Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas Quotes

“Books read by me and my friends between 1947-1957: Lautaro (Fernando Alegría), La Hechizada, El Mestizo Alejo (Víctor Domingo Silva), On Panta (and others by Mariano Latorre), Robin Hood (anonymous), La Araucana (Ercilla), Little Men (L. M. Alcott), Monica Sanders (S. Reyes), Gypsy Ballads (García Lorca), The Maurizius Case (J. Wassermann), The Skin (Curzio Malaparte), The Vortex (J. E. Rivera), Demian (H. Hesse), Point Counter Point, Ape and Essence, Brave New World and others (Huxley).”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“I went out for another walk and at a book shop I found (impossible not to find) the best seller novel The Rule of Four. I discovered that it’s a police thriller around the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
18.10 hrs. I read about 40 pages of the best seller around the Poliphili. It’s a bunch of 100 percent American nonsense, right next to which The Da Vinci Code feels like a masterpiece. Let’s say it fits right next to Conan Doyle, but far from Verne or Machen.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Last night we were until late talking with Emilio on the ideas by Bohm and Prigogine. I started to think that our book could be about animals (bestiary) and of women and allegorical situations. For example: mountains. The mountain from beyond in The Night Journey, or Dawkins' improbable mountain, or Daumal's analogue mountain, or Rudy Rucker's infinite mountain. Or Dante's jungle, or Shakespeare's mobile forest, or Little Thumb's labyrinthine forest. The river of memory (mnemosyne) of the orphic tables, the Acheron. The tree of oblivion or the letter tree of the Tibetans, Kalevala's primordial tree, the tree of science and the tree of the computer systems. The gardens: Eden and their variants. Stones: philosopher's, moon, sacred aerolites, the stone from which Camus grows. Utopian islands: metamorphic clouds, mnemonics rains. Invisible or mental cities. Wölfili's musical notebooks. Potemkin cities. Alas.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“At the Chez Gerald, in front of Peru Av., proletarianized, reading The Knowledge and the Culture by Max Scheler. In page 85 there's his celebrated definition of "culture": "educated is not the one who possesses knowledge and knows many contingent modalities of things (polymathy), nor who can predict and dominate, according to law, a maximum of events, but who possesses a personal structure, a set of mobile ideal schemes that, supported one on each other, construct the unity of a style and are used for intuition, the thought, the conception, the valuation and the treatment of the world".”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“At lunch we start preparing an opera. He told me that he adopted a Peruvian 4-year old kid. He has told me: "I didn't know his name or what gender he was, but I knew that, as Hispanic, he must hate Spaniards; as member of member of his ethnic group, he hates the Incas; as a member of his tribe, he hates the other tribes of his ethnic group, and, as a man, he hates himself". "It's a lot of hate for a 4 year old!", he told me. I didn't dare to tell him what is said about Peruvians confuse hate with the perception of the exterior world, from there when they say "I hate the world" it must be understood as "my neighbor is listening to the radio". Stages of the path towards individualization.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“I remember the visions of Christ. Or, more like, of the irruption of the mystical emotion. The image of the intimate union, communion with men, which appears in the face of a men (generally in a beggar, like in Kuala Lumpur), sometimes trough an old lady or a kid that crosses the street running, or even of Esther Williams (Lino Brocka told me of his conversion to Christianity after seeing Bathing Beauty: Esther Williams jumping from a trampoline, open arms and smiling, provoking the epiphany of divinity).”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Regarding Bideau: one week, perfect; two weeks, nice; three, I start to understand Godard (who expelled him from the plateau and replaced him with Piccoli). Anyway, I hope I'm not exaggerating.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“8.00 hrs. Yesterday, finally, we didn't go to any museum. In the morning, long walk. I was buying records. I found a CD with the works of Conlon Nancarrow, first piece (1935), with some Antheil, Morton Gould, Gershwin, Blitzein, alas, "of time ago", although with more energy and inventiveness. Some Bach tubes arrangements by Stokowski, two CD by Reger in Scherzer's version and some bronzes: Eddy Duchin (The Elegant), Duke Ellington, Friml (the author of Rose Marie) playing his works being 85 years old in Prague (1964), beautiful Czech songs. I also bought the soundtrack of Ed Wood, the pastiche is too evident. I spent the afternoon listening to music.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Later we went with Miotte and Dorotée to eat at Barolo's (50 dollars per person) and, going back to the workshop, singing songs around a Spanish wine (Marqués de Riscal, which Valeria finds detestable, I didn't). This morning, conversation about the [-] which Valeria is preparing. It's a way of shedding away the last bits of sadness of the trip to Chile. It's, Valeria says, "the execution of the dreamlike images that precede the making of a film".”