The soft quem quam will be Scops the Owl
conjugation of nouns, a line of enquiry,
powdery stubble of the socratic prison
laurels crack like parchments in the wind.
who walks here in the violet dust at night
by the tower of the winds and water-clocks?
tapers smoke upon open coffins
surely the shattered pitchers must one day
revive in the gush of marble breathing up?
call again softly, and again.
the fresh spring empties like a vein
no children spit on their reflected faces
but from the blazing souk below the passive smells
bread urine cooking printing-ink
will tell you what the sullen races think
and among the tombs gnawing of mandolines
confounding sleep with carnage where
strangers arrive like sleepy gods
dismount at nightfall at desolate inns.
Some more recent pics from late last month. I went to the New York Botanic Gardens way up in the Bronx to check out the 2009 Orchid show for my girlfriend’s birthday. No lie, it was put together by someone named Raymond Jungles. Raymond Jungles. Hilarious.
For these, I decided to take the opposite approach to those DC Museum shots and didn’t touch these up at all. If you have any preferences as far as “a lot of PS” or “no PS”, let me know.
I took a bunch of pictures in the museums when I was down in DC last November, but I only recently got around to cleaning up the best of them. I decided to take a different direction with these and modify them more than usual, cause some of them looked damn cool when I did.
No cut-and-paste or brush effects were used; I just played with the levels, curves, saturation, and various color mixtures already inherent each photo. Organic photoshopping…
Still trying to collect myself together. The weekend was great, although really hard. As someone said towards the end of the retreat, “when it’s good it’s good, and when it’s bad, it’s good.” And there were times when it got really bad. I felt like I spent most of the time screaming at the universe “where are you, I need you!” and hearing back only the silence of its presence. Frustrating, but good. That’s the best description I can come up with at the moment.
Some odd loose ends:
1) Great article at the NYTimes about the value of friendships. Some key quotes (emphasis mine):
- Exactly why friendship has such a big effect isn’t entirely clear. While friends can run errands and pick up medicine for a sick person, the benefits go well beyond physical assistance; indeed, proximity does not seem to be a factor.
- Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia, taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone. The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.
2) Some quotes from Joseph Campbell’s Asian Journals (vol 2: saki and satori) (pg 55):
- “Where the gei-sha (“art person”) principle is repressed, civilization declines. Its fosterage leads to cultural adulthood, (India today is my example of an infantile culture).”
- “Where the gei-sha (“art person”) principle is repressed, religion declines – into vulgar image worship and psalm singing.”
- “The gei-sha (“art person”) principle is at the root of the glory of Japan; its motto: “What is it that you want or require? Can do! I can supply your demand in a humble, willing, likable way.” (Leaving aside Campbell’s clearly stated preference for Japanese culture of 1955 over Indian culture of the same period, and also leaving aside the reputation of the geisha as simple a prostitute, what I take from this is that the artistic spirit is one of, ‘what is needed, we can do it” and that such an attitude needs to be applied to everything all the time, in order for a culture to mature. It is the belief that absolutely all needs can be met and properly integrated with all other needs. Not as a goal to be accomplished, but as a way of life to be cultivated. To do otherwise seems to lead to stagnancy and neotany)
And now for a short little picture show:
III. Perceiving the Bull
I hear the song of the nightingale.
The sun is warm, the wind is mild,
willows are green along the shore -
Here no bull can hide!
What artist can draw
that massive head,
those majestic horns?
As a sort of addendum to yesterday’s post, I’ve realized that there’s also a bit of false-pride involved in what I’m working through. Which seems counter-intuitive, I know. Yesterday I’m talking about overcoming an inherent sense of weakness, and today I’m saying just the opposite. Well, yeah. It confuses me too, but both are coming up as true whenever I consider them, so I’m hoping I can spend a little time here to work through this union of opposites.
