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He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. All of this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eyes, was no longer a spell of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer a pointless and coincidental diversity of mere appearances, despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman, who scorns diversity, who seeks unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and if also in the blue and the river, in Siddhartha, the singular and divine lived hidden, so it was still that very divinity's way and purpose, to be here yellow, here blue, there sky, there forest, and here Siddhartha. The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything.

Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha

The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there is no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.

Ken Wilber - No boundary

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Marcel Proust - Remembrance of Things Past.

[Full text] [Original French text]

...face shining in the bamboo grove

The potency of silence, of which he sometimes speaks, as indeed do others, is to be sought in the interval between thoughts, of infinitesimal duration to split-mind, but without, or of infinite, duration, in itself, since it is intemporal. To him who experiences it, it might have any conceivable duration, though to an observer it can have none. In itself it is never a momentary thing, for it is the permanent background of what we experience as time, the reality rather than the background, and in a feeble image, the screen on to which the ever-moving pictures of conceptual life are projected. It's incalculable potency then becomes apparent, for it is no other than whole-mind.

Ask the awakened | Wei Wu Wei

There is the odd and persistent fact that there it is only a faithful journey to a distant region, a foreign country, a strange land, that the meaning of the inner voice that is to guide our quest can be revealed to us. And together with this odd and persistant fact there goes an other, namely, that the one who reveals to us the meaning of our cryptic inner message must be a stranger, of an other creed and a foreign race.

Heinrich Zimmer
Myths and symbols in India art and civilization

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,

Pablo Neruda

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Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday

LEONARD FEATHER

It was while Billie Holiday was singing at Cafe Society Downtown, a Greenwich Village Club the likes of which we shall never see again, that a poet named Lewis Allan showed her his story of a lynching. "Strange Fruit" had an immediate message for Billie. It reminded her of how her father had died, stricken with pneumania, carried from one hospital to another in Dallas and refused admittance; finally, too late, accepted at the Jim Crow ward in a veterans' hospital. In the post depression years lynching took many insidious forms; the segregated hospital system was among the most flagrant. As Billie recalled in Lady Sings the Blues, Allan suggested that she and her pianist, Sonny White, set music to the poem. "The three of us got together and did it in about three weeks. I worked like the devil on it because I was never sure I could get across to the plush night club audience the things that it mean' to me." The first time she sang it, as she reached the searing climactic line: "here is a strange and bit..ter....crop" there was a brief silence;then the audience, stunned by the impact, found release in applause. The 1939 hippies with "The New Masses" stuffed in their pockets, the blacks who patronized this first genuinely integrated downtown night club, even the middle aged college professors slumming in Sheridan Square, all could relate in some measure to what Strange Fruit said about life in black America. To Billie Holiday the message of Lewis Allan's poem had a meaning more vital than any of the soufflé songs she had been handed by record producers. This was the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism. It was radical and defiant at a time when blacks and whites alike found it dangerous to make waves, to speak out against a deeply entrenched status quo. Lady Day was soon reminded of this raw reality when she took the song to the company for which she was then recording. The immediate reaction was fear. ("They won't buy it in the south...We'll be boycotted - ..lt's too inflammatory....) Disheartened but determined, Lady stopped off one day at the Commodore Record Shop, where her friend Mill Gabler was building a reputation as the founder and producer for Commodore Records, the first American company devoted exclusively to jazz. "Billie was very sad," Gabler recalls. "She had this great number that was so important to her, and they, wouldn't let her record it. I told her that if she could get a one-session release from her contract, I'd like to have her do it for Commodore." Strange Fruit was recorded April 20, 1939, with the small band led at Cafe Society by trumpeter Frankie Newton. Ironically, though it attracted the intelligentsia, the real hit for the Harlem juke box trade was Fine and Mellow, a blues that was released on the other side. "Fine and Mellow took off and became Billie's first real pop hit," said Gabler, "a pioneering record in the history of r & b because of the way we did the background. To round out the session we did "I Gotto Right To Sing the Blues", and one number, "Yesterdays", featuring just the rhythm section and Kenneth HalIon's tenor sax. For the band numbers, Tab Smith set up the riffs and what little arranging was required." Billie soon went back to the familiar routing of predominantly conventional material at her Vacalion and Okeh sessions until 1942, when the Musicians' Union ban brought her recording activities to a jarring halt at a crucial point in her life. These, after all, were the definitive years. Lady had grown out of her youthful gaucherie and plumpness to develop into a poised, stunningly beautiful woman. After Cafe Society, there were the big theatres (the Apollo uptown and Loew's downtown), the 52nd Street clubs (Kelly's Stable for a while, then a long run at the Onyx) and tours that paid well. Her elegant wardrobe and the ever-present gardenia in her hair became unforgettably vital to her physical presence. Billie stood tall, quiet and proud as the pianist beat off an intro, usually in a slow, easy tempo. She was almost motionless, but we watched in awed fascination the few subtle movements she made. As she tilted her head, smiled regally, snapped her fingers, there was about her a certain isolation, almost an hauteur, that seemed to tell us we could only get just so close. The voice of the Lady, her beauty and her innate dignity could bring an audience of Saturday night drunks to pindrop silence. The incomparable sound of Lady Day went unrecorded for more than two years; but as soon as the recording ban ended, Milt Gabler made an agreement for Commodore with Billie's agent, Joe Glaser. Of the 16 numbers she sang for the label, all combined for the first time in this album, a dozen were recorded over a two-week span in March and April of 1944. Like Frankie Newton who had presided over the Strange Fruit date five years earlier, Eddie Heywood Jr. had worked in clubs with Billie and was a logical choice to lead the accompanying group. "The personnel was the same on all three dates," Gabler says, "except that on the second session we dropped the guitar, Teddy Walters, and for the third date Doc Cheatham was ill and had to be replaced by Freddie Webster. Freddie was a fine musician but somehow we couldn't get the same sound with the band. "We struggled for three hours and got two sides that satisfied us; then I sent home all the horn players and did the two tunes over again, plus two others, with just the rhythm section. Those were the versions that were originally issued, but on this album we've used the takes with the horns on aaaaa'He's Funny That Way and Lover Come Back To Me''. "There's a third number on which we're using a take that was never previously released. This performance of (Billie's Blues) "I Love My Man" ran almost three and a half minutes, which in those days was considered a little too long for the jukebox 78s; but its tempo and feeling are even better than on the one we put out originally." In the narrow tradition of esthetic pigeonholing, Billie was referred to in the newspaper headlines-even in the title of her book-as a blues singer; yet typically only two of the 16 songs here, (Billie's Blues) "I Love My Man and Fine And Mellow", are based on the pattern of the blues. Although a similar spirit informed much of what she sang, this was never even remotely her exclusive image. Such songs as "Embraceable You, He's Funny That Way and I'm Yours" might best be classified as high grade Tin Pan Alley products whose words are a conventionally jubilant affirmation of love. To some of her audiences, Billie in her heyday was in fact a messenger as much of sweetness and light as of grief and frustration. For every "Yesterdays" there was an "I'll Get By" or some other blandly upbeat lyrical trifle that might be forgotten today had she not brought to it a unique ability to transcend her material. In retrospect, it is impossible for the young listener today to hear Lady Day without relating to the legend, the cult, the mystique that have become inextricably intertwined with her memory. There are many who can only hear in her the harsh, note-bending cries of a woman destroyed by society, and ultimately destroying herself; a tortured artist beleaguered by a succession of lovers whom she would later commemorate in the song "No Good Man". But it is important to remember that Billie in her lifetime dealt with audiences who knew little or none of this. The public knew her only as an entertainer. One did not have to be conscious of her personal problems in order to hear all the anguish. the sardonic touches of humor, and most of all the sheer musicianly authority with which she invested every song. There is a measure of truth to the cliches about Billie's singing and phrasing like a horn, but no less relevantly, she dealt with words, an obligation that never confronts a horn player. and had her own way of shifting them around; stretching a syllable over two or three notes, flattening out the tune to its bare essentials while retaining the lyrical essence; instinctively keeping her altered melodic contours in sympathy with the chord structure. There was, too, her singular faculty for lagging behind the beat-as Miles Davis once said, "She sings way behind and then she brings it up-hitting it right on the beat. What I like about Billie is that she sings it just the way she hears it." The way she heard it often is the only way we remember it. Typically, "Yesterdays", in effect becomes her own creation. In the line "Days I knew as happy sweet sequestered days...." who can recall the long rising curve of Kern's melody? Instead, Billie starts at the top note of that upward sweep and stays there, unraveling the complexities, making her statement in a manner more basic, to bring the song more tellingly to life. In using such traits, Billie surely was inspired by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, but she imitated no one. By the time she was 20, her style was all but formed; when she sang "Strange Fruit", at 24, it was totally mature. It is a pat explanation to point to the private agonies that supposedly shaped her. Certainly she mirrors the fight for survival, the poverty and squalor, the humiliations and grief; but here too is the lighter side of Billie, the partying and the romantic, the easyliving Lady, the young woman who could bring conviction to songs called "Getting Some Fun Out of Life" and "Laughing At Life". All these factors were a part of what we heard, but what made it special was Billie's own way of translating grief and joy alike into musical terms, and no other woman in or out of the ghetto had ever brought to the vocal art such a totally personal character and timbre. None of the ultimate tragedies seemed to loom on her horizon during Billie's greatest years. Those were the olden days, golden days, the yesterdays at the peak of a career that would flicker and die as she burned herself out at the age of 44 . It gives one pause to realize that most of today's listeners who respond to the music of Billie Holiday's voice never saw her on a stage or in a concert hall; perhaps a few will remember only the pathetic, ghastly years of her decline. These 16 songs from her time of glory will bring you as close as is possible now to a total sound portrait of this sensuous, intoxicating woman, whose loves and hates, private traumas and triumphs, indelibly reflect an Afro-American art form as well as an Afro-American life style. "Strange fruit" indeed, but a sweet as well as a bitter crop

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Edward S. Curtis - Photographer - Native Americans - Les peuples autochtones de l'Amérique du Nord [The Library of Congress]
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La bergère - The sherperdess

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