Category Archives: Aesthetic philosophy

“To all and to none.” Heidegger

31 Thursday May 2012

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Yesterday, I found myself singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with my family just as we have done many times over, but this time our tone was gentle and elegiac because our intended audience was a dying rabbit in a cardboard box, wrapped in my jacket. I know, for those who know me, that yes, it seems like injured and dying animals flock to me, but it might just be that this is the condition we all are in: living in the borderlands where a dominating human presence presses up against nature’s tenuous domain.

The bunny, who happened to be lying in the dirt path on our routine evening walk, seemed to have a leg injury and a scratch on the nose, perhaps a result of predation by a cat, a coyote, a raptor, a bicyclist, who knows.

As occurred to me when a bloodied raven worked his way out of my green Whole Foods bag onto the front seat of my car, I again had a fear of driving off the road if the bunny might leap from the box into my lap. But I reasoned that it was more likely this bunny, lying awkwardly in such bad shape and with an inherent fragile heart, was dead.

A few miles into the drive, wondering if indeed Bunny was still alive and finding my NPR show jarring, I decided to peel back the fabric to see what Bunny was doing. And there suddenly was a fur-lined, big, black, round eye staring straight up at me — and a look of fright and curiosity and concern exchanged between us. I quickly covered Bunny back up.

I immediately recalled the image of another big, round, animal eye that had also poignantly looked up at me. An adult pelican, with an injured wing wrapped in a towel, sat on my lap as my friend drove us to the same shelter. En route, feeling the bird’s heart rate progressively calm, I peeled back the warm, wet towel to glimpse Pelican. Pelican’s eye was questioning and fearful, and I decided the darkness of the towel was more comforting than my own questioning, strange, and incredulous face.

So it seems fitting that I have been thinking about an amazingly beautiful film recently screened at the Experimental Film Festival in Portland, by a friend and colleague, Catherine Fairbanks. You can watch it for yourself here.

http://catherinefairbanks.com/artwork/2397516_Transference_is_a_Tough_Row_to_Hoe.html

"Transference is a tough row to how."

Catherine wonders whether attempts at empathy reach an impasse or dead end; the failure to completely reach another.  And yet her beautiful imagery and wistful narrative embodies a transcendent poetics of the human condition. As Heidegger writes about this impasse, there is something about a thing that cannot be appropriated by us. Like walking out towards a horizon. We occupy that horizon, yet there is an out there that remains away from us. Likewise, a horizon, or object or thing, has a thereness that precedes our cognition of it. But he also describes those moments where we glimpse something otherwise, when a thing things itself. For example when the presence of his Van Gogh painting, beyond its pigment and canvas and brushstrokes, reaches into our being. Or when the culmination of instruments, rhythm, and tones arrives in an untranslatable and indescribable music that stirs something within. Steiner says we experience this presence “‘[i]n moments of great despair when things lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured,’ or in flashes of vital brilliance.”

“We feel, we know, urges Heidegger, that there is something else there, something utterly decisive. But when we seek to articulate it, ‘it is always as though we were reaching into the void.'” It is the possibility that the horizon, the impasse between two beings, is only the something we know — the consciousness of objects. Because also therein we are offered (and it almost always feels like a gift) “an opening to what is beyond the horizon of such knowing.”

The felt love between the two mythological entities in the lake surrounded by a loving voice; the moment of knowingness between the birds and animals and myself; and a lighting that occurs between a passage of painting and the viewer. Indeed, says Heidegger, without these moments, we forget to be astonished.

“The world’s darkening never reaches to the light of Being.” Heidegger

“Art is not for.” Sam Hamill about Morris Graves

12 Saturday May 2012

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Tonight, the poor bloke handsomely dressed in traditional Hawaiian cloth and lei, as it is every night, blows a conch to the delight of the hotel guests and their cameras and then runs with his burning torch from tiki lamp to tiki lamp across the expansive plantation style grounds. My incredulous son and other children giddily in tow. Every night it has been a new person, always Hawaiian though, and some are more obliging in this cultural fetish performance than others. But each one has warmly facilitated my son in lighting at least two tikis (because he demands more than one), bless their hearts.

