NOTES FOR YOU – notebook A [presenting the book]

The book NOTES FOR YOU is  a literary – existential

approach to three bewitching phenomena of human existence: eros, love, sexual desire.

Eros, love, sexual desire: 

three autonomous clusters of needs, which although they overlap, cannot substitute for each other – when I drink water, however much I drink I cannot satisfy my hunger. Maybe this is one of the reasons for which, in our days, there are so many myths and misconceptions about our relationships.


in a few words: FROM THE BACK COVER

Twenty-five texts on eros, love, sexual desire and life,
sharing something of the genres of the prose poem and the very short story.

Twenty five images:
each image portrays surrealistically, as if in a dream, the overall sense of the Note accompanied by this specific image.

Each Note constitutes an autonomous whole
of text and image. Each of them sketches in a distinct manner the drama, the pettiness and the greatness of existence and of our encounters, the depths and contradictions of our never-ending thirst for the Other.

The Other, who is always “there”.
Beloved, hated, or indifferent, palpable or just a memory living on in the mind and etched deeply into the body, inaccessible or just a hanging question-mark or a potential future encounter: the Other is always “there”, available to our eyes. Nevertheless, while no Other ever assumes a clear shape or outline, the Other remains majestic, brilliant, magnificent, always strangely present even when absent.


between the lines: A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK

This book is about the miraculous and and rather often tormenting things happening when we wander in the landscapes of Eros, Love, Sexual Desire.

There are many scattered and very brief ideas about these forms of relationships, but they are not formative or instructive at all. They are rather observations of the immediate act of being alive and of what happens in our small and big encounters of low or high expectations.
Also, as such ideas are discreetly embedded in the main web of each text, these texts “open”, well beyond what is described in the strictly meant content of each of them.

The result is that from the very forefront, there emerges a very discreet and subtle philosophical sense and a general atmosphere of great sensitivity, coloured by existential “mood” – this bitter-sweet taste of life that we have when we truly experience, with it all, the events of our lives and encounters.

“Notes for you” has an idiom. While language

is very simple and not at all sophisticated, the poetry and meanings that emerge are intense and able to immediately move the reader.

However, nothing in this book is intended to produce directly any noisy emotion. It is very emotional, however kindly, carefully, implicitly.

The style of writing, though flowing is, in fact, extremely dense; in the sense that it implies several layers to engage the reader. But the meanings and the subtle beauty of the Notes, are not explicit and noisy. They are calmly waiting to be “discovered”.

In this sense, “Notes for you” is not to be read quickly, to see “what happened” in a plot.
They ask to be read slowly.
They ask to be read carefully, but not in order to “understand” or analyse them (as would be the case with a series of reasoning), but in order to “discover” them; to enter in the several layers of what NOTES say and, most importantly, of what they imply between their lines.  These Notes are to be enjoyed, as a delicacy with many subtle constituent tastes.

The images in the Notes are a special feature of the book.

They are computer-generated visual compositions of the author.
Their “raw material” is about 600 “scanned” paintings of well-known, known and unknown creators, architectural drawings, images of all kinds.
This material is worked well beyond the logic of a simple collage; each image is worked with the mixing and freely editing of various patterns derived from the stored raw material.
The idea was to include a lot of information in each image; so that the viewer may see wha”forms” are emerging in their subjective view, depending on where and how the viewer focuses attention on the different areas of each image.
Each image corresponds to a text, but does not literally illustrate it. Rather it gives its general sense, based on some key-words in the text.

For the author, eros, sexuality and love are three striking phenomena of human existence.

Three stand-alone clusters of needs, which, although intersecting, do not substitute for one another (as when I am hungry, no matter how much I drink, I am not satisfying my hunger).
At the same time, these needs are three sources of chaos and misconceptions.

This is because, while these needs move the planet, there is no clear terminology and very unclear  conceptual descriptions of their meanings.
Maybe because these issues, on the one hand, touch the primordial layers of human existence, where our Shadows reside, as well as things that we do not like very much.
At the same time, on the other hand, many aspects of these needs are forbidden areas – mainly because of prejudices and and social taboos.

The author has been systematically working with these forms of relationships for many years (with lectures and workshops). He is also preparing a trilogy for their exploration: three books for these three clusters of needs, in a gradual release by mid-2020. “Notes for You” is a first, not a theoretical presentation of some of his ideas about relationships.

“So in loss, storms often devastate us and often we are reduced to a silent scream. We feel buried in the sand with only our heads sticking out, in agony as the tide of our sadness slowly and torturously drowns us.

All this happens so dramatically because the other person has managed to form new connections between our cells, to sculpture a new shape for us.
That is why when the Other leaves like a dying soul, it is as if what exists inside us, beneath the contour of our bodies, gets violently cut out, so that our skin remains vacant, enclosing nothing, like a hanging, empty, neglected jacket.
We feel naked from the inside – and above all dissected, imperfect, incomplete, mutilated.
Then it is easy to forget that the very core of our uniqueness is always whole and solid – besides, that is why it always lives alone, totally beyond all of our encounters, amidst the great cosmic silence.

However, although we forget it, mutilated as we may feel, we are always whole.
When I think I can never live without you because I sense myself as half a person, I continue to be something whole that simply feels like half and is tortured by the need to find you again in order to feel whole once more.

Because the Other is anyway beyond our own wholeness – and in the same way we are are also beyond the Other’s wholeness. So no Other can take our wholeness from us, nor offer it, nor restore it to us.”




NOTES FOR YOU – [notebook A]
Twenty-five texts and images on eros, love, sexual desire and life

INFO: [110 pages]  [17,5Χ22 cm]
1st ed. in English, ISBN 978-618-83861-2-9
[in 100 numbered and signed copies]
ERGASTIRI ENTIPOU publications, 2018

This 1st edition is to be distributed exclusively
in Greece or delivered in other countries only by order to the author:
+30-2310-262872   +30-6977-210469    [email protected]
____

Video in the first person about the coral idea 
and the features of this book

A NON-VERBAL video with images from the
book
 and music from my compositions
“BEATRICE” & “ONAR” 


 

Subscribe to our mailing list!

You can change your mind at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of any email you receive from us, or by contacting us at [email protected]. We will treat your information with respect. For more information about our privacy practices please visit our website. By clicking below, you agree that we may process your information in accordance with these terms.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here: https://mailchimp.com/legal/

 Newsletter Permissions * :