Kretischer Ruhrgebietsbayer (Cretan West South German): Ich verstehe nichts mehr in diesem tiefblauen Meer!!! (It's all greek to me in this deep blue sea!!!)
„Niemand zensiert, niemand kontrolliert“, sagt Schriftstelller Olaf Georg Klein über das Tagebuch. Seit er 16 Jahre alt ist, schreibt er besondere Erlebnisse auf – und ist damit nicht allein. Auch Kafka, Thomas Mann und Susan Sontag führten Tagebuch. (…)
Aber Tagebuchschreiben ist ja ein absolutes Reich der Freiheit. Sie können schreiben, was Sie wollen. Niemand zensiert, niemand kontrolliert. Sie können auch Tage aussetzen. Sie können auch einfach mal nur vor dem Tagebuch sitzen, ruhig werden, und dann schreiben Sie rein: „Heute nichts geschrieben.“ Berühmter Eintrag von Kafka. So bedeutet das eine bestimmte Haltung dem Leben gegenüber, zu sagen: Das Leben soll nicht einfach nur vorbeirauschen, ich will nicht einfach nur funktionieren und überleben, sondern ich möchte es gleichzeitig reflektieren und mich damit auch selbst ein Stück mit hervorbringen. (…)
Man kann wirklich seinem eigenen Denken auf die Spur kommen. Oder wie Susan Sontag zum Beispiel, die ein authentisches Tagebuch geschrieben hat, das dann gegen ihren Willen von ihrem Sohn veröffentlicht wurde – ein ganz eigenes Drama, muss man auch noch mal extra beleuchten. Aber sie sagt einmal: „Woher soll ich wissen, was ich denke, bevor ich nicht lese, was ich schreibe?“ Das Schreiben ist ein anderer, sortierender, konzentrierender Prozess, der etwas mit mir und meinem eigenen Denken und meinem Sein auch im Alltag macht. (…)
Und die wirklich wirkliche Energie, die Sie aus einem Tagebuch ziehen können, ist, wenn Sie es wirklich um seiner selbst willen machen und nicht mit dem Gedanken, es zu veröffentlichen. Erst dann kommen Sie wirklich bei Ihrem eigenen Selbst an, erst dann sind Sie wirklich radikal ehrlich. Erst dann können Sie wirklich, wenn Sie dann eine Woche, einen Monat, ein Jahr später Ihr eigenes Tagebuch lesen, daraus wirklich Nutzen ziehen. (…)
Es ist ja auch eine Art Widerständigkeit gegen diesen Zeitgeist, dass alles immer sofort einen äußeren Nutzen haben muss, und dass ich immer mich im außen verliere. Sondern es geht darum, nicht nur um das Anhalten, sondern um das Innehalten. Das ist ein ganz feiner Unterschied. Dann geht es darum, nach innen zu gehen. (Olaf Georg Klein)
Als langjähriger Tagebuchschreiber (seit 6.9.1979, Tagebuchgeschenk meiner Nichte Petra zum 22.Geb.) kann ich die obigen Aussagen voll und ganz bestätigen. Das Tagebuchschreiben gehört für mich zum täglichen Tageablauf wie das Zähneputzen. Es gibt meinem Leben die notwendige Struktur, Form, Ordnung und Balance, um mit den täglichen übermäßigen Inhalten und Informationen wenigstens einigermaßen klarzukommen. Wie das Leben selbst läuft dieses Nacherzählen nicht nur chronologisch, linear, konstant, kontinuierlich, gradlinig, zusammenhängend, sondern zugleich auch immer sprunghaft, ungeordnet, bruchstückhaft, chaotisch, unberechenbar, komplex ab. Mit diesen teilweise unvereinbaren Widersprüchen muss man zu leben lernen. Lese hierzu bitte ‚Über thrawn‚ von John Burnside aus seinem Erzählband ‚Über Liebe und Magie‘ (‚I put a spell on you‘). Thrawn als Sinnbild für die unordentliche Ordnung, die Schönheit des Nutzlosen, den Wert der Widersprüchlichkeit und freudigen Verweigerung in uns.
