a théimid ar an de chríoch neamhshubstaintiúla. Táimid i mbun oibre le ceo

•July 26, 2015 • Leave a Comment

Bá Chionn an Ghabha
Iúil 2015
Beatrice Jarvis
Ceol ag Akira Kosemura
Téacs ag Virginia Woolf

1

We melt into each other with phrases.
We are edged with mist.
We make insubstantial territory.

44

Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed, and the steel of the knife were liquid.
Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore.

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what if this moment were to stay forever.

88

The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and they fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep blue save for a pattern of diamond pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell, withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

22

How does light return to the world to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes it hangs like a glass cage. There is a spark there. Next moment of a flash of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing out for the first time.

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And in me too the wave rises. It swells: it arches its back. I am aware one more of a new desire.

I am quite alone, here, for the first time.

55

comhrá idir neamhláithreachta agus raithneach

•July 23, 2015 • Leave a Comment

 

comhrá idir neamhláithreachta agus raithneach
scannán ag Beatrice Jarvis
Ceol le Marek Iwaszkiewicz
Éire Iúil 2015

1

a conversation between absence and fern.
how to make present such absence
perhaps I have left myself in the heather
shot down by a quivering blue
I fall into an abyss

 

2

rising with each wave
hère I shall remain
departed with the cloud
light driving darkness
before it spilt itself properly into the corners

6
I am broken into separate pieces
I am no longer one
in this silence it seems as though
no leaf would fall
no bird would ever fly
oppose ourselves

3

to this illimitable chaos
this formless imbecility
the still mood

this disembodied mode
is upon us
we must
enjoy this momentary isolation
let us stay
for a moment
simply here

 

7

5

comhrá a idir an an péarla ‘agus an oisrí

•July 21, 2015 • Leave a Comment

ag siúl ó Malin go cúig snáithe finger.

Iúil 2015.

Scannán ag: Beatrice Jarvis

Ceol le Evgeny Grinko: Faulkner’s Sleep (D-Moll)

—-

the pearl did not ask the limpet

his name

they sat

watching mussels

absorb the ocean

the sea

sighed

as the waves

took hold

thrashing a fury

a playful glee

taken down

risen with the sky

the sun and the blanket

could have

no silence

between the stars

wave  2

kicjk

—-

hih

club

perhaps the sun and moon
will dance
and the stars
will not ask
the end
only to breathe
softly
someone else’s house
depart the road to the weather station
to see the clouds chase blue
soup and stares
synthetic vegetable
what will I become?
dreaming of potatoes.

the dawn ochre
green urchin
the day walks
a squashed sandwich
to dance the sun down
gannets shearwaters auks
the shipping news
heralds the rains
nothing remains
untouched by water.

lie

perhaps this is all the waves will ask.

sun

we are not [ listening]

•June 9, 2015 • Leave a Comment
Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 15.49.06

A film for Big Noise Festival 2015.
Music: Ohara Hale. The Reeds ( in Moonlight)
Text: Beatrice Jarvis
Film by Beatrice Jarvis
Berlin footage: Benjamin Bailey


we are not [ listening ] where does memory hide. It comes early and we are late. It takes us and wrecks us. Dust. Ash. Rubble. All to moss. We are not

it is a matter of attention and memory in this quiet place that neither you nor I know. Such richness we destroy. Dust passes through our hands. We are lost. Lost for a sense of never quite becoming and we shall never know.

this is the land we cannot forget. Everything underfoot has a name. Is named. Each anonymous grass, repeats a history. I gather your fragments and store them in the pocket of my man made smock. To be an imitation, to cover the old façade with breezeblock and stop it from telling any secrets.
with measured steps, with deliberation, to walk a quiet path, between time and the grey fold. Hide me here, and I will sit, naked and think of marble and skin. Whose voice is this, beneath the shoals of our measured steps, the ship wreck of ambiguity, I am clutching at you, you fall, out, and out back to the place.
[my] deepest breath will bring no more air, the walls are departed, where does memory hide, what do these walls contain. The tree speaks, enlarged and bulbous with such acquisition. I will not beg you, the soil wraps me, the sky melts in hot pool of darkness. Unclench your teeth and loosen your jaw, do you continually bare this need, are you entertainment, clap, clap your hands.

Tell me a secret.

where are you. the stars have broken into pieces and they still clap. The man has no voice and he does not speak my name. The stars in spasm, the stars in cloud are still present. Do not touch this memory. My flesh crawls with it. Writhing in pastness and forgotten intimacies.

The candles have all burnt down and the palace falls to moss and ruin. Who are you. I walk beside the swing of your pulse and your heart pumps in both directions at once, the lines of my body and your heart, does memory have soul. The construction will not cease to frown. The asphalt courses through thick blood, progress will stop nothing . I breathe cement.

