That's Entertainment

If Aristotle is right about drama having a mimetic effect, I much inclined to miss the time when especially in film the stories were less action based and there were not so many cuts and more and longer dialogue. It just feels that it had been more about acting and evoking emotions, not just posing.

What Makes People

"The road less travelled is where I want to be." As this is was uttered by an artist I truly wish for him  that he will do it, one way or  another.

What a Mighty Good Man

is the man who is able to say, "I'm sorry", and do this right into somebody's face! Watch the movie "Running Time" to encounter one who is able to.

What a Piece of Work is Man II

Cap-a-pie had a wonderful discussion on youtube

What a Piece of Work is Man

Blindness

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,

Looking on darkness which the blind do see:

Save that my soul's imaginary sight

Presents their shadow to my sightless view,

 

Sonnet 27, William Shakespeare

 

In the catalogue to the exhibition Jacques Derrida curated at the Louvre entitled  "Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and other Ruins"/"Memoires d'Aveugle.L'Autoportrait et autres Ruines", he took me on a journey into blindness, setting off with all the blind men in literature, whether poets themselves or all the blind(ed) men in the bible. Yet soon the passage would take a quite different turn and it surely made me discover the sort of blindness he refers to at the end myself. And to this day I still wonder how he knew?! I would highly recommend reading it and joining the voyage ;)

The Setting Moon

Have you ever watched a giant moon setting into the sea?!

Going places

More Secrets

and very pleasant and pleasing ones.

Of all the suggestions Pope John XXIII made in his Daily Decalogue , the one that affects me the most is number six:

Only for today, I will do a good deed and not tell anyone about it.

I imagine someone secretly smiling to himself/ herself all the time. The German expression "sich freuen wie ein Honigkuchenpferd"/ "to be merry like a  gingerbread-horse " comes to my mind because it absolutely fits the occasion.

The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret

With all those conspiracy theories around and all the paranoia, it's getting even more difficult to keep a secret. 



Spoiler alert if you haven't read Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum yet!


Concerning all those popular conspiracy theories Eco presents in this novel the ultimate secret , which would be a complete empty one. Go figure out ;)!

Youthful Folly

Once on a warm summer's night when the pub was just closing, I fancied that we could go and have a swim in a nearby quarry pond. No sooner said than done, we took a dive and since we were not really prepared, at least I took off all my clothes. Oddly though we were several girls, I was the only girl, who joined the boys. One of them later commented that he was surprised to hear my voice so close to him in the water. He had kept on his shorts btw. Later on when mentioning this to another mother at some toddler group I found out that I'm not the only one who fancies this.

I'M A Crazy Old Cat - Hopefully

Like back in October I hope that I will surprise myself again and again and again by simply doing things and not thinking too much about them. I guess I need to go places much, much more though for things to finally happen ;)!

Faith

I could but agree with Jacques Derrida. This so much reminds me of when my brother-in-law confronted me and his grandaunt saying: "If you do believe you must be certain of the existence of God." And we both knowingly smiled at each other. One can never be certain, one can only believe and have faith ;)! As far as I understand Edmund Husserl correctly, he said that anything that cannot be doubted must be wrong.

PS: 

Some Lines There

When I was travelling back from the Venice Biennale  completely on my own - I had to leave earlier than the rest of my academy class for I wanted to catch Raimund Stecker's speech at the Barnett Newman Symposium in Düsseldorf - I had to share my sleeping car from Milan to Düsseldorf with five other people. There were a couple from Southern Germany, a Dutch student and two men who obviously knew each other. One of them was rather remarkable in that he was scarified in his face. I could see the couple exchanging glances with one another saying: "How could we spend the night with someone like this?! And thank God we will be leaving early in the morning."
All of us soon went to sleep and the second man left quite early in the night. When I was up again, the couple had got off the train and the Dutch student had left also, probably to refresh herself. Thus  only me and the scarred man were left. We got into a conversation, he addressed me in German, but to my shame I did not realise it, and so we went on in English. It turned out that he was from Nigeria and he was a Roman Catholic priest coming directly from the seminary in Rome travelling to Dortmund as the vacation replacement of the local priest. We had a very nice chat and the one thing that stuck in my mind was that I was impressed by the very low life expectancy in Nigeria. While he stated that most people in Nigeria die at the age of 40 and most people there are lucky to know their parents let alone their grandparents, I told him that I had known my great-grandfather, who had died at the age of 90.

Flow

Floating

Du meine Güte - Kindness and Gentleness

José Saramago, Portuguese writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, once stated that the virtue he reveres the most and at the same time misses most desperately nowadays, was kindness.

Then again a hallmark of Shakespeare's cooperation  in composing a play is his frequent use of the words "gentle" and "gentleness".

Compassion

"Why Have a Soul...

...when it's yours to lose,
You gotta pick your fights,
You got work to do"

To Parry

...the paranoia that appears to be so common nowadays, when even "friends" spy on each other, one should perhaps sport an embracing attitude, though it might be frightening ;)

Lines

There are certain lines that some/ most would erase, but they represent the traces. No wonder this society, the whole world in fact, is getting paranoid due to the modern habit of presenting just the perfect surface. I definitely love these lines and cherish them ;) in me and others, because they keep me and them from getting old.

Prume Vlaai

Lying in the grass underneath a plum tree in my parents' garden, looking at the sky and trying to memorise the soliloquy "Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh" from Hamlet, for if one wanted to join the English Drama Group at my school one had to prove one's ability. Shakespeare was perfect accoding to my teacher for it is easy to learn - he was very right, a true actor's playwright ;)!  Then getting up to pick a pailful of the plums. Getting back into the kitchen and baking a plum cake, in the local Ripuarian dialect "Prume Vlaai". Later on going to school, delivering the soliloquy and eating the cake with the others - never felt so whole in my life.

Trust

Finally I'm coming around telling more train stories. Some time in the late 1990s when travelling from Recklinghausen to Münster, I was approached by a Muslim missionary. Straight away he told me: "I can see that you have a great trust in God." I retorted that he might be very right. He definitely wanted to proselytise me but I gently declined after trying to discuss  Lessing's ring parable with him.