Paul Valéry : Enjoy your hypotheses

Enjoy your hypotheses…

Valéry writes that one good part of the philosopher’s job is to not understand.

That makes sense and we like it, right?

Being able of being amazed by what is granted and ordinary for most people…

That’s what some photographers also do, I beg. Having new eyes.

But there’s more. What I like in this extract is this attitude, which is to voluntarily go and watch things we don’t understand at all, just to…

Enjoy your hypotheses…

We could go further : studying what we think we don’t like, for example, or too complex, or too far in the past (for literature), or… what else?

What’s that sect, made of people who like that, enjoying hypotheses?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Graceful, Thoughtful, Melancholic?

Do your shopping/Take your pick

There’s always one moment in a month when you want to metablog.

 

Yesterday I discovered somebody read about sixty pages of this blog, and I wondered :

What did they find?

…painters & photographers, haikus, quotes, small ideas : Unexpected Connections & Sparks Exchanges – I even made a List of Sorts of Blog Articles…

It seems “constantly random”, but my followers know there’s a structure under. Therefore I metablogged about it :

• Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

 

My sweet will is to share, to invite you to pick tools and ideas, then share again. These are not my ideas, but good ones I found which are worth spreading. Well… I think so!

 

Dreamread, take your pick. Find an ideatool and use it another way. You’re invited to do your shopping here. Explore more. Use my blog as a table of content. Stealfind what I wanted to say. Bendfind what I didn’t say (and tell it back to me, thank youuuu).

What I like the most, probably, is :

When an idea you find in a blog, in a book, in a conversation, recombines with other ideas you have in mind at the moment.

 

Recombining. That’s the subject of another article, right?

 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Anne Teresa, Bartok & Dancers, a recipe

This is a pattern exercise, a recipe for thinkers.

Take music you don’t know well (Bartok).

Take a choreographer you don’t know well (Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker).

Choose a short clip of 4 minutes.

• Listen
• Watch
• Try to imagine what the choreographer wants
• Watch and note the elements (repetition, hugs, etc)
• Are they symbols or just movements
• Is there a mood-difference, inadequacy between music and gestures
• What happens with musicians
• What do you feel when the music stops but not the dancers
• You have plenty of other Teresa movies on YouTube
• What other arts we don’t know we could explore what could we find and how
• If we extract a tool (example : dance with no music then with music, example : why their dance doesn’t follow music, example : we’re not told what’s between these people), can we transpose it? Where? Photography? Poetry? Teaching?…

Have fun!

“Make some Heaps” : Swiss, Happiness & Photography

I don’t remember exactly the whys and wherefores but I know that Pierre Bourdieu (the French sociologist) was in Swiss and he was questioning about the “Swiss happiness”, and with the help of medias he and his team received tons and tons of photographies, daily, normal, families photographies.

They got so many of them that he asked each people, around the table, to choose a bag of photographies and… to “sort” them.

In the end, the talking with each member of the team, while they were watching the heaps of photographies chosen by A or B, became a reflection on “Why did you choose these?”.

The qualities and the beauty of the photos? The historical informations? Knowledge about family lives? Colors?

Bourdieu, in a way, as a non-specialist of the photo area, transformed the material in his sociologist way. It became a study about “How to we choose? How do we sort?”. It became a reflection about the idea of choice : make heaps.

Well that’s all. I’m sorry I don’t develop more. This article is pure bricolage, makeshift. I thought one of you could do something with it. And also : how do we see things through our eyes? How do thinkers pull out all the stops?

Have a nice day!

Instagram : karine.tuil

Seeking Circuits

I found this in a Siri Hustvedt book :

Jaak Panksepp was a neuroscientist who said that what animates us is a “seeking system”, which pushes all mammals, a mouse or a human, to explore or understand what’s around, and to extract a meaning from every situation we meet.

A quick Google search lead me to this paragraph, which will make thinkers smile :

‘’For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.”

E. Yoffe

I think there are ranks here – from crazy seeking for useless lols on Internet to exploration of other cultures and areas of knowledge…

Some also say that depression is caused by a failure in our seeking system…

Thanks for reading!

Knowledge. A Michel Foucault Quote.

“What’s worth the doggedness of knowledge, if it’s only to carry out the acquisition of knowledge, and not, in a certain way and as far as possible, bring a wandering to the one who knows?

