mirages
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Post by mirages on Jun 11, 2015 0:48:42 GMT -5
I'm currently reading Susan Sontag's essays. (For those who haven't read her, she wrote a few novels, but was mostly known as an essayist, a critic and, I would say, a philosopher. She definitely wasn't your typical run-of-the-mill writer. I watched a documentary about her life: Regarding Susan Sontag, at a film festival last month, and it's a wonderful movie, full of details about her life and work. For example, I had no idea that she was also a film maker, and I definitely didn't have a clear understanding of what she was about - which, as I understand it now, was freedom -- in art, in criticism, and in life.) So, here are some thoughts I found interesting [my bold] from her essay On Style:- A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. [...] the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgement) in itself. [...] Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the person having the experience, for one may see what is "said" but remain unmoved, either through dullness or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art proposes a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.
- All great art induces contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. However much the reader or listener or spectator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction - so far as he is reacting to the work as a work of art - must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval.
- To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.
- In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said..., of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. [...] The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
It was Adam who got me to read Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp -- I'm going to have to look up that documentary. Today I listened to a podcast from a CBC radio program called "Ideas" ... it looks at the theory that stories are adaptive for our species ... one of the people interviewed goes so far as to say we are misnamed homo sapiens because other species appear to have cognitive abilities, and should better be identified by our more unique characteristic, homo fictus, story-man. I thought of you and your thoughts on imagination while listening. Here's the link to Part I, which mostly deals with non-fiction. Part 2, which I have not yet listened to, will deal with fiction: www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/vestigial-tale-part-1-1.3086744
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Post by mirages on Jun 10, 2015 18:34:09 GMT -5
I don't know, but she's won a lot of awards, so I guess it's possible. Yes, she is amazing, and her books are still among my favorites. I think that's the hallmark of great books - that you can read them again and again and always find greatness in them. I looked it up and he presented her with a lifetime achievement award. So, what book/s of hers would you recommend to start with? She has the right attitude - Your art should not be compromised by your desire for sales... freakydeaky (fun name), welcome! I'm not a techie so I'm not sure if the same thing will happen for you, but after I watched the video of Ursula LeGuinn that toramenor posted, I was offered four more related videos and one of them was the presentation of the lifetime achievement award. I also see an interview with Bill Moyers there -- I am probably going to get lost again (n the best way)! toramenor, while watching the video you posted, I was struck by the thought, "Now here is an Elder!" Everybody ages, not everyone becomes an elder with that kind of courage. Thanks for sharing it!
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Post by mirages on Jun 10, 2015 18:17:05 GMT -5
Thanks for that bit of Fry and Laurie, toramenor -- I'm a fan of both, and have been binge-watching "House" on Netflix periodically over the last year, so very disorienting to see the doctor doing a sort of vaudeville! Love Stephen Fry, too -- have you ever seen his documentary on bipolar? Fascinating, self-reflective stuff. My apologies for the slow response -- the Fry and Laurie clip reminded me of another satirical singer from the '60s, Tom Lehrer (also a professor of mathematics): This old footage, but Lehrer had his heyday in the '60s and '70s, and I've heard that he said he stopped writing and performing in the '70s because satire became redundant when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Post by mirages on Jun 1, 2015 13:13:48 GMT -5
Yikes, I almost lost that post while trying to find the source of another quote that had come into my mind, explaining why most of us avoid the path to wisdom at all cost because it's "one insult after another". Here the Franciscan Richard Rohr attributes it to a Zen master:
Struggling with one’s own shadow self, facing interior conflicts and moral failures, undergoing rejections and abandonment, daily humiliations, experiencing any kind of abuse or your own clear limitations, even accepting that some people hate you: All of these are gateways into deeper consciousness and the flowering of the soul. These experiences give us a privileged window into the naked (read “undefendable”) now, because impossible contradictions are staring us in the face.
