Assembling a Collection of Beauty

Hey there my dear friends,

many of you wrote me warm words after getting the last edition of this Newsletter, and I am happy to receive every single one of them. It makes me fill up with a warm and fuzzy feeling of gratitude, friendship, and connectedness. A gentle glow from the inside, that is reward enough for writing these more often again.

This one, I am writing in the very early morning, just after waking up, my mind alive with ideas. The sun is not quite out yet, but I can see the first golden grey shimmers behind the clouds and simply know that it will be another beautiful day. Something about the quality of these moments, early, before everybody is awake, is very conducive to writing, or really any creative pursuit, somehow. There is a stillness in the air that I can tap into.

With the AI links section gone, this newsletter feels like it misses some structure... it misses something to hold it together–a framework. The old AI links section helped me get started, every two weeks, on schedule. It used to help me make something nice, repeatedly.

But now that this is gone, writing regularly becomes a little more difficult. Staring at a white page makes me anxious...

I want to write regularly, but about what?

A nagging voice in my brain says that I'll never have enough ideas to write about. It tells me that without a framework, I'm lost.

But then, I'm reminded of two things:

• my friend Marc is calling these "digital postcards."
• attention to detail is the birth of art

That's what I want these newsletters to be. Digital postcards filled with attention to detail. Stuff that caught my mind: marvels I found, both from the real and digital world. Like little travel reports, but from journeys in two very different yet connected realms: photos and stories of beautiful places AND awe-inducing stuff I found online.

I've been working on assembling what I call a "collection of beauty" for myself, going through art that I like and finding high-resolution images of it, photographs, paintings, and collages. Stuff like this, Haeckel, Redoute, Nasa Images:

While I was doing this, I ran across Nicholas Rougeux and the insane work he does.

Just look at this: https://www.c82.net/redoute/lilies

Or this: https://www.c82.net/mineralogy/

Finding this inspired me so much. The amount of time a person can pour into a single project and how much is possible. The web, when used to its full capacity, can be extremely beautiful. I wrote him that, and he replied. This, too, is part of the web. The possibility of reaching out, of making friends with other people who create. The internet shrinks the world so much, and there is beauty in this.

I want to create more like this, art at the intersection of curation, design, writing, and programming. It reminds me of an article a friend sent to me: Craft is the Antidote to Slop.

Circus is another antidote to the meaninglessness that AI could create. It is a form of craft.

This thought occurred to me, while watching a circus show here in Pai yesterday: laughing tears, wrapped in a blanket of emotions, shaken by joy, awe, wonder, disgust, happiness, I thought: "This is enough, there is no need for despair". Seeing what humans are capable of, the weird, the messy, the acrobatic, the wonderful.

Even if robots could perform spinning fire like that... it would mean nothing. Robots don't burn, they don't hurt when they fall, and there are no stakes involved.

Circus is meaningful exactly because humans do it.

It also makes everybody wonder: "Could I do that?" And in this wonder, there is a way out of the meaninglessness. Because even if everything is taken over by AI, purpose can still be found in flow arts, every day. Time can be spent with practice and dedication. A future where we are taking pleasure in our own self-mastery, in becoming good at what we love, whatever that may be. In other words: Circus is enough. And so are the other crafts.

✨ Quote(s) ✨

Develop interests in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.

– Henry Miller

Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail.

– Julia Cameron

🌌 Travel 🌌

I'm still in Pai, and time here is warping around me, days blending into one another, but each day fills up with a surreal amount of awe and beauty, without exception. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure I am not dreaming.

Flying my drone and waking up early, meeting beautiful people from the Garden, going to contact improv, campfires, ecstatic dance, cuddling the doggos outside, playing piano for some people dancing, small excursions in the rice fields nearby and along the river, all while having beautiful, yummy food in all the different restaurants. The world is still so green, but this is what it looks like in the beginning of the dry season, I can only imagine what this place is like once it rains and everything springs back to full life. The green must be surreal, like an emerald cloak put on by nature.

I also had the chance to play with a toy named Shashibo cubes this week, and it completely blew my mind. There is something about the geometry of these toys that makes me really happy, but the best is the clicking sound and physicality that they have. It is something that a video can't replicate, because you have to have them in your hands to understand, but they are oddly like seriously oddly satisfying.

🎶 Song 🎶

Escher by Bill Laurance

I find this piece of music so beautiful because it captures the self-recursive, dreamy nature of an Escher painting. It also reminds me of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach and that makes me smile: a happy, quirky smile, some might even say a smirk.

It's a recognition of the connectedness of these very different worlds (painting, mathematics and music) and the realization and appreciation of how general our brains are to make these connections between topics that are so different.

Check it out :)

Youtube Music | Spotify

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That's all for this time. I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!

Have ideas for improving it? As always please let me know. You can also just reply to this email and I should get those too :)

Cheers,

– Rico