The Hammock Papers: Immediately.

17 May 2016

Immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you find comfort in grizzlies, coming back from Vietnam?

DOUG PEACOCK: Mainly because they got you out of your own mind. You know, if you put on a Kelty pack and you hike in Colorado or California, you’re top dog. You know, you walk down a trail, you think about your girlfriend or your portfolio or I don’t know what. In grizzly country, you can’t do that, because there’s something out there that, if it chose, could kill and eat you at anytime it wanted to. And just having to take that into stock, you know, totally and fundamentally just changes the ambiance of a place.

All of a sudden, you’re not top dog. And you look a little more closely. You walk like an animal. You scent the wind. You listen to the brush. And it really accelerates your inner — much more ancient finished system than our modern industrial culture provides. I mean, getting back into the wilderness like that, having a grizzly bear in there, just within three or four days, something happens to me. You know, I’m really like another animal almost. And it’s a wonderful thing, because everything is externalized, and, you know, you live immediately in the present.

CONNECT

Thank You, Jessica.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL