Lament” in The Glass Bead Game
Clara and Richard Winston version

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Although from the beginning 
I knew
the world is impermanent,
not a moment passes
when my sleeves are dry.


—Ryokan
Sky Above, Great Wind

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signs on the frontier

  

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It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and arranging your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.


—Italo Calvino
If on a winter's night a traveler

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It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from our view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. 

If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. 

This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

—Franz Kafka

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So what can they tell us,

the writers of dreambooks,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors

with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times

even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

—Wisława Szymborska

Dreams, excerpt

Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

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Need, then, is the net for all things. —Rumi

  

 

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We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the center of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a  massive hole at the location of the “blind spot” where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. 

What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for our eye and head movements, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes. 

All these operations unfold unconsciously—although many of them are so complicated that they resist computer modeling. For instance, our visual system detects the presence of shadows in the image and removes them. At a glance, our brain unconsciously infers the sources of lights and deduces the shape, opacity, reflectance, and luminance of the objects.

—Stanislas Dehaene

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

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You need not do anything.

Remain sitting at your table and listen.

You need not even listen, just wait.

You need not even wait, 

just learn to be quiet, still and solitary,

and the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked.

It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.


—Franz Kafka

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Give up to grace.

The ocean takes care of each wave ‘til

it gets to shore.

You need more help than you know.

—Rumi

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