Seville Cathedral used to house Christian and Muslim worshippers side-by-side.
After the inquisition took power, the Muslim part was appropriated and built over with Christian symbology.
You can still see the interface. It is cracking.
Tag: culture
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Seville Cathedral
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Cordoba
A mass of yellow stone
floating in the blue
of the clear, brilliant sky above
and the turbulent Guadalquivir below –
its enormous bulk
made weightless by the context.
Ottoman Cordoba was a univer-city,
a unverse with a small “u”.
A mess of cultures,
sweaty cross-fertilization –
exciting,
faintly indecent,
infinitly productive.
Not the golden mean of Aristotle,
not the measured path of restraint –
contorted co-mingling,
intertwined but not melded.
The way of Socrates –
clear contradiction that is growth
made stone. -
The Art of Walking on the Beach
The beach is a special place, a narrow path
between heights and depths, created by water.Precipitous cliffs on the right – concrete, huge, looming
their weight makes them feel acute and real, like pain.
It’s often said that life is pain – it is,
but lasting pain is only an illusion
created by the myth of lasting self.
But so too is happiness – same logic
applies.
Avoiding one and chasing after other –
a looser’s game.
You stop the chase and acquiesce to pain.
It lays quiescent
and underpins your joy.Enormous sea on the left – deep, silent, inchoate,
seamlessly transforming into sky.
Three container ships in undifferentiated sea-sky,
like ducks over the fireplace.
Familiar, ridiculous and safe,
creating anchor point
for frightened gaze
that’s lost in space and finding you in time –
the time of progress.So you progress –
you walk along the beach,
twixt depths and heights,
abandon and despair,
between deficiency and excess,
the middle way, the golden mean of Greeks.
Temerity-timidity
not much
to choose between –
one consonant, two vowels.
The trick is not to chose or compromise
but merely to tread between the two,
not enter the extremes,
keep in the middle,
create the path anew with every move.What you really need is a thin line of firm sand,
between loose dry and slippery wet,
easier to walk on.
Someone to hold by the hand,
to not have to look down for solid footing,
to see all that beauty.Extremes are always ugly,
beauty is
in golden mean,
in-sink
and in-between,
a pattern in complexity, a path
that unifies variety and us. -
Who are you?
First you figure out who you are not;
then you figure out who you are;
finally, you figure out you are not who. -
Socrates
What kills us is certainty,
unwavering conviction that we are doing the right thing.
The ends have to be unquestioned to justify the means,
questions leave room for empathy and doubt.
Socrates – the man who said that the only certainty is the lack thereof –
died because of his stubborn conviction that he knew the right thing to do.
Because eventually even the bravest of us give in
to the comfort of certain death
after a lifetime in the quicksand of uncertain truths.
The only solution is love
because it makes truth less important than life.
If Socrates had children,
he would have lived longer
and died without leaving a legend. -
This is what democracy looks like:
A lot of people making the same decision they always did – or no decision at all.
Making new decisions is difficult.
It carries a risk of making a mistake and offers no certain reward.
It’s fundamentally unsafe.
Better not.
Quite a few people working hard for no gratitude, no acclaim and not much money.
For the sake of decency.
A lot of people working hard for no reason – only money and thinking they are better than the rest.
They always fail.
There’s always someone richer.
A few people yelling as loud as they can – their grievances, their ambitions, their theirness –
Anything to be seen, for they only feel real when reflected in the eyes of others.
The eyes turn away and they have to raise the volume.
Crowds marching, covered in the mantle of righteousness, in the warmth of the herd.
Belonging.
Dozens of people thinking, writing, quoting.
Trying hard for new decisions – and never mind the cost.
A lone man standing in front of a tank in Tianamen square.
The first person to climb over the Berlin wall.
A woman dumping green ink into the voting box in Moscow.
This is what democracy looks like:
Each of us alone with his choice. -
Observation
Nothing makes us worse than pathetic attempts to prove that we are intrinsically better than someone else.
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Sleeping Beauty
With gratitude to a friend and a poet, Yana Kane, who asked this question – and inspired so many others.
White monolithic marble
slowly flows into
blue, where curling spires,
gradually exhausted,
fade into sky and vanish.
Tracing intricate movement,
my gaze, under its enchantment,
takes me away and out
where there is no sound,
colour or time – just spaces
still but containing movement.
Somewhere in these spires
there’s an enchanted princess
sleeping a hundred years
and one.
And then?
[question from the audience]
What happens
In year one hundred and two?
And then…
When a miracle happens it gives you a choice –
it defies the prediction’s imperious voice.
If the prince failed to show and give you a kiss
you can give happy ending a miss.
You can stay in your own unchanged universe
and ignore the fairy’s presumptuous curse.
You can stick middle finger to human endeavour –
Sleeping Beauty, enchanted forever. -
Night Light
Tell me a kind fairy tale:
I will listen with open-mouthed absorbtion;
I will look at you with shining eyes;
I will laugh and cry in all the right places –
I will be the best listener in the world.
Tell me a kind fairy tale, please!
