Artists

"Oh, Tolkien, that miserable Catholic. He even hated refrigerators. A technophobic academic who probable would have fucked Ireland, if Ireland were fuckable."

"The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called “stories”, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not."

"In a media-based society (and of course there is no such thing as a non-media-based society consisting of more than one person) it is the signs and significants, the meanings and habits and conventions of speaking and thinking, the images and stereotypes which control everything. It is important to analyze how it is represented and of course what is not represented or how it lacks representation. It's not so much Rupert Murdoch – whose assholeness I will not dispute – that we should attack, but rather something I would call the cultural grammar of the public space. Power is formed within such a grammar. Access and non-access to each and every thing is regulated in its realm. Meanings are negotiated there."

"The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed."

"Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy."

"Jesus died for our SIMMs."

"I think that the figure of the nerd provides a beautiful template for analyzing the transformation of the disciplinary society into the control society. The nerd, in his cliche form, first stepped out upon the world stage in the mid-1970s, when we were beginning to hear the first rumblings of what would become the Cambrian explosion of the information society. The nerd must serve as comic relief for the future-anxieties of Western society. And the transformation I'm talking about is already in full swing: the police gaze of 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary society made visible the individual, which is illuminated by power. In our burgeoning technological control society, the individual is x-rayed and algorithmized. Even worse: the individuals x-ray themselves, willingly putting themselves on display."

"Historically speaking, the first wave of the punk/new wave (approximately 1976-1983) was primarily a movement of creative abuse of hardly-ever-used consumer media technology. Parents (usually technophile Baby boomer dads) bought expensive equipment like 8-track recorders, Super-8 and Polaroid cameras and later VHS camcorders and only used it to "document" birthday parties and other eminently boring ceremonies. But the rebellious teens found interesting new things to do with the dust-collecting media tech, and it started one of the biggest DIY revolutions of the 20th century. So punk (years before cyperpunk) was a movement of youngsters goofing around with (aka appropriating) consumer tech."

"If I had not grown up in Stockerau, in the boonies of Lower Austria, than I would not be what I am now. The germ cell of burgeoning nerdism is difference. The yearning to be understood, to find opportunities to share experiences, to not be left alone with one's bizarre interest. At the same time one derives an almost perverse pleasure from wallowing in this deficit. Nerds love deficiency: that of the other, but also their own. Nerds are eager explorers, who enjoy measuring themselves against one another and also compete aggressively. And yet the nerd's existence also comprises an element of the occult, of mystery. The way in which this power is expressed or focused is very important."

"Art is something given, not reproduced... the painter paints what he sees with his innermost senses, the expression of his being.. every other impression becomes, for him, an inner expression."

"What we don't let out traps us. We think, "No one else feels this way, I must be crazy." So we don't say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. "Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don't make sense." Voicing it, getting it out and letting it other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal."

"I think God leaves me alone to let me find my own strength because no one else can give it to me. Sometimes it is very lonely. But I know the lonely times teach me the most. I must let go in order to let anything in. No one can love me, for me. Take a big walk protected in the trees. I miss the time before today."

"The more I look around and listen I realize that I'm not alone. We are all facing choices that define us. No choice. However messy is without importance in the overall picture of our lives. We all at our own age have to claim something, even if it's only our own confusion. I am in the middle of growing up and into myself."

"Honor your humanness and all of your feelings - the messy ones, the growing pains, the ache - because we can't have the dark without the light."

"May Sarton said, "the deeper you go, the more universal you become." It's a reminder to me that those things I try to convince myself I don't need to admit are usually those things I need the most to say. Speaking the truth, in its most poignant details, is liberating and gives those around us the freedom to be real."

"The Caribbean creativity is phenomenal. It is an astonishing phenomenon. The kind of writing that has been produced in these islands is such elaborate work. It was inevitable historically and culturally. But it is still as astonishing. Now you're talking about writers of equality, of Jean Rhys, Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, V. S. Naipaul. And these people are different colors and different races. (1990)"

"People who are offering revenge, they are just an enemy. But when you offer peace and love, that infuriates people. And you get killed for that. That's why Christ is killed, that's why King is shot, that's why Gandhi is killed. The idea of a man believing in the universal brotherhood is totally unendurable to someone who would prefer to have that man talk about revenge. (1990)"

"I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who believes in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be fascist. (1987)"

"I do not consider English to be the language of my masters. I consider language to be my birthright. I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place, and love both languages. It is the passion, futility and industry of critics to perpetuate this ambiguity. It is their profession. It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally. (1983)"

"I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship... I have always tried to keep my mind Gothic in its devotions to the concept of master and apprentice. The old masters made new masters by the discipline of severity. One's own voice is an anthology of all the sounds one has heard. As it is with children, so with poets. (1983)"

"I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)"

"you can't separate your growth from your soil. (1968)"

"I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style."

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

"Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."

"No masterpieces in huge frames to worship, … and yet there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise."

"Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound. Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name, when the hunched island was called 'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned, its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw, sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds"

"Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life."

"You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart."

"I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars."

"Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul."

"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

"The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain."

"...no matter how you look at Walcott, Walcott is a major figure; he is a Miltonic figure, a Shakespearean figure, a Chaucer figure. He stands in Caribbean literature like those figures: Chaucer, maybe Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton-those major, major massive figures who have already covered generations of work. And others come along who have their own value, their own work, but these guys have always already done more than anybody else. You look into the past, they've already done the past; you look into the future, they've already done things in the future. So he's a significant poet because he is the major poet, in terms of form and style, concerns, themes, and so on. And I very much look to him for form and so on. In terms of the ideology and the content, as I say, I think there is certainly a difference, as I move more and more into Christian poetry. You couldn't really describe Walcott as a Christian poet - not in that strict sense of the term. Our concerns have been independence, how we deal with the politics of the situation and so on...He has done his work and I think those of us coming after have to do our own work. We can't repeat him. We should not. We should learn from him and move on."