In a busy and chaotic world, journaling is a valuable practice that allows you to clear your mind, organize your thoughts, and express yourself in a free and uninhibited space. Whether you’re a doodler, list-maker, or stream-of-consciousness monologue-er, keeping a journal can be incredibly helpful to your mental health.
It is because of the intimacy of journaling that looking through someone else’s diaries is SUCH a big no-no. After all, it’s practically having a peeping tom on the inside of your head. That being said, the estates of many famous authors publish their journals, and many writers even kept journals with eventual publication in mind. So with your conscience clear, let’s take a peek into the minds of the greats, with these beautiful, hilarious, and relatable diary entries.
Virginia Woolf
April 20 1919
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.
Franz Kafka
5 October. Restlessness again for the first time in several days, even now that I am writing. Rage at my sister who comes into the room and sits down at the table with a book. Waiting for the next trifling occasion to let this rage explode.
and of course, a journal entry any writer worth their salt can relate to…
7 June. Bad. Wrote nothing today.
Leo Tolstoy
January 25 1851, I’ve fallen in love or imagine that I have; went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.
Flannery O’Connor
Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.
Same, Flannery, same.
Sylvia Plath
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
While we may be horribly limited as human beings, our thoughts and feelings are still important, some might say they are the most important! You are here in this terrible and gorgeous world and worthy of being in the record, worthy of taking up space on the page and writing it down. Whether or not anyone sees it, journals are perfect for capturing the complicated, beautiful mess that we are.
Interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling. (…)
Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be…just what it is. Is this possible now? It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now. (…)
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
In “Pilgrimage”: “Reading and listening to music: the triumphs of being not myself.”
A video essay providing an overview of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay „Against Interpretation“ (1964) and illustrating some of its ideas with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=kYINwG7l17s
For Susan Sontag, writing within a journal was not merely an opportunity for radical honesty; rather, it was, in itself, a fundamentally generative act. “In the journal,” she wrote, “I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”
“What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” asked Virginia Woolf. “Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.”
Nun also Susan Sontag. Mit Lesen und Musikhören genießt sie in ihrer Studentenbude den „Triumph nicht ich zu sein“, wie sie im Tagebuch notiert. Das Schreiben selbst gehört auch zu diesem „Triumph“. Es ist gegen sich gerichtet, aber nicht selbstquälerisch. „Selbsterkenntnis ist nicht das Ziel. Kraft – was ich will ist Kraft … Die Kraft zu handeln.“ Zu sich kommen heißt für sie, sich darauf vorbereiten, groß herauszukommen. Eilenberger gibt eine dichte Beschreibung ihres für die Bühnen der Welt bestimmten Lebensentwurfes. „Sie vertiefte sich tagsüber in Beckett, Borges und Benjamin und war jede Nacht auf drei Szenenpartys gleichzeitig; sie rauchte drei Schachteln am Tag …; sie dinierte mittags mit Leonard Bernstein und Jackie Kennedy und ging nachmittags mit deren Schwager Bobby ins Bett; sie betrog ihre besten Freundinnen mit deren kahlköpfigen Ehemännern und sich selbst mit Warren Beatty; … sie war eine nationale Berühmtheit und konnte von ihrem Schreiben doch kaum leben; sie war eine alleinerziehende Mutter und transatlantische Jetsetikone … sie strebte nach Tiefe und ließ sich von Warhol in dessen Factory fotografieren; sie dominierte jede Diskussion und verfluchte sich für ihre offenbare Unfähigkeit, auch nur ein einziges Mal die Schnauze zu halten.“
Anders als Adorno fühlt sich Susan Sontag angezogen vom Betriebsgeheimnis der Kulturindustrie. Sie sucht nach „neuen Erlebnisweisen“ in Film, Fotografie, Funk und Fernsehen. Es geht um den Zauber der Medien und der Masse. Sie wird zu einer intellektuellen Ikone der Avantgarde. Sie will ein Star sein, aber sie kann die Leute nicht leiden, die sie anhimmeln.
Schonungslos im Tagebuch, in der Öffentlichkeit bisweilen taktisch, besonders zur Zeit der Anti-Vietnamkriegs-Bewegung 1968. Beim Besuch in Hanoi zeigt sie sich über die ideologische Gleichschaltung der Menschen entsetzt, doch nur im Tagebuch. In der Reportage sind es „ganze Menschen, nicht ‚zerrissen‘ wie wir“. Diese doppelte Buchführung bekommt ihr nicht gut. „Ich habe … enorme Schwierigkeiten gehabt, über mich selbst nachzudenken, mit mir selbst im Kontakt zu sein“, heißt es im Tagebuch. Es gelingt ihr also, sich über sich selbst als öffentliche Person aufzuklären. Sie hat sich nicht mit sich selbst verwechselt. Das Philosophieren hat ihr dabei ebenso geholfen wie später bei ihrem Kampf gegen den Krebs. Krankheit als Metapher ist ein grandioses Werk der Aufklärung, das den realistischen Sinn gegen die Gespensterfurcht stärkt. (Zu ‚Geister der Gegenwart‘ von Wolfram Eilenberger: https://www.klett-cotta.de/produkt/wolfram-eilenberger-geister-der-gegenwart-9783608986655-t-8790 )
Was macht ein Kunstwerk lebendig, und warum kann übermäßige Interpretation seine Magie zerstören? Und wie können wir Kunst intensiver erleben, ohne sie auf Begriffe zu reduzieren? Gert Scobel diskutiert Susan Sontags radikales Plädoyer für eine unmittelbare, sinnliche Erfahrung von Kunst – jenseits von „Was wollte uns der Künstler sagen?“. Hier der Link zum Video von Gert Scobel: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=KVOGHG5qZbo
The film version of the best-selling memoir ably blurs the lines between fact and fiction of recovering on the tiny isle of Papay. Having the story of your life adapted for cinema is, of course, a rare experience but some of the effects it has had on me are, I began to see, amplifications and accelerations of more common processes of memory and sense of identity. Time and retelling bring distortions and realisations.
Saoirse Ronan, Amy Liptrot and director Nora Fingscheidt at the premiere of The Outrun during the Edinburgh International Festival in August. Photograph: Euan Cherry/Getty Images
The project had a long development process. I first met dedicated powerhouse producer Sarah Brocklehurst eight years ago, before I met the father of my children. There were years of meetings when I thought nothing might happen. When the team came together, I had long conversations with supersmart German director Nora Fingscheidt – her in LA, me in Yorkshire – co-writing the screenplay.
Then, when I returned to Orkney, I began writing a column for the wonderful Caught by the River website, which has become a focus point for the renaissance in British “nature writing”. The columns – on subjects including ambergris from sperm whales, working on the farm at lambing time and watching meteor showers – all became chapters of the book. I began to link the new things I was learning about my environment to the changes going on inside myself. The fluid dynamics of breaking waves, the lonely call of the corncrake and the unexplained tremors that shake the coastline were all areas of interest in themselves yet also became metaphors. The world was opening up through learning and experience. The columns focused on the birds, the land and the sea, yet all contained a small mention of my own story and my recovery. The warm reception I had to these – from both friends and strangers – encouraged me to see if I could write a whole book.
Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song has won the Booker Prize for 2023, but the Irish author’s work is a deeply odd and disturbing work of fiction
I thought about Brexit, Trump, and the forces gathering on the horizon: The Freedom Party in Austria. The National Front in France. The People’s Party in Denmark. Golden Dawn in Greece. Jobbik in Hungary. Law and Justice in Poland. Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. A tectonic shift was occurring in western democracies. I thought, too, about the implosion of Syria and the west’s largely indifferent response to its refugee crisis. The citizen’s regret is the novelist’s calling. I wanted to understand where all this might lead.I began to wonder what Ireland would look like with a populist government. I wondered, too, what it would be like to live in a democracy drifting towards tyranny. I asked myself, how much power can an individual wield when caught within such an enormity of forces? Prophet Song took shape as a dystopian novel set in our own time.
The Pulitzer-winning author of The Overstory on how ocean life inspired his latest novel – and why we need to rewrite our relationship with nature
His new novel is dedicated to his sister, who died in 2022. In common with the acclaimed and Pulitzer prize-winning The Overstory, which related several characters’ stories in the context of trees, their habitats and their precarious future, Playground plunges us into the complex and frequently unfamiliar world of the ocean with a radical purpose: forest and ocean are not merely backdrop but a way of decentring the human, of insisting that if fiction limits itself to an anthropocentric universe, it severely limits its potential.
Enlightenment liberalism neglected the socially embedded nature of the self, Taylor contends, but the Romantics can tell us how to restore a shared sense of meaning and purpose.
Lyric poets and mathematicians, by general agreement, do their best work young, while composers and conductors are evergreen, doing their best work, or more work of the same kind, as they age. Philosophers seem to be a more mixed bag: some shine early and some, like Wittgenstein, have distinct chapters of youth and middle age; Bertrand Russell went on tirelessly until he was almost a hundred. Yet surely few will surpass the record of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who is back, at ninety-two, with what may be the most ambitious work ever written by a major thinker at such an advanced age. The new book, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Belknap), though ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.
(…)
Taylor’s new book is formidably chewy, with page after page featuring passages of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rilke, offered both in the original German and in translation. Long analyses of T. S. Eliot and Milosz arrive, too. But, though Taylor’s subjects are often severely abstract, his sentences are lucid, even charmingly direct, and his purpose is plain. We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced—one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it. “I admire the moon as a moon, just a moon,” Lorenz Hart sighed, with memorable modernity, adding, significantly, “Nobody’s heart belongs to me today.” Enlightened, we are alone.
Romantic poetry—the poetry of Shelley and Keats, in English, of Novalis and Hölderlin, in German—first diagnosed this fracture (the argument goes) and offered a way to heal it. Where neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope appealed to an ordered world, with clear meanings and a hierarchy of kinds, the Romantics recognized that this was no longer credible. The enchanted world had been replaced by the modern world. We could hardly go back toward ignorance—Goethe, one of Taylor’s heroes, participated in the modern world as a scientist—but we had to find a way to reënchant it. The best way to heal the wound is through poetry and music, of the sort that doesn’t offer propositions but casts spells and enacts rituals. The arts are not subsidiary places of secondary sensations but the primary place where we go to recall feelings of wholeness, of harmony not just with “Nature”—the craggy peaks the Romantics loved and the Italian lakes they lingered by—but with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going at things atmospherically rather than argumentatively. They convey a sublime atmosphere of sound, ineffable intimations of immortality, and so the apprehension of a “cosmic connection.”
Taylor reproduces lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (“And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of thought”) and tells us, “To let oneself be carried by this passage is to experience a strong sense of connection, far from clearly defined . . . but deeply felt; a connection not static, but which flows through us and our world.” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is similarly effervescent in diction, similarly ethereal in effect. The lines “O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth” cast a spell as much as they describe a feeling. Taylor writes, “The rhythmic flow between the features as recounted in the poem somehow encounters, meets, connects up with the flow between the features as we live it.” Classical art, he argues, moves us by convincing us; Romantic art convinces us by moving us. (…)
Todd Ream: Well, those efforts have certainly been well-received. And as one who was a grateful graduate student when you were working on your sources of self, and it already put your works on Hegel into circulation, I appreciated them I will say and many others are too.
