Takashi Kawashima

IX — Oh to be idle loving idleness!

Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair, My will to act binds with excess my action, Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair, And acting rage doth paint despair distraction. Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand, Each gesture to deliver sinks the more; The struggle avails not, and to raise no hand, Though hut more slowly useless, we’ve no power. Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring, Repurposed for next day’s repurposing. Fernando Pessoa

ft.com

Syria flooded with Pepsi and Pringles as rulers open economy

End of Assad-era restrictions on dollars, exorbitant duties and extortion leads to boom in foreign goods

Finally, freedom! [13 Jan 25]

(Article is dated for a few years ago, dated by the missionary ending up as a pincushion.)

The Cold Mountain Poems

Always it’s cold on this mountain!

Every year, and not just this.

Dense peaks, thick with snow.

Black pine-trees breathing mist.

It’s summer before the grass grows,

Not yet autumn when the leaves fall.

Full of illusions, I roam here,

Gaze and gaze, but can’t see the sky. Hanshan

Mark Fisher's interview with Burial, December 2012

… And I – weak, languid, obscene, digesting, tossing about dismal thoughts – I too was superfluous. Fortunately I didn’t feel this, above all I didn’t understand it, but I was uneasy because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I am afraid of that – I’m afraid that it might take me by the back of my head and lift me up like a ground-swell). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself, do destroy at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death itself would have been superfluous. Superfluous, my corpse, my blood on these pebbles, between these plants, in the depths of this charming park. And the decomposed flesh would have been superfluous in the earth which would have received it, and my bones, finally, cleaned, stripped, neat and clean as teeth, would also have been superfluous; i was superfluous for all time.

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

O Lord, the stars of Your sky have set, the eyes of Your creation have closed to rest, and kings have locked their gates, Yet, Your gate is always open to those who ask.

— Imam al-Sajjad (ع)

« We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it. . .

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways. . .

[T]oday, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart’, like the French apprendre par cœur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. In the face of increasing rates of attention deficit disorder, the introduction of ‘ritual studies’ as a school subject has recently been advocated as a means of reviving the exercise of ritual repetition as a cultural technique. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity. »

— Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

Herr Lounge Corps - Ego Death (with Jerome Alexandre)

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-no more from the needy or lost