domingo, 5 de julho de 2020

Time Bandits

In 1981 Terry Gillian directs and produces a film called "Time Bandits ". The film talks about this young boy who joins a group of dwarfs on a trip through Time meeting several famous historical characters from King Agamenon to Napoleon .
Ever since my teenage years being a fan of History , i have always been fascinated by the concept of Time Travelling . Who among us has never seen the fun and naive Hollywood trilogy " Back to Future " with Michael J Fox and marveled at all those strolls back and forth in Time ??
The idea of travelling through Time and seeing in loco all the characters you have read in the History books and see how those people really lived and died would be one of the best experiences a person could ever had . Only comparable to leaving this tiny little planet and explore other worlds in distant star systems . I often envy astronauts who can turn their heads on one side and behold the spectacle of our beautiful blue planet , the theatre of all our misfortunes and petty glories and on the other side can gaze at the vast , infinite cosmic ocean . How Godlike they must feel !? And what else could feed our already active imagination than that superb heavenly view ??

In 1895 the British novelist and futurist HG Wells , popularize the idea of a machine that would take us to travel through Time in his book called precisely " Time Machine ".
In the book a man obsessed with the idea of travelling through Time and knowing the future of mankind , invents a machine and jumps in to the distant future where he faces an apocalyptical mankind divided into two races in which one of them canibalizes another .
I am not so pessimistic as Wells about the future of mankind but being as nostalgic as i am , the future doesn`t hold much appeal to me and i would rather visit the past .
imagining yourself in the time of Ramses I and see thousands of people erecting a gigantic wonderful useless thing like a pyramid for the glory of one man elevated by the superstition of man to category of God ? Imagining following the armies of Sargon the Akkadian as he conquered the city states of the Sumerians or be part of the Mongol Hordes of Genghis Khan as they spread fire and blood through the Asian steppes ; Watching Mozart composing his Requiem by the dim light of candles ; Paganini playing his Caprices ; Jesus giving one of his sermons ; Caesar being murdered ; Guttenberg printing his first bible ; Cortez arriving to Tenochtitlan with his rag army .
think of the immense richness of knowledge that a creature possessing such a machine would acquire?
Wormhole 

Although Einstein`s General Relativity finds little support for of Time Travel to become a reality , recent discoveries on the field of quantum mechanics opens a gap for that possibility in a more or less distant future with the concept of Wormhole , who can be seen as a tunnel connects two points far from each other in the spacetime structure .
However be as it may , its unlikely that in the near future anyone will be able to travel in the 4th dimension of reality . And even if that was possible we have to take in consideration that there are some paradoxes embedded in Time Travel that might prove dangerous to the traveler .
In the 1st film of the trilogy " Back to Future " the hero , Marty McFly , met his mother when she was young and she fell in love for him which consequently prevent her to meet his father and therefore preventing him from ever being born at all .
The lesson is that changing Time events , no matter how trivial can have disastrous consequences in our present .
So maybe nature is wise in trapping us in the present because imagine what bandits we could do with this overwhelming power !??

terça-feira, 30 de junho de 2020

The Aesthetic of Sadness


I love a sad story , a sad tune , a sad film , a sad landscape . Personally i have always been truly affected by the beauty of sadness . I do not see myself as a masochist and therefore i enjoy the pleasurable fun things of life , but there is something in sadness that touches my soul deeply .
When you see a comedy film you laugh , you have fun , the innocent and playful side of living comes to the surface and you just forget the painful inconsistencies of life . But when you watch a drama you were suddenly brought back to life`s little miseries and that sticks into your mind for quite sometime .
Joy is frivolous , light as a feather and written in the sand washed by the tide of life .
Sadness is deep , it voices our despair , anguish that in most of the cases follow us through life .
I think the beauty of sadness lies in the fact that it remind us that everything is transitory , frail and in that frailty lies its beauty .
The love for gardens in Japanese culture is related to the fact that flowers and extremely frail objects with a very limited lifespan and its precisely there that lies their beauty . Like King Priam says to Achilles " the Gods envy us because we are mortals ". Mortality gives uniqueness and glorifies the moment , who is beautiful because its brief and unrepeatable .
Maybe there lies the beauty of sadness. The moment , unique carries the magic of the finitude of things .
Sadness also invokes the nostalgia of times past in which one was happy or has an happy image of those times .
The Portuguese have a word that describes that state of nostalgia. The word is "Saudade ".
Saudade is a feeling of loss , of longing for an object that one thinks will never have it back .
In spite of its element of suffering , Saudade carries with it a bitter sweet taste . Its a pain but a sweet pain , one that puts you in a dormant, dreamy state.
Proust knew it very well when in pages and pages of his " A le recherche du temps perdu " he tried desperately to capture the aroma of the coffee of his youth .
The best Art should wet your eyes and squash your soul .

