Your death will serve as warning

1

Lovely world of cottages

Of mines and fields

2

Faces good in firelight good in frost

Refusing the night the wounds and blows

3

Faces good for everything

Now the void fixes you

Your death will serve as warning

4

Death the heart turned over

5

They made you pay your bread

Sky earth water sleep

And the misery

of your life

6

They said they wanted intelligence

They measured the strong judged the mad

Handed out alms split a cent in two

They greeted the corpses

They were polite

7

They persevere overdo they are not of our world

8

Women children keep the same treasure

Green springtime leaves and pure milk

Endurance

In their pure eyes

9

Women children keep the same treasure

In their eyes

Men defend them as they can

10

Women children keep the same red roses

In their eyes

They show their blood

11

Fear and courage to live and die

Death so hard and so simple

12

Men for whom this treasure was sung

Men for whom this treasure was wrecked

13

True men for whom despair

Nourishes hope’s devouring ardour

Let us open the future’s last bud

14

Pariahs the death earth and ugliness

Of our enemies have a colour

Grim as our night

We shall win out

 Victory of Guernica

by Paul Eluard

Gernika, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Libya, Algeria, Cambodia, Vietnam, Gaza, Jerusalem,... Syria, Sudan, Central African Republic, Congo, Irak,... the people!

Les choses, George Perec

I recommend this book by the French writer George Perec (available in Spanish, in English,..).

Although the title says "a story of the sixties", I think this book is also about today in the "developed world", the "first world".

The Wrong Place

I recommend it

Slaughterhouse Five

It is said that it is one of the best antimilitarist novels. Its author, Kurt Vonnegut, like the main character, Billy Pilgrim, was a witness of the destruction of Dresden (Germany) by the Allied bombers when the Second World War was close to finish. The “reason” was to hasten the end of the war. For that reason 135,000 people were killed in a town which was not a military target (it was an open city, it was undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance).

Billy was a war prisoner and was locked up in the slaughterhouse of the town, in the building number 5. He was one of the few survivors, survived?

When we meet the main character, he is already a mad man because of the war. In fact he lives travelling along the time and mixes reality with fiction inside his crazy mind. However, the reality is more unreal than his imaginations. He said that he has been abducted by the Tralfamadorians. They are alien beings and appear to be very interesting in the Earthling people. The Tralfamadorians know that the time doesn’t go by, they know that everything happens at the same time so they see all the moments, all the ages, simultaneously.

Billy speaks the same about the cruelty of the was, about his sweet childhood in a small village of the USA, about his marriage for money, about the dead of his father, the dead of his wife, about his daughter who cares for him, about his son who is a green beret in the Vietnam War, about his interstellar travels, about his ridiculous admiration for a mediocre science fiction writer, and about the delirious arguments of statesmen comparing the number of killed people because of atom bombs with the number because of “conventional” bombs.

This novel is really good. The rhythm captures you and the humour, the irony which is very well used by him, makes you smile. Step by step the pace envelopes you and you do not know if you should smile or… For example,  you can imagine Billy clothed like a clown with odds and ends (given by his guards), walking on the moonscape of the destroyed Dresden and mixing the facts of his calamitous life in his sick mind and then, he suddenly remember you that the teen girls who he described nudes a few pages before are dead, burned and quartered… by the Allied attack.

You finish the book. You close the book. You continue thinking

So it goes

How long will this rain keep on?

When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?

He wanted to speak to his son, but the could think of nothing to say.

I put all of my trust and hope in you. And all I get is blank misunderstanding and idleness and indifference. Of all I put in nothing has remained.

This summer she realized something about her dad she had never known before. He was lonesome and he was an old man.

He talked about how things would have been if he had just managed in a different way.

Each minute was so long that in it there was ample time for contemplation and enquiry.

The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction.

Your kid shot my baby in the head on purpose.

This is one of the commandments Karl Marx left to us. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

The emptiness spread in him. All was gone. Antonapoulos was away; he was not here to remember.

They all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.

Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.

You know full well that I do not want to leave. You pressed me into saying yes when I was in no fit condition to make a decision.

I wish to remain where I have always been, and you know it.

How long will this rain keep on?

And in the dream there was a peculiar horror in wandering on and on through the crowd and not knowing where to lay down the burden he had carried in his arms so long.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson Mc Cullers

One

Too much trouble to cling to the rest

Some of the work bored me to tears. Still, I didn’t mind the job, and the company was a relaxed place. Because I had seniority, I was able to pick and choose my assignments, and say pretty much whatever I wanted to do. My boss was OK, and I got along with my co-workers. And the salary wasn’t half bad. So if nothing had happened, I probably would have stayed with the company for the foreseeable future. And my life, like the Moldau River would have continued to flow, ever so swiftly, into the sea.

(…)

At work the next day I handed in my letter of resignation. My boss had heard rumors and decide that it would be best to put me on extended leave for the time being. My colleagues were startled to hear that I wanted to quit, but no one tried very hard to talk me out of it. Quitting a job is not so difficult after all, I discovered. Once you make up your mind to get rid of something, there’s very little you can’t discard. No- not very little. Once you put your mind to it, there’s nothing you can’t get rid of. And once you start tossing things out, you find yourself wanting to get rid of everything. It’s as if you’d gambled away almost all your money and decided, what the hell, I’ll bet what’s left. Too much trouble to cling to the rest.

Man-eating cats

Haruki Murakami

Giacometti

One of the Giacometti's chief preoccupations, he explained to us, was to discover the particular accent or relationship that enables us to identify a person we know off in the distance - to realise that it isn't just a man or a woman, but one particular man or woman.
'A man far away has no more individuality than a pin if we don't know him,' he said. 'If he's someone we known, we recognise him and he assumes an identify for us. Why? It's the relationship between his masses and quantities. If he's hollow-eyed, the shadows on his cheeks are longer. If he has a large, bold nose, there's a stronger patch of light in that spot, and he's no longer the anonymous pin. So it's the sculptor's job to make those humps and hollows create an identity by highlighting the essential points that tell us this is one person rather than another.'
Life with Picasso
Françoise Gilot

Turning, by Antony

Antony with a group of women. Some people would say a group of lesbians and transsexuals. Some people need to put labels. Some people need order. They do not mind not to live, they want to have security. They write rules and define genders. They are afraid of darkness, of feelings, of love. They only want the time to go by waiting for the promised heaven.

This is a documentary about the tour around Europe. Not, this is only the background. It is about the personal stories of these woman. It is about misunderstanding, is about the sexual identity finding. There are some funny moments and other ones really hard and deeply moving. It is hard to be free.

sadness

(A lot of memories as I saw this film)

Some things go beyond the limits...

"There are things one can do and make them understood, and there are other things that can only be done by coup d'état since they go beyond the limits of another person's understanding. It's almost better to strike a blow and after people have recovered from it, let the accept the fact."

Pablo Picasso

Life with Picasso

by Francoise Gilot 

p94