Stunning is the island landscape, illuminated by torchlight flickering in the tradewinds.

Such are the moments of artistry in Hawaii, never untangled from its colonial past and its current economic conundrum as tourist industry.

In any given hotel and restaurant catering to this particular area, there is almost certainly to be incredibly talented live musicians, plucking away at a slack key guitar, soulfully singing the Hawaiian traditional opus, mostly written to keep names of places, plants, fishes, birds and cultural knowledge — a dying language — alive.

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(Kalopa State Park, nature preserve)

I was already bruised after just hearing the wistful “Me ke aloha ku’u home o Kahalu’u,” (with love for my home Kahalu’u). Kahalu’u is a gorgeous beach almost smothered by concrete hotels and hordes of sunscreened waders, food trucks, and signs saying please do not step on the coral, please do not feed the fish. Even as I am counted among the island’s outsiders, I stopped to listen to these two men sing delicately and lovingly their version of ku’u home. Who isn’t bereaved of changes to the land?  They sang this elegy in an empty restaurant, empty besides a handful of waiters chatting amongst themselves, one sunburned couple watching basketball on the bar TV, and sentimental me in my bathing suit waiting for my to-go order.

Later when I entered the lobby of our hotel, where I’ve been annoyed by the constant presence of people since we arrived, a pang of a familiar melody filled me as it filled the architecture. The lobby lanai, full of well-dressed, shiny guests enjoying a cocktail and chatting amongst themselves, frames a view across the ocean where a faint silhouette of Maui dissolves into cloud. But what made me stop was yet again, another vulnerably sincere, Hawaiian slack key performer there in the skyline. He was playing not for the sake of the distracted guests unaware that this particular song, Hi’ilawe, extolls a site they probably snapped a photo of today; not for what is probably a paltry salary; and not for me mouthing what words I knew in appreciation for his performance, for the artful moment.

I hid in the adjacent stairwell hearing the last bits of the song until he transitioned to his next (I imagine to avoid the awkward silence between songs), and then I exited underneath the patio out to the courtyard. As I walked away, the musician ignored his audience as they ignored him and turned out over the balcony, looking for me below. I looked up at him and put my hand on my heart. As he strummed out the beginning of his next song, he smiled knowingly and nodded his head — a private, unseen gesture in a place of all places to be seen. Our eyes were on Hi’ilawe — an artful moment because it was completely gratuitous.

Hi’ilawe

George Kahumoku Jr.’s version of the song on YouTube, and its hula:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8kpNAIBRIw

Translation:

All eyes are on Hi’ilawe
In the sparkling lowlands of Maukele.

I escape all the birds
Chattering everywhere in Waipiʻo.

I am not caught
For I am the mist of the mountains.

I am the darling (a toy) of the parents
And a lei for the necks of grandparents.

The fragrance is wafted from Puna
And lives at Hi’ilawe waterfall.

Tell the refrain
All eyes are on Hi’ilawe.

“The premeditation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of freedom.” Simon Critchley

02 Wednesday May 2012

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Sitting here at my desk in North America, surrounded by meaningless words flung about in luxury and distracting waste, it is hard to imagine that the act of creating words could bring an endangerment to your life. How could words be lethal to your children, your spouse, to anyone that helped you, even when these words speak for the welfare of others? When words crafted as acts of love fall upon deaf and murderous ears.

I won’t bore you with the details of the current news story of a blind dissident in China, Chen Guangcheng, who made an improbable escape over the walls into the US Embassy in Beijing, amid Sec. Of State Clinton’s precarious diplomatic visit — you probably know more than I of it. But I read that in the last few hours, only after threats against his wife and family and the imprisonment of a man who helped him, did he acquiesce to the idea of leaving China. Until then, he refused to become any one of the numerous political dissidents who are harbored in friendly, yet stranger, countries.

