Erleuchtung oder weniger hochtrabend: eine fixe Idee Bis kurz vor meinem Konfirmandenunterricht war ich sehr gottesgläubig. Am meisten beeindruckt hat mich der Satz: "Gott sieht alles". Die Tatsache, dass Gott nichts entgehen sollte von dem, was ich machte, war sehr furchteinflössend für mich. Auch wenn ich allein war, sollte Gott alles sehen können, was ich tat. Später dann konnte ich es nicht fassen, dass Gott soviel Schreckliches zulässt. Hungersnöte, Krieg, Mord und Folterei. Gott musste ein Monster sein. Die Lösung der Christen, die sagen, dass Gott unsere Freiheit als ein höheres Gut ansieht als unser Glück, konnte mich nie so richtig überzeugen. Dann las ich Nietzsche und sah Gott plötzlich nur noch als eine Kreation des Menschen. Nicht als etwas Originäres, sondern als eine Projektion des Menschen. Als etwas, das genauso überwunden werden muss wie das unvollkommene Wesen Mensch. Der emanzipierte Mensch (bei Nietzsche der Übermensch) braucht nicht die Krücke Gott. Er ist autark. Ich wurde zum Atheisten und später dann zum Agnostiker.

Gestern abend habe ich den Satz begriffen. Oder besser ich habe ihn von einer anderen Perspektive aus verstanden. Gott sieht alles nur deswegen weil wir alle Gott sind. Gott als eigenständige Persönlichkeit existiert nicht. Alles Leben auf dieser Erde ist Gott. Ich also auch. Und ich sehe natürlich, was ich mache. Also sieht Gott es auch. Weil ich ein Teil von Gott bin. Einige Leute sagen Gott wäre die Schöpfung. Das ist mir zu eng und anthropomorph gedacht. Ich weiss nicht, ob die Welt geschaffen wurde. Ich kann nur sagen, dass ich den Eindruck habe, dass die Welt existiert. Oder anders, dass es mich und etwas um mich herum gibt und ich nenne beides zusammen die Welt. Ich würde jedoch sagen, dass ein wichtiger Teil Gottes das Bewusstsein ist. Und zwar das Bewusstsein aller Lebewesen. Ich meine hier nicht nur das Bewusstsein unserer eigenen Existenz, sondern auch das der Existenz der anderen. Ob wir anderen Leid antun oder nett zu ihnen sind, wissen wir selbst oft am Besten. Und wenn wir uns dessen nicht bewusst sind, dann weiß es natürlich derjenige, dem wir wehtun oder Liebes tun. Somit weiß Gott es. Wir selbst sind unsere strengsten Richter. Wenn wir vor uns selbst bestehen können (vorausgesetzt wir wissen um die Auswirkungen unserer Handlungen auf andere), dann tun wir es auch vor Gott. Im Jüngsten Gericht urteilen wir selbst über unser Leben. Und es gibt keinen gnadenloseren Richter als uns selbst, da keiner unser Leben so gut kennt wie wir selbst.

Ich weiß nicht, ob das viel Sinn macht, was ich gerade geschrieben habe. Just an idea. Just a feeling. Just my two cents...

Today's ILM thread: Old (on how you feel now about music you once loved turning into history or vanishing completely)

5 places

• Chinesischer Turm, München on a summer evening. After three Maß (liter glasses) of beer the tower becomes blurred in the distance and the focus is on the strangers around you (businessmen, actors, students, tourists, drug dealers, other criminals and ex-cons) to whom you talk as if you had known them for all your life.
• Forest in South Bavaria, walking from Starnberg to Füssen and crossing a deep forest in November. Suddenly the sunlight pierces through the trees. You can see the rays. You feel like in a fairy world.
• Hierro, a Canary Island, arriving by sailing boat at the small harbour of Restinga. Desertlike volcanic landscape around. You take a taxi which takes you up the mountains. Descending from the cab you see cows grazing deep green meadows. The temperature has dropped by ten degrees. You see mist clouds. You are in Scotland for the first time of your life.
• Big Sur, near the coast road there is a place where they sell thousands of wind chimes. Many chimes are suspended outside. On a windy day the metal tubes hit each other and create a natural high-pitch bell symphony.
• Cape Cod, walking along the sand beach for three hours without meeting any other people (before Labor Day it is possible). The noise of the wind and the sea so loud that you can't talk without shouting. It is just you two, the sand, the sea, the wind and the sun.

This post was inspired by the already mentioned excellent French blog JR Files ("Notes, anecdotes, mélanges, et idées").

The Art Test (via Absintheur) Usually I am not very fond of online tests but this one is different. I like the idea. What intrigues me now: if I were a piece of music would I like to listen to me? The result of the art test:

"If I was a work of art, I would be Claude Monet's Waterlilies. I am soft and gentle, but very colourful. Although based in reality, I look at the world through a filter of impressions which shape how I see things. Splashes of light help to define my presence and bring an endearing quality. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test"

I like to look at me as a painting. That is nice. Blue has always been my favourite colour. And we have a Monet poster in our sleeping room. The painting captures my dreamy side quite well. Dreamy and clear-sighted at the same time. That's how I dream of myself at least.

Why does suddenly everybody (#1, #2) love the new New Order album? I don't get it. I've said before that it is my favourite of theirs. It is the most varied and consistent record in their career. In a way it is the most "Joy Division" like. What really annoys me is when people say they love the music but find the lyrics dull. New Order's music has never been about lyrics. That was always the big difference between them and Joy Division. Joy Division had a songwriter, New Order is Joy Division without the songwriter, so what do you expect? Shallow lyrics which go with the melodies have been one of their trademarks.

