A Question

As a woman am I only allowed to identify with a fellow woman in a movie, play, tv-show etc...

Or if this woman comes from a very different social, cultural, ethnic background, could these also be reasons I shouldn't or can't...

All This Convenient Functionality

 rather touching

Beholding

the photograph of a woman who had just given birth and then reading the comment "Horrible", I know that this is only half the truth. On the other hand to me these are the most overwhelmingly joyous moments I've ever experienced.  There is also the afterthought of feeling sorry for those women who were denied it. Maybe as a woman I should also spare a thought for men who by definition cannot experience it. Even if they are brave enough to accompany the birth, they are condemned to the utmost passiveness...

Baby, you can hold my hand, though probably I won't very much care about it.

Ahh, the bounteness of life

Don Quixote

 or rather his return

How much would you dare and risk to be just...

 

The Archeology of Postures

How often have you gone down on your knees of late und of your own free will...

Posture

Like Chesterton mentions it pretty much depends on whether you are wearing trousers with pockets or a belt.

Too Catholic

Yesterevening I was reminded of an essential feature of my Catholic faith. An auxiliary bishop in his evening prayers talked about the notion that if one assumes oneself to be only evil, one tends to listen too much to the whispers of the great accuser, the devil.

There is this belief, this notion that one can turn at any moment and pursue the other road, there is this capacity for a change for the better. And why shouldn't we?! If one visits Rome and has a look at the two people that almost predominate the city, the fundament of the Roman Catholic church, it's Peter and Paul, and looking at their lives, there were certainly missteps. The one renouncing Jesus, not just once, but thrice, and the other one prosecuting, probably even killing, early Christians ;).

As a Child

All these strange stories and notions about what was happening in the middle of the night, when I was a child.

A friend once told me very convincingly that the streets were full of rats at midnight.

Out of Bounds

There is always this thought: What good is it to undertake a journey when the outcome or destiny is already known.

every cord

every fibre




...Are you ready to ride with no place to shelter...Are you ready to be where nobody goes...

Call Me the Fool

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." - I'm the fool who refuses to believe that only the reference to the worst of times is real at any given moment.

bookplate in my copy of A Tale of Two Cities

"He (James Hadley Chase, author of No Orchids for Miss Blandish) is a popular writer  - there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England -who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call "realism", meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of "realism" has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. The interconnection between sadism, masochism, success-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate." George Orwell Raffles and Miss Blandish

Lollygagging

Sometimes ideas re-emerge...

Check out Triggerfinger's Flesh Tight



voor de lol en pret

Last Week

my husband was told that the court was not fighting windmills anymore, for the judge who actually did had quit three weeks earlier.

But what else is worth fighting against anyway!

Broken

Sometimes a Miracle

happens

Some of these lines I'm definitely not aware of having painted, for the brush was size 14.

Jealousy

Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft.

Jealousy is a passion that makes you look with eagerness for the thing that will make you suffer.

There is an interesting point here made by Peter de Graef that immaterial things can only be kept by sharing them. If you try to keep them for yourself you will lose them.



Jealousy is something I cannot actually relate to.

"... besides it would still be alright."

And monogamy is one of the last big adventures.

A Fool's Errand

It is easy to be solemn, it's hard to be frivolous. - Chesterton

Prostrate

What's in a Voice?

That it is so much more likely to reveal the inner selve than any other feature?

Maybe sometimes it would just be sufficient to close your eyes and simply listen.

A woman, whom I knew to be pretty tough on herself and others, once had singled me out and was already attacking me verbally. Then I opened my mouth and she apologised immediately. I hadn't even addressed her verbal attack.

Like the wrinkles in one's face maybe one's voice remembers and reminds.

The Sublime is Now

All it takes is so little, some heart and soul truly.

Beauty

melancholy, romantic, alive all at once in a single instance








I am ready to swear that Masha--or, as her father called her, Mashya--was a real beauty, but I don't know how to prove it. It sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colors them and the sky with tints of every possible shade--crimson, orange, gold, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban. The glow of sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church, flashes on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the background of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards. . . . And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk, all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies. 
...

I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.
...

Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform. 
...


Standing at the window talking, the girl, shrugging at the evening damp, continually looking round at us, at one moment put her arms akimbo, at the next raised her hands to her head to straighten her hair, talked, laughed, while her face at one moment wore an expression of wonder, the next of horror, and I don't remember a moment when her face and body were at rest. The whole secret and magic of her beauty lay just in these tiny, infinitely elegant movements, in her smile, in the play of her face, in her rapid glances at us, in the combination of the subtle grace of her movements with her youth, her freshness, the purity of her soul that sounded in her laugh and voice, and with the weakness we love so much in children, in birds, in fawns, and in young trees.

from The Beauties by Anton Chekhov



and sometimes even a little bit naughty

Sensation

Bad almost evil

Sensitive people, who at the same time are self-serving. For they know where to hit you most cruelly. They are quite aware of your soft spot and will use it against you at any given moment.

