...

Mon bon monsieur, je ne sais plus que faire de ma personne. KapkarAnkara

[monakogjkkl]

“We must understand that we are always in the barbaric age of ideas. We are always in the prehistory of the human spirit. Only complex thought will allow us to civilize our knowledge.”

— Edgar Morin, Introduction to Complex Thought

[monakogjkkl]

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this word

[monakogjkkl]

The head is not more native to the heart, The hand is more instrumental to the mouth

[monakogjkkl]

“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. ”

[monakogjkkl]

The marginal person is poised in the psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds...within which membership is implicitly if not explicitly based upon birth or ancestry... and where exclusion removes the individual from a system of group relations.

[jamesdevereaux]

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard.

[monakogjkkl]

Their ideal is to be men [sic]; but for them, to be men [sic] is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of 'adhesion' to the oppressor

Freire

[monakogjkkl]

Beauty and memory are not different things; love is familiar.

INNOCENCE OF MEMORIES | Official UK Trailer - in cinemas 29th January

[bazenmi]

“ I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ”

[stay-close]

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

— Oscar Wilde

[thehumanfront]

Art and nothingness

Can we define who we are? Samuel Beckett (pictured), a playwright, didn’t believe so. In his work he espoused a philosophy which was founded on Nothing; that beneath our curated identities

‘… there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no desire to express, together with an obligation to express.’ — Samuel Beckett, Beckett

Thus, in Beckett’s view, art is an obligation to express nothing; language is an instrument to name the unnameable; and science and philosophy are tools which expose a void.

Pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias of Lentini (483—375 B.C.) thought something similar: nothing has real existence; and if anything real did exist, it could not be known; and if anything were to exist and be known, it could not be expressed in speech.

Likewise, Marcel Proust’s essays instilled in Beckett an uncertainty of who we are.  The tyrannies of space and time hinder us, he thought, leading Self to be perpetually unformalisable. Self-awareness is only accurate if uninterrupted and reflects the Nothing that exists at the ultimate depths of our realities.

To the tune with all of this, Beckett’s characters collapse under the burden of choice, responsibility, and anguish: for there is no self. Beckett was inspired by the literature of Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground) and Kafka (The Metamorphosis), wherein the main characters ‘become’ what they fear they are: insects. A similar becoming happens in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

Only in solitude and suffering can true self-identity be established; only when Nothing is our universal ultimate can our art have significance.

Is life more than blankness, indolence, and indecision? I think, yes—but only if you craft it so by indulging superficial value and beauty.

Imprisoned or naïve—which character will you be?

[malmaster]

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

T.S. Eliot, Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (via malmaster)

[adrasteiax]

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—

T.S. Eliot, from La Figlia Che Piange in “The Complete Poems And Plays Of T.S. Eliot” (via adrasteiax)

[keremelcream]

1st, 4th and 6th — Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn’t Burn In This One 2nd — Taylor Swift, Mad Woman 3rd and 5th — Amanda Lovelace, Break Your Glass Slippers

[elodpaints]

Apollo and the Arts by Paul-Jean-Louis Gervais, 1897.

[monakogjkkl]

Not being what he is and being what he is not.

Sartre

[monakogjkkl]

For the novel is, as Lukacs described it long ago, "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God