[Jacques] Roux once said that "liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class is allowed to condemn another to starvation and no measures taken against them"
And what of pure poetry? Poetry’s absolute power will purify men, allmen. “Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.” So said Lautréamont. Allthe ivory towers will be demolished, all speech will be holy, and, having atlast come into the reality which is his, man will need only to shut his eyesto see the gates of wonder opening.
Daydream delusion, limousine eyelash / Oh baby with your pretty face / Drop a tear in my wineglass / Look at those big eyes / See what you mean to me / Sweet-cakes and milkshakes / I'm a delusion angel / I'm a fantasy parade / I want you to know what I think / Don't want you to guess anymore / You have no idea where I came from / We have no idea where we're going / Lodged in life / Like branches in a river/ Flowing downstream / Caught in the current / I carry you / You'll carry me / That's how it could be / Don't you know me? / Don't you know me by now?
I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.
A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community.
He thinks to himself, "I must be insane."
What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does,
a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes.
These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs.
Man wants chaos.
In fact, he's gotta have it.
Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread.
We're irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state...
created out of death and destruction.
It's in all of us. We revel in it.
Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things,
painting them up as great human tragedies.
But we all know the function of the media has never been...
to eliminate the evils of the world, no.
Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them.
The powers that be want us to be passive observers.
Hey, you got a match?
And they haven't given us any other options...
outside the occasional, purely symbolic,
participatory act of voting.
You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?
I feel that the time has come to project my own...
inadequacies and dissatisfactions...
into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes,
Let my own lack of a voice be heard.
Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. That is my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
--Sam Seaborn, fictional character from sci-fi/fantasy TV show The West Wing.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish, and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon thee
"There are five or six films in the history of the cinema which one wants to review simply by saying, 'It is the most beautiful of films.' Because there can be no higher praise... I love Summer Interlude." Jean Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinéma, (July 1958)
And this I dreamt, and this I dream,
And some time this I will dream again,
And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied,
You will dream everything I have seen in dream.
To one side from ourselves, to one side from the world
Wave follows wave to break on the shore,
On each wave is a star, a person, a bird,
Dreams, reality, death - on wave after wave.
No need for a date: I was, I am, and I will be,
Life is a wonder of wonders, and to wonder
I dedicate myself, on my knees, like an orphan,
Alone - among mirrors - fenced in by reflections:
Cities and seas, iridescent, intensified.
A mother in tears takes a child on her lap.
1
I don't believe in omens or fear
Forebodings. I flee from neither slander
Nor from poison. Death does not exist.
Everyone's immortal. Everything is too.
No point in fearing death at seventeen,
Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light;
Neither death, nor darkness, exists.
We're all already on the seashore;
I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets
When a shoal of immortality swims by.
2
If you live in a house - the house will not fall.
I'll summon any of the centuries,
Then enter one and build a house in it.
That's why your children and your wives
Sit with me at one table, -
The same for ancestor and grandson:
The future is being accomplished now,
If I raise my hand a little,
All five beams of light will stay with you.
Each day I used my collar bones
For shoring up the past, as though with timber,
I measured time with geodetic chains
And marched across it, as though it were the Urals.
3
I tailored the age to fit me.
We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe;
The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced,
Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied,
Threatening me with destruction, like a monk.
I strapped my fate to the saddle;
And even now, in these coming times,
I stand up in the stirrups like a child.
I'm satisfied with deathlessness,
For my blood to flow from age to age.
Yet for a corner whose warmth I could rely on
I'd willingly have given all my life,
Whenever her flying needle
Tugged me, like a thread, around the globe.
From Dentist by Roberto Bolano:
"That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.... The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie."
As a metaphor, the Andean legend is easy enough to decipher. Whether the villains are conquistadors, Catholic priests, mining engineers, or gun-toting drug dealers in the jungle, they stand in for five centuries of exploitation and extraction—a narrative of foreign powers feeding from the soft belly and open veins of Latin America
From Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Friere
"Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion."
From Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."
They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."
"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."
"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming — just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.
What are you doing here, planted on your backsides like a load of serious mugs...
... you serious people, you smell worse than cow dung
DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing
It is like your hopes: nothing
like your heaven: nothing...
like your politicians: nothing...
like your artists: nothing...
From Waking Life, by Richard Linklater:
The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us... I'm afraid were losing the real virtues of living life passionately in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are the ability to make something of yourself and feel good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it were a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never felt once minute of despair in his life. One thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it, it’s like your life is yours to create. I’ve read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as being fragmented of marginalised, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or souls that theologians would talk about. He’s talking about you and me talking, making decisions, doing things, and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in this world, and counting, but nevertheless -what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms, to other people, and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we shouuld never write ourselves off or see each other as a victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.
Here are a few quotes by G.K. Chesterton:
“Keep in some sense before the mind that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions ... it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglers and the footpads are merely placid old conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most daring of conspiracies.”
"The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw."
GODZILLA EN MÉXICO
Atiende esto, hijo mío: las bombas caían
sobre la ciudad de México
pero nadie se daba cuenta.
El aire llevó el veneno a través
de las calles y las ventanas abiertas.
Tú acababas de comer y veías en la tele
los dibujos animados.
Yo leía en la habitación de al lado
cuando supe que íbamos a morir.
Pese al mareo y las náuseas me arrastré
hasta el comedor y te encontré en el suelo.
Nos abrazamos. Me preguntaste qué pasaba
y yo no dije que estábamos en el programa de la muerte
sino que íbamos a iniciar un viaje,
uno más, juntos, y que no tuvieras miedo.
Al marcharse, la muerte ni siquiera
nos cerró los ojos.
¿Qué somos?, me preguntaste una semana o un año después,
¿hormigas, abejas, cifras equivocadas
en la gran sopa podrida del azar?
Somos seres humanos, hijo mío, casi pájaros,
Héroes públicos y secretos.
English:
GODZILLA IN MEXICO
Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.
Copied from this excellent blog
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. ... Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work', we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.' It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism”.
Why is it I remember yet
You, of all women one has met
In random wayfare, as one meets
The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night? I know
Your heart holds many a Romeo.
And I, who call to mind your face
In so serene a pausing-place,
Where the bright pure expanse of sea,
The shadowy shore's austerity,
Seems a reproach to you and me,
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love's unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.
Why is it, then, that I recall
You, neither first nor last of all?
For, surely as I see tonight
The glancing of the lighthouse light,
Against the sky, across the bay,
As turn by turn it falls my way,
So surely do I see your eyes
Out of the empty night arise,
Child, you arise and smile to me
Out of the night, out of the sea,
The Nereid of a moment there,
And is it seaweed in your hair?
O lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drownèd past, I know,
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
Child, I remember, and can tell,
One night we loved each other well;
And one night's love, at least or most,
Is not so small a thing to boast.
You were adorable, and I
Adored you to infinity,
That nuptial night too briefly borne
To the oblivion of morn.
Oh, no oblivion! for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
And your soft breast that heaves and dips,
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies, and unite
In the intolerable, the whole
Rapture of the embodied soul.
That joy was ours, we passed it by;
You have forgotten me, and I
Remember you thus strangely, won
An instant from oblivion.
And I, remembering, would declare
That joy, not shame, is ours to share,
Joy that we had the will and power,
In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,
Out of vague nights, and days at strife,
So infinitely full of life.
And 'tis for this I see you rise,
A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,
Here, where the drowsy-minded mood
Is one with Nature's solitude;
For this, for this, you come to me
Out of the night, out of the sea.
