bluntie

(whose invisible cities i could not manage)
writes literary memos with relevance to wider reaching values for the future, on:
lightness
as melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness
quickness
no time to be idle and empty of feelings
exactitude
italian is the only language in which the word vague (vago) also means lovely and attractive; speaking of movement, mutability, uncertainty, indefiniteness, gracefulness and pleasure.
visibility
attempts to escape the vortex of multiplicity are useless!
multiplicity
And I realised the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy… But we cannot touch all those points. (from Proust – Remembrance of Things Past)

Lightness is my favourite. i wish i could be light and then my back would not hurt anymore.

a beautiful book to read on holiday in spain, lying on the beach under blue sky and sun: when you travel in iceland you see a lot of water. i want to go and see the northern lights and a lot of water.

this is the best book i have read all year: seven nights – seven lectures by borges taped during the summer of 1977. it is an amazing collection, a room full of mirrors; duality, triality(?), triviality, multiplicity, containing within the stories of the divine comedy, don quixote, siddhartha, the thousand and one nights, borges himself, and his words.

a nice bit in the talk called Nightmares; borges says that dreams are an aesthetic work; perhaps the most ancient aesthetic expression, in which we give narrative, structure, symbol and meaning to the faint and fading memory of the dream.

and here, about buddhism:
One of the subjects of zen buddhist meditation is to think that your past life is illusory. if i were a buddhist monk, i would be thinking at this very moment that i had just begun to live, that all of the earlier life of Borges was a dream, and that all of universal history is a dream. Once we understand that the I does not exist, we will not think that the I can be happy or that our task is to make it happy. We will reach a state of calm.

today for the first time i hated london and england, but then just as i looked out my window onto the slow darkening of a damp sun-less sky, a tiny light came on in a neighbouring house and it looked warm. and my own room was warm too. the problem with reading Viktor Frankl’s Nazi death camp memoir Man’s Search for Meaning is that every time i try to mope i hit my head against a wall of relative luck and comfort.

a couple of weeks ago my dream was so vivid: of this children’s book called Lupinchen. I bought it from amazon but it is in german. judging from the beautiful illustrations: a story about a girl called lupinchen who (of course with her funny friends) builds a house from paper. poor lupinchen, before her decorations and dinner parties are complete the winds blow the house away and  it is skillfully transformed into an origami paper plane and then, crash-landing in the ocean, into a paper boat. eventually, and after having discarded all her crockery, this too sinks, and the paper can’t save her. so a big bird does. it’s beautiful.

white cat promotes his restaurant Campania Gastronomica on Columbia Road, sitting on the tables in a dark clean room, calm during the day before orders begin for his mortadella, neapolitan salami, capocollo and prosciutto tosacano. I have been thinking about meat a lot lately. wake up with darkened thoughts of clandestine cutlets and secret steak. early in islington actors dress in aprons at M&R Meats and begin the rehearsal for their scene, in which they play butchers at a traditional london meat shop. another scene probably takes place in barcelona, where a more bookish window display belies the jamon sandwiches, and the acorn-eating pigs before them.

original french title: Terre des Hommes (land of men)
found this book in the street, just outside a church garden, a ‘rich autobiographical narrative’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince.
clearly i will read it in search of serendipitous messages, but actually the best thing was finding within the pages of the book, last week on the 20th august 2009, a receipt for a meal in italy from the 20th august 2001. long long ago, before the euro…
they had beer, wine, formaggio, antipasto, a primo and 2 secondos.

domesticated us, and not the other way around. seb says it is so.
Dr Karen McComb, a specialist in mammal vocal communication at the University of Sussex, said that by employing an embedded cry, cats appear to be exploiting innate tendencies that humans have for nurturing offspring.

also, in a wonderful book called Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, the new breed of humans have been engineered to easily cure each other’s scrapes and wounds by purring, after it was discovered that cats purred at the same frequency as ultrasounds used on bone fractures and skin lesions. there are many things i want from this book.