What moves forward continuously/by stages

What moves forward continuously or by stages : a structure to watch for a moment.

• Does it move continuously or by stages all the time, continually?
• Do we find interruptions in the movement?
• Or plateaux?
• What about crescendoes & decrescendoes?
• What about accelerations in the movement? What types?
• Are stages announced by a sign?
• Do we have to prepare for each?
• Is the movement propelled, or does the movement energy comes from the inside?
• Is the movement linked with a blossom, a sheaf? Division?
• What about a combination of movements, like moving forward AND climbing?
• What about competition between two movements, side by side?
• Are stages just a growing, or a change of nature?

 

Where do we follow this? Music structures? Growing of plants, or animals? Geology? Revolutions, or other social movements? Love or lost of love? What kind of becomings do we find? Adulthood?

Thanks for reading!

 

Coming back, enriched

This is not much of an article, but you know me : when I have a pattern in mind, a little tool or the piece of a map, I have to write about it.

My pattern here is about someone who comes back, enriched.

Enriched with experience, of course…

1. You have a restaurant and your cook partner goes to France for a YEAR. He learned things, because when he comes back he’s different. He knows more things. He shows you. He has different ways…
2. You lover quits you, it’s a real break-up. She met someone else… But it doesn’t really work, thus she’s back in your arms… with new caresses and techniques. You notice. Does she notice you noticed?
3. A midwife quits your country to improve her skills in… India. What happens when she’s back?
4. You’re a painting teacher, and you… etc…
5. A son comes back home after he…
6. In a company, a manager comes back with team after a month with the CEO…

See my pattern? You can draw overthinking mind-maps about this :

• Do you have to go away to “come back”, of can you do it innerly? You’d have “enriched” by your researches, and “enriched” by the fact of being elsewhere…
• Is it dangerous and where is it?
• What about the noticement? You are suddenly and mysteriously enriched therefore others know something happened… somewhere else.
• Can enrichment be disguised, hidden into a false impoverishment?
• What is “resistance to change”, here, for both parts?
• The change is always happening because we grow up, so is this article about a disruption? Like : Not “more” or “more intense”, but “more complex”, or “different”?
• Why is this weaving comeback/enriched interesting? Why come back, after all? Enrichment elsewhere as steam to stay out and not coming back, ever. Enlightenment?
• What’s the difference between this and “move forward/enriched”?
• What are the risks and ways of failure, here?
• Is the comeback a way to compare? To triumph?
• What if the comebacker doesn’t realize how much it’s a big deal for whom discovers these squirting “new knowledge”?
• Do you know other stories?
• How to link this with “the return of the prodigal son” pattern?
• What the fuck do we do with returners? Admire them? Be jealous? Kill them? Smack’em go away where you come from, idiot, them? Unnoticing politely their progress?

Thanks for reading!

Intense Rarity

In the bookstore I talked with a man looking for an out of order book about cancer, which I found second handed for him for hundreds of Euros.

He said this book must be a very big best seller.

Which is NOT.

So we talked. The book (about alternative cares for cancers) is rare, therefore expensive, but this does not mean it would be a best seller.

So I named it : “Displacement of Intensity” and we laughed.

You can make a good car and you’ll sell millions of it. Or you can buy a rare unique Italian car from the fifties… in auction, for millions of dollars.

Well, you see : I don’t know what to do with this concept…

Can you help me?

Therefore I chose a picture I’d like to show to my colleague who wears a cowy nose ring – which I find ridiculous but it’s a free country. Feathers. Aren’t they gorgeous?

Quantity or Quality? Mass or rarity? How do we equation that? Where?

Thanks for reading!

After / Other / Anti

This is a little triple-branched structure I propose you, as a set of leverages or as a dial. Weapon of choice.

Take progress, change, movement. I give you three roads :

1. AFTER
2. OTHER
3. ANTI

 

Well that’s easy :

1. You move forward on the same road.
2. Or you change what you’re doing (or the way you move).
3. Or you attack the ancient road.

 

Mmmhh. It’s something any artist thought about. Knowing the old masters, he can :

1. Start from where they are and go further.
2. Do something else (disruption?).
3. Do the contrary.

 

It’s a funny toolset, right? My pencil case…

Where will I put it? What’s the ground here? Changes? Choices? Decisions? Movement? Avant-Garde? Invention?