domingo, 28 de junho de 2020

Choices

"To be or Not Be !?
This is the immortal question posed by the Prince Hamlet in the 1st scene of the III Act of the famous Shakespearean drama .
One of the most common and transforming actions of a person is the act of choosing and sticking to that choice and the various consequences that that choice carries .
While most of the choices we have to make in our daily life are completely harmless and inconsequently , others that might define our lives for ever and presented to those choices we experience the loneliness of the decision we have to make .
No matter how much we avoid the tribunal of Life , we always reach this point in the forest of one´s existence to a place where you stand in front of a bifurcation of paths and you are confronted with the drama of a decision .  should i go this way ? or that way ?
Either way will change our lives in completely different patterns .
Accepting the consequences of the choice you made and don´t look back and think of what it would if the path would be taken its a challenge .
The existencial doubts of the Danish prince invented by the bard of Strafford Upon Avon are to me very familiar .
Mistakes are unavoidable and somehow necessary . The no safety net in Life . You walk blindly in a pitch black knowing that somewhere there is an abyss where you will fall . But you have to walk , keep walking no matter how many times you trip on the pebbles scattered on the road .
The pain you receive bad choices though sometimes its not comparable with the pain that you inflict to others that are somehow dependable of those choices .
Again Hamlet hit the nerve " conscience doth makes cowards of us all ".
Wouldn´t be lovely if we were all careless and light free children like Pinocchio without is Talking Cricket ? But maybe the Talking Cricket no matter how annoying he is has a reason to exist because otherwise our soul would be like the grotesque  Portrait of Dorian Grey.

quarta-feira, 24 de junho de 2020

Anatomy of a Belief

God, Deus , Dio , Gott, Theos; Allah , Bog .
Many different ways of saying ; many different ways of sound it ; Same reality though .
Why is the necessity of Believing in a supreme Being so fundamental in the lives of most of the 7 billion human beings that tread on this planet ?
The History of Mankind is also the History of numerous deities that were created and later replaced and substitute by more sophisticated forms of materializing this very powerful idea and so intrinsically human which is the idea of an Entity to whom we owe our existence and most forever pay tribute and seek for help whenever we need it .

The Israelite Sociologist Yuval Noah Harari in 2014 publishes a book called " Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind " in which he speaks of  several Ideas that are absolutely crucial for a society, they are the building blocks upon not only societies as particular cultural unities are built but the entire human civilization . Ideas who are completely abstract , with no correspondence in the real world , but we humans made them real by putting our trust , our faith in them .
Money and God are two of those abstract and yet powerful ideas .
In his book Harari asks her to make a mental experiment : ask a monkey to trade a banana with you for money . the monkey sees the money as a piece of paper , not as banana . we would not obviously trade with you his delicious banana for a dirty piece of paper even if with what dirty piece of paper he would buy five bananas .
Now ask the same monkey to give you his banana because by doing that he would do a good deed and live in a paradise filled with bananas for all eternity after his dead .
Obviously the monkey would never agree with such a deal . Yet this is the deal that human beings have been accepting for thousand of years . Why ? are we more stupid than our simian cousins ?
Why do we invest so much in these abstractions and built entire civilizations upon it ?
The response of Harari is that unlike the monkey we can plan things ahead of the present moment and see future benefits far ahead in the future .

But what are the benefits we extract from the belief in God ?  Why do we need it ? And why do we gather ourselves around gigantic dogmatic systems that we call Religions ?

In a very small book called " The Future of an Illusion " , Sigmund Freud tells us that religion or the belief in a God ( that in this case is that same cos with the exception of Buddhism one cannot live without the other ) serves two purposes :
1- It permits us to humanize Nature and therefore taken some of its power that frighten us because we cannot control it . With the creation of a God , Chaos ends and the Cosmos begins . Everything is explained by God´s Will even things that have no explanation whatsoever .
2- Religion becomes an instrument of control of the masses by the privileged elite of that culture .
It prevents the masses of rebelling against that elite and accept their miserable condition as part of a divine plan that will reward the obedience of the individual to that plan in an after life.

Being this all true , it doesn`t however explain the power that the religion feeling has in the human psychosis . The British biologist Richard Dawkins , a well known atheist , claims that religion exists because mankind is still in its infancy in most parts of the planet and therefore religion feeds itself of the fear of the little child lost in a world that is hostile .
Freud has the same idea when he says that God is the father that we lose when we become adults .
My view is close to Dawkins and Freud . We humans have a need to explain what cannot be explained because we have a need to control . Uncertainty disturbs us and life is too uncertain , too unpredictable , and for the human psyche the unknow is something generally negative , sinister , dark.
So lets make light by making comprehensible what is not ; know what is unknown . Death is a mystery , lets clear that mystery by saying that its not the end but the beginning of something else . Something nice of course , something will fit our wishes .
As much as i would love to believe in God , even because its a creative and rather elegant hypothesis , it crashes with my reason a God in the terms presented by the various religions .
God is a fictional character that became reality because we need it to be real and unlike Dawkings who this it will become obsolete as mankind progresses technologically i think otherwise , and thing with a taint of sadness that we will never overcome this fable because we will not stop fearing and God`s best friend is fear .




