Sunday, February 04, 2007
Constuction/Perception
Well, jury duty wrapped up nicely. Though it ended up being only four days off of work, I feel that the lax hours and my indulgent lunches downtown helped ring in a new era for my adult life. Plus I got a nice notepad that doubles as a datebook.
I have not been stressing work that much (aside from wanting to strangle a few children who have a serious aversion to conscious thought), I have been eating and drinking quite well (it all goes in the mouth, don't breathe while you swallow, all that good stuff), seeing great live music, and just generally enjoying the sensations and perceptions that make up this existence. There's a Master's program at the University of Amsterdam to which I'm excited about applying and I have various other projects brewing this month to fill my hours. Furthermore, I continue to encounter a seemingly endless stream of interesting writers and artists who make my brain hum pleasurably.
I recently finshed two books by Daniel Pinchbeck, a very bright and engaging author whose writing has somewhare crossed the line between a journalistic features piece on shamanism and prophecy to the writings of a shamanic prophet. Though I think his work must be taken with few grains of salt, I also feel it can not be taken lightly. His first book, a foray into contemporary shamanism in traditional and modern societies, describes his psychedelic experiences with invisible worlds which transform him from an alienated materialist urbanite into a shamanic apprentice with no incarnate teacher. He writes that the sickness of our society stems from a cultural wall that has been established beween our bodies and our spirits; despite our massive advances in technological applications of our understanding the physical world, our culture, having systematically erased ancient wisdom, has regressed in terms of our lack of spiritual technologies to a point where many feel beyond help. He ends the first book calling for some sort of archaic revival.
His second book picks up with the notion of how the acceleration of time that we are currently experiencing correlates to the tightness of the spiral's coil at the end of a gyre; in his consideration of theories of Mayan end-time and the return of Quetzalcoatl, Pinchbeck examines the mysteries of psychic phenomena and crop circles, stories of gnomes and alien abductions. It made me wonder at the structures of the human mind, the creative nature of our existence.
Especially at the book's close, Pinchbeck references the Hopi and their conception of cosmic time, which agrees with the Mayan claim that we are currently reaching the end of a world in a series of worlds; as for Yeats, the end of each historic age contains the seed for the character of the next. But while I read, I thought of the Hopi's labyrinth, which, from my understanding, they saw as both a symbol of the earth and as the individual's life; as Hesse wrote, "a journey to himself". But on the Hopi path, though there are twists and turns, there are no wrong paths -- perserverence will lead to the center. And as Pinchbeck's voice transformed from that of a spiritual wanderer to that of an oracle, I wondered if the Hopi metaphor was accurate: was Pinchbeck's prophetic channeling of a Mayan deity simply part of his spiritual path, which will make sense in the context of hindsight or could he be wandering down a solipsistic path to mental illness -- had he taken a "wrong turn"?
Last week my sister and I went to see "Pan's Labyrinth", which was the most beautiful film I saw this year with the possible exception of "The Fountain" (which I never wrote about in this forum, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, especially as it resonated with many themes in Pinchbeck's books, which I was reading at the time). Even if you haven't seen "El Laberinto Del Fauno", you've probably heard its conceit -- to escape an unpleasant reality (living with a sadistic Fascist officer in 1944 Spain), a little girl descends deeper and deeper into a world of fantasy in which she is an incarnation of an underworld princess [I hate spoilers -- everything I've just said is revealed in the film's first five minutes]. Dark and moving, the film's central theme is the tension between fantasy and reality. Despite a small Twilight Zonesque detail at the film's end along the lines of "So it was all a dream... or was it?", the director leaves it up to the audience to decide what is real, as I feel it should. And as Funkadelic sings, "fantasy is reality in the world today."
Yesterday, we wandered over to the Brooklyn Museum and snuck in even though it was free for the first Saturday of the month. Why?, you might ask. I am unsure, but for whatever reason the authorities were herding the public into a labyrinthine crowd control device, and I'd be damned before I'd submit to such madness. We emerged from the elevator to find the theme of the day was the subversion of reality's boundaries. We entered the Ron Mueck exhibition (incredibly lifelike sculptures of the human form in preposterous scales (massive and tiny) of silicone and fiberglass by a former Jim Henson Studios effects man) where there was some sort of "happening" going on.
Barefoot women in white cotton dresses circumabulated slowly, occasionally ringing bells. Rogue accordianists peeped dissonance atonally. "Fakes" (actual people) posed sculpturally in spaces where Mueck's bizarre simulacra were absent. The flesh-and-blood posing as sculptures ("she almost looks real!") and the sculptures that looked all-too-human was not the end of the tunnel, though.
On the second floor, Devorah Sperber's rendition of Da Vinci's Last Supper is, in my opinion, a master work in illustrating the grey areas in reality perception. Composed of over 20,000 spools of thread, themselves threaded on wires hanging from the ceiling, Sperber has created an upside-down pixellated version of the fresco; when viewed through a spherical lens, not only does the work acheive a remarkable three-dimensional effect, but its clarity is breathtaking. One can clearly see details in the image that are not actually "there" in the pixels. Sperber writes that her work has to do with "how the human brain makes sense of the visual world"; due to our familiarity with the original, we unconsiously fill in missing visual information to make our perceptions match the way it "should look". If you live nearby -- forgo the link for the full effect of the work in person. I found her website to be interesting, but to gaze at the image through the lens, which not only flips and clarifies the image (like the lenses in the human eye) but distorts it and allows the viewer's brain to "paint" in the details, is amazing.
In light of understanding the creative element in reality-perception, I'd like to end with a story that's related on an interesting website of crop circle hoaxers. Some of the circles that these fellows make are astounding, but, from my understanding, many of the most impressive ones share features that the definitively manmade structures lack. Regardless, the creators of the crop formations are, in my mind, artistic geniuses, both of design and execution. The site's author questions the divide between the subjects of artistic and scientific inquiry. The following is a quote:
I have always thought it a wonderful irony that America's Budd Hopkins, the ufologist who is arguably the chief patron of the art-form known as the UFO abduction story, is by training and profession an artist. Would that he could apply his artist's insight to the tales of his abductees, which as a ufologist he takes to be literally true. As an artist, he once recounted a gentle parable about the human impulse to confuse the products of the mind with exogenous experience and revelation: 'A kindergarten teacher asked the children in her class to paint whatever they wished. Later, she enquired of each child what subject he or she was painting. A picture of Mommy or my cat were typical answers. One child, however, said "I'm painting a picture of God." How can you paint God? the teacher asked. "No one knows what God looks like." "Wait till I finish my painting," the child replied.'
I have not been stressing work that much (aside from wanting to strangle a few children who have a serious aversion to conscious thought), I have been eating and drinking quite well (it all goes in the mouth, don't breathe while you swallow, all that good stuff), seeing great live music, and just generally enjoying the sensations and perceptions that make up this existence. There's a Master's program at the University of Amsterdam to which I'm excited about applying and I have various other projects brewing this month to fill my hours. Furthermore, I continue to encounter a seemingly endless stream of interesting writers and artists who make my brain hum pleasurably.
I recently finshed two books by Daniel Pinchbeck, a very bright and engaging author whose writing has somewhare crossed the line between a journalistic features piece on shamanism and prophecy to the writings of a shamanic prophet. Though I think his work must be taken with few grains of salt, I also feel it can not be taken lightly. His first book, a foray into contemporary shamanism in traditional and modern societies, describes his psychedelic experiences with invisible worlds which transform him from an alienated materialist urbanite into a shamanic apprentice with no incarnate teacher. He writes that the sickness of our society stems from a cultural wall that has been established beween our bodies and our spirits; despite our massive advances in technological applications of our understanding the physical world, our culture, having systematically erased ancient wisdom, has regressed in terms of our lack of spiritual technologies to a point where many feel beyond help. He ends the first book calling for some sort of archaic revival.
His second book picks up with the notion of how the acceleration of time that we are currently experiencing correlates to the tightness of the spiral's coil at the end of a gyre; in his consideration of theories of Mayan end-time and the return of Quetzalcoatl, Pinchbeck examines the mysteries of psychic phenomena and crop circles, stories of gnomes and alien abductions. It made me wonder at the structures of the human mind, the creative nature of our existence.
