Pasolini, Fassbinder, and Rumi

I don't want to sound like a Philistine-actually I do! -but all this wanting to appear "deep" or "dark" can get terribly boring. A sort of brooding northern melancholy of the soul that wants to be alone in Paradise, to be all or nothing. Like those insufferable bores who want to talk about "the truth" or who think that everything can be the subject of analysis (even Rumi's become an idol), the radicalism of the blue-eyed ones is abstract and atomistic.

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Kirk Douglas: Melancholy is the inability to get out of oneself.

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And how right Nietzsche was-what we lack more than anything are healthy instincts;what we lack is the self-repose that casts away despair, that knows how to live with sadness, how to dance...a lightness out of profundity. Do we have to learn how to cultivate a bit of superficiality, how to be Greeks again?

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Gawd! Sorry, D, but Fassbinder is crap. I swear, if you can watch the whole of Merchant, I'll buy you a chocolate eclair. Grim beyond belief. And Passolini's Mama Rosa is not much better. Most of the film is about some kid prancing about. (But I don't want to give the plot away!). What a delight it was, then, to return to The Leopard. I know Said talked about the triumph of style over content, but I'm not sure. Sometimes the style is the content.

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Books I haven't read but should are piling up. Should? Today I can laugh at the book lists in The Culture (the name gives it away!) Communism and capitalism aren't that different after all. What separates them? Only this: one is at a slight angle to the other: The Culture. Recently, I read someone saying, 'anyway, back to breakfast'. How wise that seems to me!

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The philosopher does not permit his wonder stand as it is, to be released into the flow of life. Of necessity, he must "hook" the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought's "object" and "subject" from the flow of life and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates and is perpetuated in the motionless mirror of his meditation; that is in the subject. He has it well-hooked; it is securely fastened and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive, statuesque, subjugated. The solution and dissolution of their wonder is at hand-the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a wonder to eachother; they are in the very heart of wonder. Life becomes numb in the face of death and dies. The wonder is unravelled . And it was life itself that brought the solution.

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---Franz Rosenzweig.