In the Spirit of Things

The definition of ANIMISM:

 

1

: a doctrine that the vital principle of organic development is immaterial spirit

2

: attribution of conscious life to objects in and phenomena of nature or to inanimate objects

3

: belief in the existence of spirits separable from bodies 

                                                   - according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary 

(As animism has been around for a while, well predating the time of Jesus Christ, it may vex the blog-reader to find this blog-entry to start things off on such a familiar and ancient note.  But I think it needs a reiteration.)

There may be a time in our lifetimes when apologizing to a tea-kettle after absent-mindedly complaining about its boiling too slowly, will be a norm.  Why, pray tell would we be animistically apologizing to inanimate objects someday?  For one, practice.  It will be a big pile of hooey, but some people will justify such behavior by saying 'we are just practicing to be good and loving with everything, including our kitchen appliances'.  These objects might even be imagined to possess some rudimentary level of consciousness.  Subjectivity will reign.  The idea of the metaphor will probably squeezed out of existence, as every object viewed will be an extension of oneself.  We will see ourselves in everything.  Much the same way we identify with heroes (or villains) in the movies.  They are someone we want to be, they are someone we could possibly be - they are us!!  The act of looking at a movie and making these kinds of assumptions will similarly be held in daily life.  Just as movies also animate objects  - such as in an animated feature like "Beauty and the Beast" or some such - so too will we see our daily objects as quiet, stunned animals.  Some mystic taxidermy summoning porcelain from a vulcanic pit to preserve the pre-being; now, 'object'-ified.  Animals preserved in formaldehyde bottles, as much as live animals, would be tantamount to a cup of tea with your favorite friend, your tea cup.

I'm reminded also of Buddhism.  I once had the chance to see Buddhist monks in action on the news, gingerly removing the worms from a newly dug hole, preserving them and keeping them from some sort of misplaced and cruel death.  They believe in reincarnation of course.  But oddly, they have nothing against self-immolation, such as was practiced to demonstrate against the Vietnam War.  So a worm's life is more valuable than one's own.  And, so too, I think objects will come to mean and carry more 'life', more 'spirit' in them than some of us, so that a car, a diamond ring, a gun, and so on will be treated and held in popular and major esteem higher than the spirit of a man or woman.   

Of course, animism might never take hold of people as I'm guessing it will.  And it shouldn't be too harmful if we attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects, especially if this is helping people be kinder and more humane to each other, as I suggested above.  The real worry comes when the opposite comes true in tandem with the animism - the accompanying belief that we humans don't actually possess souls; that souls don't exist.  Especially when the self-assured smugness of a tea-kettle that boils too slowly seems to focus on you regularly --  its inferior now, in many ways, -- and makes one see in the void of its spout, as Auden put it, "a lane to the land of the dead".

Zen of the Day

First things first - "The Flower Sermon"

 The beginning of Zen can be traced to a brief but important incident, when the Buddha had gathered his monks together for a “Dharma talk”.  The Buddha sat in front of the monks, not saying a word.  The monks were worried. At length, he reached down and plucked a small flower, possibly a daisy,  and twirled it in his fingers --

... — Hold you here, root and all,
in my hand, Little flower—
but if I could understand
What you are, root and all,
and all in all,        5
I should know what God and man is.


(From "FLOWER in the crannied wall" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

The monks offered several interpretations of what the flower meant, but were all wrong. One monk, Mahākāśyapa, understood, however, and laughed.  The Buddha knew then that this monk had achieved enlightenment. How did he know?  Because Buddhism until then had been about words and writing and speaking.  When the Buddha twirled the flower, he was demonstrating the religion become experiential, free from verbal explanations.  The flower was the flower itself. How can one explain or interpret a flower.  It simply “is”.  Buddhism was itself, as well.  It should need no explanation or interpretation. It is as free as the flower -- “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin” (Matthew 6:28):

 "ZenOfTheDay"

2500 years later, I came across a wonderful app -  "ZenOfTheDay" - on ITunes.

Essentially, each day you get a quote.  There is Japanese music in the background.  Also, nicely, there is a brief animation at the beginning which plays like "The Flower Sermon", appropriately enough. In the animation, the Buddha glides along but trips -- a lotus flower tucked behind his ear plops into a bowl of water he is holding.  This gives the Buddha great joy, for he realizes that one can stumble accidentally into Enlightenment.  A Zen nun seated in the background, perhaps here meant to represent Mahākāśyapa, also smiles broadly, and then offers to us her wisdom, offering her bowl as a symbol of the Buddha’s bowl.  

 The bowl is empty but from the emptiness arises wise words much the way Zen monks pass onto their students “koans” (sayings which are meant to be contemplated and meditated on, before the answer is finally found and there is enlightenment).  This is one of the ways Zen Buddhism goes - each patriarch (enlightened monk in the line of monks extending from Buddha to the present day) passes his/her wisdom along.  "In the beginning, there was the Word," much as there is in the early stages of Buddhism, when one begins to travel the path from initiate to enlightened person.  In "ZenOfTheDay" We are offered quotes which, like koans, serve to introduce us to wisdom and the road to enlightenment. 

