Decir indirectamente las cosas

Qué curioso: en las novelas japonesas, uno de los hábitos de la gente de la corte es, cuando quieren decir algo, no decirlo directamente, sino citar un verso -chino o japonés- que antecede a lo que quieren decir. Y así se dicen indirectamente las cosas.

Jorge Luis Borges

No man is without a religion

I would say that men -for example in communism- have a religion, because they believe in science.

They believe unconditionally in modern science. And this unconditional believe in science, that means the confidence in the certainty of the results of science, is a belief and is in a certain way something that exceeds the existence of a single person, and is therefore a religion.

And I would say: no man is without a religion, and every man is in a certain manner transcending himself.

Martin Heidegger

Spoken vs written tongue

The main difference between affective and logical language lies in the construction of the sentence. The difference stands out when we compare the written with the spoken tongue. In French the two are so far removed from each other that a Frenchman never speaks as he writes and rarely writes as he speaks.

...

The elements that the written tongue endeavours to combine into a coherent whole seem to be divided up and disjointed in the spoken tongue: even the order is entirely different. It is no longer the logical order of present-day grammar. It has its logic, but this logic is primarily affective, and the ideas are arranged in accordance with the subjective importance the speaker gives to them or wishes to suggest to his listener, rather than with the objective rules of an orthodox process of reasoning.

In the spoken tongue, all idea of meaning in the purely gramatical sensse, disappears.

Joseph Vendryes: Le Langage

El alma secreta de las cosas

Kandinsky escribió: "Todo lo que está muerto palpita. No sólo las cosas de la poesía, estrellas, luna, bosque, flores, sino aún un botón de calzoncillo brillando en el lodazal de la calle... Todo tiene un alma secreta, que guarda silencio con más frecuencia de la que habla."

El pintor italiano Carlo Carrá escribió: "Son las cosas corrientes las que revelan aquellas formas de sencillez mediante las cuales podemos percibir esa situación superior y más significativa del ser donde reside todo el esplendor del arte."

Paul Klee dijo: "El objeto se expande más allá de los límites de su apariencia por nuestro conocimiento de que la cosa es más que el exterior que nos presenta ante los ojos."

Jean Bazaine escribió: "Un objeto despierta nuestro amor sólo porque parece ser el portador de poderes que son mayores que él."

El pintor italiano Giorgio de Chirico escribió: "Todo objeto tiene dos aspectos: el aspecto común, que es el que generalmente vemos y que todos ven, y el aspecto fantasmal y metafísico, que sólo ven raras personas en momentos de clarividencia y meditación metafísica. Una obra de arte tiene que contar algo que no aparece en su forma visible."

Chagal escribió: "Todo puede cambiar en nuestro desmoralizado mundo, excepto el corazón, el amor del hombre y su esfuerzo por conocer la divinidad. La pintura, como toda poesía, tiene su parte en la divinidad; la gente siente esto hoy día igual que lo sintió siempre."

Aniela Jaffé: El simbolismo en las artes visuales.

En "El hombre y sus símbolos" de Carl G. Jung.

TV

What's so inhuman about television it is not that it chops everything up and interrupts it with ads, although that's already bad enough. Far worse is that everything on the air becomes an ad itself, an ad for the existing conditions. All broadcast images settle down to a common, nauseating transmission, a kind of pretentious contempt. No image leaves you alone. They all want something from you.

Wim Wenders: Alice in den Städten

Tradition

When tradition thus becomes master it does so in such a way that what it 'transmits' is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such and origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.

Martin Heidegger

The Myth of Success

The consumers are the workers and salaried employees, the farmers and petty bourgeois. Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them. However, just as the ruled have always taken the morality dispensed to them by the rulers more seriously than the rulers themselves, the defrauded masses today cling to the myth of of success still more ardently than the successful. They, too, have their aspirations. They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are enslaved. The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities.