I thought instantly to Anna Akhmatova, who suffered immeasurably during the Russian Revolution for her poetry. Her literary friends and colleagues were systematically killed, starved, exiled. Several took their own lives. Her husband was executed by firing squad. Her son spent years emaciating in prison camps. For words. Even when in poetry, words reveal themselves to be words.

Yet, while others moved to Western Europe and beyond, she remained a steadfast resident of her homeland, despite censorship and slander (the grammars of war), dedicating herself to promote a golden age of Russian poetry.

To The Many

I — am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I — am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to the end, in any case.

That’s why you so fervently love
Me in my weakness and in my sin;
That’s why you impulsively gave
Me the best of your sons;
That’s why you never even asked
Me for any word of him
And blackened my forever-deserted home
With fumes of praise.
And they’d say — it’s impossible to fuse more closely,
Impossible to love more abandonedly…

As the shadow from my body wants to part,
As the flesh from the soul wants to separate,
So I want now — to be forgotten.

Anna Akhmatova (1922)

“What is ultimately required of us with respect to our love of beings?” Henry Bugbee

30 Monday Apr 2012

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This weekend, I sympathized with my dear friend who writes an amazingly tender and delicious food blog, www.themooninmykitchen.blogspot.com, that like art, meditation, and any endeavor necessitating commitment, writing these entries can be a mundane practice. There are days when the flow is not there to deliver rivers of insightful revelation, clever words flipping off the tongue, or sparks of delightful references and analogies.  But one starts about anyway, hoping the force of pushing through it doesn’t also run right over the grace of creativity, leaving a corpse of tired, ever-embarrassing, revealing remnants of a self that cannot transcend self.

The same weekend, for a friend’s 70th birthday, a group of us went birdwatching in some of the most beautiful land in the Bay Area. There on the same, short jaunt, one can easily traverse through lemon-green meadows, water-logged swales, arid oak chaparral, and fern-laden woodlands with sentinel sequoias.

Our stout and serious group leader, a veritable General of birdwatchers, started the walk with what amounts to a Holy proclamation of a birder’s Grail: In the same territory she had just spotted Lazuli Buntings on their migratory way through the area. I knew by the reaction of oohs and ahs that none of us seasoned birders had that bird on our life list.

So it was with this exotic expectation burning lazuli blue in my mind that a frustration began to foment as the General took us around every inch of perimeter of a concrete parking lot, bordered by cyclone fence.  She would call out, “Junco at one-o-clock!” as if we should align our bayonets. “Straight ahead is a Robin.” I pretended to take a picture so as to not appear bird-snobby about these usual, tedious suspects. But at one point I couldn’t cork a chuckle as she declared militantly the presence of a dawdling mourning dove ducking into the weeds.

The walk finally ventured away from cars and concrete and chain-link barriers, though we never left a paved trail and the evidence of man’s obtuse intrusions on nature. It was clear that our General was carrying out a warfare not concerned with an immersion in wilderness, but the sniper-like calculation of species of birds sighted — however mundane the species, however bleak the context. My friend even whispered to me (so as to not get chastised again by the General for distracting her from bird calls) that she sees more birds in her frontyard.

With only a few minutes left on the hike, I resigned to an unremarkable, albeit lovely day robbed of solitude (as we were in a bustling group), void of an escape into nature (cite the parking lot above), deplete of silence (hear the General’s commands?) and amiss of a rare and exotic bird sighting (the buntings are undoubtedly in Canada by now).

I was returning to the car when a Pacific Slope Flycatcher overcame its usual shyness to flit from a tree, snatch a meal of unsuspecting moth, and bravely perch a few feet in front of me. We both took pause in the time that Celan calls a breath-turn. A beady black eye gazed unabashedly into mine – and we greeted each other knowingly.

This tiny Flycatcher has made perilous trips from Mexico to its breeding grounds somewhere in Canada, while I am sheltered in my disdain of the predictable. Perhaps the Flycather has crossed paths with the Lazuli Buntings I might never meet, who knows.