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“In London, to discuss with an incredibly smart and somewhat pedantic audience the relation between some of my films and the work of Pierre Klossowski (with whom I should dine with next week). In the morning, a conference in which Pierre is interpreted almost exclusively through Sade's work, with a curious twist at the end, of the ecological kind. Now, having a beer and waiting for lunch. It's weird that Pierre's philosophy is unknown until this point in Anglo-Saxon countries. It could be said that Pierre is worth a hundred Batailles -à plus d'un sens.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Chin tries to explain me the gesture and numbers game that I saw some nights ago in the nightclub. Example: he says 2, that means, "let's go together"; she answers 1, that means, "by myself". He insists many times and she, suddenly, says 3 (you, me and a friend). He says 1 (no) and then 3 (you, a female friend and me), she says 4 (OK, but for four seasons, the whole year), etc. The gestures are funny, lots of malice and diligence.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Melvil tells me: "Luc Mollet says you're his favorite filmmaker, that he's seen The Blind Owl ten times and still finds new things". I haven't seen The Blind Owl more than five times, but I like it. In the end, these things leave me in a good mood. It had never occurred to me.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Last night I was perfecting the list of theoretical, experimental and allegorical animals: Alice's cat, Muhammad's hologram rooster, Ruiz's camel (free in the desert, or prisoner of the desert?), Jonah's whale, etc.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Lunch hour, at a restaurant I don't know. Curious attitude of mine: the fact that there are English people in the chorus blocks and paralyzes me when it comes to treat it. They're English and, thus, despicable. Unprofessional attitude from my part, but it's impossible to fight it. An Englishman (like a Chilean) is someone who loses half of their life looking for the fault in their neighbor.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“The passion, the vice of the old books, like everything concerning men, is confluence and dispersion of many currents, tendencies and cycles: 1) Cult to the ancestors (Gracián calls the act of reading "speaking with the dead" ). 2) Superior greed, like the numismatics and the philately. 3) Immobile journey: touching a book that has been through many hands. 4) Exploration (search of what hasn't been read by anyone). (Yesterday, in El País, speaking of psychedelism, they said that drugs are a way of escaping of what had already been seen, said, lived). 5) Recapitulation: never the same book. 6) Answer to the derealization of the object, book that can be touched and smelled (and I can't explain in any other way that I had bought this notebook with paper filled with signs that want wrinkles like the palimpsest). There are other reasons that can be applied to all the collections: creation of "paramarkets", splurge necessity, [-], etc.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Last night I was sleepless and I started to imagine a farm with theoretical-experimental-philosophical animals: Schrödinger's cat, Bohm's fish, Kuhn's rabbit-duck, Pavlov's dog, Jouvet's sleeping cats, Buridan's donkey, Ibn Tufail's gazelle, Lorenz's ducks, Maeterlinck's talking bees and... Kohler's monkey, Kafka and the behaviorists, Étienne Rabaud's ants, Zeno's turtle, Attar's simurgh, etc. Ah! Martinoya's hesitant dove, the Buta.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“The hotel’s very lively, people coming and going to concerts, a strange Japanese ceremony. In the elevator I ran into a Japanese man in a tailcoat suit, with a round orange face that smirked without stopping. As I’m a Chilean I turned my back on him.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Eighteen days of war: terrible images.More than I've become a primaire anti-American. Everything that comes from the USA provokes horror, disgust, hate. I have trouble listening to Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan. I couldn't read William Carlos Williams (and I'm sure that all of them are against the war). A country that was to impose to the world their impressive stupidity and cruelty, its vulgarity (to which they call democracy), their taste for theft (to which they call freedom).”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Now I listen to the talk shows of the Latino TV. Round table in which a group of ladies speak about their relations with aliens as if they spoke about a trip to Europe.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Today, rhetorical spring, sun, somewhat cold wind and quick clouds. Reading Arseni Tarkovski. Other poets had filmmaker sons: Mijalkov, Bertolucci. It's a way of escaping the words and into the images and from the images towards drama (the movement).”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Chile is not a country, it's a military camp. Being Chilean doesn't designate a personality, but a sexual perversion: the search for the orgasm through laughter.