Friday 30 June 2017

Nice Point

"Trying to feel better versus getting better at feeling" - Mauro Antonio Pawlowski







O My Guts













"I put fresh heart into myself...Much fuss about a cheap thrill"

Thursday 29 June 2017

Kiss

There might be all sorts of kisses: kisses of devotion and dedication, kisses of arousal, surprising and stolen kisses...







Yet, what kind of kiss is this or is it hardly any?


Wednesday 28 June 2017

Hygiene

While my bike was being returned I myself was in the backyard looking for fireflies. It so happened that in one bush there was a constant glow and I was able to pick it up and hold it in my hands. My husband joined me and I started marveling at the fact that it wasn't going away, it seemed rather attached to my hand. So I came up with the thought that it had been caught in a spider's web and there was still a thread in my hand that would fix it. I even wondered if it was dead, but then my husband stated correctly that it wouldn't be glowing if it was. Gently I put it on the ground.





This experience made me wonder about this garden.




Hygiene only the second worst: "The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors - meaner even than the terror which produces hygiene...These creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men." Chesterton, Heretics

Tuesday 27 June 2017

Sleep Tight

Looking at my sleeping children in the morning.

Do I feel sorry or is there a slightly malicious joy in knowing that I have to wake them in just a few moments hence.











Slaap lekker - Sleep tight

Monday 26 June 2017

Oh the Laughter

So the bike was gone, stolen when we returned. Something regretfully anticipated by me because just before we were to leave on a three-day vacation I had been thinking about putting it in the garage but had forgotten it.
On the next weekend while we were preparing a barbecue for the local altar boys and girls, there suddenly appeared this man inquiring if a bike had been stolen. He first addressed my husband and since I had not yet come around telling him out of shame, he replied:"No!" Then I came and had to admit - and not only to my husband, but to everyone present - that the man was probably talking about my bike. The man went on explaining that a friend of his had taken the bike and had wanted to ride it to a town that was about twenty kilometers away, but he had prevented him. He promised to return it and put it back into our drive where he or better his friend had seized it.
For two weeks I heard nothing and on Saturday in the middle of the night at half past eleven - just like a thief - there was a ring at the door. My son opened and there was the man informing him that the bike had been returned and asking if he should leave his friend's address. Quite correctly my son replied that it was okay since the bike had been returned, which was also fine with me because in a way I feel that I have to take part of the blame. Gelegenheit macht Diebe - opportunity creates thieves. Honestly I detest those people who would deliberately leave money in their hotel rooms to test if the staff would take it away.
Yesterday we inspected the bike and what apparently happened was that somebody carried the bike away. Nobody could have ridden it since it was still locked. Somebody had tried to get rid of the bike lock but couldn't manage. Now the lock is smashed and I am not able to open it with my keys and removing the whole lock is quite hard. I cannot help laughing for now I have a wonderful bike lock with a bike around it 😄.

Sunday 25 June 2017

Urgent

While the original is elaborate and rough due to its inherent urgency to get out




the replica loses a lot of this quality.

Saturday 24 June 2017

Crooked

God writes straight with crooked lines.

At the end of WWII there was a group of young people in Aachen who had taken it upon themselves to protect the Cathedral.

As the wars grow more violent, fierce and total nowadays - I wonder.

Thursday 22 June 2017

When Our Smiles Were Genuine

Why shouldn't we just keep winning? It just depends on the definition:

Does it mean to defeat your enemies or never to succumb, to give in?

Even in his late eighties Peter Brook displayed a genuine smile at the re-opening of the Swan Theatre.

The readiness is all.








Wednesday 21 June 2017

Insight

to be human enough to be able to become a saint

but certainly not sacrosanct ;)

Coincidence

 So a friend shared this today.



Yesternight I watched a movie in which the hero leaves flowers for his lover in the most peculiar and life threatening situations.

Peter Camenzind also has a hard time picking a flower, an Alpenrose, from a high precipice for his secret love, Rösi Girtanner. The easily attainable edelweiss wouldn't suffice.