And so it seems fitting that along this trip I learned the pair of eagles who began a nest along my hometown reservoir has abandoned their purpose. They disappeared on Earth Day, which leaves a note of irony hanging in the air, along with the humility I imagine their watchers leave behind as they fold up their scopes and head home. I hear George Steiner describe this unfolding of events:

“As if the music played… could turn on its composer and ask: Why did you make me?”

Surely, something beyond us is needed when we question the meaning of coming to be and passing away. At the end of such vigils, whether of writing or birding, one can only surrender a respectful adieu. À dieu.

Today’s Advice: And so put, we must acknowledge an answer to it with which life is inescapably haunted, namely, some kind of parting.” Henry Bugbee

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein, “Tractatus.”

21 Saturday Apr 2012

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Almost at the ocean edge, I look back up the hill, over the martian landscape to see the miles of frozen stone rivulets, overlapping and intertwining upon themselves, blanketing anything that ever had been there. It is dark, hardened lava which was at one point molten and seeping from wounds in the earth, crawling down the topography according to gravity, until it slipped into the ocean with a burst of steam cloud.

I cried unspeakably when I first saw this, at Kilauea. At first I thought I was responding to the experience of primeval vastness – a meeting with an uncompromising, prehistoric force. Or maybe because it was humbling to be in the presence of the beginning of land, the birth of earth.

For some reason, this is the image that comes to mind as I ponder why I have inexplicably taken a break from writing here.

At some point my philosophy mentor mentioned to me that it is best not to overwhelm the writings or artworks of others with my own subjectivity. It is a balancing act to read the work of others and engage in dialogue, to make comparative study without projecting too much of my own material and subsequently dampening them. To listen without talking over them.

In the last few weeks I have been reading hyperactively, but in a way also bordering on attention-deficit disorder. From Kierkegaard’s crowd of untruth to Anna Akhmatova’s poetry of personal truth amidst a  crowd of censors. And there is George Steiner’s grammars of creation, eruditely nostalgic for the messianic, and Wittgenstein’s language games of lost faith. I have let the writings of these thinkers run over me, perhaps not unlike the rivers of the slow moving, but nihilistic lava, making its way to a border of another prehistoric vastness – my ocean of ignorance. While the writings have been resonant, elegantly constructed and provocative, they are opaque. And maybe it is best to let them do their work before I attempt to crash in with my callow response, my impediments, my convictions.

In short, to let answerability take the form of silence.  However, for those of us who know the therapy office, the dead end of a conflict, or know the time in front of one’s own intransigent painting or sculpture, there is a silence that is laden with an almost perceivable din, however healing it may be. And then there is a silence of a higher order, of untranslatability.

Schopenhhauer said, “Were the universe to perish, music would endure.” And in the moment of pondering the lava field, where seedlings somehow sprout in rock, and liquid rock in its extension of earth annihilates life — creation meets destruction. Artists and writers might want more to be mediators of where sound meets silence, and form meets formless. Paul Celan’s breath-turn. In the end, if I were in that lava field, facing the force that we all perish by, I may be trivial and sentimental, but I would want to hear Olomanu’s plaintive slack key guitar and the lyrics of a homecoming: “Last night I dreamt I was returning. And my heart called out to you: To please accept me as you’ll find me. Me ke aloha ku’u home o Kahulu’u.”

Today’s Advice: “It is through words that words are to be overcome. (Silence may only be the tying of the tongue, not relinquishing words, but gagging on them. True silence is the untying of the tongue, letting its words go.).” – Stanley Cavell

