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Sunday, March 17, 2013

Waking Life


Burning Man      : A self-destructive man feels completely 

                   alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to 
                   the human community. He thinks to himself, "I 
                   must be insane." What he fails to realize is 
                   that society has, just as he does, a vested 
                   interest in considerable losses and 
                   catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and 
                   quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants 
                   chaos. In fact, he's gotta have it. 
                   Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this 
                   dread. We're irresistibly drawn to that almost 
                   orgiastic state created out of death and 
                   destruction. It's in all of us. We revel in 
                   it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on 
                   these things, painting them up as great human 
                   tragedies. But we all know the function of the 
                   media has never been to eliminate the evils of 
                   the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to 
                   accept those evils and get used to living with 
                   them. The powers that be want us to be passive 
                   observers. (...) And they haven't given us
                   any other options outside the occasional,
                   purely symbolic, participatory act of voting.
                   You want the puppet on the right or the puppet
                   on the left?

-

Guy Forsyth      : The trick is to combine your waking rational 
                   abilities with the infinite possibilities of 
                   your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you 
                   can do anything.


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Man on the Train : Hey, are you a dreamer? 

Wiley            : Yeah. 

Man on the Train : I haven't seen too many around lately. Things 

                   have been tough lately for dreamers. They say 
                   dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It's 
                   not dead it's just that it's been forgotten, 
                   removed from our language. Nobody teaches it 
                   so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is 
                   banished to obscurity. Well, I'm trying to 
                   change all that, and I hope you are too. By 
                   dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands 
                   and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is 
                   facing the greatest problems it's ever faced, 
                   ever. So whatever you do, don't be bored, this 
                   is absolutely the most exciting time we could 
                   have possibly hoped to be alive. And things 
                   are just starting.

-

Boat Car Guy     : The idea is to remain in a state of constant 
                   departure while always arriving. 

-

Philosophy Prof. : The reason why I refuse to take existentialism 
                   as just another French fashion or historical 
                   curiosity, is that I think it has something 
                   very important to offer us for the new 
                   century. I'm afraid we're losing the real 
                   virtues of living life passionately in the 
                   sense of taking responsibility for who you 
                   are, the ability to make something of yourself 
                   and feel good about life. Existentialism is 
                   often discussed as if it's a philosophy of 
                   despair, but I think the truth is just the 
                   opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he 
                   never really felt a day of despair in his 
                   life. One thing that comes out from reading 
                   these guys is not a sense of anguish about 
                   life so much as, a real kind of exuberance, of 
                   feeling on top of it, it's like your life is 
                   yours to create. I've read the post modernists 
                   with some interest, even admiration, but when 
                   I read them I always have this awful nagging 
                   feeling that something absolutely essential is 
                   getting left out. The more you talk about a 
                   person as a social construction or as a 
                   confluence of forces or as fragmented or 
                   marginalised, what you do is you open up a 
                   whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre 
                   talks about responsibility, he's not talking 
                   about something abstract. He's not talking 
                   about the kind of self or soul that 
                   theologians would argue about. It's something 
                   very concrete, it's you and me talking, making 
                   decisions, doing things, and taking the 
                   consequences. It might be true that there are 
                   six billion people in this world, and 
                   counting, but nevertheless - what you do makes 
                   a difference. It makes a difference, first of 
                   all, in material terms, it makes a difference 
                   to other people, and it sets an example. In 
                   short, I think the message here is that we 
                   should never simply write ourselves off or see 
                   each other as a victim of various forces. It's 
                   always our decision who we are. 

-

"Speed" Levitch  : On this bridge, Lorca warns: Life is not a
                   
dream, beware, and beware, and beware. And so 
                   many think because then happened, now isn’t. 
                   But didn't I mention? The ongoing WOW is 
                   happening right NOW. We are all co-authors of 
                   this dancing exuberance, for even our 
                   inabilities are having a roast. We are the 
                   authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic 
                   Dostoevsky novel starring clowns… An 
                   assumption developed that you cannot 
                   understand life and live life simultaneously. 
                   I do not agree entirely, which is to say, I do 
                   not exactly disagree. I would say that life 
                   understood is life lived. But, the paradoxes 
                   bug me, and I can learn to love and make love 
                   to the paradoxes that bug me, and on really 
                   romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing 
                   with my confusion.

-

Louis Mackey     : The most advanced technologies and 
                   craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the 
                   super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap 
                   between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the 
                   average human is greater than the gap between 
                   that chimpanzee and the average human. The 
                   realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the 
                   saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. 
                   Why so few? Why is world history and evolution 
                   not stories of progress but rather this 
                   endless and futile addition of zeroes. No 
                   greater values have developed. Hell, the 
                   Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced 
                   as we are. So what are these barriers that 
                   keep people from reaching anywhere near their 
                   real potential? The answer to that can be 
                   found in another question, and that’s this: 
                   Which is the most universal human 
                   characteristic – fear or laziness?

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