For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?” - THE SENSE OF WONDER by RACHEL CARSON

Sense of wonder

Serendipity

listen

smell

see

touch

Wishing you a good one, see you back in two weeks -Charles Balse

***Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville***
July 2, 2023
*NICODIM, Los Angeles*

Words of Wisdom

Best use of imagination is creativity. Creativity is a disruption in the algorithm. It’s a discontinuity. Fundamental creativity. Creativity is death and resurrection. It’s a death of context, meaning, relationship, and story. And a new meaning, relationship, and story. That’s fundamental creativity. Einstein coming up with the Theory of Relativity…or a great piece of art. Beethoven’s 5th. These are original creativity as a disruption to the algorithm. - Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO
If you’re not joyful you are wasting your life. The fact that I exist is a perpetual surprise for me. What’s the healthiest emotion? Not love, not compassion, not even joy. It’s All. It’s wonder. Why do we exist? Perpetually surprised, full of wonder and joy. You return to innocence. And what we lost today in this world is the loss of innocence - Deepak Chopra, interview by The Diary of a CEO
What is so wonderful - indeed, almost magical - about our brain is that we can perceive an object based on incomplete information, and we can perceive it as being the same under strikingly different conditions of lighting and context - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 25
In us, learning has led to the establishment of a completely new kind of evolution - cultural evolution - which has largely supplanted biological evolution as a means of transmitting knowledge and adaptations across generations. Our capacity for learning is so remarkably developed that human societies change almost exclusively by cultural evolution. In fact there is no strong evidence of any biological change in the size or structures of the human brain since Homo Sapiens appeared in the fossil record some 50,000 years go. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times to modern times, are the product of cultural evolution, and therefore memory. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 44
On November 12, 1918, the day after the day after the armistice ending World War I was signed, Monet committed to giving the French government a set of large paintings as a monument to peace. Shortly after his death in 1926 at the age of eighty-six the French government constructed two oval galleries at the Musée de l'Orangerie, …as a permanent home for eight water lily murals…most of the murals do not show the sky; only the infinity of the lily pond. These remarkable works are filled with ambiguity and beauty. We see in them the beginnings of a change from a dialogue between the artist and his subject to a dialogue between the artist and the canvas. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 69
As artists started to move toward abstraction, they began to see analogies between their art and music. Although music has no content and uses abstract elements of sound and division of time, it moves us powerfully. Why, then, does pictorial art have to have content? This question was addressed by the French Poet Charles Baudelaire, who pioneered a new style of prose-poetry and wrote the famous volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The flowers of Evil), in which he described the changing nature of beauty in modern life. Baudelaire argued that even though each of our sense responds to a restricted range of stimuli, all of the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. It is therefore particularly interesting that the earlierst truly abstract painting was achieve by the pioneer of abstract music, Arnold Schoenberg. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric R. Kandel Page 71