Bjork: Just Like a Musical
BJÖRK: Obsessed w this…
Newly discovered vessels beneath skull could link brain and immune system
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JEFFERSON HACK: It’s an unbelievable discovery. The doctor even admits “based on what we know they should not be there”. What else will be revealed…. how little do we know, how much is waiting under the skin of our bodies to still be made sense of???? Biology, physiology and psychology are so linked in your work….Just listening to Stonemilker.
It’s almost like the opening string section should be the soundtrack to this piece of news… What music did you hear? It made me also think of other things…. Vulnicura – Cure For Wounds in Latin – what if your wounds are not curable?
Mental Health….. is so far so little understood….. My favourite writer Robert Walser said, “My disease is one of the mind and difficult to define” – Auto immune diseases – the body attacks healthy cells by mistake…. it’s so fucked up…. they say it’s genetic… i imagine it as looking at the world through the eyes of Francis Bacon. Pain distorts the senses, sound, shapes, colours, darkness…
(I’m supposed to be interviewing (?) you so I’m conscious of not typing too much… but we need to start so I thought I would start with a splurge…)
Walt Disney has his brain Cryogenically suspended so he can be defrosted and return – apparently in the body of a professional basketball player…
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Dearest Jefferson,
Sorry for late reply but Sardinia had less Wifi than I had hoped – I went into these incredible caves there, Neptune’s grotto…
I noticed this article too and sent it to like all my friends ABOUT TIME they connect the gut with the brain: and it is a breakthrough for them that they connected it to the lymphatic system!!! did you see that medical drawing of those branches growing in the skull lol ? we all have those ha ha ha ha . the meninges gets an upgrade:
“meninges is often regarded as the brain’s shrink-wrap packaging, rather than a piece of anatomy in its own right.”
i have a personal connection to this discovery as this area swells up in me when i eat bread . and ive tried to explain this to several doctors and they just shook their heads . fair enough , me describing a swimming cap appearing on my brain and closing down my connections ha ha ha ha ha the odd icelander strikes again . but it is always sooo satisfying when science backs up your instinct like that . have you read a book called “proust was a neuroscientist” ? it is several lectures by jonah lehrer where he proves that creative impulses foresaw science often about 2 centuries. he describes how proust getting lost in how that french cookie sets off memory and 50 pages spent on describing how it travels from his fingers to his mouth is basically the promise of neuroscience much later . my favorite tale though is the insane french chef who discovered boullion by burning broth for days most people thinking he lost it . meanwhile he was isolating an enzyme which is now perhaps thought of as the 7th taste up there with sweet , sour and bitter . it is the same enzyme that gets stimulated by sex and it appears in odd collisions for example burnt cheese on pizza yeast . at the same time a japanese chef was frantically inventing miso not knowing of the french one ….
who is robert walser ? sounds super interesting
in the cornwall palm trees !! they always told me it had rain forest here and i didnt believe them !!!!!
enthusiasm,
björk
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I’m sure it was a relief for you to be off -grid for a few days. A digital detox? I think this idea of individual pursuit of new ideas is a thread that is really interesting. The doctors who shook their heads are a reflection of society’s failures and limitations in dealing with the complexity of the human condition. And how often individuals who are considered nutty or off -key who are obsessed with studying or doing the same thing over and over again to find a diff erent outcome are often onto something fundamentally important, that is linked to the essence of life… It was Kerouac who tapped into that veneration of the genius/outcast dichotomy in On The Road in his speech about ‘The Mad Ones…” which Steve Jobs later appropriated for his Think Diff erent campaign for Apple which resulted in billboard sized images of Einstein and Muhammad Ali pasted over the high density traffic intersections of the industrialised Western World. I’m thinking of your Jonah Lehrer reference as its this intersection of science and creativity that is such a strong thread. How technology influences art: the clash or reappraisal of ancient and modern, hidden and visible, the known and unknown, in your work. It makes me jump to Jung , who you so generously introduced me to when you became obsessed with The Red Book around the very beginning of the writing of Biophilia, is there a connection to jung for you in relation to this?
(just a quick note on Walser… he writes observational short stories they are simple, almost minimal (reactive) tales. He influenced Kafka and Hesse and is credited with really birthing Modernist style of literature. He was penniless, had one suit and lived to write. His life became reduced to the bare essentials and in his writing you feel the link of spirituality and anti materiality especially in his view on man and nature. To cut a long story short as he descended into madness his writing became incredibly small until eventually he invented a microscript style of writing which was coded and so tiny you would need a microscope to even see it. It took decades for the code to be eventually cracked! – He has an unami way of writing!)
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I had never heard of him , i can relate to this slowly disappearing writing ha ha ha ha … i probably drive around reykjavík like this , gregarious some days and then humbly hide on backstreets on other …
just googled your robert walser . interesting , was just recently introduced to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Fvp8XyJys and rollo may :
a friend recommended his book love and will to me and i found this tone of friendly male matriarchs nourishing , them waving the flag of emotions and pioneering eastern philosophies in the mainstream early/mid 20th century … not sure why im attracted to that right now, perhaps counterbalancing feminism somehow , a relief because of the latest gender awareness surge ? to find the root of sympathetic males ? or just feeling that at last we can erase the differences . patriarch industrial 20th century was always a bad idea , we all kinda knew it , lol
but so so so so so hungry for spoken word now , can someone explain that to me ? it is like the vitamin i never took !! and listening in that gap between wake and sleep and then just when you wake up ? it is not a coincidence that the worlds religions invented prayers for this moment , im feeding all sorts of youtubes in there and it sets up an explosive cocktail in my mind , we are so so receptive , arent we ?
