Video

_The humanistic cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, where frames, sometimes, speak louder than characters. 

“You are the void and the cinder Bird without head with wings beating the night The universe is made of your slight hope

The universe is your sick heart and mine Beating to skim death To the cemetery of hope

My pain is joy And the cinder is fire.” Georges Bataille

"The liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor. Confrontation would disrupt the smooth functioning of the society and so the politics of the liberal leads him into a position where he finds himself politically aligned with the oppressor rather than with the oppressed. The reason the liberal seeks to stop confrontation [...] is that his role, regardless of what he says, is really to maintain the status quo, rather than to change it. He enjoys economic stability from the status quo and if he fights for change he is risking his economic stability. What the liberal is really saying is that he hopes to bring about justice and economic stability for everyone through reform, that somehow the society will be able to keep expanding without redistributing the wealth."

Kwame Ture, The Pitfalls of Liberalism

Aquarium

“And I know it must die, for its hour is o'er; Folding its impotent hands at last, Hands too weary to pluck any more The flowers of the past!”                         

Maurice Maeterlinck

"On March 2nd, as you came again, "the middle" occurred, bringing what had been into what endures. Time gathered into the fourth dimension of intimacy, as if we had stepped directly out of eternity—and returned into it. But, closest one, you should know this: "intending and delicate"—nothing forgotten, with every contrary added to it whole—all your pain, scarcely measured, and all my absence, without denying it to myself, rang in a long ringing of the bell of the world in our hearts. It rang in the morning light, and for days afterward that moment of the distant hearing of the now dawned for us. You—Hannah—you Your Martin" Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, Messkirch, May, 1950

Secrecy

Secrecy flows through you, a different kind of blood. It’s as if you’ve eaten it like a bad candy, taken it into your mouth, let it melt sweetly on your tongue, then allowed it to slide down your throat like the reverse of uttering, a word dissolved into its glottals and sibilants, a slow intake of breath—

And now it’s in you, secrecy. Ancient and vicious, luscious as dark velvet. It blooms in you, a poppy made of ink.

You can think of nothing else. Once you have it, you want more. What power it gives you! Power of knowing without being known, power of the stone door, power of the iron veil, power of the crushed fingers, power of the drowned bones crying out from the bottom of the well. Margaret atwood

« 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