Then, where to apply? Marketing? Art? Poetry? Teaching? Management? Science?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Movements in a line (and amounts of possibles)

A Red Dress and other desires : Dispositif ou Agencement?

Well this is a conversation subject for drunk overthinking friends, let’s go :

Deleuze says that a woman doesn’t desire a red dress, but the whole arrangement she makes of it in her mind : a date, the dress, a man, a summer evening, a dance maybe, a dinner…

A little boy desires a baseball bat, but also a system of what could be around : friends, summer afternoons, running, winning…

The French word he uses for that is “agencement“, which I find translated as “arrangement“. But there’s a problem : “arrangement” is also a French word, therefore I feel a bit disappointed here. It’s colored : un arrangement is a way things are placed, but it’s also a deal.

Our “agencement” means arrangement, but more in a layout process.

A red dress for a date/a baseball bat can dance in an arrangement, a system made of many things (dancing, eating, man’s eyes, walking in a summer night street…), maybe we can consider it’s a layout, a deal? What about a new splendid bat?

My problem is the radioactivity of words. They are like bees here…

If a French arrangement is an English arrangement…
if a French agencement is also an English arrangement…

…how do I explain agencement to you? It’s an arrangement but it’s not a deal. It’s something you find already placed (by destiny, or another person?). We say that an appartment is perfectly “agencé” : it’s not about the furniture, but about the map, the drawing. This big window is on the sunny side, waow, great!

Agencement is about space. Things oriented and placed in space.

The red dress, and the bat, they are all imagined moving in a special space… This is desire!

It’s colored : things in space, how they are placed, a layout. Passive voice, maybe.

If we want to talk about something prepared, it’s more an arrangement (under the form of a deal), we call this un dispositif.

Dang! A new word! Dispositif is often translated by Apparatus, but it’s wrong. I think an apparatus, in English, is a thing, a device, a machine. It is, in French, but it’s also “the name we could make from the verb to dispose”. A metaphorical apparatus, in a way. Effectiveness is coloring it.

It’s not a disposal (which means a destruction, an elimination), though we say une disposition, in French (I’m sure it makes sense, right?). It’s a positioning, voilà : a placement.

Here we are : Agencement means Arrangement, but also a Positioning.

Not positioning each little part of the agencement : it’s clearly about positioning the whole system. Things “linked” (how) to each other.

Agencement is more like that : a map of how things are and play together. The purpose is to say “It’s there, it’s like that, it’s what we have, what was prepared”.

Dispositif is the same, but it sounds more like something decided, wanted. The purpose is to say “This is what we placed and how, to be effective”.

 

Mhh where’s the red dress, here?

Thanks for following & reading!

 

Movements in a line (and amounts of possibles)

Just a little pattern to play with :

Valéry writes about what came, in literature, after Romanticism – example : Baudelaire after Hugo.

That’s this : Movement B comes after Movement A. It comes :

1. To distort it
2. To bring corrections to it
3. To bring contradictions to it
4. In the end, to stand in, to take his place

 

…what we are, what we can, what we want

Amounts of possibles?

1. Unexplored domains
2. Paths to trace
3. Fields to exploit
4. Cities to build
5. Relations to establish
6. Processes to spread

 

Can B bring exact responses to B? Is B a retaliation to A? Is this answer a energy source in order to gather? What are the desires in play? To be more solid, more clever, more… pure? What is the adolescence of newness? Why is it an advantage? Where are the imprudences, vulnerable spots, the impurities? Wisdom, move, perfection : when (after) do they come? What and where is the loss, when B crystallizes? How do audiences move around these?

Where do we see that? Between personalities? In Art only (fashion, architecture, etc)?

 

Have a nice day!

 

 

Paul Valéry with Stendhal : Shunning the poetic style & Unreached cruxes

Let’s listen and daydream with Paul Valéry‘s seeds (sorry for my English, it’s pretty hard to translate this sharp spirit)…

ooo

“Mais la vérité et la vie sont désordre; les filiations et les parentés qui ne sont pas surprenantes ne sont pas réelles”.

