Book II, Chapter 5, p. 274
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
“To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.”
Changing My Mind, Among Others : Lifetime Writings (1982), p. 76; also in Change Your Brain (2000), p. 72
Context: To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
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Timothy Leary 54
American psychologist 1920–1996Related quotes
“You become an artist to upset your family.”
Günter Brus
(1938) Austrian artist
Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 51 (Gunter Brus.Nach uns die Malflut!Pheoretische Poesien.Klagenfurt:Ritter Verlag,2003, p. 135)
Kara Walker
(1969) African American artist
On becoming an artist in “‘There’s No Diploma in the World That Declares You an Artist’: Watch Kara Walker Lay Out Her Advice for Art Students” https://news.artnet.com/art-world/watch-kara-walker-art-21-1316030 in artnetnews (2018 Jul 12)
“What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion.”
Slavoj Žižek
(1949) Slovene philosopher
Source: Less Than Nothing (2012), Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances
Context: The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself. What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion.
Ch 20
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux
Context: Reasoning which touches experimental reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients? Certain references tend to indicate it. One paper refers to elemental transmutation — which we just recently established as theoretically impossible — and then it says — 'experiment proves.' But how?
It may take generations to evaluate and understand some of these things. It is unfortunate that they must remain here in this inaccessible place, for it will take a concentrated effort by numerous scholars to make meaning of them.
“WARNING
If you dare to read this story, you become part of the Experiment”
James Patterson
(1947) American author
