July 21, 2007

If you ever run across a bear...

The bears are extremely curious animals. They generally avoid contact with humans yet they might get close in search of food, especially during their food frenzy in fall before they hibernate. Bears can be dangerous and attack in cases when they are protective of their siblings or if they are wounded.

If you ever run across a bear

  • don't run; you won't have any chance. Bears are faster and stronger than you, and they can climb trees. Even if you manage to climb a tree, the bears are known to be patient. And running will only trigger bears' curiosity.
  • stand still and try to create noises, for example by using two stones: bears are afraid of avalanches, the trembling of the earth beneath their feet and falling of the rocks and soil. Who doesn't fear that if one lives on the mountains?
  • you can play dead if you are good at it. Still, the bear might check whether you are really dead or just pretending, they are just smart.

July 17, 2007

madness and meaning / what is a blog?

Is a blog more than (or, less than) a marker board, like the surface of a fridge covered with pictures and notes and ads? I love my virtual magnet board where I stick some quotes and notes and pics.

Here is such a quote on madness, from an article on the story of Nabokov "Signs and Symbols":

"madness, unlike literature, fails in the quest of meaning and is therefore associated to silence, as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida suggested, whereas literature, although sometimes verging on madness, is characterized by the desire to live and to move away from the silence of death."
Jacqueline Hamrit
this is a madness driven outside the shore of language where the fishes of meaning swim.

and a contrary one:

"On n'est fou que de sensé ("Only meaning drives you mad" or "No madness without meaning"), writes [Michèle] Montrelay, -the unconscious is the only defence against a language frozen into pure, fixed or institutional meaning, and what we call sexuality, in its capacity to unsettle the subject, is a break against the intolerable limits of common sense."
Jacqueline Rose

By posting them, I am intending to forget about them, but at the same time to make them near, so as to return and think about them in a new light. Why do people stick notes on their fridge door? In order to remember, or to materialize and externalize so that they don't have to keep in their minds all the time?

reminders of the day

July 7, 2007

circles on the water

I watch the drops dripping on the surface of the water. they form circles and then the circles merge to create other circles, and they tremble and they tremble me. I extend my hand to touch the surface which looks like solid and put my finger just above the water and the line of the surface bounds with the touch, my finger still dry. I look closer as the circles fade and as reflection of the sky with white clouds on the surface gets clear, the visage of my face enters the frame, so distant, so mysteriously real.