There are moments in life, when the question to know if we can think differently than we think, and perceive differently than we see, is indispensable to go on looking, to go on thinking”.

Michel Foucault

“Que serait l’acharnement du savoir s’il ne devait assurer que l’acquisition des connaissances, et non pas, d’une certaine façon et autant que faire se peut, l’égarement de celui qui connaît ?

Il y a des moments dans la vie où la question de savoir si on peut penser autrement qu’on ne pense et percevoir autrement qu’on ne voit est indispensable pour continuer à regarder ou à réfléchir”.

To study your field & problems : use History or Geography?

History & Geography are cousins, right? Today I wondered about this : To study your field & problems : use History or Geography?

This is exactly the kind of stupid question I like to play with – sorry.

 

First you have to define what the problem is. You have ten minutes.

 

Then :

If you use History‘s tools, you will find elements, predictions (“where does it go?”), understandings from “where does it come from”, time (“when”)…

If you use Geography‘s tools, you’ll find things about the “wheres” : territories, movements, possibilities linked to them…

 

Oh! Wait a second!

What about other disciplines? Topology? Architecture? Literature? Of course, Psychology or Sociology – but one don’t need an article to think about it…

Inappropriate disciplines to study a problem, here it is.

 

Take your brain, pick up a random tool. Inappropriately dig in your problem. Find a surprising solution to it. Bingo.

 

You can also read :

The Extreme Upper Register of the Bassoon, story of the Wrong Tool

“Displacing Concepts” : from #Architecture to #Poetry ?

 

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : omardarling22

 

Too complicated to be bugs : Chronicle 34

If you’re passionate, if you’re a thinker, there are two types of spouses. When you begin a lecture about something you found, with “this” tone and sparks in eyes :

1. Rolling eyes “Here we go again!”.
2. Asking questions, loving it, helping you, smiling “I love your lectures, love!”.

I’d love my blog to be not some food, but some stimulant.

Someone who thinks only thoughts which (he thinks) are useful.

To me : “One mistake at a time, will you?”.

Criminy! Yesterday, someone took an article I wrote years ago, cut 95% of it and put it into the drafts section. That’s opening a few questions : who, how, why? Some occurrences are bugs, but some are too complicated to be bugs.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland worked with such directors as John Ford on “The Grapes of Wrath”.

“Toland’s trademarks included sharp, deep focus pictures, black-and-white film, ceilinged sets, low-angle lighting, and touches of Germanic expressionism”.

After much success in his early career, Toland remarked, “I want to work with someone who’s never made a movie. That’s the only way to learn anything from someone who doesn’t know anything.” He got his chance in 1941 with Orson Welles and “Citizen Kane”.

Exhausting : when people don’t hear you (and don’t understand) when you’re exhausted.

How come you could be trapped AND unmoored? When?

I reckon there’s a Meta-Talk Toxicity. When we communicate we sometimes have to talk about the ways and paths of… communicating. Sticking to it – and killing something. How and why? Develop.

Ask for a map.

 

Have a nice day!

Epistolarian

If I had to give a few words to define me, epistolarian would be in the list. Letters writer lover.

Old letters are as useful as old diaries. You can find back some old ideas you forgot, you can understand where you were – therefore where you are now, etc.

A real human being never trashes informations. The past stays in the past, and it’s interesting to have maps – for example : to find new paths.

So when an epistolarian meets another epistolarian it’s blissful. It can appear in the guise of twenty pages of “this is what happened” or one email of “kind but precise questions” or just like a slow paced tennis conversation, games and smiles, what ifs and helping hands, curiosity and musics or books discoveries.

Like in tennis, it’s like having a respectful opponent who sends back the ball to challenge you. Oh OK it’s more like a dance…

It’s like a secret. It’s slow. It’s a common silence too. Written words.

Good epistolarians are rare. They have to love words, ideas, telling stories, sharing, but also the process of elaborating. And they have to like the pace of it, determined by the other responses too. It’s like a dance, I agree. A dance of spirits.

 

Sometimes we MEET someone with whom we shared letters for years. The person is likely to be very different from the Epistolarian Friend you played with before. It happened to me (almost 30 years ago). It was intense, interesting, very different, and it… supplied a great new blood to our future letters!

