Smell of Rain

And 

... taking a long walk,

... drinking a glass of water and consider it not ordinary,

... reading a book 

... - there must be so much more.
 

P.S. The quote is from Brooke Hampton: here. And the picture is from Alessandro Puccinelli: here.

The First Kiss

Did you know that the cover of the album 'The First of A Million Kisses' (1988) is from Elliott Erwitt? And was made in 1955?

 

The original of this picture is even more beautiful.

P.S. Here the original can be found as picture 23 of 23.

Written Over (Not Erased)

What a beautiful book: Edmund de Waal, ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes. A Hidden Inheritance’ (Vintage, 2011). Art, family history, history of the world, and wealth acquired and taken away woven together. With taste. A book that hurts. Just read it.

Page 258-259:

"So, on 12th August 1938, Ephrussi and Co. is taken off the business register [in Vienna, Austria]. In the records it says, singularly, ERASED. Three months later the name is changed to Bankhaus CA Steinhausser. Under its new name it is revalued, and under its new Gentile ownership is worth six times as much as under Jewish ownership.
There is no longer a Palais Ephrussi and there is no longer an Ephrussi Bank in Vienna. The Ephrussi family has been cleansed from the city.
It is on this visit that I go to the Jewish archive in Vienna, the one seized by Eichmann, to check up on the details of a marriage. I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp cross his first name. It reads 'Israel'. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: 'Israel' for the men, 'Sara' for the women.
I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over. And, finally, it is this that makes me cry."

Page 347:

"There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others. In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, (...), burnt the hundreds of letters and notes she had received from her poetic grandmother Evelina.
Not 'Who would be interested? 'But 'Don't come near this. This is private.'
(...) There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live."

P.S. There is an exhibition of The Ephrussis at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Austria. Review from the pinklookbook: here.

Trinity

 

Summer Letter

 Another poem from Salome Benidze (source: here):

When an octopus is such a creature of the sea. The taste of salt.

As One Who Had to Come

"Vieste do fim do mundo
Num barco vagabundo
Vieste como quem tinha que vir
Para contar histórias e verdades
Vontades e carinhos
Promessas e mentiras
De quem de porto em porto
Amar se faz
Vieste de repente
De olhar tão meigo e quente
Bebeste a celebrar
À volta tua
Tomaste-me em teus braços
Em marinheiros laços
Tocaste no meu corpo
Uma canção que em vil magia
Me fez tua"

P.S. Part of the song 'Vieste Do Fim Do Mundo' from Gisela João. I love this video (here): the movements, the play with light and shades, and its lyrics.

Feel Volume of Space

 "And I'm not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. And I am not interested in 'thin'. I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers - hard and tricky and Japanse - and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it - if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed."

Edmund de Waal, 'The hare with amber eyes. A hidden inheritance' (2010), 15-16.

Eat Lunch With New Kid (rule #9)

 

P.S. This is a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Analysis of this poem: here.

P.P.S. Rules for sons:

1. When shaking hands, grip firmly and look them in the eyes.
2. Don’t enter a pool by the stairs.
3. When entrusted with a secret, keep it.
4. Write down your dreams.
5. Return a borrowed car with a full tank of gas.
6. Never be afraid to ask out the best looking girl in the room.
7. If you need music on the beach, you’re missing the point.
8. Be confident and humble at the same time.
9. Eat lunch with the new kid.
10. Give credit. Take the blame.
11. After writing an angry email, read it carefully, sleep on it for a night and then delete it.
12. Never turn down a breath mint. (Someone is politely saying you need to brush your teeth.)
    

Ordinary Things

 

The Red 10

My presupposition is that Poetin and his comrades - for lack of a good word for this group, hereby baptized, 'The Red 10' - are primary and personal responsible for the war between Russia and Ukraine.

What's puzzling me is how their motivation to wage war fits into Maslow's Motivation Model. What's in it for them? Why? They have enough money. They have enough power. You would then assume that the deficiency needs are satisfied. Or do they still feel anxious and tense about their acquired (some will say: stolen) rights?  

Is it because money and power corrupts people? How to define being corrupt in this context? Is it because they want to be in the history books - make Russia Great again - as Peter the Great #2022? Isn't this Self Actualisation?

Some say, "Make love not war!" I guess for 'The Red 10' love is not the core of life. For them love, flowers, books and other art-stuff in general are items one buys at a shop. Deficiency needs.

For me personal the dimension - or level - of 'having (almost) absolute power at your disposal' is not accounted for in Maslow's pyramid. We can put '(corrupted) power' away as immaturity and some kind of psychological disorder, but if you do you do an injustice to the human species.

(Aside, what also is not accounted for is the dimension of culture. Read for culture also: storytelling and narratives.) 

P.S. Mark, Maslow himself never created the image of a pyramid to represent the hierarchy of needs. Some use another image (source): the image of (interfering) waves

 

Wondering why not use one of these images of representing Maslow's hierarchy of needs': DNA string, 11 dimensional cube, rooms in a house with windows, a cold and warm buffet diner,  and ... - there must be more.