Fresco from Livia’s Villa, now displayed in Museo Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome.
“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (The Four Quartets )
I bumped into these photos of Algerian Women in the 1960’s by Marc Garanger about a year ago and I visit them regularly online, because frankly I find them striking. The women are just beautiful and the shots are so encapsulating. But there is a story behind them that has given this “Femmes Algériennes 1960” portfolio an even more revealing history.
Marc Garanger served in the French army in the Algerian War, the infamous end of the French colonisation epoch in the 60’s. Garanger opposed the French occupation but he was serving there as a soldier photographer. While there he was asked to take photos of the regional population for their ID’s. Within ten days he took some 2.000 pictures, some of them of women who had never before taken off their veils in front of a stranger. There is much talk about the captured looks of these women, their resistance, their strength and their reservation. That is all interpretation as far as I am concerned.
Garanger soon after fled the army and went to Switzerland to publish these images in the hope that he would tell a striking story about the force and demoralisation exercised by the French occupying army towards the peoples of Algeria. And he was right. His images told a story and the discussion on these images hasn’t seized since, while Marc Garanger has made a celebrated career as a culture documentary photographer.
I tried to find more information online about these women and their conditions of life, their traditions, their ways in the various cultures that make up Algeria. Most of the articles I have found bound these images with oppression, Islam, the French occupation and feminism. The only things I have found so far simply on their ways of life just mention that they come from either Islamic or Berber Algerian communities. The Berber ones wear face tattoos. These could not be seen in public because they were hidden by their veils. They were certainly beauty signs but they were also meaning carrying symbols. The tradition of face tattoo has died away in today’s Algeria, but there are still old ladies alive who carry them. Most of them do not remember the symbolism and I find that astonishing, because it is in their face. Apparently, the profession of the tattoo artist that used to travel between the tribes to give them these tattoos has died away along with this tradition. The most concrete information and a sort of background I found for this desert tattoo rite was on Yasmin Bendaas‘s research project (funded by the Pulitzer Center), which she updates regularly.
Traditions die away and memory fades. History is made continually, gets piled and gets done and undone. In this Femmes Algériennes photos I find beauty in women, in photography, in history, in locality, in awkwardness, in the richness of a moment in time.
Marc Garanger is still working on his photography and he has travelled in many locations to record history. Here is a 4min video where he shares his take on his projects.
‘Performers at Sea’, sculpture by Yiorgos Mavridis. Photo by me. Paros, August 2013
“So much desire must create a reality.”
“Work diligently. Diligently. Work patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently. And you’re bound to be successful. Bound to be successful.”
S.N. Goenka’s continuous advice during the Vipassana meditation course
I read today that S.N. Goenka died yesterday at the age of 90, due to old age. Bye bye Goenka Ji, and thank you…
Goenka was the equivalent to a Guru for Vipassana meditation. He spent most of his adult life ‘exporting’ to the world this almost lost meditation technique, practiced by Buddha.
The idea of doing this blog, its title, its content, everything came to me during my second 10day Vipassana course. Although this means that while I was sitting trying to meditate my mind was floating around, dreaming up blogs, I guess it also comes to show that good creative ideas can come out at breaks from deep concentration of the mind.
I first heard of Vipassana by Mika on a wonderful summer swim at Farangas beach on Paros. It sounded interesting but I had nothing to do with meditation, so it got stored in the ‘interesting stuff‘ file in my mind. Then, a couple of years later I was travelling in India, and meditation was so normal in the daily practice and lifestyle over there that, when Omar answered to me that he probably got that beautifully serene look on him from his Vipassana practice, I was convinced I had to try it too.
A few days later I went to do to my first 10day Vipassana course. The information on the application form said that through Vipassana you get peace of mind and that was enough for me to hand in to the management upon my arrival my passport, money, bank cards, cellphone, etc and admit myself to a 10 day silence with a 10 hour meditation practice per day regime.
As tough and crazy as it may sound in the above description it is exactly that in its actual practice and in its results! Because it is absolutely tough to sit for so many hours day after day concentrating on yourself, on your silence, on your bodily sensations in order to gain access to yourself and to the way your mind forms and works on your thoughts, memories, fears and desires; and it is absolutely crazy how balanced and calm and strong, enriched, confident, even happy, you feel at the end of it.
Every time I am asked how this works, I try to explain it and I always feel I fail to do so. So this being a post about S.N. Goenka I should let him do the talking.
Here is a pretty recent interview of Goenka on Indian tv about him and Vipassana:
And here is another older video where Goenka gives and introduction to Vipassana meditation:
“We operate on the unthinking assumption that the person who existed ten years ago is essentially the same person who exists today, who will exist ten years from now, perhaps who will still exist in a future life after death. No matter what philosophies or theories or beliefs we hold as true, we actually each live our lives with the deep-rooted conviction, ‘I was, I am, I shall be.”
