diane ackerman…

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.

diane ackerman

marlene dumas…

I paint because I am an old-fashioned woman. I believe in witchcraft. I don’t have freudian hang-ups. A brush does not remind me of a phallic symbol. If anything, the domestic aspect of a painter’s studio (being locked up in a room) reminds me a bit of the housewife with her broom. If you are a witch you will still know how to use it. Otherwise, it is obvious that you’ll prefer the vacuum cleaner.

marlene dumas

notebook…

Choose something absurd to have a conversation with — one of your habits, say, or something in a dream, or a small piece of something you found at the beach.

wanderer

color…

When a name for a colour is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When name for a colour is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese and until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue….the Icelandic word for blue and black is the same, one word that fits sea, lava and raven.

It is shown that the words for colours enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white and red, then yellow and green ( in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes in to itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green colour. Despite the complexities of colour names even in the same language, we somehow make sense of another person’s references. We know colour as a perceptual ‘truth’ that we imply and share without its direct experience, like feeling pain in a phantom limb or in another person’s body. Within every colour lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture.

ellen meloy, the anthropology of turquoise

Thaayorre language

Among the Thaayorre of the northern coast of Australia, there is no word for ‘left’ or ‘right’; instead all orientation is done according to compass points, so that you might tell someone, ‘Your southeast shoe is untied’. What’s more, in the Thaayorre language, the way to say ‘hello’ translates as ‘Which way are you going?’ and the proper response is along the lines of ‘West-northeast, in the middle distance,’ so that if you don’t know which way you’re pointed, you can’t even get past hello.

lera boroditsky, how does our language shape the way we think