Posts Tagged I
We Feel Fine
A while back, I posted a YouTube video called The Machine is Us/ing Us. It was an interesting and creative expression of the way the modern internet is changing the way we think about many different things, including art. In this spirit, I’d like to share with you a very cool piece of web art called We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. The artists describe the piece as “an exploration of human emotions, in six movements.” Harris is interested in collecting stories, and this piece is constantly mining the internet for new ones. Every two or three minutes, We Feel Fine searches through all newly posted blog entries for sentences that begin with “I feel…” or “I am feeling…” It takes those sentences and as much data about the author as it can figure out, then displays them in a number of ways. Check it out here (http://www.wefeelfine.org).
We Feel Fine
Rumi
In my last post, I typed this:
I like to use “I.” I am not afraid to use this word anymore, now that I have learned to identify and face my ego when it is out of place. I am not independant from nor dependant on the world – the word interdependant is vague, but I think it matches my vague knowledge about what truly constitutes me and what does not. My hunch is that there is not much that separates me from the world, if anything at all.
“I” is an admittance that “you” have value and that I may not know what your experiences or perceptions are. Using “you” incorrectly projects “I” and what I constitute on “you”. I cannot perceive what you have perceived; I have not experienced your life. On the other hand, I can draw conclusions, for if our perception couldn’t overlap at some level, there would be no chance for community!
Nowadays, the use of “I” is a fiction.
—————————-
Here are two poets and wonderful human beings who put words to this ineffable feeling:
—————————-
I am a soul who has had
A hundred thousand bodies.
But I can’t talk about it.
What can I do?
I am tongue-tied.
I have seen thousands
Of people who were all me.
But from them I haven’t found
Any like me.
– Rumi
——————————–
“All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.”
– Gibran Khalil Gibran