“But the truth and the life are messy; the filiations and the kinships which are not surprising are not real”.

ooo

List of what Stendhal hated the most in his life :

…pettiness, absence of all whims, terror of opinion, terror of loving what we love, traditions, the little city, the local vanity, inflicted mediocrity…

ooo

“Spéculation sur le lecteur futur” : Speculation on the future reader

…is maybe what bloggers do, hmm? I’m not really read now but one day I will…

Something in the way we write (dry, fast, casual) implying an unknown person who will read it one day…

Paul Valéry about “writing for someone”?

ooo

About Stendhal’s style :

1. Negligences, the willpower of negligence, disdain of all formal qualities of style.
2. Diverse pillagings and quantities of plagiarisms : the essential for the accused is to become infinitely more interesting than his victims – “from other’s bleak possessions, he rebuilds work one can read, because it’s weaved with a certain tone.”

Oohhh that’s baaaad, right?

ooo

• “Fuir le style poetique, et faire sentir qu’on le fuit”
• “To shun the poetic style, and make feel that we shun it”

ooo

“Nous savons bien qu’on ne se dévoile que pour quelque effet”

“We know well that we unveil ourselves only for some effect”

ooo

There are two ways to falsify : to embellish, and the application to sound true.

ooo

“La confidence songe toujours à la gloire, au scandale, à l’excuse, à la propagande”

“A confidence always dreams for glory, scandal, excuse, or propaganda”

ooo

Fears : fictional and wished

ooo

The “worse” is the food of critical temperaments

ooo

Those who want to detect, define and administer the whole social filth

“Toutes les fois que nous accusons et que nous jugeons, le fond n’est pas atteint”

“Each time we accuse and judge, the crux is not reached”

ooo

To live. To appeal. To be loved. To love. To write. Not to be duped. To be myself. To achieve…

ooo

Hmm : pick one, write an article, OK?

Have a nice day!

The Cahiers/Notebooks of Paul Valéry are a unique form of writing. They reveal Valéry as one of the most radical and creative minds of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of investigation into all spheres of human activity. His work explores the arts, the sciences, philosophy, history and politics, investigating linguistic, psychological and social issues, all linked to the central questions, relentlessly posed: ‘what is the human mind and how does it work?’, ‘what is the potential of thought and what are its limits?’

Inner volcanoes/Inner glaciers

I found this little tool in a Walter Murch book (“In the blink of an eye”). Murch is a film editor, a kind of genius – he’s the guy who edited Apocalypse Now. He quotes an Ingmar Bergman paragraph, who explained something about… Igor Stravinsky.

Stravinsky wrote a lot about interpretation, performance.

As he had a volcano inside, he was preaching moderation. And then he couldn’t tame his volcano, and some concerts were… fiery – which was very surprising for his readers!

Murch tells that we seek balance in our lives.

1. Therefore when we realize we have a volcano somewhere inside us, we try to temper the eruptions!
2. And the one who has a glacier inside will advise passions unbridling.

The danger, tells Bergman, is to read Stravinsky the wrong way : to moderate the glacier, or to wind up the volcano.

I think of this Polish idiom : “One shouldn’t butter the butter”.

 

I knowww it’s not a tool, it’s a seed for overthinkers…

When do we have to think this way? What are our volcanoes? What are our glaciers? Do we handle balance? Do we do it the correct way?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

The need of weakness and other subjects to think of : Chronicle 53

If we see the human mind as a layer of beast and a layer of culture above, what about people who never read? Index cards certainties…

To have the right to judge, one just has to announce that they never judge.

A secret is not made to be kept, but to give some importance to the information.

The suffering of children is the absolute evil.

If one wants to get the upper hand, it’s because one is under.

The stronger of all is the one who shrugs.

A unity made of neutralized contraries, an apparent immobility which hides a vertiginous and perpetual life : develop.

What is our “horrible need of weakness”?

The coward’s tantrum.

What is temptation, what is desire? How are they different?

Categories, what do they say?

If a soft bass voice is the sign of high civilization, what about loud people?

Is to transform a place into something it’s not (take an old church and make it a gallery, take a barn and make it a store) vulgar or painful? Why?

Someone is ugly because one was born ugly, someone is ugly because mediocrity shaped their face. Do we have the faculty to determine it? Which one scares you the most?