which brings us back to the brain : obsessed w this https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13&v=nEOpUypJgyw sooooo curious about how brain is the place in us that adapts and changes quickest , like all our lives we can develop different sections up there , i remember reading a book about all the hormones and the body offers us new ones every few years and even after 80 they are still introducing us to new ones we have never tried before , id like to think the spiritual wise ones …. ( i wish )
Wow that’s beautiful. We are constantly able to be enriched and excited by life and our bodies if we are open to the inner not the exterior development. That’s a life lesson right there! Neuroplasticity is incredible. I first read about it in Wired. The idea of the constant re-wiring of our brain, the story was about the brain’s malleability and how it’s constantly re-configuring according to stimulation. There is a direct link between VR, gaming and Neural healing/ development… I found this on Wired… (not quite as academic as your link) http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/05/features/game-your-brain)
Also quick side note but it reminded me of a story that I‘d heard about Albert Enstein’s brain being removed – it was removed (with or without his permission no-one truly knows) after his death – the autopsy and studies reveal that he was missing part of the Sylvian fissure and also he had a high proportion of Glial cells. Lets see in the future if we can use VR to make us all into Einsteins?
Sometimes i feel like we are already in VR – just without the headsets.
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Sadness oliver sacks passing away ….but then again , strangely not ? didn’t he REALLY live a full life ? did you see this ? he kinda wrote his own eulogy here
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/opinion/my-periodic-table.html?smid=pl-share
i went to his house in june and was lucky enough to have tea with him and touch these rocks he was collecting , everytime he had a birthday he got the element which position in the element table corresponded to his age ……… and he would surround himself with mercury on mercury year ( when he was 80 ) and tin and osmium and we confessed we had the same favorite : bismuth . how graceful of him to leave on that year !!! ( it is number 83 and he was on his 83rd year )
watched “awakenings” tonight again just appreciating how much he cared for people its kinda crazy . that he broke through to folks who hadnt talked for decades , were vegetables in institutions and the amount of times he did it with the only thing that would reach : music !!!!! is reassuring , beyond faith and hope and all that pizzazzass ….. im not sure i would ever make that effort for a stranger , shy and selfish w my time . and somehow his life seems to be all about adding compassion to science ?
been doin a lot of research on those moments between sleep and awake and just before you fall asleep again and you look yourself into the eye , t h e s u s p e n s i o n and that canyon that appears and it has made me curious how people build their own personal scaffolding for it. it can be words , music , mantras , whateva . and somehow i ended up listening to tibetan book of the dead in one long whack on spoken word. i recommend it , it is only 4 hours . i put 2 coats on and was lying on the beach by this icelandic lake and adoring the clouds choreographing these ancient words . its kinda crazy it was written in the year 600 , right ? like before or during viking shit . all my friends were reading it when i was a teenager and i decided they were too nihilist, like william boroughs or bukowski kinda cowardish antilife stuff. Meanwhile I was focusing on euphoric surrealistic ladies . but maybe i wasnt ready for it . not even about death that much , more about
were traditionally used for funerary purposes, much of it was originally intended for advanced Tantric initiates who used it to re-live the death process as a means of realizing the mind of clear light while still alive.
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I am really swept away in that image of you lying there listening to the Day of the Dead. That’s a performance in itself. Could be staged at the next Venice Biennale! The word suspension really struck a chord for me, also this idea of the ‘realising the mind of clear light’. Is that a possible state in which to compose and write music? Have you ever achieved a closeness to experiencing death? In yogic and Buddhist text it’s Nirvana or enlightenment which is both death and birth or re-birth. Its interesting how the clear light is linked to both or the circle of life is completed through that ‘transience’ that Oliver Sacks talks about. What other suspensions are there? Drugs were always seen as a fast track to experiencing that spiritual connection, but in my experience that’s a fake enlightenment. Even with so called natural drugs which i loved doing like Ayahuasca. There’s always a dialogue still with self or a projection of self thats carried or a nihilism as you so rightly call it. Bringing physics and science into it is really powerful, especially through Neurology
That’s so incredible that you got to spend time with Oliver Sacks. Reading his obituary makes me just want to never waste a second of any day, his enthusiasm for the future in it is so infectious and his understanding that there is so much to learn, so much to discover that will change our perception of the universe and the mind so positive……
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Harvest time here, picking berries , getting lost up there for hours , question how much of it goes in your mouth and how much in the bucket …. also picking berries w headphones good , listened to a passionate playlist and crawled around a gooseberry bush in my garden meticulously removing every single berry off, like 6 buckets !!! amazing how many of them hid behind on the lowest furthest away branches i had previous years missed or not been too bothered about before thought of doing it w music !!!!! my hands got all delicately scratched though from the thorns but i didnt realize until in the local swimming pool using a citrus hair conditioner and a strong glowing sensation came out of the back of my hands . like dozens of thread of light glowing into the shower ha ha ha ha ha . confused at first not making the connections but then a silent giggle impressed with the gooseberry thorn / citrus hair conditioner ha ha ha . this post of ours is about inspirations , right ?
also incredibly inspired by viviennes (Westwood) tank …. might have to borrow it for our minister here . weve been for months preparing a national park in the centre of the island as the government has decided to undo the only nature preservation law …. to be continued
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Every activist should have their own white tank! Declare Independence – Raise Your Flag! Vivienne’s protest was brilliant. Tell me more about yours?
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just hearded sheep on horses for 6 hours
so magnificent
total merge of nature / animal / human / human rituals / weather
synchronized 50 folks on horsebacks and 200 sheep
in massive rain and wind
just like a musical