hum

Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all — they produced an oyster.

Sallust

Those who knew Mario and Marisa Merz understood that if you invited one artist, you got both. So they installed themselves for several weeks in San Gimignano, turning up together to eat lunch and sit under the trees. I sat with them often, observing Mario at close quarters. I dearly wanted to film him, but was advised against it. Marisa is totally camera phobic; Mario might not have liked it either, and he could famously be quite monstrous. But Mario was more knowing. He had already remarked that he had heard I made “beautiful films”, and I think he knew what he wanted.

So when eventually I asked, “Mario, can I film you?” he replied, “Yes, but no speaking,” and immediately sat himself in a chair under a tree, cupping a huge pine cone in his lap.

Flowers for the lovers, Schnapps for the thinkers, Death to the vegetarians.

“I try not to dwell on paralysis,” John Callahan once told me. “Unless I want a Chinese takeaway and the person with me doesn’t want to go out in the rain to collect it. Then I subtly bring the conversation round to the fact that I’m quadriplegic. That way, I know I’ll be looking at egg foo yung quite soon.”
[…]
Not all of his work was provocative: he sent me a drawing a few years ago that showed two dogs drinking from elegantly labelled water bottles. “You know,” one is saying, “this stuff probably doesn’t even come from a toilet. It probably comes from a fresh mountain stream, or something.”
[…]
“I think it’s significant that liberals can’t quite decide what to call us. You’re now referred to as ‘a person with a disability’. Recently they’ve become fond of ‘differently abled’. On the whole, I’d rather be called a cripple. It’s so romantic. It’s so D.H. Lawrence.”
[…]
The last original drawing he sent me, not long before his death, showed him sitting in front of the television, his tears represented by two dotted lines falling to the floor.
“That’s me,” he wrote on the bottom, “listening to a song by Elvis Costello, on Letterman. It was so beautiful.” Music was as great a passion for Callahan as art or humour. He was proud to be one of the very few men, in recent years, to have been sought out by Bob Dylan.
“He walked up to me,” John told me, “and I felt my heart beating faster. I opened my mouth and I heard myself saying: ‘I write songs, too.’ What more stupid thing could you blurt out to Dylan? It’s like meeting Jesus and saying: ‘I too have suffered at the hands of my enemies.’”

If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.

Agatha Christie

Going about with matted hair, without food or bath, sleeping on the ground smeared with dust or sitting motionless - no amount of penance can help a person whose mind is not purified. But those whose mind is serene and chaste, whose senses are controlled and whose life is nonviolent - these are true brahmins, true monks, even if they wear fine clothes.

141

In the middle of the Great Depression, New York City mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, strived to live with the people. It was not unusual for him to ride with the firefighters, raid with the police, or take field trips with orphans. On a bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the poorest ward of the city. La Guardia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself. Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She told the mayor that her daughter’s husband had left, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving. However, the shopkeeper, from whom the bread was stolen, refused to drop the charges. “It’s a real bad neighborhood, your Honor,” the man told the mayor. “She’s got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson.” La Guardia sighed. He turned to the woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.” But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket. He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous hat, saying, “Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Baliff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.” The following day, New York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a bewildered woman who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren. Fifty cents of that amount was contributed by the grocery store owner himself, while some seventy petty criminals, people with traffic violations, and New York City policemen, each of whom had just paid fifty cents for the privilege of doing so, gave the mayor a standing ovation.

La Guardian Angel

Whatever you think, that you will be. If you think yourselves weak, weak you will be; if you think yourselves strong, strong you will be; if you think yourselves impure, impure you will be; if you think yourselves pure, pure you will be. This teaches us not to think ourselves as weak, but as strong, omnipotent, omniscient. No matter that I have not expressed it yet, it is in me. All knowledge is in me, all power, all purity, and all freedom. Why cannot I express this knowledge? Because I do not believe in it. Let me believe in it, and it must and will come out.

Swami Vivekananda