Know they self

Solitude and loneliness in the masses, Dr Scarpone is right of course in his comment on yesterday's post. Luigi Pirandello said in his novel Uno, nessuno, centomila... that you are either one, nobody or a hundred thousand since we reflect in our behavior the expectations of others, we fulfill the roles we are assigned. I was married twice, and not making the same mistake twice, my two husbands were very different. Their view of me was totally opposite. The gift of being on my own now is that I have the chance to figure out who I am, how I view myself and hold my own. It is here that the other author comes in: Fernando Pessoa. He in his whole oeuvre states that we are nobody and thus can choose to be whom or what we want... And that works for me except when a dark blue spleen immobilizes all of me, then I need a friend...

Last stand

A dear friend wrote me about her new place. She describes it as a yellow shanty in the heart of an old town, sitting on a a grand size lot. She says: When J. is not here it is pretty lonely - but I was lonely in Ole Chl. also. It is the last strong stand we must make I believe- this stand against being/feeling alone. We both cherish our time and solitude and we both know that it turns occasionally into loneliness. We both are rebels, so both rather take that strong stand because compromising isn't our forte and we'll meet under one or other sky, in one or other desert, near one or other ocean...

Guests

My place has a mysterious way of filling up with people; probably it has something to do with the view. This time it was a group of youngsters and their hosts coming from different countries in Europe: 2 Poles, 1 German speaking Italian, I Austrian, 1 Romanian. Theirs hosts were as varied as they: One is very ecological and has a water recuperation system and solar on her roof and refuses to have a car. The guy had brought his husband... And indeed that was the theme: diversity. The European Union paid for the workshops and role plays.

At the table I asked what they had taken away from their experience up to now. One person said: I have become more tolerant. I understand and know now that what to me is normal may not be so in another country or for another person. These youngsters took some pictures which I offer here to you.

The Shadow Lines

The story is told by a boy growing up in the period after the partition of Bengal between Pakistan and India. In a mixture of fact and fictions he shows through the events in one family how The Shadow Lines, borders drawn arbitrarily on maps and thus on peoples’ lives. The boy thrives on the stories about England and faraway places. By the same author I have admired ‘The Hungry Tide’ and he did captivate me again with his thoughts about places and memory. A few teasers:
I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination…
He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as geed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky to a place where there was no borer between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.
But he knew that the clarity of that image in his mind was merely the seductive clarity of ignorance; an illusion of knowledge created by a deceptive weight of remembered detail.
Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and to come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not coming or going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of the verbs of movement.
Everyone lives in a story, he says, my grandmother, my father, his father, Lenin, Einstein, and lots of other names I hadn’t heard of; they all lived in stories, because stories are all there are to live in, it w s just a question of which one you choose.
I tried to think of the future as it must have appeared to him: of helpless dependence couples with despairing little acts of rebellion.
- it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.
Amitav Ghosh is a great writer, run to the library!!!

The insurection of the mannequins

Street art, the ephemeral results of creativity meant to distract, amuse and maybe mislead passers by. The mannequins changed everyday, they looked and gaped at passers by, laughed at them.


Sometimes a story was told.One had to come back and look for it. I don't know whether the dancer finally fell off the roof.

The fire looked pretty real. After two days the police stationed a car there to stop people from calling the firebrigade. the manequins arrived late, after two days o smoke coming oout of the building

10 years

10 years is all we need to be totally energy independent in the US, thanks to renewable energy sources. Listen here to what Al Gore has to say about our choices as to what kind of futures we want. Let's take up Al Gore's challenge also in Europe... Economy, climate change and security all can be solved without going back to teh stone age. "The stone age didn't end because of lack of stones". Move on.

Words

Some phrases just graft themselves in my mind until they have a life and meaning of their own.
My current guiding stars are:
Degrees of separation: which will tell you what you have in common with others
Radical naivety: where you hold on to dreams and visions, with only realism things won't work
Creative non-violence: resistance and change by non-violent means

Mataharis

Spooky choose the Spanish film by Iciar Bollain who was also responsible for the movie Te doy mis ojos, (Take my eyes). It is a wonderful story of three women, Inès, Eva and Carmen, private detectives in Madrid. By spying on the lives of others they have learned to accept and not to judge the secrets of others. Through the problems posed by their clients they find the courage to work out their own situations. It is a moving, quit film with very talented actors. Problems of conscience and love are shown almost as a miniature, here there is no major drama, just the daily drama's of life: can one love and survive betrayal, can one go against one conscious at high personal cost, can one accept the end of love- when no more words are spoken, when one doesn't matter any more- and move on and be stronger in quiet way... Yes! without it being syrupy.

