Imagination itself is a socially creative process

Across two studies, we find that co-imagining a shared future with a novel partner cultivates feelings of social connection, to a greater degree than individually imagining a shared future or engaging in a collaborative or shared experience in general.

En-‘chanted’ land is not only land that has been sung to, but land who has had its own song listened to and sung back to it: land that is understood for its own specificity. And through that understanding, the land radiates back in true expression of itself, the same way a child beams when understood—or, when sung to.

How poised it is!
Petal and leaf
curving like a fan

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

A poem celebrating generosity in all its forms.

… when Oscar Wilde announced ‘Nobody of any real culture talks about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned,’ sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux-arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up-to-date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

It’s a 6-inch circle of soil and a column of air above it. The column is marked by a 6-foot granite ring embedded flush into the concrete…

I like a private life, it’s true…

The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence.

A spirited defense of slowing down in a world obsessed with acceleration.

There is a tribe of people known as the Ethno-graphic Filmmakers who believe they are invisible. They enter a room where a feast is being celebrated, or the sick cured, or the dead mourned, and, though weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed.

The desires of the audience’s heart are as crooked as corkscrews. We continue to love what we ought to hate.

This is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster.

What do we do with the art of monsters from the past? Look for ourselves there—in the monstrousness.

…when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.

To have rejected strategy; to sit, instead, with one’s bafflement

Changing the work and how we work is the unpleasant task of dealing with what we’ve been denying. It is probably the biggest test in the creative process demanding not only an admission that you’ve made a mistake, but that you know how to fix it.

The story of Twyla Tharp’s Billy Joel musical and the unlikely bicycle-powered airplane.

We wrote our names all over the city because we felt invisible. And it was fun. I existed when I did graffiti.

The brain scan image—a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color—has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves.

This is a film about the simple polka dot. A dot that has obsessed Kusama for nine decades.

Museum of Nonhumanity calls for the deconstruction of the categories of animality and humanity in order to enter a new, more inclusive era.

… the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed

A collection of philosophical essays by a celebrated artist grappling with our current, global predicament.

After you listen, be sure to check out the book they discuss at the end, All Yesterdays and its sequel, All Your Yesterdays.

Doctor, if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world

Furtwängler’s Bach is no smug or mindless adaptation of Bach to the style of Wagner. It is a reaffirmation of the presence of Bach in Wagner and the simultaneous, reciprocal presence of Wagner in Bach.

A forceful argument against the modern trend of “historically authentic” musical performances.

Born into a Jewish family in Nazi Austria, Hundertwasser came to despise straight lines and the authoritarianism they represented. His story reminds me that we are products of our environment, even—or perhaps especially—when we reject it.

… poets do not [normally] get this kind of attention

The story of an unusual fence in New York City and its bold rejection of cynicism.

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction–to locate what is true. …beauty is a starting place for education.

A thorough defense of beauty and of its power to push the boundaries of our concern outward.

Not written from the Buddhist perspective, these essays dismiss (too?) casually the ugly failure modes of beauty: the acquisitiveness, possessiveness, and jealousy which consume many the beholder. However, I find it a useful corollary or even corrective to the standard Buddhist “rejection” of aesthetics, explaining how beauty can condition becoming’s wholesome forms.

In this way, we start to view the spiritual education as a kind of aesthetic education: acquainting the student with “truer” sources of beauty and affording them the more sublime responses outlined in these notes.

… ask whether it is necessary–or wise–to abandon the field of the emotional sublime to the fascists