tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49186582306731287652024-03-13T14:00:15.942-07:00radioshenyenAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-64795734669253975742018-02-23T02:00:00.000-08:002018-02-23T02:00:55.439-08:00DEITIES, SOFTWARE, ADDRESS (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #5) <b><br /></b>
<b>"As long as some poets and thinkers and filmmakers write or make films also if not exclusively for angels, it is inaccurate to say that no angels exist -- indeed angels exist more as addressees of poetry, thinking, and filmmaking than as addressees of the exoteric prayers of religious people."</b><br />
<b> -- Jalal Toufic</b><br />
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Having grown up in the West, where the established worldview says 'its just us and the animals, beneath an endless black sky', the ontologies of Tibetan Buddhism are breathtaking. The notion of 'deity' in all its various manifestations is one of the most philosophically challenging concepts I have ever had to deal with. Deities out ahead; deities in the subtle channels of one's nervous system; one's own self as a deity. Deities as operating system and instant download and para-architecture. The spaciousness of the mind as deity; one's deepest fears as deity.<br />
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For three years my interactions with people will be kept to a minimum, but each day I will be spending hours in the company of what I like to call The Invisibles. The Tibetan tradition says it is through ritual conduct that one has relationships with deities. Recitational speech, visualisations, mudra - these are the ritualised forms of speaking, seeing and acting that enable us to be in the presence of The Invisibles. That enable us to re-presence ourselves.<br />
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<b><br /></b><b>"The unseen and arrived is interlaced with the seen and the delayed, the blur is precisely this oscillation between 'what is' but does not yet have a name, and 'what might become' because we can give it a name in advance of its arrival."</b><br />
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That quote is from <i>"The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty",</i> a massive treatise detailing the arrival of planetary-scale computing. Computers - with all their speed and frictionlessness, their shape-shifting plenitude and their super-quiet sidestepping of the 'off' button - are probably the nearest thing that secular culture has to 'deity'. Three years of talking to computing's fairy godmother is going to make the return in 2021 very interesting.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-34839445049801436842018-02-19T01:04:00.000-08:002018-02-19T01:04:50.965-08:00THE TWO SOLITUDES (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #4 )<b>"You're so quiet you're almost </b><br />
<b> tomorrow" </b><br />
<b> -- Ocean Vuong, <i>Night Sky With Exit Wounds</i></b><br />
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I'm trying to imagine the door closing behind me. I feel it as an act of immense kindness. No anxiety at all. When it begins, so do I. What might be a little heartbreaking are the goodbyes across the next five months, beneath skies with too many stars, and no horse.<br />
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I remember reading, a long time ago <a href="https://radioshenyen.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/housekeeping-hulme-1990.html">in this room</a>, a brief biography of a Korean Zen monk. It talked about a three year retreat he undertook, the first six months of which were confession and purification practices. But such was his sense of joy after six months of those practices that he decided to dedicate the whole three years to them. And as I sat there reading, something deep inside me shifted its coordinates very quietly, very precisely, triggering the GPS system that is my unconscious. I knew where I was going. And I knew that even if I forgot about it entirely for years at a time (and I did) I would still get there, eventually. That equation - of solitude and confession and purification equaling sheer joy - was now safe inside me, a living thing almost, locked into place by something as simple and untraceable as a brief moment of reading permeated by faith.<br />
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But there's a second level of solitude that extends beyond the confines of the three years of retreat. After the physical solitude comes a biographical one. It involves letting go of any sense whatsoever of 'becoming' someone - of becoming someone special, either in one's own eyes or in the eyes of others. How to come back out in 2021, 'with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone...' -- that's the real challenge.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-61332659210550707362018-02-15T02:12:00.002-08:002018-02-15T02:24:24.413-08:00FUNDRAISING (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #3)Our Tibetan lamas say that doing the three year retreat in the West, where there is no established tradition for it, is much more powerful than doing it in Asia where it is already an established tradition. But doing it in the West is expensive. And the kind of person who is willing to do a three year retreat is generally not the kind of person who has 21,000 pounds at their disposal! But equally, there are many people out there who deeply believe in the goodness of such a retreat but who don't personally have the freedom or confidence to undertake one, yet would love to support such a project. So the natural next step is to try and bring these two groups together.<span id="docs-internal-guid-9ffe1afa-7b2d-cc67-6461-16a111614a51"></span><br />
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Here's the link to my page on a crowdfunding site for Buddhist projects. I have five months to raise 21,000 pounds.<br />
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<a href="http://www.theofferingbowl.com/petitions/558"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">http://www.theofferingbowl.</span><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">com/petitions/558</span></a><br />
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And just to be clear: you can support this fundraising project simply by wishing it well. Or mentioning it to others who may be able to help. It doesn't have to be financial. Wishing it well is actually a very powerful contribution.<br />
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I've managed to live most of the last 9 years back in the West living on alms. I've stood outside supermarkets in the UK on hundreds of occasions and never gone hungry. In fact alms round practice has been one of the most joyful experiences of my life as a monk. The hitch-hiking to and from towns, the meditative high of just standing still for hours on the high street, the difference between receiving seven pounds or eleven, or thirty, the return to the forest with a bag full of food, the 'no direction home' tenderness of the whole thing. So it feels strange - painful, actually - to suddenly be required to act in a different mode, raising three years worth of support rather than just what I need for the next few days. Especially when most of the people I know personally are people without much money.</div>
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But the group in Germany who are hosting the retreat keep telling me not to worry, to just trust in the karma of the situation. And I remember, many years ago, smiling as I read an account of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh talking to his trustees in America, describing his extravagant vision of a new California ashram. After five minutes of descriptions of luxury accomodation blocks, swimming pools and shrines one of the trustees politely asked 'And where is the money going to come from for all this?" Rajneesh replied, with only the tiniest pause, "Well, from wherever it happens to be right now!" And without even a single Rolls Royce on my wish-list, that's how I feel too - it will come from wherever it happens to be right now. My job is to prepare myself for the cosmonaut role, to step into the deep unknown as confidently as I can when all the conditions are in place, the catalyst for turning specific concrete acts of kindness - twenty one thousand pounds worth of kindness - into a three-year project of immeasurable goodness. And it's a scary role, actually. But that's my job.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-44517035240168427572018-02-07T04:08:00.001-08:002018-02-15T02:14:50.508-08:00"BUT ... WHY?" (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #2)"But why? What do you hope to get out of it?" This is a question I hear a lot, and perhaps the hardest to answer because it is loaded with preconceptions that simply don't apply. A three year retreat is not a career step. Its not even a strategy. Its more like birdsong. Or the timeless look in a horse's eye, the beautiful quiet horse that carries the fierce Tibetan protector deity Palden Lhamo as she rides through a river of blood beneath a starless sky. That horse has no agenda and neither do I. The spirit of three year retreat just looked me in the eye and I said yes. That horse is timeless, graceful and present. I only wish I could be likewise.<br />
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I believe - I imagine - that human beings are machines for creating works of art, and that the best works of art are nameless and invisible. For the world to be completely, blessedly itself, it has to befriend the nameless and the invisible. The world, plus the work of art, equals the world. For me, three year retreat is training in that spirit. Only by befriending the nameless and the invisible will I truly be able to meet everyone everywhere. <i>"With diamond-clear intention instill faith everywhere. With mirror-like wisdom stabilise all chaotic minds."</i><br />
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In the passage that follows and which brings this post to an end, a passage from the illimitable pen of Roberto Bolano, for 'work of art' read 'this precious human life', for 'translation' read 'the Tibetan tradition', let 'the attic' be the 21st century and 'the kid' be Shenyen (or you, if you want to come with me), and let one of those battered pages be 'three year retreat', and you will sense what I mean, I'm sure. And for now let the Nightingale just be the Nightingale..<br />
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<b>"How to recognise a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarisers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings, not a ploughed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest itself, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale."</b><br />
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<b><br /></b>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-6262063017135495772017-09-16T04:26:00.001-07:002018-02-15T02:13:34.194-08:00THE PRACTICES (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #1)<br />
Our lives are mostly invisible, and deeply connected, but somehow our lives seem bereft of this knowledge.<br />
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So
the first year consists of practices (the “ngondros”) to purify this
impoverishment: expressing one's commitment and openness to the
(invisible, present, surrounding) buddhas through recitation of prayers,
visualisation of buddha lands, prostrations, etc. Confession and
purification of one’s negative karma accrued since beginningless time.
Offering visualised Mandala universes to the buddhas on behalf of all
wandering beings. Expression of one’s commitment to become a buddha as
the best way to repay the kindness of all mother-like sentient beings
throughout all those lives.<br />
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Then begins a cycle of practices to
stabilise, concentrate and open the mind through more meditative
practices (the ngondros themselves are quite meditative and focussing,
but they are primarily energising and cleansing). These include
practices aimed at transcending one’s deeply ingrained delusional
tendency to see oneself and the world as ordinary.<br />
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The final year is
quite specialised tantric work whose aim is to accelerate the attainment
of buddhahood: working on the subtle body, dream yoga, emptiness
meditations, techniques to transfer consciousness to a pure land at
death, to remain conscious during the dying and post-death state, among
other things.<br />
I’ll unpack some of this in greater detail over the
coming months. And if there are any specific questions, just ask. I’m
happy to talk about it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-76817991613320052072016-09-09T04:25:00.000-07:002016-09-14T09:30:23.843-07:00AFTER THE FALL: THE CONSERVATION OF TULLIO LOMBARDO'S ADAM<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">"Burying things in a first glove of words, a second pocket of writing, a third screen of printed matter, a thousand names..."</span></div>
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<b> -- Michael Serres, 'Biogea' </b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">A friend sends me URLs that she has 'orphaned' from their seamless one-click digital environment. She writes them by hand: scrawled in semi-legible pencil on the back of a 20 baht note, or neatly penned in gold ink on glass and then photographed. She draws the outline of a Fra Angelico painting and writes one around the angel's halo, or finger-draws them over photos of darkened rooms that come to me via Instagram.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then, slowly typing these unclickable unpronouncable URLs into the address bar,</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I am reminded once again of something that our digital culture ís straining to forget: that there are many, many different ways to approach things, and that love and attention have their own unique velocities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I find myself watching things like this:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">This beautiful short video documenting the reconstruction of a shattered sculpture unintentionally yet effortlessly seeps outside its immediate concerns, leaving me thinking about robotics, slow time, extreme medical intervention, dance, crime scene investigation, and even William Gibson's Bobby Chombo (the 'Spook Country' GPS geek who chalks out a grid of metre-wide squares on his warehouse floor and refuses to sleep in the same space twice...)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And the vimeo one? Well that isnt too difficult to type in yourself, is it...? </span><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-14613802047517739792016-08-03T03:50:00.000-07:002016-08-03T03:50:46.679-07:00HOUSEKEEPING (HULME, 1990)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HZo134-xgOo/U8vafjlabmI/AAAAAAAAAHw/NNa8PO--c-8/s1600/Scan+13.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HZo134-xgOo/U8vafjlabmI/AAAAAAAAAHw/NNa8PO--c-8/s1600/Scan+13.jpeg" width="212" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy. We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent upon the tiniest initial tweaks..." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> -- Richard Powers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“We laughed, but as little as we could, because we knew it was a solemn thing to burn a house down.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> -- Marilyyne Robinson</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a dream 30 years ago an angel taught me the secret of photography. She said there are two essential rules: be sure to find the correct distance and always stay as close to the ground as possible. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And for a while I lived inside the wider ambience of those instructions. I turned my home into a soft-logic laboratory, an architectural equivalent of what in India is called ‘frugal engineering’. I had no furniture. The floors were covered with small sculptures and the debris of a nomadic intelligence (books and photocopied fragments, beautiful letters from my friends in Japan). I remember how the act of constantly stepping over things slowed me down and changed the rhythm of my thinking, making it more nuanced, attentive. I remember a Korean zen monk talking about the importance of ritual: he said, when you do something every day your manners become pure, your face shines. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I remember photographing the books lying on the floor, the corners of rooms that had been ‘softened’ by small piles of cotton wool, subtitled tv images, the radiator in my bedroom. I made audio tapes with seventy minutes of silence wrapped around three or four songs. I understood that the object-world was about to start talking, and that we humans were about to stop doing so, out of a sense of balance, or harmony, or relief. </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">I remember reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping” during those years. And when I re-read it recently I was amazed to see how much it has influenced my subsequent life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">I remember waking up one morning with a small poem in my head, a tiny thing no bigger than an address on an envelope: "The young Tibetan monk comes west. He will walk through the whole of Western civilization as if it were snow." But isn't that what all poetry aspires to - being an address on an envelope? Anyway, I got the message and I started walking towards the address, towards my future self, beyond the limits of my imagination and rationale.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suddenly thirty years pass.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-80567485151073825802016-08-03T02:37:00.000-07:002016-08-03T03:51:29.835-07:00BUDDHAFIELD TALK<b>"Opinions Are Non Contemporary"</b> (37 minutes)<br />
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A talk about confession, robots, Je Tsongkapa, walking towards China, and more...<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bC_rw2zbgJ0/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bC_rw2zbgJ0?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-8311865061834215242015-01-21T03:44:00.000-08:002015-01-21T03:44:20.300-08:00RECEPTION (LETTER-BEINGS AND TIME)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it </b><b>cannot </b></div>
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<b>prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."</b></div>
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<b> -- Roland Barthes</b></div>
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<b>"As an allegory rather than a utopia, an allusion ra</b><b>ther than </b></div>
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<b>an illusion, </b><b>desire was for a whole generation a guiding </b></div>
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<b>star. </b><b>Today it is merely an observation satellite." </b></div>
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<b>-- Jean Baudrillard</b></div>
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10:17 pm. I receive a text saying "document arriving in ten minutes #letterbeingsandtime"</div>
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She doesn't need to sign her name: our devices do that for us now. And our names are now our addresses. We exist as locations, not as histories. We appear as messages, as quieter and quieter messages, appearing and dísappearing like moments of weather inside the Times Square of our crowded and cool devices. Messages like snow, or the 21st century equivalent of snow, coded for anonymity and distance and endless love.<br />
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And then, ten minutes later, these arrive:<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dN77Wbi3-RU/VLymuBNVypI/AAAAAAAAAVs/yzC4U1k_faQ/s1600/1421674259590.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dN77Wbi3-RU/VLymuBNVypI/AAAAAAAAAVs/yzC4U1k_faQ/s1600/1421674259590.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SrBoKKfgbrs/VLyp8UkfqAI/AAAAAAAAAV8/mV00J4AxzO4/s1600/1421675435345.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SrBoKKfgbrs/VLyp8UkfqAI/AAAAAAAAAV8/mV00J4AxzO4/s1600/1421675435345.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
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Gazing at the images in the darkness I find myself thinking about the notion of 'reception'. There's a passage in "Godel, Escher, Bach" where Hofstadter talks about how messages have to not only contain their message content but also a little bit of meta-message that announces the <i>presence</i> of a message. He talks about Bach records being sent out into space with the hope of some alien civilisation receiving them. Will they be able to recognise the 'envelopes' of satellite craft and metal box and LP record? Will they recognise the grooves as containing 'music'? Will they đeduce 'record player' and 'violin' and 'reverberation' and 'emotion'? And finally, will they get the message?<br />
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He also goes on to wonder whether a meteorite crashing into the craft, obliterating it in a moment, may be a way of playing Bach, of 'receiving the message' of Bach...<br />
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Sometimes I feel like that meteorite and sometimes I feel like Bach, or a museum of musical instruments, or some kid's first ever record player, or a museum on fire in the night of all nights, or a video of that conflagration found on Kafka's phone and destined for Felice but never sent. Sometimes I feel like the message and sometimes I feel like the envelope.<br />
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I picture her texting, standing by the window of her studio (where her phone lives, on the windowledge, safe from the surrounding chaos), and a line from a Richard Powers novel comes back to me: <i>"her face was like someone texting a lover."</i> Its not an infatuation, its just something I'm thinking, something to do with light. Faces and light. The human eye perceives less than one millionth of one percent of the electromagnetic spectrum - yet here we are: texting, visualising, painting, remembering, a communicative array somewhere between golden telepathy and meteorite crash. We're at home in the darkness. Its amazing.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-4369899414470643062015-01-02T00:37:00.000-08:002015-01-19T00:50:39.427-08:00HAND-SET AND GRETEL<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><b>"The tree that springs up again, the locusts that devour the crops, </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;"><b>the </b></span><b>cancer that beats others at its own game, the mullahs who dissolve the </b></div>
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<b style="text-align: center;">Persian </b><b style="text-align: center;">empire, the Zionists who loosen the hold of the mullahs, the </b><b style="text-align: center;">concrete </b></div>
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<b style="text-align: center;">in the power station that cracks, the acrylic blues that </b><b style="text-align: center;">consume other </b></div>
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<b>pigments, </b><b>the </b><b>lion that does not follow </b><b>the predictions of the oracle..." </b></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><b> -- Bruno Latour</b></span></div>
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<b>"On Mushashi Plain / the voice of a deer / is one inch long."</b></div>
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<b>-- Basho</b></div>
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She's just finished painting for the day. Conversation begins as she cleans brushes and I finish assembling <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4jq-aIB6TE&list=PLSpSRqIf8g9G5qaeSniHicjMxzrpI-uGl">a playlist for her on Youtube</a>. We talk about envelopes and clothes and platforms of anonymity, The vastness of the envelope, the length of a sleeve, the voice of Basho's deer, ghosts without watches or pens, voice recognition software and voice pretend-not-to-recognise software, CVs that fit on the back of a postcard, self-confidence and stillness, smiles that explain everything. We talk about anonymity as ornament: eloquent, disciplined, intentional, restrained. And anonymity as maze, as lost voice and disinheritance.</div>
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She asks me ìf there are any book titles I envy, that I wish could've been mine. I mention two: '<i>Operation Wandering Soul,</i>" and an essay by Helene Cixous entitled '<i>Letter-Beings and Time</i>.'</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--_de8r-QSQc/VDt6tyifzaI/AAAAAAAAANQ/IY6bmbVQpGY/s1600/communion.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--_de8r-QSQc/VDt6tyifzaI/AAAAAAAAANQ/IY6bmbVQpGY/s1600/communion.JPG" height="400" width="400" /></a></div>
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We talk about languages, all the possible languages. The enchanted ruins of old grammars and etymologies The prosaic formality of book titles compared to the fractured chaos of <a href="http://www.xlr8r.com/podcasts/2014/05/kid-smpl/">DJ playlists</a>. The illusory distances between Jane Austen and Twitter and the literature-to-come, Hansel and Gretel in the age of google maps. Fairy tales told by maths professors. </div>
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<img alt="Fairy Tales" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fairy_tales.png" height="342" width="640" /></div>
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(more of his cartoons can be found <a href="http://xkcd.com/872/">here</a>)</div>
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She tells me about a disappointing date she went on recently. 'We met, but we đidn't meet each other and we đidn't meet the unknown.'<br />
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She asks me for an image of passion, something from the world of a buddhist monk. "'Walking through fields of snow I counted the snowflakes.' - that's close to what I mean by passion. I mean a true feeling, poised within íts unrepeatability, yet graceful and modest. Neither limited nor reckless. But most of all freedom from compulsion. Deep sadness - with thanks. That's passion."<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qo5lm5MQtjQ/VDt82RWkwJI/AAAAAAAAAN8/PESUzot9wVo/s1600/leyers.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qo5lm5MQtjQ/VDt82RWkwJI/AAAAAAAAAN8/PESUzot9wVo/s1600/leyers.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>"I'm listening, attentive, I'm translating, I'm advancing in the </b></div>
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<b>scaled-down </b><b>meaning ... the ascent goes from the hell of noise to </b></div>
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<b>the smaller </b><b>and </b><b>smaller paradise of the said."</b></div>
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<b> - Michael Serres, "Biogea"</b></div>
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I tell her about John Cage's recollections of D T Suzuki, the Japanese zen teacher at Columbia University in the sixties. He used to teach with the window open in the summer and the classroom looked out over the runways of La Guardia airport. Whenever a plane took off or landed the roar of the engines would drown out hís words. But he never paused or raised his voice. He just continued with his lecture regardless, allowing some of íts content to be erased in this way. One time he mentioned some zen master 'who lived in the 8th or 9th century... or maybe the 10th... or perhaps the 11th, or 12th...'<br />
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I tell her about a remark by the American writer Marilynne Robinson that I can't get out of my head at the moment, about humanity's <i>"odd capacity for destitution." </i>She gives me one of her special smiles - a lighthouse beam from the cliff-edge of rash decisions - that says 'I know, I know,...but don't forget your breadcrumb map...'<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-69768832251573834902014-12-20T23:45:00.000-08:002014-12-20T23:46:06.792-08:00(THEY NEVER REALLY STOPPED BUT) THERE THEY ARE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future -- the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are... There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said."</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-9569c94a-1495-7632-d797-83d92e605592"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9569c94a-149c-ea93-37f9-17d4fee2ef0e"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - John Ashbery</span></span></span><br />
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Watching thís video I know I'll be coming back to this world again and again. I cant believe that such loneliness and speechlessness and cuteness can exist without eternity as one of its ingredients. So I know I'll be back: as silent witness, as over-eager commentator, and as goofball performer,.. I will be there. You try too</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/wSIRyLtgXSY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-74793178435451577702014-12-11T20:49:00.000-08:002014-12-11T20:49:41.996-08:00HIGH-SPEED-SUPER-SLOW I try not to watch this video too often, in case its cybernetic otherworldly beauty starts to fade.<br />
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But really, if I could talk to you like this, if I could disappear into the high-speed-super-slow while miraculously protecting the desire to communicate, I would send you video-letters like this...<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y-5EI4bjyBk" width="480"></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-69078939775985488762014-12-06T06:09:00.000-08:002018-02-08T11:24:03.387-08:00KAFKA'S PHONE<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘In the duel between yourself and the world, act as second to the world.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Those writing great private journals in the last century (i.e. the 20th) did not do so to know who they were, but kept them to know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what they were turning into</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in which unforeseeable direction catastrophe was taking them.”</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-d1d9e941-1fec-ec9d-fbd8-7d591e73f1e1"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-- Enrique Vila-Matas</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m walking with the Vietnamese nuns in the evening coolness, They are telling me about how much they miss Hanoi, I say I miss Hanoi too and they laugh - they know I’ve never been there. They are trying to practice their English in between birdsong clusters from their native tongue. And I can’t say much. I have to stay within their tiny vocabulary. I feel kind of alone, but surrounded by love. The story of my life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then, walking beside me, is Kafka, engrossed in his mobile phone, sending text messages to Felice in the old-new language. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to send you an impossible video: of the nuns’ sing-song voices and shining faces and Kafka’s otherworldly silence and hís shining mobile phone. A beautiful, raggedy yet carefully edited two minute video that just about stays within all those borders so respected by Bolano: the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I would like to send it to you through the post, inside a smartphone designed by Kafka. Just the phone itself, alone in a box, without any letter of convoluted explanation, without any “hi there” or “I hope you like it." Just the device, like a halo without an angel, a device all alone, alone like Kafka, like each of Kafka’s stories. I dream more and more of living in such an explanation-less world. Opinions, explanations, addresses, histories - they’re all on the verge of disappearing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Describing Rembrandt's last self-portrait, Genet expresses the feeling that 'it seems to be saying "<i>I shall be so intelligent that even the wild animals will recognise my goodness.</i>"' I'm imagining a world, post-Facebook, post-Apple-Amazon-Microsoft, in which our devices - and therefore ourselves - behave like Rembrandt and Vermeer and Kafka and Jane Austen. I will arrive there - you try too.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-316311787349920392014-11-21T19:48:00.000-08:002014-12-25T05:03:17.907-08:00DEATH POEM<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>when I die </b><b>I wont let </b><b>language </b><b>get in my way</b></div>
<b> </b><br />
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<b>I'll switch off</b><b> the lights I</b><b>n</b><b> the aquarium of </b><b>my dictionary</b></div>
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<b>but I will always be </b><b>thankful </b><b>for the years spent</b><b> walking the beaches</b></div>
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<b> gazing into the </b><b>ocean</b><b> of possible sentences</b></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lm2GFq2PdaA/VHAByIyETrI/AAAAAAAAATk/ljPNRhofNkk/s1600/spirithouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lm2GFq2PdaA/VHAByIyETrI/AAAAAAAAATk/ljPNRhofNkk/s1600/spirithouse.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i> (photo by Jerry Gordon)</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-51676395405257924532014-10-14T13:27:00.000-07:002014-10-14T13:27:27.429-07:00ARCHITECTURE / THIRD / SEVENTH<br />
We were talking about how a handful of words can fish a single video
out of an ocean of millions and place it right at the top of the list of
search results. About how Googling is a new form of 'address'. Location
is no longer ascertainable through a fixed language protocol but
through an exercise in lateral thinking where precision combines with a
kind of 'scattergun' delivery. Location was now a dream-language.<br />
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We wanted to live like this: to live like an address, like these new addresses. To be precise and specific, coded and silent. To be hidden and lost and recollectable and findable. We wanted people not to know we existed, not to even think about us, yet be findable by anyone anywhere when the right time came.<br />
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We were talking like this, as I was looking for this video:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/7809605" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/7809605">The Third & The Seventh</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1337612">Alex Roman</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-15848360912823203352014-10-13T23:21:00.000-07:002014-10-13T23:46:22.153-07:00INSECT CHORUSES / THE LITERATURE TO COME<i><br /></i>
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<b><i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Through weakness or anxiety, to be serious or for effectiveness, we no longer know how, we are no longer capable of speaking in any but disjointed terms, in special, specialised, specious discourses, as physicists or politicians, as historians or pious believers, through equations, poems or prayers, as scientists or those in love, in bad French or exact algebra. None of these discourses can or wants to rejoin the other, to encounter it, recognise it… We claim to hold colloquia, but we speak there in these dislocated terms.”</span></i></b></div>
<b><i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> -- Michel Serres <i>“Biogea”</i></span></i></b><br />
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<i><b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of </span></b></i><b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">your</span></b><i><b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> time exercising your diplomacy, stealth and charm."</span></b></i><br />
<b><i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i> -- </i></span></i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Roberto Bolano</span><i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i> "The Savage Detectives"</i> </span></i></b><br />
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We were talking in her studio, alone together, wrapped in a hundred voices whose volumes have been turned down to almost zero, voices which, consequently, can be heard but not recorded. Something akin to the voices of insects, of tiny insects with revolutionary aspirations or a taste for opera. Insect choruses.<br />
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We were talking about imaginary unknowns: about cinema and cinema's 'little sister', about Bach and 'Bach squared'.<br />
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We talk about how Dante would send his poems into the world to go and greet his beloved, with instructions 'to talk to no-one except virtuous ladies along the way'. We talk about encryption, about how 'the door to the invisible has to be visible', about Godel and Claude Shannon, about encryption and love and secrecy, and semi-secrecy, and quarter- and sixteenth-secrecy. All the homeopathic secrecies that allow us to think we understand things.<br />
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We talk about reading a story first thing in the morning and then listening for every accidental quotation throughout the day.<br />
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We talk about the literature to come. About words with shadows and ambience. Words with data structures forming protective umbrellas over them. Words without dictionary definitions, that operate instead as handles and switches, as security clearance for other, noisier words. Words which gather like shoals of post-grammatical fish coded for music, tonality and absolute rhythm, inside pages that resemble lakeside ripples, or mobius strips, or icebergs.<br />
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That's how certain nights go in her studio, imagining the voices of a new Jane Austen, a new Emily Dickinson.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-16281660472409869772014-10-10T08:36:00.002-07:002014-10-10T08:36:34.919-07:0023 CANDLES<br />
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<img alt="" class="spotlight" src="https://scontent-a-vie.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/1237871_10152540174220677_153583532103931935_n.jpg?oh=088d3562667b439c6793da7169e24b49&oe=54C9CDFE" style="height: 584px; width: 438px;" /><br />
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<b>I'm riding the bus<br />between<br />rice paddies<br />and pachinko parlors. <br />their surfaces<br />shine like diamonds<br />powdered by<br />nuclear suns. </b><br />
<b>outside my window,<br />a heavy hauling-truck <br />rumbles past<br />and i effortlessly visualize<br />it plowing through<br />the thin skin of this side <br />of the bus, and each of us<br />in this line of seats <br />softly breaking <br />
into colored smokes, <br />like 23 candles<br />beneath a few breaths. <br />conversely, i feel no<br />confidence to imagine<br />what the woman <br />on her cellphone<br />on the sidewalk<br />is talking about.</b><br />
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<b>(poem and images by Jerry Gordon)</b><br />
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<b> </b><img alt="" class="spotlight" src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/v/t1.0-9/10649586_10152540174175677_8109215695767991015_n.jpg?oh=8e91e85445faead2fcc0985ff42eb2a1&oe=54B106D1&__gda__=1420594564_2faada93b5907d723918bbe719e23811" style="height: 584px; width: 438px;" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-39717348061211432872014-10-09T04:16:00.001-07:002014-10-11T13:39:08.815-07:00THERE ARE THINGS IN LIFE WE CANT DESIGN - TALK AT SDGC14 STOCKHOLM<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Like everyone else speaking at the conference I was asked to begin my talk with an image showing what 'quality of life' meant to me. But I don't have a camera, so I decided to just use the opening slide of my talk. But i must admit, after seeing the various homely, friendly slides presented yesterday, I began to wonder how my one would look - because its a bit weird in comparison to those other slides! But as I began to look deeply into the image it began to be quite revealing.<br />
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The right side of the opening slide contains a photo of me at my friend's house, and in this picture she used an app which bleached the photo so it looks like I'm kind of disappearing, and actually that it what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to disappear into a 2500 year-old Buddhist tradition while staying in touch with my own 21st century Western culture. <br />
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And on the left is Vajrasattva and consort, who represents or symbolises the purifying power of the Buddha's enlightenment. This is one of my meditation practices. And I love the fact that this image is so radiant and clear. That what I am disappearing into is clearer and brighter than what I am coming out of.<br />
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So you can see that I'm reading a book in the photo. Whenever I have money I buy books. I love reading and I read all kinds of stuff. The memory of a map-making monk has to contain all kinds of oblique and wonderful things. And now I have a kindle, so I'm no longer limited to carrying just one or two books - electronic culture and homelessless go so well together! And I wanted to have fragments of that reading in the slides today. So I asked myself what would be a good quote to share with designers? And immediately I thought of this passage from William Gibson's "Spook Country":<br />
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Wouldn't you love to have a design brief like this? No explanations, no goals cited, no budgetary cap, absolute priority in any queue...? That's the kind of the space I live in as a Buddhist monk. Of course, I have my vows to live within, and my life is very limited in terms of money and devices and those kinds of things. But psychologically... no explanations, no goals...<br />
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The rest of the slides I wont be talking about - they will just accompany me, a kind of ambient voice, representing the angelology of words. An expression of ambient intimacy. And you don't have to understand these images, you just have to stand under them for a few moments.<br />
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So... the theme of my talk here is "There Are Things In Life We Cannot Design". And to lead into this let me tell you two stories.<br />
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The first one takes place in Tokyo in 1923. A huge earthquake has just devastated the city killing more than 100,000 people. And in the days immediately after the disaster a ten year old boy decides to take his six year old younger brother by the hand and lead him through the destroyed city, forcing him to witness the entire disaster: dead bodies floating in the river, traumatised survivors sitting motionless in the ruins. We don't know why he did this.<br />
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Later in life the elder brother sinks into a deep depression and eventually commits suicide. But the six year old, little Akira, grows up to become one of the greatest film makers in the history of cinema: Kurasawa Akira.<br />
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The second story concerns a zen master I had the wonderful experience of studying with in Japan in 2005. His name is Harada Sensei and he has been teaching quietly at the same monastery in Obama, Japan, for sixty years. The story I want to share with you today concerns another disaster: Japan's imminent collapse in the closing months of World War 2. Its 1945 and Harada-san is just a kid; he's seen so many people sacrifice their lives in the war and now he feels its his turn. He's 20 years old and he just wants to help his country. Those were the words he used in a talk one evening at the monastery: 'i just wanted to help my country'. The army and navy were more or less finished, as indeed was the airforce. All that remained were the kamikaze squads. So he volunteers to become a kamikaze pilot. That's a suicide bomber in our world, yes? We think of them simply as psychopaths. But I cant stop hearing the gentleness in his words: 'I just wanted to help my country...'<br />
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One of the students at the monastery had a copy of a photo of Harada-san and two fellow pilots having their last cup of Japanese sake before flying to their deaths. You should see their uniforms: they're just bits of rags sewn together - the poverty and desperation of the whole situation is obvious.<br />
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And then, one hour before he is due to fly, the war ends. Japan announces her surrender. He came so close to death and then it was taken away from him. (<a href="http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Teishos/Harada_Tangen_Teisho.html">You can read his own teaching on this experience and how it permeated his thinking and future direction here</a>.) But the experience was not in vain. After the war he met a zen master in Tokyo who invited him to train under his guidance. "I can see you've sacrificed your life once already and it didn't work. Now give it to me. Train at my temple and I promise you you will have a deep awakening within three years." He accepted, and a few years later he had his breakthrough. And for the past sixty years he has been teaching in his little temple on the north coast of Japan.<br />
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What is the purpose of these two stories? I want to say that there are things in life that you simply cannot design. I mean, if I asked you to design a filmmaker or a zen master how many of you would dare to include an earthquake or a war in your proposal? The obvious solution would be to build a film school, say, and that's fine as far as it goes but it doesn't touch the whole situation.<br />
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I remember a teacher of mine talking about life in a
traditional Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Some of the monks commit to a
20+ year-long course of study. In the beginning they study things like
Buddhist logic and epistemology, how the mind works, the rules governing
a monk's life, things like that. And then, I'm not sure when exactly,
maybe around year six, they start to really focus on the wisdom
teachings, on prajnaparamita and madhyamaka philosophy. These are the
teachings that can end suffering forever. You can't escape from samsara
on the basis of ethics alone, or through the power of a concentrated
state of mind in itself: you have to have wisdom. These teachings will
be the basis for developing the mind of a Buddha. They are very, very
precious. And before they start they take a break from their studies.
Some of the monks go into retreat for six months, perform purification
practices, make vast visualised offerings to create the spiritual energy
in the mind necessary to have realisations. They make vast aspirational
prayers <i>just to be able to understand what they are about to study.</i><br />
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I
don't know of a single university in the UK where the students pray
just to be able to understand what they are about to study. In our
modern scientific-materialist cultures we have this kind of abstract
'democratic' understanding of knowledge. We feel, basically, that we can
understand anything and that all we have to do is receive the
information. The acquisition of knowledge is imagined as a neutral and
'flattened' experience. "I'm here and my mind is functioning and I can
basically understand anything. Just give me the information." <br />
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This is not how Buddhism understands the mind. The idea of - and I like to use a medieval spelling of the word to protect it, to return it to its lost world of meanings - of <i>'virtu'</i> has (sic) virtually disappeared from our cognitive vocabulary. We have no idea that there are levels of consciousness and increasing subtleties of mind, and that working on the mind's radiance - its <i>virtu</i> and clarity and inner state of being - is just as important as the content of what that mind is trying to understand. We have no idea that the approach to knowledge contains ethical and ritual dimensions.<br />
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If we are going to talk seriously about quality of life, we have to have two things in place: we have to understand how reality works and we have to have an understanding of what a human being is capable of, what it can aspire to. If we don't understand these two things clearly and completely, in all their existential vastness, all attempts to end the sufferings of beings will ultimately fail. They may succeed within temporary and limited contexts but ultimately they will fail.<br />
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These two things have to embrace the entire existential context: what is visible and invisible and what is simply beyond the present limits of my imagination and rationale. In Buddhism we aren't just aspiring to make our little place in life more comfortable - we are aspiring and training to become the kind of being who no longer has to experience this kind of body: a body which has zero tolerance for pain, which is destined to grow old, sicken and die. My design brief as a Buddhist monk is to end suffering forever. For everyone, everywhere.<br />
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I'm running out of time now so I will leave you with one last slide, and I will leave it for you to decide for yourself just how seriously I would like you to take this suggestion. But again, when I first read it my inner radar went very quiet and affirmed the deep relevance of this remark and I sensed a wildness and an accuracy in its words. Here it is:<br />
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I would love you all to consider what it would mean to just say no to ... everything. To free yourself from the limitations of the world you operate in, the endless demands to perform, to meet deadlines, to find solutions to problems over and over again. I would like you to at least imagine, as a kind of ritual action that you perform occasionally, saying no everything you are entrapped by: the need to succeed, to have a career, to be accepted, to be understood (even by yourself).<br />
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There is something quietly nihilistic in being so blindly positive, of moving ever forwards with an invisible glass wall in front of you: namely, a limited - even delusional - sense of what reality is. And there is something liberating and purifying in being willing to stay in the space of not-knowing for as long as it takes. I can imagine the pressures you are under just to ... continue ... and I live with gratitude in the world(s) you design. But I really hope you get the chance to just ... do nothing, be nothing. Thank you.<br />
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<i>The following link is to a collection of photos and sketchbook responses to my talk put together by the conference organisers, plus a video clip:</i><br />
http://conferences.service-design-network.org/sdgc14/things-life-cant-design/<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-7049165387370295812014-09-20T02:41:00.000-07:002014-09-20T03:16:33.632-07:00HATSUNE MIKU: JAPAN'S FIRST HOLOGRAM POPSTAR<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I first saw this video (back in 2010) and saw Hatsune Miku appear on stage from her little black box I felt the world shifting its parameters. And then the song started and i heard a 4 minute description of the next 200 years, a song of straight prophesy and teasing ambiguity, of playfulness and arrogance and love, in lyrics that got stranger and stranger ...<i>"Someday, on the hundred-thousandth birthday of my children, when you see them, for celebrating it, I thank you..."</i> Imagine "Terminator 12" as a kid's anime movie written by Julia Kristeva...<br />
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It is well known that photography is no longer considered a reliable source of evidence in a court of law, but soon reality itself may be considered unreliable. We are not only moving into 'the robotic moment' (as Sherry Turkle calls it in her consistently engaging book entitled "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other") but into a generalised post-human mish mash of technologies, platforms, protocols and speeds.<br />
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But reality doesn't have to be believable - it just has to be imaginable. Reality is a reference point not a destination. A map, not the territory.<br />
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A lot fell into place for me recently when I dropped the burden of 'believing' in Buddhism and decided to simply imagine it instead. Belief tends to have an agonistic dimension to it: <i>"do I or do I not believe in ... karma?... rebirth?...my lama as a buddha?..."</i> We feel compelled to decide one way or another on a question that is actually outside our capacity to answer. And we always believe too soon - we come to a 'conclusion' we haven't earned, and our world subtly closes down a little as a result. Instead of remaining in the space of not-knowing (which is a beautiful, sacred place to be) we turn not-knowing into a fake knowing and the resulting turbulence affects everyone around us.<br />
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These days I simply 'imagine' Buddhism. I do my practices as naturally as I brush my teeth or watch the football. I have faith in these practices, in the teachers who gave them to me and in the tradition that carried them to me through the centuries. It is faith based on 30 years quiet engagement with the world of Buddhism. It is not certain knowledge - it is faith, trust. A kind of perfume radiating out of consistent experience.<br />
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After all, Buddhism isn't about the agonistics of belief as dogma, nor is it a collection of truth statements in an abstract world of philosophy. It is about engaging with practices whose 'reality' is judged on a pragmatic quality: their ability to end suffering. Of course, I am presenting this somewhat simplistically. There is always an element of belief in our experience. But so long as belief is recognised as belief and not as fact then the integrity of one's experience is protected.<br />
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I look forward to meeting Hatsune Miku's 'children' and celebrating their hundred-thousandth birthday with them. I will arrive there - you try too. <br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-75982664129248013112014-09-19T09:50:00.000-07:002018-02-08T11:33:44.366-08:00THE ERA OF OVERPRODUCTION<br />
<br />
We were talking in her studio, about living in The Era Of Overproduction. I tell her about a guy who had been working on a computer program that would write 'new' Bach pieces. He'd finally got the program to a point where he was personally satisfied with it, so he hit 'start' before going to lunch one afternoon. When he came back there were 4000 new Bach pieces on his laptop. At CERN (the centre for nuclear research in Switzerland) there are experiments which generate 5000 encyclopedias of data per second. It's said that every minute there's 32 hours of new footage uploaded to Youtube... <br />
<br />
We talked about the impossibility of having anything remotely resembling an 'overview' of world literature or world cinema these days. We sensed the presence of unbelievably perfect books in distant languages that would never be translated and which we would never read. Of beautiful articles on topics we had never consciously formulated even in our wildest reveries, in magazines that would go bust after a few issues without us ever hearing even their names.<br />
<br />
We liked living in this world. We liked the poverty and the richness of it. But mainly the richness. And at the same time we felt some strange tremor in our conscience urging us to .. to live in it more accurately ...<br />
<br />
She's reading James Gleick's "Chaos". I see her highlights on the pages. I've just got time to share a few of them with you but then I have to go...<br />
<br />
<i>At the national laboratory some physicists learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with 26 hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs. This bordered on strange, even in the Theoretical Division.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>These scientists had experience with brilliance and with eccentricity. They were hard to surprise. But MItchell Feigenbaum was an unusual case. He had exactly one published article to his name, and he was working on nothing that seemed to have any particular promise. His hair was a ragged mane,</i><br />
<br />
<i>When he worked, he worked obsessively. When he could not work, he walked and thought, day or night, and night was best of all. The twenty four hour day seemed too constraining. Nevertheless, his experiment in quasiperiodicity came to an end when he decided he could no longer bear waking to the setting sun, as had to happen every few days.</i><br />
<br />
<i>He thought about clouds, watching them from airplane windows (until his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on grounds of overuse) or from the hiking trails of his laboratory. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself</i><br />
<i>Outside the ordinary range</i><br />
<i>Of what is called statistics.</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-32093533676137097352014-09-17T03:42:00.000-07:002014-09-19T03:18:09.696-07:00THE SEVEN INGREDIENTS - A TIBETAN PRELIMINARY PRACTICE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YO2OnrhMWtY/VBllZjN9RrI/AAAAAAAAAIg/A05O_l3pByE/s1600/kirtitsenshabrinpoche.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YO2OnrhMWtY/VBllZjN9RrI/AAAAAAAAAIg/A05O_l3pByE/s1600/kirtitsenshabrinpoche.jpg" /></a></div>
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<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Many people are beginning to practice mindfulness in the West, but it is being presented to them stripped bare of its Buddhist roots in order to fit with the dominant secular, scientific-materialist worldview. Of course, Buddhism doesn't own the copyright on mindfulness, and if a secular presentation of mindfulness helps people with their problems that's good. But from a Buddhist point of view the true power of the teachings require the total existential context of life and practice to be acknowledged. The practice outlined here is an example of this.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In Buddhism, to progress on the path we need teachings to help us understand reality clearly and to practice accordingly. But from our side we also need a store of positive energy - ‘merit’ in Buddhist language - to make us </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">capable</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> of understanding the teachings, capable of having faith in them, and to water the seeds of wisdom inside us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The seven ingredients is a classic preliminary practice in Tibetan Buddhism, a way of purifying the mind of negativity and increasing one's store of virtuous energy in the mind. With each ingredient we switch on a positive state of mind and nurture the roots of these virtuous states. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The following seven elements are all performed while sitting quietly in our meditation space. They are performed by the imagination. Interestingly, modern brain research suggests that an imagined act performed with a concentrated mind triggers exactly the same neural pathways as when performing the act in reality. So, for example, visualising making infinite offerings to the buddhas is internally resonant with actually making infinite offerings!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As we go through the seven ingredients in an actual practice session, don’t get hung up on doing it perfectly or ‘including everything’. Just trust your mind’s response in the moment and perform each element in a relaxed and engaged way, allowing the practice to flow naturally. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The seven ingredients are as follows:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prostration:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Visualising a special teacher (or teachers) in the space in front of us we imagine ourselves prostrating to them, purifying pride and rigidity of mind and expressing and deepening gratitude. This makes us receptive to the power of the teachings and opens us up to the blessing-powers of the awakened ones. Although the traditional language of the seven ingredients mentions 'prostrations' this first ingredient can be taken to mean any kind of expression of gratitude and re-establishing of commitment to our chosen path. If the image of prostrating feels alien to you simply imagine a heartfelt thank you for your chosen teacher having made the efforts to practice and realise the teachings themselves and pass them on to others.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Offerings:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> We imagine ourselves making offerings in whatever way feels right. We may use a traditional Tibetan cosmology, lavish, spectacular and miraculous, with ourselves multiplied into millions of forms to make millions of offerings, accompanied by many other beings, both human and divine, a whole shining mandala-universe of beings scattering flower petals, offering incense, chanting praises, etc. Or it may be more restrained and quiet - a single flower to a single buddha. it may focus on contemporary elements from our world: art galleries, music, landscapes, technology - things that we are personally excited about or attached to. It may be invisible and psychological - offering one's recent efforts to study and practice the spiritual path, or some other good action we have performed. We can even offer some good action that deeply attracts us but which we feel we aren’t able to perform at the present. For example many people feel some archetypal wish to become a monk or nun while acknowledging that its not going to happen in this life. And they experience this as a ‘failure’ of some sort. But in buddhism, the genuine wish to perform an action is just as much a virtuous action as actually performing the action. So we can visualise our perfect response to the world and offer this.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Confession:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Making what has been hidden an open disclosure </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(within the symbolic space of visualised Buddhas, not out there in the real world!)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> fundamentally weakens the power of latent negative karma to grow, releases psychological blockages and turns the pent-up negative energy into a positive force. Again, there are many ways this can be done. We can make a specific confession of some unskillful action that is weighing upon one's conscience, or we can make 'general confessions' such as confessing one's lack of faith and practice before the Buddhas. Confession practice purifies the mind of feelings of guilt and the feeling of being unable to let go of - of being defined by - one’s past negative actions. It also strengthens the mind that would refrain from such actions in the future.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rejoicing:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> We call to mind all the wonderful things that people have done in this world, including ourselves, and re-affirm our appreciation of and commitment towards such behaviour. This particular ingredient is called the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">lazy person’s path to buddhahood </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">because it can be done quite effectively and pleasantly lying in bed or on the beach etc! Rejoicing in the good actions and qualities of others purifies our mind of envy, and rejoicing in one’s own good actions strengthens the mind that would perform similar actions in the future.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Requesting teachings:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> The only way to transform ourselves from suffering beings into awakened ones is to hear accurate teachings that present a correct and complete path. Symbolically requesting teachings in this way nurtures one's store of virtue in this area. It creates the karma to have teachings manifest in our lives in the future. We can ask for teachings to manifest in traditional and contemporary forms. For example, I often ask for teachings to manifest in the form of contemporary art.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Requesting teachers to remain in this world and to manifest again and again in all our future lives</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: There are no teachings without teachers, and realised teachers can benefit us in many other ways too. Just being around them, without anything being said, can have a transformative effect on our minds and hearts.. Requesting teachers and teachings to manifest in our world also directly purifies lifetimes of negative acts towards spiritual teachings, whether acts of negligence and laziness or active rejection and denial. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Offering the merit of our practice to all beings unconditionally</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: By sharing the merit of our practice with all beings we are acknowledging that we are all interdependent. All beings support me in this life of mine. The practice of generosity is the first step on the bodhisattva path (the path of a being who resolves to reach enlightenment in order to best help all other beings) and sharing one's merit with all beings is a powerful expression of this. As such, it helps to purify negative karma accrued towards other beings.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The seven ingredients also resonates as a purificatory practice of the three times. The first two - prostrations and offerings - purifies the present moment by placing us imaginatively in the presence of awakened beings and behaving skillfully towards them. Numbers three and four - confession and rejoicing - begin to purify past negative actions and to magnify past positive actions respectively. And five and six create the karma to have teachers and teachings to manifest in the future.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Preliminary practices can often become the mainstay of a meditation session for tibetan practitioners. In the tibetan tradition the need to increase our store of merit is quite keenly felt and such practices are considered more important than developing concentration etc. But even if your practice is conducted within the secular mindfulness model there are times when one feels too tired and unfocused for the quiet purity of mindfulness sitting and a little time spent engaging the emotional and existential dimensions of practice - whether within or beyond the present limits of one’s imagination and rationale! - can re-energise one's session.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(NB the picture at the top of this post is of my first Tibetan teacher, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche. I only met him a few times but he gave me my first initiations and not a day go by now without me mentioning his name within my practice sessions. The picture is from Bruce Farley's article "Blessing The World's Waterways" which you can read <a href="http://mandala.fpmt.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2006/10/BlessingtheWorldsWaterways.pdf">here</a>.) </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-16936854981191406272014-07-02T14:08:00.000-07:002014-07-02T14:11:16.992-07:00GAZING AT THE FACES OF THE HORSES <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KJkQkgVrr4Y/U7R0dxc2W_I/AAAAAAAAAGg/I0_ACEydZtY/s1600/SHENYEN+CONFERENCE+PREZ(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KJkQkgVrr4Y/U7R0dxc2W_I/AAAAAAAAAGg/I0_ACEydZtY/s1600/SHENYEN+CONFERENCE+PREZ(1).jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">sun and moon in the same sky... ‘one home a year’... the end of dictionaries, photographs, nature… the beginning of drifting objects...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">small creatures which are blind... 'this rain is our practice'... the end of furniture… the beginning of the robotic moment…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the emotions of people you never knew… the minimum space necessary for you to occupy… the end of second-guessing… the beginning of ‘very simple decision making’…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"... For forests, hills, fire and water alone have voices, speak a language. We've lost the secret of it, although the memory of an august accord, of the ineffable alliance of intelligence and things, cannot be forgotten even by the lowliest. The voice that we no longer understand is still friendly, fraternal, a maker of serene peace."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> -- George Bernanos, (quoted in "Biogea" by Michel Serres)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Intelligent preparation… ... a single field in bloom… the end of logic trees… the beginning of hypothesis-free research...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the rhythm of the printer... the differences in our lives... the end of ‘the near future’... the beginning of the postcard apocalypse...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">nameless, cinematic feelings… diagrams of complex thoughts... the end of portable altars… the beginning of ‘Live Like An Address’...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the photographer of insects... partially blocked windows… the end of the era of handwriting… the beginning of the forest of passwords...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"To progress in life you must give up the things that you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things which are acceptable to your mind. You can see that you will have to have time to yourself to find out what appeals to your mind. While you go along with others you are not really living your life. To rebel against others is just as futile. You must find your way."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> -- Agnes Martin, “notebooks”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">84,000 sutras… pure colours... restraining hands... ‘is merely the thing’...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(I thought I was writing. It was beautiful.)</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-11156506730790131852014-06-29T07:23:00.000-07:002016-10-12T02:32:19.933-07:00WRITING WITH LIGHT 1<div class="post_body">
<b>"You will take notes, and the scraping of your pen will be one of the most peaceful sounds under the sun."</b><br />
<br />
<b>"And
even I can remember a time when historians left blanks in their
writings, I mean for things they didn’t know, but that time seems to be
passing…"</b><br />
<br />
Unknown rooms, a garden gate, harbours,
factories, warehouses, unknown faces on a train, a wedding reception
from long ago, a letter or a book in somebody’s hand, empty telephone
boxes, deserted crossroads, half open doors… This is how I wanted
writing to be: as delirious, brutal and tender as an old photograph. We
give things meaning because we are unable to give them love. Or rather,
everything has to be meaningful because we cannot love. Writing, the
same thing as loving: an experience of limits.<br />
<br />
<b>"I call
the contemporary text a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither
as to a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for
entertainment. we come to it as the start of a different kind of
journey."</b><br />
<br />
The beautiful ‘Commedia’ by Dante rests
quietly upon the simple surfaces of sheets of paper. Raffaello’s
‘Madonna with Goldfinch’ drifts through the postal networks of the world
printed on a piece of card. Tarkovsky’s last film is projected onto the
white fabric of a cinema screen. I love this dependency of beauty -
sublime and incomparable - upon the simplest of the world’s materials.
And when a Japanese woman hands a zen priest a photograph of her sister,
who is a prostitute, and asks him to write a few lines on the back, its
not what he writes that overwhelms me but <i>the image of him writing on the back of a photograph of another human being</i>.<br />
<br />
Phone
calls in the middle of the night. Her brother. He’s going through some
kind of breakdown, he’s having difficulty talking, but she’s gentle with
him, takes the long silences without any fuss. He asks if there are any
letters for him (she was looking after his flat while he was away) and
can she read them to him over the phone. This is the amazing bit. She
doesn’t just read what is written on the sheets of paper, she talks him
through the entire letter, from the stamp and the postmark, and how the
address is written, and how easily the envelope tears open, to the way
the paper is folded and the placing of the words upon the page. Beauty
now means giving equal attention to everything. The loving gaze as
revelation.<br />
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<br />
<b>"Where there is observation there is science, there is philosophy, there is dream."</b><br />
<br />
She
writes a letter on large sheets of paper pinned to the wall. Afterwards
she photographs them to reduce them to ‘letter size’. Some of the words
are too small or feint to survive within the shrunken field of the
photographs. Some of the photos show only a portion of the paper, the
resultant image testifying to a certain incommunicability, a word or
phrase lost to the border, but a loss that’s at least as honest as
speech: “When I made up my mind to work in the house where there was a
new-born child, I …”; “I dont read, I walk besides words. You can’t
imagine how little it means to me to…” In one photo, taken from the
other side of the room, the sheets of paper are dwarfed by the cream
coloured emptiness of a piece of linen covering the window, billowing in
the breeze, filled with light. The letter-as-content has been
transformed into letter-as-pure-intention, conveying a desire as
unlimited as it is modest. And somewhere amidst those trailing sentences
and disappearing words I realise that ‘stopping’ is one of the beauties
of language. Its ok to just stop - right there in the middle of the
sentence, before the distortion starts, before the artificiality, the
cleverness, the need to be right. It means you dont have to waste the
gift of language expressing your neurosis.<br />
<br />
<b>"Evocation of
emotion determined by a resistance to emotion. As Bach, sitting at the
organ, explained to a student: ‘its a matter of striking the notes at
exactly the right moment’."</b><br />
<br />
<b>"A sentence is not emotional but a paragraph is."</b><br />
<br />
So
when you’re tired of writing it may be that you’re only tired of
writing ‘I’. But you dont have to tell me about your life in order to
keep in touch, in order to sustain communication. You could just
‘write’ - there doesn’t have to be a ‘you’ there, encoded in the writing
biographically, referentially. The ‘you’ is already there anyway, in
the materiality of the letter, the tenderness of all the touches, in the
very ache of the writing as much as the writing itself. You don’t have
to squeeze yourself into an outmoded psychology of biography, of the
written ‘I’. You could let (yourself) go. I’m not saying that biography
is wrong - not at all. In any case its absence is unimaginable:
biography is the limit-case of the human, and in its own way as
beautiful as a field full of flowers. (One day - not now - I will tell
you about a fragmentary biography of a Tibetan lama I once read…) I’m
just saying that if ever it gets too much you can live without it.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-29925023385511822962014-06-28T07:25:00.000-07:002016-10-12T02:32:50.360-07:00WRITING WITH LIGHT 2<div class="post_body">
<b>"But I
will arrive, I will arrive at the point where you will no longer read
me. Not only by becoming more illegible than ever for you (it’s
beginning, it’s beginning), but by doing things such that you no longer
even recall that I am writing for you, that you no longer even
encounter, as if by chance, the ‘do not read me.’ That you do not read
me, this is all, so long, ciao, neither seen nor heard, I am totally
elsewhere. I will arrive there, you try too."</b><br />
<br />
Sometimes I find myself thinking about Tarkovsky during the making of
his last film: sawing branches off trees and glueing them back on in
different places - the ‘right’ places. I’m not trying to work it out,
much less justify or condemn it, I’m just trying to ‘think’ it, to spend
a little time in its shadow, allowing it room, room enough to affect
me.<br />
<br />
Your letter arrived today, its instantly recognisable handwriting
like a print-out from an echocardiograph machine. And I thought: if only
I could speak like that! I’m not talking about the sound of the
machine, I mean the same sparse beauty - little peaks and depths of
feeling manifesting with pinpoint accuracy from within a neutrality that
is gentle, reliable, generous even… I think of the most dear letters
that I would like to send you as I’m drifting off to sleep, but I can’t
write them down… More and more I believe that for the forseeable future
communication is going to depend more on trust than on the stability of
signs. Autism, nomadology, ‘postcard writers’ in a world of collapsing
sign-systems and exhausted languages, archaeologists of a sadness
without an object, refugees of the paragraph and the page, attempting to
say everything with a few remaining fragments: unfinished, open-ended,
under-determined sentences, isolated, incomplete or even erased words,
fragments of images torn from magazine pages… Perhaps more than ever
before we need an extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity, an education in
difficulty. To re-establish the relationship between difficulty and
kindness, difficulty and love. Difficult objects, texts, spaces have
their own kindness: they evoke states of mind characterised by patience,
attention, commitment, trust, openness - the same qualities that make
love possible.<br />
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<br />
The kanji for ‘touch’ combines the kanji for
‘insect’ and ‘horn’; the kanji compund eikyo (‘influence’) consists of
the kanji for ‘image’ and ‘echo’; ningen (human being) consists of the
kanji for ‘person’ and ‘in between’; honyaku (‘translation’) contains
feathers or wings turning as they fall; ‘leaf’ consists of three
elements: ‘plantlife’, ‘tree’, and an element which is a kanji in its
own right and appears in compounds such as ‘world’, ‘century’,
‘decency’, ‘small talk’, ‘to assist’ etc. This is the cinematic,
contemplative side of kanji study. This is where I find myself again and
again when my concentration starts to wander; in the openness of its
interconnections, its written ‘photography’.<br />
<br />
Translating some poems by Kawara Machi. In one poem she complains
about her lover’s rough way of talking to her on the telephone. In the
next, the touch of falling rain on her lips suddenly brings him to mind.
There is no way of conveying the fact that the kanji for ‘telephone’
contains the kanji for ‘rain’ except by stepping outside the smoothness
of translation and making notes such as this… Watching a word disappear
into another language is like watching somebody walk out the door, the
feelings and images triggered by the disappearing word are just as real -
just as deserving of a response - as the word itself. Or, if that
image is too dramatic, perhaps we could compare it to dropping a pebble
into a pool: the translator’s task then revolves around how to handle
the noise of the pebble’s disappearance while at the same time allowing
the ripples to flow outwards. But in any case the ‘precision’ of
language is a totally different precision from that of, say,
aeronautical engineering. There are no identical texts, only kindred
texts or, to continue the etymnological link further, ‘kindness texts’.
Languages refreshing themselves in each other… I imagine a translator,
indifferent to the functionality of the times, aware that language, like
‘home’, is holographic and is carried completely in any one of its
parts, extending the range of his perceptions and decisions to the point
where his translation of two lines of a six line poem extends to
hundreds of pages.<br />
<br />
<b>"A musician can trust the notes that
come out or he can trust the feelings that go into the notes that come
out. He cannot trust both at the same time, because they never do equal
each other."</b><br />
<br />
Go to sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, wander around the apartment, go back to sleep in a different room…</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4918658230673128765.post-47061338134836579892014-06-27T07:26:00.000-07:002016-10-12T02:33:13.063-07:00WRITING WITH LIGHT 3<b>"When a
code enters a crisis; when already too few carry its references; when
reading it no longer yields meaning; what remains is to transform it,
from the interior of doubts, by means of renewed attention to direct
sources of nature: landscape, passing clouds, clearings, bodies,
movement, stability."</b><br />
<br />
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<br />
Plugging in the slide projector she says ‘lift up your shirt’. The
image of a swan projected onto my stomach. I stroke the swan. I say, ‘of
all the senses, I think touch is the most profound, the most
philosophical.’ A click, and the swan is replaced by a Giorgione
painting, the word airport, a sheet of musical notation, the Parthenon… A
friend of mine, who can hardly put two words together usually, wants to
video Dogen’s Shobogenzo - in fact a whole range of Buddhist teachings.
In the margins of the gentlest texts, some of them impossibly abstract,
I keep seeing the one word: ‘film’…<br />
<br />
A true biography can sometimes be glimpsed in the tiniest phrase.
Which is to say your life is waiting for you everywhere. A drifting,
shining text, containing hundreds of paragraphs, thousands of sentences,
contains enough material for innumerable true biographies.<br />
<br />
Sometimes
ambition is so low that it makes me happy just to feel that I
understand the title of a book or an essay. (We were talking about how
beautiful were the titles of a couple of essays by Barthes: ‘The Rustle
of Language’ and ‘The Grain of the Voice’.) And its not a proud
understanding - nothing particularly intellectual - just a feeling of
being able to make do with less and less, mixture of tiredness and
tenderness, and what the Japanese call, in a positive sense,
bewilderment.<br />
<br />
<b>"For in the end it is important to confine yourself within a
framework that will deepen your world, not impoverish it, help you to
create it, excluding all pretentiousness and efforts to be original."</b><br />
<br />
Finally
there is this war, peaceful and yet so violent. And you said, ‘Right
now its more important than ever to try to have an interesting llife.
I’m not talking about going out partying every night or stuff like that,
but about something very gentle, like conversation, about taking care
over the tiniest things, paying attention to everything…’ I asked you
what would make a good conversation and you replied: ‘where two people,
freshly bathed, wearing clean clothes, in a simple room with white
walls, feeling sad but without bitterness, express what’s on their
minds…’<br />
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<br />
<br />
we used to write to each other, now we send each other
photographs. We used to agonize over the right words, now we worry about
the light.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09487651999362386311noreply@blogger.com0