[Image: “The Day the World Went Away,” by Sabbian Paine. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) The title refers to a song by Nine Inch Nails, and the Flickr writeup quotes from the song’s lyrics and directs us explicitly to a video of the song’s “Quiet” version, assembled from outtakes of the music video for the “original” version. The image itself is one of many created by Sabbian Paine using tools originally built for the Second Life virtual-world social network.]
From whiskey river:
Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear—flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands—and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.
(Paul Auster [source])
…and:
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile
(Alice Notley [source])
…and:
Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair’s breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the ‘real’ world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the real – not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself – inside stories and tales and dreams.
(Rick Bass [source: can’t cite any other source at all for this (which drives me crazy… what’s the Internet for if not to answer every question?!? (laughing))])