I read that one of one father’s role (purpose) is to save time to his child, to offer or show them the most checked boxes possible before sailing on existence. I terribly agree with this one.

Those for whom one of the greatest pleasures is to cancel a travel.

This age where you have a form, an index card for everything and everyone. Your neighbor, a singer, a recipe, a writer, a movie, a city. This exercise : to cancel it, to change it, to enrich it. How?

To make/keep someone shut up, three ways : to monolog endlessly, to make as if you don’t understand, to show that you’re not interested by what one says.

Our mother dreams about what?

Good masters open a chasm under your feet. In one sentence, they show it to you. For good or bad.

You know things only by differences, wrote Suares. Does it mean that we function with analogies?

If there are no rules, you can not transgress them.

The right to go away (Baudelaire). Develop.

To be conscious of everything and at the same time to keep our instinct alive : Art?

Mystery, but no obscurity.

A lack can be unconscious. It shows itself with instant tears…

Thanks! Have a good day!

All these stolen from J. D. – let’s spread.

When you insist until you fail… on purpose.

“When you insist until you fail… on purpose” is a pattern everybody knows and everybody tried one day, right?

For Headlong rush or forging ahead, in French we say : “La fuite en avant” (an escape forward).

Sometimes one does it oneself, but is it on purpose and fully aware – as a strategy, or in a nihilistic despair suicide-like rush?

In other times, we can be part of it, for instance when you work for a company which makes bad decisions in a row :

Incompetence or Cruelty?

There’s these ideas swirling in “forging ahead” : going fast, decide quickly, being a bit crazy, vanity and vainglory, last brightness, grab what we can, or maybe go ahead, destroy what we can, and bury yourself in the end. Who knows?

In dictionaries I found to careen, which seems to be a bit crazy, right? To throw oneself into the fray (if the fray is a fight, why is there another word? Is a fray a messy fight?). “Fling yourself” sounds similar.

All these sound risky and breaknecky… but I titled my article “When insisting…”. Therefore I’d like to talk about a quieter way of forging ahead, a headlong quiet insisting daily rush…

I just found the word “Adamant”, which is splendid! Maybe because in French “Un Diamant” is a Diamond. Your adamant sounds to me like “adamond” – see?

I also found that you add “on” after insist : to insist on, stubbornly, right? Leads me to “pigheadedly” (waowwww!).

This is really funny to discover these words… In French we also say this. Entêté (could be “enheaded”, or têtu comme une mule…

Calmly insisting… until I fail. Makes me think about self sabotage (but “Why would you do that??”), or nihilism.

Sometimes it’s the only way, the only path to walk on, so… you go! Sacrifice? Maybe. Suicide? Maybe. Dark fun? Why not? Manipulation? Ohhhhh… No. To provoke, to trigger an answer, to show a door or a window? Well…

When do we do that? When do we witness that? What to do, then?

Overthinking, I know.

Thanks for reading!

Treating the Fringe

When you work, there are often two parts :

1. One part you have to deliver – and you’re paid for it. It’s the “main thing”, your job.
2. There’s another part, where you treat yourself, or where you treat your audience…

 

“you offer them a treat” : what’s that word which is a noun and a verb? What’s that verb which sounds positive and lovely to me, and at the same time which need “well” at times : to treat well…

Question : does “to treat” contain “to treat well”, “to give pleasure”, or not?

 

It’s a two-parts-pattern all creative people know well.

If you’re a teacher and you have to teach a complicated maths lesson for 2 hours, if you’re a director and your job is to make a film to promote a train station, if you order books for a library, etc :

1. you can do it the normal, proper way
2. you can do it in a splendid inventive way
3. you can play a cursor between both

 

This “3.” is interesting. How do you do it?

1. Do you begin with pleasure and complexity aimed to an intelligent marginal group, THEN you add elements to help others to stay on the road?
2. Or do you build the average normal job, then hide smart elements to be seen and guessed by the clever fringe?

 

If your fringe becomes too large, you’re elbowing them, good to you, but you lose the next one, who will look at you as a smart arse : not good, right?

