Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
Why Look at Animals: John Berger on What Our Relationship with Our Fellow Beings Reveals About Us
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
Nathan Schneider—whose Governable Spaces I am always recommending—said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since:
I think of tech as a wildfire—it burns really quickly. And we get a lot of wildfires out here, and there's the front of it, where the blaze is, and then once it's burnt over, that's when cool things start growing up. They grow much slower, and they find their way through…the burned trees and new life happens. I kind of hope we're entering that phase of social media that we're done with the fast burn. And maybe it had to happen.
What’s there after the fire passes over if not that goddamn mushroom at the end of a world?
On the extortion of sensitivity:
We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life — the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs — into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned with creation.
The only way I knew how to process being sick was to think about it in terms of a finished art project.
“These are the times in life—when nothing happens—but in quietness the soul expands.”
—Wilderness, Rockwell Kent
“Go, young men to grow wise and wise men to stay young, not West nor East nor North nor South, but anywhere that men are not. For we all need, profoundly, to maintain ourselves in our essential, God-descended manhood against the forces of the day we live in—to be at last less products of a culture than the makers of it.”
—Wilderness, Rockwell Kent
Drawing on that experience, Kent would later formulate the closest thing to a personal credo:
Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physi... See more
Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physi... See more
I have felt this compulsion, that my creativity of late has not channeled my true pain and truth. It has made me look at my own work with some disdain, because I am not being honest enough, or something. But I don’t want to share everything and every part of me. Alas, it’s a battle.