What seems to be involved is a feeling that I have discovered something GOOD, or of having found a firm platform from which I can extend my thoughts (and my work). That is, a feeling that I am somehow (and I hate to say it, but I want to stay honest here) special, that I have something no one else does and that this makes me better than everyone. At the heart of it there’s the belief that every thought I have is important, or at least that my perspective is always a good perspective to have.
And just like I posted yesterday about weakness, this sense of specialness is not necessarily a false thing. But neither is it not something inherent in my self. If I’m going to say that there is no inherent weakness in my self, I’ll have to accept the flip side of that, that neither is there any inherent specialness or strength either. Maybe I’m good at some things. I’d like to think that I am, anyway. But that doesn’t make my self any more or any less than anyone else’s.
Both these feelings seem to come out from an underlying sense of fear-of-loss. If I see myself as inherently weak, I can hold on to that and label good things that happen as time when I was just lucky, or got something I didn’t deserve. If I see myself as inherently special, I can label times of failure as just glitches in the machine. But in either case I have a definition of “self” I can hold on to. The question is though, who’s holding on to that self?
And just to be clear, this is not stuff that I knew I was doing previously and am suddenly realizing is not such a good idea. That would make me an asshole. What I’m trying to capture here are realizations of subconscious programming that has been running in the background of my awareness for quite a long time, and which I am only now becoming aware of. The old saying, “knowledge is understanding of others, wisdom is understanding of one’s self” is slowly starting to make sense to me. As Voltaire said, we all need to “tend our gardens as best as we possibly can”, because we are the soil that gives birth to the goodness in this world. Keep wiping the mirror until there isn’t any room for dust…
Woke up this morning around 5:00, and it seemed as if I was back in my parents’ house. I could hear my mom talking to her parents on the phone in the next room. Nothing felt strange or at all out of the ordinary, even though I haven’t lived in that house for nearly 10 years. Laying there, I decided to concentrate on my ajna (third eye) chakra; it seemed like exactly the most natural thing to do. As my concentration settled in, I had the feeling of a metal band around my head. I didn’t worry, didn’t try to pull it off, just sat and was aware of it. Then my awareness gathered more centrally in my head and I felt this slow building of bliss from the center of my skull. It became stronger and stronger, but it never became unbearable. Very peaceful and a fast feeling of ease. Eventually it seemed to stabilize. I looked over at the clock and was suddenly back in my room in Brooklyn. No feelings of dislocation, as smooth a transition as I could have asked for. I rolled over and went back to sleep. But even now there is an ease and a sense of space in my head that weren’t there before.
I have been slowly working through the realization that I do not act from a place of good motivations. I have spent hours of furious energy in what I’ve come to see as attempts at compensating for a feeling of less-than-wholeness, rather than in trying to see my way through-and-out-of it. Such a covering-up is impossible; these feelings only exist because I choose to give them existence. As such, they are merely a waste of time, yet they taint everything I do with an inherent sense of weakness that has no basis in reality (that is, although weakness does exist, it is not something inherent in the self). When I see my self as unable, any action that is manifested through/by that self is equally unable. It is choosing stability over growth, and no wonder I am feeling so stuck.
Also involved is a false understanding of the self as something separate from reality. Not only is that obviously not the case (where is the self if it is not in touch with reality), but because I see it as separate, there is a sense that the self must break through some sort of barrier in order to directly engage reality. Creating such an imaginary barrier allows for all kinds of excuses when things do not work out, as imaginary barriers are great reasons for failing to get up and try again. Since they are not actually there, you can make them as big and as complicated as necessary. Yet all that is really required is a need to reorient and begin again, and only fear gets in the way of that. There are no boundaries in nature, just requirements of time and effort.
The goal as of now is to find the feelings responsible for such a flawed view of the self, learn to recognize them without giving attentional belief energy to them, and then slowly starve them to death. They are not the self, as the self is nothing. It is a space within which patterns manifest. Time to pull up these intruders by the root of the weed. Time to learn to chew through that machine.
