[Image: “Hard Lesson (Detail),” by Lewis Minor; found it on Flickr, and use it here of course under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). Minor is one of numerous photo-artists on Flickr who assemble found photos into collages of often eerily photorealistic quality. (Some are more successful than others, of course — just as is true of the component images.) In this example, captioned “Messin with Banksy and Bouguereau,” he’s combined portions of each of those artists’ work with some Pop-art-style scraps from here and there. This is a detail which he selected from the full image, here. Really, I could’ve used any of a dozen or more choices from Minor’s photostream.]

From whiskey river:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

If we look at this conflict as a straight eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.

But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire.

We may not have stopped it in its tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.

…Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

(Arundhati Roy [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

(Roy, ibid.)

…and:

Happiness

A state you must dare not enter
   with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle
   that doesn’t exist.
But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above
   the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

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