signifying nothing
Faculty of discrimination –
What is worth reading and what is not
What is worth paying attention to and what is not
What is worth listening to and what is not
What is worth spending time doing and what is not
Somehow life has become clogged by inputs and the discriminating faculty has been overwhelmed.
Then again, my starting point was pretty discriminating, so I don’t think I’ve regressed too much.
Interesting read over the holidays: Marie Kondo’s “The life-changing magic of tidying up; the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing.” I picked up this small book on impulse from a bookstore counter display, a gift for me. It is quirky – or maybe just Japanese – and personal. Her method centers around the emotion of “a spark of joy.” The last chapter was so lyrical I almost felt tears start to form.
I found this quote today reading an article about Ray Johnson. It seems related.
Johnson’s operative principle that language and visual data form enclosed systems of self-replicating “codes†that preclude original expression and prevent meanings beyond their sound and fury.
So so so so much input is sound and fury and so little “spark of joy.”
More from the article:
art operates not as a reassuring by-product of existence, or a sole commodity produced by one isolated person, but as a collaboration involving many people, correspondences in a humanistic sense as well as an aesthetic one—art as an open-ended undertaking, a shared state of being present to someone else rather than art as a hallowed object to be hung on a white wall.
Direct communication may be the biggest fallacy of the instant messaging era.
~~~
Not Nothing, Siglio Press