However it would be an exercise of mental hygiene to read  Feurbach ´s " The Essence of Christianity " which is for me the most brilliant critical analysis of the process of Belief .
In this book Feurbach shows us how we feed this fictional character with qualities that we have and by doing that we impoverish ourselves . The notions of Justice , Kindness, Omnipotence , Compassion are all within us , and yet we transfer them a being external to us .
How much suffering in the world would be spared in every individual realized that God is simply an extension of each and everyone of us ?

domingo, 21 de junho de 2020

The Horde


When i started this blog my idea was never to immerse myself in the contemporaneity which i find its absolutely hideous , particularly is aesthetics terms , ( in that sense, using the Hegelian expression , i definitely do not incarnate the spirit of my Time ) but sometimes the events out there in the real world are so powerful that they demand an answer even from a soul of the past like me .
Actually Crowds and their irrational , savage behaviour can be unfortunately traced throughout History so the events that triggered the death of George Floyd in the United States are nothing new .
But it does not stop to amaze me the fascination that most seem to have for mass movements and the need to belong to them .
I am not a psychologist , so i lack the technical expertise that could give  me a better insight in this topic , but i can not help thinking that something profoundly humiliating in an individual that by joining a crowd like a good little obedient sheep of a flock , abdicates of its own individuality follow an ideal , a movement , that left alone to its own device probably wouldn´t agree with it .
Without getting into the particular details of the Floyd case and the sheer stupidity of destroying statues which basically means destroying the memory of nations , that like the memory of people is formed of good and bad things , i think that crowds give a very poor spectacle of humans as a species that cultivate somehow this idea , however illusionary it might be, of a so called intelectual superiority over the other species .

The French Sociologist Gustave Le Bon , who wrote a series of brilliant essays about the psychology of masses , pointed out very well in his writings to the character of absolute savagery of the masses .
Le Bon was particularly keen in observing the loss of the personal conscience of the individual and the predominance of his unconscious personality submerged in the crowd turns the individual into an automaton with no longer a will of his own .
Religion and Politics are masters in this form of manipulation . The Crowd more than anything shows the profound mediocracy of the human kind.
Le Bon and also Wilhelm  Reich in their writings show is very well that History is built the individuals who have the courage to stand out from the Crowd and fight for the originality of their ideas .

"At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit many millions of men swarmed to the East; the words of an hallucinated person … have created the force necessary to triumph over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther set Europe ablaze and bathed in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius transform a civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history." 
                                                                                          Gustave Le Bon
                                                                               
As a human being ill never give up the treasure giving to me by nature of thinking by my own head and therefore ill always refuse to be just a member of the herd .


 Gustave Le Bon : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon
Wilhelm Reich : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich


quarta-feira, 17 de junho de 2020

Chronos


In Greek mythology Chronos the God of Time would eat his own children .
This show us that from a very early age the ancient Greeks had a clear perception of the corrosive nature of Time .
Time , this invisible fiend of reality that is forever present in a subtle but very enduring way in our lives .
I often pondered about the nature of Time . Its benefits and its losses .
Augustine of Hipona was probably the first thinker in western philosophy to discuss the nature of Time. For one of the princes of the Christian church , Time was a big hand filled with nothing . Like sand going through your hands . You only the moment and even this would quickly vanish into the past leaving you nothing . He was also the first to tell us the difference between chronological Time and psychological Time. Depending of our state of mind Time would seem  expand and contract .
Already before him , the Romans had this perception of psychological Time . who doesn`t know the famous phrase of the poet Virgil : Tempus Fugit  ( Time flies ) ?
The idea that Time is a precious that always escape from us and its the only thing that we can´t get back .
The Irish writer Lord Dunsany , one of the fathers of Fantasy literature , has this curious tale of a King who assembles a powerful army to fight Time , this destroyer of everything that is living .
The army wanders through the kingdom looking for its enemy but never finds it . In the end all the soldiers perish and the king realizes that not only his army but him also were once again defeated by Time .
I do not know what was the idea of Dunsany behind this story but i interpret it as a reminder of the frailty of reality . Nothing remains of all our plans , projects , earthly ambitions . In the end its all carried away by the sandstorm of Time .  This is an enemy we cannot vanquish because Chronos is the other face of Thanatos . Time is the Dance Macabre of Death .