Epistolarians know something : No “in real life” meeting can change the person you danced with with letters. It’s the last phrase of this notebook page : “Rien ne peut changer ce que vous êtes à mes yeux” : “Nothing can change who you are in my eyes”.

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Examining a problem with Valéry

In found this very little structure in Paul Valéry’s notebooks. I cut, bolded and translated my way. As it’s a “tool”, Mr Valéry won’t be angry (and well, he died in 1945). Where would we apply this screwdriver? How do I say “I will can”, in English? I’ll be able to? Hmm?

 

The spirit won’t be in a hurry to imagine what is necessary to considerate a problem.

it will examine, not caring about time & duration of the process.

Aware of the remarkable contrast between 1/ promptness, impatience and worries of the “heart” and 2/ this slowness, made of criticism and hope.

This lateness, this delay – which can can unlimited – has an effect : to transform the problem.

The transformed problem will be able to transform the questioner…

 

 Also :

“To overcome one’s talents.

My skills unplease me.

My easy bores me. 

My difficult drives me”.

 

Surprising Reversibilities

– I owe you so much!
– No no no, it’s I who owe you…

 

1. A therapist takes care of his patient.
2. Stravinsky or Hindemith were influenced by Bach.
3. Someone is watching and analyzing a painting.

All these three examples are simple and clear. You can draw the arrow, right?

We thinkers like to go deeper, though. To find nuances, subtleties :

1. There are many ways of listening, of helping someone…
2. What are the elements which makes us notice the influence?
3. What do we seek – and find in Arts? An emotion? Links?

You can spend months on each, reading books. Refining concepts is a bliss, right? Good!

 

Today I study one thing : reversibility. It’s meeting a surprise “the other way around”, and it’s charged with intensity :

1. A therapist suddenly talks about himself. Instead of listening, he tells his own story. The patient is suddenly captivated. This is a well known trick in this field! Psychotherapists say it gives a stronger link (therefore a power) on a patient. Adding humanity in the bond is a strange and powerful idea…
2. Many specialists come to a point where they see where is Bach in Hindemith, but also that there is some Hindemith (1895-1963) in Bach (1665-1750). Two centuries before, OK, but you can study this the other way around – even if you think it’s “not OK”. It’s a game for spirits, to study how the now can be seen as an influence for the past.
3. An Art lover studies a painting, a music, and he realizes it works in the other way : the piece of work moves him, changes him, teaches him, overwhelms him. You explore yourself through another person’s work. You are amazed by unconscious and historical forces at stake. Your skin (or your guts) are activated. Astonishment is a trigger for your brain. Then, maybe, you’re… slaked (and this can be in MANY ways), right?

 

A child comes from a mother, a father. But parents are also transformed by the coming. In the end, the person who is a child gives parents… motherhood and fatherhood.

Mhhh I like that. You feel that I touch something here, oui? Where, in what other examples can you imagine this reversibility process? Business? Couple? Creativity? Ads? Poetry? Where, when it’s obvious “things are going this way”, could you reverse something? Therefore what?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Event VS Structure

“Event VS Structure” – This is a title, right?

A philosophical problem I pick like a screwdriver, to examine it.

1. A Structure, it can be a rule, a law, a “it’s the way things are”, a habit, a skeleton under things, an axle, a map, a followed road.
2. An Event is what suddenly happens, it’s life, it’s a surprise, an accident, a happiness, a present, a mishap, a disturbance, a movement, a change.

 

This article is an invitation. The game will be : choose your structure, and invent an event :

Where do they touch? Is it good, bad? What happens? Can an event change a structure, or entertain it? Destroy it? What then? Is a new structure needed? Is there a thirst for other events? What is a suite of events? Can a structure hide another one? What triggered the event? Another structure? Can a structure contain an inner “events invention”? Do you have to protect the structure against events? Are there Metastructures? Do a structure USE events to grow, to increase knowledge, to breathe life in? What is a mutation? What is a call for event?

Structure : Battle? Symphony? Plan? Marriage? Company? Life? Body?

Suddenly, an Event. Mutation, change, disease, sudden victory, cut, inspiration, meeting another structure, thoughts, failure, ending, bend, ideas…

Does an event have a structure?

 

What do you choose to study?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : anapaula

 

Spoon Harvesting : a casual way to read scholars

If you kept a certain form of active curiosity, you will get me at once. This is it :

Enter a library, pick a book, a VERY clever scholar book, about anthropology, philosophy or anthropological philosophy, whatever, something you don’t know anything about.