S.N. Goenka
* Anicca means impermanence in Pali (old Indian). It is one of the essential doctrines or three marks of existence in Buddhism. The term expresses the Buddhist notion that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is in a constant state of flux. The Pali word anicca literally means “inconstant”. According to the impermanence doctrine, human life embodies this flux in the aging process, the cycle of birth and rebirth (samsara), and in any experience of loss. This is applicable to all beings and their environs including devas (mortal gods). The Buddha taught that because conditioned phenomena are impermanent, attachment to them becomes the cause for future suffering (dukkha). [Quoting from Wikipedia]
Tomorrow has almost come. Tomorrow will be the first Studio Work day for the new Fall 2013 semester at the Aegean Center. Being a returner has never made me fill stuck, but rather progressing. Progressing into the silence of the still instant.
Before I embark on this new group dynamic, I would like to share my sea & rock & sky -scapes from last semester. These images are of course best viewed on a calibrated screen. And I think is worth saying that these photographs seen in print make a whole different impact. I am proud of each and every one of them, a feeling never really believed to have me ‘attack’ with my photography. I hope you will enjoy them too.
Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir
I bumped today into the www.brainpickings.org website which seems very interesting. Having said that, let me just clarify that I haven’t really explored it yet, I have just glanced over some articles, but they were all interesting. Good start for a new fav website!
Anyway, it had two articles about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre and Beauvoir had an open life long relationship that was intimate yet at times had space for other lovers to home in….
Here are links to reviews by Maria Popova on two books that give insight into these literary lovers’ way of love; one being a collection of his love letters to her and the other a collection of women’s breakup letters, including some of Beauvoir’s to her various lovers.
I had to share two of their quotes, one from his letters to her and the other from a breakup letter written by her to one of her other lovers, found on the above mentioned books (via links)….
“I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself.”
Jean Paul Sartre (in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir)
“I can still feel warm and happy and harshly grateful when I look at you inside me”.
Simone de Beauvoir (in a breakup letter to Nelson Algren)
Henri Cartier-Bresson, photo by John Loengard
“Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
In a 1971 taped interview, rediscovered in 1991 at the International Center of Photography (New York) archives, Henri Cartier-Bresson talks a bit about his take on his photography. Simple and real. “Yes, yes, yes”, as he says echoing someone else…
“Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Text by Spyros Skordos. Photo by D.Dimoulitsas. EN mag, issue 3 (spring, 2010), pp. 9 and 11
And a bit of Greek on this blog….
Today is the anniversary of the union of Corfu (and the other Ionian islands) with the modern Greek State (1864). In Corfu town we have a public monument to physically mark this event in our large, green and flowery central town square, the Esplanade. Every year on this day this stone monument gets decorated but for the rest of the year it is left in peace and in darkness for teenage lovers to discover each other, in equal distance between seclusion from and proximity to public life. This monument seems to be sitting comfortably there awaiting them to mark their Union.
Thinking of that a few years ago, when, some dear dear friends of mine – Dionysis Dimoulitsas and Vasso Kotsi, among others – and I were producing a free press magazine about Corfu, called EN, we felt we had to connect those dots. To make a note of this personal and social union. The Spring issue of 2010 would be in circulation during this anniversary, so we asked from our witty editor, Spyros Skordos, to remind us all what ‘The Union” really meant for our Corfiot generation. I am sharing this lively article here. To access it, click on either images (above or below).
The text is in Greek. Whoever can, enjoy it!
ΕΝ magazine, issue 3 (spring 2010), cover. Cover photo by D.Dimoulitsas
“These things have an unreal reality, like mermaids, difficult to hold. They exist, but the uses of language fail, because their substance is thinner and finer than words.”
“Such was life in the age of happiness”
Freya Stark in ‘Ionia: A Quest“
(with a sunset over Parikia bay, Paros)
“A heavy burden lifted from my soul,
I heard that love was out of my control.”
Leonard Cohen
I started this day by watching a 1965 film about Leonard Cohen (via OpenCulture). A young Leonard Cohen. In the film, Cohen is portrayed mainly as a poet, as a literary man. So that got me going and I started looking on the web about his poems and his quotes and I bumped into plenty of interesting material.
“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick everyday.”
Leonard Cohen
At some point in the film, at 20mins into it to be exact, Cohen explains how he got to move to Greece, to Hydra. He says he lived in London at the time. It was winter, it was gloomy, rainy, and he had a cold, when he bumped into the Bank of Greece, the title of which was etched in marble on the building facade. He walked in and the man behind the counter was wearing sunglasses. Leonard felt, and I am quoting him, that this was “the most eloquent protest against the entire landscape.” That was the beginning of his affair with Greece.
Here is a page from the Leonard Cohen Files website, an incredible database, with Leonard’s photos & poems from the island of Hydra (click on image to access the link):
Leonard Cohen Poems & Photos from Hydra
“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore.”
Leonard Cohen
Then, at 26mins into the film, he recites from his poem/song “True Love Leaves No Traces“, where he beautifully says:
“As the mist leaves no scar
on the dark green hill
so my body leaves no scar
on you nor ever will
When wind and hawk encounter
what remains to keep
so you and I encounter
then turn then fall to sleep”
Leonard Cohen, “True Love Leaves No Traces”
Love and Leonard…. In this realm, it is an all together different song I wanted to share with you here, the ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’:
“When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.”
Leonard Cohen
escape from a bankrupt state 