Below

aesthetics + soundtrack + concept = wishlist

em busca do sentido

O sofrimento de alguma forma deixa de ser sofrimento no momento em que encontra um significado, tal como o significado do sacrifício.
(...)
A preocupação principal do homem não é obter prazer ou evitar a dor, mas sim ver um significado na sua vida. É por isso que o homem está mesmo pronto a sofrer, sob a condição garantida, de que o seu sofrimento tem significado.


Em Busca do Sentido, Viktor Frankl

finding a place where the beam of light can be caught

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Blue Octavo Notebooks, Franz Kafka

to begin the day

You go downstairs and prepare a pot of coffee, the strongest, blackest coffee you have made in years, figuring that if you flood yourself with titanic doses of caffeine, you will be lifted into something that resembles wakefulness, a partial wakefulness, which will allow you to sleepwalk through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon. You drink the first cup slowly. It is exceedingly hot and must be swallowed in small sips, but then the coffee begins to cool down, and you drink the second cup more rapidly than the first, the third more rapidly than the second, and swallow by swallow the liquid splashes into your empty stomach like acid. You can feel the caffeine accelerating your heart rate, agitating your nerves, and beginning to light you up. You are awake now, fully awake and yet still weary, drained but ever more alert, and in your head there is a buzzing that wasn't there before, a low-pitched mechanical sound, a humming, a whining, as if from a distant, out-of-tune radio, and the more you drink, the more you feel your body changing, the less you feel that you are made of flesh and blood. You are turning into something metallic now, a rusty contraption that simulates human life, a thing put together with wires and fuses, vast circuits of wires controlled by random electrical impulses, and now that you have finished the third cup of coffee, you pour yourself another - which turns out to be the last one, the lethal one. The attack begins simultaneously from the inside and the outside, a sudden feeling of pressure from the air around you, as if an invisible force were trying to push you through the chair and knock you to the ground, but at the same time an unearthly lightness in your head, a vertiginous jangle thrumming against the walls of your skull, and all the while the outside continues to press in on you, even as the inside grows empty, ever more dark and empty, as if you are about to pass out. Then your pulse quickens, you can feel your heart trying to burst through your chest, and a moment after that there is no more air in your lungs, you can no longer breathe. That is when the panic overwhelms you, when your body shuts down and you fall to the floor. Lying on your back, you feel the blood stop flowing in your veins, and little by little your limbs turn to cement. That is when you start to howl. You are made of stone now, and as you lie there on the dining room floor, rigid, your mouth open, unable to move or think, you howl in terror as you wait for your body to drown in the deep black waters of death.


Winter Journal, Paul Auster

everything is beautiful except when we forget our own human dignity

The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings - the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky - thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.

The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904, Anton Chekhov

one can choose simply to live in the mystery

All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether. I suppose that's why Christianity invented the notion of intentional sin. When I was younger, my so-called conscience forbade me to entertain certain images -- like fratricide, for instance, or incest. I'd tell myself these were hideous ideas and push them out of my mind. But when I reached the age of sixty, I finally understood the perfect innocence of the imagination. It took that long for me to admit that whatever entered my head was my business and mine alone. The concepts of sin or evil simply didn't apply; I was free to let my imagination go wherever it chose, even if it produced bloody images and hopelessly decadent ideas. When I realized that, I suddenly accepted everything. "Fine," I used to say to myself. "So I sleep with my mother. So what?" Even now, whenever I say that, the notions of sin and incest vanish beneath the great wave of my indifference.



Luis Buñuel (via)

the real pettiness of so many of our great minds

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness. This is what makes the real pettiness of so many of our great minds, and accounts for the lack of personal dignity among us – civilized parrots that we are – as compared with the Arab of the desert; or explains the growing frivolity of our masses, more and more educated, no doubt, but also more and more superficial in all their conceptions of happiness.

from Amiel's Journal by Henri-Frédéric Amiel

a surplus of reason would be lethal for the existence

Where can so much void and inexplicability lead? We cling to our living days because the desire to die is too logical, therefore inefficient. If life had at least one argument for itself – one tenable, indestructible argument – it would be torn apart; instincts and prejudices fade when in contact with Rigor. Every living creature feeds on the unexplainable; a surplus of reason would be lethal for the existence – an endeavor to reach the Absurd … Give a precise meaning to life and it will instantaneously lose its savor. The lack of clarity of its goals makes it superior to death; a grain of precision would lower it to the triviality of a tomb. For a positive science dealing with the meaning of life would depopulate the Earth in one single day and no fool would ever succeed in resurrecting the fertile improbability on its surface.

from A Short History of Decay by E. M. Cioran

There is no authentic lyricism without a grain of interior madness.

