Wednesday, February 22, 2006

the undercity of trees

bummer. haven't been able to write much due to mucho work. mucho, macho. hah hah. okay.

anyway: nice thing driving through night-time park. all trees and silence. some light, not much. enough. moon and clouds and again, silence but also shuffle of an underground, neverknown fallen leaves love dance. secret rituals we never know of.

music to the setting: Easy Muffin by Amon Tobin. its sounds, its heavy melodies hanging like mists between the frozen, sleeping trees. a perpetual fog of wind-blazen modern day nocturnes, black and crawling. embracing. everywhere; everywhen. silent observer on a bike: nonexisting, fading in the world of night, time and park. the world of all trees and silence.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

happiness # 2

High Hopes. Pink Floyd. the very beginning of the song.

silence. a possibly imaginary wind blowing. and then the bells. from a faraway, lonely and desolate clock tower somewhere.

the piano sets in. intertwining melodically with the clock tower, as if belonging to one big, all-encompassing whole.

a harmony in rhythm and contrarhythm.

Friday, February 10, 2006

happiness # 1

last summer, i discovered a field of grass enclosed at three sides by corn fields and at one side by a nice little sandy road. i sat down with my back to one of the trees on this field, face directed at the sun. luckily brought The Grapes of Wrath with me and sat reading, barefooted, feet in the grass. sound of crickets everywhere.

an inquisitive cricket jumped on one of my bare feet. it sat there, comfortably, together with me. and then it started rubbing its feet. a private composition, the solo player amid the orchestra of hundreds of other crickets, i in the middle of this natural orchestra, eyes bathing in the sun. enjoying the subtle vibrations of the soloist on my foot. things have the potential to make sense, and sometimes they indeed do.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

stay car-tuned

right, that does it. freedom of speech is one thing, respect for the things we believe in is another. sure, i am not a muslim and thus it is easy for me not to condemn cartoons depicting mohammed (is the writing of this word another form of depicting?), but still...

i think the basis for any belief or religion should be that it enrichens our lifes. of course we can't all believe the same thing, but that's just how the cookie crumbles. a sense of idealism is great as far as religion is conerned - without hopes and dreams the world would crumble as fast as previously mentioned cookie would.

of course people are offended when you do exactly the opposite of what they think is valuable. that's only natural and i understand that it is no fun being made fun of. or at least, having the things you believe in, the things you value being made fun of. and it is another instance of freedom of speech that you can say you do not like such a thing and try to explain that making cartoons of that kind actually hurts people in the essence of their personal worlds.

but hurting people because the things you think are right are offended in this way, is so so so wrong. though i can feel the most warm-hearted sense of respect for those people who try to state their problems the way i mentioned in the previous paragraph, i can feel nothing but pure disgust (a strong word, i know that) towards people who do it the way it is done right now. i can have no respect at all for those who value their individual belief system over the lifes of other human beings. after all, a human life is the most precious of all, whether that life adheres to hinduism, the islam, buddhism, christianity, jewish faith, the scientology church, agnosticism, atheism or whatever. i think that hurting other people to "defend" your faith is a centrifugal motion in relation to the essence of that faith. there is no religion that preaches to hurt other people, there are only people who make their own versions of religion in order to use it as an excuse to do the things according to one's own principles, not according to that of the religious system. and this is a disease which not only affects the islam. (take one good look at the bible belt and ask yourself how such a thing is possible, how such dogmatism can rise out of the beautiful fundaments as laid out in the Bible. and how, for god's sake indeed, can you justify being a christian and at the same time sentencing people to death penalty?)

and then another thing (sorry for those who are already very bored by now, but this thing has got me going). have we so little faith in our belief systems that we feel the urge to protect them at any cost? do we esteem our own belief so low that we think it can be fundamentally disrupted by such a thing as a cartoon? and do we esteem our own powers so highly that we can assume that arrogance that leads us to start acting ourselves in the name of a Lord of any kind? where is the faith in a Final Judgment (a christian thing, i know, i know, but i'm writing on impulse here - ed.), in a Lord who can take action by His/Her/It own hands?

but anyway. believe what you want to believe in (for all clarity: im a steak of agnosticism myself, with a light dressing of buddhism), but make sure your belief does what it is supposed to do: make this world more bearable, more tolerable. do not, in any way, use your belief to add to the sometimes almost unbearable heaviness of being. and if problems arise, try to explain things in words. believe in the power of your belief to survive. but no more killing, no more hurting. please.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

the cold, the silence

Winter

Winter. You can see the trees
through the forest again, and this light
is no light but insight:
there is nothing new
without the sun.

