The Glass Menagerie

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”








“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”





“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”









“People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.”








“The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into ever lasting regret if you don't plan for it!”








“attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”


Tennessee Williams

Dead Friends (Around the Corner)

 
 
Everything here is unchanged
it looks like everywhere
This whole area is out of my way
so I rarely come around here







Here are those who went
and those who were made to leave
Here are those for whom I appeared
in the last film in flight in free fall
Most of them are still very hungry
and they don't even have cigarettes
so they just cling to the ideas.








There is a place around the corner
where your dead friends live...

Some drift through places and thoughts
blind passengers in subways and busses
or they simply stand around and wait
Even those who couldn't wait any longer
here they have nothing else to do
Especially at night they are bothered by boredom







There is a place around the corner
where your dead friends live...

It is nothing
It is nothing
I call you by your old names
I do not change my tone of voice
I let them fall like they always fell
now that you are just not visible not touchable
and also unassailable
It's all still the the same
only you are waiting in between
not very far you're rather close
around the corner so to speak
around the corner so to speak
around the corner so to speak
It is nothing
It is nothing
It is nothing
It is

 Einstürzende Neubauten





 

Note: The photos of the post are from Lublin and Majdanek (PL). Majdanek or KL Lublin was a Nazi German concentration and extermination camp established on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. [more]
The day of my visit there a concert of Einstürzende Neubauten was on.

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

  

 

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”




 

 

 

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.”

“One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.”








“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

Roland Barthes

Notes from Underground

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”

“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”






“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”



“I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.”



“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”



“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”



“Can a man of perception respect himself at all?”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Animal Farm

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

 

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”



 

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

 

“Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

George Orwell