colorful wings

#144 welcome back from the void

Damn, holiday break is already over. This week almost slipped my mind, I’m going to be honest with you.

The less you do. the less you do. Another way to say the more you do, the more you do. Wait.. Inertia. Yes.

I’ve said the word “inertia” twice in this newsletter before, here and here. Neither one really hitting on what I mean here. What I’m trying to say is that doing a lot of things makes you more likely to do more.

Be a doer.

Aside: In that first “inertia” mention, we saw the introduction of Landfill. Here is the most recent one, an idle glue session from last night while watching My Dinner with Andre that turned into a Landfill Mini (at least that’s what I called it).

I liked the movie. It’s a fun conversation about the world, life, and such. Nothing happens, but it’s enjoyable and definately rewatchable since you can alsways grapple more with the dialog. Perhaps every rewatch you will side with a different diner.

I enjoyed these two “monologues” — whether they’re extreme or not is besides the point:

Andre #1:

Well, I mean, Wally...how does it affect an audience to put on one of these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they can't reach each other, and their lives are desperate? Or how does it affect them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events, and terror, and violence? Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? See, I don't think so, cause I think it's very likely that the picture of the world that you're showing them in a play like that is exactly the picture of the world they have already.

I mean, you know, they know their own lives and relationships are difficult and painful. And if they watch the evening news on television, well, there what they see is a terrifying, chaotic universe, full of rapes, and murders, and hands cut off by subway cars, and children pushing their parents out of windows. So the play tells them that their impression of the world is correct and that there's absolutely no way out. There's nothing they can do. And they end up feeling passive and impotent.

Andre #2:

Okay. Yes. We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks. And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep? And somebody who's asleep will not say "no"?

See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he's a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand, and he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers, and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.

And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods, he's 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he's gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, "Where are you from?" and I said, "New York." He said, "Ah, New York. Yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said, "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all."

He said, "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built. They've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made or to even see it as a prison." And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said, "Escape before it's too late."

See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

Now, of course, Björnstrand feels that there's really almost no hope, and that we're probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period. Findhorn people see it a little differently. They're feeling that there'll be these pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world, and that these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet, and that as we, or the world, grow colder, we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come back. And it's their feeling that there have to be centers now where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world.

~

If this is / were true, where would these centers be? Who are the individuals who have freed themselves?

I don’t mean to get all hardcore to start off the year, but wanted to share the movie I just watched.

Now, what else?

I’m not particularly a fan of summary tweets (for example this guy just sharing some stuff he read, however, I support things that shout out Richard Feynman. Thread.

The more direct path is to watch this video where he draws a lot from. Plus you could read his books but that takes a lot longer.

Another fun one from this week is a six word story. You know the ones I’m talking about.

This might be why I always open the windows and doors everywhere..

Not because some guy said this, but because I want to have some skills I have thought about taking some community classes to learn to build stuff or just built something. Other than the garden boxes though, I haven’t thought of anything that would result in a useful output. Like the tweet, though, I wish we had a shop class or even a club growing up.

This week is short, I hve to get back to reading Wind and Truth.

End

Did everyone enjoy their holiday? Are you excited for a new year? Or do you view it as just another day, simply changing a number, nothing else?

Closing remark from Nietzsche that I saw somebody post online: