Thoughts
15 items.
You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.
Thomas Traherne
“You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it’s just complaining.”
Joni Mitchell
All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Lynda Barry on writing slow and letting it come to you…
I learned how to do this from kids. I met a kid named Benny Greiling when I was trying to write a book on the computer, and he was four, and I was babysitting him and I asked him if he wanted to tell me a story and I’d write it down and we could draw pictures to go with it.
He says yes but he will only tell me the story one word at a time. I have to write that word down completely before he’ll tell me the next one. And the story turns out solid! It has a beginning, middle, end, character development, transformation, fore-shadowing, no change in evil character, symbols of death, every lit/crit thing you can think of. And this four year old did it one word at a time in eight minutes.
And I remember going back to my studio and thinking if he can do it, what the hell, I’ll give it a try. And between slowing down the story intentionally in my head and using a paintbrush so it slowed physically on the page, something happened to how I physically felt while I was writing. And that changed the content of the writing into something I was following rather than pushing along.
Again, I don’t mean any kind of big feeling, it’s just the difference between being interested in your surroundings and not being interested
Writing this way gave me a feeling I remember having when I was a kid and cutting things out of construction paper for a shoebox diorama or coloring in a coloring book when it was going really well, or making tiny channels and rivers between dammed up mud puddles in the alley, it gave me that same feeling, that sensation of being absorbed in the physical act of what I’m doing in such a way that the back of the mind had a chance to come forward and move things around.
Read the whole article here.
. . . this mind, through endless kalpas without beginning, has never varied. It has never lived or died, appeared or disappeared, increased or decreased. It’s not pure or impure, good or evil, past or future. It’s not true or false. It’s not male or female. It doesn’t appear as a monk or a layman, an elder or a novice, a sage or a fool, a buddha or a mortal. It strives for no realization and suffers no karma. It has no strength or form. It’s like space. You can’t possess it and you can’t lose it. Its movements can’t be blocked by mountains, rivers, or rock walls. . . . No karma can restrain this real body. But this mind is subtle and hard to see. It’s not the same as the sensual mind. Everyone wants to see this mind, and those who move their hands and feet by its light are as many as the grains of sand along the Ganges, but when you ask them, they can’t explain it. It’s theirs to use. Why don’t they see it? . . .
The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, trans. Red Pine
In response to Barnes’s youthful questions, Mother Jones replies, in the accompanying interview, “Listen…you are a young woman, you have never seen the beginning or the ending of creation. I’ve borne sons; I’ve seen death. I’ve just come from the inside of the world. I’ve been on the under side of the watch. I’ve been breast-to-breast with the ticks, and I know…. No tragedy was ever comprehended from the mouth to the ear. It has to pass from the eye to the soul.”
“‘A Skirt About So Wide,’” New York Press Magazine, February 7, 1915.
The reason for nostalgia:
“…when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things—a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.”
From Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), 1913, by Marcel Proust
Scott Adams says that humor consists of the following elements: * Bizarre * Recognizable * Naughty * Cute * Clever * Cruel. He contends that to be funny your work needs to have at least two of these elements, and the more you have the funnier it is. He says that most comic strips are cute, so just need one more from the list.
From the Webcomics Weekly Podcast
“You start a cartoon the way a dirty joke teller starts a dirty joke. The first thing a joke teller does is make you like him, the teller. He establishes his own personality first. He dominates the scene, he gets a rhythm going, he exudes playful mischief, he creates an atmosphere which is electric with potential.”
“That done, he gets started on the set-up. The set-up is the most important part of the joke. It has to be ignorant as hell. The teller gets you to smile and even laugh way before the punch line. It’s as if the real joke was that the people in the story would put themselves in such an improbable and silly situation. The punch line is just an excuse to justify the funny set-up.”
“Transpose all of this to a cartoon and you have your beginning. How do I know it works? Because this is more or less what Bob Clampett did. He’d start a barnyard cartoon by first establishing that it was a cool barnyard, where cool animals live. He infused the cartoon with a bouncey rhythm and a sense of life and playfulness before the plot ever got started. He took the time to make friends with the audience. A lot of animation directors seem like they’re scared of the audience and try to keep it at a distance. Directors like Bob and Tex liked the people they were making cartoons for and took pains to bring them in.”
“In a society in which everything is for sale, in which deals and auctions make the biggest news, doing it for love is the only remaining liberty. Do it for love and you cannot be censored. Do it for love and you cannot be stopped. Do it for love and the rich will envy no one more than you. In a world of tuxedos, the naked man is king. In a world of bookkeepers with spreadsheets, the one who gives it away without counting the cost is God.”
Erica Jong
“Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses — for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it…”
Herman Melville