During meditation this afternoon, the white wall I was sitting in front of kept changing colors, subtly. Similar those colors you see when your eyes are closed. After having spent part of the morning playing around in photoshop (a couple of new photo sets will be up here either tomorrow or Monday), I found this very amusing. My mind is playing with the hue/saturation of reality…
I’m out of the office this week, originally for a week long intensive meditation retreat. That got unintentionally shortened to only Thursday through Sunday, as they only allow first timers (like me) to come for a portion of the intensive, since it can be, well, rather intense. I’m planning on heading up Thursday afternoon, so things will likely be quiet here for a while.
In the meantime, I am using my free time to catch up on some articles I’d been wanting to read, mainly some stuff on neuroscience. Check out today’s posts on The Links for a rundown of the good stuff. The neuroscience kicks off with a large Notes post on a NY Times article about finding (and possible removing) the molecule in the brain that helps store memories. There’s a lot of that over there, perhaps subconsciously saved up in preparation for my journey into the inner frontiers of my own mind. Here’s hoping my head doesn’t explode while I’m up in the mountains, sitting on a cushion, furiously concentrating… or maybe that it does.
Anyway, I am now on twitter, although only provisionally for the time being. It depends on whether I’ll be able to integrate that comfortabley along with this site and the tumblr blog. Right now though, I’m finding myself really worn out and tired. I’m hoping a few days outside the city will really help clear my head. I’ll be back in touch here on Monday, with a report of any worthwhile happenings.
Just had a thought. What’s the difference in usage of “for the foreseeable future” and “at the present time”? I can’t think of any situation off hand where those two phrases wouldn’t be interchangeable? Yet, if the “foreseeable future” is the same as the “present time”, what does that say about the way we experience time?
It really blurs the line between present/future and throws that whole “we only experience life as one single moment at a time” right out the window. Granted, there’s an element of prediction to both those phrases that isn’t apply to our direct experience of reality. But then, where does the line lie between them?
At what point does the experience of “the present moment” slip into the predicted “foreseeable future”?
The plan was to start writing something new here last Sunday. I’d hinted as much in the comments, but then drank myself stupid last Saturday and couldn’t really raise the energy to get back in the saddle (or even get out of bed, to be honest). Then I was on call for jury duty part of last week and had to work overtime at the office the rest of the week playing catch up.
Luckily that’s all over and done with, and I’ve had a chance to get things started up here again, somewhat. My current plan, for what that’s worth, is to pick things up here slowly, with larger pieces spread further apart, with more regular updates on The Links as I get through an unnervingly large backlog of articles I’ve been saving up. But I’m not making any promises, as I’ve noticed that my pronouncements about “what I’m going to do” usually seems to make it that much harder for me to actually get around to doing it. Just goes to show any plans I make are, at best, something I should consider as a loose guideline, and not something that I necessarily must follow through on. Gotta keep that old OODA loop running its course…
First though, I’d like to take a chance to explore the problems I’ve been having when turning my attention back to this site, in the hopes that other people might find it useful. Plus I’d like to try and work through it for my own sake as well.
After the large “Organization” post I was really happy, both my the post itself and everyone’s response to it. I was surprised to see so many people comment on it, and I was really happy to see some of my readers chime in with their own thoughts. One of the things I enjoy most about this blog is the conversations I get into with everybody in the comments; sometimes it feels like the posts are just attempts at stirring up good discussions.
And after that “Organization” post, I wanted to keep up the energy it had raised, and tried to have a post up every day. I managed to pull it off for a couple of weeks, but then I simply ran out of steam. I had become so focused on needing to have something new up that I’d lost any sense of why I wanted to do so in the first place. At first, I didn’t even realize this had happened, and I just felt really sad at my inability to keep up the work.
But I’ve since come to realize that what I enjoy most about the process is organizing my thoughts and experiences into some sort of entertaining ride. As I write here, I am taking a journey through all the things that are floating around in my awareness and trying to piece them together into some kind of whole to make sense of all of them. It’s something similar to making a mandala, I suppose, in that you take different things, put them all together as part of one “whole” in a way that feels as good or as right as possible, and then you let it go.
With the Tibetan sand mandalas, the mandala is blown away as soon as it is completed. And with these blog posts, I hit “publish” and that particular thought-formation is released back into the public noosphere from whence it came, hopefully better polished and more able to help others work through those same thoughts. Anyway, that’s the way I’ve realized that I describe the process to myself, in a subconscious sort of way.
What I’d run into after the “Organization” post was a desire to have more of that feeling of “finished”, without wanting to spend time developing the “thing-to-be-finished”. And I ended up rushing out a bunch of half-finished posts which weren’t on the issues I really wanted to tackle. I’d sacrificed quality for the sake of quantity, and ended up feeling unfulfilled without really knowing why. It’s like picking unripe fruit, except that I’m the tree, the fruit, and the sun all at once. It’s my attention that I focus on certain things which then reach a point where I feel I’ve explored them fully and I can let them go. Why make sour cherries when I can take more time and have some good juicy plums? Or whatever…
Not that quick little sour cherries are bad, but a better balance between the two was definitely needed.
This wasn’t something I realized at the time though (to be honest, I’m really only finally putting the pieces together now), and I looked around for things to blame.
My job? Definitely, because I spend all day at the office in front of the computer, but I can’t focus on the blog very much because, well, because I have a job to do. Forgetting, of course, that it’s that same job that gets me my paycheck and health insurance, and that also teaches me what it means to do something well just because it needs to be done, irregardless of whether or not it’s something I “want” to do…
My relationships? Yeah, of course, they take up time that could be better spent working on my writing. This blog is really what I want to be doing with my life for the time being, and anyone who wasn’t supporting my attempt to be doing that every chance I had, must surely be someone who was only holding me back. And here, I’m forgetting that it’s these very relationships that make life both so enjoyable and so unpredictable. Ain’t no fun to be had in a solipsist universe, unless you like jerking off in a corner and talking to yourself…
Anyway, there was a bunch of finger pointing, but no moons in sight, if you know what I mean. Looking back , I do feel I acted kind of badly, but at the same time, it was a chance to really experience these kinds of feelings in action and focus deeply on them so that now, when I’ve had a chance to put them behind myself a little bit, I have a better understanding of what causes them (all in the interest of better avoiding them in the future).
None of this really began to come together though, until I was sitting in the jury selection pool, waiting to be called to a trial. I was going back and forth on how to approach the interview process. Should I pull some ridiculous tin-foil-hat bullshit, to get out of it? I knew things would be piling up back at the office, and didn’t want to leave my coworkers (who are all great people) pulling my weight for too long. Should I do what I knew I was “supposed” to do, and serve on a jury no matter what? They tell you that trial by jury is one of the things that make America great, that it’s a chance we citizens have to take a part in the governance and administration of the very system which is meant to allow us so many great freedoms. And I do believe in that system, despite whatever other craziness might be going on. The American system is not perfect, but at its core are some really great things. If those things are failing to shine through, then we can only blame ourselves for not keeping things polished enough to let their light out.
I spent most of the day waiting, reading a book. Then, at some point in the early afternoon, the Commissioner of Jurors, Nancy Sunshine, came out to speak with us. She explained how she’d been working to make the jury process smoother and more convenient for everyone. How’d they’d recently gotten rid of the old wooden benches everyone used to have to sit on and put in comfy chairs, plasma TVs (running news coverage all day), computers with free internet access, and free wi-fi for laptops. She asked us to come up and speak with her if we had any suggestions on how to make the waiting process better. It was King’s County’s attempt at crowd sourcing, and I was impressed by her sincerity. I almost went up and asked if there was any plan to put a Starbucks in the waiting area, but I figured, no need to be a smartass. Plus there was one right across the street.
She went on to tell us that many of the cases that we had been called for had reached verdicts without needing a jury. She spoke of the persuasive presence of jurors, how many parties bringing cases to trial would see the many people on hand to serve on juries and would decide against seeking legislation. She spoke of the power of presence, of how we were actively fulfilling our civic duty by simply being present. I thought of the old saying about “90% of life being just showing up”, and I thought of the meditation practice I’d been undertaking these past few months.
Long story short, I almost made it out the first day without being called, but got summoned in to be interviewed for a jury towards the end of the first day. They didn’t finish the interview process that night, so we were told to show up again the next morning. After a few hours of waiting that next morning, it turned out that our trial had done exactly what Ms Sunshine talked about and settled without a requiring a jury. We were put back into the pool and were the first group of people to be dismissed later that day.
That experience, on top of what I was going through in regards to keeping this blog going, really brought home the fact of how much our life just requires us to be present in it. To work on fully acknowledging exactly what is going on around us and exactly how we feel about it. I’ve been trying to do this is every aspect of life lately, and it has proven quite difficult.
Facing every situation exactly as it is, not bringing in anything that is irrelevant, and to trying to truly decide what I think the best course of action is, makes me feel like a toddler trying to learn how to walk again. It’s such a slow process, but it’s forcing all my old thoughts and prejudices out of my mind, because I don’t have the energy to sustain them, not when I’m trying to achieve the best possible understanding of what-is-really-going-on and how-I-really-feel-about-it.
With that said, I’ll let this little grain of sand loose on the winds, to blow around until it can get into someone else’s eye and make them tear up and wash themselves a little bit cleaner. I’ll finish up with a long list of pictures and videos in an attempt to capture another facet of this thought-form. Hope you all enjoy, and Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and Happy Buddha’s Birthday everybody!
Recently found an treasure trove of some old work from college. I won’t bore you with most of it, but some pieces still seem at least somewhat relevant, so I’ll be sharing them over the next few weeks.
These are a couple of collages I’d made for a digital arts class. They’re kind of silly, but I still like ‘em. Click for full size versions…
For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed some strange effects in the spam caught in my Askimet filter. It looks like the links are trying to line up, like a television that’s nearly tuned to the right station but not quite. Don’t know if this was happening to everybody, but it was happening in most of the longer spam about 10 days or so.
An example:
It made me think of the Outer Limits introduction: “We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal, and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels or expand one single image to crystal clarity – and beyond.” Sounds like a lot of fun to me. Where can I get me hands on something with that kind of control?
Anyway, the spam bots have stopped doing it at this point; they’re back to the random mix of blue in with the rest of the text. But I’m still waiting. If they ever manage to get a straight blue line top to bottom, I’ll consider it some kind of serious achievement. What that actually means, I have no idea. Probably nothing. I long ago gave up on the idea that there was anything useful in those strangely poetic utterances. Far too much noise, and far too little signal.
and you make a mistake that you refuse to acknowledge, the universe will hold you in place until you recognize that the mistake was yours. No matter how small (or large) it might have been.
Because that’s what you’d asked it to do…
From Rumi:
Never lose hope
if the Beloved pushes you away,
if He shuts the door on you, don’t go,
be patient and wait!
It is your patience that will
draw him back.
If he blocks all your roads,
be sure
He will show you a secret way
unknown to others.
Reason is our facility which allows us a clear view of the world-as-it-is. In this facility, no sense of self belongs, as it functions best when it is objective.
But the problem is that we hold our “self” as separate from reality, as if the two did not interact fully like “two arrows meeting in mid air”, and yet still think that we can reason properly. We can’t reason properly when we have this false sense of differentiation between the internal and the external.
“Emptiness” is the proper inclusion of the “self” within the experience of reason and understanding. In truly enlightened reasoning, there is no “self” distinct from everything else. Everything that you think of as a “self” is merely a sensation within the enlightened reason of your awareness. That awareness is where your true self lies…
Hallelujah.
And once the reason is fully integrated with the body/mind, then we can begin to grow further. This is evolution in action. Perhaps reason will become as instantaneous as emotion? Maybe not… Reflexive? Instinctive?
Walking home in rain. Chants from Africa on iPod. Felt “self” as an unreal thing moved by something higher. Want to entrain that higher thing completely…
