Monday 23 December 2013

From 'The Art of Being' by Erich Fromm

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society.

Thursday 12 December 2013

Sister


Goethe's Faust, Part I. Monologue

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology,—
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before:
I'm Magister—yea, Doctor—hight,
And straight or cross-wise, wrong or right,
These ten years long, with many woes,
I've led my scholars by the nose,—
And see, that nothing can be known!
That knowledge cuts me to the bone.

I'm cleverer, true, than those fops of teachers,
Doctors and Magisters, Scribes and Preachers;
Neither scruples nor doubts come now to smite me,
Nor Hell nor Devil can longer affright me.


Saturday 7 December 2013

Fragmented Intentions


Fragmented intentions is given some sense
'till foreordination breaks down to base bits.
Epiphanies unveil repeated attempts
to capture intangible, looping the wits.

Realizations that merely show
how much there is out there
how little I know.

"Pretty Day" by Marie Möör

 Chanson: Marie Möör - Pretty Day (1982) Film: Ballet Mécanique (1924) de Fernand Léger