The Space

between us

"Love's the only engine of survival."

For the Love of Colour and Life

Walking through Maastricht I realized that this is in its heart is a city made of stone - the sandstone, limestone, cobblestone. Yet any small space that it admits is planted with flowers. So in this grey of stone the lust for life, colour, abundace is implemented - bourgondisch.

Re-action

"I wanna bite the hand that feeds me, I wanna bite that hand so badly." - especially if it is the hand that manipulates.

Until One's Ribs Start Hurting

to the divine laughter, that is always one of love and joy


disarming



laughter of recognition

Bear With Me

Listening to Abraham's  haggling with his Lord again today and still laughing about his courage, suddenly it made me wonder if righteousness should not be quite unselfish. Do the right thing, but do it just to bear the burden for the one who is too weak.

There's the Rub

If you truly embrace somebody or something, some part will hopefully always rub off on you.

Just like on my magical tour to London some decades ago, when in Leicester Square an apparently homeless person asked me whre I'm from - just like some other people on the Tube - and when I told him he embraced me.

Peekaboo III

And then finally there was the art critic, who complained about the ugliness of a newly expanded museum comparing it to a factory or a hospital. I told him to give it a chance and to wait with his final verdict until he had been inside (for there is always an outside and an inside view. And the great thing looking inside out is that one does not actually see the building). And lo and behold, he liked the inside really very much and the breathtaking view from the outside terrace ;)!

Peekaboo II

Changing the outlook to change the perception.


So the nurse had this question, looking at the one hand at the neglected but physically healthy children, who had been sent to hospital to be coddled up again, and at the other hand at the mother desperately singing to her chronically ill son:"Why do the good parents get the sickly children and the bad ones the healthy?"

And I replied:"If it had been the other way around, the children would have been dead by now."

Seeing my point it kind of consoled her.

Peekaboo I

Just one little twist in perspective and things look quite different.


All these poor rich people who are so desperately in need of money, and much more than their fair share, because they are so unimaginative, that they even have to pay somebody to give them an idea of beauty.

to be continued

Gargantuan

Gargantuan indeed.

And yet it was in Scotland where I first and only time encountered somebody who had to write a hundred times "I should not swear" because he had said "shit" in class. We sympathized and helped him write it, for how often had we said the same word and weren't punished?! Some good advice: The next time you feel the urge to swear say "Driss". It's Rhenish and means the same but not many people outside the Rhineland will know it!

Cathartic

If only Aristotle was/is right about catharsis! Sitting down, listening and understanding should be so much more than a pastime, theatre an essential necessity.


imaginative playfulness

diesseitig oder jenseitig / This-worldly or Otherworldly

Sometimes I get this strange sensation of things or people already living in a different system or reality, somewhere beyond the usual. This might be due to the sheer beauty of the exposure, the virtuosity of  artists like Giambattista Tiepolo or Shakespeare especially in his Romances like Cymbeline. Or here, where Barnett Newman is talking about his art.



The feeling is quite real, yet there are glimpses of a beyond, somebody who does not belong to this order any more.

The Hardest Thing

On Valentine's Day some years go Belgian musician Bent Van Looy presented a live radioshow, where people could call in. So this woman got on the line and I couldn't believe my ears as she was quite distinctedly making a pass at him. He reading her signals clearly told her 'No' in a very charming, sensitive and loving manner.





some quality

Echo Sounder

There is an 'echo chamber' that does not limit me, but instead broadens my mind and perception by its repercussions.

There is sense and there is (a) reason.


revelations

Conditio Humana

as mirrored by the divine - or vice versa.


Even though the occasion was solemn, Bach resorted to a parody of the divine grief. Yet though the parody is pretty sublime, it can not match the sublimity of the original.

Good Riddance -

when a friend on facebook, whom I had felt for some time to be slightly xenophobic, banned me. For I rather shy away from such a radical step. The rather curious reason was that I - if pressed to choose between the two - confessed to preferring the R(oyal) A(ir) F(orce) to the R(ote) A(rmee) F(raktion)/ Red Army Faction. Though I mentioned this as a flippant aside to his adulations concerning the Red Army Factions, he took it quite seriously. - Good riddance!

