Bokelskere.no

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the longboat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando courtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Jag ser på ett blad och fäster mitt hopp
till det. Att det trots årets slut ska
hänga kvar. Om vinden ska rista till.
Och darrande inte märka. Jag ser
på det här från min plats. Har inte
alltid dess plats varit? Liknande
i sig själv? Vad hindrar mig
då. Från att för alltid
vända tillbaka. Eller
bara vända mig
om.

“Tell me a story, Pew.
What kind of story, child?
A story with a happy ending.
There’s no such thing in all the world.
As a happy ending?
As an ending.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Denne figuren, tegner, har ennå ikke blitt vid nok, ennå ligner den seg selv Og tenker, Og tenker, Og tenker, og den blir mørkere, vakrere, den lærer seg et språk, vi venter. Vi venter foran huset, mens skyggen glir over det, og sola, som vi også ser, synker ned gjennom himmelen. Men er det en himmel, og er det tankevekkende oss? Nei, ikke nye navn! Slik at de fortsetter å være ord i en livlig samtale som nettene glir over, og nettene blir hvite, vi blir forløst, formørket, løst, formørket, uløst, mørk, hverdagslig, nattfarget, annen person, i det andre landet, i det andre Berlin, flere ganger urbane. Ha tillit til forvandlingen.

Et alfabet blir synlig i hagen der vann har smeltet snøen, tilfeldige bokstaver kan leses i det som har sunket ned og sammen, en henslengt A, en L formet av en rake. C slynget rundt et tre. Et vinteralfabet. Jeg leter etter flere bokstaver, begynner å lese, jeg lærer å lese denne historien, dette stedet, det klare og mørke ved den, ved de gråskimrende trestammende, det fine lakenet av snø.

Bjørka og bladene på den. Og høst, og vinter, og tidlig vår. Jeg går ikke denne veien, men er en pilsamling, en bokstavsynagoge, er rolig; jeg går over vannet, på sjøen, over havet. Det er et omvendingshav, et høsthav, et vinterhav. Rolig snakker vinden om at ingen går over vannet. Ingen går: så er vinden der og over hvert ord suser det og trekker. Tenningsnøkkel som får susingen til å starte. Virkelighetssjåføren har kommet seg inn i bilen og kjører bortover landeveien.

[W]e can say that religious belonging becomes progressively more important in the life of postmodern populations as the sense of belonging to a territory, a community, or a social class is lost. The current resurgence of religious forms of self-identification has little to do with spirituality, piousness, or the feeling of the sacred. On the contrary, it has a lot to do with the craving for belonging, which seems to accompany the deterritorialization and the decrease in solidarity provoked by virtualization.

The person who is not doing anything isn't committed to any activity, so she has the potential for anything. Since non-doing lacks a place in the general order of things, it becomes a threat to order.

Og hver dag den samme natten.
Og et helt nytt hode.

Og hver natt den første blå stripen
på himmelen. Morgenen kommer
som et spyd i blått gull.

Og hodet skjelver.

Jeg kjente en revne i sinnet –
som om hjernen var delt –
Jeg prøvde å skjøte den – søm for søm –
men fikk den ikke hel.

Tanken som kom etter ville jeg knytte
til tanken som kom først –
men sammenhengen floket seg
som nøster på et gulv.

Hjernen er større enn himmelen
for hvis du sammenlikner –
vil den ene lett romme den andre
og i tillegg også deg

Hjernen er dypere enn sjøen
for hvis du ser dem blått mot blått
vil den ene absorbere den andre
som svampen gjør med vått

Hjernen veier det samme som Gud
for hvis du veier dem gram for gram
er de like forskjellige
som stavelse og klang –

Seeing all things purely as symbols leads to a state comparable to schizophrenia, in which all things resonate with meaning yet nothing has a clear signification. On the other hand, to banish the symbolic in order to see all things merely as signs, as recommended by reductive materialism, is to remove the dimension of meaning from our picture of the universe. The resulting state of being is the moral abyss of the psychopath.

Perhaps the use of the future tense in the phrase "beauty will save the world" does not refer to a historic eventuality so much as a moment beyond chronological time, a virtual event always in the process of happening yet never fully consummated. Perhaps the world has already been saved in beauty, and always has been. Is this the secret of art, whose power is to transmute moments in time so as to lay bare the eternity that inhabits them?

We need a faith to restore our capacity to feel, to affect and be affected with the same passionate intensity as our forebears, whose powers of feeling astound us so in the records and art of the past. The death of affect, to borrow a phrase from J.G. Ballard, is the true catastrophe of our spectral age, our spiritual Hiroshima. It makes questions such as whether life's riddles are answered at the Vatican, in Tibet, or by the Large Hadron Collider utterly meaningless, since it removes the ground we need to pose such questions in the first place. Neither religion nor science can give us back the ground. Only the imagination can. Only art can mend the rupture of the soul and the world, the body and the earth.

We have all met people who embody the New in their actions and words. We have all at one time or another done something so spontaneous and authentic that it suddenly revealed to us the wild potentialities that lie beyond habit and convention. The argument can be made that every mad, unwarranted act of love, becoming, or true self-giving is literally a work of art.

Creativity is freedom's most primal expression, though not the freedom we were sold under the banner of democracy. True freedom is less a license to do as one pleases than the power to be what one has no choice but to be, the capacity to follow one's inmost desire.

To create is to free oneself from the dialectical binds that keep the ideological in place. Thus, every act of creation is an act of resistance.

Since experiencing a work of art is as creative an activity as making one, idiology is not the prerogative of artists. In fact, trusting one's own experience over the dictates of Consensus may be all that is required to speak of artistic creation. While apolitical in itself, artistic creation becomes revolutionary the moment it is actualized in the world, because it transcends all that has been given as self-evident and calls on us to question and to seek.

If your purpose is to build a waking dream, discontinuity on the surface may be essential to coherence in the depths.