Destiny...

The town in the night
Death in a cry
And the child in life...

Yannis Stavrou, Destiny, oil on canvas (detail) 

Jacques Prevert 

Family Life

The mother knits
The son is at war
It seems completely natural to the mother
And the father, what does the father do?
He does business
His wife knits
The son is at war
It seems completely natural to the father
And the son, the son?
What does he think, the son?
Nothing
He doesn't think anything... the son
His mother knits
His father does business
He is in the war
When the war is over
He will do business with his father
The war continues
The mother continues knitting
The father continues doing business
The son is killed
He doesn't continue
The father and the mother go to the cemetery
They find it quite natural, the father and the mother
Life goes on, life
Knitting
War
Business
Business, business, business
Life with the cemetery.

The mother knits
The son goes to the war
She finds this quite natural, the mother
And the father?
What does the father do?
He has his business
His wife knits
His son goes to the war
He has his business
He finds this quite natural, the father
And the son
And the son
What does the son find?
He finds absolutely nothing, the son
The son: his mother does her knitting,
His father has his business
And he has the war
When the war is over
He'll go into business with his father
The war continues
The mother continues knitting
The father continues with his business
The son is killed
He doesn't continue
The father and mother visit the graveyard
They find this natural
The father and the mother
Life goes on
A life of knitting, war, business
Business, war, knitting, war
Business, business, business
Life with the graveyard

Familiale

La mère fait du tricot
Le fils fait la guerre
Elle trouve ça tout naturel la mère
Et le père qu'est-ce qu'il fait le père ?
Il fait des affaires
Sa femme fait du tricot
Son fils la guerre
Lui des affaires
Il trouve ça tout naturel le père
Et le fils et le fils
Qu'est-ce qu'il trouve le fils ?
Il ne trouve rien absolument rien le fils
Le fils sa mère fait du tricot son père fait des affaires lui la guerre
Quand il aura fini la guerre
Il fera des affaires avec son père
La guerre continue la mère continue elle tricote
Le père continue il fait des affaires
Le fils est tué il ne continue plus
Le père et la mère vont au cimetière
Ils trouvent ça naturel le père et la mère
La vie continue la vie avec le tricot la guerre les affaires
Les affaires la guerre le tricot la guerre
Les affaires les affaires et les affaires
La vie avec le cimetière.

First Day (*)

White sheets in a closet
Red sheets on a bed
A child in its mother
The mother in agony
The father in the hallway
The hallway in the house
The house in the town
The town in the night
Death in a cry
And the child in life

(*)(Copyright (c) 1997 by Alastair Campbell)
"Poems of Jacques Prévert", Alastair Campbell, 
Apt 1006, 5303 52nd St, Yellowknife, NWT, Canada, XIA-IVI

Our judgments judge us...

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false...

Yannis Stavrou, Coffee and Books, oil on canvas (detail)

Paul Valéry

Aphorisms

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.

Politeness is organized indifference.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Paul Valéry 1871-1945

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

A man who is ‘of sound mind’ is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

Love is being stupid together.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

At times I think and at times I am.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world

 Arthur Schopenhauer (1815), portrait by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl

Arthur Schopenhauer
Quotes

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.  
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

The Shock Doctrine...

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.



At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

A man's worth has its season, like fruit...

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them...

About human nature - one of the greatest minds


François VI duke de La Rochefoucauld
(1613-1680)

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Aphorisms

(some of his 504 aphorisms found in his book "Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales")

It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them.

It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.

It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.

It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self.

It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Jealously is always born with love but it does not die with it.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another.

Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.

Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.

Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

A man's worth has its season, like fruit.

A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish.

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.

Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.

Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.

Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.

Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.