Computers, video, radio, printing presses, synthesizers, fax machines, tape recorders, photocopiers – these things make good toys, but terrible addictions.
Finally we realize we cannot “reach out & touch someone” who is not present in the flesh. These media may be useful to our art – but they must not possess us, nor must they stand between, mediate, or separate us from our animal/animate selves. We want to control our media, not be controlled by them. And we should like to remember a certain psychic martial art which stresses the realization that the body itself is the least mediated of all media.
The voyage into distant worlds of the imaginary truly conducts a dynamic psyche only if it takes the shape of a voyage into the land of the infinite. In the realm of imagination, every immanence takes on a transcendence.
peter lamborn wilson, spiritual destinations of an anarchist, 24.
Each of us are a part of Nature, it is true, but our value as individuals is not thereby lessened in any way, since it would be equally true to say that Nature is a part of us, individually. Nature's freedom from all abstract “categorical imperatives” does not reduce all biota to a faceless mass; on the contrary, it restores to each thing its own unique face.
quote, charles steiner, the watch house where the switches keep
There is a “bad” eternity: the quasi-atemporality of half-inhabited images; of concepts believed; of institutions imposed. There is a “good” eternity unveiled when energy is released, where the Now abides at the very center of the transitory
If we think that these human beings have been totally objective, totally dominated by facts, totally true—yes, totally true!—could they then have invented things? Where was the flute before it was invented? And the garden? And dances? And paintings? Absent. Nonexistent. No knowledge could possibly have pulled these things from nature. It was necessary that the imagination become pregnant in order that culture could be born.