“How should we grieve when someone close to us dies? Should we wail and gnash our teeth? Should we swallow our pain? Some would say there is no right answer. You feel whatever you feel, and heal however you heal, and that’s okay. But according to the ancient Stoics – those Greco-Roman philosophers making a comeback as preachers of practical wisdom in a self-help world – there is a correct answer to the question of how we should grieve. And the answer is that we shouldn’t. What’s done is done. There is nothing you can do to change the situation – so move on.”

“Until recently, lying down was seen as the horizontal counterpart to the dreamy rambling of the melancholy flâneur, walking about without pursuing any goal in particular. When we lie on our backs and direct our gaze up toward the ceiling or sky, we lose our physical grasp of things. We relax our state of hyper-vigilance, and our thoughts soar.”

“While Haliphat and Miriam give us a wonderful glimpse into the life and creativity of ancient societies, each one has taken on a new role today.”

“AS LONG AS NO Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of...an insurrection?

Never mind if it's "impossible." What else can we hope to attain but the "impossible"? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires?

If art has died, or the audience has withered away, then we find ourselves free of two dead weights. Potentially, everyone is now some kind of artist & potentially every audience has regained its innocence, its ability to become the art that it experiences.

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols (in this case, the images we've been "given" by the organizers of this salon- murder, war, famine, & greed).

We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or "cruelty," as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. "Poetic Terrorism." Our chosen images have the potency of darkness - but all images are masks, & behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light & pleasure.

For example, the man who invented aikido was a samurai who became a pacifist & refused to fight for Japanese imperialism. He became a hermit, lived on a mountain sitting under a tree...

One day a former fellow-officer came to visit him & accused him of betrayal, cowardice, etc. The hermit said nothing, but kept on sitting & the officer fell into a rage, drew his sword, & struck. Spontaneously the unarmed master disarmed the officer & returned his sword. Again & again the officer tried to kill, using every subtle kata in his repertoire - but out of his empty mind the hermit each time invented a new way to disarm him.

The officer of course became his first disciple. Later, they learned how to dodge bullets. We might contemplate some form of metadrama meant to capture a taste of this performance, which gave rise to a wholly new art, a totally non violent way of fighting - war without murder, "the sword of life" rather than death.

A conspiracy of artists, anonymous as any mad bombers, but aimed toward an act of gratuitous generosity rather than violence - at the millennium rather than the apocalypse - or rather, aimed at a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization & liberation.

Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.”

-Hakim Bey

Dutch resistance fighters hear the news of hitlers death in 1945.

“One day, fleets of RangerBots may autonomously monitor vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef, Babcock says, complementing current monitoring systems and arming reef managers with better data.”

Josh Usmani’s painting on a £5 note, ‘Funny Money’, 2018

Findings
From the August issue of Harper’s magazine

Polarized political partisans are impatient not with their opponents’ views but with all politics; political consensus between parents and children has been rising since the Sixties; liberals are more likely to read news sources that use serif fonts. The language of inmates represents the prison as an animal kingdom. The more a man associates women with birds, the more sexist he tends to be. Women are likelier than men to assume male feminists look feminine. The more educated an American man is, the less likely he is to change his name when he gets married. Hyposexual Czech women confer mercy sex on their male partners four times as frequently as do hyposexual Italian women. High vocal pitch offsets antisocial speech content. Men with high testosterone direct more swear words and sexual words at their romantic partners and more “achievement” words at their children. Both male and female psychopaths have fewer children than average, whereas male narcissists have more. Both male and female narcissists have thicker, bushier eyebrows.

The highly educated tend to underestimate how much time they have left to live. Most adults, starting in their early twenties, feel younger than their chronological age, by 15 percent on average; those who feel older are at double the risk of dying. It remained unclear why positivity peaks late in life. Eighteen percent of men in their seventies and only 1 percent of women remain open to having sex with different people. Sex becomes more important and less enjoyable as people age, and frequent sex in old age does not correlate with slow cognitive decline. The most common porn search criterion is youth. End-of-life medical spending was falling. The annual US economic loss from childhood sexual abuse exceeds $9 billion. Jack Russell terriers achieve peak cuteness at 7.7 weeks. Duke University’s Jonathan Anomaly argued for a return to eugenics.

Sitting in a hard chair makes people want to impose harsher punishments, as does seeing other people exhibit a willingness to punish. The “honesty” that has been observed in Parkinson’s patients is the result of a dampened dopaminergic reward system, which reduces the incentive to deceive. Researchers claimed to have transferred memories between snails via injection. The Sunk Cost Fallacy persists even when someone else has sunk the cost. Mirror-touch synesthetes can tickle themselves. Happy teams score more World Cup goals. Nigerians, Colombians, and Ghanaians are likeliest to say that they are having a good day. Women wearing fat suits eat more snacks. Hunter-gatherer men achieve maximal hunting efficiency only in their late forties. The body odor of anxious dental students worsens the performance of other dental students, nests built with aromatic herbs make starlings better parents, and a male crested auklet’s sexual attractiveness is proportional to his citrus scent. Large Trinidadian guppies signal aggression toward smaller ones by turning their eyes black. Astronauts who weigh more on earth experience more changes to their eyeballs in microgravity. Bees are confused by iridescence but understand zero. Low clouds were becoming rarer over southern California. Large portions of disappearing South American rainforest are not naturally distributed but were planted by pre-Columbian peoples. The red hats of Easter Island statues were put in place with parbuckling. Malaysian oil-palm harvesters dislike their hard hats foremost because they are too hot and heavy. A colony of dead star coral from the southeastern United States washed up on a Normandy beach, transported by stray polyurethane.

“In the 1960s, intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley were fascinated by the effects of LSD, but today most professors are far too worried about respectability and tenure to investigate psychedelics themselves. Which is somewhat ironic, given that the field of Western philosophy has a huge debt to psychedelics, according to Peter Sjöstedt-H, a philosophy doctoral candidate at University of Exeter who has written a book on the philosophical significance of drugs. In fact, one of Plato’s most-cited theories may have been a direct result of hallucinogenics.”