"insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule"
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thus i speak
just had a short conversation with one cousin with whom i hope to be having lunch in about one week's time somewhere by the beach. he asked me what i am doing, and i say "lies, all lies." then he asks me if i am now a lawyer... and i say that if the money is good, i'll do that. he is a lawyer, and we laughed and turned to other matters including the weather. while in california it has been raining quite a bit, in portugal the water reservoirs are hitting all time lows.
in the midst of churning up the ideas and wrestling this beast to the ground, i find one sentence that is bothering me: the french are overrated. i said this about twice on a social occasion when in spite of total sobriety, my words were drunk. i said this to somebody born in germany while chatting meaninglessly about italian wine with him and an irishman. identity has been an issue for a while, so much so... one day a friend sent me a book by Amin Maalouf "les identités meurtrières" that somehow sums it all up in the title: murderous identities.
i always feel at home in france, if i was not born there, it was an accident. when i was 14 i wrote french better than english. i learned german with the help of a french-german dictionary among other things. when i need to get my head straight, i usually take off to paris where i have enough friends and family to find nurturance and peace, to say nothing of free lodging. being in paris does me a whole lot of good, whether i will ever get my head straight is another matter.
how many times have i died in paris? how many times have i been reborn in paris? yes, reborn, yes died. overrated! the irony of it all, humour macabre.
i had one good conversation and a few good laughs over our own limitations with one of my teachers this weekend. when he left on sunday, we hugged each other and he expressed his good wishes for my new life' struggles. i was irritated by his use of the word struggle... still, that is exactly what this is. wrestling the words down to the ground, as my friend joan schenkar would say, is hard work, it is a struggle, and i have chosen to do this. (clearly not an exact quote, but that what i got from it)
the french are as overrated as the germans, or the japanese, or the persians... what do i know?
damn, that was not even the issue. does not only enlightenment come unannounced and without an alarm, it also has no sense of timing.
now i am just annoyed that some of the pictures i took on the weekend did not come out because i mistakingly thought that i had the camera on a different mode than what it actually was at, and the focus is damn lousy, it was not on dynamic focus it was on spot focus. i had good reason to think that i had changed the focusing mode to dynamic. damn, i am slow, and when i try to do things fast, shit happens.
i get tired of again and again being asked what my nationality is. nationalism is a mental illness.
i get tired of the question, but what is your real name? frankly, i don't know, i was born naked and unnamed.
i get tired of the probing about my sense of belonging, i belong nowhere, i belong to nobody, i own nothing, i own nobody.
i get annoyed with myself when i do not have the courage to speak the unspeakable.
in my annoyance, i struggle.
slowly i am starting to get what one of my coaches once told me... slowly it is sinking in.
massivement cinétique, pesée.