Time also not only corrupts our bodies but also the way we look at things .
Things once so vital for us are now laughable and tuck away in the trunk of memory .
That house you once wanted so much , not that you got after years living there seems like its nothing but a hut.
The woman or the man you once loved with passion now it becomes a nuisance, an annoying background rattle .
People, Places , Objects they all lose value to us after a certain Time . What was once amazing now its dull and we will go searching for something amazing until eventually this new wonder fades its glow with Time .
However Time compels us to move forward , do things . Because Time is precious and the need to accomplish something , to leave our footprint in this world, to satisfy our vanity ( " my writings will survive Iron and Fire " - said the poet Ovid ) no matter how futile that is , is so pressing, that without
the cold grip of Time we would have been simply too lazy to do anything . Again the ancient warning Carpe Diem ( Cease the Day ) ! Do something ! Use your time . Do not let it go to waste .
Even though the moon contemplates our achievements with a mocking face as the great Persian poet Omar Khayyám so beautifully put it

  “Drink wine and look up at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by.” 

Even the moon itself will one day will  be another of Time`s victims .                          

domingo, 14 de junho de 2020

The Art of Travel

photo : https://500px.com/jskirschstein

For me one the things that makes alive the most is travelling .
It always seemed to me that people who neither travelled or travelled very little ( the family of the author of this Blog included ) were very unfortunate and sad individuals .
To go through life , now that we are well in the 21st century , living as a man of the Middle Ages , living and dying in the same , looks to me as a real tragedy .
What will possess an individual living the Global Age of Digitalization which a cheap and varied network of transports to stay planted in the same place , living as a tree , without a single curiosity to the world that goes beyond its limited boundaries ?
Probably the same reason that makes millions of homo sapiens throughout the planet not to pick up a book and read at least a few lines : lack of curiosity .
Lack of curiosity in a species that owes its survival to its compulsive need of discover is another of the many riddles in life that i still have not decipher in life .
No, the economical factor cannot be the reason .
Millions of years ago our ancestors crossed continents just using their feet . Necessity compel them to do so yes , but that fact just confirms that a sedentary existence that provides all the basic needs of the individual makes him passive , complacent with his situation , numbing our sense of curiosity , of adventure that made our species thrive on this Planet .
Having the world displayed on a screen or at the distance of a mere mouse click took our verve to explore this beautiful blue planet of ours .
St Augustine of Hipona once wrote that " a man who doesn`t travel beyond his own land is like a man who reads only the 1st page of a book ".
How shameful the lives of some of my contemporaries is compared with the life of the 14th century Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta who in an age with no airplanes , cars or trains , travelled throughout the entire Muslim world for 20 years , From the his birthplace Morocco to Indonesia !!


To travel is not only a trip to discover the world but also to discover yourself . The Discover levels of tolerance to others and resources of autonomy that you weren`t aware of its existence within you.
Travel makes you leave your comfort zone , break the routine that suffocates you and makes you like Chaplin`s character in the film Modern Times , just a gear , a robot .
As the Swiss London based philosopher Alain de Botton says in his book The art of Travel

         “The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away—to go, as he concluded, ‘anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!” 

Out of OUR world.
Travels also feed our imagination . Prevents our minds to rust because at the end of the trip we are richer with new ideas and emotions and boosted with an energy that refuses to accept that we cannot change as our daily environment remains changeless as well.
again de Botton puts its brilliantly ;

       “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are."

So i urge you all , Travel , Travel , Travel !
Dare to cross the boundaries of your village like Samwise Gamjee , even if you do not have the company of a Froddo Baggins



quarta-feira, 10 de junho de 2020

The Lonely Ape

Photo: https://bgsphotography.co.uk/
 In 1967 the British Anthropologist Desmond Morris published a book that would make him forever famous , The Naked Ape. The naked ape is nothing more than our own tormented and at the same time magnificent species .
In this remarkable book Morris show us how our species is so amazingly similar to our so called "savage " fellow simians even in things that we thought , in our sheer arrogance, that were specifically and unequivocally ours.
One thing though i believe that its sadly ours and ours only : The lonely nature of human condition .
Unlike the other simians , we have a sharp sense of our finitude , of our demise , and this put us in a rather existencial waste land that our desperate social masquerades cannot really disguise.
We fear loneliness and try to surround ourselves of people all the time in order to think in our life journey we have someone at our side .  Hence the reason why we struggle to find a partner , to share moments, experiences , even emotions , when in reality there is what Kant called " the thing in itself " which most basic , elemental almost sub atomic structure of our inner being that can never be transmitted to no one . Each and every one of us is a phenomena that can only be perceived poorly by an outsider . Plus the strong sense of individuality that we cherish as our most precious of treasures , give us the poisonous gift of choice . a choice that can only be made by each and everyone of us , because its our life and no one else´s .
Photo: http://www.magic-art-photography.eu/

The unbearable burden of choice throw us into the dark world of loneliness.
And even when the choice is not made by me , even when  others that i held in a power higher than mine or , like Ortega Y Gasset states , the circumstances of my life compel me to choose , the consequences of that choice will upon me and me only. Grasping this responsibility in its full extent gives me the pungent and distressed feeling of loneliness.
Every experience of my existence is perceived by me in my flesh . Only i will bleed and only i will rejoice . And in the moment of my Death , the ultimate and supreme moment of loneliness, only i will feel the cold grip of Thanatos.
Nothing is more pathetic , tragi-comic than the sinister spectacle of the relatives and friends of the dying around his deathbed .
Hopeless attempt of mitigating his infinite loneliness .
The Poet John Donne was wrong when he said : " no man is an island entirely of himself".
Indeed we are islands . Always trying to connect with the main land but in the end realizing that that connection is an illusion , a " veil of Maya ".
I share the wish of Walt Whitman , i too would love to be like the animals , immersed in the comfort of the moment , with no past and no future , true children of eternity escaping the jaws of Time.
Happiness is not knowing what happiness and not care about it. We humans care , and in there lies our misery and perhaps our greatness .