There are experiences and obsessions one cannot live with. Salvation lies in confessing them. The terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. This is why lyricism represents a dispersion of subjectivity; it is a certain quantity of an individual's spiritual effervescence which cannot be contained and needs constant expression. To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself. The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concentrated.

(...)

To be lyrical from suffering means to achieve that inner purification in which wounds cease to be mere outer manifestations without deep complications and begin to participate in the essence of your being. The lyricism of suffering is a song of the blood, the flesh, and the nerves. True suffering begins in illness. Almost all illnesses have lyrical virtues. Only those who vegetate in a scandalous insensitivity remain impersonal when ill, and thus miss that deepening of the personality brought about by illness. One does not become lyrical except after a total organic affliction.

from On the Heights of Despair by E. M Cioran

pai natal

olha que bonito que este set ficava ali na minha prateleira :)

ainda 17F

quero este álbum, já!

edit: I'm blushing with the idea of Frederic Merk visiting this blog :$
in case you see this again, I really love your music. have a nice day.

To suffer together, what disunion!

They felt that everything was fleeting, that everything wore out, that everything that was not dead would die, and that even the illusory ties holding them together would not endure. Their sadness did not bring them together. On the contrary, they were separated by all the force of their two sorrows. To suffer together, alas, what disunion!

from The Inferno by Henri Barbusse

Uncommon Deities

amor a este álbum.
estou particularmente vidrada na The God Of Small Caresses, onde David Sylvian lê o seguinte poema

He never touches us, but he loves us, and he wants us to love one another, gently and intently. He has golden locks and smells of newly bathed childhood. While we sleep, he speaks to us from somewhere inside our sleep, every word like a smile. He expresses himself through faint puffs of breath, on the borders of the audible. When he smiles we realize that we are finite and mortal. His company is a band of small angels, plump and drowsy, at dusk resembling seals or penguins with their impractical wings and waddling gait. At times he shows himself as a bumblebee or hummingbird and whenever a flower opens he is filled with a reckless joy, distilled and concentrated in the word “bliss”. The wind whispers to the grass and the grass whispers back. He loves us. He dreams of kissing us with lips of fire. For each newborn child he plants a tree in the light with roots that reach down into the dark. He knows how troubled we are. He is waiting for us. He is listening out for our footsteps. We are often drenched and forlorn. He is waiting to see us home.

o nada que é tudo

I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.

from Hell by Henri Barbusse

You Have To Be Careful

You have to be careful telling things.
Some ears are like tunnels.
Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.
Some ears are flat pans like the miners used
looking for gold.
What you say will be washed out with the stones.

You look a long time till you find the right ears.
Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,
a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,
and the slow, gradually growing possibility
that when you find such ears,
they already know.

from Words Under the Words by Naomi Shihab Nye

He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unraveled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happens arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother's womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself—he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought... Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice—he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.

But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

ᔥ toward the creative nothing

noodinâmica

A busca por sentido certamente pode causar tensão interior em vez de equilíbrio interior. Entretanto, justamente esta tensão é um pré-requisito insdispensável para a saúde mental. Ouso dizer que nada no mundo contribui tão efectivamente para a sobrevivência, mesmo nas piores condições, como saber que a nossa vida tem um sentido. Há muita sabedoria nas palavras de Nietzsche: "Quem tem por que viver suporta quase qualquer como." Nestas palavras vejo um lema válido para qualquer psicoterapia. Nos campos de concentração nazistas, poder-se-ia ter testemunhado que aqueles que sabiam que havia uma tarefa à sua espera tinham mais probabilidades de sobreviver. Outros autores de livros sobre campos de concentração chegaram à mesma conclusão, assim como investigações psiquiátricas sobre acampamentos com prisioneiros de guerra no Japão, Coréia do Norte e Vietnam do Norte.

