Don’t think about the color “Blue” for a minute…

ONE

Let’s imagine I dislike George Michael. I hate his music. So here I am building a web page about that : “I hate GM !”. I write daily articles about everything I hate, his nose, his voice, his life, etc.

Until I realize I hate George Michael and I’m thinking about him all day long. I harvest things for my blog. I hunt. I spit words. I am obsessed by someone I don’t want to think about. Smart !

TWO

Don’t think about the color “Blue” for a minute…

Mmmhhh ?…

THREE

As I’m constantly reading slices of books, I one day read something in my sofa, from Nietzsche, and two hours later, in triangles of sun (see picture below), from André Suares (I will find the quotes soon and put it there). Both were talking about people banning sex from their life. They were both noticing that when you do that, you have like a black hole in the center of your brain, thinking about sex constantly.

Work for a Temperance Movement, become an activist : you will be in a position where you talk about… alcohol and sex constantly !

Tool :

If you hate George, just don’t pay attention to him. Breathe. If you want to think about the color blue, think of it, it’s not that dramatic. If you want to have a drink, just relax and have a glass of wine. If you need peace, don’t build a block castle : listen to some Royksopp and dance with what’s around. Dialog. Or not. Solemn drama or dolphin casualness ?

I suggest Coming Home.

The Flight Excites the Hunter

 

 

Reading the News… in old magazines

Diogenes Syndrome is a curse of course, a disease. Some people live like isolated monsters in accumulations of “things”, papers, books, whatever. I don’t live in domestic squalor and I don’t collect old candies wrappers, but I admit I keep too many things in the basement, including… boxes of old magazines.

From time to time I open one box and bring two dozens of old Pop-Rock, movies or news magazines at work. At lunch time, I read them. It provides me many little things :

• I eventually have small talks with people around me, surprised to see me reading  news from 2001. They think I’m a weirdo, and it’s a good feeling, I don’t know why.
• I get the satisfaction to realise that the “big pop groups” I disliked in the past vanished into oblivion. Bim. So there !
• I sometimes google some personalities to see how they are and what they do “now”, fifteen years after. It’s full of surprises, random changes, new roads, and disillusions…
• I save money : instead of buying a great new book at 24 Euros, I can find, eleven or fifteen years later, a pocket second hand one at 90 cents.
• Therefore, this makes me often think about what we all find “important” today…

Voilà ! Isn’t it a bliss, from time to time, to get under the surface of the “news” ?

Tool : Why couldn’t we use this “state of mind” for what we have now ? What if we imagine “What will this be in fifteen years” ? In entertainment, but also for our struggles and problems. Isn’t life short ? Is THIS (whatever it is) sooo important, really ?

How to stop spinning around damn rules

There are so many types of rules : inner and moral rules, the laws, the norms of a society, and even some unspoken rules !

These rules don’t interest me that much today. I want to track the way we interact with them… – for the laws of your country, just follow, OK ? C’est d’accord ? Oui.

What do you do with rules when you feel that they’re not OK any more ?

You can obey them, though, persistently, “because they are rules”. Follow morality (which says always : “Don’t”) and try to find happiness into that !

You can keep them but follow your inner new ones. You can do that for a while only, like putting a augmented reality mask built by you, on old rules.

Yes you can bend rules, just a little – I know, this sounds very French, probably (we like to cross roads out of zebras). Testing the elasticity of rules in a national sport, in my country.

You can sparkle. You follow the rules but for one second you don’t. Hop ! Once, you decide to say “Yes !”. Then back to the track, immédiatement ! Or…not.

There’s an old good book called “The Strategy of the Dolphin”. The authors divide human beings in “Carps” (no invention, total obedience, etc), “Sharks” (rebellion, agression), and “Dolphins” of course – who move elegantly, are fast and inventive.

Something’s interesting about rules : it’s when a person FIGHTS with himself or herself, between “obey the rules” and “these are not effective or useful NOW”. It’s a terrible spinning hesitation process !

Lever :

You can stop the spinning being a carp : you shut up and obey rules. Your life is simple, black and white, you follow rules, morality and orders.

You can stop the spinning being a shark : you bite the rules and you don’t care more. You just run like a fool, a rebel who doesn’t care about the others or about damages.

You can stop the spinning being a dolphin : you dance with the rules when they’re OK or not, and you adapt, you are fast and elegant. You decide your life and your actions. You are able to invent your own rules, even for a moment. Everybody wins around you, as much as possible, because you like that ! You live in movement, in colors, you are a good Queen or a good King. You can’t leash a dolphin, anyway. Bravo !