Much-needed healing, forgiving what is, and weeping over and accepting one’s interior poverty and contradictions are normally necessary to invite a person into the contemplative mind. (Watch Paul do this in a classic way from the depths of Romans 7:14 to the heights of his mystic poetry in most of Romans 8.) As one Zen Master said, “Avoid the spiritual journey, it is one insult after another!”
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Post by mirages on Jun 1, 2015 13:08:43 GMT -5
In other words, the question that I pose is: Has human wisdom, on the level of our species - Homo sapiens, increased at all since then? ... have humans as a species become wiser? Sorry, I don't have an answer to this question - the only true answer is: I don't know. What do I think? ... I also think that wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence, knowledge, and/or skill. ... What is it? Who is wise? Can one become wise? Is it, then, simply genetics? Wisdom is prized by some and despised by others. So, who is wise, and what is it like to be wise? Can you forget to be wise, like you can forget some information you had learnt in school? Or are wise people doomed to wisdom for the rest of their lives, all day every day?... Is it a curse or a gift for the individual in question?... ... And there's another question popping up again: can something lead us to wisdom - can it be acquired, as you acquire a skill, or at least broadened, as you may broaden your knowledge? Can wisdom be taught? ... Perhaps the student was already wise, before the teacher taught them a single thing. Just by coming to the teacher, they demonstrate wisdom.... Perhaps wisdom exists everywhere, but one must simply learn how to open one's mind to it.... Perhaps... who knows? Maybe somebody wiser than me... After all, remember, I am just a poet.... Wisdom is simplicity. Wisdom is complexity. Wisdom is beauty and truth; wisdom is art and science. Wisdom resides in the farthest corners of our consciousness as well as on the tips of our tongues. Wisdom is something we've heard a hundred times and something we've only just heard and understood. Wisdom is an idea, or a thought process, or a way of life. Wisdom is the human mind at its best: at its loftiest and at its most profound.Um, wow! Thanks, toramenor, so much to interact with here, and much of it stuff I've ruminated over myself. I tried to isolate a series of questions from your narrative, and while I don't have time right now to adequately address these, I did want to begin to respond in a few general areas. First, I have noticed, as you have, that indigenous people often seem to be speaking from a place of far greater wisdom than that of their (mainly European/western) conquerors, and that it has taken several hundred years for "us" (Europeans and their descendants) to begin to give our heads a shake and be willing let alone able to hear what they were saying then, and what the few who remain continue to say now when they can. I'd have to go back in our discussion to see how much of this I may have already expressed here, but there are quotes from elders in the North American First Nations during the initial stages of contact with the Europeans that seems to indicate that they knew the invaders were "mad" in some way, that the invasion would bring ruin to the indigenous people, culture and wisdom, but that in time, the white/European people would begin to awaken out of their mad dream and come back to what remained of the indigenous people to sit at their feet and learn. We seem to be seeing a movement like this starting now, although it has far to go. Those Europeans who arrived on the shores of North America saw only "savages" and were blind and deaf to the culture, wisdom and technology of the people already living here. They saw small tribes facing the hardships of weather, privation when food was scarce, and without the technology of guns and medicine and a codified religion, and they thought they had no technology at all, not realizing that for a people who follow the migrations of salmon and game and the ripening of berries and other food sources, the technology of the tipi is formidable indeed. My ancestors thought this land was empty because it wasn't settled in the European agrarian fashion, and so it could be taken. Ever seen Eddie Izzard's routine about how to steal a country by the cunning use of flags? But I digress ... I do hope we are returning to the wisdom of people who knew how to walk humbly with their God and their environment and fellow creatures. We have become so distracted by our technology and the myth of continual growth ... my hope is that we will have the wisdom to recognize our own madness and begin to remedy it, SOON. I think Mother Earth will probably slap us silly until we do. So it doesn't look like we have progressed any in wisdom, but only in technology, doesn't it? And yet, perhaps we have, and perhaps what we have gone through, all the