Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 41

CarrollBlog 1.6

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

Jeffrey Eugenides

CarrollBlog 1.1

by Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Dana Gioia

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.

With eyes that have forgotten how to see

from viewing things already too well-known,

lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

and put it in the heavens: tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

then close your eyes and gently set it free.

CarrollBlog 12.31

‎"My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle - may they never give me peace."

Patricia Highsmith

Happy New Year, Everyone

CarrollBlog 12.30

Foreign Phrase Fun:

Bakku-shan (Japanese) - Means: A beautiful girl... as long as she's being viewed from behind.

Dépaysement - French – The feeling that comes from not being in one's home country.

Tingo - Pascuense (Easter Island) - "the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them."

Wabi-Sabi - Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as "a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay."

Torschlusspanik - German – Translated literally, this word means "gate-closing panic," but its contextual meaning refers to "the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages."

Ya'aburnee - Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means "You bury me," a declaration of one's hope that they'll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

Duende - Spanish – While originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one's surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to "the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person."

Jayus - From Indonesian, meaning a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.

Litost - Czech - The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.

Tartle - Scottish – The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you've forgotten their name.

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Weird words and bizarre phrases;

Gwarlingo: Welsh description of the sound of a grandfather clock before it strikes.

Pisan zapra: Malay for the time needed to eat a banana.

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper - literally, "an enraged sheep".

Kati-kehari: Hindi meaning to have the waist of an elegant lion.

Yupienalle: Swedish for a mobile phone - literally, "yuppie teddy" like a security blanket.

Ikibari: Japanese, a "lively needle" and describing a man who is willing but under-endowed.

Tantenverführer: German for a young man with suspiciously good manners.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone's parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door - literally, a "see-you-home wolf"

Trennungsagentur: German for someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped.

Momma ko ene: Cheyenne for having red eyes from crying over your boyfriend marrying someone else.

Kanjus Makkhichus: Hindi description of someone so tight that if a fly falls into their tea they'll fish it out and suck it dry before throwing it away.

Tlazlimquiztli: Aztec for the smell of adulterers.

Nosom Para Oblake: Serbian for "he is ripping clouds with his nose", describing someone conceited.

Traer la lengua de corbata: Latin American Spanish for to be exhausted - literally, to have your tongue hanging out like a man's tie

Sjostygg: Norwegian for someone so ugly the tide refuses to come in if they stand on the shore.

Lalew: Filipino word meaning to grieve so much you can't eat.

Nito-onna: Japanese for a woman so dedicated to her career that she has no time to iron blouses and so resorts to dressing only in knitted tops.

Buaya darat: Indonesian for a man who fools women into thinking he's a very faithful lover when in fact he goes out with many different women at the same time - literally, a land crocodile

Chantepleurer: French for singing at the same time as crying.

Hira hira: Japanese for the fear you get from walking into a decrepit old house in the middle of the night.

Les avoir a zero: French for "to have one's testicles down to zero", or be frightened.

CarrollBlog 12.29

Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn't have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance 'lead anywhere'? Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passion is the woods. It's the deepest wildest part of the forest; the grove where the fairies still dance and obscene old vipers snooze in the boughs. Everybody but the most dried up and dysfunctional is drawn to the grove and enchanted by its mysteries, but then they just can't wait to call in the chain saws and bulldozers and replace it with a family-style restaurant or a new S and L. That's the payoff, I guess. Safety. Security. Certainty. Yes, indeed. Well, remember this, pussy latte: we're not involved in a 'relationship', you and I, we're involved in a collision. Collisions don't much lend themselves to secure futures, but the act of colliding is hard to beat for interest. "

Tom Robbins

CarrollBlog 12.27

They told Love:

'Write your name down.'

So she did.

They said:

'Read it out now.'

So she did.

They said:

'Count the letters.'

She said:

'I Never learned to count.'

- Jan Twardowski

CarrollBlog 12.26

So much of what we live goes on inside–/

The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches/

Of unacknowledged love are no less real/

For having passed unsaid. What we conceal/

Is always more than what we dare confide./

Think of the letters that we write our dead./

Dana Gioia

CarrollBlog 12.25

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

Ray Bradbury

CarrollBlog 12.24

ME IN PARADISE

Oh, to be ready for it, unfucked, ever-fucked.

To have only one critical eye that never

divides a flaw from its lesson.

To play without shame. To be a woman

who feels only the pleasure of being used

and who reanimates the user's

anguished release in a land

for the future to relish, to buy

new tights for, to parade in fishboats.

To scare up hope without fear of hope,

not holding the hole, I will catch

the superbullet in my throat

and feel its astounding force

with admiration. Absorbing its kind

of glory. I must be someone

with very short arms to have lost you,

to be checking the windows

of the pawnshop renting space in my head,

which pounds with all the clarity

of a policeman on my southernmost door.

To wish and not jinx it: to wish

and not fish for it: to wish and forget it.

To ratchet myself up with hot liquid

and find a true surprise.

Prowling the living room for the lightning,

just one more shock,

to bring my slow purity back.

To miss you without being so damn cold

all the time. To hold you without dying otherwise.

To die without losing death as an alternative.

To explode with flesh, without collapse.

To feel sick in my skeleton, in all the serious

confetti of my cells, and know why.

Loving you has made me so scandalously

beautiful. To give myself to everyone but you.

To luck out of you. To make any other mistake.

~Brenda Shaughnessy

CarrollBlog 12.23

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.

Charles R. Swindoll