Want to transition now, if I may, to talking about some of your most recent works. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity was published in *2016. And then just recently, your Cosmic Connections, which you referenced earlier, Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment was published. In the first of these two interrelated works, you proposed linguistic holism. Would you begin by offering an overview of that proposal and what you mean by it?
Charles Taylor: Yeah, well, there’s really, as I look back on that book, language book, there really are two senses in which you can talk about holism. Number one is that, in developed language, there is a sense when I use a word to describe something seriously, I’m not joking, I’m not caricaturing, that this is the right description, this is the right word. But you can only articulate, even raise the question, is that the right word, if you have all the resources of language at your disposal, right?
So, think of an argument that used to be yours, you’re characterizing that as foolishness or characterizing that as stupidity or in characterizing that as a bad faith description. You have an alternative in mind, and you are, what captures better that behavior, that situation, and so on. And you have to defend yourself against it, right? Because you’re making an implicit claim. So the whole of language, in a certain sense, is kind of prior to any particular argument about a particular description. That’s one sense of holism.
The other sense of holism, and maybe I didn’t make this clear enough in the book, is that language has this important place in human life that it, it’s a mode of being together with others in which we bring up things for discussion or perception, which are recognized as not for me and for you only, but for us, right? A kind of sharing of that consciousness.
And if I had to rewrite that book, I’m not going to try this in my life, but if I had to rewrite that book, I would make more of this, that the extraordinary thing is that I drew on people like Bruner. And I’m recently reading a book that I should have been, published before mine and that I should have been using but I didn’t know existed, which is by Greenspan and Shanker, about children and how they’re inducted into language. And you realize that their only way to induct children into language is by intense communication, intense sense of what children love and always looking for.
They want their parents to talk to them, to play with them, to pay attention to them, and that gives them a sense of who they are and so on. So that it’s this being, I call it, for us, and not for you and for me, but for us. Language is always that kind of place in human life.
I mean you can see this in certain very sophisticated situations where, let’s say some, some politician has actually been caught with his hand in the till, but it isn’t yet public knowledge, but the inside dopesters in Ottawa or Washington all know about it, so they’re all talking about it at a cocktail party in which there are other people that are not privy to this. And so they’re not raising it themselves. (…)
Todd Ream: In your recently released book, Cosmic Connections, you turn to poetry as an expression of language that could address at least some of these insufficiencies. Would you please offer an example or two of how poetry serves us in such ways?
Charles Taylor: Yeah. Well, I think, yes. A lot of us have some sense that they, that nature or the, let’s say, the planet and all its differences and so on, that cosmos, as people might call it, right, that we live in, is something deeply meaningful for us. Or sometimes we think, when we look at the devastation of the planet by ourselves, we think it should be more meaningful for us, right, than it has been.
Okay, but now we get the really crucial point in light of a point we made immediately before. What’s the language that you can find which will tell you what the meaning of the cosmos is? And here, I think that we’re in a very strange situation that looks as though it bars any progress, but I don’t think it does, but it looks as though. Why? Well, because there are various kinds of artistic expression, which help to articulate how we can feel about the larger universe that surrounds us.
But it’s very hard if somebody doesn’t get it. To say, okay, I’ll give you an alternative description, right? And what I wanted to do was to show that in the case of poetry of the Romantic time and what succeeds that, which everybody is deeply influenced by that Romantic term. So, how about, I thought to myself, how about if, I try to take some examples like Wordsworth, like Hölderlin, and so on, and do a reading of them, where you can see that what’s happening here, is you have a very powerful sense of cosmic order, but it isn’t one that you could defend in philosophical terms, but it’s very, very powerful sense that arises from that.
I want the reader, in the end, to put all that into a context, even bigger context than the book, with the underlying idea that there’s always been some sense of the cosmos, which has moved people, and that in the 18th century and before, in the Renaissance period, it was these notions of cosmic order that people believed in philosophically, right, and then the philosophical belief was undermined by modern natural science, and the order of Newton was not like the order that Aristotle offered us.
