Jane Birkin

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44 (1921)

“tonight I wd. love to write an essay about music—it seems to me I know some things tonight—but good God! For hours with pencil in hand + only one stupid sentence. Who tied my tongue + stopped the spirit for words? Maybe I can tell you what vision I have: rhythm is like the air or water or the ether that the planets move in,—it is in fact like space, and the whole problem in writing notes or making movements, etc., is to not destroy it. It has not the slightest thing to do with anything that is put into it: an accent or a metre or what else; it only begs to be free to be. Does that mean anything?”

— John Cage, in a Letter to Merce Cunningham [postmarked August 17, 1944, New York], in John Cage’s Selected Letters

Le rayon vert

dir. Éric Rohmer

1986

david inshaw, "she did not turn," 1974

Wedding in Azerbaijan, photo by Lev Borodulin (1959)

Lee Lozano

No title, 1971, pen on vellum, 11 × 8½ inches

Intellectuals are wonderfully cultivated, they have views on everything. I'm not an intellectual, because I can't supply views like that, I've got no stock of views to draw on. What I know, I know only from something I'm actually working on, and if I come back to something a few years later, I have to learn everything all over again. It's really good not having any view or idea about this or that point. We don't suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say.

— Deleuze, On Philosophy, in Negotiations

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.””

— Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education” (1977), On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (via sadladypoetssociety)