“…those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Albert Camus

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

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It was clear to everyone at the hospital I was a mess. Because of indescribable back pain, I received an epidural before I was dilated past a centimeter, and therefore my labor progressed at a crippled and wayward snail’s pace. Sometime through the night, I began to shake uncontrollably and a wave of general anxiety overcame me, which I attributed to the drugs; but the nurse on duty said it was mental. The next day, my friends and family took turns rubbing my legs because after a day on an epidural my lower half felt irritatingly restless and paralyzed at the same time. One of the labor and delivery nurses struck up conversation with me, probably because she saw I was floundering. The more we talked, the more my labor picked up, and my dilation progressed.  She seemed to recognize this, too, and felt a sense of ownership over her “project.” It began as chit chat, but at some point it became, as my friends kidded, unsurprisingly philosophical. And I don’t remember how, but it turned to Kierkegaard, as I blurted out to the nurse that during my pregnancy I had struggled with faith — a faith that everything in my pregnancy would be ok. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but she said something exactly wise, and it implored my confession of a previous  miscarriage – and that I would never know why it happened. That unanswerability undermined my willingness to “leap to faith,” even though I knew my faith, or lack thereof, had no bearing on how the Fates would knit together the outcome of my current pregnancy. Something so utterly close to me so as to be part of me, indeed sharing my blood, was outside of my control. This realization seared me like the pain that both rends and joins, and the nurse feeling her own limits looked out the window as I wiped a tear away. But she came back from her momentary distance and said, I bet you just reached the transition stage of labor – every woman I know has a revelation when she reaches the utmost extent of dilation. Exertion.

—

Over this past weekend in a light conversation with my studio mate, I threw around the word absurd to describe similar artworks from two artists, both who crochet and knit onto their treasured but precarious subjects. After hearing my studio mate’s response that she liked absurdity in art, I realized, despite my sophomoric passion for philosophy, that I was using the word unnecessarily in a negative way.

(Annette Messenger, “Les Repos de Pensionnaires,” aka “The Boarders.” 1971-72)

Both Camus and Kierkegaard philosophize about the absurdity that every human being faces – that we sense our life has some significance, some meaning; but as Camus put it, we are met with a cold, uncaring universe. We are saddled with the paradox that we are called to care with all of our might for the most vulnerable amongst us (especially ourselves) — yet we have in the end a limited bearing on what becomes of our fledglings.  (And somehow an acceptance of this allows our circle of caring to expand.)

Yesterday my mother, my son and I reach the spot where from across my hometown reservoir, we could see the faint outline of a large, dark bird with a tell-tale, beacon of a white head and tail, perched on a dead pine. Nearby, we could barely make out a nest occupied by his mate, mid-story in a moss-laden pine.  But the small smudge in our binoculars amounted to an extraordinary image in our minds. Thought never to emerge from the point of decimation by DDT, it is a nesting pair of bald eagles — the first in the Bay Area in 100 years.  We joined a small group of other enthusiasts, all sharing an inexplicably warm communion as witnesses to this scene. Somehow we are the faithful because we know doubt, tragedy even. And it makes these little glimpses like this, of heart-warming good in the world, seem precious in this painfully but poetically absurd world.

Today’s Advice: “[D]oubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.” Kierkegaard

“Nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless…. But the poem is bright.” – Leo Strauss

17 Saturday Mar 2012

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I found myself awakened to the point of tears today in front of a work of art. Despite the onslaught of art in which I have been exposed to in the last few years, you’d think this would happen more often. But the instances when art suddenly uncoils something within, melts a mundane frozenness, or leaps me into a moment of being – unfortunately, these moments happen less and less.

But today, I stood in front of a series of photographs by Rineke Dijkstra, and tried to hide the welling up that seemed so awkward and inappropriate in a sterile, brightly-lit museum environment.

We are of a time when photography is so facile as taking your phone out of your pocket and clicking it, and so mechanical as to overlay an algorithmic alteration to a photo with the push of a button, and so ubiquitous that even my mother (a monk, no less) captures and broadcasts photos of her grandson on her slick iphone.

Yet, Dikjstra’s meditative work solicits something missing in the accelerated onslaught of photography everywhere else. It is found in a realm of expert photography that cannot be mechanized and is all too elusive – the expression of an untranslatable but no less palpable human interiority creeping out from under a futile veneer. And such excision and study of this interiority necessitates a compassion for the subjects but also recalls one’s own vulnerability – places where we don’t admit that we could use compassion towards ourselves. This is Dijkstra’s poetry. As my friend said to me on the way out of the exhibit, you don’t think this is photography, her work transcends the photograph.

