A Thousand Peaceful Cities

"I'm concerned with the spiritual aspect," Mr. Trąba started to giggle unexpectedly and in a very peculiar manner. "I'm concerned with the spiritual aspect, plus practice, of course.  Training is the way of life.  Moreover, one mustn't forget that this," Mr Trąba raised the crossbow to his shoulder, "is the weapon of the ancient Chinese.  And the ancient Chinese say that when you shoot at your target, you must free yourself from trivial thoughts of the necessity of hitting it.  The shot must have a spiritual scope, whereas the shooter must remain in intense tension until the shot falls upon the target like a ripe fruit falling, like snow from a bamboo leaf..."

(H)

Truth is a pathless land.

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organised; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organise a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organise it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallised; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others."

--Jiddu Krishnamurti, from this speech

This reminds me of don Juan's statement about all paths leading nowhere. 

Li Tuan

"Her hands of white jade by a window of snow
Are glimmering on a golden-fretted harp--
And to draw the quick eye of Chou Yu,
She touches a wrong note now and then."
-Li Tuan

(J; courtesy of James Monaco)

1939 and 1999

Two articles about 1939 and 1999, two very important years in American movies.

(J)

movies and power

"[Movies] function, not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen. This is not a wish for power, . . . but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens."

--Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

Again, the responsibility ("burden") of power, agency.

(J)

Emotions and responsibility

". . . we will not . . . be in a position to understand much less to change ourselves until we have learned to accept this responsibility [for our emotions], to view the passions as our own and our doing, and to ask, not 'What causes me to feel this?' but always 'What reason do I have for doing this?"

--from Robert C. Solomon's The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion

I am nearly finished with this book, and I will certainly discuss it more--this is just a taste. This shift he describes in one's approach to the emotions completely turned me on my head when I read it. In the days following, I have already noticed a distinct change in my attitude towards my emotions, particularly paying more attention to the strategies employed by different emotions, but with a greater sense of responsibility, assuming that each reaction or habit is at heart my own doing. This is been my opinion on the matter for a few years, but Solomon's book has really helped to clear much of my confusion about putting this conviction into practice.

(J)

Divine Darkness

J (4/21/12):

Here is Alan Watts' translation of Pseudo-Dionysius' Mystical Theology.

Note (1) in particular stood out to me:

(1) Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or nescience as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore it is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. There are two main kinds of darkness: the subdarkness and the super-darkness, between which lies, as it were, an octave of light. But the nether-darkness and the Divine Darkness are not the same darkness, for the former is absence of light, while the latter is excess of light. The one symbolizes mere ignorance, and the other a transcendent unknowing - a superknowledge not obtained by means of the discursive reason. [italics mine]

I love encountering images like these in the writings of these early theologians: the Darkness that is the "excess of light," a luminous presence so intense that it becomes a form of darkness, of "super-darkness."

---

H (4/21/12):

One quick reaction (only because I can apply what I've learned in the Marias' book):

 "that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One" is an extreme form of nomalism (originating in Medieval Scholasticism), one that William of Occam (Ockham) wrote about.  His theory was that only faith could give us access to theological truths (that is, bring us closer to God) and that reason had nothing to do with theology and God; reason is only used for science.

Chikamatsu Monazaemon

"The twittering yellow thrush rests on the corner of the mound. If a man fails to rest in the place meant for him, does it mean that he is inferior to this bird?"

I have loved this quote ever since I first read it.  It's from a 18th century Japanese playwright whose plays are superb.  What are your thoughts?

(H)

What have we really learned thus far?

I posted this on the blog with Peter (from here on out, known as P/H's), but really wanted you to see this interesting line from the Don Juan book.

"Fear is the first natural enemy a man must overcome on his path to knowledge."

From The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.

(H)

Re: really long movies...

"However, another approach to the mind in time is to make us acutely (sometimes painfully) aware of our own apprehension of the world by slowing down the passage of minutes. Slow cinema--a form in which 'longueurs' is not a dirty word--throws us back on our own thought processes, sometimes even deliberately bores us so that we are obliged to keep thinking if we want to stay conscious. Never underestimate a film-maker's recourse to the oppressive effects of duration and repetition, as with Chantal Akerman's icily analytical Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a 225-minute account of domestic drudgery that sets out to prove that a woman's work is never done until the viewer's mind is done in.

Other devotees of duration (either over an entire film or within single extended shot) are Jacques Rivette, many of whose films (including the original 13-hour cut of Out 1) make us experience the real duration of film so that the act of sitting in a cinema becomes akin to an extended theatrical experience. Also theatrical, in a more pageant-like sense, are the works of Hungary's Miklós Jancsó and Greece's Theo Angelopoulos, both of whom represent modern history as a series of stately and complex dance moves to be executed by individuals and crowds on large landscapes in long takes (Jancsó's The Red and the White, Angelopoulos's four-hour The Travelling Players). There's also a film that might be called the ultimate 'documentary' about the viewer's relationship to vision: Michael Snow's majestically incommunicative Wavelength, a single (or apparently single) 45-minute zoom in which the viewer's mind becomes aware of its own forward thrust, straining to detect whatever the certain hidden something is that the camera obstinately refuses to disclose."

