Category: language

Survival is insufficient

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PXL_20260518_151427360

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery

Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Because survival is insufficient.” (Emily St. John Mandel)

051726 or to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding

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Bertrand Russell on useless knowledge and idleness via The Marginalian.

“a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation”
“Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction…”
“A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.”
“it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.“

051626

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The Draw Project. A series of traveling exhibition of drawings and works-on-paper.

Poor, impious Soul! that fixes its high hopes
In the dim distance, on a throne of clouds,
And from the morning’s mist would make the ropes
To draw it up amid acclaim of crowds—
Beware! That soaring path is lined with shrouds;
And he who braves it, though of sturdy breath,
May meet, half way, the avalanche and death!

O poor young Soul!—whose year-devouring glance
Fixes in ecstasy upon a star,
Whose feverish brilliance looks a part of earth,
Yet quivers where the feet of angels are,
And seems the future crown in realms afar—
Beware! A spark thou art, and dost but see
Thine own reflection in Eternity!

Aspiration, Adah Isaacs Menken

and make some room

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AG2026_1170926a, 043026

In-between the sun and moon,
I sit and watch
and make some room
for letting light and twilight mingle,
shaping hope
and making single glances last eternity,
a little more,
extending love beyond the doors of welcoming,
while wedding all the parted people,
even sons to violent mothers,
and searching all the others finding light
where twilight lingers,
in-between the sun and moon.

In-between the sun and moon, Pádraig Ó Tuama

The sea-god’s other bones

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A sea-god, whose father had been a mortal, becomes a skeleton.

The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
And the tone of the sea was dull;
When I found by the edge of the sullen sea
The half of a sea-god’s skull.

Half of a sea-god’s skull was there,
Half of a sea-god’s tail.
When I dug them out of the clutch of the sand
The peering moon went pale.

The peering moon went pale, because
Her other eye had seen
The other half of the sea-god’s bones
Ten thousand fathom green . . .

Ten thousand fathom green with sea,
The sea-god’s other bones
Swayed in a dead sea-goddess’s arms
On a pile of sea-washed stones.

The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
And the tone of the sea was dull,
While I buried away from the sinister sea
All the mortal part of a skull.

Skull Song, Genevieve Taggard

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operate within it

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… Perhaps this, my skin engulfed
in morning dew and music,
is the true human romance.
Immune to purpose.

Ashna Ali

“AI-generated images no longer serve as evidence of anything, having been detached from their material origin. Imagine, then, the surprise of Maja Malou Lyse upon learning that the viewing of pornography through VR technology enhances male fertility by as much as 50%, as recent studies suggest. Fertility, futurity, and pornography thus become deeply entangled.

Maja Malou Lyse has conceived a paradoxical environment that suggests we are not simply at the end of the image, but at the beginning of a new world in which images persist, yet their meaning, function, and credibility are fundamentally altered. In her work, images no longer describe reality; they operate within it. Images function as an affective technology: they produce sensations, they produce time, they produce the species. They are rehearsals for possible futures rather than records of the present. “

Chus Martínez, Curator via kunst.dk