Theodor W. Adorno

Ser culto y ser maestro

El hombre –tendencias filosóficas actuales, novísimas, lo afirman a través del genio de Martin Heidegger– no es solamente un intelecto. El hombre es inteligencia, pero también sentimiento, y anhelo metafísico, y sentido religioso. El hombre es un compuesto; de la armonía de sus posibilidades surge la perfección. Por eso, ser culto significa atender al mismo tiempo a todos los valores y no meramente a los intelectuales. Ser culto es saber el sánscrito, si se quiere, pero también maravillarse ante un crepúsculo; ser culto es llenar fichas acerca de una disciplina que se cultiva con preferencia, pero también emocionarse con una música o un cuadro, o descubrir el íntimo secreto de un verso o de un niño.

Y aún no he logrado precisar qué debe entenderse por cultura; los ejemplos resultan inútiles. Quizá se comprendiera mejor mi pensamiento decantado en este concepto de la cultura: la actitud integralmente humana, sin mutilaciones, que resulta de un largo estudio y de una amplia visión de la realidad.

Así tiene que ser el maestro.

...

El maestro debe llegar a la cultura mediante un largo estudio. Estudio de lo exterior, y estudio de sí mismo. Aristóteles y Sócrates, de ahí las dos actitudes. Uno, la visión de la realidad a través de sus múltiples ángulos; el otro, la visión de sí mismo a través del cultivo de la propia personalidad. Y, esto hay que creerlo, ambas cosas no se logran por separado. Nadie se conoce a sí propio sin haber bebido la ciencia ajena en inacabables horas de lectura y de estudio; y nadie conoce el alma de los semejantes sin asistir primero al deslumbramiento de descubrirse a sí mismo.

La cultura resulta así una actitud que nace imperceptiblemente; nadie puede despertarse una mañana y decir: "Soy culto". Puede, sí, decir: "Sé muchas cosas", y nada más. La mejor prueba de cultura suele darla aquel que habla muy poco de sí mismo: porque la cultura no es una cosa, sino que es una visión; se es culto cuando el mundo se nos ofrece con la máxima amplitud; cuando los problemas menudos dejan  de tener consistencia; cuando se descubre que lo cotidiano es lo falso, y que sólo en lo más puro, lo más bello, lo más bueno, reside la esencia que el hombre busca. Cuando se comprende lo que verdaderamente quiere decir Dios.

Julio Cortázar: Esencia y misión del maestro.

Frank

Frank wanted to save lives. He joined the army hoping to become a paramedic and help soldiers injured in combat. But then he thought about his wife and kids. He thought that what he wanted was to save lives and not to take them just because he would be ordered to. When he realized this, he talked to his captain, who told him he didn't need to be in the service to help others, to be useful to the community as he wanted to. And so Frank got into the Community College, which coincidentally was training the same group of soldiers he would have been a part of.

He became a paramedic and worked with the Emergency Response teams for several years. When he is asked about how he got into it, he says it was destiny. He didn't have to go to war. He thinks about the veterans, and how they never get to be the same when they return. He wonders what would have happened to him, if he would still be out there in combat facing death. Cause he says no matter what, no matter how long you have been doing this, there is so much you get to see, that you can never get used to it. Deep down, there is always something that hurts. Even when we have to be tough, he says, we are still human beings, we have feelings.

Now he drives a bus. He says it was too much pressure, and there is nothing like being happy, living happy and relaxed. And every single morning, like he has done for the past two years, he stops, a minute sooner, a minute later, at the designated places and greets his passengers with a big smile and tells them stories, with an enthusiastic voice that sounds like he is really glad and thankful to be alive for one more day. And you can almost see the shining of his bright pure soul reflected in the rearview mirror, as he drives away while you try to catch some sleep during the morning commute.

The shape of god

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything which brings shame and reproach among men: theft, adultery and fraud.

But mortal men imagine that gods are begotten, and that they have human dress and speech and shape.

If oxen or horses or lions had hands to draw with and to make works of art as men do, then horses would draw the forms of gods as horses, oxen like oxen, and they would make their gods' bodies similar to the bodily shape that they themselves each had.

The Ethiopians say their gods are snub-nosed and black-skinned, the Thracians that they are blue-eyed and red-headed.

Truly the gods have not revealed to mortals all things from the beginning; but mortals by long seeking discover what is better.

Xenophanes of Colophon