This is from an essay, "Let's get cerebral," by film critic Jonathan Romney, which surveys the range of movies whose subject matter include time, perception, the mind, cinema itself, etc. The essay is from one of my favorite books about movies, TimeOut's 1000 Films to Change Your Life, which is organized, delightfully, by emotions that movies can evoke or explore. The nine emotions included are: joy, anger, desire, fear, sadness, exhilaration, regret, contempt, and wonder, along with a tenth category, "food for thought." When I first came across the book, I found this approach so refreshing, as I was growing tired of my usual source of movie recommendations, "greatest" or "most important" lists, or lists organized by genre. Instead of organizing movies by their technical, historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance, this book organized and recommended them based on their emotional power.

From the introduction: "To begin with, we make no suggestion that every film mentioned in the following 240 pages is 'good,' or even 'worthy.' Secondly, this book does not have a special interest in the critical or popular stock of any given film--though it's not short of praise for hundreds of movies we think anyone would enjoy watching. Instead, it's about the ways--even ways their makers may not have foreseen--that films go to work on us. . . . We reckon there are already quite enough generalist movie books organised by genre--chapter on the Western, chapter on the road movie, chapter on horror flicks, and so on. More interesting, we argued, to look at films through the emotions they trigger: the instant, unthinking, gut reactions, the Geiger counter clicks of a movie's power. That's why 1000 Films is shaped by the nine emotions people are most likely to feel at the cinema; there's one chapter dedicated to each. And a tenth chapter, entitled Food for Thought, assesses the thinking responses that are often just a short distance behind the visceral ones."

The book's essays are fascinating. I like to see how people plot the relationships between movies--historically, thematically, emotionally. One essay will discuss the history of the American road movie, while another will trace different images that pop up in many films noir, and another will analyze the genre of the musical in the context of presenting an image of joy, especially in dark times like the Great Depression or the World Wars. The emotional approach gets really interesting when a particular American silent movie's emotional tone is likened to a very similar tone in a Japanese drama made 70 years later. Of course, any given movie will cycle through many emotions and produce varied emotional responses in its viewers. They wouldn't be as rich as they are if this were not true.

I find this book a nice accompaniment to the list put out by the National Film Registry's list--a division of the Library of Congress whose criteria are three of the ones I mentioned above (culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant), along with the requirement that the movie was American-made. I'll have more to say about the National Film Registry another time, but I will say that its goal, to me, seems to be naming and ensuring the preservation of American "documents" or "texts" that happen to be in the format of film. So, you not only have Hollywood feature films, but animated shorts, documentaries about race relations, specific geographical regions, or cultural segments (like Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary High School, which presents a "fly-on-the-wall" view of a typical day at a Philadelphia high school). If you read over the year-end report published by the Library of Congress detailing the 25 new films that were added to the registry that year, you will see the range of types of film chosen to represent America.

I have more to say about these different ways of valuing movies, as other "lists" come to mind, like the Academy Award Best Pictures and the AFI Institute lists.

(J)

knowledge & war

"A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.  Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps."

From The Teaching of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.

(H)

The body and its potentials

Re: our discussion about the possibilities of the body, and the role that one's culture/society plays in defining certain limitations for the body, emphasizing certain potentials and not recognizing other potentials. One culture, and even one historical period, may recognize cosmetic surgery as a potential for the body, another may recognize the ability to walk on hot coals, another may recognize the self-infliction of pain as a path to spiritual understanding. Charles Tart has some things to say about this in the context of assumptions. 


I was thinking about the particular role psychedelic plants and compounds have played in modern American culture, mainly during the twentieth century, in this context. What ethnopharmacologists, anthropologists, and other researchers have found is that most cultures in the world outside of the modern West have some recognition of certain plants as "teachers," to be treated with the same respect and humility one would accord a wise man, a shaman, or a guru. This is a possibility that is recognized in those cultures, the idea that a student-teacher relationship can be conducted with a particular plant. But our culture for the most part does not have much experience cultivating this potential. There have been traditions, both in Europe and America, that emphasized the healing or instructive powers of nature, like the Romantics and the Transcendentalists. And there has certainly been a history of ingesting certain plants/plant products for artistic inspiration (cannabis, opium, etc.), recreation (alcohol), or even for increased production, especially in the post-industrial age (coffee). Of course there are other relationships and dimensions with these drugs, these are just a few.


