Bunla

Tertius Oculus

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Moon

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Dismantling

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

When we are born our brain is open to the world. We itch to understand and to learn. A product of our nature and our will to survive. But the information that enters the mind, from which we build a model of the world, is always wrong, biased, inexact. Archetypes slip in along the way. The ones Jung spoke of, the social ones.

We spend a good part of the rest of our lives understanding them, and dismantling the many that do more harm than good.

But many people question nothing, dismantle nothing. And they live condemned to the pursuit of a simplistic happiness, one that is often dictated by others.

if only

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Yellow

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Yellow. In Spanish, amarillo, from the Latin amarus, bitter. The colour of the sun, the colour of sickness, the colour of sunflowers, the colour of bile, the colour of gold, the colour of warning…

And there we go on, stuffing meaning into a visible slice of the spectrum, trying to make sense, meaning, out of what has none.

Change

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

On waking, our consciousness gathers up the clothes it left the night before by the bedside table. These are the garments that make us feel like a self. A cohesion of matter and thoughts. The night before we left worn clothes, clothes with a history. Sometimes torn, sometimes with new golden buttons. A whole personal history. And in the morning we pick them up and dress ourselves.

The fabric wears out, changes, whipped by damned Chronos, time without scruples. But it doesn’t change every day, or every hour, or every minute; it changes constantly. In every instant.

It doesn’t suit the mind to understand that in every instant we are different. We depend on the inertia of being, on the seemingly constant entity we believe ourselves to be. We only admit we have changed when it is unavoidable. When we compare the young man with the adult, the adult with the old man, or the wisdom gained after some particular experience. But in truth the changes in our being are brutal, frequent, relentless. Yet we keep up the illusion, without thinking it is an illusion. Daydreams.

In the mornings I pick up yesterday’s identity, which is no longer the same. Nor is it after this full stop.

Obsession

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

At thirteen, young Pablo found a battered copy of Bach’s six suites for solo cello. And I say found, but really he rediscovered Bach’s lost manuscript. Another thirteen years went by, practising those six pieces every day, before he played them in public. Over the years, with relentless practice, he became the greatest cellist of all time. But Pablo kept practising. In his nineties someone asked him why he still played day after day, when he had already become the great Pablo Casals, the best cellist in history. He replied that he was only just beginning to notice some improvement.

Obsession. It means siege: surrounding a place and letting no one in or out. An idea takes over the mind, and blinds it, clouds the understanding. Obsession becomes the only way to live. The life force.

Bernhard

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Back in the early two-thousands I went through a period of hungry reading. A friend had suggested a book by Thomas Bernhard, an author I had never heard of. I ended up fascinated by his books, by his rage, his nihilism and his forms. That peculiar rhythm: two steps forward, one step back. Reading him is reliving every idea with an exquisite, musical cadence. I read several of his books. But my mind drifted off into other waters and I never read The Loser, perhaps his best-known book.

Recently I started it, and it surprised me as if I were reading Bernhard for the first time. With the benefit of a perhaps more orderly mind, able to appreciate his subtleties even more. Avid and greedy.

Gould's Goldberg Variations

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Listening to the Goldberg Variations from Glenn Gould’s fingers makes my hair stand on end. That humming from beyond the grave gets into your bones.

Is the humming part of Gould’s plan for immortality? The final signature of his work? A message from the other side? A seal that breaks the dimension of time? A metaphysical experience, either way.

Struggle

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:00:00 +0000

More and more I understand that man’s struggle is against himself, in his own mind, rather than out in the world. A struggle to tame his own demons.