m s t p

A Reason – The power of the image vs the power of the word

I read this text for the first time a few years ago, it is a short paragraph of a great text by vilém flusser, i just have read it again a few days ago and i feel as if i have a new understanding of it.
it is great to be able to go back to a text and though you know what it say there is nothing gained more than reading it again.
Power of the word vs the power of image.

¨This is an uncomfortable situation. Because our arms are not long enough to bridge the abyss between ourselves and the world. We can no longer seize it and handle it. The world is no longer manifest. It has become apparent. It is no longer composed of objects against which we stumble. It is now composed of phenomena which we look at. Now why did we put ourselves into such an uncomfortable position? Into the
position of doubt, of alienation? We did it, in order to see the world as a context. To see the forest, and no longer to have to stumble against individual trees. And what is the advantage of seeing contexts? One may step back into the world, and seize it and handle it better than before: in accordance with the context one saw. Imagination is a “réculer pour mieux sauter”, and pictures are tables of orientation for seizing and handling the world better. ¨

ENDLESS
ENDLESS

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In the morning of the last day in the Gregorian calendar i was heading towards this cala, to have the last Mediterranean salty dip of the year.
Underlining the year to begin and the one that is about to pass by.

I love to fill my time with imaginations and love to feel my imagination.

When I am in the sea what i see assembles into my imagination and time stands by.

¨The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.¨ proust

For this specific year to come i ask time to be expanded.

• ¨ All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shewn signs of apparent coldness towards me, which might have
  shaken my faith that I was for her a creature different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilberte had felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon the love that I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely upon the manner in which I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think of Gilberte. But my feelings with regard to her I had never yet ventured to express to her in words. Of course, on every page of my exercise-books, I wrote out, in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those vague lines which I might trace, without her having to think, on that account, of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to shew me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffective. The most important thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual confession of our love which, until then, would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubtless the various reasons which made me so impatient to see her would have appeared less urgent to a grown man. As life goes on, we acquire such adroitness in the culture of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with that which we derive from thinking of a woman, as I was thinking of Gilberte, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds to the reality,—and with the pleasure of loving her, without needing to be sure, also, that she loves us; or again that we renounce the pleasure of confessing our passion for her, so as to preserve and enhance the passion that she has for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice the rest. But at the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist, apart from ourselves; that, allowing us, at the most, to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered us its blessings in an order in which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of a confession a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most often dreamed, I should have been fabricating, of my own free will, a love that was artificial and without value, that bore no relation to the truth, whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have been declining to follow.¨
  Proust – Swann’s Way – 1.4 Place-Names: The Name