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Are.na
Maria Cynara
aura, the lights around me
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the great archive of my world, the narrative play of fiction then to reality

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The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it.

| Anaïs Nin

The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. I’ve been thinking about trauma—how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember.

∆ Ocean Vuong, What’s your mood when you write?

∆ Ocean Vuong, What’s your mood when yo…
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Jung said about the spiral:

The spiral in psychology means that when you make a spiral you always come over the same point where you have been before, but never really the same, it is above or below, inside, outside, so it means growth (Jung 5, p. 21).

Carl Jung on the spiral
 

when i feel creatively aligned, all of the learned behaviors and trauma coping mechanisms fall away

i'm left with a sense of purpose, challenge, and love for something beyond

first_principles_of_thesophy_066.jpg
first_principles_of_thesophy_066.jpg

In the beginning, the hand was just a hand — or so we can imagine. It was a workaday organ, albeit a versatile one: a tool for grasping, holding, throwing, and hefting. Then, at some point, after millions of years, it took on other duties. It became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor. As a species, our systems of understanding, belief, and myth had grown more elaborate, more cognitively overwhelming. And so we started to put those systems out into the world: to tally, track, and record by carving notches into bone, tying knots in string, spreading pigment on cave walls, and aligning rocks with celestial bodies. Hands abetted these early mental labors, of course, but they would later become more than mere accessories. Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine.

∆ Handy Mnemonics, The Five-Fingered Memory Machine, by Kensy Cooperrider

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan didion
David Hockney, Pretty Tulips, 1970
David Hockney, Pretty Tulips, 1970
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