“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into something else, before it's some kind of murder?”  (Siken) Everything dissolves under the searching eye: passions, long attachments, ardors are the characteristic of simple minds, faithful to others and to themselves. A touch of lucidity in the "heart" makes it the seat of feigned feelings and turns the lover into Adolphe and the discontent into René. Loving, we do not examine love; acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my "neighbor" ' it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer "myself" if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life. A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die. “As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of thinking about balloons, so each citizen expressed, in the attitude he chose, a complex of attitudes.” ( Barthelme, The New Yorker) “Everything is full, existence everywhere, dense and heavy and sweet. But, beyond all this sweetness, inaccessible, quite close, so far away alas, young, merciless, and serene, there is this… this rigour.” (satre, nausea) Love and life, as in a process of: trying to give what I have lived to somebody else courageous like a sleepwalker who simply goes.  I am so afraid that I can only accept that I got lost if I imagined that someone is holding my hand. [this must be why I want romantic love so badly. Need someone to hold my hand so it feels less like a scary act to navigate the world, when in reality I could do it on my own if I only had the pure courage] – give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me and I don’t know how to speak – reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier  courage isn’t being alive, knowing that you’re alive is courage (lispector) What I lived in the present was already getting ready so I could later understand myself. Devotion to every detail of the not! “As if the room weren’t deep enough to hold me and I had to leave pieces of myself in the hallway, in the worst rejection to which I'd ever fallen victim: I didn’t fit.” The great neutral punishment of general life is that it can suddenly undermine a single life. One dies without knowing where to, and that is the greatest courage of a body Danger of meditation → beginning to think → thinking leads to an objective ... I want a present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it.  The tiny divine part of me is greater than my human guilt. “It is always a great mistake to try to prove anything, for then it is only what we do not know that counts, not what we know. If we know a part of the truth, but not the whole truth, people who know nothing at all are able to prove that we are wrong and they are right—in whatever they choose to call right.” Laura Riding Jackson. “Progress of Stories.” “A last lesson in Geography” I am not afraid that you don’t understand, but that I understand myself badly. If I don’t understand myself, I will die from the same thing I live from.  Learn from me, who had to be wholly exposed and lose all of my suitcases with their engraved initials.  Love is something I then knew with a word – but there is something that must be said, it must be said... knowledge is born and dies as our feelings change and progress Could it be that we were not originally human? And that out of practical necessity, we became human?  PERMANENT PRESENT We only have of God whatever fits inside of us. The more we need the more we receive Jim Morrison: The Doors are erotic politicians Q: Do you succeed always? A: Yes, I succeed thirty percent of the time. O: Then you don't succeed always. A: Yes I do. To succeed 30% of the time is always. Already it is a great thing to see something clearly, because we do not see anything clearly “I haven’t learned to mobilize rage – I perform militant actions, without militant feelings.” —- reminiscent of Leonard Cohen “sometimes I fear my sorrow does violence to the facts” Can one overwhelm experience by understanding? Or only replace it with another experience? -- over-intellectualizing Sontag: I’m not “saying” something. I’m allowing “something” to have a voice, an independent existence (an existence independent of me).  I write and talk in order to find out what I think. But that does not mean that “I” “really” “think” that. It is only my thought-when-writing (or when-talking). If I had written another day, or talked in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently. Just because I have opinions does not mean I am right. Trick: ask what this would mean if I were doing it. In other words: would I have to, most likely, have a mean or hostile feeling towards someone to do or say that? Long silences. Words weigh more, become palpable. I feel my physical presence in a given space when I talk less.  Frequently don’t like things to be decided. It closes them off. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” “To imagine a language means to imagine a way of life.”  Become famous in order to have access to people, not to be alone. I’ve always been “hiding behind my eyes”  [addition: with friends, this is how I feel]: erecting a structure of understanding, to transcend sorrow, anxiety, false hope, to plot strategy, to experience mastery, to counteract emotional defeat, sense of impotence. To draw closer to my friends, to experience the ways in which they are intelligent, sensitive, loving, and can therefore nourish me. Recycling one’s own life with books... In “life” I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In my work, I do not want to be reduced to my life. All my life I have been looking for someone intelligent to talk to! When one asks oneself a question for a long time without ever getting a satisfactory answer, there is usually something wrong with the question (rather than the answer).  What is most American about me is my faith in the possibility of radical change. Dostoyevsky: “There is only one thing I dread; to not be worthy of my sufferings.”  Paul Thek: not to try to be better than other people. Try to be better than myself. Spiritual exercises: lowering the ideas into the body. Making it part of one’s instincts.  “To feel the pressures of consciousness, to be informed, to understand anything, one must be alone. Being with people, being alone – like breathing in and breathing out, systole and diastole. As long as I’m so afraid of being alone, I’ll never be real. I’m in hiding from myself.” To define is to annihilate? Lispector: Life is not a joke because in the middle of the day you die. Scarlat and Rimer (as decided at Coupa spring of 2023): Life is a joke because in the middle of the day you die. Don’t die from the same thing you lived from. (Cioran would like this Lispector quote) If each of us gave free reign to our solitude, God would have to remake the entire world. Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself  One runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home Tyndall: used his energy to pioneer new ways to witness and to understand (the two always went together) the wonder of nature: its continuity.  We must release ourselves from the desire to comply with the world as is. We must propose new ways of thinking about our potential as human beings. We must have freedom TO, not just freedom FROM. In Bosch’s hell there is no elsewhere or otherwise. Globalization is as such – the given is a prison. Faced with such reductionism, human intelligence is reduced to greed. We must build a world capable of withholding many worlds, possibilities (John Berger) “Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively/ by constantly greater things” (Rilke, I think?)** [[collectives, communal learning and empathy]] [[freedom to, not just freedom from]] [[inner and outer being]] [[knowing all kinds of people, my travels]] [[pina bausch]] [[redesigning, reimagining self]] [[The more we need the more we receive]]