#constructs

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality. ↗

— Abdolkarim Soroush

#coin #concepts #constructs #equating #explain

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#discloses #painter #photographer

The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced. ↗

— Andre Gide

#annoys #artificial #bores #constructs #eludes

Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality. ↗

— Thomas Griffith

#arrested #constructs #disorder #gives #implied

Nirvana was pop. You can have distorted guitars and people say it's alternative, but you can't break out of pop music's constructs and still get extensive radio play and media coverage. ↗

— Kristin Hersh

#break #constructs #coverage #distorted #extensive

Consciousness conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes the activity of the body. ↗

— Deepak Chopra

#becomes #body #conceives #consciousness #constructs

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#constructs #contain #mind #reality #size

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self. ↗

— Agnes Repplier

#fabric #his #leisure #lives #man

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. ↗

— Paul Ricoeur

#character #constructing #constructs #her #his