La valeur est souvent conférée. Values of things are conferred…

#bw #instagood #picoftheday #photooftheday #architecture #sky #clouds #monochrome #instablackandwhite #stairs

 

 

Enregistrer

Waldgänger uses the forest

Waldgänger is a german word we could translate as “Forest Goer”. It’s a state of mind archetype, an inner way of standing in life. It means : staying where you are, but you don’t believe in what you live anymore…

Wald means “forest” – a Walgänger is someone who retreats into the forest.

Many similar representations exist, and are more common. In fact, to define what a Waldgänger is, it’s maybe easy to tell what it is not…

It’s not a rebel (against), nor an otaku (cut), nor an ermite (far). You don’t go away. You just retreat inside. And you stay there. You are different, suddenly, but nobody knows it.

You become a Waldgänger when you step aside inside of your mind. You are stuck into a game, a situation, and you don’t believe in it anymore. You make “as if”, but inside of you, you are out. You watch. Maybe you contemplate the disaster. You don’t play the game anymore. Or as if. And you know what : you are invisible. It can happen to you, but you can decide it, too. It’s maybe a struggle with yourself (“Protect me from what I want”, says Jenny Holzer). You don’t tell.

#womanonbicycle

Tool provided by Nietzsche :

a kind of most profound self-reflection and self-recovery that desires to avoid, not “temptations,” but “duties”: an escape from the daily round; a detachment from the tyranny of stimuli and influences that condemns us to spend our strength in nothing but reactions and does not permit their accu- mulation to the point of spontaneous activity

…which leads to La Culture à réaction, or why “Luxury is Insular”…

The other one is easy, logical : you become a Waldgänger to avoid becoming crazy. It’s a inner retreat. You don’t move, you don’t “quit”, you don’t rebel : you watch and don’t believe in what to see. And nobody knows it. Waldgänger state is alone. But you can think…

 

Art of Inventing Problems

To invent problems, if you’re a manager in a company, you just have to set rules. Many of them.

There’s always a moment when everybody will forget that a “problem” is not a problem per se, but it’s a problem “because it does not obey the rules”.

There’s sometimes a person, then, who – probably sarcastically – points out that the “situation” wouldn’t really be a problem if this stupid rule didn’t exist.

Tool : When a problem occurs because someone didn’t obey the rules, you can think into the box and put back this person on tracks, or you can think out of the box and just supress, kill, and destroy the stupid useless rule. Bim.

If you haven’t got this power : sarcasm or stoicism. Choose your weapon.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marcus Aurelius

 

A New Way to Read – A Deconstructionist Approach

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Why do people love crime fictions so much?  It must be personal.

First there is a murder, and who likes dead bodies? Then, comes the policeman.  What is so exciting about police officers?  Boring. It’s all boring. Les polars…

But OK, let’s amuse ourselves… Some of you enjoy using your minds to follow the clues and solve the case. Maybe that’s cool, et si vous aimez ça, tant mieux. Readers enjoy living in the pages where crime has happened, within papers, reports, and discussions and then they suddenly understand the mystery and all in the comfort of their homes. Voilà !

Do you believe that the author has just as much of an alibi as the murderer?  Well he does.  The author’s usual alibi is to paint a historic period, show rising suspense, invent action, criticize a way of living, and exploit a setting.
Most writers don’t write a “polar” (as we say in France) to simply write a police story.  They write for other reasons !

I would like to propose another way to interact with this genre.

First :  What if you read the first twenty pages of your crime novel to get an idea of the plot, characters, etc.  You like the idea ? Good.

Second : OK… bear with me… You read the last five pages of the book. YES. OK, you now know “who did it”, but there is a purpose behind it all. Still with me?

Third :  Go back to page 21 and continue to read the rest of the book. Following the writer’s process of unfolding the story.

With this exercise, you the reader, are changed. You cease to be the victim, the writer’s prey.  YOU are now the investigator discovering how the writer pulls his readers this way and that.

Tools :

• Once in a while try to break the old cycle.

• If you’re bored in the world, invent a different approach in order to make your own power and pleasure.

• Don’t be so serious. You can always break the rules by adding casualness to Art. Pick pages in Proust. Vous avez le droit !

• What would it feel like to stop the Pavlovian response to what media proposes. Invent your own style of perspectives. Write something. Deconstruct anything and above all… Play.

Lastly, at the end, you should maybe pick another crime book and read it properly. That is good TOO. The waldgänger is a hidden discreet rebel, but he sometimes quickly reappears from the dark woods and is back, in a second, within the world of humans.