Suit thoughts

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. (p. 23-24)

Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dress-maker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. (p. 21-22)

From Henry David Thoreau's Walden

2 weeks & retirement in weimar

Three of my former plans have connected.

In the first one I was going to perform a day in a week, meaning I will treat the week as a day. It will be a 168 hour long day in which I will have a 3,5 hour (7 x 30 min.) breakfast, I will brush my teeth twice for 35 minutes (7 x 5 min.), I will sleep for 42 hours (7 x 6) and do a 7 hour or two 3,5 hour naps inbetween. I my evening I will drink 14 glasses of wine and during the long day I will go for a 14 hour walk, read for 14 hours, write for 21 and play around for another 14. That is my first week.

In my second week I will work on workdays only. Monday till Friday 8 to 5. I will have two coffee breaks and one lunch break every day, 10.15 - 10.30, 12.30 - 13.00, 15.00 - 15.15. For the rest day of the day I will walk in circles on Theaterplatz. Round and round. Round and round. Round and round.

After that I will retire and grow cucumbers. Like my reckless grandfather did. I'm going to take W.G. Sebald's advice, who once (and at other times in other words) said in an interview when he was asked if he could imagine to stop doing the things he did in everyday life like writing books:

"I could just as well work in a greenhouse, growing cucumbers. It has this advantage: If you produce a decent cucumber there's no discussion about it."

or in his original words:

"Ich kann genausogut im Treibhaus arbeiten, Gürken züchten. Das hat den Vorteil: Wenn Sie eine anständige Gurke haben, nicht?, dann gibt's da keine Diskussion drüber." *

I already found a nice location for my cucumbers. Goethe's garden in Weimar. I'm sure he wouldn't object. But would the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the organisation in charge of Goethe's garden and his garden house? 

* (W.G. Sebald. Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis. Gespräche 1971 bis 2001. p. 103, from an interview with Ralph Schoch)

wor(l)ds

a new old friend wrote a few lines to me
after I had flooded him with words and suggestions
telling me he didn't have as many worlds as I have

I was puzzled
did he mean words or worlds
or is it the same thing?

when I don't know what I'm thinking I'm writing
words make things clear to me
and I do move in different worlds to gather food for thought
to feed my words

but what for?

I could stay in this one and be silent
if I don't need the words I don't need the worlds

there's one dilemma though
should I send these words to my friend?
to tell him he made me think?
are they for him or are they for me?

he doesn't need these words
and I don't need them either
but I've got a suit I can sew them in
nobody will see them there

somebody lived in a book (was it me?)

  

Words of a walker

Die philosophischen Bemerkkungen dieses Buches sind gleichsam eine Menge von Landschaftsskizzen, die auf diesen langen und verwickelten Fahrten entstanden sind.

The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and complex journeyings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, preface to Philosophical Investigations

Back to Allan Kaprow

"Suppose you offer to sweep a friend's house, and then spread the gathered dust through your own place - you might learn something about friendship."

".... any experimental art of our time can be an introduction to right living; and after that introduction art can be bypassed for the main course."

" Only when active artists willingly cease to be artists can they convert their abilities, like dollars into yen, into something the world can spend: play ...... in their new job as educators, they need simply play as they once did under the banner of art, but among those who do not care about it."

Essays on the blurring of art and life, p. 218, 225, 125