[my] self falls into marble and the crowds relinquish. This show has always been over. The hill takes me and the sky hits me. Where does memory hide. The man sits against the fresco and rubs it off with his nylon shirt. This is where the heart is.

we are not [ listening ] and

the day breaks again.

[Beatrice Jarvis]

This is not a manifesto.

•June 9, 2015 • Leave a Comment

Groundwork Residency

Tracing the Pathway at Milton Keynes Arts Center.

May 2015

Beatrice Jarvis. In collaboration with Dr Bob Jarvis

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This is an exploration my current strands of research around MK, exploring the city as site of memory and archive.

For more information about this project please see:
miltonkeynesartscentre.org/groundwork/

This is an exploration of sites of MK in the personal geography of my father, Dr Jarvis.
A full interview can be heard here soundcloud.com/beatrice-jarvis/bob-jarvis-talks-to-beatrice-jarvis-about-mk

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” Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation for my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise.
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.”

I asked the city to dance with me on a tuesday afternoon.

How can I walk there

In this intensive eight day residency working with memory, cultural history, movement mapping, writing, exploring and finding ways to understand place through oral history, collected narrative and embodied urban mapping.

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The Duet of the Body in the City.

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( are we dancing yet)

Collaborative and unbuilt studies towards unknown utopian geographies of Milton Keynes.

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I would like to thank you Ashleigh Griffith, Cara Davies and Aaron James and Groundwork: Tracing the Pathway Project. Thanks also to Deirdre and Mike at Fulwell Court, and all at MK Arts Centre for all the support.

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études en bleu

•June 9, 2015 • Leave a Comment

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études en bleu is an on going collaboration I am making with the colour Blue.

Working with landscape, improvisation, body and mind, I am studying through movement what the colour Blue might mean to me.

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bleu nu | Dans le sillage du printemps
For no one really knows what a colour is
where it is
or
whether it is.
{ can it die, does it have a heart }
What if I told you I had fallen in love with a colour?
I shall speak this as a confession.
A spell I have fought to stay under and fought to get from under
in turns.
But what kind of love really is it?
Do not fool yourself and call it sublimity.
I am to be not a student of longing, but of light.
dans la mémoire
dans l’espérance

bleu neu [ étude ii ]

l’échec de langauge.
une complainte de mots
les mots partent et la scène est laissé à nu.
le cœur bat.
les supports de souffle.
I continue to fool myself with the affects of language.
The word.
The empty white paper.
waits
for me.
yet I cannot enter the space it lays bare.
The words are left cold.
Alone on the page.

bleu neu [ étude iii ]
– mais que faire si la pluie se dissout tous les mots –
Music by:
Dakota Suite & Emanuele Errante – The North Green Down – A Worn Out Life (With Cello) – (lidar productions)

Perhaps all words will be dissolved by the rain.
How cold the fingers in the snow.
How cold the heart.
The words are falling and melting, fleeting as the snow.
The wind wishes to take them all away.
She can no longer say no.
How quickly the words take to the wind. Flight and abandon.
She sits nursing the empty white pages where the words used to play.

la page est laissée vide.
Mais que faire si il ne existe qu’un seul mot.
Le papier se envole dans le vent.

bleu nue
(Exploration iiii)
Music: 1. Nadia Sirota: Etudes I ( Composed by Nico Muhly)
2. Dakota Suite: Very Early One Morning On Old Road


i take a book for a walk
i imagine it may say a word to me
it says nothing
no words
it watches me
the pages stare.
the words race then to the sky
leaving me quite alone.
between the spaces the words leave
there can be silence
as the words take to the wind

‘ The old man closed his eyes
and held his gift close to his heart,
” I have danced in the dream world
and danced in the dead world.
My past is now my present
which is now my future.
I am an old man
and I am a life time
of childrens songs.
I am gone.
There is no time in space
only movement and silence
and cold.
The universe rolls..
a great surging tide
of enormous size.
You will become
a white ball of light
forever, within the
boundaries of the freedom of silence. ‘
( M. Robinson)
—-
The words are still in the wind
I will see if my net can catch
even one
so i might hold it in
my hand.
——

bleu nue [ étude v ]
Music: The Tumbled Sea: Melody III

The hawk and the fish.
the water and the words.
The body and the earth
sun and the mud under my fingernails
Perhaps you are here.
Perhaps you are hiding in the trees.

perhaps all the words which I lost are hiding the trees.
the river takes all the words away.
the sun’s glare take all their sadness
the words are seeking a peace
that the trees conceal.

