Sublime

This gets to the crux of the Woolf that has been most exemplary for me: she is always celebrating a liberation that is not official, institutional, rational, but a matter of going beyond the familiar, the safe, the known into the broader world.

Urban explorers use the dérive to map the emotive force field of the city, and the way architecture and topography combine to create its 'psychogeographical contours'. Robert Macfarlane, a masterful writer-walker of the countryside, offers this summary of the practice: 'Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map,

The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself.

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.

The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.

Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.

We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures.