[Video: high-definition trailer for the wordless 1992 film Baraka, a sequel of sorts to the better-known Koyaanisqatsi (and directed by that film’s photographer). According to Roger Ebert’s review of the restored DVD edition (2008), “‘Baraka’ is a Sufi word meaning ‘a blessing, or the breath, or the essence of life, from which the evolutionary process unfolds.’ In Islam generally, it is ‘a quality or force emanating originally from Allah but capable of transmission to objects or to human beings.’ In Judaism, it is a ceremonial blessing. In Swahili, it means ‘blessing.’ In French slang, it means ‘good luck.'”]
From whiskey river:
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
…and:
The Ninth Elegy
(excerpt)Why, if it’s possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?…Oh, not because happiness,
that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practice the heart,
that would also be in the laurel…
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
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