Mushroom
The Lovin’ Spoonful – Daydream
What a day for a daydreamWhat a day for a daydreamin' boy
And I'm lost in a daydream
Dreamin' 'bout my bundle of joy
And even if time ain't really on my side
It's one of those days for takin' a walk outside
I'm blowin' the day to take a walk in the sun
And fall on my face on somebody's new mowed lawn
Claude Levi-Strauss – Tristes Tropiques
Have we to conclude that, in the opinion of these natives, nothing is to be expected from society? Both institutions and customs seem to them like a mechanism the monotonous functioning of which leaves nothing to chance, luck or ability. They may think that the only means of compelling fate is to venture into those hazardous marginal areas where social norms cease to have any meaning, and where the protective laws and demands of the group no longer prevail; to go right to the frontiers of average, ordered living, to the breaking point of bodily strength and to the extremes of physical and moral suffering. In this unstable border area, there is a danger of slipping beyond the pale and never coming back, as well as a possibility of drawing from the vast ocean of unexploited forces surrounding organized society a personal supply of power, thanks to which he who has risked all can hope to modify an otherwise unchangeable order.Simon and Garfunkel – April Come She Will
April, come she willWhen streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again
June she'll change her tune
In restless walks she'll prowl the night
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight
August, die she must
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September, I remember
A love once new has now grown old
I Ching – I Ching
5. Hsu (Waiting/Nourishment)The Judgment
Waiting. If you are sincere,
You have light and success.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
The Image
Clouds rise up to heaven:
The image of Waiting.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.
The Beatles – Come Together
He bag production, he got walrus gumbootHe got Ono sideboard, he one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knees
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together right now over me
Tom Wolfe – The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
LSD; HOW CAN — NOW THAT THOSE BIG FAT LETTERS ARE babbling out on coated stock from every newsstand ... But this was late 1959, early 1960, a full two years before Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis heard of the dread letters and clucked because Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were french-frying the brains of Harvard boys with it. It was even before Dr. Humphry Osmond had invented the term "psychodelic," which was later amended to "psychedelic" to get rid of the nuthouse connotation of "psycho" ... LSD! It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a hulking supersecret, in fact—the triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds.Claude Levi-Strauss – Tristes Tropiques
Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But, over and above agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities and the various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. A pale blurred line, or an often almost imperceptible difference in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil. As I follow the traces of their age-old stagnation despite all obstacles—sheer cliff faces, landslides, scrub or cultivated land—and disregarding paths and fences, I seem to be proceeding in meaningless fashion. But the sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition.Roy Harper – The Same Old Rock
And you try to tell me with consternationThat you have found me a brand new lock
Then you try to warn me that there's only one combination
One new sling – the same old rock.
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow light pooled between the trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third of the trees I walked under were still bare, a third spread a luminous haze wherever they grew, and another third blocked the sun with new, whole leaves. The snakes were out—I saw a bright, smashed one on the path—and the butterflies were vaulting and furling about; the phlox was at its peak, and the evergreens looked greener, newly created and washed.Virgil – Eclogue V
Mopsus: [...] Where the plump barley-grain so oft we sowed,There but wild oats and barren darnel spring;
For tender violet and narcissus bright
Thistle and prickly thorn uprear their heads.
Now, O ye shepherds, strew the ground with leaves,
And o'er the fountains draw a shady veil-
So Daphnis to his memory bids be done-
And rear a tomb, and write thereon this verse:
'I, Daphnis in the woods, from hence in fame
Am to the stars exalted, guardian once
Of a fair flock, myself more fair than they.
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”
“One side of what? The other side of what?” thought Alice to herself.
“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
304. “But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behavior accompanied by pain and pain-behavior without any pain?”—Admit it? What greater difference could there be?—“And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.”—Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose to convey thoughts—which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please.