But that is not the main reason I was so moved today.

Within this series taken over 3 years, bearing witness to what time does to a young man entering adulthood, there are flashes of atemporality — 8 images sliced out of time and forever frozen in the present tense. Moreover, if you come to love him, like I did, you can sense something unchanging, a steady center at battle with the hard world. The minimalism of these works makes plain what he so arduously introverts at each point in time — plaintive lips curled to the edge of a cry, a stoic brow hovering over deeply questioning eyes, cheekbones hardening over the softness of youth.  I am delivered to a heart-rending moment when one opens to the particularity of his experience and rediscovers qualities that are irrevocably and universally human.

How could I not think of my own son, and not mourn all that has already passed and changed in him? How could I not grieve that one day I will not exist to see him and his evolution? That even as much as our lives are intertwined now, there will be a great deal of his life unfathomable to me, completely unreachable. How could I not be flooded by the pain of loving something so fickle as a life – and so overwhelmed that if I didn’t push it back a little, I would be a blithering mess, in a sterile, brightly lit gallery of the MOMA. It was a moment in the day-to-day delusion that all remains safely the same, when I am suddenly awoken to the inescapably temporal. And from there, flowing in the rhythms of temporality, I can come to relish one exquisitely measureless, timeless beat.

Today’s Advice: “He who to himself binds a joy/Doth the winged life destroy/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.”  — William Blake

Today’s Issue: “Freedom toward death.” Heidegger

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Cranes in Cage in Field

Maybe a break in the silence can restore a more profound silence within me. This is one of those times when I just need to set out on a writing and not worry about where I’m going, or why. Reckoning the losses that seem to be happening around me, making sense of permanent absence, of the violent changes in my midst — the act of setting out to wander seems appropriate. Accepting an unknown destination is congruent with the humble futility where there was once security in my beliefs, logical understanding, the irritating predictability within myself. This couldn’t be more different than the trite journeys, the banal distractions of these times.

Wandering necessitates a field, preferably one abandoned to nature. I’m not even sure it’s a particular field. It could be the fields through which Heidegger has us roaming, on a woodcutter’s path. One tree opens up a new clearing with another tree to fell.  For Heidegger, a clearing on the woodcutter’s path is also a lighting. It is where inspiration occurs to me, where an idea or thing can be unconcealed, even if it is for a fleeting moment. It is where, “the lighting middle itself encircles all that is, like the nothing we hardly know.”

Or maybe it’s the field where Paul Celan, influenced by Heidegger, finds his path. On his path, where language meets meaning, I am lost, but I am also found: “Yet, among how many other paths, they are also paths on which language gets a voice, they are encounters, paths of a voice to a perceiving Thou, creaturely paths, sketches of existence perhaps, a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself… a kind of homecoming.”

Perhaps it is the field that John Berger ventures into, where he is at first disinterested, but then something shifts. One’s awareness of self becomes displaced: “The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.”

Berger’s fields flash before my eyes: The fields above Yosemite where I heard the delicate cracking of ice as the river intimated its willingness to the next season. The fallow cornfield of 60,000 geese pixelating into not-geese, into a deafening drone of warning calls upon my advance. The open tundra overlooking my native coast where my knees failed the moment she kissed me.  The grassy expanse where I found two abandoned eggs, left by the fretful killdeer fleeing my footsteps the day before.

Finally, Mary Oliver tells me where this field is, without knowing exactly where it is at all:

There is a place where the town ends

And the fields begin.

It’s not marked but the feet know it,

Also the heart, that is longing for refreshment

And equally, for repose.

[…]

Where is it? I ask, and then

My feet know it.

One jump, and I’m home.

—

I have picked up my exhausted, cranky self, and have taken off into a field. Where there is a field and its itinerant endless paths, there is an opening for a homecoming.

