Turn idea into feeling

Max Jacob to a student:

Meditation is not about having ideas, on the contrary! it consists in having one, in transforming it into feeling, into conviction. A meditation is good when it leads to a YES, pronounced by the whole body, to a cry from the heart: joy or pain! by a tear or a burst of laughter. Just try to meditate on this: God became man. Repeat this within yourself until you come to conviction. It does not matter which images appear, image of Christ or child or young man or crucified. No matter. Repeat on your knees: God became man! For how long ? It depends on your faculties. There are good ten-minute meditations and bad ones that last an hour. In short, collect yourself twice a day at least.

I'm not talking to you about prayer, about contemplation, first because I don't understand much about it, then because I don't want to make you a mystic, but only a man.

Funerals

Funerals are used to point with diabolical precision a dart that comes to burst the abscess of pain to let it flow out gently and smooth like the infusion of a patient, it hydrates those who remain on the edge of the bank of the alive, it brings him the comfort of always being a little with the missing person, but at the same time, it reminds him of his absence… It is difficult not to revel in it and not to hate it at the same time. The loss changes the whole layout of the living because he sees the imprint of the dead everywhere, some rooms are adorned with flowers when they have never been... The dead imposes a prism on the living who sees him in places where the latter has never set foot. The mental image makes it possible to remember and to imagine and frantically intertwines the threads of one with the threads of the other in a mad saraband that intoxicates and hoarse until we are no longer able to differentiate what which is true of what we invent. Time does nothing, or rather knits this confusion. But do we still want to separate memory from imagination?

We don't mourn someone, it's mourning that shapes us, it's the loss of a loved one that shapes us.

The Meaning… of Funerals

The contemporary world is thrilled by using the formula, make sense , a perfect translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression, make sense . It is comforting to repeat this expression to yourself without it actually having any… meaning, so we pick up little things that make sense, but what are these mini-meanings found on the ground almost by chance? What are these skin of sorrow meanings that Through the methodical destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning , we have to create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not having abdicated. Deceit is backed up by ignorance, and on this point too, trickery is not new. The meaning given by death within the family, this meaning almost completely forgotten nowadays, is recalled by Antigone in Sophocles' play where she stands as a guardian of the values ​​that liberate, because they protect man from death. 'animal. Antigone reaffirms what man can and cannot; it takes hold of a force destined to protect us from our will to power and to teach us the time of responsibility; a time nowadays entrusted to specialists replacing the family, the people who compose it, and the tenuous links woven between them over time.

The penalty

The pain resembles the backwash that comes and goes with languor, without languishing, on the hieratic rock that fulfills its role of whipping boy. She overwhelms it almost every time and, if she misses her shot, if she does not completely subdue the rock in the moment, she never resigns herself, she always regains her momentum and, as a kind of feint , bypasses it, surrounds it, embraces it and hugs it the next time!

The call of fate, the forgetting of vocation

To deny the origin, it is possible to affirm that the existence of past facts cannot be proven, or better that it is an accident, an accident amplified by gossip. It is here that the attenuation often proves to be an effective subterfuge, because it does not oblige to deny and is based on a part of honesty, but if the escobarderie makes it possible to extract oneself in appearance from a lineage , makes it possible to hide from the world the ghosts of its origin under the veil of ignorance, it only feigns the outside, the surrounding people, it does not offer any escapes during an encounter with oneself. It often represents the cornerstone of a fear of intimacy. Because intimacy reveals. Because unassumed fear partitions a fear of oneself into itself while denying it. How many of our contemporaries live thus harnessed to their fear of disclosure? This way of feint declines a rainbow of cowardice; a cowardice which beats the measure of silence, which creates balance and bases it on a forgetfulness of self, therefore on a loss of self, then a negation of self. The fear that does not die and does not rise again in bravery announces the death of freedom. The reign of robots. Ismene hides the outrage of Creon. Ismene has already lost her freedom. She lost it on purpose. She traded it for a little comfort. She is afraid to see herself. Ismene leads her little way as the popular adage says, which means that she merges with her destiny, even more she wraps herself in her destiny, she is one with it, she can almost to distinguish one's destiny from one's life, but destiny is an unassumed fear, destiny invites us to live a life parallel to the life we ​​could have lived, the life for which we were made, destiny inexorably takes us away from our vocation, at the beginning we still see this vocation, but little by little it dissipates and becomes confused with a dream. Sometimes, however, an event can revive this awareness of what we are deep inside us, it is when the event becomes history.

From sense to nonsense

The contemporary world gets excited by using the formula : make sense , perfect translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression, make sense. It is so comforting to repeat this expression to yourself without it actually having any… meaning, so we pick up little things that make sense , but what are these mini-meanings found on the ground almost by chance? What are these senses, a skin of grief , which invite themselves without our being there for nothing or almost if not the residues of a past sense, of a common sense, of a good sense sculpted by the centuries? Through the methodical destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning, create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not having abdicated. Deceit is backed up by ignorance, and on this point too, trickery is not new. The meaning given by death within the family, this meaning almost completely forgotten nowadays, is recalled by Antigone in Sophocles' play where she stands as a guardian of the values ​​that liberate, because they protect man from death. 'animal. Antigone reaffirms what man can and cannot; it takes hold of a force destined to protect us from our will to power and to teach us the time of responsibility; a time nowadays entrusted to specialists replacing the family, the people who compose it, and the tenuous links woven between them by the passing of time.

Like robots facing death

No need to be frightened by these robots from Asia who seem ready to conquer our place, because the robot is in us and it is watching us; he watches for this point of no return where the man stripped of all humanity will exhibit his corpse believing he has defeated his worst enemy. The loss of know-how vis-à-vis death has gone hand in hand with the loss of the rite: almost nothing any longer accompanies the dead to Hades, almost nothing any longer frees the living from the dead and the dead from living. The gravediggers of humanity grant importance to the rite only to mock it or harm it without grasping the liberation it procures through the meaning it reveals.

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)

 

What stories about identity! The word does not appear neither in the Greek epic nor in the tragedy. The identity at the time of Antigone is leaning on the line and belonging to a city. Identity was soaked from rooting. The family and the city brought together under a virtual standard the entirety of what the other should know about oneself during a first meeting. During Antiquity, no one proclaimed their identity or promulgated it, and no one decided on its identity. It was not a question of putting a costume. Men were in their identity. The identity was akin to a charge, we had to be worthy of it. She ruled being and becoming. Modern era has made an issue, because it has transformed the identity to have, a sort of achievement which can be disputed or departing. In its modern fantasy to believe that you can choose everything all the time, the modern era replaced with a relentless method being by having it. Yet this logic, this ideology has its limits: certain things cannot be acquired, among them: otherness. Living your identity, being what you are, living in your name , allowing intimacy and therefore the knowledge and deepening of your being, these are the sine qua non conditions of one meeting with the other. The first difference between Creon and Antigone is at this specific location, the terrain on which the fight is built, Antigone preserves anchored in it this gift of the ancients, of the gods, this rooting which defines the authority to which it is leaning for Take up to this man, his parent, the king, who marries the will to power and finds himself blinded by her until he only heard her own voice, his echo. Read the rest of "Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. Vocation)"