Not. Your. Field.

And dig. Go to page 174 and read half of the page. Nothing happens? Good! Add 35 pages and move forward : read. OK, read TWO pages. Go on. Until…

Until you find something quirky. In a totally inappropriate way, steal it, bend it, squeeze it, make a stick, a balloon, or a juice of it. Then apply this weird twisted “tool” to another field : to love, to poetry, to photography, to music, to creativity.

Then open your eyes and your mind, see what happens, or better : see what kind of seeds jump on your nose, what colors you find, what coincidences begin to roundance in the sun. There you go.

Plant a seed, make it happen, feel the joy of it. Water it. Be a wizard. Sharpen your curiosity. Be casual. Dance with yourself. Listen to the wind and tan your forehead in front of the moon. And there it is. From a piece of savant page, you made an idea. Voilà!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

“Attention to the World” Thinker’s Game : Patterns

I had a friend who was able to detect a Duke Ellington track in a few seconds.

“He has a pattern”, she told me – “Even if I’ve never heard the song.”

That’s amazing!

It depends on where you’re thinking, but I will alway admire people who are able to “feel” a pattern. You’re like : “Oh my!” – these “thinker type” people have a certain type of attention to the world with signifies something…

In France we DON’T use this word. Worse : we don’t use it “that” way.

We say : He has a signature.

If it’s about a recurrent behavior, we say “C’est un type de comportement”. If you talk about design, we say “un motif” (like in “a circle pattern”).

The closest thing we say is : signature. But IT IS different. A signature is more like a “way you do things that makes is obvious it’s you”, right?

So I assert that THIS concept of “pattern” is Anglo-Saxon (or maybe protestant?). I learnt this way of patterning behaviors and creativity with America’s culture.

Of course in music I could detect a Brian Eno or a Mike Oldfield piece with patterns, but that’s too easy. In Classical Music, it begins to be more tricky. I listen to the radio and I play with myself : Sibelius or Dvorak? Debussy or Ravel? It’s not the sound any more, it’s not signature, it’s… a way.

The little screams of Michael Jackson, the spluttering drums of Stewart Copeland (The Police), the screens in Brian de Palma‘s movies, the way the sound overlays different scenes in Godard’s movies : all are a signature. You SEE it.

A PATTERN is different, it’s DEEPER, it’s hidden. You have to have a certain use, a certain SKILL to detect a pattern. It is NOT obvious.

In a way, it’s why I wrote an article called “Constantly Random is an Instagram Flaw”. I don’t show my signature, but I know I have patterns, and I know some people feel it – I hope they like it.

My friend of the beginning of this article was like me : she was listening to rock-pop and knew it was USA or UK within SECONDS. They have a pattern, right?

Genesis, John Barry, Gentle Giant, Oasis : they pattern it. But where?

Well, voilà. This need a conversation.

It could begin like

“Are there French patterns?”…

Have a nice day!

 

#INFJ & #INTJ & the Tango Feeling/Thinking

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
Bergson

To say it very quickly, Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, says there are 2 ways to know something : Analysis is “turning around” the thing, it gives you a map, but Intuition is about “entering” it, it’s the only way to “feel” what is the thing. That makes sense, right?

Well, I linked this with the two MBTI families, INFJ (F is for Feeling) and INTJ (T is for Thinking).

What is YOUR way of appreciating things? Do you think, or do you feel?

I think I’m obsessed with the idea of weaving a braid with two opposite tools. Reason & Feeling, Numbers & Harmony, Improvisation & Schedules, Slow & Fast, etc. I constantly play with the idea of weaving them.

• Maybe you are, like me, a INTFJ?
• Maybe you like to be moved by a symphony AND to know how it’s built?
• Maybe you like to have projects AND to decide thing in a second.
• Maybe you invent poetry with your nose in the wind AND you organize words precisely while you write.
• Maybe you like to decide and organize things AND you pray God at the same time?

So… when I do tests about MBTI I find myself a INTJ, but sometimes a INFJ. I feel like the French knight with a sword in a hand and an axe in the other. I hope you appreciate my power! 🙂

Why thinking couldn’t weave feeling?

Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend!

Instagram : nachoyague

 

 

 

 

 

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.