         

sábado, 6 de junho de 2020

The North

Photo:https://artbyjonna.com/


The popular adagio says that Home is the place where the heart is . Not the place born but the place where one´s soul inclines you to go .

Being born in the southern part of the European continent with its generous showers spells of solar radiation, more or else look alike  tropical beaches and people desperately seeking for physical displays of where one is

affections , I always felt pretty much like an alien in what was supposed to be my land .

The sun, an omen of happy and joyful moments for most people , to me it was always synonymous of an excruciating heat that my poor icy , snowy  nostalgic soul could never bear .

The heat always put me in a state of lassitude and often suffocation that made me comprehend the ritual of the siesta prevailing in some southern European cultures .

More than an inner anthropological trait , its actually a mechanism of self defense against the inclemency of our beloved star .

The Beaches , those strips of silicon that mercifully put an end to long voyage of the sea waves, in the summer are populated by  hordes of human beings that in a desperate attempt of fighting the heat only make it more pungently stronger , were always for me places of pure human folly .

Tell me Odin , the one eyed, in your infinite wisdom , why people seek beaches to freshen up in the most where the Heat is most strong ?

 
Photo: https://artbyjonna.com/


The North , my beloved North is where my soul is !

Why I asked myself many times was the cold lands of the North so appealing to me when the people who lived there seek the warmest and most pleasant lands of the south !?

Well probably the reason for this is that as a human , I suffered from the illness of Dissatisfaction . One of the tragedies of Human Condition is that one is never entirely satisfied with what one has and always seek something that one doesn’t have thinking that perhaps this eternal pot of Gold that we call Happiness is lying somewhere in pastures that look greener than the ones we have . Some say that this is also our greatness because it compels us to excel and look and explore for more , expand our horizons .

Nevertheless , whatever it is that compels me , a southern , to those icy cold, snowy , misty lands it was they that I always trod in my inner world, those lands that the ancient Arabic travelers erroneously referred as “ the land of Darkness “.

Having they actually visited those northern realms , they should more accurately call it “ The Land of Extremes “ because to the extreme darkness of winter comes the extreme light of the summer .

Oh how I eager for those misty sea of conifers of the purest emerald color ; Those serene lakes embraced by timeless mountains crowned with snowy peaks ; the icy winter landscapes with its frozen rivers and the pristine , unspoiled , untouched beauty of that North mysterious kingdom .

Where else can one behold one of nature´s most wondrous spectacles, The Northern Lights ?

In Norse mythology a legend suggests that the lights were reflections of the shields and armours of the Valkyrie , female warriors who would choose who may die in battle and who would live to fight another day.
Photo: https://artbyjonna.com/



Dying in battle was quite important in the old Norse culture and the Northern Lights were also believed to be Bifrost the Bridge , a glowing and pulsating arch that led those fallen in battle to the warriors final resting place , Valhalla .

With the more romantic spirit , the Estonians on the hand believed that the Aurora ( Northern Lights ) to be a heavenly magnificent horse drawn carriages taken guests to a celestial wedding.

And the snow . My Most beloved snow. Eternal inhabitant of those lands, forever will touch my soul with its overwhelming pristine Beauty.

I love the contrasts that the snow does in nature between white and dark shades.

How beautiful forests look like with these abstract patterns .

And much they fill my soul with a sense of glee and belonging !

The North , my beloved North will always be carried by me in my soul no matter where I go because its where my Viking adventurous soul is .

Skol to you my most beloved North .