complexity and beauty and futility and waste, was necessary for a breakthrough into simplicity -- much as it seems with physics, the theories and complexity proliferate until we break through into some single unifying idea. Perhaps we needed the ability to cross-pollinate ideas among cultures and eons that the internet has given us ... I keep thinking that one of the glorious places to be in history would have been Alexandria in the first and second centuries CE, with the Egyptian and North African tradition there plus the incursions from the Greek and then Roman empires, some influence coming up from India and then the successive Jewish and then early Christian diasporas -- until now, there has never been such a melting pot of cultures and ideas, and it produced some amazing thinking and writing. The internet has recreated that potential now, if we choose to use it -- well, wisely. As for wisdom and intelligence, I don't think there's much connection. In my own experience, in the long run all high intelligence allows you to do is run in mental circles faster than anybody else, and rationalize things that a sensible person would know were nonsense. Rarely is intelligence in the service of wisdom because intelligence seems always to be hijacked by ego. On the other hand, truly wise people seem to have solved or resolved that ego problem in some way, allowing them to dissolve dualism, see and feel that we're all one and we have to live from love and compassion (heaven) or stay in the hell of isolation, competition and futility that ego demands. --> by the way, if we didn't have enough to chew on here, another tangent is the whole idea of individualism versus collectivism ... ancient cultures were very collective in nature, where the sacrifice of the one was always justified to serve the many. Western individualism was, I think, a necessary step, and the whole Reformation insistence on working out one's salvation oneself rather than inheriting it, but we have gone way too far in thinking that what happens to me individually matters as much or more than what happens to our whole community, species and ecosystem. So I think we are also headed back toward more collectivism, hopefully a more enlightened one. Back to wisdom ... I suppose it would help if we could define it, eh? Because I'm thinking that I've often seen what looks and feels very much like wisdom to me in people with developmental delays -- Down's Syndrome and autism in particular. Which underlines the separation between intellect and wisdom in the case of Down's. The autistic people I know are very high-functioning and intelligent, but have divergent ways of looking at the world because they are not as trapped as the rest of us in thinking that the norms are always right, or that appearances matter, etc. It makes things difficult for them socially but there is often a deep loveliness and egalitarianism about what I can only describe as their souls or their worldview. And see, there's another kettle of fish: wisdom seems, to me, to have more to do with the soul than with the mind. But what is the soul? Why do we distinguish soul from spirit, for another thing? There is a wonderful theologian I've read named Robert Farrar Capon who says that whenever we talk about God or soul or spirit we should parenthetically add that we don't know what we're talking about, really. So he begins his own paraphrase of the Lord's prayer this way: "our Father (whatever that means) who art in Heaven (whatever that means), hallowed (whatever that means) be Thy name (whatever that means)." This is not to say that he is dismissing any of what is in the Lord's Prayer, only making the point that it might do us good to be more aware of how much we don't know, how much mystery and awe we're handling when we say words like that. Can wisdom be taught? My gut says only by experience, but one can situate oneself in such a way that the experience is more likely to be edifying. Does one have to be wise even to know one needs to find a wise teacher? Yes, but it's very likely the kind of wisdom that one "acquires" with a wound or a breaking. "All of us to love will come, but like a refugee," says Saint Leonard. "The fear of freedom is deep within us all," says someone I can't currently track down -- Erich Fromm? We all resist, or part of us, our egos resist, the humiliation that seems to be part of letting go of our little, false selves and our big ol' egos. We must be broken, wounded, opened up by something in order to want to walk in that direction. By the way, I slagged the European tradition above but of course there have always been many Europeans who were walking a humble, mystical path (I guess I associate this with wisdom) ... I've been reading a lot about St. Francis lately and much of what he was about resonates with me (although I am a bear of too much brain and very little wisdom, to misquote Pooh). Phew! Okay, better go -- thanks for a thoughtful start to the day!