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Books that were pillars of our parents’ culture, the Chilean little bourgeoisie of the 30s-40s-50s: The Revolt of the Masses (Ortega), Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno), The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck), The Importance of Living (Lin Yutang), Grand Hotel (Vicki Baum), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin), Gog (Papini), Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell), The Mediocre Man (Ingenieros), Broad and Alien is the World (Ciro Alegría), The World of Yesterday (S. Zweig), The Life of Jesus (Renan), Napoléon (Emil Ludwig), The Goose Man (Wassermann), The Prophet (Gibran), The inferiority complex (Adler), Civilization and its Discontents (Freud), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), The Human Beast (Zola), The Lily of the Valley (Balzac), Representative Men (Emerson), Modern Medical Counselor (?), How Green Was my Valley (Llewellyn), The Foxes of Harrow (Yerby), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Amiel’s Journal (Amiel), The Story of San Michele (Munthe), Maxims and Morals from Dr. Franklin (Franklin), The Kon-Tiki Expedition (Heyerdahl), My Life (many), Desolation (Mistral), The Old Man and the Sea, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Zweig), The City and the Mountains (Eça de Queirós), All Quiet on the Western Front (E. M. Remarque), Encyclopedia Britannica, Enciclopedia Espasa, The Treasure Book of Youth, La tournée de Dios (Jardiel Poncela), Don Juan (Zorrilla), La Tía Pepa (cook book), Almanaque 18, The Magic Mountain (Mann), The Unloved Woman (Benavente). To be continued.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Meanwhile I found time to read one of the strangest texts I've ever read: Exiled in the West by Suhrawardi (11th century), commented by Abdelwahab Meddeb. It's a small text that has, on a first glance, the shape of tale of Arabian Nights, but with allegorical expressions that give the impression of dreaming it while one reads it. For example "The city of the men that can't forgive", "The region of the central tree". I'm going to return to this text, which has awoken so many vocations and vacations.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“I don't like today's young people, specially the young French ones. I don't like the people that want to be beautiful, rich and famous.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“12.10 hrs. An hour and a half of flight. I read a strangely weak article by Dawkins, of an absolute moral idiocy. He proposes the prohibition of religions and advances into a simplified interpretation of the Islam so not serious that it has made me doubt of everything that I've read of him until now (which seemed sadistic to me, but interesting). He pretends that the suicidal comrades want to have in the beyond the right to oppress women more, which in the best of cases it's a very bad gringo joke.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“On the plane, waiting tto take off at any moment. I was reading in the Inrockuptibles an article by Richard Dawkins in which he speculates around the attack on N. York. He tells that in the Second World War they studied a way of using doves to guide missiles. I started a theorical book by Stephen King, man worthy of our greatest contempt.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“Reading the Epistle of the Seven Ways by Abraham Abulafia (the cabalist, not the psychologist), it jumps to view what is the ascent to the divine vision through the calculated reading of sacred texts. It's also a coding that isn't as diverse as Dante's. I quote from memory: literal, doxal, allegorical-narrative, protocol, intellectual (agent intellect), cabalistic (by acronyms, by ciphered correspondence), anagogical (divine). The prologue to Aethiopica by Heliodorus (VI or V century?), best seller of his time, was analyzed by methods near to the Christian cabala (XIII, XIV century). But the game of absolute and relative (R. Lulio) is quite far from the very rich combinatorial of Jewish cabala (360 degrees games and 80 gradients, etc.). Curious that Abulafia quotes some of the operations of the cabala using Greek names.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas

“It's 11.20 am, I'm preparing my luggage to settle in Alcochete. Valeria phones me. We miss each other. That's right, we miss each other. The concetti by León Hebreo reappear in my mind. From his book of love: sudden apparition (between big bang and childbirth) or poison with delayed effect. Then ascend towards speculative ways of affection. Crystallizations, rhetorical figures, enargeia and paradox. Could someone love "the love of sailors" (Neruda) without loving sailors? The Treaty of Love by Ibn Arabi categorizes all the way up to vertigo the ascending and descending stadiums , but forgets, or isn't interested by, the lateral figures (concretions, deviations, ways of erotism, artificial spells, enchanters -feitizo-feitio). Hallâj (Husayn Mansur) seems to believe (if the commentaries by Louis Massignon say the truth) that love is fleetingly contemplate what's unfinished in the loved object. I prefer the husband-wife-ideal woman triangle, as described by Zola (L'amant invisible). To share what's here with what's over there through the comings and goings of the concrete woman to the ideal woman, that shamanic figure that goes through the times. Isis-Laura-Beatriz.”
― Raúl Ruiz, Diario; Notas, recuerdos y secuencias de cosas vistas