Definitions, a linguist’s domain – “knowledge”

Knowledge /ˈnɒl.ɪdʒ/
Accumulation of notions pertaining to diverse fields in memory; organization of them in a logical cognitive system; application of k. to reality perceived with logic, hypotheses and assumptions; development of critical faculties; inflation of the ego; development of self-hate due to systematic application of critical faculties to the self; deflation of the ego; uneasiness caused by the possibility that other people possess same critical capacity as self; shame; block of any creative activity; total and perpetual inertia.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Playing with dark matter

Nothing to do with physics, I swear. I know nothing whatsoever about physics.

When you open doors;
When you put your hands in the mud;
When you play with fire and look at it with enchanted eyes;
When you allow your bare feet to be pierced by fresh grass;
When you simply look and listen, not letting yourself be blinded by interferences:

You let something flow in, but even more flows out. All sorts of stuff, on every plane – from mere physiology to air to thoughts. Once you do it, there’s no turning back.

It’s infernal at the beginning, especially if you clench everything hard and tight. You stop eating and sleeping. I did that for weeks. You vomit. You punish yourself for not being able to keep things from showing. For your own puny visibility. For needing help. For being weak, lacking, lame, run-down, powerless. For being imperfect. For being finite. For being human.

And so I stopped eating and sleeping, at first. I wished to disappear, to dissolve, to freeze, to wake up in another 10 years. All my torturers became visible and palpable, in dreams and in waking. To myself, I am Hitler. I am Bernard Gui. I am the whole fucking Spanish Inquisition, with all its devilish rites and purifications and pyres. I host them and let them use a big part of my random memory. And they have always been there, like the imaginary friends of a schizophrenic, walking beside me and not letting me see properly. Telling me I’m inadequate, insufficient, unlovable. That I have to be better, that I need to do more.

I’m starting to make friends with my dark matter. At first, I could only infer it from its gravitational effects on my visible matter. It has visited me in my dreams. When it takes hold, though, there’s another me that comes out. The healthy and strong and loving me. The one that can imagine what it is to live in a lovelier light. The one that is able to stroke. And to be stroked. And to feel loved without all the paraphernalia (oh yeah I have plenty of it! I know everything, I’m up-to-date, fucking efficient, I can tell you about Foucault and French literature of the Eighteenth Century and acoustics and perception of time in Bergson and Modernism and Bach and Artificial Intelligence; I can draw and speak 5 languages and recite Hamlet by heart and – if I decide to – even sing. I know all that, but I don’t know how to enjoy it).

My dictators have been my drive for years. I’ve let them. Had enough of all that shit, now. Stop showing off. Just be.

(Silvia, thanks for everything you’ve done for me)

Hitler in my heart

Popularity: 5% [?]

My father as he slept

Barefoot in the garden, in this spring afternoon.

Some pretty standard pics, inspired by sensibility or – more simply – by allergic rhinitis. Want to see the rest of them?

more »

Popularity: 1% [?]

Alphabets

A was really boring. Fishing and sports was all he cared about. I was very young and knew nothing, so I thought that it was fine if I was bored or depressed or waiting on the beach all the time. It wasn’t particularly nice in winter. I remember that I used to spend a lot of time reading. I never complained or went mad, I was really small. I guess that if you ask him, he’d say I’m the most frigid and passionless cow he’s ever dated.

B wanted me but I didn’t want him. He kept following me while I was at the library or at University. He stole one of my leather gloves once. He used to call me in the middle of the night to insult me. I often went mad. I bet that if you ask him, he’d say I’m a fucking cunt.

One day, I simply stopped calling C. He hadn’t heard from me for two months, when I turned up at his workplace. Pretended nothing had happened. And then, I woke up one morning and simply went away. That was pretty much the last time I saw him. That year, my mother had died and I used to listen a lot to my inner voice. I’m sure that if you ask him, he’d say I am silent as a tombstone.

D told me once: “I’m sorry, my girlfriend has just turned up. Could you please go as soon as you can?”. I remember driving for almost 100 miles, that night. It took me 50 minutes. Later and for years, I couldn’t even stand her being mentioned. That was probably one of the most painful things that has ever happened to me. I’m certain that if you ask him, he’d say I’m the most jealous person he’s ever seen.

E really made me happy. I’ve never laughed so much. We were like Adam and Eve, or small children giving names to things for the first time. Full of defiance. Throwing coriandoli. Owners of infinite space. I guess that if you ask him, he’d say “I hope she’s happy”.

F was no serious matter. I thought I could use him so I would stop thinking of G, but it didn’t work because I loved G too much. If you ask F, he’d probably say I’m a deadcat. If you ask me, I played with him like a cat with a mouse.

Being with H was like adopting him. But don’t tell this to him or he’ll be mad at me.