quarta-feira, 3 de junho de 2020

By The Light Of The Moon

Photo :https://nonalimmen.bigcartel.com/

One of the many stories involving artists and their creative process , tells us about how Beethoven created his ethereal masterpiece , The Moonlight Sonata with its brilliantly melancholic 1st movement ( Adagio Sostenuto ).
Having born among the anonymous working masses of society , Beethoven , unfortunately for him, had to make a living by playing in soirees of the Aristocracy and the tale tells us that being rejected by a lady that he fancied , the genius of Bonn decided in an impulsive manner , so characteristic of himself, to leave the soiree and get into the warm summer night . There he beheld this beautiful full moon that inspired him in the composition of the great anthem of the Romanticism . The veracity of this story is of no importance here but what it is really important is that this story illustrates one of the most atavistic seductions of Man throughout History ; His fascination for the moon and fading light .
Since the dawn of time the satellite of our planet exercised in us a power that originated the 1st myths and later on some of the best artistic accomplishments of human ingenuity .
The Moon, especially when its full turns the night into a shady version of day , its magic inspiring all sorts of stories about creatures tat are too hideous, too monstrous to roam in day time among the so called " normal " , so to speak , creatures .
The rays of the Moon have the duplicity nature fighting the nightmarish imperium of the Night because the darkness , as a good Game of Thrones fan knows , is full terrors . But at the same time  those same rays who fights darkness also creates shadows that feeds our vivid imagination with all sorts of ghoulish phantoms . As the divine Poe says "... each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor ".
The moon kills the darkness of the night but brings forth the Demon of Fear that lurks in the most primitive recess of our soul .
I love the moon ! As its power controls the movements of the tides of the oceans of this planet , giving a periodic  , comfortable rhythm to nature , it also gives me the same comfort to my soul .
Bringing peace , serenity , a state of spirit the ancient Greeks refer to as Ataraxia , a freedom of disturbance of mind and anxiety, tranquility .
I think that is what Beethoven when he composed his magna opera , Moonlight Sonata .




domingo, 31 de maio de 2020

The World Through The Eyes of a Romantic

The common view of the contemporary layman , reduces Romanticism to acts of courtship between two people that have sensual intentions towards each other given a pale image of one of the most fascinating cultural movements of the modernity that shaped the way we now see each other and interact with the world.
The Romantics gave us individuality and a value of our emotions as the real source of an aesthetic experience .
The movement was born in the end of the 18th century rooted in the Sturm und Drang ( Storm and Drive ) movement in Germany but rapidly spread to other European countries particularly in England, France and Italy .
This post does not pretend to tell the History of Romanticism which is vast and rich , but its important to know some of its characteristics and why i believe that i look at the world through the eyes of a Romantic .
As i have stated previously, the romantics placed a great value to the individual emotion , especially in the aesthetic experience and more specific in the free expression of the emotion by the artist .
as the great German painter Casper David Friedrich pointed " The artist`s feeling is the law ".
For the English poet William Wordsworth poetry should begin " as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which the poet then recollects in Tranquility " evoking a new but corresponding emotion that the poet can mold into Art .
Art had to sprung from the imagination of the artist and not submitted to artificial rules . Hence the supreme value of the Genius for the Romantics .
Not essencial in the Romantics but so widespread as to be normative was the profound belief and interest in the importance of Nature . It was seen as quite beneficial to the artist in his creative process to be left alone in communion with Nature.
Opposite to the social art of the Enlightenment , Romantics were distrustful of the Human World and tended to believe that a closer connection with Nature would be morally and mentally healthier . A derivative concert of the " good savage " idealism of Rousseau .

Having said this , if a skepticism towards human societies and its innumerable laws that constrict us and individuality driven mostly by emotions and not reason are the landmarks of a Romantic , then i must proudly say that i am a romantic and see the world through the emotional and somehow gullible eyes of an 18th century individual and not the analytical and practical eyes of a man of my Time.
Gullible as  might be i despise this age of usefulness and effectiveness that hunted down without mercy all the useless things that constitute the embodiment of artistic and creative expression .
We live in an Age that values objective , useful things , things with a purpose , a society of Tools. Not realizing that what truly define us as humans are those things that have no other purpose but to awaken in us feelings being of beauty , horror , of pure awe in its various forms .
I raise my chalice of happiness to the ornate of life ! To the Empire of the Useless because beauty flourishes within its borders.
Casper David Freidrich - Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog 1818

quarta-feira, 27 de maio de 2020

Child of the Nephilin


In Norse cosmology Niflheim is literally the  "World of Mist " . 

According the first part of the Poetic Edda also known as  Gylfanning , Niflheim is described as a primordial realm of ice and cold with the frozen rivers of Elivagar and the Fountain of Hvergelmir from which the mentioned rivers come from .

Niflheim is one of the two primordial reals to emanate from the primordial void the Norse called Ginnungagap . The other one being Muspelheim the real of fire .

This world of Mist later would be that abode of Hel , Goddess of the Underworld who received in her house of mist the unfortunate ones that did not die in battle .



Mist has always exercised in me a profound influence in my spirit not one of fear , sadness and even bad omen, but rather one of magic and wonder .

Nature has a way of drawing our attention to its intrinsic beauty . Who has never felt bewildered by the beauty of a landscape covered with the pure white blanket of snow ? Who had never felt the serenity of that vast sea of whiteness that releases you from the chains of your Ego just to make you awe with that nature`s marvel ? 

Mist its nature´s element of mystery , of dream . Mist is the way nature has to tell you that life is nothing but a dream , a chimera , a "...walking shadow " like the bard of Strafford Upon Avon brilliant observed . 

