That’s what I am

30 Tuesday Jun 2020

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”Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either”

« C’est peut-être ça que je sens, qu’il y a un dehors et un dedans et moi au milieu, c’est peut-être ça que je suis, la chose qui divise le monde en deux, d’une part le dehors, de l’autre le dedans, ça peut être mince comme une lance, je ne suis ni d’un côté ni de l’autre, je suis au milieu, je suis la cloison, j’ai deux faces et pas d’épaisseur, c’est peut-être ça que je sens, je me sens qui vibre, je suis le tympan, d’un côté c’est le crâne, de l’autre le monde, je ne suis ni l’un ni l’autre »

Samuel Beckett, l’innommable, Paris, 1953, p.204

 

How to Survive the Agony of Falling in Love

28 Sunday Jun 2020

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The falling-in-love may be reciprocal, or it may be onesided; it may be successful, or it may be unsuccessful; it may be only a surface indication of other and very different events; but anyhow, deep down in the sub-conscious world, something is happening. It may be that two unseen and only dimly suspected existences are becoming really and permanently united; it may be that for a certain period, or (what perhaps comes to the same thing) that to a certain depth, they are transfusing and profoundly modifying each other; it may be that the mingling of elements and the transformation is taking place almost entirely in one person, and only to a slight degree or hardly at all in the other; yet in all these cases — beneath the illusions, the misapprehensions, the mirage and the maya, the surface satisfactions and the internal disappointments — something very real is happening, an important growth and evolution is taking place. Edward Carpenter

With the Blink of an Eye

25 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Truth

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Thus, all existence is like the clouds. Each created thing appears to be solid and firm, but in truth it is insubstantial and transitory:  “Man’s origin is dust and his end is unto dust. He earns his bread at the risk of his life. He is likened to a broken potsherd, to withering grass, to a fading flower, to a passing shadow, to a vanishing cloud, to a blowing wind, to dust that scatters, and to a fleeting dream.”

These are not thoughts we want to push from our consciousness. These are not thoughts that need to paralyze us.

 

Threshold geography

24 Wednesday Jun 2020

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This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?” G.Perec.

“And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors”

Space is a doubt

21 Sunday Jun 2020

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Pictures by a friend : Emil Przepiorski
The wall has been like this since the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. German bullet marks.

“To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself. Space is a doubt” /  “Vivre, c’est passer d’un espace à un autre, en essayant le plus possible de ne pas se cogner. L’espace est un doute.“

G. Perec, Espèces d’espaces, p 14

Under a little tree

20 Saturday Jun 2020

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«My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the
abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably
at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
veil.

Soul, don’t blame me that I’ve got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
because I myself am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.»

Wisława Szymborska