J broke my heart. I was pretty convinced that, were it not for some strange power that possessed me, I could have killed him. I destroyed all I had, lost 18 pounds and quit my job. I’m pretty sure that if you ask him, he’d shudder and tell you I’m a bloody nutcase.

K and I were so full of mutual care and attention that we stayed together mostly out of politeness. If you ask him he’d say I’m one of the best persons he knows.

I used to like L a lot, but stopped seeing him when I caught chickenpox from my little brother. When I felt better, it was too late. If you ask him, he’d say “Daniela who?”.

And so on…

I know lots of alphabets and languages and stories and like telling them all inaccurate and messed up and tangled. And now, all I can do is give away this ball of yarn, so you won’t be surprised. Hoping you’ll keep me in your hand, like the most precious gift I have for you.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mantra

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone on it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again. I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.

Ernest Hemingway, Introduction to The First Forty-Nine Stories

Keep that in mind, now.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Practicing invective – Ingenuousness

One of the reasons for the high mortality of my blogs is ingenuousness. Not my own, but the ingenuousness of bloggers in general, or my lack of it. Let me explain.

To be able to write about your own matters; to trust innocently and naively that somebody might be interested; to offer your stuff, straightforward and unfiltered, on display, has always struck me as childlike simplicity, as something really not cool as opposed to what I deemed cool: sophistication, experience, critical judgement, irony or capacity of tearing something into shreds.
Candour has never been my cup of tea. If it was, I’ve always sought to weed it out as soon as I detected it. Because candid is too often paired with “credulous, unsuspecting, lacking craft or understanding of matters, unsubtle”, and has always reminded me of two things: of innocent, virginal creatures lacking independence and unable to support themselves; of mere objects, things that don’t make meaning, but only bear it, for somebody to evaluate and interpret them and – finally – be able to laugh at them. All things that I honestly didn’t wish to seem.

“Thus conscience makes cowards of us all.”
Seem is the key to all this. Almost thirty, I suddenly discover the innate (=genuine,= ingenuous) strength of spontaneity that’s not afraid of mistakes. Of simply showing and being, of not hiding behind the multiple radioactive layers of cleverness and taste. Of the great fun of doing something wrong. Of contemplating the possibility of imperfection. Of being comically (innocently, inadvertently, God forbid!) laughable. Somebody stop me!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Roxanne

Popularity: 1% [?]

Of the endless repetitions

In case of life, act cautiously:

Make sure you’ve applied enough stucco to the holes in your walls;
Make sure all your bruises from last year’s ski holidays have healed (hurt knees can take years to mend);
Make sure you’ve recovered your strength from all your marathons.

Just in case. You never know when and what repetitions may occur.
Repetitions are always waiting in ambush behind corners. Fantasy is limited and people don’t have nerve enough to harm you in a new way. To surprise you.

There’s also a good part. It is a marvelous opportunity for your own variations on a theme. It can become an art, you start possessing talents and are able to anticipate the full range of possibilities open to you. Like music, like maths, like a good book: after a phrase, you know perfectly well what module may follow, you can choose from a set of topoi, with the ease and lightness of an artist. You can stand beside yourself and watch how, under the same circumstances, you could have fallen in a state of cognitive obsession.

I myself have become amazing. Literally. I am swift in the resolution of equations. With a zen poise, not a drop of blood spilled. Just leave things happen, just watch them, just listen to how you want to react to them. Nothing human is unknown to me.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Self justification

Can’t avoid it, had to write it:
a tree that grows hearts > about this blog

Popularity: 2% [?]

Oniric matter. Practicing nakedness.

Last week:

- I dreamt of standing naked opposite a bunch of shocked people. I felt proud and happy.

- I dreamt of dying of haemorrhage in a white room, on a white bed. People around me trying to hide my blood ’cause it made them feel uneasy and embarassed.

- I dreamt of chatting with my mother in a cosy mountain lodge. She told me that the notebook I use to write down my dreams was improperly kept. It was full of drawings I’ve never actually drawn. It was full of secrets. So I went outside on the snowy slope and kept trying to climb it upwards, thwarted by all those around me who were skiing at the speed of light. Properly. Downwards.

- I dreamt of walking in a field in a full-blown spring afternoon. I kept picking all sorts of flowers; some of them actually exist, like daisies. Others don’t. But then my dog would shit, and I would pick up his shit as well. This was a really happy moment.

- Last night I dreamt of waking up and finding a ghost in my living room, in the dark. The ghost would touch me while I was sitting on the sofa, frozen with horror. Then I realised that I was the ghost. I had a ghost’s hands. My dogs saw inside of me and bit both my hands, snarling. Then I dreamt of running to the other room, desperate, to tell that I was a ghost and that I had a ghost’s hands.

So this is what I dream of. Apparently I feel happier when I get naked, so there you go. The Internet is a perfect place for sharing trash of all sorts and counting ourselves as kings of infinite space.

Limerence

Popularity: 2% [?]