But the sense of wanting some kind of contact of that sort remained very strong. So artists, poets, composers, because I have side references to these, but particularly poets, stepped in a certain sense. But they stepped in with a different, different contribution because they aren’t telling you anything which will permit you to prove that’s the real nature of things. They just give you a very powerful sense that that’s the world we live in. Right?
And so there’s a kind of, I call it epistemic retreat. They’re not trying to say this is the final correct description of things. So we can follow that through. And then other changes occur. You know, the whole sense of a continuing cosmic order really is swept aside by modern sense of the universe since the big bang and evolution and so on.
And then we get another kind of connection that people are finding in the dimension of time, in the dimension of what I call higher times. And there’s 20th century figures like Eliot and Milosz, yeah.
Überall Ernüchterung. Und doch sehnen wir uns danach, mit dem Kosmos verbunden zu sein. Der große Philosoph Charles Taylor erzählt in seinem neuen Buch ‚Cosmic Connections‘ von der Macht der Spiritualität. (Interview in ‚Die Zeit‘ vom 15. Juli 2024)
DIE ZEIT: Wir sehnen uns danach, mit dem Kosmos in Verbindung zu sein. So sagt es Ihr neues Buch Cosmic Connections. Ist das Wort Kosmos nicht veraltet? Was soll es noch heißen?
Charles Taylor: Kosmos ist ein altes Wort für die Ordnung des Universums, deren Teil wir als Menschen sind. Aber es ist nicht veraltet, die Art der Verbundenheit hat sich nur beständig gewandelt. Heute redet man eher von der natürlichen Umwelt, von der wir uns entfremdet haben, weil wir sie als pures Instrument für unsere Zwecke behandeln. Mir geht es in meiner Arbeit um die Beziehungen des Menschen zur umgebenden lebendigen Natur, die uns etwas bedeutet. Diese kosmische Verbundenheit ist eine Quelle von Kraft und Sinn, aus der sich das moderne Selbst nährt.
ZEIT: Gilt das nur für moderne Menschen, die in ihrem Verhältnis zur Natur und in ihrer Empfindsamkeit westlich geprägt sind?
Taylor: Nein, Menschen waren zu allen Zeiten und in allen Kulturen hungrig danach, als Mikrokosmos mit einer größeren Ordnung verbunden zu sein, um daraus geistige und spirituelle Nahrung zu ziehen. Diese Sehnsucht nimmt aber immer wieder radikal verschiedene Formen an. Mal tritt sie uns sprachlich in den Gedichten von Baudelaire, Rilke oder Miłosz entgegen, mal in einer indigenen Naturreligion, mal in der indischen Geistesgeschichte, mal in der gegenwärtigen Arbeit an einer ökologisch intakten Welt. Die Sehnsucht gilt nicht einfach einer bewussten Wahrnehmung der Umwelt, sondern einer besonderen Verbundenheit, in der Freude, Inspiration und Bedeutung spürbar werden.
Taylor: Mir geht es um einen epistemischen Rückzug, und das soll heißen: nicht immer bloß auf wissenschaftliche Erklärung orientiert und fixiert sein, sondern auch die Macht des Unerklärlichen und des Unverfügbaren spüren. Die Poesie lässt zwischen dem Subjektiven und der physischen Welt offene Spielräume der Erfahrung und der Deutung, und in diesem Dazwischen kann entstehen, was uns verzaubert. Romantisch ist die Idee von einer Sprache, die aufgrund ihrer Doppelnatur zweierlei vermag: Sie kann die Dinge einfach nur instrumentell benennen, sie kann aber auch Bedeutungen in Worten entdecken und neu hervorbringen. In der höheren, der poetischen Sprache erleben wir den Versuch, etwas auszudrücken, das sich uns entzieht und das uns unwillkürlich nach einem treffenderen Ausdruck suchen lässt, weil wir spüren: Dieses Wort trifft es oder trifft es noch nicht. Die Metaphern, die wir finden, sind in gewisser Weise lebendig, sie entfalten sich. Sie bringen etwas hervor, das sich genau zwischen einer rein subjektiven Projektion und einer völlig unabhängigen objektiven Realität bewegt. (…)
ZEIT: Kriege und Klimawandel stellen uns gegenwärtig aber unromantische Fragen: Haben wir seit 1800 historisch überhaupt Fortschritte zum Besseren gemacht?