"I like the magic that operates in many of Derek's plays, the lushness and the exquisite wordcraft of them, and the fact that he uses Creole and music."

"...a master wordsmith. These words are his, from his poem "The Schooner Flight": I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation... Doesn't that last line just fucking give you chills, coming hard on the heels of what preceded it? Goddamn. Much respect."

"I love the opulent poetry of Tishani Doshi and the more formal work of Derek Walcott and Christian Wiman."

"You may have lived a calm and contented life—but from the moment you come face to face with the ideas of Viktor Schauberger, you will never again have peace in your soul."

"We have never... thought to question the influence that continual exposure to unnatural straight lines may exert on our mental, intellectual and emotional processes, on the energies that motivate and animate us and cause us to behave... Such is the desensitizing effect that we will perhaps have to change our living spaces in order to make possible the leap to the next higher state of awareness, to be able to appreciate Nature's processes and attune ourselves to them. No doubt it was for all of these reasons the Viktor Schauberger so joyfully declared: "In the whole machine there is no straight line or circle". By this he meant that the overall design and shape of his devices were founded on completely different parameters to those of current design. Gone are the mortifying elements of Euclid. ...[T]hese machines incorporate the swirling spirals and sinuosities, the open elements of non-Euclidean geometry so prevalent in Nature."

"[I]t seems timely that the radical departure in energy concepts presented here, should be available now, when the tide of human development is turning and the impetus of this renewing flood can be harnessed to launch Viktor Schauberger's pioneering discoveries into a world more ready than ever it implement them. At a time also, when the activities of humanity are increasingly seen to be on a head-on collision course with Nature's processes."

"He tries to explain the puzzle of how a trout can make a standing jump several meters high against the enormous force of a waterfall. His conclusion: the spiraling free-falling water... creates a wake at the center. The trout searches out this counter-current... the mass of the falling water opens... a gap for a fraction of a second, it slips through and, sucked up the center by the countercurrent... is thrown up... This makes it easy to visualize the inner energy... in... clouds... wind and the water. Birds behave... much like trout..."

"Contrary to centrifugal explosion, implosion works inwards, towards the center, centripetally. It concentrates the power towards the center where it... becomes... strongest. ...In the water, the wind, in the sap... and in the blood... movement ...take[s] ...an implosive [course] ...concentrating itself at the center. Bodies of water left to flow naturally turn within themselves, make winding movements that breathe and shelter life. They... regenerate waste water... and... revitalize it. And in the whirlwind... spiral motion is present with a vacuum and low temperatures in the inmost core. The same system is seen in... the universe as spiral nebula. Schauberger recognized this principle while observing in water."

"Schauberger... arrived at the opinion that the "explosion technology"... of burning and destroying, is... wrong and... in contradiction to nature. He opposed... internal combustion engines, "the fire-breathing monsters," with that of the power of "implosion." ...[I]nternal combustion worked centrifugally, destructively and detrimentally to life, it changed natural products of high quality ...as coal and oil into waste products ...which place an enormous burden on the environment and... will ...lead to its destruction. ...Nature ...only uses disintegrating forces to decompose sick, weak or unviable elements, in the form of spoilage and decay... the starting point for the development of new, more important life. In burning and combustion, this "sacred principle" is interrupted... In contrast... implosion is ...product refinement ...material ...is transformed into something of greater worth. ..."Nothing explodes in a plant," said ...Schauberger."

"His fundamental realization was that hydrologists (with the exception of a small group he was... able to convince) do everything backwards."

"[T]he Upper Austrian forester, naturalist and natural philosopher, Viktor Schauberger... is without a doubt one of the most fascinating figures of this century."

"Viktor Schauberger has observed water and seen and recorded more than all the scientific instruments put together so far."

"He... became interested in the behaviour of trout and salmon in mountain streams. The... trout could lie motionless... in the strongest current. ...He ...organized his woodsmen to warm up about 100 litres of water and pour this in ...upstream ...The meagre 100 litres ...did not noticeably warm up the stream. However, ...the trout ...until then ...motionless ...was only with considerable effort able to maintain its position. This convinced Schauberger... that there was ...a connection between the water's temperature and the trout's behaviour. ...[A]lso ...the trout's ability to jump up high waterfalls with little apparent effort. ...[H]e saw evidence for his theory that the trout exploited some hitherto unknown source of energy within the water."

"Water was his consuming interest. He set out to discover its laws and characteristics and the connection between its temperature and its motion. He noticed how water running from a mountain stream was at its greatest density, the so-called 'anomaly point' of +4°C, and [apparently] at its highest quality. Salmon and trout, during spawning, drive themselves towards these sources, and he found the richest... vegetation in these spots."

"This is not the place to discuss the validity of his theories... only a small number of them have been able to be tested. ...[I]f his central theme is correct... this embodies a revolutionary discovery of crucial importance. ...Schauberger wished to make practical use of nature's reconstituting principle of 'cycloidal spiral motion' ...However his theories may be regarded, ...he was a great friend of Nature and a man with original, grandiose and often revolutionary ideas. Many have been moved by his ideas about Nature and his philosophy of life..."

"Viktor Schauberger's early appreciation of the intimate relationship between water and forest, and their dual influence upon water resource management, the landscape's health within particular precipitation areas—is undoubtedly correct. ...Schauberger's theories about Europe are, in the tropics, ...verified in a convincing and shocking way. We, in the temperate regions will, in the long run, experience similar damage... if harmful ecological measures are allowed to continue..."