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Greg - 2006-05-20 10:55:45
Love this quote, love it, love it, love it. Heavy thoughts to live lightly by. Requires personal re-programming though doesn't it?
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iwombat - 2006-05-20 12:04:53
It is a nice quote, but I've come to have the opinion that, "what is the meaning of life?" might not be the right question. Parables have meanings, moral lessons have meanings, but "meaning" might be too small a concept for apprehending the sublime in life, existence, conciousness. Truly serious art, or poetry, seems to transcend meaning, it is whole, complete, the thing itself, not merely a signifier carrying some further meaning, life could not be less.
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Greg - 2006-05-20 12:27:30
Totally agree here, iwombat. I'd like to think it's a limitation in vocabulary--there are concepts/things bigger than we have words for--and I believe the tendency is to overlook things we don't have words for, even if we sense them. i.e. a painting of a tree (or a real tree for that matter)is defined as much by the space surrounding the tree as it is the boundaries of the tree--there is incidently no word in English for the spaces between leaves but try looking at them and not the leaves sometime. It ain't easy. Is there a word in music for the space between notes?
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iwombat - 2006-05-20 14:50:49
well, yes in music, it's a rest, in painting, I guess negative space, and the tree is a great analogy, because I think that's how all of our knowledge is organized, branching and bifurcating, expanding, but leaving negative space, of terra incognita.
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Greg - 2006-05-20 19:23:18
Ahh okay.. a rest... and negative space too. Both terms interesting in that they place the importance in the note or the "positive space," which says a lot about our language and our culture. When Charlie Saatchi did his little art soiree in New York and London he had works by Rachel Whiteread, a sculptor who works with negative space, which can be deeply moving. There was one piece that was 40 some-odd acrylic blocks evenly spaced in the floor of a big room. It represented the space beneath deskchairs in a classroom. Anyway, that was like a natch struck unexpectedly in the dark for me.
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Greg - 2006-05-20 19:26:38
er... I mean a match struck... and all I'm saying is there are a lot of rests and negative space in my life, and I'm realizing how much they define me. But now I need a rest.
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Paula - 2006-05-21 22:10:08
Well, I believe that life is way bigger than any human conception of "meaning"--meaning is a campfire story you tell yourself, and it serves a purpose to the extent that it carries the lifeforce. When it starts to trap you, you gotta change stories.
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Tom G. - 2006-05-22 01:02:00
I tend to agree with Paula on this one. Our brains are configured to find "meaning", to find the pattern. That's why we love stories and narratives so much. Nowadays, I am thinking more and more about Hui Neng and his "answer": the meaning of life is to see.
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Erich - 2006-05-22 09:58:06
I remember this Kerouac quote from Desolation Angels:
"The meaning of life is so simple it is beyond human comprehension."
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Paula - 2006-05-22 10:54:58
Wombat: Going back to the original quote, and to your comment: I think ol' Virginny was essentially saying what you're saying.
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Befexord - 2007-12-10 20:53:42
hm.. thank you man
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