And still, even the night is not
hopeless, as long as there is snow
darkness never fully comes, no,
there is the clarity of a certain belief
that it will never become dark entirely.
As long as there is snow, there is hope.


(a poem by Herman de Coninck, my translation. i like its solemn simplicity and the way it invokes so many images through the silence between the words. and i love the cold that is breathing in the poem.)

flux

nice word, by the way. aeon. aeons. i like that. like the mtv-cartoon with the beautiful name that is soon to become a movie or whatever. but great title. aeons. aeon. aeons. aeon. how very very nice.

love and death and being very tired, actually

why do we fear death anyway? is it just because we are too attached to life, or is it because there is some primal instinct inside of us warning us for the end of the final act? if it were instinct, then sure death must be quite terrible. our instinct often warns us when trouble is ahead, making changes in our body in order to survive, and trouble never is fun. so death is no fun either? but as it is such a natural part of our lives, why then try to avoid it? nature is so good at being logic, at eliminating redundancy, then why not remove our fear of dying? but then again, if the fear were removed, then there's a good chance we would not try to survive any longer and it might mean the end of all things living and/or breathing. i guess. or are we quite simply too attached to life? if so, then death can still be nice or not-nice. but it would mean that life is nice. or can be nice. or should be nice.

perhaps i'm just being human again and trying to make sense of everything. it is not because nature is always logical, that she should be so right now. eh Hume?

and what about love? if there is a chance that the only reason why we are here, is to continue the strange phenomenon called life, then why make things so complicated? say it is just species-survival. male A likes female B and whoopee there they go trying to insert more life into this world. great fun, i admit, but it's never this simple. which is strange, looking at life's logical sense of upholding its own laws of simplicity again. (or perhaps homie Hume again shouts "of course it can be like this - there's no reason why it should be otherwise!") if love is only biochemistry, a pattern of smells leading us to the one partner with whom we can create The Greatest Children of All Aeons, then we surely are behaving very strangely as human beings, taking our daily behaviour into account.

maybe humans are a deviation of nature. then again, this is probably not possible. all is nature, right? or not right. wha.

and maybe, very definitely maybe, instincts function only "inside" of life. life tries to uphold itself and death tries to do so too. maybe in the realm of a death-world we have some strange instincts to keep on being dead. hah. that would be fun.

so anyway. to conclude this lesson: have loads of sex. thinking is for idiots. death rules.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

biggus dickus

what is all this fuss about cartoons and mohammed anyway? it's The Life of Brian all over again. "He said Jehova!!!"

pump my jam

just saw the video clip of Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam". those were the days.

despite its undeniably cheesy flavour, early 90s "dance" music always makes me happy. more!

(okay, and now the video clip of The Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men". a must-see during the exam period. or any period.)

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

alex kidd in miracle world

from The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster:

"No one is less cynical than a magician. He knows, and everyone else knows, that everything he does is a sham. The trick is not really to deceive them, but to delight them into wanting to be deceived: so that for the space of a few minutes the grip of cause-and-effect is loosened, the laws of nature countermanded. As Pascal put it in the Pensées: 'It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles.' " (p. 120)


i really do like that. i think it is quite important to sometimes let go of reality, realism, rationality, everything definite and/or definable. of course, it's no use only living in a dream world - that would mean becoming as rigid as believing only in the world before our eyes. but even if all else fails, we can still hold on to a certain belief (i mean this in the broadest sense of the word, not in a religious one) that things happen because of... magic. wonders are wonders only if we let them be as such.

i don't believe in determinism. i don't believe in lady Fortune hiding behind every event in our lives. i don't even believe in fate. but i do believe in the power we have over our lives by sometimes deliberately choosing the 'existence' of one of these, or all of them. if all of this sounds rather blurry, then maybe it is. let me put it in other words. i don't believe that certain things in my life happened because they 'had' to happen. but i do like to 'do the magician' on myself and adhere to a certain willing suspension of disbelief, just because it makes the world more beautiful. maybe my message is then just this. let's not have reasonable grounds not to believe in miracles, and let's not search for those grounds. i like miracles, even though they are not true. deliberate blindness to their nonexistence is good enough.