Poe says that " life is a dream within a dream " ; Calderon de La Barca " La vida es un Sueño " and mother nature show us in a beautiful misty , foggy winter day that indeed life is a dream .

When i walk through wet , ancient cobbled streets in a misty day i feel like a character in a Gothic tale for the enjoyment of a benevolent creature spending a cosmic winter , windy , cold day while drinking a nice cup of tea . 

I feel mysteries and nameless creatures lurking in that vaporous scenario . Silhouettes of unfinished works of a creative Deity .

What i wouldn´t give to be a character in the brilliant film of Alejandro Amenabar , The Others , just to live in that dreamy world of Mist !?

I am a child of Niflheim and there like any child my eyes sparkle with the sheer magic of life .


Mild the mist upon the hill
Telling not of storms tomorrow;
No, the day has wept its fill,
Spent its store of silent sorrow.

O, I'm gone back to the days of youth,
I am a child once more,
And 'neath my father's sheltering roof
And near the old hall door

I watch this cloudy evening fall
After a day of rain;
Blue mists, sweet mists of summer pall
The horizon's mountain chain.

The damp stands on the long green grass
As thick as morning's tears,
And dreamy scents of fragrance pass
That breathe of other years. 

                                    Emily Brönte


domingo, 24 de maio de 2020

Eros & Psyche

written in the 2nd century AD by Lucius  Apuleius Madaurencis in his book "Metamorphosis" also known as " The Golden Ass", the story tells the obstacles that Eros ( Love ) and Psyche ( soul ) have to face till their sacred union is completed .
Many interpretations and readings can be made of this beautiful tale , but the one that interests me the most is the paradox of this union .
Can Eros and Psyche not live without each other as the myth says or one needs more the existence of the other to sustain its own existence ? 
Can we love without a soul ? can the soul exist without love ? 
To answer that we have to first be aware of who Eros really is .
in Greek Mythology Eros is the son of Aphrodite , Goddess of Love with Ares God of War. 
however Hesiod in his "Theogony " considers him son of Chaos, a primordial God .
There he describes him as being very beautiful and  irresistible which leads him to abandon his good judgement . Hesiod gives him a unifying role , contributing to the passage of Chaos to Cosmos ( Order ).
Plato however in his book Symposium , describes Eros in a very negative manner .
To him Eros depicted as being poor, homeless , always barefoot and sleeping on the floor. Plato describes him also has seeking constantly for beautiful bodies , hunting them with mischiefs, intrigues and lies . He is a philosopher , a sophist , making potent potions . Its nature is neither mortal or immortal and in one day when everything turns right to him , on the next day he will die just to return again on the next day . But everything he gets he loses quickly .
This very negative view that Plato has of Eros will set the way thinkers and mystics will look upon sensual love for centuries to come .
There will be a suspicion concerning the poisonous nature of Love and an attempt to protect the purity of the Soul from it .
Not only these thinkers and mystics thought that the Soul could live without Love , but it was preferably to do so. 
Sensual love with its obvious sexual connotations was seen as something disruptive and corruptive to the Soul. It drowned the soul into stormy waters , clogging one`s judgement .
Eros became forever seen as a reminder to man that he was an angel with clay feet unable to higher realms unless only his idealism and mysticism .
Strange creatures we are that so fiercely try to conceal our animalhood aspiring to a divinity that we never possessed .
Why this need to reject nature ? Reject the living breathing biology in us? Religion and Morality makes us sick and feeble like Nietzsche said. Shame is nothing but a moral category , artificial and abstract like all morality is. Embrace the Eros in us and let us invite us Psyche to celebrate this great, magical feast called LIFE .

quarta-feira, 20 de maio de 2020

Being Peter Pan

In 1902 , the Scottish Novelist and Playwriter , J.M.Barrie , in a novel called " The Little White Beard", introduces a character called Peter Pan who is a 7 days years old baby who has flown from his nursery to Kesington Gardens in London where the fairies and bird taught him to fly . He is described as a creature between a boy and a bird .
The character Peter Pan would later develop in to the archetype of the boy who would never grow up into manhood and also of a certain carelessness and selfishness towards life.
The expression " Being a Peter Pan " immediately adopted a negative connotation , implying the incapacity vs refusal , in accepting the painful contradictions that reality imposes onto every human being . Modern Psychoanalysis even adopted the name Peter Pan in reference to the inability that certain individuals have ( usually men but also some women ) to believe that they are of an older age and/or to engage in behavior usually associated with adulthood , by calling The Peter Pan Syndrome .
The concept became popular when in 1983 the American Psychoanalyst Dr Dan Kiley in his book " The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up"mentions the fact that while doing therapy with teenage boys he detected an incapacity from them to grow up and accept adult responsibilities like the character of J.M.Barrie. And this problem continue into adulthood.

