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Ouabuko
@ouabuko.bsky.social
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ouabuko.bsky.social
The words you speak become the house you live in.

Hafiz
Photograph of a cloudy winter sky and below it, its reflection in a still lake. On the near shore, there are rocks, on the far left side, trees. In the background, hills and trees begin again. The photo was taken in color but it seems to only show whites, greys, silver, black and near-blues within those colors.
June 3, 2025 at 3:52 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Do not look either in front of behind, but within yourself. There is the point of departure.

Edmond Jabes
Photograph of a path through a forest. Lush moss on rocks, wood chips from a rotted tree. A strange rock structure in the distant left side. A chasm creeping between the two sides of the ground.
June 3, 2025 at 3:47 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Milan Kundera
"People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten." Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
May 26, 2025 at 5:57 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Always loved this harrowing remnant (located at the Met).
Photograph of what remains of a marble statue from Greek or Roman times--unsure--at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. The sculpture to untrained eyes looks like a haggard but energetic, corroded female museum who seems to be caught mid-beseeching someone or warning them. Her arms are cut off between the elbow and shoulder. Her face is eaten by time and somehow it looks like her mouth is open and that she's an old woman with wide eyes. But that open mouth is likely just a wound of the stone. Her hair is fashioned in a casual style above her head with some sort of band holding it off her face. She probably isn't meant to look old. It seems in this light that her clavicles show and also a vein along her left bicep. Her outfit is tied interestingly around the solar plexus. To me she looks like an old woman who might have been in bondage, beseeching or crying a warning or a threat. She's remarkably "alive." At any rate, a historian or someone who'd read or photographed the plaque could tell who she really is believed to be, and what effects are those of time corroding art versus the original image. Behind and around her, there are other pieces of sculpture, and some vessels are behind her in a glass display. Something appears to be at her left side, part of her stonework.
May 26, 2025 at 5:42 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Difficult Times, by Bertold Brecht
(translated by Ron Slate)
Difficult Times / Schwierige Zeiten Standing at my desk I see the elder tree in the garden through the window And make out something red in it, something black And instantly recall the elders Of my Augsburg childhood. Then for several moments I seriously deliberate Whether to go to the table For my glasses, so that I might see Those black berries again on such delicate stalks. - Bertold Brecht
May 26, 2025 at 5:31 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.

T.S. Eliot
Painting entitled “Defeated. Requiem” from 1878 by Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin
April 22, 2025 at 11:21 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Another day to unearth our true selves.
Digital art portraying sunset over the sea
April 22, 2025 at 11:29 AM
ouabuko.bsky.social
The act of living in the truth is a terrifying weapon in the eyes of a post-totalitarian regime, per Vaclav Havel:
Book page and pencil. “it is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an” Continuation of book page. “apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a thick crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventively, even the most, modest attempts to live within the truth.”
April 22, 2025 at 11:27 AM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Vaclac Havel on why each of us, by not cowering and repeating the regime’s definitions of reality (LIES), has the power to end it.
This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. - Vaclav Havel
April 21, 2025 at 11:05 AM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Art by Vietnamese painter, Dao Hai Phong
April 20, 2025 at 11:38 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Solzhenitsyn on what Soviet gulag prisoners thought about how best to engage the secret police who abducted people to far off prisons.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! ~ Solzhenitsyn
April 20, 2025 at 11:34 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
2025
Goya’s painting, “Saturn Devouring his Son”
April 18, 2025 at 4:31 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
April 13, 2025 at 7:04 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Motto

In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
about the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht
April 7, 2025 at 11:50 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
To those who do not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say. Bertolt Brecht
To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say. - Bertolt Brecht
April 7, 2025 at 11:47 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
“You are the end of one story, and the opening of the one to come. The epilogue for one, the prologue for the other. Now it’s up to you to speak.

~ Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
April 4, 2025 at 12:54 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Excerpt from The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Basically, his hope was rhetorical, the way a question can be. And he knew what it meant, and had only spoken as a matter of form, to say something vaguely optimis-tic, something, therefore, that didn't represent reality, but was a mask behind which his mind sought to hide that reality, so he wouldn't have to face it head-on. But on closer inspection, how-ever, it wasn't so much reality as his own face that Pessoto was covering with a mask—a strange mask, an opaque mask with no holes for the eyes-and it was of less importance to hide behind it than to disappear altogether while murmuring, "It's not that I want to avoid recognition; I just want to avoid recognizing anything in this world. I don't want to see any of it." Pessoto had been deliberately trying to stab himself in the eyes, so as not to see what was stirring pitifully there before him: a portrait of human misery. But he had failed. He could still see, he could still hear. Jogoy's words were echoing in his mind, but they had departed from his friend's kindly, familiar voice, had been stripped of that voice to move on to another voice that was toneless and anonymous, and which gave the words a more implacable weight and resonance: "You know how it goes."
April 4, 2025 at 12:49 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Difficult Times, a poem by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Ron Slate.
Difficult Times / Schwierige Zeiten Standing at my desk I see the elder tree in the garden through the window And make out something red in it, something black And instantly recall the elders Of my Augsburg childhood. Then for several moments I seriously deliberate Whether to go to the table For my glasses, so that I might see Those black berries again on such delicate stalks. A poem by Bertolt Brecht.
April 2, 2025 at 12:50 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
~ Bertolt Brecht
April 2, 2025 at 11:35 AM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
April 1, 2025 at 11:07 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
What if we said NO and meant it—and stopped the arbitrary cruelty together.

More Solzhenitsyn from his Gulag Archipelago.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! ~ Solzhenitsyn
April 1, 2025 at 11:03 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Solzhenitstn was disappeared into the gulag system for criticizing Stalin in a letter.
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
April 1, 2025 at 10:56 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
« The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. » Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
March 27, 2025 at 7:37 PM
ouabuko.bsky.social
Excerpt from Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice

Hear Mark Rylance recite the whole poem here youtu.be/78Vf7s3GR0w from 1:46 on
I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me. I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me. Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.
March 27, 2025 at 1:05 AM
ouabuko.bsky.social
When the world burns, love. When everything is taken, love.

Don’t let devastation silence your heart or your art.
"The world is violent and mercurial - it mill have its only on or we are saved mer and The love That me pour into The art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a frend. We live inaperpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love." - Tennessee Williams
March 27, 2025 at 12:57 AM