Levity

It turns out that the last few weeks have gone over me while I seem to have been in an altered state of conscientiousness. Trouble is is that I am not quite sure on which side of that consciousness I have been, I have whined and moaned and pestered many around me about the details of it all, I have partied, and I have worked. I sat in the sessions of our city council, our party meetings and assemblies, and after all of this there is one strange taste left in my mouth. But these have been interesting times, as “times” at my address tend to be always very unpredictable.

Once more I am right there in the middle of my own inquiry in what consists the interface of the public and private. After all, it is another election year for this city council, and although the campaigning season has not yet really opened up, it is clear from the nature of the debates and the local newspaper nonsense that we are in that season already when all of a sudden politics is a lot about ego trips. Ego trips are not all that bad, but what is for sure is that one must be willing to take one’s ego for one hell of a ride when exposed to the public scrutiny and this may be the ultimate thrill of them all.

Just earlier this week - or was it last week? - while heading up town I bumped into Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf walking in the opposite direction fully engaged in a very animated discussion. This was just days after I had finally claimed my fame in the diplomatic parquet by having spilled a hot expresso over the nice white shirt of one of the local ambassadors all the while not having had a clue to the nature of the position of the “lucky” gentleman who had thus had a much too intimate and private encounter with “my” expresso. It is hard to take life too seriously these days when the nature of my experiences are of this calibre, and a look into either the headlines of the international or local press makes me wonder if this world has gone totally insane already and that I may be the last one to discover what must already be obvious to all. There is something sobering about the observation of all the insanity and irrationality that surrounds us all. We do live in a world where wisdom and rational are precious jewels cultivated by the very few who know that freedom resides only in the generosity of our spirit. The faculty of critical thought is one rare and necessary instrument within our democratic societies, however we often forget that life is indeed an ephemeral non-equilibrium phenomenon. Each time that violence erupts in the streets of Beirut, I wake up.

In the grand scale of things, the weather often has the last word. You may think what you may want, however there is no such thing as a non-political discussion when it domes to humanitarian relief: watch the UN Webcast of Noon Time Press Briefing of May 8 for an idea of what this dilemma is about. Somewhere along the line the whole reminds me of some fantastic scenes from the movie Babel.

Stress

I summarise the 2008 Birankai Spring Camp in Labaroche in one word: stress. It was my fourth year, and as every preceding year, it was different from all others. Three of us travelled for two hours from Berne to Labaroche on Saturday the 12th and returned on the 19th. In between I must confess that I delighted in stress and all its bodily sensations! I sat out the third class on Tuesday morning and took some pictures of Rikko Varjan Sensei’s class.

Every morning I got up at 6 and was in Zazen by 6:30 warmly wrapped in a few layers of cotton sitting on a Zafu, and every day at some point I got nauseated while sitting. Really, I literally felt like throwing up and vomiting while sitting. The great thing about Zazen is that it is a perfect opportunity to postpone. Everyday I postponed giving in to that urge to vomit by making a conscious effort to breathe from deep down that place that is often referred to as hara. Aikido and Zazen go together better than one can imagine, especially if one has never tried either. One is moving, the other is sitting, and both are active, very active. What one trains in either case has to do with hara, or what we call the centre or the lower chakra, or rather what I would call my gut. We all know the idiomatic expressions around gut from “having no guts” to “feeling it in my guts” or that all too familiar “gut feeling” however the expression lacks all the mystical and mysterious connotations that a word like hara or chakra can awaken in the seeking mind and searching spirit. There is nothing romantic about training one’s gut and getting it connected to the rest of one’s existence, yet that is exactly what it boils down to, and it starts with learning to breathe.

Entangled Change

Achilles: Is this what remains of you when you are done ploughing through the reality of men’s dreams?

Tortoise: For the first time in our life, I would rather punch the living daylights out of you than to reason with you! What gives you the right to make of me your dream that I never was?

Achilles: Was it I? Was it me? What is your nature?

Tortoise: I am insanity, truly am, and still your voice is so very loud. Why must you speak with me? Do you really imagine that I exist? Let me make it clear to you now and for ever and ever: I do not exist!

Achilles: You are a screaming dying fool! Those few malignant anorexic cells that are left with you, those anorexics are eating away your bandwidth, and you are doomed!

Tortoise: To listen to you is the only folly that is left in my sanity! Today I tasted that which is the very elixir of life: not caring, not giving a damn, not wanting, not committing, not owning, not existing!

Achilles: If I listen to you carefully now, I would think that you are… could it be? is it possible that you actually turned around, and you considered the existence of the possibility of love?

Tortoise: Must you once more return to your belief in love? There is no wisdom and no attainment! Why would I want to belief when my cosmos is already empty?

Achilles: Pathetic! You call the pressure anvil that you create day in and day out, peace? Your cosmos is chaotic, agonizing, suffocating, moronic, boring, and the next calamity follows the past calamity. You bleed to death!

Tortoise: There is no fear.

Achilles: Fear?

Tortoise: Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form; form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Blind Not my Mind

In Bern today.

I get a lot of unsolicited post from the city of Bern’s various administrative and cultural units. Some of it lands right straight into the waste basket and each time I regret the trees and all the energy that has gone into producing yet another wasted paper. Still, waste comes naturally to nature. Nature is very wasteful and generous. Some of the material I actually look at, and even read. Most often than not I just regret that I do not have the disposability to attend many of the fantastic cultural events taking place in this city.