Taylor: Zweifellos sind heute die ethischen Standards hoch, die wir historisch entwickelt haben, und ebenso zweifellos ist das reale Verhalten der Menschen oft nicht auf der Höhe dieser Standards. Aber es gibt in der Geschichte so etwas wie ein ethisches Wachstum, auch wenn es nicht linear ist: Heute zählt ideell jedes einzelne menschliche Leben, und selbst ein Diktator wie Xi Jinping würde aus diesem Grund öffentlich nicht vom Unwert des Lebens der unterdrückten Uiguren sprechen, sondern eher von amerikanischen Lügen. Es hat historische Zäsuren wie die europäische Aufklärung und die Französische Revolution gegeben, in deren Folge die Sklaverei abgeschafft wurde und die Menschenrechte formuliert wurden. Der Gedanke der Unantastbarkeit der Würde ist seither in der Welt. Und seit der Amerikanischen und der Französischen Revolution ist auch die Idee der unveräußerlichen Rechte so präsent wie der Gedanke des Rechts auf Selbstbestimmung. Politische Autorität muss legitimiert sein. All dies sind Neuerungen in der Geschichte, die wir als Fortschritt verstehen können, auch dort, wo gegen diese Standards massiv verstoßen wird.
ZEIT: Sie sind nun 92 Jahre alt und haben drei Jahrzehnte an diesem Buch Cosmic Connections geschrieben. Die letzten dreißig Jahre haben die Welt in ein Chaos aus Krieg, Autokratie und Ökokollaps verwandelt. Wie hat sich diese Realität auf Ihr Projekt ausgewirkt?
Taylor: Ich bin ein und derselbe Mensch, der entsetzt ist über diese Entwicklungen und zugleich an den kosmischen Verbundenheiten gearbeitet hat. Über die Frage, ob Menschen in ihrer Geschichte moralisch gewachsen sind, hätte ich sonst nicht nachgedacht. Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass Wege nach vorn uns nicht zu einer universellen einzigen Form von Spiritualität führen können, sondern dass die Wege so irreversibel vielfältig sind wie die Spiritualitäten, aus denen wir Menschen uns nähren. Ethisches Wachstum kann es nur in deren wechselseitiger Anerkennung und Versöhnung geben, auch wenn wir gegenwärtig Rückschläge erleben. Ich möchte es wiederholen: Die Geschichte hat die Form einer Spirale. Menschen verfügen über eine Offenheit gegenüber der umgebenden Welt, die ihnen etwas zu sagen hat und mit der sie in vielfältiger Weise in Beziehung stehen. Von dieser Offenheit auszugehen, ist auch inmitten von Katastrophen nicht unvernünftig.
Kev Quirk answered the question in his blog( https://kevquirk.com/blog/why-have-a-personal-site-instead-of-social-media ) and I wanted to add my two cents on top. It’s a topic close to my heart as a website owner and personal web advocate. For Kev, the main reason to have a personal site is ownership. When you are only using social sites, you are completely relying on their decisions and whims. A site might go down, change direction, drop features or let people you don’t want to associate with run amok in the platform. All of these are potential reasons for you to lose what makes being on that platform worth while.
Having my own site and publishing my thoughts here, I can decide what gets shown, what is prioritized and what gets a spotlight. Not someone else and their recommendation algorithms. My website is the place where I can point anyone interested to. It’s like my home address, in the web.