On the other side, if you treat yourself with too much subtlety, it becomes a “private pleasure hidden, just for you”. And why not? :

Luxury is insular

 

Overthinking over it – two examples :

I talked with a friend who, in a way, complained that when you work and you add great and complicated elements on purpose, for the pleasure of resolving them (for example, a sequence-shot when you direct a movie), only a few percents of the audience will catch it (moreover : to find where to put the cursor is a mess).

Pablo Picasso explains that when he works on a complicated project for a cubist painting, he has to develop very subtle and complex balances, colors, masses, energies, frames, etc… This, as the core of his Art.
Then he adds little easy elements (like a necklace or a moustache) and then names the painting accordingly. This to… guide or please the unschooled, while the connoisseur will see the real purpose…

 

Thanks for reading! Have a great sunday!

JP

 

Cutlery Test & Clean New Suburbs

I moved house, and laughed with one of the movers. He said that you can say a lot about someone according to the way the cardboard boxes are sealed.

Pattern : this summer, in a few houses, I watched the way the cutlery was placed on each side of the plates.

I’m a constructivist, therefore : as I know people need forks and knives and spoons near their plate, I effing don’t care if there are “rules” for where I put cutlery.

In the contrary : if your boxes are a mess, there will be moved as well – there are no rules here. But beware of what you’ll find at the end !

I could name this article “the constructivists”. We are people who construct (decide) of many aspects of reality. Call us the pragmatics, or the practical, or rules questioners/deciders : as soon as the cutlery is “there”, you don’t have to follow cutlery “rules”.

We have here an interesting language thing between French and English. The world “Acquis”, in French (the past participle of “Acquérir”, but also and adjective and a noun), is the same for MANY of your English words, who are nested, layered :

• Benefit, asset, knowledge, gain, laurels, acknowledged, assured, recognized, won over to, as read, established…

 

The question dancing around is this one : what is assured and established… and shouldn’t be? Can we examine “rules” of life, and decide it’s useless, or more : stupid?

Cardboard boxes well sealed are perfect : they don’t crash themselves in the truck. Perfectly aligned cutlery is great if you have 4 forks and 7 knives and 5 spoons (boring dinner), but not for family snacks. And do we absolutely have to iron the bed sheets?

What do we “HAVE TO” do that we… don’t have to do?
What do we “HAVE TO” do that we… should do?

Should I become a rules questioner today? Where? Why?

Perfection seeking, the absolutely followed rules, the straight lines everywhere, what do they say about him, her, you, them?

Is it a progress not to believe?

Why is it such a pleasure so see cracks in the concrete, or little grasshoppers, or two daisies fighting for their way near the white perfect walls of clean suburbs like this one?

Will nature win always?

(yes she will)

Have a nice day!

Not “Evil vs Good”, but “Chaos vs Order”

Many mainstream movies have this pattern : “Evil vs Good”, and a good villain is funny, right?

Today I’ll play a cross-game with another pattern : “Chaos vs Order”.

It can be similar : “Evil brings Chaos, and Good brings back Order”.

But of course you’re like me, sensing, that the contrary is true, and probably more interesting…

Evil = Order, like the First Order in Star Wars, and the perfectly aligned Nazis army.

Order means “every rule obeyed”, and that’s a bit 1984…

Yesterday I watched “A little Chaos“, a charming little film (directed by Alan Rickman!) : chaos brought by an inventing gardener hired by Le Nôtre – while Louis XIV was building Versailles, in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Chaos

“Something uniquely French”? Order, but with a little chaos, or a casualness, maybe a slice of disobedience (to the rules), effortless elegance, imperfections embrace. Yeah, that’s the Parisian Elegance…

 

Well, I have this in mind since I saw “perfect gardens” – my brain was craving for fantasy! There’s a wiki for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_garden_types –

 

Well, is it an article? Beginning with cinema, then France, then gardening? In what other fields of the human activities do we have to find our own frontier, balance, between chaos and order? In rocket science, 100% order, right? Art of Battle : 80%? What is discipline? What and where is invention? Can we have both at the same time? Differences of nature, quantity, places?

Have a nice day!

 

Geometrical Hashtag Ideas

When you write a blog on WordPress, you check your activity from time to time. The website gives you statistics on what articles are read, and from which country.

