Maps are all-over narratives about an environment like a Jackson Pollock drip painting. A map is a story, a narrative, but it's given all at once, not pieced out with words and sentences that have beginnings and endings. It is not atomic. It's all right there, like a fully formed continuous idea without parts. A map is like a belief.
Our understandings of things are no more than stories we tell ourselves: They are patches on our experience as we search for knowledge. An understanding has ontological and metaphysical implications that are ultimately unfounded. They are plausible stories we tell ourselves about our experience. A map is like an understanding. It papers the world. It turns beauty into ink.
I want to take off my beliefs as if they were a stranger’s clothes. Everything is already known, and revelations are just a matter of our needs, and how to look. It’s all in the Library of Babel, all the memories, theories and beliefs. All those Akashic records of the world’s unnecessary duplicates will be found in the cosmic filing cabinets, all the possibles, impossibles, irrelevancies, and noise. I leave all those misleading details to the Theosophists. It's better to see rather than to understand because our trust in metaphysics only leads to schisms.
Situations, relationships, and even spiritual awakenings, are understood by means of approximations that are coherent with our fundamental assumptions. But assumptions confine our perception, and our intellectual pride leaves experience beyond reach. Like Socrates, we don’t seem to know anything. Perhaps enlightenment would be knowing too little like a child.
Lovely things make us happy, and we never own them.
The Library of Babel was written by Jorge Luis Borges
Image: Steve Armstrong, Round Earth’s Corners, three-piece paper collage, 9” x 12”, 2024.
And don't forget about my book. If only you knew about it, you'd probably want it.
An imaginary author named André Questcequecest has made his writing career by almost exclusively quoting other writers. This fair-use collage of ideas produces an expanded understanding of Western cultural history and an individual's immersion in that context. The quotes range from the Pre-Socratics to contemporary art theory, along with numerous artists, poets, composers, philosophers, theorists, mystics, and an assortment of unexpected eccentrics.
S. E. Armstrong is a visual artist, writer, and former Editor/Publisher of the art magazine Wegway Primary Culture. André Questcequecest was the magazine's Quotes Editor, and Wm. F. Krendall (also imaginary) was Wegway's Mysterious Advisor. Krendall contributed a preamble and introduction to this volume. [“Questcequecest” is French for “What's that?” with all the apostrophes and hyphens removed].
This is a collection of four works collected in one 229 page book: Gathering Thoughts 2021 , The Pomposius 1995, The Science Wars 2004, and The Communist Manifesto with all Words Functioning as Nouns Removed 2001 to 2010.
Spoiler: The final words in the book are, “And so ends the old world. Peace be with you.”
It’s now available for sale for $20 USD, $24CAD, 14.50 EUR, 12 GBP, $23 AUD.
If you buy it through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Ingram they will take approximately 90% or more of the cover price, but if you buy it at lulu.com the split is closer to 50-50.