Quote

Quotes Are Not What You Want Them To Be…

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I like looking into the background of quotes that I come across – I source just about everything I write, with the exception of what is imagination or opinion. In doing so this morning, I was thinking of using a quote by Musashi, and I thought to use:

“Truth is not what you want it to be, it is what it is, and must bend to it’s power or live a lie”.

I went to my copy of the Book of Five Rings, which is pretty much where all legitimate Musashi quotes come from. That quote wasn’t there. I check Project Gutenberg for the book, since they would likely have an older copy, but strangely they do not have that book – which should be in the public domain by now! – at all1.

No one who uses the quote cites a source. No one.

It seems that this was something added by D.E. Tarver in his rendition of Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings”- but apparently it’s not in the original Japanese. No texts by Musashi seem to have this quotation.

This does not mean it doesn’t express some of his teachings, such as in the Dokkodo – accepting things the way they are, though extrapolating to living a lie does not seem to be something he actually did.

The fact that this quote circulates so much is pretty much the exact opposite of what his teaching would be.

これは翻訳者によって追加されたようです。(Kore wa hon’yaku-sha ni yotte tsuika sa reta yōdesu.)

  1. Someone should get on that. I have a translation that isn’t in the public domain, sadly. ↩︎

Criticize By Creating.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
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If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

Sourcing Humanity

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This meme has been wandering around a lot lately, and it’s almost amusingly something that those who support either side of the conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas agree on – for very different reasons.

Of course, it’s Noam Chomsky that is cited on this, but… I couldn’t find a source, instead finding a source for Barbara Schecter Cohen saying it.1 For something as popular for so many people, you’d think people would get the source right.

What I’ve found with it is that those who support the State of Israel like it, and those that support Palestinians really love it. Nobody seems to be supporting Hamas, which is probably as it should be, but to date it doesn’t seem like anyone is supporting the Palestinians in a meaningful way. It’s a failure in that regard. It certainly hasn’t made the State of Israel safer, and could be a central issue when it comes to the Presidential election in the United States.

All of this exists in a world where we increasingly can’t trust what information we get. I don’t support Hamas, I don’t support the State of Israel. I will support the Palestinians but even as I write this it’s quite likely that they are becoming extinct – with the use of AI, no less.

It seems like the technologies of humanity are conspiring against the concept of humanity we were taught.

With all that technology, we can’t seem to source a quotation properly, and the meaning of it is subjectively good for just about everyone who thinks everyone who disagrees with them is wrong. At a meta level, that’s even more disturbing.

  1. What I did find was a citation of it where Barbara Schecter Cohen apparently said it before a public audience at the Zekelman holocaust center.
    ↩︎

Decorating A Piece of Time

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Frank ZappaSticking this here because I may be referring to it multiple times, and the full quote is a bit wordy.

In an interview in 1984, Frank Zappa responded to a question in a way that fits all of this very well:

“Well, I’m specialized. What I do on a guitar has very little to do with what other people do on a guitar. Most of the other guitar solos that you hear performed on stage have been practiced over and over and over again. they go out there and they play the same one every night and it’s really, just, spotless.

My theory is this – I have a basic mechanical knowledge of the operation of the instrument and I got an imagination. and when the time comes up in the song to play a solo, it’s me against the laws of nature. I don’t know what I’m going to play, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I know roughly how long I have to do it, and it’s a game where you have a piece of time and you get to decorate it and, depending on how intuitive the rhythm section is that’s backing you up, you can do things that are literally impossible to imagine – sitting here – but you can see them performed before your very eyes in a live performance situation…”

We are all just decorating time. Some do the same things over and over – some don’t.