Here some more infos and thoughts from Matthias Ott about ‚own your web‘: It looks like I’m not the only one who is unsatisfied with the current state of social media and the Open Web. Many of us share that vision of a Web that lets everyone participate, a Web that is empowering and full of creative ideas, a Web that is home to respectful and welcoming communities, and a Web where people can truly own their work and the content they create and publish. And you know what? Drowned out by the noise on the large, attention-grabbing, enshittificated social networks, that version of the Web still exists. On our personal websites.
Having a personal website in 2023 is a superpower. It’s a place to write, create, explore, and share whatever you like, without limitations. It’s a playground to try out new things, tinker with new technologies, and build something beyond the ordinary. It’s a tool to make yourself heard, to participate in online discourse, create community, and make new friends. And, it’s a place to truly own your content and tell your story. It’s your personal home on the Web.
Now imagine a place where you actually own your content, your connections, and your online identity.
And now, imagine that this place is your personal website, under your own domain name, under your control.
This is the basic idea behind the IndieWeb. The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites and the people behind those sites creating tools that enable a decentralized, people-focused alternative to the corporate web and its social media silos.
The IndieWeb has already been playing a key role in developing many of the tools that make an independent, decentralized network of personal websites possible. This in itself is invaluable. Now it is on all of us to implement more and more of those features into our sites, build even more tools and solutions for the independent web, and help to lower the barrier of entry so that the IndieWeb’s vision of owning your content and online identity will be more accessible to evermore people. Every step we take will change the Web for the better. Because ultimately, the IndieWeb is for everyone.
The next chapter of the IndieWeb awaits and the fight for an independent, open web seems more worthwhile and promising than ever. Tim Berners-Lee once said: “You can make the walled garden very very sweet. But the jungle outside is always more appealing in the long term.”
Let’s make this jungle wild, exciting, and beautiful again.
Imagine, just for a second, a future in which we all have our own websites and that those sites are at the center of everything we do and create online. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to collect reactions from other personal websites or large platforms when we publish something on our own sites? And wouldn’t it be exciting if we could actually enable decentralized conversations across our websites, by letting our sites talk to each other?
Well, there is a way to that today: Webmentions. Webmentions are one of the fundamental IndieWeb building blocks and a powerful way to establish rich interactions between websites. As I wrote earlier this year, comments used to be at the heart of the interactions that happened around blogs and personal sites. It’s time to bring them – and the people – back to our sites. Webmentions are a part of that.
Here some own thoughts on this topic: I totally agree to all former thoughts on this complex topic (ownership, self-determination, freedom, interaction, community, identity…) and hope for your additional thoughts and comments. What are your main reasons for having a personal website instead of or additionally to social media?
Schneebedeckte Berge, Palmenstrände, verwunschene Dörfer, Kräuter und Kulinarik: Griechenlands malerische Mittelmeer-Insel verzaubert Künstler seit jeher – und nicht nur die.
Mountains, palm-lined beaches, enchanted villages, herbs and culinary delights: Greece’s Mediterranean island enchants artists – and not just them. Crete is the largest of Greece’s islands. The picturesque landscape of the island in the eastern Mediterranean is the muse of many of its inhabitants. Crete was the birthplace and home of world-famous artists such as the painter El Greco, composer Mikis Theodorakis and writer and Nobel Prize winner Nikos Katzantzakis. Cultures intersect here and the senses are sharpened – by nature, art and people. A researcher of Greek food culture cooks ancient recipes under olive trees on an open fire. In the mountains of Crete, herbs for Malotira tea are discovered that only grow at an altitude of 1800 meters. The painter Angelos Spartalis not only creates oil paintings, but also works with film and ceramics. In the traditional pottery village of Margarites, Crete’s clay is potted and fired, just as the Cretans have been doing since Minoan times. Georgia Dagaki plays rock music with a lyre, an ancient instrument that was previously reserved for men on Crete. The documentary by Lourdes Picareta has the original title „Crete with all senses“.