Especially at the book's close, Pinchbeck references the Hopi and their conception of cosmic time, which agrees with the Mayan claim that we are currently reaching the end of a world in a series of worlds; as for Yeats, the end of each historic age contains the seed for the character of the next. But while I read, I thought of the Hopi's labyrinth, which, from my understanding, they saw as both a symbol of the earth and as the individual's life; as Hesse wrote, "a journey to himself". But on the Hopi path, though there are twists and turns, there are no wrong paths -- perserverence will lead to the center. And as Pinchbeck's voice transformed from that of a spiritual wanderer to that of an oracle, I wondered if the Hopi metaphor was accurate: was Pinchbeck's prophetic channeling of a Mayan deity simply part of his spiritual path, which will make sense in the context of hindsight or could he be wandering down a solipsistic path to mental illness -- had he taken a "wrong turn"?Last week my sister and I went to see "Pan's Labyrinth", which was the most beautiful film I saw this year with the possible exception of "The Fountain" (which I never wrote about in this forum, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, especially as it resonated with many themes in Pinchbeck's books, which I was reading at the time). Even if you haven't seen "El Laberinto Del Fauno", you've probably heard its conceit -- to escape an unpleasant reality (living with a sadistic Fascist officer in 1944 Spain), a little girl descends deeper and deeper into a world of fantasy in which she is an incarnation of an underworld princess [I hate spoilers -- everything I've just said is revealed in the film's first five minutes]. Dark and moving, the film's central theme is the tension between fantasy and reality. Despite a small Twilight Zonesque detail at the film's end along the lines of "So it was all a dream... or was it?", the director leaves it up to the audience to decide what is real, as I feel it should. And as Funkadelic sings, "fantasy is reality in the world today."
Yesterday, we wandered over to the Brooklyn Museum and snuck in even though it was free for the first Saturday of the month. Why?, you might ask. I am unsure, but for whatever reason the authorities were herding the public into a labyrinthine crowd control device, and I'd be damned before I'd submit to such madness. We emerged from the elevator to find the theme of the day was the subversion of reality's boundaries. We entered the Ron Mueck exhibition (incredibly lifelike sculptures of the human form in preposterous scales (massive and tiny) of silicone and fiberglass by a former Jim Henson Studios effects man) where there was some sort of "happening" going on.
Barefoot women in white cotton dresses circumabulated slowly, occasionally ringing bells. Rogue accordianists peeped dissonance atonally. "Fakes" (actual people) posed sculpturally in spaces where Mueck's bizarre simulacra were absent. The flesh-and-blood posing as sculptures ("she almost looks real!") and the sculptures that looked all-too-human was not the end of the tunnel, though.On the second floor, Devorah Sperber's rendition of Da Vinci's Last Supper is, in my opinion, a master work in illustrating the grey areas in reality perception. Composed of over 20,000 spools of thread, themselves threaded on wires hanging from the ceiling, Sperber has created an upside-down pixellated version of the fresco; when viewed through a spherical lens, not only does the work acheive a remarkable three-dimensional effect, but its clarity is breathtaking. One can clearly see details in the image that are not actually "there" in the pixels. Sperber writes that her work has to do with "how the human brain makes sense of the visual world"; due to our familiarity with the original, we unconsiously fill in missing visual information to make our perceptions match the way it "should look". If you live nearby -- forgo the link for the full effect of the work in person. I found her website to be interesting, but to gaze at the image through the lens, which not only flips and clarifies the image (like the lenses in the human eye) but distorts it and allows the viewer's brain to "paint" in the details, is amazing.