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you smallAnd the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
Michel Foucault – The Birth of the Clinic
IT IS THE SOVEREIGNTY OF CONSCIOUSNESS THAT TRANSFORMS THE SYMPTOM INTO A SIGN. Signs and symptoms are and say the same thing, the only difference being that the sign says the same thing that is precisely the symptom. In its material reality, the sign is identified with the symptom itself; the symptom is the indispensable morphological support of the sign. Hence 'no sign without a symptom'. But what makes the sign a sign belongs not to the symptom, but to an activity that originates elsewhere. Thus `every symptom is a sign' by right, `but not every sign is a symptom' in the sense that the totality of symptoms will never be able to exhaust the reality of the sign. How does this operation occur, which transforms the symptom into a signifying element, and which signifies the disease as precisely as the immediate truth of the symptom?Jacques Derrida – Of Grammatology
This question is therefore not only of Rousseau's writing but also of our reading. We should begin by taking rigorous account of this being held within [prise] or this surprise: the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce. What does produce mean here? In my attempt to explain that, I would initiate a justification of my principles of reading. A justification, as we shall see, entirely negative, outlining by exclusion a space of reading that I shall not fill here: a task of reading. To produce this signifying structure obviously cannot consist of reproducing, by the effaced and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that the writer institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element of language. This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading.Roland Barthes – Elements of Semiology
The fact remains that, although Saussure's ideas have made great headway, semiology remains a tentative science. The reason for this may well be simple. Saussure, followed in this by the main semiologists, thought that linguistics merely formed a part of the general science of signs. Now it is far from certain that in the social life of today there are to be found any extensive systems of signs outside human language. Semiology has so far concerned itself with codes of no more than slight interest, such as the Highway Code; the moment we go on to systems where the sociological significance is more than superficial, we are once more confronted with language. it is true that objects, images and patterns of behaviour can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic message (which happens in the case of the cinema, advertising, comic strips, press photography, etc.) so that at least a part of the iconic message is, in terms of structural relationship, either redundant or taken up by the linguistic system.Thomas Wolfe – Look Homeward Angel
But the university was a charming, an unforgettable place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big State. Students came and departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter, twelve miles away: the countryside was ray, powerful and ugly, a rolling land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried in a pastoral wilderness, on a long tabling butte, which rose steeply above the country. One burst suddenly, at the hill-top, on the end of the straggling village street, flanked by faculty houses, and winding a mile in to the town centre and the university. The central campus sloped back and up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent ancient trees. A quadrangle of post-Revolutionary buildings of weathered brick bounded the upper end: other newer buildings, in the modern bad manner (the Pedagogic Neo-Greeky), were scattered around beyond the central design: beyond, there was a thickly forested wilderness. There was still a good flavor of the wilderness about the place—one felt its remoteness, its isolated charm. It seemed to Eugene like a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast.Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the forest had given the university a sweetness and a beauty it was later to forfeit.
Richard Rorty – Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
We seem to have no doubts that pains, moods, images, and sentences which “flash before the mind,” dreams, hallucinations, beliefs, attitudes, desires, and intentions all count as “mental” whereas the contractions of the stomach which cause the pain, the neural processes which accompany it, and everything else which can be given a firm location within the body count as nonmental. Our unhesitating classification suggests that not only have we a clear intuition of what “mentality” is, but that it has something to do with non-spatiality and with the notion that even if the body were destroyed the mental entities or states might somehow linger on. Even if we discard the notion of “mind-stuff,” even if we drop the notion of res cogitans as a subject of predication, we seem able to distinguish mind from body nonetheless, and to do so in a more or less Cartesian way.James Joyce – Ulysses
Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund.Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia’s tempting last rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth: Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard.
Tap. A youth entered a lonely Ormond hall.
Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks’s window. Robert Emmet’s last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.
—True men like you men.
—Ay, ay, Ben.
—Will lift your glass with us.
They lifted.
Tschink. Tschunk.
Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see.
Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her place among.
Prrprr.
Must be the bur.
Fff! Oo. Rrpr.
Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaa. Written. I have.
Pprrpffrrppffff.
Done.
Shakespeare – Measure for Measure
ISABELLACould great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
Love – Andmoreagain
And if you'll see AndmoreagainThen you will know Andmoreagain
For you can see you in her eyes
Then you feel your heart beating
Thrum-pum-pum-pum
Cream – White Room
In the white room with black curtains near the stationBlack roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes
Dawnlight smiles on you leaving, my contentment
I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
And Billy, watching the brass brads on that woman’s Levis wink at him as she walked out of the day room, told Ellis to hell with that fisher of men business. He joined us at the door, and the least black boy let us through and locked the door behind us, and we were out, outside. The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose bed. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly against the wire cyclone fence. There was little brown birds occasionally on the fence; when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.John Muir – My First Summer in the Sierras
June 30. Half cloudy, half sunny, clouds lustrous white. The tall pines crowded along the top of the Pilot Peak Ridge look like six-inch miniatures exquisitely outlined on the satiny sky. Average cloudiness for the day about .25. No rain. And so this memorable month ends, a stream of beauty unmeasured, no more to be sectioned off by almanac arithmetic than sun-radiance or the currents of seas and rivers—a peaceful, joyful stream of beauty. Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, “Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!” Looking back through the stillness and romantic enchanting beauty and peace of the camp grove, this June seems the greatest of all the months of my life, the most truly, divinely free, boundless like eternity, immortal. Everything in it seems equally divine—one smooth, pure, wild glow of Heaven’s love, never to be blotted or blurred by anything past or to come.Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
Suppose someone points to a vase and says "Look at that marvellous blue—the shape isn't the point."—Or: "Look at the marvellous shape— the colour doesn't matter." Without doubt you will do something different when you act upon these two invitations. But do you always do the same thing when you direct your attention to the colour? Imagine various different cases. To indicate a few:"Is this blue the same as the blue over there? Do you see any difference?"—
You are mixing paint and you say "It's hard to get the blue of this sky."
