Monday, August 2, 2010

Daydreaming for the future

An article in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald argues its case with the old chestnut that I am hereby calling the reductio ad Einsteinium. Einstein was a daydreamer, the author claims, therefore daydreaming must make you smart. To give credit where it is due, the article does go on to say that only some kinds of daydreams make you smart, or is it that smart children tend to daydream to relieve their boredom in class?

Dr Marcus Raichle, of Washington University, postulates that the human brain has a default network that operates when the brain is not receiving outside stimuli, and thinks that activity in this network is related to daydreaming. "It has since been established that this network is impaired in people with autism or Alzheimer's," the article says.

So go ahead and daydream...

1 comment:

  1. Having yet to read the SMH article or to meet Einstein, my only comment is that Einstein was as nominally blind to reality as yourself.

    Just as Einstein felt his work was betrayed by the discovery of a seemingly quantum basis to the Universe; your work likewise is betrayed, by a similar quantum claim by Jim Endersby that: "Science is the kingdom of the blind: there are no sighted – or even one-eyed – people, because we have no way of looking directly at reality to assess what it is like."

    Which you then reconfigure as: The exhibition is called ‘Kingdom of the Blind’ because “we are all groping in the dark towards a reality that no one can really see.”

    Yet your work clearly shows that you actually feel the absolute reality to which you refer and so did Einstein.

    Look how the undoubted poetry and the seemingly 'prosaic' of your work coincide.

    For weaving the light of reality that most enlightens, requires a plane surface of "gently welcoming darkestness--"

    "This is a selection of... Rajmahal Art Silk threads I've chosen to stitch the Paths of Dreams.
    At this stage I plan a combination of chain stitch variations, stem stitch and padded satin stitch, to create the interlinked neural pathways, on a black silk... background."

    This claim by a 'voluntary autistic' primordial physicist is made on behalf of those, such as yourself and Einstein and e.e. cummings, whose natural autism, having been repressed or deformed by cultural denial, obscures their visible recognition of the ultimate reality of:

    "(the great dim deep sound
    of rain; and of always and of nowhere) and
    what a gently welcoming darkestness--

    now i lay me down (in a most steep
    more than music) feeling that sunlight is
    (life and day are) only loaned: whereas
    night is given (night and death and the rain

    are given; and given is how beautifully snow)

    now i lay me down to dream of (nothing
    i or any somebody or you
    can begin to begin to imagine)

    something which nobody may keep."

    with Justice in Peace,

    m.

    i'll read the article; but more importantly i'll view your work and review how you and einstein and cummings have so assuredly accessed the absolute reality of cognitive fusion!!!

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