But the plant as teacher, ingested teacher, particularly for the purposes of spiritual or religious understanding, is not as common in our culture. So it seems like a good idea to turn to these other cultures, who have been cultivating this particular relationship for a long time--creating ritual settings, educating the members of the culture as to the safe, beneficial use of the plant(s)--to learn from them. It's another example of the fact that different assumptions lead to different conclusions: what is the end result of assuming that if I ingest a particular plant, I can learn certain things, that I can follow a specific path with this specific relationship? Like I mentioned, it never occurred to me, before I was exposed to certain ideas from India, "how can I train my own body to control the 'involuntary' aspects of my breathing?" Similarly, I never assumed, as a child, that a plant could be a teacher--not just on the level of communing with nature, but by actually introducing a substance into my body. 

And on the topic of the body and its potentials, I see some similarities between certain drugs, like the psychedelics, and sex: easy to misuse or abuse, potentially dangerous, managed/regulated/controlled in different ways in different parts of the world, but also potential teachers and sources of profundity. Both also have a multifaceted relationship with different religious systems and approaches to spirituality, ranging from outright damnation to complete abstinence to consecrated ritual use.


Some resources I have found helpful:


Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within (documentary, 2011)


DMT: The Spirit Molecule (documentary, 2010)--the YouTube channel for the documentary has full interviews with several interesting people in this field


Council on Spiritual Practices' section on entheogens

This book


Dale Pendell's three books, particularly Pharmako/gnosis

Alan Watts' Joyous Cosmology


(J)

Prologue and Requisites

H (3/7/12) sends the Prologue and Requisites from Julián Marías' Reason and Life: The Introduction to Philosophy. 


---


J (3/20/12) responds to this paragraph in particular:


"The Greek verb from which the noun "problem" is derived means to throw or cast forward. Problem means in the first place something jutting out, for example a promontory: more concretely, an obstacle, something that I find before me; and by metaphorical extension, what we usually call an "intellectual problem." But let it be noted that in order that something should be an obstacle to me, it is not enough that it should be there in front of me: I have the wall in front of me too, and does not serve as an obstacle to me, but as a shelter--another sense which the Greek word also possesses; its presence in front of me is not sufficient for it to be converted into an obstacle: it is necessary that I should need to pass to the other side of it, precisely by going through it; then it is a real obstacle, in the concrete form of what the Greeks called aporia, that is, lack of any pore or hole through which to escape from a situation."


J: Still reading it, so dense! But I can say a few things right now.

I appreciate the likelihood that I may never read the actual book, but that the introduction has shown me several interesting ways of thinking about the process of thinking, philosophizing, and problem-solving. As he points out, the historical situation is central to the relevance of a particular philosophy, and part of the reason why I feel like I may not read the actual book, at least following my current patterns, is its historical situation in 1950s America, one that I don't connect with as much. But he himself recognizes that, and so he at times discusses matters that are less entwined with his own historical situation, like the discussion of what a "problem" is, including the Greek origins of the word. That was my favorite part so far (I'm about halfway done). His pointing out that something--a situation, a concept, an attitude--is only a problem if it is perceived as an obstacle. And "obstacle" implies movement, the process of going somewhere, and the thing that is preventing one from getting to where one is going. Like when he mentions a wall--a wall can be either an obstacle or a shelter, depending on one's goals and where one wants to go. I love this because it reveals to me a bit why different people get passionately involved in vastly different theories, concepts, ideas. It seems that it is partly a matter of where they are going, or where they believe they are going. For one person a particular religious belief may take the form of a shelter, and the person may passionately guard this shelter from any outside attack, from entertaining any possibility of their belief being wrong or false, just as one would want to protect one's physical home from attack. But for someone else, who is also religious but takes shelter in otherbeliefs, this same religious belief may prove to be an obstacle for them--an obstacle in their journey for truth, or peace, or happiness. So they may seek to debunk or dismantle the other person's belief, because for them it is not necessary, and appears to be impeding a religious understanding that they believe they are heading towards. Does that make sense? It's like what you told me about that older woman whom you spoke with. Was it Gwen's grandmother? The woman's face when you felt like you shattered, or at least tampered with, one of her cherished beliefs. Sort of like that. 

Or I think of it in terms of relationships. In a monogamous, romantic relationship if one person wants to go out and experience romance with other people, they may perceive the relationship's boundaries, its walls, as obstacles to be overcome or solved, whereas the other partner may perceive those boundaries as their shelter, taking comfort in the exclusivity of the monogamy. The first person will experience the conflict of facing an obstacle, while the second will experience the comfort of resting in a shelter. Of course, it is usually more complex than that, but you know what I'm saying.

Anyway, that discussion of obstacle vs. shelter has proven to be most fertile for me.

---

H (3/21/12): Wow.  Can I pass this along to Peter?  You've got some great thoughts here.  I mean, you're talking about what defines the very nature of conflict (vs oneself, vs others).  There is a subtle motif below the larger issue of obstacle vs shelter which also interests me a lot: the manifestation of ideas, and their physicality.  It's interesting to think that an IDEA can become a wall.  It's as if the make up of a thought straddles metaphysical and physical composition.  

There's a lot more I want to think about before continuing along this line of thought.