weird & a little bit of strange / tuhaf ve biraz da garip?

"How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?"
Sylvia Plath

"You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
Pearl S. Buck

"Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play."
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world."
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."
Dr. Seuss

"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."
Edgar Allan Poe

that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent

arthur c-clark -- i really cropped this one out!

"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
Tom Robbins

"...I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"We all know interspecies romance is weird."
Tim Burton

"I'm not so weird to me."Haruki Murakami

"In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful."
Alice Walker

"I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something."
Tom Waits

"By a route obscure and lonely
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule --
From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE, out of TIME."
Edgar Allan Poe

"Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass."
D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

for some rivalry:

"Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."
Charles Mingus

"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."
Charles Bukowski

"What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms."
— Kobayashi Issa

"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
John Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday)

I often tried to get away from her and
she tied to get away from me
but it was difficult:
Cupid, in his strange way, was really
there."
Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

human vs. inhuman

"The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)..."
c.s. lewis

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
camus

"and beauty is of smallest duration"/ the Strudlhof stairs

http://www.doderer-gesellschaft.org/english/pdf/The_Strudlhof_Steps.pdf

on the Strudlhof stairs i spent some hours yesterday. daylight faded into night. i kept recording...

as i was lured by the movements of a hanging plant in tune with the wind, i overheard the language of some footsteps. i heard somebody look at me; i heard this in the sound of his steps. with a side-glance i felt like seeing this person who introduced me to the idea of this stairs.

i walked to the steps. i looked down.

only to marvel at the appearance of my accidental viennese guide for the night. the russian marco polo. who is very luckily still in vienna. the last time i came across him was at this owl place. i bought him some dinner to pay my respect. (and on this fucking cold and magnificiently metaphorical day, i had actually sent him and also simon a message to translate 2 lines of the poem by Doderer. this poem i tried to read in german. at the base of the stairs by the fountain was this poem. the last two lines rhymed and sounded very poetic. i craved to understand the language. however, as it turns out he had not received this message. he received themessage after he tried to translate... after his appearance here. shaved face; fresh smell; and a particular distance like that of a comrade even.)

and marco polo walked past by me. i asked: "what are you doing here?" delighted with his presence.

he was here by a touch of magic, as he stated it.

and here he tried his best to translate.

the wanderer said:

vase with this bloody green stuff: moss he means.

between the wars ...

much has sunken...

"it should be poetic as well so i can't do a direct translation"

... would be grief

as marco polo struggles with the translation, an old man comes in... at a point marco polo stumbles, an old man approaches the marco polo and the unknown digitized stranger, the oriental little one so to say... the passer-by approached and offered these two souls some help... this passer-by's version is:

"the beautiful is the smallest thing"

and marco polo put the bits and pieces together:

"much has sunken in grief "; or:

"a lot has been sunken in grief and sadness"

"and beauty is of smallest duration"

as we step down to view the stairs from below, we recite: jugendstill, art deco..

he points to the middle and says:

"here we go: vase in the middle. mosses. "

"hey, they renovated it, actually!"

this was also the day i got my new pink 80s LAMY. from a magical store.

"so, this is where you travel between time!"

"in 1918, the austrian empire breaks up; and the narrative jumps forward and backward and forward and backword ... all these figures they meet at the stairs"

"it's bloody cold here, let's go up", says the white-skinned marco polo with the russian-british accent. i am already shivering. we go up the stairs, once more trascending time. trascending space. just by walking.

i adore the sight of the streets in vienna at this time of the year. as if i have seen it in spring or in summer? no, just my imagination. i realize that i perceive this city to be an extension of Pera, taksim, istanbul. it gives me space to think and to reflect.

and i just found this piece of literature in english online. just tonight.

On the Strudlhof Steps in Vienna

...
the mossed urn in the middle, by the wall,
outlasts the year between the wars and dying.

So much is past and gone, to our dismay,
And beauty shows the frailest power to stay.

Heimito von Doderer, "The Strudlhof Steps"
tranlated by Vincent Kling.

i enjoy the passer by's and marco polo's version better. (and simone's version is erased due to some absynth and vodka and beer. which was really not necessary at all. this was also the stupidest night in this oriental little one's personal history. she just kept on sending out messages to the eastern countries, sharing the fact that she was watching the turkish star trek in vienna after a time travel in a neighbouring stairs. with friends. and she also sent messages to marco polo. who was he, actually? at this point there was a twist in this digitized technology, like a twist of fate, the message system started to have a life apart from her. acting on its own will. it was a solidification of some will power anyway; the whole night. the oriental little one missed the beat, ordering an unnecessary glass of beer. and as soon as she believed in its unnecessity and th out-of-tune situation, she spilled over the glass of beer. luckily, marco polo was not hurt. and still soon she would already have to apologize for another weird and off -tune behaviour, an excess of feeling, of not knowing how to show in what way... and the next day she looked for words to call herself. shall she call herself a fool. an alien? a child too impati,en at times to miss the beat and run fast only to fall face down. she should call her self the sweetest fool. she had a touch of boldness, some brevity that would surprise men and women both. it was all right in the end. apologies accepted by marco polo. new exciting projects already set on the table. a man of his word; the oriental one wished that marco polo, too, is a human being of his word. a promise is a promise. stairs is stairs. stairs in this case is also the ultimate time machine. for this little shapeShifternightDrifter, the crash course on the psyche of vienna proved most worthwhile... in gratitude, she dived into sleeps and dreams that she would not remember the next day.)

"and beauty is of smallest duration"