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mirages
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Post by mirages on May 22, 2015 9:37:09 GMT -5
Not that I'm advocating shamanism, but there is great wisdom here (as there is in every culture, of course): Ooooh ... "the sweet territory of silence". Now there's a found poem in five words!
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Post by mirages on May 11, 2015 11:25:06 GMT -5
I found this recently on facebook. It almost continues or complements our conversation from a few pages back about how we are never truly lost. Thank you, toramenor, love Thich Nhat Hanh (don't you think all those h's in his name are intended to make us stop and breathe?) ... back at you:
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Post by mirages on Apr 29, 2015 21:52:56 GMT -5
toramenor, it took me forever to get back to this article ... I needed its inspiration today, so thank you! My own struggle lately has been to develop discipline ... I've had a line by Leonard Cohen going around in my head lately, rather accusingly: "You know the way to stop me / but you don't have the discipline." Well, I don't in any way want to stop Saint Leonard, but that thing about discipline, there's something to that. And then I stumbled across this: Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What It Is You’re Quittingby Maria Popova To find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency. To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering. […] My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV… So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interests. Otherwise I nod off in one way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat. But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload. www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/15/leonard-cohen-paul-zollo-creativity/
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Post by mirages on Apr 28, 2015 17:35:32 GMT -5
Below is information on a bike ride raising money for the LGBT communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles - My daughter-in-law Joyce will be participating. This is more for a news worthy share than contributions, however all monies go directly to the cause - Here is her e-mail to me below - Not sure where to share this with Atop members - but thought some may have an interest - Is Adam related indirectly due to the LGBT community of Los Angeles benefiting from this event. If this should be posted elsewhere or not posted at all - Please PM me and I will delete. Babs12 Hi, Babs -- no need to delete, but I think the right spot for this would be Atop's Social Justice thread. Now, let me see if I can find it ... BBL! (And I'm jealous of your DIL -- I've driven the Oregon coast and was stunned by its beauty -- I'm sure it only gets more beautiful as you go along!) Okay, found the thread -- here it is: linkI checked in with Q3 because the thread didn't initially seem clickable to me, and she also invites you to get in touch with her to help make learn about the event -- here's what she said: The Social Action Thread is not closed but is kind of dead. Why not encourage her to post there and post a link in the news thread. I would be happy if it was brought back to life.
Have her PM me the link to her post when she posts it there and I will help her make people aware of it. She can also PM me if she has any questions.
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Post by mirages on Apr 25, 2015 23:55:56 GMT -5
redpanda, thank you for such a thought(s)-provoking post! Love the humour, too -- one of my most favourite collective nouns is still "a murder of crows", but "a murmuration of starlings" and "an ostenation of peacocks" are also pretty good (thanks to "A Conspiracy of Ravens" by Bill Oddie). And the thought bubbles, yeah! I've often said that I converse by segue and it's dangerous because everything in my head is connected to everything else -- pull one string, you get the whole ball! And thanks for linking the article on the walk-out -- that's worth seeing and thinking about. It initially made me think of Mel Brooks doing "Springtime for Hitler," but the difference is that Mel Brooks is Jewish and has some right to work with that material. mszue, have you ever listened to the CBC radio program, "The Dead Dog Cafe"? First nations people have no shortage of a sense of humour about themselves and everybody else, that's for sure! (Oh, and what happened to Kim Campbell was a shame -- that was one smart, capable woman and such a waste that she was put in as a placeholder. She was once, briefly, minister of a government department I worked for and I got to sit in on her incredibly lengthy and detailed briefing session when she took on the portfolio. Long after the rest of us were limp and babbling, she was still alert, good-tempered and firing out really good, relevant questions -- impressed me!). toramenor, great contributions as always -- I was completely unaware of the efficacy of the feminist movement in Iceland! And I haven't yet read the linked article, but will do that next. And jablea, nice to see you! I empathize with those post-it notes. One of my favourite lines from ani difranco is, "I have the answer. I wrote it down. I just have to find it ..."
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