The Crisis of the Small Mind(ed)

Wondering if there need be a role model for everything one likes to achieve and if this role model has to mirror this person exactly.


So what, be the first!

Physique

Watching people actually performing stunts - even if they are not live but taped - is so much more thrilling, exciting, tangible than anything CGI can ever create. It resonates, it grips.

Puzzles

Sometimes I wonder and sometimes I marvel.

Yesterday I wondered if a Kazakh woman I happen to know was Muslim and doesn't eat pork. Today I met her at a supermarket where she told us that some people were visting her and therefore she had to buy some meat. Since those people were rather strict in their religious views she couldn't serve them pork, which she professed eating herself. Consequently she would not only have to get rid of the pork but also to clean her fridge meticulously of every single trace of it. And so I marvel.

Contagious

Being the perfect teacher his love for his subject was contagious and communicable.  We all caught it.

It's Immaterial PS

I remember that the Dutch radio presenter in the 1980s called the song "een beetje maf maar wel goed" - "a little bit barmy but still good"!

It's Immaterial

I love the name of the band, though I also fear that most people are prone to trying to preserve immaterial things like feelings or experiences, especially by filming them with their smartphones, yet it will cost them dearly, namely just exactly those immaterial things.




There is a tirelessness that is the exact oppposite of restlessness.

a wonderful afterthought by Peter de Graef

The Miserable Refined

I was just reminded of this quote the other day: "Great lords have their pleasures, but the people have fun." - Montesquieu; and only today followed the illustration.


Now this is certainly pleasure.




But this is fun - body and soul! Or in the words of Jan Hautekiet: "Hell yeah!"



I love the introduction. Mercy!

Of Virtue and of Sin

"And" is the important word. It's all interwoven, and it takes a master to do so.

Luxury

All this luxury one has grown used to like taking a shower. It's definitely wonderful to simply taste the sensation of what a truly wonderful thing this is again and again.

Lalala Save Me

While Jean Cocteau would save the fire if his house was on fire, a Belgian biologist, whose name escapes me, when asked in a radio show which species he would save if he could save but one, replied "The ants."

Being Impossible

Given their former abusive relationship even to consider forgiveness would be hard, but the embrace was overwhelmingly astonishing.

The Catholic Hero

Far from being the pinnacle of perfection, he needs to be forced to take action, which he eventually will perform quite reluctantly.

He is after all like Flambeau the benevolent sinner.

Levinas is right.

Wish You Were Here

As a child I was intrigued by the concept of masks. How one is never sure of what is going on behind them, of the possibility of unchartered depth beneath the superficial. And indeed a lot could be going on there.


Or else somebody is riding on her bike while texting something.

No more presence, no more mystery, something for algorithms to decipher.

A Universal Code

"Mama ist unterwegs/ Mama is on her way!" was the code given out on Sunday. In the hour of need the prospect of consolation.

If only I had had some duct tape!













OKAY GO!

With Our Eyes Wide Open

plank

Sometimes

truth appears to be quite naive.

Like listening to Ben Ferencz this morning and me remembering that even at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Fine Arts) in Münster while I was studying there, some of my fellow students called out for war. Their point was that people nowadays cherish values far too less and a war because of its scarcity will teach them to appreciate the luxuries and beauty of life once again. I was not alien to this thought that people would see something good in a war, another point often heard that it would provide a chance to build up a country from scratch, yet I was irritated to be confronted with this sentiment there. So I yelled at them:"People die in wars, really and actually!" My response was so strong because I was thinking of all the atrocities committed in wars. War is when everything is turned upside down, when there is no more decency and even no more common ground. This is well reflected in the history of my home, a small village on the German-Dutch border. In November 1591, when war was raging between Spain and the newly established Netherlands, this village was pillaged by Spanish soldiers. According to the chronicles those people being on the payroll of a Catholic nation slaughtered more than one thousand five hundred Catholic people in a Catholic church, where they had fled because they thought they were save there. This is war to you and sadly it happened and happens time and time again. P. S.: Later the soldiers even had the nerve to demand a ransom for the bodies of the slaughtered, else they would them into the local river, the Rur/Roer.