Life (…suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning…)
“Life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends; new, confusing voices always mingle with the chorus of those that have been heard before. Everything flows, everything merges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure; everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers into real life . . . Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life. But suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning that illumines the banal paths of empirical life; something disturbing and seductive, dangerous and surprising. The accident, the great moment, the miracle ; an enreachment and a confusion. It cannot last, no one would be able to bear it, no one could live at such heights – at the height of their own life and their own ultimate possibilities. One has to fall back into numbness. One has to deny life in order to live.”
(Lukacs, Metaphysics of Tragedy)
When a tree is growing
“Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”
(Andrei Tarkovsky)
Awareness
“Awareness hurts. Relationships hurts. Life hurts. But to float, to drift, to live in the dream does not hurt.”
(Anaïs Nin, Winter of Artifice)
96 years of beauty (almost not talking)
…”always the years between us, always the years. Always, the love. Always, the hours.”
(Michael Cunningham, The Hours)
Welcomed nostalgia
“I was happy to be back in my same room on the second floor. Once I had imagined living in this room, cloaked in obscurity, writing detective stories. I opened the window and looked out at the long fishing pier with its lone café, a sight filling me with the pain of welcomed nostalgia. It was a bit windy and the sound of the waves seemed to amplify the call of somewhere else, more surreal than real.”
(Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey)
As the sea needs to heave
…” I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. (…) We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. (…) We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.”
(Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955)
Little friends
“We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.”
(Francis Bacon)
– to Alice, Glória and Zani –
Continue walking, continue to see…
“Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.”
(Vicent van Gogh, Letters to Theo)
Straight line
“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Unspoken – Me and Alice XV
“Unspoken feelings are unforgettable.”
(Andrei Tarkovsky)
Visual Artist
Inspired by poetry, art, life, imperfections, music, nature, dreams and antiques.
Believes that things should not be in small drawers inside large closets.
As we live our lives forwards, but understand them backwards (as Kierkegaard says).