Quanto a mim, quando fui levado para o campo de concentração em Auschwitz, um manuscrito meu, pronto para publicação, foi confiscado. Não há dúvida de que o meu profundo desejo de reescrevê-lo me ajudou a sobreviver os rigores dos campos de concentração em que estive. Assim, por exemplo, quando fui atacado pela febre do tifo, rabisquei muitos apontamentos em pedacinhos de papel para depois conseguir reescrever o manuscrito, caso vivesse até o dia da libertação. Tenho certeza de que essa reconstrução de meu manuscrito perdido, levada a cabo na penumbra dos barracões de um campo de concentração na Baviera, ajudou-me a superar o perigo de um colapso cardiovascular.

Pode-se ver, assim, que a saúde mental está baseada num certo grau de tensão, tensão entre aquilo que já se alcançou e aquilo que ainda se deveria alcançar, ou o hiato entre o que se é e o que se deveria vir a ser. Essa tensão é inerente ao ser humano e, por isso, indispensável ao bem-estar mental. Não deveríamos, então, hesitar em desafiar a pessoa com um sentido em potencial a ser por ela realizado. Somente assim despertaremos do estado latente a sua vontade de sentido. Considero perigosa a errônea noção de higiene mental que pressupõe que a pessoa necessita em primeiro lugar de equilíbrio, ou, como se diz na biologia, de "homeostase", ou seja, de um estado livre de tensão. O que o ser humano realmente precisa não é um estado livre de tensões, mas antes a busca e a luta por um objetivo que valha a pena, uma tarefa escolhida livremente. O que ele necessita não é a descarga de tensão a qualquer custo, mas antes o desafio de um sentido em potencial à espera do seu cumprimento. O ser humano precisa não de homeostase, mas daquilo que chamo de "noodinâmica", isto é, da dinâmica existencial num campo polarizado de tensão, onde um pólo está representado pelo sentido a ser realizado e o outro pólo, pela pessoa aque deverá realizá-lo. E ninguém pense que isto é válido somente para situações normais; isto vale ainda mais para indivíduos neuróticos. Quando os arquitectos querem reforçar uma arcada que ameaça desabar, eles aumentam a carga por ela sustentada, pois com isso os componentes são ligados mais firmemente. Da mesma forma, quando os terapeutas desejam incrementar a saúde mental dos seus pacientes, não deveriam ter receios de criar uma sadia quantidade de tensão através da reorientação para o sentido da vida".

Em Busca do Sentido, Viktor Frankl

Deus enquanto metáfora

I ask Edmond Jabès:
"You say you are an atheist. How can you constantly write of God?"
"It's a word my culture has given me."
Then he expands:
"It is a metaphor for nothingness, the infinite, for silence, death, for all that calls us into question. It is the ultimate otherness."
Or, as he puts it later, in the conversations with Marcel Cohen:
"For me the words 'Jew' and 'God' are, it is true, metaphors. 'God' is the metaphor for emptiness; 'Jew' stands for the torment of God, of emptiness."

from Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes by Rosmarie Waldrop
↬ bookslut

the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos

the passion for the absurd can grow only in a man who has exhausted everything, yet is still capable of undergoing awesome transfigurations. for one who has lost everything there is nothing left in life except the passion of the absurd. what else in life could still move such a person? what seductions? some say: self-sacrifice for humanity, the public good, the cult of the beautiful, and so forth. i like only those people who have done away with all that - even for a short time. only they have lived in an absolute manner. only they have the right to speak about life. you can recover love or serenity. but you recover it through heroism, not ignorance. an existence which does not hide a great madness has no value. how is it different from the existence of a stone, a piece of wood, or something rotten? and yet i tell you: you must hide a great madness in order to want to become stone, wood, or rot. only when you have tasted all the poisoning sweetness of the absurd are you fully purified, because only then will you have pushed negation to its final expression. and are not all final expressions absurd?

from On The Heights of Despair by E. M. Cioran

What’s the matter with you?

Nothing.
Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her".

from Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson