BEATLES. When I think of the Beatles or hear some of their old tunes I expect part of my pleasure is a kindly, cozy bias ... a trusty, safe connection as though we've survived some trauma together. Cozy but not fresh. Then Paul McCartney does something new like these lyrics from “The End of the End” –
On the day that I die
I’d like jokes to be told
And stories of old
To be rolled out like carpets
That children have played on
And laid on while listening
To stories of old.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The A&O Diary
I ask all A&O students to keep an intimate diary/ a scrapbook of their soul ... now I know why. “I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul." (Carl Jung’s advice to a client for processing recoveries from the non-conscious mind. Found in the client’s self-published book and quoted by Sonu Shamdasani in NYTimes Magazine 9/16/2009; Jung's own diary was "The Red Book" recently released by the estate ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Arcane dimensions of beauty: a nacreous point of view
Nacre is an iridescent layer of calcium carbonate lining the inside of shells of marine mollusks and is commonly known as "mother of pearl." It is composed of layers of uniformly oriented crystals of aragonite (a metastable form of calcium carbonate) separated by layers of organic matrix. How the ordered structure of aragonite layers is achieved has been unclear. Suzuki et al. (p. 1388, published online 8/13/09) identified two acidic matrix proteins (Pif 97 and Pif 80) that regulate nacre formation in the Japanese pearl oyster. The proteins appear to form a complex in which Pif 80 binds to aragonite and Pif 97 binds to other macromolecules in the organic matrix. (SCIENCE, Volume 325, Issue 5946, 9/11/2009)
Monday, September 7, 2009
The I, developing
In a poem entitled "Ode to Plurality" Adam Zagejewski writes:
...Who once
touched philosophy is lost
and won't be saved by a poem
...Who once learned a wild
run of poetry will not taste anymore
the stony calm of family narratives
...Who has once met
irony will burst into laughter
during the prophet's lecture....
...Who once
touched philosophy is lost
and won't be saved by a poem
...Who once learned a wild
run of poetry will not taste anymore
the stony calm of family narratives
...Who has once met
irony will burst into laughter
during the prophet's lecture....
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Montaigne, me
Relaxing, Reading recently arrived New Yorker (September 7), I found Jane Kramer’s “Me, Myself, And I,” about Michel De Montaigne.
“Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day that the educated nobleman Michel de Montaigne retired from court and public duties, retreated into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday. His plan was to spend the second half of his life looking at himself. Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called 'essais.'” ... "They made no claim to composing the narrative of a life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves—and, of course, with himself. … ”
… he wrote in his essay, “On Vanity,” that “Even in my wishes and dreams I can find nothing to which I can hold fast. The only things I find rewarding (if anything is) are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.” (quoted on p38) -- Surely this is so attractive to me because it is so close to my own sentiment … put quite well, I think, by Kathryn Morton: "Nothing passes but the mind grabs it and looks for a way to fit it into a story....Feverish for order, our minds seek not only a unified field theory, a pencil by the telephone and a punch line to the joke. We want to make sense out of the greatest mystery all of us must face‑‑ourselves." (1985, in “The Story-Telling Animal”) … Montaigne ends “On Vanity” with the Delphic Oracle’s familiar injunction: “Know Thyself” ... resonating again as I hear myself telling another group of A&O students that the beginning and end of being an artist (a human) is to know and to be known.
Later in Jane Kramer’s piece, she comments that Montaigne “thinks of himself as a browser, and in a way he is, because, by his account, a couple of interesting thoughts or stories bin one book will always remind him of something smarter, or more interesting—or better still, contradictory—in another book and he opens that.” (p40). Although I feel more like a pinball in play, this almost makes me feel normal.
“Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day that the educated nobleman Michel de Montaigne retired from court and public duties, retreated into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday. His plan was to spend the second half of his life looking at himself. Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called 'essais.'” ... "They made no claim to composing the narrative of a life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves—and, of course, with himself. … ”
… he wrote in his essay, “On Vanity,” that “Even in my wishes and dreams I can find nothing to which I can hold fast. The only things I find rewarding (if anything is) are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.” (quoted on p38) -- Surely this is so attractive to me because it is so close to my own sentiment … put quite well, I think, by Kathryn Morton: "Nothing passes but the mind grabs it and looks for a way to fit it into a story....Feverish for order, our minds seek not only a unified field theory, a pencil by the telephone and a punch line to the joke. We want to make sense out of the greatest mystery all of us must face‑‑ourselves." (1985, in “The Story-Telling Animal”) … Montaigne ends “On Vanity” with the Delphic Oracle’s familiar injunction: “Know Thyself” ... resonating again as I hear myself telling another group of A&O students that the beginning and end of being an artist (a human) is to know and to be known.
Later in Jane Kramer’s piece, she comments that Montaigne “thinks of himself as a browser, and in a way he is, because, by his account, a couple of interesting thoughts or stories bin one book will always remind him of something smarter, or more interesting—or better still, contradictory—in another book and he opens that.” (p40). Although I feel more like a pinball in play, this almost makes me feel normal.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Imperfection ... Radiance all around
Opening to You - Parabola Magazine:
"Ring the bells that can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
"Ring the bells that can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
"Still, I found myself returning time and again to Baran’s own reflections on Present Moment Awareness:
“I spent years trying to be a holy, solemn monk. It was so artificial, unnecessary, and, in retrospect, goofy. I was trying to glow in the dark while in truth everything was naturally radiant.”"
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