Brain Pickings

How Inviting the Unknown Helps Us Know Life More Richly

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“The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.”

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” Rilke famously urged. “It is possible to live and NOT know,” Richard Feynman dissented in his memorable meditation on the responsibility of scientists. John Keats called for “negative capability” — that peculiar art of remaining in doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Debbie Millman advised to look both ways when lingering at the intersection of the known and the unknown. And yet we continue to grasp for the security of our comfort zones, the affirmation of our areas of expertise, the assurance of our familiar patterns — however badly they may need rewiring.

In an entry from April of 1945 found in The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) — which also gave us Nin on the meaning of life, why emotional excess is essential to creativity, and how our objects define us — the beloved diarist and reconstructionist considers the vital importance of allowing for not-knowing in order to truly know the world in its fullest dimension, of using the unknown as a gateway to deeper presence and greater awareness:

It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

Five years later, in the fifth volume of her diaries, Nin would revisit and evolve this sentiment in her famous words on embracing the unfamiliar, writing:

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

In a testament to that rare and powerful intersection of the romantic, the intellectual, and the creative — the kind of love emanating from such celebrated creative couples as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, and Charles and Ray Eames — Henry Miller, Nin’s then-lover, echoes the same sentiment in his reflections on writing:

Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.

For more of Nin’s timeless wisdom, see her insights on anxiety and love, the necessary fluidity of character, parenting and personal responsibility, and the magic of letterpress and handcraft.

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Barthes’s Likes and Dislikes, Illustrated

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Champagne over strawberries, Glenn Gould over Vivaldi, romantic music over fidelity, and no telephoning.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about Susan Sontag’s meditation on why lists appeal to us, which included her quirky stream-of-consciousness lists of personal likes and dislikes. One reader — Australian illustrator and graphic designer Lynore Avery — was moved to draw some of Sontag’s favorite things, while another pointed out that French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes had written a similar list of likes and dislikes, which probably inspired Sontag’s. This, in fact, makes perfect sense: Sontag mentions Barthes frequently in her later journals, always with admiring and aspirational remarks like this one jotted down on a November afternoon in 1977, the year Barthes’s original list was published in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (public library):

Imagine having such a mind as Barthes has — that always works …

On March 26, 1980, she notes with forlorn dryness:

Barthes died.

It is the only death of a public intellectual she notes in this diary. Several days later, Sontag dedicates an entire journal entry to him:

People called him a critic, for want of a better label; and I myself said he was “the greatest critic to have emerged anywhere …” But he deserves the more glorious name of writer.  

His body of work is an immense, complex, extremely discreet effort at self-description.  

Eventually he became a real writer. But he couldn’t purge himself of his ideas.

Such a celebrator was Sontag of Barthes’s legacy that in 1983 she edited an anthology of his selected writings and penned the introduction to it. It comes as no surprise that it included Barthes’s own list of likes and dislikes, originally titled J’aime, je n’aime pas (I like, I don’t like).

So, the only natural thing to do was ask Lynore to bring the same illustration magic to Barthes’s lists — which she kindly did:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

Like previous Brain Pickings Artist Series collaborations, both of these gems are available as prints in Lynore’s Society6 shop — enjoy. Find more of her wonderful work on Behance.

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How to Make a Ricky Board: A Creative Exercise from David Lynch

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An avant-garde reminder that it’s all in a name.

It’s not uncommon for creators chiefly acclaimed in one medium to make lesser-known yet wonderful art in another: Patti Smith’s poetry, Sylvia Plath’s drawings, Marilyn Monroe’s unpublished verses, Richard Feynman’s sketches, René Magritte’s sheet music covers, J.R.R. Tolkien’s original drawings.

Though the leap between surrealist cinema and avant-garde art might not seem so great, there’s something especially striking about celebrated director David Lynch’s 1994 coffee table book Images — a collection of his private paintings, sketches, photographs, and short fiction that offered a never-before-revealed glimpse of the inner workings of his uncanny imagination. The most palpable unifying theme across the works were Lynch’s esoteric personal obsessions, from snowmen to suburban housewives, among which was his kooky concept of Ricky Board collages — dead flies neatly stacked in rows, a kind of morbid precursor of Ursus Wehrli’s The Art of Cleanup. Lynch writes:

The Ricky Board is my idea, right or wrong, of what the Japanese might do to organize controlled accidents in a formal environment.

From Do It: The Compendium (public library) — the fantastic collection of famous artists’ wide-ranging instructionals for art anyone can make, based on 20 years of legendary curator and provocateur Hans Ulrich Obrist’s project of the same title — comes a creative exercise from Lynch, who shows us how to make our own Ricky Board:

Do It: How To Make A Ricky Board (2012)

This board can be any size you want.

The proportions are dictated by four rows of five rickies.

Each ricky is, as nearly as possible, exactly the same as every other ricky.

The ricky can be an object or a flat image.

The thing about the rickies is you will see them change before your eyes because you will give each ricky a different name.

The names will be printed or written under each ricky. Twenty different names in all.

You will be amazed at the different personalities that emerge depending on the names you give.

Here is a poem:

Four rows of five
Your rickies come alive
Twenty is plenty
It isn’t tricky
Just name each ricky
Even though they’re all the same
The change comes from the name

Do It features contributions — from the kooky to the profound to the subversive to the sentimental — from beloved contemporary artists like Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Douglas Coupland, and Sol LeWitt. See some of them here and complement with these activity books for grown-ups.

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Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:





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