The Talk Quotes

“I had a conversation with John Diaz, editorial pages editor of the Chronicle, before an audience of the paper's subscribers. Makeda was in the first row.

He told them his favorite cartoon of mine was the very last one I'd drawn about gay marriage, just after the Supreme Court had legalized it. After years of increasingly complex cartoons, I'd created one last, simple, poignant image.

John asked me if it was discouraging as a Black cartoonist to see gay marriage resolved, but Black lives still didn't matter.

I smiled. I replied "It's not discouraging... it's foreshadowing.”
― Darrin Bell, The Talk

“In honors physics, I learned that Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell observed how electrical fields and magnetic fields - both immobile by themselves - would move when combined. They would oscillate, and radiate at fantastic speeds. They would become electromagnetic waves. This was the birth of radio.
Physicist Heinrich Hertz later measured the speed of those waves to be 3.0x10^8 meters per second through a vacuum. Exactly the same as the speed of light. This proved that radio waves were a form of LIGHT invisible to our eyes, just like infrared.

It also proved that light itself was an electromagnetic wave. Such waves differ from mechanical waves, because they don't have to travel through a medium. Electromagnetic waves can travel through the vacuum of space.

But some still believe - as scientists did in the years following the Civil War - that there's a universal, fundamental substance called the "Aether" that undergirds all of existence. And that the Aether is the medium through which electromagnetic waves travel.

As best we know, the Aether does not exist. But to those who believe in it, the Aether doesn't just fill the universe. The Aether IS the universe.

I think I was taken off guard by their asking me questions. Usually there guys reflexively tell me I'm wrong. Or they outright ignore my points (until one of them repeats what I said as if THEY thought of it). My hypothesis is that, wittingly or not, they see minorities as electromagnetic waves. And they see themselves as the medium through which our experiences, our perspectives, our opinions -and even our PRESENCE - propagate. Everything about us is valid only to the extent that THEY are willing to entertain it.

They seem to feel that they're as foundational and as supreme as the Aether.”
― Darrin Bell, The Talk

“You think the universe was always here?

Douglass, everything has an origin.

Maybe you're both right. Things don't get created out of nothing. Creations are made outta ingredients. Even ingredients are made out of ingredients. Think about it:
Universes are made of galaxies are made of stars are made of gases are made of atoms are made of quarks are made of universes... for all we know.

Cool.

Maybe there's an infinite number of big bangs, each one creating a universe that forms a single quark...which interacts with other quarks to build a larger universe. And then that universe fits inside a singularity that explodes into another big bang becoming another quark.

Makes sense, but... it had to start at some point, right?

Why?

We're all basically apes with language and clothes. Maybe we think there has to be a "start" 'cause human brains are just too primitive to comprehend infinity. "Creation" happens, but it's not a "start". It's a coming together of what always was to make what always will be.

That's a lot like the "turtles all the way down".”
― Darrin Bell, The Talk