"It's turning fine, you can already see blue sky again."
"Look what different effects these two blues have."
"Do you see the blue book over there? Bring it here."
"This blue signal-light means . . . ."
"What's this blue called?—Is it 'indigo'?"
You sometimes attend to the colour by putting your hand up to keep the outline from view; or by not looking at the outline of the thing; sometimes by staring at the object and trying to remember where you saw that colour before.
Francis McPeake – Wild Mountain Thyme
Oh, the summer time is coming,And the trees are sweetly blooming,
And the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather.
Will ye go, lassie go?
William Wordsworth – I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful." He is the man who feels that "what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future - all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills." We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus
The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane" increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.Lao Tzu – Tao te Ching
The supreme good is like water,which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.
Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception
Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
-O my animals, answered Zarathustra, talk on thus and let me listen! It refreshes me so to hear your talk: where there is talk, there is the world as a garden to me.How charming it is that there are words and tones; are not words and tones rainbows and seeming bridges between the eternally separated?
To each soul belongs another world; to each soul is every other soul a back-world.
Among the most alike does semblance deceive most delightfully: for the smallest gap is most difficult to bridge over.
For me - how could there be an outside-of-me? There is no outside! But this we forget on hearing tones; how delightful it is that we forget!
Have not names and tones been given to things that man may refresh himself with them? It is a beautiful folly, speaking; therewith dances man over everything.
How lovely is all speech and all falsehoods of tones! With tones dances our love on variegated rainbows.-
-"O Zarathustra," said then his animals, "to those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee - and return.
Everything goes, everything returns; eternally rolls the wheel of existence. Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again; eternally runs on the year of existence.
Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; eternally builds itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remains the ring of existence.
Every moment begins existence, around every 'Here' rolls the ball 'There.' The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity."-
John Denver – Annie's Song
You fill up my sensesLike a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime
Like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert
Like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses
Come fill me again.
Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same [...]
William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
When I used to sleep with Vardaman I had a nightmare once I thought I was awake but I couldn’t see and couldn’t feel I couldn’t feel the bed under me and I couldn’t think what I was I couldn’t think of my name I couldn’t even think I am a girl I couldn’t even think I nor even think I want to wake up nor remember what was opposite to awake so I could do that I knew that something was passing but I couldn’t even think of time then all of a sudden I knew that something was it was wind blowing over me it was like the wind came and blew me back from where it was I was not blowing the room and Vardaman asleep and all of them back under me again and going on like apiece of cool silk dragging across my naked legs. It blows cool out of the pines, a sad steady sound. New Hope. Was 3 mi. Was 3 mi. I believe in God I believe in God.Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful." He is the man who feels that "what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future - all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills." We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.William Faulkner – Light in August
The brother worked in the mill. All the men in the village worked in the mill or for it. It was cutting pine. It had been there seven years and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach. Then some of the machinery and most of the men who ran it and existed because of and for it would be loaded onto freight cars and moved away. But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan—gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly into red and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes. Then the hamlet which at its best day had borne no name listed on Postoffice Department annals would not now even be remembered by the hookwormridden heir-sat-large who pulled the buildings down and buried them in cookstoves and winter grates.Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.Jaques Derrida – Of Grammatology
In that Tristes Tropiques which is at the same time The Confessions and a sort of supplement to the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, * the " Writing Lesson" marks an episode of what may be called the anthropological war, the essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures, even when that communication is not practiced under the banner of colonial or missionary oppression. The entire " Writing Lesson" is recounted in the tones of violence repressed or deferred, a violence sometimes veiled, but always oppressive and heavy. Its weight is felt in various places and various moments of the narrative : in Levi-Strauss's account as in the relationship among individuals and among groups, among cultures or within the same community. What can a relationship to writing signify in these diverse instances of violence?Penetration in the case of the Nambikwara. The anthropologist's affection for those to whom he devoted one of his dissertations, La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (1948) . Penetration, therefore, into "the lost world" of the Nambikwara, "the little bands of nomads, who are among the most genuinely 'primitive' of the world's peoples" on "a territory the size of France," traversed by a picada (a crude trail whose "track" is "not easily distinguished from the bush" [po 262]; one should meditate upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken, beaten, fracta, of the space of reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening, the divergence from, and the violent spacing, of nature, of the natural, savage, salvage, forest. The silva is savage, the via rupta is written, discerned, and inscribed violently as difference, as form imposed on the hyle, in the forest, in wood as matter; it is difficult. to imagine that access to the possibility of a road-map is not at the same time access to writing).
