cry

cry with someone; it's more healing than crying alone...

Albert Camus

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

Ashes

Burned to ashes
And the ashes flew
In the wind
Taken by breath
As I breathe on

Shadows in my head
When I'm too high to think
Give me my view

Teaching Present, Past, & Possible!

Today, as I was reading Bruner's The Culture of Education, I came across this impressive paragraph which meant a lot to me. That's why I've decided to share it with you:

I thought I was in for another discussion of the usual but was not it at all. What do we do now, they asked, about teaching Russian history of the last century, including the 75 years of the Communist regime? Teach it as just one big mistake? As Russia hoodwinked by party opportunists in the Kremlin? Or can the past be reconstrued to make sense not only of the past and its tragedies but of how the future could be shaped? "You," one of them said, "have been writing about history and culture as narrative, about the need for constant updating and reconstrual of past narratives. So how do we get a new generation to reflect upon and reconstrue their history? How do we keep from fooling ourselves again?" The discussion went on past midnight- better to have fresh reading, say, of Dostoevski's Notes from the Underground or Gogol's The Inspector, than 'exposing' official histories of "The Revolution"? The next morning I thought, How come we're not asking questions like that? Because we "won"? Should that mask our failures and blindness- not a moment of official mourning for the tense of thousands of oppressed Iraqi civilians killed in desert storm, never mind how just our cause? No public pondering about the richest country in the world generating poverty at a rate second to none? Is that "winning"?

Jerome Bruner

Anna Akhmatova

I drink to our ruined house

To all of life’s evils too

To our mutual loneliness

And I

I drink to you

Mikhail Bakhtin

Carnival is associated with the collectivity. Those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization. All are equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age. The carnival atmosphere holds the lower strata of life most important, as opposed to higher functions (thought, speech, soul) which were usually held dear in the signifying order. At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes individuals to feel they are a part of the collectivity, at which point they cease to be themselves. It is at this point that, through costume and mask an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community.

Letting the cables sleep

You in the dark
You in the pain
You on the run
Living a hell
Living your ghost
Living your end
Never seem to get in the place that I belong
Don't wanna lose the time
Lose the time to come