Billie Holiday, Blue Moon

Billie Holiday -- vocals

Charlie Shavers -- trumpet

Flip Phillips -- tenor saxophone

Oscar Peterson -- piano

Ray Brown -- double bass

Barney Kessel -- guitar

Alvin Stoller -- drums

"who knows?"

"This basic text establishes first of all the extreme distante between human beings and God, and the identification of humanity with animals (which squares well with Gen. 1 and 2). The breath of life vivifies animal and human being alike. But the word here is ruah, well-known as an ambiguous term. Qohelet says nothing here about spirituality, humana beings bearing God's image, etc. Therefore, unquestionably, we are animals. After all, this conclusion does not strike me as so out of the ordinary: since humanity does not behave like the image of God, it is nothing more than an animal.

Our identity with animals is indicated by our common lot: death. A human being may have ruah, but he can in no way claim to be God's equal. He knows nothing of an afterlife, and this indicates his distance from God. Human beings wanted and established this distance, pretending to be equal with God! One wonders why Christians have been so scandalized by scientific hypotesis, including Charles Darwin's, considering they had Qohelet. Human beings and animals are subject to the same fate, just like the wise person and the fool (2:14), the righteous and the wicked, and the pure and impure ...(9:2). Their lot is identical: death. But this as nothing to do with destiny or fate.

Since we cannot fail to come up against death, we must question our identity with animals, who have the same lot, as we have already seen. But we cannot offer a definitive answer; we can only ask: "who knows?" (3:21). You cannot maintain that your spirit will experience a different fate (rising upward) from the life-breath of an animal (which will go downward). We can state nothing in this regard. The unquestionable difference between human beings and animals does not allow us to infer an absolute qualitative difference. Qohelet obliges us to limit ourselves to the question: "who knows?" No revelation can simplify this issue for us. All we have is God's work, this blockage, and this insoluble question. "

Jaques Ellul, Reason for Being - a Meditation on Ecclesiastes, (tr.) Eerdmans Pub., 1990, 222-223.

one and the same fate

"So I decided, as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings and to face the fact that they are beasts. For in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust. Who knows if a man's lifebreath does rise upward and if a beast's breath does sink down into the earth?"

 Ecclesiastes (JSP) 3: 17-21

Coleman Hawkins - live In Europe 60's

London, England, October 1964
1. Stoned
2. September Song
3. What's New
4. Willow Weep For Me
5. Centerpiece
6. Caravan

London, England, 26 November, 1966
7. Blue Lou
8. I Can't Get Started
9. Body And Soul
10. Disorder At The Broder

Belgium, early June 1962
12. Blowing For Aldolphe sax
13. Disorder At The Border
14. South Of France Blues
15. Rifftide

O ponto de vista animal

"Crítica dos animais. Temo que os animais considerem o homem como um ser da sua espécie que perdeu o senso comum animal de forma extremamente perigosa, como o animal alucinado, o animal que ri, o animal que chora, o animal desditoso."

Nietzsche, A Gaia Ciência, Relógio D'Água, 1998, p.175.

Dr. José Afonso, Os Bravos

kenny barron & dave holland the art of conversation

john parish & polly jean harvey - is that all there is?

like a shadow

"No mistake about it, Qohelet means to leave us no escape. He warns us that something very small (a dead fly) will suffice to ruin a jar of perfume or scholarly wisdom. I cannot help but think of certain more or less great philosophers of modern times whose entire system appears ruined by their support of a political error: the great G. W. F. Hegel, for instance, whom I cannot take seriously because he sees the culmination of History, Idea, and Spirit in the State! Everything he says is truly wonderful, but when I come up against this dead fly that corrupted and killed Western society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I cannot continue to take anything seriously in his preceding discourse on so many other problems.
The great Martin Heidegger, in whose work everything is so profound, enticing, and innovative, failed to display any lucidity at all in discerning the real nature of national socialism. Those few months of his support for Nazism suffice for me to consider the rest of his work null and void. How can anyone expect me to follow such a guide in his Holzwege, when he was unable to make the right choice in that one simple matter in his life? The dead fly - misplaced loyalty - may appear for just an instant! And I fully realize that by blackballing certain thinkers, I in turn deserve Qohelet´s other judgment in the same passage!
Wisdom is fragile - it can vanish when we change a single line. Even worse, wisdom is impossible. Anyone who thinks he has reached it has grasped only wind. Who knows anything? Who can pride himself on "knowing"? "Who knows what is good for a person during life, during the number of days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow?(6:12) Wisdom is as fragile as the person himself. After all, why should wisdom be surer and truer than those who create it? It is like a shadow. We can mesure, situate, and weigh everything, but not a shadow. It has no existence in itself, since it depends both on the object that projects it and on light, which changes constantly.

(...) As for us moderns, we have discovered a great many things. But, as we have already seen, the horizon continually moves farther from us. In this connection, Qohelet seems to posit a kind of absolute: no matter what he does, he cannot find the ultimate secret, the key that would enable him to understand everything. As little as I know, what strikes me most is that further we advance, the more everything we know becomes complex and elusive."

Jaques Ellul, Reason for Being - a Meditation on Ecclesiastes, (tr.) Eerdmans Pub., 1990,  pp.148-149.

The Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul

Kohéleth

"Dead flies turn the perfurmer's ointment fetid and putrid; so a little folly outweighs massive wisdom."

Ecclesiastes, 10:1

Min Kamp - Karl Ove Knausgaard talking to Andrew O’Hagan

"Talvez nunca ninguém como Celan tivesse conseguido estar mais perto do que é a apropriação do real pela palavra e ao mesmo tempo das suas limitações quando o faz. Sem as palavras o mundo colapsa, mas o mundo por vezes mata as palavras. Hitler destruiu as de Celan, porque a sua linguagem era diferente. O sentido que um e outro conferiram à mesma palavra não se ajustava."

(Entrevista de Isabel Lucas a Karl Ove Knausgaard, revista Ler, Março 2015, nº137, p.70)