self, art and buddhism in the la review of books
“If you’ve ever sat through a silent 10-day meditation retreat, you know the spectacle that is the human mind — the monkey mind (as the Buddhists call it), the clamoring mind; the memories rising, relentlessly, one after another, the sheer acrobatics of thinking. According to certain meditation practices, samsara is the story we create of experience. It is the mechanism of the mind that interprets sensation and turns it into narrative. But we suffer, the thinking goes, because we react to sensation based on these stories. One teacher describes samsara, first, as a line in the sand — erased easily by the rising tide. The danger, he warns, is that over time such lines become as permanent as grooves etched into stone. It’s not just that our stories lack flexibility or nuance, but that they ultimately create a phantom self — a limiting and faulty version of who we are based on past events, with an ego that eclipses our ability to observe the world in the present moment. This, according to the ancients, is the cause of our misery; the alternative, however — the dissolution of ego — is a threatening paradigm for any person to consider, let alone one who has devoted her life to art.”
“Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.
I think your philosophy on religion is okay. I think every person should think, act & believe according to the dictates of his own conscience without too much pressure from the outside. I too think there is a higher power, a supreme force, a governor, a something that controls the universe. What it is & in what form I do not know. It may be that our intellect or spirit exists in space in some other form after it parts from this body. Nothing is impossible and we know that nothing is destroyed, it only changes chemically. We burn up a house and its contents, we change the form but the same elements exist; gas, vapor, ashes. They are all there just the same.”
LeRoy Pollock to his son Jackson, 1928
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles (Number 11), 1952
the “problem of other minds” in the guardian
“In everyday life, the problem of other minds isn’t usually a problem: we assume everyone has one, and things mostly work out fine. Even so, it’s a useful reminder to be sceptical when it comes to our belief that we know what’s going on in other people’s heads. If we can’t be certain there’s a mind there at all, how much more dubious are the detailed assumptions we habitually make about what they’re thinking? The field of social psychology is a litany of the ways we get overconfident about our ability to read others’ minds, landing us in trouble.”
“We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.”
Annie Dillard
“Your parents are the first memo to come across your desk, on a page so large you can’t see past its edges.”
-Jonathan Lethem
“That’s what art does, that’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head by something you weren’t prepared for — by a work, by a play, a song, a scene in a movie, a painting, a collage, a cartoon, an advertisement — something that has the power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person standing next to you, or even anyone else on Earth — art that produces a revelation that you might not be able to explain or pass on to anyone else, a revolution that you desperately try to share in your own words, in your own work.”
simon critchley on uncertainty in the nyt:
The pursuit of scientific knowledge is as personal an act as lifting a paintbrush or writing a poem, and they are both profoundly human. If the human condition is defined by limitedness, then this is a glorious fact because it is a moral limitedness rooted in a faith in the power of the imagination, our sense of responsibility and our acceptance of our fallibility. We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.
a physics devotee describes her conversion to writing in the atlantic:
“The language of science was unsatisfying to me. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible,” Einstein said. But I don’t think human relationships are ever fully comprehensible. They can clarify for small, beautiful moments, but then they change. Unlike a scientific experiment with rigorous, controlled parameters, our lives are boundless and shifting. And there’s never an end to the story. We need more than science—we need storytelling to capture that kind of complexity, that kind of incomprehensibility.”
oliver burkeman and rick moody on stopping the search for the “one true secret” to anything (the guardian)
“Indeed, there’s one view of psychology according to which everything we do to make ourselves miserable – every dysfunctional behaviour, from minor to destructive – begins as an approach that once worked well, often in childhood, then passed its sell-by date. We’re not idiots who choose unhappiness; rather, we develop coping mechanisms that make sense at the time. ”
on other people talking about their dreams (bbc):
“these bizarre monologues do highlight an interesting aspect of the dream world: the creation of connections between things that didn’t seem connected before. When you think about it, this isn’t too unlike a description of what creative people do in their work – connecting ideas and concepts that nobody thought to connect before in a way that appears to make sense.”
pina bausch, blaubart (performance), 1977
zadie smith on mortality, phones and louis ck in the new york review of books:
“His aim, in that skit, was to rid us of our smart phones, or at least get us to use the damn things a little less (“You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your products, and then you die”), and it went viral, and many people smiled sadly at it and thought how correct it was and how everybody (except them) should really maybe switch off their smart phones, and spend more time with live people offline because everybody (except them) was really going to die one day, and be dead forever, and shouldn’t a person live—truly live, a real life—while they’re alive?”
damien hirst, posterity-the holy place, 2006
some guidelines for decision making in the harvard business review:
“ultimately we’re best served by avoiding paralysis-by-analysis and moving foward by:
paying close attention to the feelings and emotions that accompany the decision we’re facing,
assessing how motivated we are to work toward the success of any given option, and
recognizing that no matter what option we choose, our efforts to support its success will be more important than the initial guesswork that led to our choice.”
laurie anderson reflects on what one 21-year-long relationship looked like (rolling stone) :
“Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other’s work, studied things together (butterfly hunting, meditation, kayaking). We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other. We were always seeing a lot of art and music and plays and shows, and I watched as he loved and appreciated other artists and musicians. He was always so generous. He knew how hard it was to do. We loved our life in the West Village and our friends; and in all, we did the best we could do.
Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.”
annie leibovitz, photo, 1995
thoughts on mourning on social media in slate:
“Social media may make it easier to launch a stream of frown-y faces into the ether, but Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent the impulse to reach out when you’re hurting. Perhaps it’s the ephemerality of online mourning that trivializes it—the word limits mocking death’s enormity…Social media platforms favor a tone of snark and irony, not earnestness, which can make plaintive expressions of grief hard to parse. And since we use Twitter and Facebook in part to create a public persona, our posts always run the risk of appearing self-promotional, inauthentic: It’s never quite clear whether someone is actually upset about the latest Hollywood overdose or just trying to seem that way. Of course, this makes our online interactions pretty much the same as our offline ones: a stream of true and false statements mixed together, adding up to a social self that is sort of us and sort of not.”
compelling lessons from a popular chinese philosophy class at harvard in the atlantic
“At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. ”
david byrne on the struggle of making art in nyc in the guardian
“The city is a body and a mind – a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information. Knowledge and creativity are resources. If the physical (and financial) parts are functional, then the flow of ideas, creativity and information are facilitated. The city is a fountain that never stops: it generates its energy from the human interactions that take place in it. Unfortunately, we’re getting to a point where many of New York’s citizens have been excluded from this equation for too long.”
oliver burkeman on “empowered refusal” in the guardian:
“Who wouldn’t rather be the self-directed, principled type who doesn’t have more than one beer, than the rule-oppressed drudge who can’t’?”
do addicts have a choice? (the atlantic)
“Eventually, addicts find themselves torn between reasons to use and reasons not to. Sometimes a spasm of self-reproach (“this is not who I am;” “I’m hurting my family,” “my reputation is at risk”) tips the balance toward quitting. Novelist and junkie William S. Burroughs calls this the “naked lunch” experience, “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
In short, every addict has reasons to begin using, reasons to continue, and reasons to quit. To act on a reason is to choose. To make good choices requires the presence of meaningful alternatives. And making a series of good choices leads to achievements—jobs, relationships, reputations. These give a person something meaningful to lose, another reason in itself to steer away from bad choices.”