Today’s Advice: “Rather, one should step into the circle of language and experience which are vitally and intensely tied together, and listen belongingly (gehoren) to the sound of silence which constantly emanates from the depths of the indescribable, and continue to let this be the source of one’s own language.” Heidegger and Asian Thought, Graham Parkes

Today’s Issue: “You who are not kept anxiously awake for love’s sake, sleep on.” – Rumi

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

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I’m now at the dreadful realization that I have squeezed in a little time and space to write and make art, but that I am willfully refusing to. I see clearly what is bubbling up to be expressed, and frankly I don’t want to do it. What wants to exist on page or on canvas touches upon things that I fear are too banal, vulnerable, unoriginal — the list could go on and on.

I could blame it on becoming a parent. I’m already a frighteningly sensitive person, and now my son blows open a new portal of acute feelings, including the most intense pangs of doubt, impatience, and heart-bursting ache for his welfare. I exist like an emotional puff pastry — flakes of feelings falling down onto my messy lap at the slightest jostle. Just a snippet of some violence done to a child on the fading ticker of the corner of the news channel I skipped over on my way to Downton Abbey… and I am on the verge of existential crisis.

And so it is this week, if the muse couldn’t corner me any more, I cross paths with the writings of psychotherapist and artist, Alice Miller.

Her premise is simple: Our culture is violent because we learn not to feel. It seems like old news now, but an insight that is all too ubiquitously relevant: Repressed feelings are a reaction to being hurt, often by parents, and that a child, completely dependent on those parents, must repress them or else be killed by the pain. A numb child can grow into an adult who lacks empathy for others, and in turn inflicts pain on their own children, as well as others.

Trust me I hear the groans from those who know me as overly sensitive and analytical. Obviously, this encompasses my own dealings with my childhood and shaping my son’s childhood, but more interestingly involves the resistance to writing this and avoiding the studio.

I’ve never met an artist who didn’t feel things deeply or who didn’t want to question things, even if it’s the story tickering off the corner of the news screen. And this requires an exploration of the “furthest countries of one’s secret soul,” because, as Rilke penned, the most profound and unique art is borne by those “who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go.” In my silly, little case, I just might have to face the danger of being too banal, vulnerable and unoriginal.

Turns out Alice Miller felt that creative work trumped all the years she practiced psychotherapy. That, as Gadamer agrees, in play, albeit serious play, can we visit places outside of where we were supposed to go, off the paths we were only allowed to go.

Alice Miller doesn’t go as far as I do here; that art opens up a beyond, past the prerequisite and unavoidable acknowledgment of what is true (and often painful) about ourselves and those around us. That if I recall the last time I was moved by music, writing, or art, I was taken to the edge of an experience where I could leap into a moment of not being anything at all.  I could go with art into my very self-most straits, and set myself free.

(And only from that freedom — from my self, my needs, my projections, my ego — can I truly love someone else.)

Today’s Advice: “Only when we learn to transcend our death-bound selves in love, learn to take ourselves not too seriously, do we begin to truly live.” Karsten Harries

Today’s Issue: Rilke’s Great Melody

19 Monday Sep 2011

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A crossing guard marches into the gauntlet of the intersection in the Mission – an old woman but the neon sign is her shield. The children are her minion. And the grizzlied fervent of traffic ceases, as they would not dare to do anything but deign to her authority.

A young tomboy, flannel, piercings, tattered black jeans, skips down the street. Thick, outdated rims hold equally thick prescription lenses and belie the secret behind the facade. I hear her skateboard crash to the ground as I drive by.

A man is eager to please over the telephone. I agree to his permutations. He finds joy in his acquired expertise though he gets paid the same as his uninterested colleagues.

My babe holds a ravaged field mouse in her hand, petting it, praying for it. Nobody knows the natural lifespan of a field mouse. Just as this one does after a few more strained breaths, they meet death so early, so often.

During a pause in conversation, my friend puts her chin on her hand and lets the silence flow past the point of discomfort. I feel my heart radiate and look up from the floor — she is looking at me, and she is content.

A struggling, Vietnamese immigrant holds a bag of bread in her hands. She tosses it up in delight to the rain of pigeons cascading down around her.

Today’s Advice: “I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances… From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.” Virginia Woolf,  “A Sketch of the Past.”