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;grant them a few more warm transparent days,urge them on to fulfillment then, and pressthe final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.Whoever is alone will stay alone,will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,and wander the boulevards, up and down,restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
by Rainer Maria Rilke
But the point is that a near random juxtaposition of elements eventually becomes an art form of its own, able to make statements in its own terms. Copying from one learned text is called plagiarism, Copy from fifty and it's called research. Use one cliché and it's culpable. Use a hundred and it's called Gaudi. It's a brilliant point.
As a film, Casablanca, he argues, never inhabits a single genre, never communicates merely a single message. It is presented almost as a series of unrelated tableaux, where the characters do as required by the passing scenario. It thus becomes a pastiche where there's something for everyone, where it can become more entertaining to spot, categorise, recognise and then discuss the loosely-related vignettes than to appreciate the whole, because there is no whole to appreciate.
McLuhan advised us that the medium had become the message. Eco takes us further, illustrating how mass media are no longer conduits for ideology because they themselves have become the ideology. So now, when we watch television news that concentrates on celebrity and the entertainment industry, we ought to be rendered keenly aware of the motives and interests at play. When, come to think of it, did you last hear a wholly negative film review? So where lies the line between reviewer and promoter?
Quote of the now:
"I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one".
From Persona by Ingmar Bergman.
I talked to somebody today who I had not talked too for a long time. I didn't massively want to, but now I am stuck with him for at least another two weeks.
The little turns that life takes never cease to amaze me. I feel like Golyadkin in Dostoyevsky's The Double. After shutting myself in for so long, life trickles in, like water, and all I can do is react.
Very odd.
The unnamed hero/stalker’s ambiguous, uncertain search even seems to touch the heart of the woman who has been trying to elude him, and she offers him a fleeting kiss as she gets off the tram. She remains iconic, the one to be pursued. As elegant as Guerín’s new film is(22) – and his films are always thought-provoking – this is no tale of Dante and Beatrice, despite the fact that the protagonist stays in a hotel named “Paradise”. If the artist/protagonist descends into hell – and the bar Les Aviateurs he revisits after his failed attempt to reconnect with “Sylvia” seems close to an inferno of shallow temptations – then he needs to continue his journey upwards, and not just in outward forms.
"Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if the patients wife is sleeping around with other men, the patients jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition. In a homololagous way, even if rich jews in the Germany of the early 1930s 'really' exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press and so on, Nazi anti-Semitism was still emphatically 'untrue', a pathological ideological condition. Why? What made it pathological was the disavowed libidinal investment made into the figure of the Jew. The cause of all social antagonisms was projected into the 'Jew', the object of perverted love-hatred, the spectral figure of mixed fasicnation and disgust".
I have been having the strangest feeling recently. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, I can only loosely describe as a feeling of impending doom. Not for me personally, but for humanity generally.
There is something incredibly dark about there as a place. The hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juarez. The drug wars between the cartels and the Mexican government. Go further back in history, the frontier, and the massacres of Native Americans, mass scalping. Go further back, the conquistadors and the conquering of Central America, and the Aztecs and human sacrifice. It is almost as if something terrible and malevolent exists in the air and the soil.
I thought about this when I read reviews of The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, (which recently won the Palm D’Or). It is a film set in a small German village in the years just before WW1. The village becomes plagued by small acts of horrific and inexplicable violence. I have not seen it, but it struck a chord with me, with the idea of violence woven into the very fabric of existence, systematic and anonymous. The film is meant to foreshadow what was to come for Germany. Part of the Roberto Bolano book was set in Germany as well.
It seems to me that the most important artists, the ones who are saying really saying something important, at the very cutting edge, all seem to be saying the same thing. That something terrible is coming, just like in the years before the World Wars in the 20th century. It is in the air of the world we live in right now, and evident in every action. Things have been set in motion that we as a society/species cannot turn away from.
But, to lighten this up, I will say, that it is amazing that civilization even exists at all. I will quote G.K Chesterton, who said it better than I could, who remarks that detective stories...
“Keep in some sense before the mind that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions ... it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglers and the footpads are merely placid old conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most daring of conspiracies.”