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NO PRESSURE
[NIC NA SIŁĘ]
Bartosz Prokopowicz
Poland, 2024
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Sunday, March 31, 2024
Saturday, March 30, 2024
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Friday, March 29, 2024
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BRIAN ALDISS
"Three Types of Solitude"
She was sceptical about the painting when it was finished.
"It's nice. But it's not quite like the real thing."
"But what would be the point of it being exactly like the real thing?"
The next day, he painted the same corner of the room as previously. Bea's response was as before. He was amused. He painted the corner of the room over and over. She was never entirely satisfied.
When he had produced his hundredth canvas, she kissed him tenderly, suggesting he gave up. 'You'll never be a success.”
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BRIAN ALDISS
Cryptozoic!
When he woke, she was gone. He lay for a long while looking up at the tent roof, wondering how much he cared.
He needed company, although he was never wholly comfortable with it; he needed a woman, although he was never wholly happy with one. He wanted to talk, although he knew most talk was an admission of non-communication.
How far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act?
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Wednesday, March 27, 2024
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Tuesday, March 26, 2024
BRIAN ALDISS
Greybeard
Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind - for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults - that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was never only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods.
What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination - they copulated and they ate; but the the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service - and not only in the medieval bestiaries, by any means.
Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among the first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality.
It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.
Monday, March 25, 2024
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
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Sunday, March 24, 2024
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Saturday, March 23, 2024
BRIAN ALDISS
The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world - in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind - can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.
TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
"National Insecurity"
The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.
As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground
so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.
Translated by Robin Fulton
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Friday, March 22, 2024
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Thursday, March 21, 2024
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"I'm On Fire"
Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?
Did he go away and leave you all alone?
I got a bad desire
Oh, oh, oh, I'm on fire
Tell me now, baby, is he good to you?
And can he do to you the things that I do?
Oh no, I can take you higher
Oh, oh, oh, I'm on fire
Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull
And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull
At night, I wake up with the sheets soakin' wet
And a freight train runnin' through the middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
Oh, oh, oh, I'm on fire
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
"Composite Nation" - Lecture in the Parker Fraternity Course, Boston, MA (1867)
There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity….
I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other and more ancient nationalities. Ours seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of Government, world embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is to make us the most perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.
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