P.S. I have to agree 100% to what Barney sings in Crystal: "I don't know what to say, you don't care anyway"

Lou Reed: Magic & Loss So I found my personal favourite album about AIDS. It is not really about AIDS but it is about seeing your friends die from it. Magic & Loss is one of the few successful concept albums I know. It is quite fatalistic and cynic in places but what I like the most is the humour which is appropriate to the subject as it is very dark. It is gallows humour. In Goodbye Mass Lou sits on the hard chair in the church and feels very uncomfortable. He does not like death masses and thinks that his deceased friend would not have liked his own death mass either: You would have made it easier you'd say 'tomorrow I'm smoke'" (to be extended)

5 travels (I have made)

• Cycling from Salzburg to Athens in the heat of summer 1982
• My first hitch rom Moers to Firenze 1982
• Frisco / Sonoma / Big Sur in sunny early February 1997
• Sailing from Gomera to Hierro and getting into a storm on the way back in winter 1992
• Walking from Starnberg to Füssen in November 1989

5 travels (I dream of)

• Crossing the Sahara with a salt caravan.
• Crossing the Pacific in a sailing boat.
• One month in a Zen monastery.
• One year in the Northwest Territories.
• Walking along the Appalachian Trail.

I started a thread on ILM What were the favourite bands/artists of your life up to now? I know it is difficult. I just did my list from when I was twelve years old to today. I am 38 now. The most difficult thing is to choose just one band/artist per year. I have succeeded. So should you. The list:

12: The Sweet 13: Manfred Mann's Earth Band 14-16: Genesis 17: Nick Drake 18-20: Keith Jarrett (jazz piano improvisations) 21: Dire Straits 22-23: Joni Mitchell 24: Neil Young 25: The Smiths 26: The Velvet Underground 27: Suzanne Vega 28: My Bloody Valentine 29: Sonic Youth 30: Red House Painters 31-32: Swell 33: Cowboy Junkies 34-36: Yo La Tengo 37-38: Giant Sand

Another current thread on ILM worthwhile checking out is ILM members in love on the music people were listening to when luv hit them.

Disappearance Sous le Sable (Below the sand) is a film by the young French director François Ozon. I love the French author cinema of Truffaut, Rohmer and Chabrol. Especially the first two have made films where conversation is essential. Ozon's film is different. Conversation is quite peripheral here. The film shows the slow psychical break-down of a woman who has lost her husband. She simply does not accept the reality and almost succeeds. I would call this an impressionist film which gives a very exact picture of what goes on in that woman. The more the story goes on the more reality takes over.

Spoiler alert! (though the plot is not so important really) Jean and Marie are a middle-aged couple who go on holiday to the Landes south of Bordeaux where Jean owns a holiday cottage. They do not talk much but they seem to get on ok. The first time they go to the beach Jean asks Marie if she wants to go swimming with him. She says no and never sees her husband alive again. There are no huge waves. It is a normal sunny seaside day. The film is about how Marie copes with the loss of Jean. Even though it becomes more and more evident that he has committed suicide she won't accept that he is dead. She lives on as if Jean had only left for a short trip. When the police phones back a couple of months later that they have found a body who fits her description of Jean she does not call back. She does not want to know. She has an affair with an acquaintance who is interested in her only after having talked about it to Jean in her imagination before. When Jean's old mother who apparently never liked her tells her that Jean was bored in the marriage and probably just left her to start a new life with another woman she changes her mind. Now she wants to see his dead corpse. When she sees the deformed body in the morgue she denies reality again. She tells the police that it was not him though the belongings the police found were obviously his. At the end she is back at the beach and sees a man in the distance who resembles Jean a bit. She runs towards him and the film finishes.

What happened to men? Recently I saw two movies about the absence of a man. In the first the man is mentally absent, in the second he just disappears physically. Both were highlights of this year's cinematographic output.

The Man Who Wasn't There is the latest work of the most European of all American film directors, the Coen Brothers. It is a film noir darker than any of the films in the 30s/40s which gave the name to this genre. Ed the chain-smoking barber does not talk much. When he speaks it is mainly about the miracle of growing hair and his fear that the hair could stop growing which would make him jobless. He lives an average American life in a small town. He is married and when he finds out that his wife betrays him everything takes its unstoppable course. I won't say much more about the story only that it does not finish as Hollywood films would end. Everything happens to Ed. He only reacts. The question of culpability is irrelevant. Ed could be a character out of Kafka's short stories. Especially Der Prozess (The trial) comes to mind. Or Camus L'Etranger (The stranger). Everything is fate. Ed is an anti-person. A loser whose care for the career of a young piano-playing girl is interpreted by her only as interest in sex (I actually thought the same). Who is so naive to invest money in an obviously fishy plot. Tragically it won't be only the cash that he loses there. The Coen brothers are in American film what Beck (esp. with Odelay) is in American rock music. Geniuses of eclecticism. They have absorbed all the history of Western arts and culture to create something refreshingly new. They transform Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that you cannot measure speed and location of an electron at the same time into the phrase "The closer you look the less you see" which the lawyer says in before the trial. There is also some very black humour at one point where I had to laugh till I cried when suddenly the laughter stuck in my throat. It is the scene when the brother of Ed's wife asks if there are no alarm clocks in prison as she does not turn up in time for her trial. There I really felt cheated by the Coens. I forgive them the slapstick scenes but in the trial scene they really manipulated the spectator. Anyways a great movie and one of their best together with Fargo. It is a quarter to twelve and the other film review will have to wait until tomorrow...