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@insectoid_intelligence · EXOplanet (Dub)

Once, more than several years ago, while high on LSD, I walked across a bridge over the Mississippi River. Rather than becoming anxious about the drop, I found myself in an unusually calm state of mind as I approached the center of the span, which seemed like a giant runway arching up to cloud level at some kind of colossal cosmic airport. It was around then that I started to become aware of a distinct impression as I walked along. Or rather, it was perhaps just the same impression as always, but something about it had definitely changed in a profound, yet fairly indescribable way. 

Be that as it may, I'll try to explain it: quite suddenly I ceased to remain aware of myself as a person slowly walking along across the top surface of a stationary bridge. Instead - as one might have to say it - there was a bridge that was walking itself along beneath my feet, rotating slowly under me, while I remained entirely stationary above it, save for the repetitive pedaling motion of my legs.

We know, by now, that all motion is indeed relative to the observer. Intuitively, I might speculate that this "illusion" was caused mainly by the specific set (or lack) of visual cues typically encountered when standing or walking on a tall, narrow structure, in addition to the profoundly disassociative effects of the acid. But the experience has nevertheless stayed with me for reasons I can't entirely explain. It seems to me, even now, that the way I looked at motion then wasn't fundamentally wrong.

After all, what exactly is an observer?

F U N S T U F F

New Stereolab album! First in 15 years. Well worth the wait! Nice one :)

"In tactile space you measure the distance that separates you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance that separates one object from another." 

            - Georges Braque

Unlike objects, facts are never facts alone, capable of being considered distinctly or in isolation from a web of interrelated conditions or other facts. Any fact implies the entire sensorium that beholds, produces or otherwise contains it, together with all of its antecedents.

Academic freedom under threat from US ideologues

https://allea.org/portfolio-item/allea-statement-on-threats-to-academic-freedom-and-international-research-collaboration-in-the-united-states/ 

Democracy dies in the cold, hard light of day, too.

"Lao Dan said, 'Be careful not to meddle with the human heart! The human heart is something that springs up when pushed down, sometimes ascending and sometimes descending, sometimes the prisoner and sometimes the executioner. How soft and restrained and pliable it is, yet how firmly and roughly and sharply and severely it chisels and cuts. So hot it smolders to fire, so cold it freezes to ice, so swift that in the interval between glancing up and glancing down it has already twice touched points beyond the four seas. It dwells still like an abyss, it moves like the overhanging heavens -- stampeding and haughty, allowing nothing to tie it down. Such is the human heart! ...'"  

               - Zhuangzi, translated by Brook Ziporyn, Hackett Publishing edition 2020