eigengrau

"Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home." --Ursula Le Guin

Ulam's Spiral.

"The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it." --Thomas Merton, The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948)

The Gadfly and the Spider.

"The fragments of Osiris's body are not, however, all of equal value." --Brigid Brophy, Black Ship to Hell (1962)

(by Alexander Nekrashevich via bellabelarus dot com)

"This Is Not A Migrant Crisis... It's a Conflict Crisis: about all the countries ruined by all the "9/11"; was oil wars, still smouldering since 2001. Not to mention the previous generation of client wars, proxy wars and plunder wars (you know, the gold, the cobalt, the tungsten; whatever. All the stuff you need so you can have the latest phone etc), still 'smouldering' since the 1990s.... . . It's a soil depletion crisis. It's a climate change disaster crisis (I am sick of that feeble 'climate change' expression. I'm going to ban it). It's a water crisis. It's, above and beyond all its many faces, the crisis of the economic growth model freight train hitting the buffers, and the train is driverless (don't think there's a guard on board either), so it doesn't know when to stop. It doesn't know how to stop, it just keeps hammering on, SLAM SLAM SLAM . . . Crushing the bodies of thousands, of millions of helpless, struggling human beings against that immovable limit."

"...men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from even finding out the truth about anything." --Merton, op cit

"He tried to recall some of the bombings that he had witnessed in his 12 years working on the street. 'The last one was just there,' he said, pointing to a nearby parking lot. 'Then the huge one down there,' motioning farther down the street with hands stained yellow from the turmeric used in his pickling mix.

He loses track, then gestures to the road nearby. 'A while back there was a big one just there. I flew 20 foot through the air.'

But he brushed it off: 'That one wasn't that big.' "

"In Anglo-American legal parlance, 'Blackacre' is a standard placeholder used to denote a fictional piece of land, often a bequest, much as the term 'John Doe' is used to indicate a fictional or anonymous individual." --Monica Youn being reviewed by John Yau

(Aleppo via CNN)