When you see what is read, you smile : you’re happy to discover that your article is like alive somewhere, possibly putting a little spark in a brain.

Of course we bloggers don’t control anything. Some articles are a hit for no understandable reasons. For example, my ““Become who you are”, is it what Pindar said?” has been read 176 times since I wrote it and I really don’t understand why…

We all know that some ideas come from a combination. Remember? : One book, you’re a student, three books opened and you’re a searcher.

Some mornings I read my stats and I discover that five-six articles has been read within the few last hours. My brain can’t help doing the Geometrical Shape Game :

• trying to find the link between all of them
• trying to invent a new article subject from the combination, or even :
• trying to find a coded message sent by… The Universe.

Most of the time, it makes sense!

(of course, I invent this sense)

And well, it gave me… this article!

Thanks for reading!

 

Waterbudding & Recombinations : To learn is to unlearn?

It came in a conversation.

There are two ways of learning :

1. One is to pile up knowledge. Your culture gets bigger, like a balloon.
2. One is to unlearn.

 

We all stacklearn! We know more. At the same time, as the skyscraper grows, maybe the first floors vanish. That’s OK. You know more this and you know less that – because it lost it accuracy, or whatever.

 

To learn-unlearn seems to be cleverer, right? Our new knowledges have an effect of what we already know.

• Ideas recombines!
• They struggle to find their place!
• They fight. They dance!
• They cut old branches!
• They water buds!
• They add features to the engine!

 

Heyyy I found the final word for this article :

 

Them with an open book is a student

Them with three open books is a thinker

 

 

Have a nice day. Thanks for reading.

 

Photos : Galen Rowell

Books to awestruckheal your worries?

We all have worries and overthinking hours. We often superthink about “what will happen”, and… OK, there’s a concept here I’d like to present to you :

Affective Forecasting : which is “to predict your future emotional state”. You worry about what you WILL feel, your future emotions, their duration, and their intensity. Ohlalaaaa !

Your mind, like mine, has more superpowers : the capacity to overthink the past. It’s a whole mess, right? You do and redo what happened, and you imagine what you could or should have said or done, etc. You have hours in the night to to that, right?

What to do, que faire ?

Books. You can easily find novels and accounts about betrayals and despair and divorce if you’re in a break-up, about illness if you have some health problems, about crazy job stories if your manager hates you. It’s about understanding. You’d be amazed by what people go through. “We’re not alone”, “you’ll learn from that”, etc.

But there are books about worse situations, which can put your story in perspective and detach yourself from your mess. It’s not about understanding yourself, but about awestruck (waow, THIS is a frightening word!). The OMG books, if you want.

Personally I’d choose something real about WWII or these terrible stories about USSR and gulag. Yes it’s a little awkward, to breathe differently and watch the sky when you think about “worse”, earthquakes, burning cities, epidemics or working class centuries ago. Shit happens and can hit the fan, but there you’ll see that there are BIGGER FANS, much bigger. For gulag, I suggest Shalamov.

Until…

Thanks for reading!

Russian trio to begin :
Shalamov : Kolyma Tales
Grossman : A Writer at War
Alexievich : Secondhand Time

 

Overthinking Ways

The memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened, says Marguerite Duras, and that’s a good example of overthinking. In fact, it’s the seed of a whole tree!

What are ways of overthinking? What are the subjects? The past (what it’s been, what it could have been). The future(s). About what you did or will do (or say). And I’ll stop it here : you perfectly know your ways of overthinking!

What are the ways OUT of this curse (which it is, right?). Most books show these paths :

1. Mindfulness
2. Dare and do something

Voilà! You just saved a bunch of money! Put these books back in the shelves!

1 Mindfulness is a way to focus on the now (let the past sleep/just enable the future) – well, you can try!

2 Acting-Doing has many good effects, from “keeping you busy” to “stop thinking a bit”, by way of “changing what I can”… instead of thinking about it.

Tool :

Of course you can use another path, which could be “smart overthinking”, taking a wheel (if you find it) to drive it somewhere else, to tame it, to use it, to link it with others – or with books (which is the same), to divide it up like a sheaf, to make it a dance, to fight it, to… What about you?

You go girl! Merci et bonne route! Thanks for reading.