Without wanting to dispute the truth of a science i know very little if not nothing, i would like to put aside the pejorative association of  the name Peter Pan , so negative that even the British author Aldous Huxley associate it with the sinister figure of Adolf Hitler, and restaure the name into a more favorable manner .
Recognizing myself as one of those Peter Pans that roam the world like plagues of locusts in the fields of adulthood conformity , i see being Peter Pan as not a denial and refuse of dealing with reality but rather an harmless drug against its most poisonous effects .
Reality for an highly conscious being with all its contradictions , incoherences, is sometimes an unbearable and often traumatic experience. If we can alleviate the weight of that reality by creating our own personal Neverland even if briefly , i take that as an healthy mechanism of self defence , a balsam for one`s soul .
When in his extraordinary novel" Le Petit Prince" , Antoine St Exupéry makes the little Prince tell us that we should never lose the child inside of us with the risk that by doing so we will lose also the capability of seeing life with awe, wonder , magic; What is he telling us if not that Peter Pan must live with us!? Within certain boundaries of course. Because in the bottomless pit of the human mind the line between sanity and insanity is rather slim.



domingo, 17 de maio de 2020

Literature for Free Thinkers

one wonders if mankind moves forward or backwards.
we live in an age filled with paradoxes and one of those paradoxes is that we live in an age that glorifies Democracy and free speech and at the same time it enslaves us in the iron chains of political correctness. suddenly you cant say a million of things because it might upset the feelings of different groups of people . 
Although from one side this means a civilizational leap in terms of conscience for the dignity of the individual or a group of individuals,  from the other it limits our capacity of criticism and of self expression turning us all into herds of well behaved sheep grazing in the fields of conformity and often hypocrisy .

History offers us countless examples of individuals that had the courage to breach the mediocre wall of conformity and speak their minds but i leave here two of the most brilliant of those courageous individuals . Two brilliant minds who had no fear in exposing human nature , looking at humans without the mask , as the portuguese poet Teixeira Pascoaes brilliant pointed out .


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_de_La_Rochefoucauld_(writer)



Love in the Digital Age

In 2003, the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman in his book "Liquid Love "speaks, even before the advent of the internet social networks of the way that our human relations became somehow more "flexible" developing increasing levels of insecurity.
the liquid modernity "a world filled with confusing signs with a tendency to change in a quick and unpredictable way" in which we live in brings with it a mysterious frailty in human bondage , what he calls a "liquid love ".
Basically Bauman points out to the fact that given the wide variety of choices at our dispose in the "love market " we not only trivialize human relations but we dehumanize the other reducing a human being to something that like any other item can be discarded and replaced by something better .
The wide variety of choices that the Web offers in terms of relationships, endangers the possibility of solid and fruitful relationships.
The internet brought with it an enhancement of one`s individuality that carries the idea that i, as having the divine given right to happiness, should seek it in the most brutally selfish manner looking to a partner now as long time investment but as a temporarily one .
Tragically in this scenario not only love relationships and family bonds are endangered but also our capacity of treating the other with humanity is as well put to danger .
Internet speeds up  the ephemeral nature of Life .



quarta-feira, 13 de maio de 2020

SOLITUDE


What is solitude ? Why many of us fear it ? and why others seek it so fervently ?
We often confuse solitude with loneliness , when in reality they are very different .
Loneliness is never a state in which is voluntarily immersed into it . Its a state imposed by the circumstances of one`s life that lead to that condition . And loneliness has such an insidious character that even surrounded by lots of people and apparently having a successful and joyful personal life , you can feel yourself stranded in the grim dark forest of Loneliness .
Solitude is something , however , of a completely different manner .
Mystics throughout History sought it to understand the mystery of existence and the role they played in it .
in Ancient Greece , the Oracle of Delphi had , inscribed in its portico ,  the maxim KNOW THYSELF  ( Gnothi Seauton ) .
Only through solitude we will have the enough distance from the rattle of the world to know ourselves . And why do we need to know ourselves ? Because only by knowing ourselves intimately 
we can move through life in a disciplined and wise manner. 
We can ask ourselves what we can and what we cannot do . What is good and what is not good for us.

In his book  " Silence in the Age of Noise ", the Norwegian Explorer Erling Kagge , speaks of the gift that the solitude of crossing Antarctica alone gave him . The gift of talking to that friend that he always had but was always silenced by the noise of everyday life ; HIM.
The vast and desolate ice deserts of Antarctica made him lose his fear  of confronting him with his inner self . Which is a fear common to most of us . How many of us really know ourselves ?
the Danish philosopher Kierkgaard  said that we seek the company of people because we dread to be alone in our company . Why is that ?
What do we fear ? Perhaps do we fear that our soul is grotesque as the portrait of Dorian Gray and we want to shun from it ? Or we fear that we are so dull that left to ourselves to entertain us we would end up die from an horrible tedium ?

From my part i always enjoyed my solitude and very seldom in it i have felt alone .
Embrace your solitude and in it you might surprise yourself and find the best friend you ever had : YOU .