In light of understanding the creative element in reality-perception, I'd like to end with a story that's related on an interesting website of crop circle hoaxers. Some of the circles that these fellows make are astounding, but, from my understanding, many of the most impressive ones share features that the definitively manmade structures lack. Regardless, the creators of the crop formations are, in my mind, artistic geniuses, both of design and execution. The site's author questions the divide between the subjects of artistic and scientific inquiry. The following is a quote:
I have always thought it a wonderful irony that America's Budd Hopkins, the ufologist who is arguably the chief patron of the art-form known as the UFO abduction story, is by training and profession an artist. Would that he could apply his artist's insight to the tales of his abductees, which as a ufologist he takes to be literally true. As an artist, he once recounted a gentle parable about the human impulse to confuse the products of the mind with exogenous experience and revelation: 'A kindergarten teacher asked the children in her class to paint whatever they wished. Later, she enquired of each child what subject he or she was painting. A picture of Mommy or my cat were typical answers. One child, however, said "I'm painting a picture of God." How can you paint God? the teacher asked. "No one knows what God looks like." "Wait till I finish my painting," the child replied.'
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I'm currently playing a Shaman in a dungeons and dragons campaign.
I wanted to be a character that could cast healing spells, and the other characters offered in this campaign that could heal sounded like they were the product of a writer's imagination. At worst, a shaman registers in my understanding of a cultural mythos, and at best I identfy it as a spiritual reality.
Do you think that learning from an incarnate teacher is sort of like acknoledging and reaping from the fact that all humans are, to varying degrees, schizophrenic?
I wanted to be a character that could cast healing spells, and the other characters offered in this campaign that could heal sounded like they were the product of a writer's imagination. At worst, a shaman registers in my understanding of a cultural mythos, and at best I identfy it as a spiritual reality.
Do you think that learning from an incarnate teacher is sort of like acknoledging and reaping from the fact that all humans are, to varying degrees, schizophrenic?
# posted by 
: Feb 9, 2007, 7:40:00 PM
: Feb 9, 2007, 7:40:00 PM
jesse beau - unsure i follow you on the necessity for schizophrenia - i heard that the term itself is being phased out of the mental heath field because it refers to too many different symptoms. do you mean multiple personality disorder?
i think that having a master whose word is law is dangerous, but at the same time, assistance going down the path is crucial. i think that our selves contain many such teachers, whose wisdom we can follow. whether they be unconscious structures, projected by the individual or floating in the collective mind, "spirit guides", telepathic communication, or something else altogether has yet to be shown, but I think that anyone who's in touch with themselves is aware of the presence of the "still, small voice".
theists may call it the voice of God, atheists the voice of Self, but regardless, I don't think it needs to go in the DSM-V unless it's giving you shit advice or telling you to slice people...
stv - thanks for the compliments. everything goes - is that like the law of thelema? "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"
i think that having a master whose word is law is dangerous, but at the same time, assistance going down the path is crucial. i think that our selves contain many such teachers, whose wisdom we can follow. whether they be unconscious structures, projected by the individual or floating in the collective mind, "spirit guides", telepathic communication, or something else altogether has yet to be shown, but I think that anyone who's in touch with themselves is aware of the presence of the "still, small voice".
theists may call it the voice of God, atheists the voice of Self, but regardless, I don't think it needs to go in the DSM-V unless it's giving you shit advice or telling you to slice people...
stv - thanks for the compliments. everything goes - is that like the law of thelema? "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"
"Schizophrenia" was considered an outdated and irrelevant term by the British mental health field in the late 60s, the American shortly after. But shrinks still use it. And it's still the only word I know to describe in blanket terms the condition of having, for one reason or another, your psyche split into more than one entity.
All I'm offering - from an ignorant but interested standpoint - is that maybe we all have hidden entities, lying dormant, waiting for us to wake them and learn from them and start a fight club with them.
All I'm offering - from an ignorant but interested standpoint - is that maybe we all have hidden entities, lying dormant, waiting for us to wake them and learn from them and start a fight club with them.
# posted by : Feb 14, 2007, 12:06:00 PM
: Feb 14, 2007, 12:06:00 PM
sorry, man. didn't mean to get pedantic on you. i definitely agree that we each house multiple thought patterns, conscious and unconscious, that can be understood as independently existing entities. From what I understand of Jung, he saw our life goal to be the crafting of a self from these disperate energies. I try to bring them together at internal social functions, like a coctail party held in my parietal lobe, but I guess beating the crap out of each other is fairly social. are you saying that shamans, in their work with the spirit selves, may end up performing these psychological funtions? and that your psychic fight club is a shamanic institution? sounds about right to me.
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