Dilettantery

“The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for anything else….The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take or make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.” -Nelson Goodman “…the Abelam do not ask what a painting means. The design elements all have names and they are assembled into harmonious compositions, which appear to act directly on the beholder without having to be named. Abelam art is about relationships, not about things. One of its functions is to relate and unite disparate things in terms of their place in the ritual and cosmological order. It does this, I would suggest, directly and not as an illustration to some text based in another symbolic system such as language. One of the main functions of the initiation system with its repetetive exposure of initiates to quantities of art is, I would suggest, to teach the young men to see the art, not so that he may consciously interpret it but so that he is directly affected by it.” -Anthony Forge

“Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.” -Protagoras, fragment 80 (the Homo Mensura fragment)  “Through logos humanity truly is the measure of everything. Only that which can be experienced as something is, and that which can not be thus experienced is not.” -Mats Rosengren's updated, clearer version of Protagoras' fragment  ‘When a cave supports a mountain on rocks deeply eroded from within, not made by human hand, but excavated to such size by natural causes, your soul is seized by a religious apprehension.’ -Seneca, quoted in Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind by Yulia Ustinova (2009) “Genuinely, we know nothing: the truth is in the depth” -Democritus, fragment 117

"Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. what we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality." -Bohm, 1977 "...without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observation" -Darwin, 1860 letter to Lyell "It is only the nonbeliever who believes that the believer believes." -Jean Pouillon "To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe." -Sartre

“Sometimes I have entered this world of darkness alone, or remained behind alone to finish taking notes or measurements. It is hard to admit, but such occasions are always accompanied by flashes of indefinable apprehension. The comfort you may find in the ray of light from the headlamp is disturbed by the pressure of the darkness that is always behind you – shadows seem to advance from all parts that are not lit up. The shaky well-being you may find in the beam of light is disrupted by the fact that it also makes you very visible, vulnerable, a highlighted eye-catcher for nameless things you are not able to see. It is ten times the uneasy feeling of being the ‘target’ in the child’s game where all the others try to get closer each time you turn your back on them, and you wait for the uneasy moment when you are touched by the winner. It is tempting to slip away from this by switching off the light, and entering a state of a peaceful nothingness that normally is not reached by living persons without the use of strong mind altering drugs. It is like being dead or unborn…On several occasions I have experienced the paralysing anxiety which today is known as ‘claustrophobia’. For me it is like a sudden horrible stench – one that is not noticeable until it is too late, at er you have inhaled it and it is inside you….Perhaps humans long ago also recognized, named, and had their own explanation for this phenomenon? Did they sense this as something coming from within themselves – or as entities in the cave itself?” ~Hein Bjerck “At first, we are children of the darkness. Your body and your face were formed first in the kind darkness of your mother’s womb. You lived the first nine months in there. Your birth was the first journey from darkness into light. All your life, your mind lives within the darkness of your body. Every thought you have is a flint moment, a spark of light from your inner darkness. The miracle of thought is its presence in the night side of your soul; the brilliance of thought is born of darkness. Each day is a journey. We come out of the night into the day. All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover the balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm.” ~John O' Donohue Rock art links to explore: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/ Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/10hcgv8/39_david_lewiswilliams_part_3_a_temporary_death/?

(episode 3.7 is part 1) “People did not ‘invent’ two-dimensional images; nor did they discover them in natural marks. On the contrary, their world was already invested with two-dimensional images...The first two-dimensional images were thus not two dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed...For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions – as indeed was the case for the southern African San and the North American shamans...They were not inventing images. They were merely touching what was already there.” -David Lewis-Williams From far, from eve and morning/ And yon twelve-winded sky,/ The stuff of life to knit me/ Blew hither: here am I./ Now—for a breath I tarry/ Nor yet disperse apart—/ Take my hand quick and tell me,/ What have you in your heart./ Speak now, and I will answer;/ How shall I help you, say;/ Ere to the wind's twelve quarters/ I take my endless way. ~A.E. Housman Rock art links to explore: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/ Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/10hcgaw/38_david_lewiswilliams_part_2_north_american/?

"The /Xam San spoke of the rain as an animal. A rain-bull  the thunderstorm that roared and destroyed the people’s huts; a raincow the gentle, soaking rain; columns of rain falling beneath a thunderstorm were called the ‘rain’s legs’—the rain was said to walk across the land." (discussed at 59:36: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459918418071552) rock art discussed at 55:20: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459942589857797/photo/1 rock art discussed at 1:09:20: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459938802388992/photo/1 rock painting of trance dance: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459942589857797/photo/1 "For the makers, the paintings and engravings *were* visions, not representations of visions." -James David Lewis-Williams "High at the head a branching olive grows/ And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs./ A cavern pleasant, though involved in night,/ Beneath it lies, the Naiades delight:/ Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine/ And massy beams in native marble shine;/ On which the Nymphs amazing webs display,/ Of purple hue and exquisite array,/ The busy bees within the urns secure/ Honey delicious, and like nectar pure./ Perpetual waters through the grotto glide,/ A lofty gate unfolds on either side;/ That to the north is pervious to mankind:/ The sacred south t'immortals is consign'd.” -Homer, Odyssey Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/zlhzkk/37_how_19th_century_shamans_gave_the_21st_century/?

