John Surman , Nestor`s Saga

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus,Hannah Arendt, meaning, Paul Goodman, language, silence: quotes, thoughts

Note:

Today i could not stay silent. 

Too much happened, bad and good.

All in all, we all stay in the continuous tension between the quest for meaning 

and being (existing) in the presence, our experience shaping our consciousness.

It is and remains an immense effort to walk out of culturally imposed egocentricity and 

concentrate our flow of kindness into this world and to other humans in spite

of doubt and thought. It is a pure act of perception, feeling and participation. It is the transformation

of our  true despair into the creation of hope, the music rising from our own hells

and out of the suffering of the world  towards the vision of  possibility for joy.

A. Camus:

"I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that is what I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world."

...

"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

[…]

"I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death — and I refuse suicide."

Albert Camus, consciousness

supplement:

Hannah Arendt

“The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same,” adding: “The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”

Hannah Arendt, thinking, meaning, truth

on silence and speaking:

Paul Goodman

"Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos."

Paul Goodman, Defence of Poetry,silence, need, meaning, language

From the same book, Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language, Defence of Poetry:

"The transaction of speaker and hearer is fundamental, though the hearer my not respond 

nor even, as in poetry, be a real person.

For this transaction, the speakers use an inherited code (which could be called a "means"), 

but it is not constant, and the actual language is the tension between the code

and what needs to be said,

Communication is not the conveyance of meanings from one head to another 

by means of language: it is the language itself being said and understood."

later on in a summary, on himself:

"I have to justify my needs with meanings."

note: i had to smile on this last sentence...
for me it is not to justify...it is to make my life richer
and to create 

John Steinbeck, letter, January 1st,1941

"Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded."

....

"Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man."

letter to Pascal Covici, 1941, during World War II

brainpickings.org

--January 7th, 2015, Paris, Charlie Hebdo, terrorist attack
--November 13th, 2015, Paris, terrorist attack
--July 14th,2016 , Nizza, terror attack
--December 19th, 2016, Berlin, terror attack
--January 1st, 2017, Istanbul, terror attack

terrorist incidents

Global terrorism database

wars, armed conflicts

Peter Green ,Carry My Love

GACELA DEL AMOR MARAVILLOSO, F.G.Lorca

GACELA DEL AMOR MARAVILLOSO

Con todo el yeso
de los malos campos
eras junco de amor, jazmín mojado.

Con sur y llama
de los malos cielos
eras rumor de nieve por mi pecho.

Cielos y campos
anudaban cadenas en mis manos.

Campos y cielos
azotaban las llagas de mi cuerpo.

Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac Rambling Pony

Happy New Year!

The Ghazal of the dead child, F. G. Lorca

Todas las tardes en Granada,
todas las tardes se muere un niño.
Todas las tardes el agua se sienta
a conversar con sus amigos.

Los muertos llevan alas de musgo.
El viento nublado y el viento limpio
son dos faisanes que vuelan por las torres
y el día es un muchacho herido.

No quedaba en el aire ni una brizna de alondra
cuando yo te encontré por las grutas del vino
No quedaba en la tierra ni una miga de nube
cuando te ahogabas por el río.

Un gigante de agua cayó sobre los montes
y el valle fue rodando con perros y con lirios.
Tu cuerpo, con la sombra violeta de mis manos,
era, muerto en la orilla, un arcángel de frío.

translation:

Every evening in Granada,
every evening a child dies.
Every evening the water sits down
to converse with its friends.

The dead wear wings of moss.
The cloudy wind and the clean wind
are two pheasants who fly by the towers
and the day is a wounded boy.

Not a sliver of lark was left in the air
when I met you by the caves of wine
not a crumb of cloud was left in the sky
when you drowned in the river.

A giant of water fell over the mountains
and the valley was whirling with dogs and irises.
Your body, with the dark purple of my hands,
was, dead on the pillow, an archangel of cold.

Gazela de amor imprevisto,Federico García Lorca,Ghazal of the unforeseen love

Nadie comprendía el perfume
de la oscura magnolia de tu vientre.
Nadie sabía que martirizabas
un colibrí de amor entre los dientes.

Mil caballitos persas se dormían
en la plaza con luna de tu frente,
mientras que yo enlazaba cuatro noches
tu cintura, enemiga de la nieve.

Entre yeso y jazmines, tu mirada
era un pálido ramo de simientes.
Yo busqué, para darte, por mi pecho
las letras de marfil que dicen siempre,

siempre, siempre: jardín de mi agonía,
tu cuerpo fugitivo para siempre,
la sangre de tus venas en mi boca,
tu boca ya sin luz para mi muerte.

translation by:Amy Rodriguez

No one comprehended the perfume
Of the dark magnolia of your womb.
No one knew the way you tortured the hummingbird
Of my love, as you held it between your teeth.

A thousand Persian foals fell asleep in the plaza
Lit by the moon of your forehead,
While for four nights I embraced your waist,
Enemy of the snow.

Yet between gypsum and jasmine, your gaze
Was a pale bunch of seeds.
I searched my soul, sought to give you
the ivory letters that spell “always.”

Always, always: a garden of agony—
Your body my fugitive forever,
The blood of your veins in my mouth,
Your mouth already lightless, marking my death.