Flower Offering

It should always be some flowers hard to come by.



Maybe I should be reminded of the fact that flowers are not always purely ornamental...

Tuesday 20 June 2017

The Truth

So it was puzzling me a lot.
What the hell was so intriguing about this particular person?
Why do I rejoice in merely looking at him?
And only the other day I began to realize why, though it's been plain for some time:
He certainly was a rare one, an actor who wasn't able to lie.
So I learned from an old magazine issued at the College, that he allegedly attended but in fact had failed to pass the initial test; they actually called him to ask him about it. He sort of angrily - at least according to the magazine - replied that he applied but failed in Maths. The only thing keeping him from rectifying this false claim in the official biography issued by the film company was that he did not want to expose the press office. Not stopping here, he even told them another thing that wasn't true.
Add to this a great imagination and how he baffled his fellow actors: He would simply come, deliver his lines and be gone again.

"Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now." - Peter Brook

Monday 19 June 2017

The Ending

part one

two

three

The classical example for the unfathomably meaningful coincidence is - love. Neither does it let itself be forced by will nor expected or calculated. It happens suddenly, nobody can tell from where it falls down. Certainly all things that happen here are complete, necessarily complete according to great laws. But nobody can earnestly believe that this circumstance is owed to causality, that love can be explained by causes? For example as an effect of beauty, virtue or intellectual merits. These might be present a thousand times without invoking love and yet again love happens a thousand times without any of these qualities being there. And sometimes - and those cases are not rare - two people, who have known each other for years, have been living indifferently or in good friendship side by side, take a look at each other and are transformed: The spark ignites, the fervour blazes, a dark power has taken hold of them, that will rule their lives from now on...love is never a 'blind thereabout', but always a mystery. Of the nature and the workings of the secret connections, that reveal themselves here, in the best case we only perceive the roughest and most external, mostly however nothing. Why at a certain moment and between certain beings love arises - well, after all it is nothing but a word; when we call it cosmic determined and hint at the fact that in the narrow sense not only the private human space is involved, but also an overall circle of causes: innumerous beams from all the distances of space and time had to meet, connect, concentrate to ignite the light at this singular point. "When the fulness of time was come" - this simple phrase by St Paul essentially encloses everything that human wisdom may have to tell about it. Or one may think of the pious Greeks who worshipped Kairos as a god, the genius of the fateful moment, the dispenser of unhoped-for fulfillment or irretrievable possibilties, that one had to seize quickly and clairvoyantly. But the expression or name is not all this important: whether one talks about the divinely ordained time of fulfillment, of magic moments, constellations or the unfathomably meaningful 'coincidence' - everything is but an attempt to grasp in a parable that, which is at the same time distant and close, familiar and alien, unmistakable
certainty and eternal mystery.


Sunday 18 June 2017

Part Three

part one

part two

We must learn to meet coincidence with more humility again. The deep emotion, that lets us sense especially in this case the most significant, is neither superstition nor Schwärmerei. It is rather superstition and a superstition of a rather arrogant and foolish kind to believe that our human faculties are sufficient to understand the world substance. The capacity of our intellect is simply too limited, and 'powers' (it is not important what name we apply to them) there are innumerous. So - who wouldn't have experienced this? - for example that just at the moment when one has gained the inner maturity an outer event happens that helps us to unfold and break through; that just at the historic turning point the man is born, who is called to bring forth the decisive reversal; that in the first place in this or that hour a human being of a certain, singular dsiposition comes into existence: all of this (and many more) is neither coincidence nor can it be construed by the laws of causality.

Saturday 17 June 2017

Part Two

part one btw

That  about sums up what the great majority of occidental people think nowadays. Yet it has only been a few centuries since the belief in the all-encompassing validity and the flawless precision (a view that is challenged again by the latest development in physics) of this law of cause and effect has taken hold of the human brain. And if we were able to knit a complete web of causes and effects, would this actually explain everything that is going on in the world? Is the guideline of scientific causality the only facility to find one's way in the labyrinth of reality? The so-called primitive people, whose metaphorical wisdom often comes shockingly close to the mystery of life, regard all circumstances as acts of impenetrable powers. The deeply religious person even today experiences evolution as a creatio continua, the everlasting creation by God. Even the soberest rationalist sometimes shivers, when in the mechanics of coincidences suddenly there arises a meaning, when in the impersonal play of powers something flashes like a - destiny. Every effect has a cause: this flimsy formula explains nothing, because it says nothing about the 'cause' and the way it rules.

Friday 16 June 2017

My Attempt

So this is my attempt at translating Dr Karl Wollf's little essay on Zufall/coincidence from his book "ABC Buch des Herzens"/"ABC book of the Heart" and it is of course listed under "Z" almost at the end, only Zweifel/doubt will follow.

first part

Coincidence

Actually there is no coincidence: that's what the educated Europeans of the 20th century are strongly convinced of. The expression coincidence only shows that the chain of causes that led to a certain event cannot be observed and predicted yet. The coincidental is the utterly unexpected; flatly the thing that "mir zu-fällt" (literally falls to me, happens to me), like it has been cast down from some dark distance: there all of a sudden it is lying in my way, in my life. That doesn't mean that it isn't essentially conditioned, like any other event. An effect without a cause, this would be no coincidence anymore, this would be a miracle - and there is certainly no talk of this.

to be continued

Thursday 15 June 2017

Manifestation

I like how the actor plays with some stick when his character considers a decision that might turn out to be pivotal indeed.


Wednesday 14 June 2017

Resign

or reconsider



As I've been reminded of "Dr Fischer or the Bomb Party" by Graham Greene lately...



Two really fine actors by the way Alan Bates and James Mason!

Tuesday 13 June 2017

Zu-fall

How I appreciate these coincidences, when suddenly out of the blue everything falls into place.



Yesterday I was virtually walking the Roman streets in search for something or somebody connected to the movie and then looking virtually up this appeared in a window.

Actually I don't even know what it is, it is certainly no reflection.


































Monday 12 June 2017

Exorcism II

In a more private manner. Whenever my brother was in some rage or angry, my grandmother would turn to him, look him in the eye, sometimes embrace him and tell him: "This is not you, but some little demon inside of you."

Exorcism

"I struggled with some demons. They were middle-class and tame." - Leonard Cohen


There is something powerful in being able to call a thing by its (proper and right) name.

Sunday 11 June 2017

What Fears Are (Also) For

The girl came to me and explicitely told me to feel her still wildly beating heart. She had just jumped an eight-meter-high plank. And having also succeeded in climbing up to thirteen-meter-high walls, she remarked: "Today I have overcome a lot of fears!"

Saturday 10 June 2017

In Contrast

to all these merely advertising slogans and catch prases

















decisive decisions 


distinguished distinction


Thursday 8 June 2017

Open




"Maybe I listen more than you think."

agelessly open and interested

scornfully defying the concept of age






Wednesday 7 June 2017

Fire

As a child one of the most bewildering and frightening passages of the bible to me was John the Baptist talking about baptizing by fire.

Yet yesterday somebody was talking about rage being a better motivation/inspiration for artists than love, which David Hockney has identified as its primary source.

To me rage has long subsided, while love will still burn on.


Painting

In order for it to be any good, there has to be the moment when all preconception has to let go and it becomes pure action.

Monday 5 June 2017

"No one

listens when someone's hurt"

"Habt einander lieb!/Hold one other dear!"


Friday 2 June 2017

As Things

were starting to look dire, he performed some somersaults to gain a new perspective.





Solemnity was yesterday - "with a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no"

Why, one could even do something head on to prevent getting hit over the head.


Thursday 1 June 2017

Touché!

Hit it...


Some Difference

though I'm not sure whether it's universal.

During my first year at basic school the girls and the boys of my grade each formed their own respective gang. We would fiercely battle each other and even take prisoners. It was generally threatened to put these poor prisoners into the rubbish bin. Yet whereas the boys only ever talked about it, the girls actually performed it, though only once ;).