Remedios Varo

The last Bread and Puppet

"Scientific investigation, which starts from common sense naturalism, arrives back at a contrary conclusion: we cannot trust our senses to tell us the true nature of reality. This is still also where the physical sciences of today meet their final limits in the attempt to establish the truth by physical experimentation. Their outgoing search for reality reveals the emptiness of physical appearances and eventually dissolves the very belief that reality is nothing but physical nature. Science brings its followers to the limits of the materialistic fallacy, and philosophical insight must begin all over again."

Science and the Demise of Philosophy

Digital Book Index

"The hope to change the world is a childish illusion. You have to change yourself." --Marie-Louise Von Franz

"...we decided that we wanted to make a personal ad system for people like ourselves: jaded, sarcastic wankers... we guaranetee that you will look wittier on this system than on any other!" --Über Personals

The Pain Station

Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments

A dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:

My dear.

I Have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your behaviour. I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile! My research has even made such a progress that I no longer need to understand you IN THIS WAY. I'm happy to say I'm now in a position, with the aid of an apparatus which I shall promptly attach you, to assign to each body movement you make a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.

In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight.

I trust you will not resist if I bring along this apparatus then to help me determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.

"Resisting madness can be the maddest way of being mad." --Norman O. Brown

What is Libertarian Socialism?

"That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words..." --Georges Bataille

"When my son was four or five years old, he asked one of those interminable questions that children ask: "Why does the sky get dark at night?"

Eager to increase his understanding, I put a lamp in the middle of the floor to act as the sun, got down the world globe, and used a tennis ball for the moon. Then I walked around the "sun", carrying the globe and turning it, explaining how we are suspended in space, constantly moving. It was the universe in a nutshell - sun, earth, moon, stars, seasons.

My son watched the production with silent, squint-eyed attention. When I finished, he said to me, "You don't expect me to believe that, do you?"

Wynette Barton

Who is Bush's Brain?

Suehiro Maruo

"We understand ourselves thanks only to our speed past words." --Paul Valery

MIT Treasure Hunt tradition inspires Wizard of Oz Hunt

R.Z. is a thirty-five year old man... A single man, he lives alone and does not work. His main activity is photographing the landscape that he sees from his window. He regularly shows these photographs to his therapist and comments on them: "Here there is a car." "There, the car did not move during the night." "This is the same car on another day, there are dead leaves on the roof." He says, "Time goes by, things do not change. I find time with photographs."

Rebuilding Reality: A Phenomenology of Aspects of Chronic Schizophrenia