mutant hedgehogs.

bearing black spikes

that pierce bone and tissue

i remain transformed

transfigured fratzenhaft

hardly recognisable

breath interrupted

body not mine

talking through me

possessed

i am flashes of light

i am lava

i am annoyed

and

annoying

too much

attempting.

to resolve to soothe

to trickle to break

to explode to discipline

i run and run and run

the beasts become still

suddenly i understand

the nature of the pull

resistible.

needing to learn to live with black spikes within.

full speed ahead into the food crisis.

leaves me worried. have been interested in food issues for a long time, but this seems to be something of an altogether different order… and maybe i should have seen the signs earlier, and acted more on them. it seems crazily out of control without wanting to sound too alarmist…

Really mandatory reading this time:

Here. here. And here.

You may also want to read up on food security, food sovereignty, gm, biodiesel, and some of the links i list to the left here…

(photo from BBC news website)

hoffnung ist ein seil.

‘In this rite, the officiant – fakir, shaman… or juggler – throws a rope like a lasso in the air. This rope rises higher and higher ‘in the air’. It should fall down. But the officiant assures us that it has mysteriously anchored itself somewhere, and to prove it, he or his disciple climbs up the rope. The rope does not give way. It holds. And it carries the weight of the man as he climbs.
This ‘miracle’ has many variations. In particular that in which the climber is dismembered. Once he is out of sight, his limbs fall to the ground one by one until the officiant, by a second miracle, proceeds to put them together again.’

Upon reading Henri Desroche’s Sociologie de l’espérance.

Does anyone remember similar miraculous tales from childhood (and faraway lands) that were (and probably remain) intriguing?

deserving loyalty.

Still surprised about how people make friends and then stay friends, despite these claims that everyone makes once in a while about how friends do not stay. I think they do.

Brevity may be part of some games, but so is loyalty and real mutual understanding (and in this case, the games change and hatch into friendship), and even in my high-mobility life, I have, somewhat miraculously, managed to have long-term friendships, towards which I am hoping to give the right balance of loyalty, cakes, walks, ceilidhs (or, for some of you suckers, mock 80s bars), listening skills, and laughs (point taken about hugs, where I tend to assume everyone’s more like me than they really are…).

I am grateful that some people choose not to be terribly upset by the following three (list not exhaustive) characteristics of mine – sadly amplified by writing the thesis: 1. delusionally whacky humour, 2. increasing scatterbrainism, and 3. a limited capacity to take in information about people’s lives.

Recent examples:

Bringing in a scene by Shakespeare, a bible quote about pigs (2 Peter 2: 22), and a fragment from Light My Fire by the Doors (a band I do not particularly like) into a chapter about Direct Payments (the EU policy…) is not something that academia will particularly appreciate. I found it terribly funny to include it and submitted for consideration without giving it second thoughts. The second draft omits the bible quote and has a footnote dedicated to the Counting Crows. Shakespeare has moved to an Annex, where he is quite happy. I still have no explanation for any of this shit.

I am not a scatterbrain. I forget what I wanted to say here though. Bear with me, darlings.

I think Anke must have told me at least five times now what she will do in the summer. I will probably forget until I next see her and have a conversation. Thus, I will ask her again and not even feel ashamed until about half way through her patient explanation….

The Past in the Present.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it “the way it really was”. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.

(Walter Benjamin, 1992: 247, in Hannah Arendt’s Illuminations)

‘pui prea mult sufletu… mereu…’

can i be an island from now on? i want to be indifference itself. give me absolute autonomy, the perfected twenty-first century individual. for things are affecting me too much. nutshell is a strange fiction of aspiration, renunciation, and wishful thinking denied.

i am thinking of a series of cartoons. anyone want to help me draw? anyone know anyone that could help me draw?

i also miss the thieves, one of which is illustrated above.

Fulfilling. Self-Fulfilling.

Like most everyone else, she liked to play at oracle. As a kid she dreamt up which kind or colour of car was going to pass by next. She imagined being able to tell the colour by listening intently to the sound, at times really believing it was true. She touched tall grass leaves for luck and counted the in-betweens of pavement lining, not letting her shoes touch those crazy boundaries. Her walking was rhythmed by tunes in her inside world moving forward with her, like a butterfly, like a growing force field, like a meandering swallow, making her heart lighter and, every now and then, making her voice heard in the outside world.

I cannot breathe today. Nor write. It does not travel. Academia is a world I cannot enter.

How can those who do not know me understand?

venus.

‘One must imagine Venus turbulent, above the noise of the sea.’

(Michel Serres 2005 [1995] Genesis, p. 122)

friends with people who write something like this?

The two great molar aggregates of the East and West are perpetually being undermined by a molecular segmentation causing a zigzag crack, making it difficult for them to keep their own segments
in line. It is as if a line of flight, perhaps only a tiny trickle to begin with, leaked between the segments, escaping their centralization, eluding their totalization. The profound movements stirring in a society present themselves in this fashion, even if they are necessarily “represented” as a confrontation between molar segments. It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. That is true only on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a “change in values,” the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France
was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very limited in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most advanced politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced from the viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this case judge things better than a modernist.

Deleuze, Gilles. Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. p 216.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/aberdeenuniv/Doc?id=10151134&ppg=237

photos: on the train in the belgian hinterland that is the deep wallonie and province du luxembourg. i miss that place…

syntagm/paradigm

ha! this is the time when you notice that the blog should, in fact, have black as a background colour. i count on your wild imagination, as usual. i apologise for suboptimal picture #2… you can click on the pictures and they blow up (in a harmless way).

what you’re dealing with is a nocturnal meditation on ‘nightswimming’ by r.e.m.