The ugliest thing I've ever witnessed.

The Reason For Some Recent Changes

the sense of proportion

humour

John Cleese hits right on

these things are interconnected

even the desire to slightly offend or provoke some people sometimes

Regrets

all the time not wasted on simply lying there and dreaming

Partners in Crime

There is something romantic and adventureous in having the idea that you just might have gone a little too far, and in an unselfish way you take a deep breath and do it nevertheless.

Feel the shame ;)

Play It Again

Alike but not the same.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy seperately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. - Chesterton

All theses months years ago when I spent every free evening watching this one movie - Young And Innocent.

A Line Somewhere

When it came, it hit me by surprise. Even more so because I was expecting it and I knew beforehand that something was bound to be mentioned. And yet when it came, it came in the most unexpected way.
The good thing though was that I never forgot my reply and that it is still something I stand by, something I can hold on to. And thank God I did not realize the queer notion that might have been implied at the time, like I might be the one to defend or even represent something so terrible.

It was back in 1987 and I was an exchange student in Texas. I had been up for almost 24 hours and was already beyond tired, when I was confronted by the thing I had been dreading. Almost the first thing my host parents told me was that according to them Hitler hadn't been that bad and that they'd rather had that the Americans would have fought Stalin instead. Now, shortly before I had learned about the Nazis' totalitarian grip of every aspect of life, especially on education. How they would immediately start to impliment their ideology in the minds of the young.

And this is and was my reply to not only my host parents, but in a way to the American people:

I would like to thank you and the American people. I'm so grateful that you've risked and sacrificed the lives of your sons and daughters to free Germany of this terrible ideology. I do not believe that we, Germans, could have done this ourselves. And I'm taking this very personally for I'm sure I would not have existed if it had prevailed. I do not mean this in a physical way but I fear that I would not have been the person I am. The Nazis presented you with this one choice either they would kill you or you had to succumb to their ideology. Since I do not consider myself to be brave or courageous I suppose I would have succumbed. I would not have been what I consider to be myself. So for my freedom and my being I have to thank you.

They never bothered to address this issue again.

Only later I learned about this movie but somehow Anton Walbrook, who allegedly wrote this speech himself, hits a similar point.

Draw!

 

Something, that made me laugh cordially yesterday:

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. - G K Chesterton Illustrated London News, May 5th 1928

Sometimes there are lines I have to acknowledge and sometimes something definitive happens. One of these lines will feature tomorrow, for it is the day befitting the occasion.

Sich an den eigenen Haaren aus den Sumpf ziehen / Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps

 A Ballade of Suicide

by G.K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours–on the wall–
Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay–
My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall–
I see a little cloud all pink and grey–
Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call– I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way–
I never read the works of Juvenal–
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational–
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small–
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

So II

"Is it the howl of the devil or a sound divine."

Conditio Humana

So

who is to be blamed

Of late a friend has unwittingly reminded me of Karl May and because of this, something happened. I told him, for after all he is to be blamed:

"I have to pick some little bone, because of this (post) I rewatched Winnetou I and now it's me counting the cost. As a child I certainly rooted for Winnetou, but this time around it is Old Shatterhand. Well, actually I watched with my mouth gaping and marvelled: What the hell is he doing there?! How can you feel and express such hellish delight and lust for life, while somebody with a cleaver is hunting you down and how is somebody able to depict this (quite paradox emotion)? Well thanks a lot anyway."

Once the appeal is there, I have to look deeper into the matter by the way...

Shalishalilala

Detox Danny (en de Dirks)

Detox Danny (and the Dirks)

Because my husband's name is Dirk ;)

We are Detox Danny and the Dirks
We are the worst showband of all circusses

The Awful Rowing to God

...


Then there was life
with it’s cruel houses
and people who seldom touched –
though touch is all –
...

but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life, 
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me, 
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands
and embrace it.

...


excerpts from ROWING by Anne Sexton

Shalalala

überdrüssig - there is a weariness that comes from too much, especially consuming too much, and this is the saddest of all

Yet certainly there is a cure.

GIVE!

A Leap of Faith II

Lebensfreude 

joie de vivre

zest for life

my sweet darlings

Shalalala