Multitasking = Attention Deficit ? Learning Therapy

Okay, so I'm sad today ... I always get sad when I can't do something as well as I expect ... I let go and mindmap to relax ... free associate and come what will ... I stay with it until I learn something ... anything(?) new. I know I'm overextended, I let it happen ... things become disconnected ... brain cells die of loneliness ... so make some new connections, renew even as I disintegrate, evaporate ... I'm crazy for connections:

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” -- Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

So stop, center, focus ... I can't center everything, and yet "Centering [is] that act which precedes all others on the potter's wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, unwobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts." --Mary Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.

Okay, so learn something ... make connections: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers by base minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you." --Terence H. White, The Once and Future King

Art & Organism: POETRY AT WAR

I find the social / political significance of art is as compelling as any more intimate or even uniquely personal significance. Such power is often neglected in thinking about how the experience of art affects our ability to meet our (real or perceived) needs. The mind bending powers of propaganda art and music are better known than poetry ... but then there's Kipling ... and Muhammad Abdille Hassan, known now as then to the Somalis as Sayyid, or "Master" and to the British as "The Mad Mullah."

Every educated Somali, Jeffrey Bartholet writes, knows what happened at Dul Madoba in 1913: “ Some have memorized verses of a classic Somali poem written by the mullah [that prevailed over the British there]. The gruesome ode is addressed to Richard Corfield, a British political officer who commanded troops on this dusty edge of the empire. The mullah instructs Corfield, who was slain in battle, on what he should tell God's helpers on his way to hell. "Say: 'In fury they fell upon us.'/Report how savagely their swords tore you."

“Many Somalis would come to think [the mullah] mad in another sense—that he was touched by God.... “It's impossible to gauge the impact the poem had on the thinking of Somali fighters [then and now]. … In an age before television, the Internet, and streaming video, the mullah used poetry as a propaganda tool, both to gain sympathy and to terrify his foes.

Today poetry is also written and recited by bin Laden and just about every other Qaeda leader with a following. The poems proliferate on jihadi Web sites.” (from his essay, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (Newsweek, Oct 12, 2009; http://www.newsweek.com/id/216509/)

Sunday, October 25, 2009 5PM On the deck overlooking the back yard, only a little chilly. Neighbors have turned off their leaf blowers and I can imagine their pride of power and a bright green lawn. crickets and birds, a distant dog’s bark , The sun is behind the top of the trees in the yard now but the green and gold and amber leaves have become incandescent. Reading Wm F. Schulz’s little essay[1] in UU World from last winter. He was head of Amnesty International and exposed to the vicarious experience of unrelenting evil for over a decade. But he spoke also of the grace often on the other side. I began to think of assembling a little sermon on “fear.”
I have a daughter who may or may not have daughters who may or may not have daughters themselves …I have students who may or may not have students, and so on…
Some days, I feel like I have come to the crest of time. An event horizon. Poised at the angle of repose soon to join a cascade over the edge when the flicker of an eyelash a mile away triggers the tipping point.
[1] http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/121286.shtml

Driving home...

After a long Fall break weekend in Asheville (we saw Tosca, the annual Bonsai exhibition), WE impulsively chose to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway home to Knoxville ... We saw the clouds above but went anyway ... an adventure. But then we were IN the clouds, we were part of them. The Parkway is narrow and we felt very safe. As we drove through the clouds the world revealed itself to our senses slowly, sensuously ... the gorgeous colors of death preceding rebirth emerged from the mist, resonating with other myths I live by. The little mysteries of "what next" echoed the great mystery ... Blue Ridge mist / boughs of trees / … born before my eyes.

On the day that I die ...

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.

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)

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)

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....

(from Chares Simac's 2002 review of works by Zagejewski in NYRB May 9 .. .)

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.

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.

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.”"

NEED to KNOW ... when do mere desires become needs?

The need to know one's self is a central concern in the pursuit of self actualization. At some point, this knowledge may be abandoned (I have heard), but it seems to be the indispensable scaffold. ("know thyself" was inscribed at the shrine of the Delphic oracle, very near the other critical injunction, "nothing in excess")

“ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves ...” (opening line of Metaphysics by Aristotle, 350BCE). "Mandates" of sufficient urgency have come, over time, to be a constitutional element of the species, and we are guided by delight where deeper purposes may not be obvious.

WAYS of KNOWING must be in balanced lockstep:
“There are two modes of knowing, through argument and experience. Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but does not cause certainty nor remove the doubts in order that the mind may remain at rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience” (Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, 1268)