20 December 2011
14 December 2011
25 November 2011
20 October 2011
'the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not... '
/ thomas carlyle, scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian & teacher during the victorian era
16 October 2011
i finished watching this film last night, unsure of how i felt about it most of the way through. towards the end i felt an overwhelming surge of emotion. i wept.. extremely touching film about life, aging, love and death. this was also bergmans last film before he passed.
07 October 2011
05 October 2011
'the endless cycle of idea and action,
endless invention, endless experiment,
brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
endless invention, endless experiment,
brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
knowledge of words, and ignorance of the word.
all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
all our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
but nearness to death no nearer to .
where is the life we have lost in living?
where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
the cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
all our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
but nearness to death no nearer to .
where is the life we have lost in living?
where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
the cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
bring us farther from god and nearer to the dust.'
/ excerpt from the introduction to 'the rock' by ts eliot, 1934
03 October 2011
'Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?'
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?'
/ excerpt from 'the love song of j. alfred prufrock', by ts eliot 1919
my god my god, so moving. read the whole piece online HERE
28 September 2011
'writing about the origin of cries and whispers, bergman describes a persistent but wholly isolated image that kept coming back to him for more than a year without his knowing why: 'over and over: the room draped all in red with women clad in white. that's the way it is: images obstinately resurface without my knowing what they want with me; then they disappear only to come back, looking exactly the same.' in several interviews he has said that the creativity in his directing of film or theatre relies mainly upon his momentary intuitions rather than any fixed or premeditated reasoning.'
/ from the book 'ingmar bergman, cinematic philosopher' by irving singer 2007
yes yes yes yes yes yes yes i'm in love with this man.
25 September 2011
22 September 2011
'Well, we're grasping for two things at once. Partly for communion with others - that's the deepest instinct in us. And partly, we're seeking security. By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude.'
/ ingmar bergman, filmmaker genius hero et al
20 September 2011
interviewer: Why can’t you be alone without Yoko?
john lennon: But I can be alone without Yoko, but I just have no wish to be. There’s no reason on earth why I should be alone without Yoko. There’s nothing more important than our relationship, nothing. And we dig being together all the time. Both of us could survive apart but what for? I’m not going to sacrifice love, real love for any whore or any friend or any business, because in the end you’re alone at night and neither of us want to be. and you can’t fill a bed with groupies. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to be a swinger. I’ve been through it all and nothing works better than to have someone you love hold you.
/ i haven't been through it all, but i have always known/felt this last statement to be true
16 September 2011
and through the sleepless nights and the loveless days i think i found the answer, now, here in the pages of the dhammapada and the dripping joyless ecstasy of uncertainty - it is to have no ties no connections to anything - not to other humans or food or drink or any other vices or anything anything at all - -- to be utterly and completely free. just be free, be clear, to not want anything, to be able to get up and go. to be silent and listen. to have no outward opinion, to not get involved. to say nothing in place of being cruel. to love everything and have the ability to love everything for the sheer reason that you are detached - completely and utterly free of all ties to anyone, anything. the character ivan in dostoevskys 'the brothers karamazov' said - "I must make one confession. I could never understand how one can love one's neighbours. It's just one's neighbours, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those at a distance." truer words have never been spoken! i believe this is why we love people so much at a distance. for when we are away from them and we can input our own hopes/dreams for their personalities into the space that exists between us and them - we can create fantasy, delusion, traits and qualities that don't even exist or have the briefest hint of real existence. i love you, i say; i love you, but i don't really know you. i know you for what i know of myself's hope & desire of what i see that you could be, but you are not. i can't see myself. i can't really see myself so i don't know how i would expect myself to see you for what you are. i don't live in this world. i can't. i suffocate and lose air and choke and will die if kept here too long. i am like a fish without gills trying to live in the ocean. it is not possible for me to exist here and so i must create my own world. my own happy delusion, my own fantasy. when i am alone i can convince myself that it is real. i don't expect you to accept this or appreciate it or understand. yet it is who i am. i am happiest when i am alone and miserable and productive. my life is my work, and yet in the recent days my life has been to live. living, much too real. i have become too much like girl and less like machine in recent time. perhaps its not possible to maintain the state of a machine but i have to try because being a girl seems altogether much too unbearable. i have to try to live alone and without emotion of my own coming out through the body, i must channel this emotion through my work. and yet.. part of me still wants to love you, needs to, probably always will. silly girl. with all you know you still give in to it or play with the idea. you are drowning and drowning in this ocean, dear, and it's only a matter of time
28 August 2011
21 August 2011
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
/ excerpt from quartet 2: east coker of ts eliots four quartets
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