"Deep in the timecrevasse, in the honeycomb-ice, waits a breathcrystal, your unalterable testimony." -Paul Celan “When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find what people left behind, their trash. But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish—it seems like a message, we can feel a connection to it.” -Maxime Aubert "When a cave supports a mountain on rocks deeply eroded from within, not made by human hand, but excavated to such size by natural causes, your soul is seized by a religious apprehension." -Seneca Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/zd0ou9/36_two_beginnings_a_standard_history_of_modern/?

"Some of our most common and comforting groups no longer exist if classifications must be based on cladograms [evolutionary branching diagrams] .... I regret to report that there is surely no such thing as a fish.”  -“What, If Anything, is a Zebra?” by Stephen Jay Gould, 1983 "To change the concept of category itself is to change our understanding of the world.”  -Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff, 1987 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/zcz9rd/41_to_think_we_must_split_up_the_world_a_history/?

https://twitter.com/PersianPoetics/status/1261745279860080641 [The Northern Line or the Gothic Line] “is a line that passes between things and, in the process, imbues the figures of people, animals, plants, etc. with a common nervous and frenetic energy. Its movement gives birth to a dynamic and chaotic geometry of diagonals, jagged edges, and swirling lines that actively construct space rather than merely describing it. This nomadic line connects and assembles heterogeneous elements while maintaining them as heterogeneous. Thus, space is assembled piece by piece, with each piece of space having its own internal geometrical coordinates, its own temporal rhythms, and its own dramatic intensities.” -Darren Ambrose “Man betrayed the prophetic advice of his ancestors, who adopted the law of migration, believing the sedentary are the only dead ones, since they alone possess bodies that arouse the earth’s greed. Nomadic people, who never stay anywhere or settle down on the earth, own nothing to provoke the earth or arouse its greed. They possess nothing: no gear, no walls, no bodies, not even dreams. All they possess is their voyage, nothing more. They possess a single riddle, over which the earth holds no sway and for which the lowlands can offer no explanation. This is deliverance.” -Ibrahim al-Koni “He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. Such a man will, to be sure, experience bad nights, when he is tired and finds the gate of the town that should offer him rest closed against him; perhaps in addition the desert will, as in the Orient, reach right up to the gate, beasts of prey howl now farther off, now closer to, a strong wind arise, robbers depart with his beasts of burden. Then dreadful night may sink down upon the desert like a second desert, and his heart grow weary of wandering. When the morning sun then rises, burning like a god of wrath, and the gate of the town opens to him, perhaps he will behold in the faces of those who dwell there even more desert, dirt, deception, insecurity than lie outside the gate – and the day will be almost worse than the night. Thus it may be that the wanderer shall fare; but then, as recompense, there will come the joyful mornings of other days and climes, when he shall see, even before the light has broken, the Muses come dancing by him in the mist of the mountains, when afterwards, if he relaxes quietly beneath the trees in the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown down to him from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him, are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and the twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so light-filled, so cheerful and transfigured: – they seek the philosophy of the morning.” -Nietzsche, Human, All too Human (I, §638) [Enlightenment philosophers] “left us with a notion of matter as passive and inert, while the human mind was seen as active and creative” Bjørnar Olsen (2007) Rock art threads: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/ Sources/place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y59149/35_deleuze_and_guattari_and_cave_art_part_2/?

How My Poetry Comes To Me by Gary Snyder, 1992 "It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night, it stays / Frightened outside the / Range of my campfire / I go to meet it at the / Edge of the light" Warning: This episode is me trying to figure out complicated philosophy. If that's not your thing you can skip to episode 3.6 without missing anything. Example of the "primeval magma of life": https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1541657274438914048  “For Lorblanchet, these lines and marks indicate a clear metaphysical intention – ‘a primeval magma where all living and imaginary beings merge in formal games.’ Thus, these indeterminate lines and marks contain potentialities for the becoming of latent figural images and as such are, for Lorblanchet, a crucial element within the prehistoric figuration of a mythology of creation. Here, the figurative components are born from a formless tangle or magma, e.g., from the formless web of subsidiary lines, perhaps a hoof or an antler emerges, perhaps a muzzle or a creature’s spine, perhaps an eye stares out from the depths of the graphic chaos. The seemingly incohesive graphic chaos is seemingly vibrant with emergent forms of Life.” -Darren Ambrose “In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.... The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible.” -Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon, 1981) Rock art threads: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/ Sources/place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y4xaxo/34_deleuze_and_guattari_and_cave_art_part_1/?