The gypsy woman walked down the paseo, her head high and arrogant, her brows furrowed with the intensity of her pride, her face and body thin, her eyes flashing. The men shouted remarks to her and she either tossed her head proudly or looked straight before her. To walk this way, free from the imposition of all the laws of this wretched society, to disregard contemptuously all the claims, to ignore the derisions…”I do not care for your rules, I live within my own world!” How poor they are and yet how proud! The gypsy, how clever he is to cheat men at their own games…and in the face of all his poverty he flings back a cry, a song and dances with fury before them.
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I want to get at the mystery of human beings…the profound mystery…and the mystery of things…and, paradoxically, in a way, this is something I must create. I walk the streets and I don’t see anyone. It is as if I were in an Utrillo painting where the people appear as blurs or not at all. I must learn to see people. I have other tasks. I must learn how to live again. How do people live when returning from the dead? How to shed that initial corruption? One must test oneself…one must act…and contemplate…the two sides of the coin…which set up a harmony and reinforce each other.
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November 17, 1971
A tropical night in Trinidad—clouds resting on the hills, scattered lights, palm trees, pyres, poverty—and the spontaneity of the Negro. No one can ever understand the Negro until he sees and hears his music. All his spontaneity, his creativity, goes into rhythm. A steel band playing on the docks—and the memory of the slaves landing here—the pain, the fright—and Africa surviving in rhythm and sound, Africa surviving in the wonderful long-limbed people with ability to abandon themselves completely. O Africa—what have we done to you?
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Perhaps the essence of understanding is that the familiar becomes less familiar, that the beginning of knowledge is a state of wondering. This is an age of self-consciousness but do we really know more about ourselves and the world around us? Is there a danger that in putting aside myths as irrational we actually forfeit a possibility of understanding things better? Do we “see and see not,” “hear and hear not”? Have we really become self-conscious and rational and better able to control our lives? The Greeks were raised on Homer; the West was raised on the Bible, but children today are told about rockets and outer space and the facts of life; fairy tales are eschewed as irrational and too violent. Is it true? seems to be the criteria…but what is truth?
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The Latin world is primarily a sensual one, a sensuality intensified by a strict definition of the sexes. It is further intensified by polarizing the life of the spirit from that of the body and then paradoxically carnifying the spirit and spiritualizing the body. That unity which all Latins seek is not equality but union; not a state, but an act of penetration and submission. The separation of the sexes is expressed in romanticism; the separation of body and spirit in mysticism. These polarities absorb the energies of the Latin.
* * * * * * * * * *
The past continuously and mysteriously reassembles itself in fragments, evoking old forgotten needs. It sets partial scenes of shadows and light, of images and sounds and odors…but its sensual unity is lost. Only the child contains the world in all his senses because he has no past. The self becomes an increasing series of disruptions and deaths, and the need to remember this sensual unity of childhood becomes even more intense. We are all secret pilgrims, driven by forgotten purposes and needs.
* * * * * * * * * *
To know another country is always a form of alienation from one’s own. For there are two kinds of knowledge: one that reveals one’s deep ties—one that unites to one’s environment—and one that disrupts, that makes one a stranger. It is the second kind of knowledge that is emphasized today. If we are alienated more and more from our particular environment is it to join us to a universal one? Are we becoming common members of one world? In a political/economic sense this is what we are struggling towards. In a commercial/cultural sense this is what we are certainly achieveing. But not in a true cultural sense. One belongs to the whole world today, it is true—and yet in a genuine sense one doesn’t belong at all…
It is this sense of belonging that was broken first of all by the city. The city has always denied the community. A community, in essence, is participation by all. But it is only the Russians who have tried to create a community based on the facts of a modern industrial world.
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This is the end of Western Civilization as we have known it—as it has been developing since the time of the Greeks. Ironically, we see the culmination in the U.S. of the Greek ideal of the polis and the government of reason, the Renaissance ideal of the whole man, and the importance of the city in commerce, with the Lutheran revolt against authority, the Rousseauian ideal of liberty and equality, the British ideal of law and justice. With this culmination and all the conflicts and consequences arising from it we now see its decline.
With the Soviet Union and the rise of Communism we see the great turning point…the revolt against freedom and equality in the name of freedom and equality…a revolt that removes the final obstacles to technology and the total conversion to the machine.
The most powerful country in the world afraid to exercise power…with this fear and vacuum of power the rise of the Soviet Union and China that can justify the use of power.
Technology could not be built upon Catholicism and the family. It had to develop under Protestantism and the breakdown of the family, and law that favored this development….the consideration of large corporations as persons.
American society had to begin to die within, attacked at its most vulnerable points. It had to destroy itself…by destroying education, youth. The idea of the Self…the dignity of the individual, Self enterprise.
The last area of survival in the West has been the Latin cultures. The Catholic religion solved the paradox inherent in Christianity, that of founding a community on an anti-community. Man’s ancient relationship to nature, denied by the Greeks (Plato, Socrates, etc) was guarded by the ascendancy of the Virgin Mary.
Unity had to be destroyed by conformity in the guise of unity.
* * * * * * * * * *
Perhaps the tragedy today is that we must all become heroes without possessing an heroic vision. Formerly it was only possible for there to be a few heroes. Only a few men were really supposed to suffer and they suffered for others. The community was absolved of suffering—of real suffering. Of course they suffered in the flesh and in the heart…but not in the mind. This was the suffering of the traditional tragic hero—the suffering of the mind that sees the structure of meaning, of order, crumble—the destruction of vision that the rest of mankind is spared. But today we all must somehow construct some kind of meaningful vision—we must all bestow ourselves with some dignity—and we are all responsible. We must all rise to the level of the hero. There is no one to do this for us—and we must all witness the destruction of our vision. Only the innocent, the unseeing and the deliberately blind are spared. And worse, though it happens to all of us…it happens to each one alone. Yes, in the beginning we think we can all become heroes…
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I understand that I will never leave—some ghost of myself will haunt the streets, the alleys, the cafes, the monuments—for one is so unfulfilled in life that one’s desires desert the flesh—so limited, so weak—even before it is dead. The world is populated—haunted—by my many lost selves who have deserted my body long ago.
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Water is the child’s element—insubstantial, mysterious, yielding, joyous and frightening. It is like life itself, clear and secret, something a child both understands and does not understand….
What can one say about the sea? Unlike other experiences, it simplifies rather than complicates. It strips one of all superfluities—of words and sensations. One becomes primeval—one realizes more clearly than ever that man has been given the most difficult existence—that he is the most alienated from unity. Freud speaks of the “oceanic oneness.” It is only on the sea that one finds true unity. Land is the beginning of complexity and alienation.
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Is it a great injustice that so much homage is paid to physical beauty? That people—especially men—usually surly or indifferent turn pleasant to the point of a grovelling silliness at the sight of a beautiful face?
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The room is warm—brown tiles on the floor, wooden tables and chairs, wooden beams and pillars, artifical ferns in pots hanging from the ceiling, a long counter on one side piled with food and drink. People come and go. Music comes from speakers in the corner. At one time it was what I wanted: simply an environment, an ambiance. What reality does it have? I don’t see this or experience it in any way. I only sense my own anxieties, loneliness. The people have no more reality than shadows—I know nothing about them. More than anything else I know pain. This is a terrible way to live…
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