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Riz Khan (Al Jazeera) interviews Anand: 1,2

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches"

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet, Letter 1

Arthur Clarke's 3rd law of prediction reads: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. "

Upon reading Dan Dennett, I would translate this as: any sufficiently advanced crane is indistinguishable from a skyhook.

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

-- John Milton (1608-74)Paradise Lost, I:242ff.

"¿Hay mensajeros? Sí,
cuerpo tatuado de señaleses
el espacio, el aire es invisible
tejido de llamadas y respuestas.
Animales y cosas se hacen lenguas,
a través de nosotros habla consigo mismo
el universo. Somos un fragmento
-pero cabal en su inacabamiento-
de su discurso. Solipsismo
coherente y vacío:
desde el principio del principio
¿qué dice? Dice que nos dice.
Se lo dice a sí mismo. Oh madness of discourse,
that cause sets up with and against itself!"

-- Extract from Octavio Paz's "Pasado En Claro" (A draft of shadows)



[Are there messengers? Yes,
space is a body tattooed with signs, the air
an invisible web of calls and answers
Animals and things make languages,
through us the universe talks with itself.
We are a fragment --
accomplished in our unaccomplishment --
of its discourse. A coherent
and empty solipsism:
since the beginning of the beginning
what does it say? It says that it says us.
It says it to itself. Oh madness of discourse,
that cause sets up with and against itself!

-- Translated by Eliot Weinberger ]


(The Deepak Chopra type mood is unintended)

Beating a dead cliche

Gregory Stock: To upgrade is human