by Thurston Hopkins
British Colour Conflict, January 1955: A recent emigrant from Jamaica arrives in Birmingham looking for work and lodgings.
(via Burned Shoes)
disproof of what we thought possible
failures of medication
doubts of another’s existence
—-tell it over and over, the words
get thick with unmeaning—-
yet never have we been closer to the truth
of the lies we were living, listen to me:
the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed
flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing
the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.
FOLK NEUROSCIENCE Popular misconceptions
■ The “left-brain” is rational, the “right-brain” is creative
The hemispheres have different specialisations (the left usually has key language areas, for example) but there is no clear rational-creative split and you need both hemispheres to be successful at either. You can no more do right-brain thinking than you can do rear-brain thinking.
■ Dopamine is a pleasure chemical
Dopamine has many functions in the brain, from supporting concentration to regulating the production of breast milk. Even in its most closely associated functioning it is usually considered to be involved in motivation (wanting) rather than the feeling of pleasure itself.
■ Low serotonin causes depression
A concept almost entirely promoted by pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s and 90s to sell serotonin-enhancing drugs like Prozac. No consistent evidence for it.
■ Video games, TV violence, porn or any other social spectre of the moment “rewires the brain”
Everything “rewires the brain” as the brain works by making and remaking connections. This is often used in a contradictory fashion to suggest that the brain is both particularly susceptible to change but once changed, can’t change back.
■ We have no control over our brain but we can control our mind
The mind and the brain are the same thing described in different ways and they make us who we are. Trying to suggest one causes the other is like saying wetness causes water.
http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/Regeneration/9780141030937
The Wanderer and his Shadow
The beauty of the whole was awe-inspiring and induced to a mute worship of the moment and its revelation. Unconsciously, as if nothing could be more natural, you peopled this pure, clear world of light (which had no trace of yearning, of expectancy, of looking forward or backward) with Greek heroes. You felt it all as Poussin and his school felt it at once heroic and idyllic. So individual men too have lived, constantly feeling themselves in the world and the world in themselves, and among them one of the greatest men, the inventor of a heroico-idyllic form of philosophy Epicurus.
Et in Arcadia ego
Who, now, seeing Her so
Happily married,
Housewife, helpmate to Man,
Can imagine the screeching
Virago, the Amazon,
Earth Mother was?
Her jungle growths
Are abated,
Her exorbitant monsters abashed,
Her soil mumbled,
Where crops, aligned precisely,
Will soon be orient:
Levant or couchant,
Well-daunted thoroughbreds
Graze on mead and pasture,
A church clock subdivides the day,
Up the lane at sundown
Geese podge home.
As for Him:
What has happened to the Brute
Epics and nightmares tell of?
No bishops pursue
Their archdeacons with axes,
In the crumbling lair
Of a robber baron
Sightseers picnic
Who carry no daggers.
I well might think myself
A humanist,
Could I manage not to see
How the autobahn
Thwarts the landscape
In godless Roman arrogance,
The farmer’s children
Tiptoe past the shed
Where the gelding knife is kept.
It is not sufficient to live, there must be a destiny that does not have to wait for death.
—Albert Camus, The Rebel
The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it. Far from always wanting to forget it, they suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to possess it…
