Sunday in Santa Fe
He’s like a cherry bomb in a cherry pie.
Tom Waits, speaking about director Terry Gilliam to the L.A.Times.
And, what’s it like, acting? He said:
It’s like sneaking up on a glass of water.
He has a way with words!
I offset 70 tons of CO2 at Carbonfund.org the other day. That’ll cover the flights (as a group we accumulated more than 120,000 miles in 2009), the tourbus (not sure what milage, but it’ll be covered in the 70 tons) and my car.
Found the following yesterday. It was appropriately posted on Christmas day:
Nikola Tamindzic – On compassion
On compassionAll languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages — Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish for instance — this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish wspól-czucie; German Mit-gefühl; Swedish med-känsla).
In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on cooly as others suffer; or, we symphathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French pitié; Italian piéta; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower than ourselves.
That is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root word “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion — joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.
This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit; wspólczucie; Mitgefühl; medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Of course, it does not matter how you get there – as long as you get there.
Here is a quote from David Byrne’s book Bicycle Diaries, which I have been reading off and on for a couple of months (((I am reading the Kindle version))):
The World isn’t logical. It’s a song.
I quite like that! And how about this:
…that she was recently in Iran to visit some of the artists currently working there. She says most of them are regularly subjected to beatings by the government, and they incorporate that into their lives and dress, wearing six pairs of pants for their beating appointments.
And with that we’ll come full-circle, as that is surely something one could expect to find in a movie by Terry Gilliam, the cherry bomb in the cherry pie.
PS: Canton’s Mercury Retrograde Widget tells me that Mercury is in Retrograde and to save often. Just wanted to pass that on…
