UNDERDOGS Issue 7

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BYSTANDER OF OUR WORLD

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Photography by antoinedelaroche,Markus Hartel, Jack Hubbell, Ying Tang, Stavro Papadopoulos

"Who will make clear to mankind what is really heavy and intolerable and what only grazes the skin locally? Who will direct the anger to that which is most terrible and not to that which is nearer? Who might succeed in transferring such an understanding beyond the limits of his own human experience? Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced?"

~Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

"A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love , or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened."

~ Albert Camus

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

~Henry Miller

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

~Jack Kerouac

“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'

'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'”

~Lewis Carroll

"Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a god; look straight at me and you see yourself."

~Charles Manson

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

VALIS ~Philip K. Dick

"All is imaginary--Family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this: that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell."

1921 Diaries ~Franz Kafka

"Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."

~Jorge Luis Borges

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

~Thomas Wolfe, from: Of Time and the River

"Daido Moriyama's vision resides in the heart of darkness, literally and figuratively. The world he records is black, stunned rather than illuminated by light, threatening, chaotic, incomprehensible, compulsively erotic, obsessed, eccentric, fixated on consumption devastated by accidents, always off-kilter, sometimes ruined, sometimes empty—a world unaware of its own instability, a world in need of Prozac."

~Vicky Goldberg

“Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse affect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside.

I am no better. My guts roil with fear. This is how the future comes to me, how I stumble down unmapped lanes and suddenly am in front of that cathouse where she waits unloved, her face of indeterminate colors, the lips smiling and the eyes knowing far too much. I am always walking, sometimes in a forest with pink amapas bending over me, their petals carpeting the ground, sometimes in the desert with every shrub and tree and plant raking my skin with thorns. I t is very quiet, soft purr of a breeze, brief bursts of birdsong, whir of insects, and I hear this roar, she comes as a locomotive is flying across the ground, smoke belching, steel wheels screaming, no engineer in the cabin, and behind this engine is an endless strand of boxcars—no tramps looking out because the doors are closed—and there are no tracks, never a single length of track, this express goes its own way. It will all happen too fast for me to react, to fast for me to close my eyes, shut my ears, turn my body, and I will briefly face the future. This time the future is alive. And then it will be gone. Sometimes this happens in the night and I see the glow of the lights as it vanishes into the land. This future is palpable, and no charts of economic growth or of population growth can possibly suggest its routes or cargo. There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts.”

~Charles Bowden, Blood Ochid

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

~ Susan Sontag

"Then at last, before I fell, first to my knees, as cattle do, then on my face, I was in a throng. I didn't lose consciousness, when I lose consciousness it will not be to recover it. They paid no heed to me, though careful not to walk on me, a courtesy that might have touched me, it was what I had come out for. It was well with me, sated with dark and calm, lying at the feet of mortals, fathom deep in the grey of dawn, if it was dawn. But reality, too tired to look for the right word, was soon restored, the throng fell away, the light came back and I had no need to raise my head from the ground to know I was back in the same blinding void as before."

~from The Calmative by Samuel Beckett

What brings me delight?

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