Gary Snyder – Of The Wild Mushroom
We set out in the forestTo seek the wild mushroom
In shapes diverse and colorful
Shining through the woodland gloom.
If you look under oak trees
Or around an old pine stump
You'll know a mushroom's coming
By the way the leaves are humped.
They send out multiple fibers
Through the roots and sod
Some make you mighty sick they say
Or bring you close to God.
Rodgers and Hammerstein – Do-Re-Mi
doe, a deer, a female deer(Re!) ray, a drop of golden sun
(Mi!) me, a name I call myself
(Fa!) far, a long, long way to run
(So!) sew, a needle pulling thread
(La!) la, a note to follow so
(Ti!) tea, a drink with jam and bread
That will bring us back to do oh oh oh
Jacques Derrida – The Animal That Therefore I Am
I decline all responsibility. I respond no more, I no more answer for what I am saying. I reply that I am no longer responding. If autobiography were at least a genre, in the sense of an exercise fortified with all the assurances that a centuries-old institution can guarantee, you could right now recognize in that institution of the so-called ‘‘autobiographical’’ genre a signal merit: that of permitting whomever speaks of himself to find refuge—in order to decline all responsibility and all onus of proof— behind the artificial authority of a genre, behind the right to a genre whose literary pedigree, as we well know, remains problematic. It will, as we say, have caused much ink to flow. Discharged of every onus of proof, pure autobiography authorizes either veracity or mendacity, but always in accordance with a scene of witnessing, that is to say, an ‘‘I am telling you the truth’’ without shame, bareback, naked and raw [a` nu et a` cru]. As if, in speaking of oneself, I, me, my self were speaking of another, were quoting another, or as if I were speaking of an ‘‘I’’ in general, naked and raw. With these words, ‘‘naked and raw,’’ I have just seen an animal pass. Looking at me without blinkers. A mounted animal, like a horse, raw, naked down to its body hair [a` poil]. The French expression—monter un cheval a` poil, ‘‘to mount a horse bareback,’’ that is, raw and without a saddle—is barely translatable.Allan Watts – The Book on the Taboo against knowing who you are
To sum up: just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
ESTRAGON: Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let's go.VLADIMIR: We can't.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We're waiting for Godot.
ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here?
VLADIMIR: What?
ESTRAGON: That we were to wait.
VLADIMIR: He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?
ESTRAGON: What is it?
VLADIMIR: I don't know. A willow.
ESTRAGON: Where are the leaves?
VLADIMIR: It must be dead.
ESTRAGON: No more weeping.
VLADIMIR: Or perhaps it's not the season.
ESTRAGON: Looks to me more like a bush.
VLADIMIR: A shrub.
ESTRAGON: A bush.
VLADIMIR: A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place?
ESTRAGON: He should be here.
VLADIMIR: He didn't say for sure he'd come.
ESTRAGON: And if he doesn't come?
VLADIMIR: We'll come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGON: And then the day after tomorrow.
VLADIMIR: Possibly.
ESTRAGON: And so on.
VLADIMIR: The point is—
ESTRAGON: Until he comes.
The Byrds – Wasn't Born to Follow
I’d rather go and journeyWhere the diamond crescents glowing,
And run across the valley
Beneath the sacred mountain
And wander through the forest
Where the trees have leaves of prisms
And break the light in colors
That no one knows the names of.
Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now
Rows and flows of angel hairAnd ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way.
Walt Whitman – Give me the Splendid Silent Sun
[...] Give me to warble spontaneous songs, reliev'd, recluseby myself, for my own ears only;
Give me solitude—give me Nature—give me again,
O Nature, your primal sanities! [...]
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5.6The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. 5.61
Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not.
For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
Virgil – The Georgics
Spring benefits the leaves of the groves and woods,in Spring soil swells and demands life-bringing seed.
Then Heaven, the omnipotent father, descends as fertile rain,
into the lap of his joyful consort, and joining his power
to her vast body nourishes all growth.
Then the wild thickets echo to the songs of birds,
and in the settled days the cattle renew their loves:
the kindly earth gives birth, and the fields open their hearts,
in the warm West winds: gentle moisture flows everywhere,
and the grasses safely dare to trust to the new sun.
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understand me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
[End]