sciencevevo:

“Don’t you understand that the overall disaster is much too great to be moaned and groaned about? I can grieve or feel bad if [my cat] is sick, or if you are not well. But when the whole world is out of joint, then I merely seek to understand what is going on and why, and then I have done my duty, and I am calm and in good spirits from then on. None are obliged to do more than they can. […] This giving oneself up completely to the headaches and miseries of the day is completely incomprehensible and intolerable to me. […] A fighter is precisely a person who must strive to rise above things, otherwise one’s nose will get stuck in every bit of nonsense.”

— Rosa Luxemburg, in a 1917 letter to Luise Kautsky, written from jail while she was imprisoned for her anti-war activities
(via bildungstrieb)

blue-voids:

Dennis Oppenheim – Parallel Stress, ten minute performance piece, 1970

Intended partly as a protest against the minimalist fixation on the essence of the object, this piece tested the capacity of the artist’s body to suspend itself from fingertips and toes between two masonry walls. The performance repeated the same position on the stomach in the notch between two gravel hills. Photographs were taken at the greatest stress position prior to collapse.

principleofplenitude:

““We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspenses, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. Look!” With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers, he took hold of my pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small world. For a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through its evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making treaties and fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was indeed a crowded stage, a moving breathless drama. Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist’s skill, made up a new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships and entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first, it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time changed, the motif was differently give out and the situations differently presented. And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself and every game had a distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged recognizably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet each was entirely new. ‘This is the art of life,“ he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands.””

— Hermann Hesse, from Steppenwolf (1927)