In memory 6 | 2 | 14

bleu nue
étude vi
Music: { recordings of piano experiments for children ballet lessons 2010 }

peut-être la terre chante les paroles.
peut-être les mots sont de plus en plus que les cultures.
peut-être les mots se cachent dans la boue de mes ongles.
Le ciel est bleu
mais je ne vois que rouge
mes yeux sont ouverts
les mots sont tous fermés
la lumière et l’espoir de mots écarte.
noir remplace à la fois bleu et rouge


bleu nue [ étudier vii ]
Music: Max Richter, Daniel Hope, Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin & Andre de Ridder
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons: Spring 1

Perhaps it is when we stop
to search
and seek
no thing
no ending
and no begining
to stand
thinking of orange
bathed in naked blue
to seek to write the sky
à la recherche sans fin d’un bleu nue
écrit la couleur du ciel

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The search for blue
the love of blue.

The hope of blue.

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Tá muid damhsa ar an chiorcal

•December 2, 2014 • Leave a Comment

Tá muid damhsa ar an chiorcal,
Le aon thús agus gan deireadh,

 

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The body is a microcosm of the earth
The processes of nature are guidelines to aesthetics
Nature is a healer.

To live the experience of nature,
We are dancing the circle,
With no beginning and no end,
Yet we will begin and we will end,
But in our ability to perceive as such may be faulted and limit us.

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We can dance the earth with the earth. 

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Our breathing mirrors the winds of the world,

Our metabolism akin to fire,

When we take in nourishment, we make a little fire inside of ourselves,

We assimilate,

Our skin constantly renews and sheds,

As leaves falling each autumn,

Our body’s move and change in cyclic ways,

Just as and with the earth,

And just as the earth, we cycle between lightness and dark,

The seasons, the day and the night

Akin to each soul.

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Let the image of bird come.

let the image of an animal come.

Let the image of float,

softly softly,

The duet of body and earth.

A constant,

How little do we tune?

Each foot step a new duet.

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‘ To be in conversation is surely to live in the open.

To be in conversation is to think and feel on your feet and not to speak of prepared positions.

To be in conversation is to be who you are as who you are.
It is to live in what is not yet in the other

And what they are leading you to.

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It is when centers meet that the world is changed.

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To live in serious conversation is to live with the converse

To live in and with the contradiction

With opposites

With the other than we are

To be a place of meeting

Not a place of judgment.

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To be in conversation is to enter into what flows

In and amongst and between you.

To be present in conversation is to speak of and speak to

the world

now.’

(Mair. M. Between Thee and Me.)

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Be still.. breathe.

let go, the need to do anything.

sense stillness, emptiness, at the bottom of the breath,

Pause in the turning moment, between one breath and the next,

 

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Open the inside of the body,

Open the pathways of bone, open the skin,

let the body spread open like a sail to the wind.

Move into the spaces in and around the body.

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Sense endings and beginnings.

Sense the possibility of movement.

Interval, silence, emptiness.

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Listen to the space between one moment and the next.

Let the body breathe, make room,

sense the body.

Sense the horizon.

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‘ Listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms out of silence.’

( Rilke)

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“ Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine. Thus, sun and moon cling to heaven, and grain, grass and trees cling to earth.’ (I Ching)

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‘ To dance is human, and humanity almost universally expresses itself in dance. Dance interweaves with other aspects of human life, such as communication and learning, belief systems, social realizations and political dynamics, loving and fighting, and urbanization and change, and evolutionary development of the human species. When dance is surprised for moral, religious or political reasons, it raises, phoenix like to assert the essence of humanity. Dance appears primary among aesthetic forms and, the instrument of dance, the human body, contributes to other forms, which use its spatial, temporal and kinetic elements. Such dance dynamics preserve in the broad spectrum of non dance aesthetic phenomena.’ Hanna. L. J (1979) To Dance is Human

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To question only lightly.

To return to the sensation of the hand on the heart,

the sun on the chest,

the wind the hair,

the seal swimming beside,

and the boots which fell in the sea

after falling over.

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to keep light

and

to stay afloat

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and

to keep circling

and. 

.

( Explorations of Carraig Ceasail; Eire. November 2014) 

Is féidir linn a theipeann

•November 17, 2014 • Leave a Comment

iarracht
Is féidir linn a theipeann
chomh fada agus a fhios againn seo
íomhánna ar ár selves
Tá anaithnid
is é seo an íomhá
Titeann sí i cupán caife agus drowns
ní bheidh sé a shábháil.
Déanfaimid theipeann
Ag pointe amháin
Maireann aon nóiméad

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Anois.