Just a few days ago I got the 2007 Business Report from the Stadtbauten. The Stadtbauten is the city’s entity that manages some 1584 buildings belonging to the City and those include schools, office buildings, and other public service architectural objects. The cover of this report is beautiful, and just flipping through the pages is quite pleasant to the eye. Good layout, easy to read, great photos. Then I turned to page 7 and something catches my eye: Facts and Figures. There to my great dismay I find out that this city spends CHF 300′000.00 a year after an initial investment of CHF 625′000.00 to destroy the very material which they have used to illustrate the pages of their annual report: graffiti. Now when my colleagues on the left block complain and whine about how little money the city invests in culture, I do wonder if they too like those on the ideological right wing, also think that graffiti is not part of our culture and it too must be removed.

There is indeed beautiful graffiti in this town, and there is also vandalism.

Is removing what otherwise is public domain culture the best way to create new jobs?

If vandalism is what the city would like to set a limit to, is removing graffiti the appropriate approach?

I am wondering how we can find a solution to the challenge of contributing to the public space within a culture of self-expression and respect for the public domain. I think here we need to put our heads together, because this schizophrenia of destroying otherwise valuable art is simply not acceptable.

Virtually Absent

DSC 5536, originally uploaded by Dannie Jost.

On a toujours cherché des explications quand c’était des représentations qu’on pouvait seulement essayer d’inventer.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945)

Neidlos

Er ist ganz ohne Neid, aber es ist kein Verdienst dabei: denn er will ein Land erobern, das Niemand noch besessen und kaum Einer auch nur gesehen hat.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) - Die fröhliche Wissenschaft - Drittes Buch 238

Saturday Rituals, the Flu, FreezeParis or a Night with Macbeth

Friday night I called off my participation in all social activity and curled in bed with a few videos and a whole lot of tea. This silly flu had me and was giving me some grief. On Saturday morning I woke up feeling much better, but not quite up to karate katas, nonetheless I showed up at the karate Dojo at the end of the training to help out with the Spring cleaning and ended up working up a sweat while vaccum the floor and undersides of the tatamis. At some point I did wonder if it had not been wiser to train anyhow or in an act of total absurdity have attended the FreezeParis event. My only conclusion was that I was feeling much better if I could engage in such cleaning rituals, and that my mind must be at its normal as it wonders towards Paris while I have not even had the time to write what I promised to write. Anyhow, this was the kind of flu that attacked my bronchi and gave me an awful sounding cough, but is otherwise moving swiftly through my body without the drippy nose or persisting sore throat. However visiting people who just had brain surgery within the last two weeks is still out of the question according to my colleagues of the medical profession and thus my Sunday plans have just been redrawn.

Heavy?

00220, originally uploaded by milenanelim.

No! It is just a back stretch at the end of training. Sensei Matt Teale (Athens, Greece) did correct my stance when doing this just on Sunday as I was standing much broadly and running the risk of getting an hernia. Nine hours of training during the past weekend… Thanks to all.

Monthly Monday Local: blmdybrn

Thanks habi for the links. Great conversation was to be had on all fronts last night at Desperado as already mentioned by David, however grid computing is something that I forgot to mention and that is being worked on rather seriously these days in order to handle the mammoth amounts of data being produced by some experimental facilities like Fermilab. In addition, two items were of particular note to me: the iPhone and Lift. My impression at LFT08 was that just about everybody had one of those gadgets and I had my fun using Pedro’s and gawking at Charles‘ who had all sorts of geeked-to-the max software on it. I for my part am enjoying with increased pleasure two functions of my - now very old - cameraphone: the off button and the silent mode.

Politics…

Politics… the local variety

The honeymoon is over, there is work to do. I am at this point dealing with my own administrative breakdowns and my strong wish that it would be really easy to deal with this city. After all my bank has managed to make it possible for me to log-in to my account and do all my transactions at the push of a little soft button within a web browser, so why can not the city do this for all citizen’s services?

Meanwhile I sit here in the city council - parliament - listening to what sometimes seems like a whole lot of nonsense. We started today’s comedy with a whole lot of argumentation along anarchist lines that were pleading in favour of this one place called paradisli that de facto has been occupied by a group of well-meaning but poorly educated citizens with great love for producing cultural events and loud parties in a residential neighbourhood. Granted this one does not give me much to worry about, however the polemic is starting to bore me.

The discussion about the EURO was amusing given that only four games will take place in the local Stade de Suisse than unfortunately still bares the name of Wankdorf. On the other hand the discussion about the trash problem in the city is to be taken a bit more on the serious side, and perhaps we could ask our admirers the Singaporeans for some advice in this matter that the Swiss use to be world champions at.

When it comes to police and trash I have plenty of colleagues in this parliament that are interested and knowledge on these matters, so I will concentrate on figuring out what we can do in terms of e-government to bring this city up to speed in the XXI century.

Weekend: Mindless Monkeys

Me loves you all, you all know that, or sorta know that. But now imagine all the films that I have missed while writing up my own. Writing up? It is a long story as usual.

Recently I told somebody very dear to me who was stuck in a certain dearly and tightly held position to look at what could be given up. “Give up? Give up what? I know I am right!”

You know that this is the time when I look at you - you know who you are - and just wait for you to listen to your own words again. Then I do not tell you what to do, if nothing else it is because even if I did, it would not help. Not that I would know what it would be that you could give up, only you can decide that one. Well, I am at this point myself right now. I need to listen to my own words, what is it that I can give up?

Floris

Floris, originally uploaded by Dannie Jost.

Schmap London Fourth Edition