Post-apocalyptic dystopia

Disillusioned, due to the slow pace at which we are trying to do something against the Co emissions, climate change and the post-apocalyptic consequences of our present behavior in about 20 tot 50 years, I picked up Ben Elston's Blind faith set in a distopic, disease ridden London after the city shrunk, in a time called ATF: after the flood. (In that era they wouldn't know how to read a long sentence like that because books, real books are forbidden.) The title of the book refers to the kind of bleak urban society that evolved: nudity and sex, entertainment, vast social electronic networks, faith and no privacy, even an obligation to you-tube your life and to blog every action, pervasive chat screens and camera's in one's home and cctv everywhere. The state, the inquisition and the policy spy, secrets are forbidden. It is a fast, funny, read that makes one think because the faith based society that Ben Elton describes resembles the fundamentalist evangelicals in the US, the black stockings congregations in Holland and other mixes of Christianity, new age and absolute power. It is a chilling vision of one of our possible, yet undesirable futures. Being different, just small defiances are noticed, thinking, looking for understanding and reason is subversive and ignorance is wisdom... The big floods are not caused by melting icecaps but were send by the wrath of Love (god) to punish humanity for their arrogance... Almost too close to home is the longing for celebrity, the public lives people seem to think normal. I believe as one of the characters I can blog and be 'unknown' since nobody reads all the stuff that is on the net anyway. Thumbs up for this picture of a dystopic now.

Celebrations

Even among the tragedies of life people have their birthdays. My grandmother always told me: 'Mann muss die Festen feiern wenn sie fallen'. One has to celebrate when celebration day has come...
A bunch of us found ourself in this charming Alzation Restaurant with the appropriate birthday songs for the two friends who now are a young 60. Presents were unpacked, the food was typical cuisine, involving sauerkraut and three types of fish in my case, good wine and vivid conversation.
I just learned this morning that this kind of companionship is good for one's brain. The interaction in a group is about giving and taking, waiting for your turn, being overenthusiastic, giving all their part of the conversation, stimulating thought also being slightly annoyed at whom told the humpapa orchestra there were two birthday girls, being coy with all the attention and all the goodwill one can stand...

Marcel van Maele

Marcel van Maele is one of the great poets writing in Dutch. He ended up in hospital, and seems very frail. To honor him I offer here my English translation of one of his poems. (Paris will go on tomorrow...)

Sharp the limits of inside and out,

life and death meet

barely and while lusts leave life

eyeing only the tempting vista’s.

So simple to fool life

when the soul sails out, in the white

of this wide view a cool glance.

The past is wrapped up, the future locked,

thought nailed down, desire

lamed, the body declared inhabitable

taken out of circulation.

Thus the night devours evening

it is done

forever sounds the midnight gong.

 

Parisian sights

The Eifel tower, I had to show it to you all.


This is Les Tuilleries, so called for the glass'tiles' that form the roof. Yves Saint Laurent had that day his show there; lots of pretty people.



The station of the Quai D'Orsay is now a good museum. It is amazing how well kept the grandeur of yesteryears is in this town... at least in the center.
And don't look down too much, look up for pretty roofs and cupolas.



The Notre Dame Cathédral, with its buttresses seen from the back, is situated on a small island in the Seine.

Paris

Of course the Place de l'Etoile is one of the emblems of Paris and the beginning of the Champs d'Elysée. The Seine is its fluid soul.


Paris is all you want it to be: it is grand, spectacular, monumental traffic jams and rain... We are housed almost at the periférique, so getting into town takes a long ride on the metro, not just a quick stroll away. This stay included a lunch at the Assemblée Nationale... because of the rain we all took refuge in the splendor of the Salle de Fête. In the Parisian grandness the human touch gets lost a bit. The rain coats it all in a gentler light. On the Pont Mirabeau I had to misappropriate the poet Verlaine: Il pleut dans la Seine comme il pleut dans mon coeur. It rains in the Seine like it rains in my heart, that is what Paris does when there is a lack of romance.