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Gach go bhfanann
áirithe
An bhfuil
anála
Tagann agus téann
An taoide a réamh-mheastachán
As ár teipeanna féideartha
I roinnt chuimhneacháin

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Níl aon cheann de seo, nithe

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B’fhéidir gurb é sin go léir is gá dúinn

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sometimes when I close my eyes
i can listen to the chatter of the spiders
as they weave their webs before dawn

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to be like a tree.
is impossible
but as a human
i can reflect on my interpretation of what sensing a tree might appear as
this may not be apparent to anyone other than myself
perhaps i do not need to share this detail

the experience of standing in the rain under a tree
I am breathing in
I am breathing out.

 

 

 

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once upon a time;

only time for those moments did not exist,
and the clocks had all stopped
and the compass was stuck
and we were here
the walls ran with water

we are here

the morning lays in wait
the lark promises.

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what enchants and and what excites?

the images are falling.

our hands met in mud.

a chello on a hill

the performance of taking an ice cold bath

counting the ravens

a marching band follows you.

to texture and scent.

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far from the widening field
in a narrow town street

that is where we began
you with a broken branch
time space energy direction

to give each other attention
to listen to each sound

the film breathes in and out
the film coils and turns in on itself
it begins to die
the maker watches
the pen out of ink
the images will all fade

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making the transition into the light and into the dark
accepting that both states can be present
and absent

and when i dance
i am almost human again
all the emotion comes flooding back
and back and back
and moss listens
a wild rush
a stream
a waterfall

and I stand still.

still.
But then I realise even my blood is dancing.

there can be no stillness.

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perhaps this is all we need.
the ferns sing a lament
to the fading sky and the rains march in
the scene is flooded and the moss
catches the tears.

 

Explorations of Gleann Eatharla ( November 2014) with special thanks to Jynx for such hospitality and kindness.

à la page vide

•November 9, 2014 • Leave a Comment

The pages remain blank.

the image forever undeveloped.

to close the eyes

and imagine the future

for a past that cannot exist

and a present which remains

now.

untouched.

to keep the eye lids closed

for to see

means that one will never see for the first time again.

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The tide comes and go
The images come and go

The dark room as refuge.

The moment before each image emerges
when all you that you think you know of what you are about to see
could be
totally disproved.

There I will wait.

In that precise moment
and I wish never to leave it.

there I shall dwell a life time.

Never to be sure.
Never to know.

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” what is knocking?
what is knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody that wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels,

Admit them, admit them.” ( DH Lawrence)

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the tide collects our sorrows and joys
each wave a new symphony
the act of taking a walk

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” perhaps, i thought, he liked the gloom, as I liked sunlight,
because both put objects into a relationship with each other” ( Winifred Nicholson)

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Perhaps i left it in the sand.

the day the heart ballon burst and killed a fish .

the day the empty page filled up with words that will remain unspoken.

this is the day i departed.

the waves watched.

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acceleration. adversity. crushing a plum in ones hand so the juice runs all the way down the wrist to the arm.
stand back and take a breath.

This is where i wish to remain.

let me stay here.

please.

now.

before the memory fades with the light.

this is where i will stand

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the past has yet to be revealed.

the empty sheet

does not demand

our faces

your heart

as brief as photographs

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here and now

i will remain.

stać się las.

•November 4, 2014 • Leave a Comment

to become forest.
studies in interaction .

how to become a part of this earth.

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to the endangered and vanishing

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As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills.

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to the endangered and vanished ones.

To hold memory

and let it fall.

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To hold dust and let the wind take it.

to press a cold rock against my lips

to stick my tongue out into the rain

to get my feet so wet i can no longer feel them

to press my spine against a tree

to mould myself into sand

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How to become a part of this earth

the metal compositions of blood

rust, skin, iron, bone.

rot, decay, birth and growth.

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the gift of pen and paper

the gift of a seed.

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‘Humans are tuned for relationships. The eyes, the skin, the ears, the tongue and nostril , all are gates where our body receives nourishment of otherness. The landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams, these breathing shapes, our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

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The colour of the sky, the rush of waves- every aspect of sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger.

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Every sound was voice. every scrape, every blunder was a meeting – with Thunder, with oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.

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As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body. we live in our bodies and so know. from within the possibilities of our form. We cannot know with the same familiarity or intimacy, the livd experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of humming bird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun. Our experience may indeed be a variant of these modes of sensitivity, never the less we cannot as humans, précisely experience the living sensations of another,

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We do not know with full clarity. their desires and motivations, we cannot know. and can never be sure that we know what they know. ‘

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‘From the tree of life
leaf after leaf falls around me
Oh world delighted with ecstasy,
How you fill me at last,
How you fill me with weariness
and make me drunk !
Whatever still glows today
is soon lost’ ( Hesse)

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