the WORD project

a'nimat|e² v.t. - breathe life into; enliven, make lively
a'nim|ism n. - attribution of living souls to lifeless objects - Concise Oxford Dictionary

"...the icons, associative links, virtual spaces, and parallel processing of multimedia computing may resurrect...a mode of consciousness based on intuition, imaginative leaps, and fuzzy rules-of-hand."
Techngnosis Erik Davis

"The simplest sense of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one...This significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words and conjunctions of words... bring it when the mind is tuned aright."
William James The Varieties of Religious Experience

On Language: "there should be no central configuration that attempts to freeze the play of the system, no marginal one, no priveleged one, no repressed one ….we should continuously attempt to see this free play in all our texts and languages - which otherwise will tend toward fixity, institutionalisation, centralisation, totalitarianism. All texts are equally unstable, and must surrender to the complete free play of the binary opposites in a non hierarchical way." - Jacques Derrida

"Combine letters, a few or many, reversing and rolling them around rapidly, until one's heart feels warm" - Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia 13th century Jewish mystic

"That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes the framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than concepts" - Nietzsche

We will then show how the ridiculousness of speech is born from misunderstandings of similar words for different things and different words for similar things, from garrulity and repetition, from play on words, from diminutives, from errors of pronunciation, and from barbarisms" - quote from Aristotle's second book of Poetics, the enigmatic book in Umberto Eco's bestselling novel The Name of the Rose.