The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to Dog.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from Dog and nearer to the Dust.

T.S. Eliot (from The Rock)
(i exchanged God for Dog. God seems too ungraspable and odd. Dog may seem odder, but at least i feel more familiar to that word)

mystery

Daring to lift my eyes
towards the dry treetops,
I don't see God, but his light
is immensely shining.
Of all the things I know
my heart feels only this:
I'm young, alive, alone,
my body consuming itself.
I briefly rest in the tall grasses
of a river bank, under bare
trees, then move along beneath
clouds to live out my young days.

[Pier Paolo Pasolini; from Il Stroligut, n. 1, Casarsa, August 1945]

il vangelo secondo matteo

how i love this film.

boring

he said to her: "now that you know all these things about me, it´s only a matter of time until you´ll be bored by me."
she wasn´t estranged by anything as much as by lovers who tried to entertain her, show her something "special", go to specific places like going on "vacation" together or doing athletic movements in some kind of synchrony, go to what is considered an "event", see spectacles, go to some water and say "romantic" words to each other.
the only thing she looked for in a lover was to be bored and to exist side by side without having to perform the choreography of love like trained apes in a zoo.
like the old people who stand by windows all day long, supposedly watching "nothing" happen, she liked watching "nothing" happen.
once a man she loved came to visit her from far away and all they did was walk down streets. ugly streets. short streets. long streets. streets with nothing to see. when he left, he said: "i saw nothing in your town. it was great."
there´s nothing worse than "adventurers".
i hate travelling and explorers (levi-strauss).
she just liked spending time.

allonge-toi. je veux te regarder.

random bits of so-called dialog

a: i coughed on your breast
b: it doesn´t matter. my breast is silent.
like god.
a: god is silent?
b: well...
hello god?
...
yes.
a: oh.
b: is this supposed to be romantic?
a: i guess. yeah.
b: are you going to recite a poem now?
a: yeah.
b: should we make love after?
a: i guess so.
b: yeah.
b: one day i´ll show you the house where i was born.
a: until then, can i make love to a model of the house?
b: to please yourself?
a: well. not exactly. but yeah.
b: okay.
a: do you like burnt cookies?
b: no. i´ve heard the burnt stuff causes cancer.
a: so i´m gonna get cancer?
b: well i use cancer causing nail polish. so now at least we can get cancer together.
a: yeah.
b: i really don´t understand this thing about truth and manipulation. i think i need to get a big philosophical book about the problem.
a: i don´t think a book is going to help.
b: yeah. everytime you find out more about the philosophy of the problem it makes it more and more problematic.
like i learned nothing in school.
a: that´s nice.
b: are you breaking? (while cycling down a hill)
a: yeah. my breaks are kind of broken.
b: express yourself. don´t repress yourself.
a: should we go and meet my friend c?
she always lets me eat freely.
b: i like to live freely.
freeeely.

symmetry

symmetry is something satisfying.
seeing symmetrical phenomena seems to please some kind of natural obsession with things that mirror each other.
ornaments are symmetrical. faces are symmetrical. leaves are symmetrical. houses are symmetrical. most animals are symmetrical.
except for one fish: the scophthalmus rhombus
both of his eyes are on one side.
you got to love the scophthalmus rhombus

jonah and the great fish

more than any other name i love the name jonah (after that it´s oskar and then piet). and i love great fish.
when i die one day, may there please come a great fish that will devour me and may someone please write a short story about my little death and call it jana in the fish?
but i kind of doubt there are still these kind of fish around in these godless days of hedonistc pleasuredomes. i´ve heard a lot of fish have turned into hermaphrodites because of all the women´s pee, with all the hormons from their birth control pills inside, that contaminates the water.
a wee little hermaphrodite fish then. i´ll take you that way, too.

erwin blumenfeld

erwin blumenfeld, jewish-german photographer and writer born in a january in 1897 in berlin, died in a july in 1969 in rome
-his pictures look so modern as modern can be, but are all from the 40s, imagine that!
wikipedia rather laconically and aridly says about blumendfeld:
"In the 1930s, he published collages mocking Adolf Hitler. In 1936, he emigrated to Paris. With the German occupation, he was interned in a concentration camp in 1940 because he was Jewish. In 1941, he could escape to the USA. In the 1940s and 1950s he became famous for his fashion photography, working for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and also for artistic nude photography. In the 1960s, he worked on his autobiography which found no publisher because it was considered to be too ironic towards society, and was published only after his death."

blumenfeld wrote literature, was engaged in collage, sketching, painting, photography, antifascism, anarchy, atheism and he was very little, -or rather short. he said he never ever wanted to be a "poet, never an artist, never a hero, just always and always a human".

watching feeling in the face

i prefer watching this silent. just seeing the music in bernstein´s face.

why do you speak?

to simplify. allegedly.
to intervene.
to escape the loneliness of writing. allegedly. (-isn´t the "loneliness" of writing a rich, inhabited loneliness?)
often we speak too much, she says speaking. often we say whatever.
talking needs time, roudinesco constates.
maybe we talk, just to spend time.