thoughts in a new year

I wasn't looking for an emotional experience.
I just wanted to know where things stood.

multi-universe theory be blowed.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I don't have the know-how to refute.
but I need to trust my intuition; my instinct . . . 


this word: "know".
like "love": overused, and yet central though it can have many different implications.

in Icelandic there are two words "vita" and "kunna". In French, "savoir" and "connaitre".
In English just "know"?

but . . . . .  I still know.

an important contradiction:
nature as savage, whilst you are not.
how can that be? 

thinking about it, perhaps nature isn't as savage as it appears.
family is still at the heart of it. lots of loving goes on . . . . .
yes, a lot of eating goes on too.
 
but you seem to want to draw us away from that . . . . to transform that nature:
lion and lamb . . . an end to violence.

creation continues then: from elemental fireball to community. 
so you're still working on it?

and we are an essential part of that.
however tiny a speck we might occupy in the grand scheme of things.

but size isn't everything:
important for us to have in mind as we gaze out across countless ions of time and space.

size isn't everything. in fact, size isn't really anything.
size is just size.
enormous/ tiny.
it is Being which counts.

100 years ago tonight

25th December 1914
Private Frederick W.Heath :  Still looking and dreaming, my eyes caught a flare in the darkness. A light in the enemy's trenches was so rare at that hour that I passed a message down the line. I had hardly spoken when light after light sprang up along the German front. Then quite near our dug-outs, so near as to make me start and clutch my rifle, I heard a voice. there was no mistaking that voice with its guttural ring. With ears strained, I listened, and then, all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: "English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!"

Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxons: “The English brought a soccer ball from the trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvellously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”

André Devaere d.14 November 1914

On 17th May 1914 André Devaere played his last recital in the Kortrijk town hall. He performed Bach´s Toccata and Fugue in c minor, some CPE Bach, Beethoven´s Waldstein sonata,Schumann´s "In der Nacht", Kreisleriana no.5 and Novelette no.2, a Chopin prelude, and "Islamey" by Balakirev.

At the outbreak of war he was conscripted into the 27th line regiment. On 10 November 1914 he was shot in the lungs near Nieuwpoort, Belgium and died in the Pensionat Sophie Berthelot in Calais on 14 November.

remembering

gassed   sargent

August Macke d. 26 September 1914

Expressionist German artist August Macke was killed on this day in 1914 aged 27 on the Western front. This painting from that year. Clearly such an influence on Klee!
He was perhaps the first of that generation of artists, poets, musicians, writers and scientists killed during the Great War.

His wonderful self portrait (1906)