And there is fun in trying to figure out what the koans/quotes mean, as well.  There is happiness when koans/quotes strike a chord of familiarity, crystallizing something known but never fully defined in the mind of the reader. A spark goes off; the other quotes, less familiar, can be savored  over, can be thought about, til one finds the truth in them.  Each morning, another flower of wisdom appears for one to consider throughout the day.  It’s a nice touch. A nice app.  Happy as a big, ponderous Buddha, I happily recommend "ZenOfTheDay". 

All the World's a Stage

New Year's Eve 2011 is but a day away.  There were a lot of political things that happened this year, things which set the drummer's drumming in their paper spinning rooms.  Inklings of tomorrow's work already staining their hands, and yet always new and different, even to them.  Industry, ho!!

I wanted to touch a little on a phenomenon which has been going on for a long while and will continue to happen in an unexpected way into the future.

Evolutionary stages.  Big, boggy words there.  Going back to the "Big Bang", forward through time towards us, there are a string of ever-shrinking evolutionary stages.  The first stage, way, way back, was several billion years long. The next, very long as well, but shorter.

Follow the stages along up to the appearance of earliest humans, 2 million years ago.  After this appeared the various stages of man.  Off this diagram, then, are the stages closer to our own time.  Anyone in anyway familiar with anthropology and human history will know modern, "civilized" humans have only been around for the last several thousand years.  There have been evolutionary stages as well since the beginning of civilization, not only at geological and biological levels, but also socially/culturally -- a clock melting and waning sweetly away.  In the last several hundred years have been increasingly smaller  and smaller evolutionary periods.  In the last half century evolutionary stages are short enough in duration to happen within an individual's lifetime.  These stages continue shrinking.  Where does this lead?

Mayan Cosmogenesis.  December, 2012.  The increasingly shrinking evolutionary periods will reach a point - a point at which shrinkage will no longer be possible, and then "flip".  Evolutionary periods will start to slowly - slowly, but Shirley - start growing in size.  It will be as if a higher being held a mirror to our history and reflected in that mirror our future. Slowly, our evolutionary stages will take longer and longer.  I imagine some of us who live long enough will eventually find evolutionary periods extending past a lifetime's length.

Most noticeably, this change will influence the speed of progress, the incessant hammering away of technology with its insistent, feverish pitch of capitalistic innovation. I think the harried pace of life in general will slow. We may look back on our lives of this past century, and wonder how we handled the frenzied buzz of everyday life.

No doubt, I could be wrong. I have nothing to prove anything I have to say.  It is just a hunch, a hunch which I am loathe to admit I have not entirely a total faith in.  So, it can come across as dinner table banter, or some such, and will have to go that way:

"Oh, look, we've said our part -- How time flies!"

One Dark Second

Watch any movie nowadays and you’re likely to see somewhere along the line a zoom.  The zooming technique in movies nowadays is as ubiquitous as any other camera trick, such as pans, fades or editing cuts.  Zooms weren’t always so prevalent, though.  In the annals of experimental cinema (that almost mythical species of film that the average cinema goers will have as much a shot of seeing in their lifetime as spotting a Sasquatch), a film made in 1967 by Canadian Michael Snow called “Wavelength” was the first overt and most single-minded zoom to date (i.e. "Wavelength" is a movie composed entirely of one long zoom).

A zoom is made by changing, smoothly, the focal length of the camera lenses while the film is running. The camera's subject appears to grow, or shrink, continuously in the frame.  Though the zoom was around for decades before “Wavelength” it had never been used as the focus of a film.  “Wavelength”, being an experimental film, has not much in the way of a story.  The setting is an apartment, empty for the most part.  The movie starts with the camera, which one might infer is on the one side of the apartment facing the other.  Over the 43 minutes of the film, the camera slowly zooms into a photograph on the other side of the wall until it fills the frame.  The photo is of rolling waves on a lake or sea.  Initially, Snow had wanted to use a picture of the room itself, a kind of repeating, fractal effect.  He didn’t, however, and the film stands as it is (with the exception of some tinting of the film stock, and the entry of a few people – some being other experimental filmmakers who play a snippet of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”). Overall, however, it is excruciatingly boring to watch.

That very boringness –prompts me to guess at the meaning of the film, and I feel considering the ‘openness’ of the text, that any reading is legitimate.  The time the film was made in was an era fixated on space travel.  The trip in this apartment from one side to another is akin -- to me -- of a spaceship traveling to, and landing, on the moon.  A wavelength is a measure of distance not a measure of time. Because the moon is one light second from our planet (or 300,000 m), I'm tempted to say it suggests a kind of base unit (since the speed of light is 300,000 m/s).  The moon's  presence is also referred to most obviously by the waves and tides (i.e. the photo at the end of the zoom) on our planet.

  

"Wavelength" is about sight, about the moon, but also about space travel  - that is, travel across one room or between two heavenly bodies.  While it may be  too conceptual to be enjoyed by the average person, the film does make for some interesting readings, nonetheless. 

DE-heehee-MONS!?!??

Ever feel yourself couched before a TV and feel something kind of suck into you,  like a something or other (demon), and enter you so you become that person on the TV in a way, briefly?   I sometimes believe the television/computer projects beings into us.  Wait until we get better than this.  What happens when we have full, overwhelming possessions?  How long before one man or woman steps forth and projects their being into everyone watching and thereby creates a whole army of the damned & possessed? (Heehee?!?***) And how the hell do we get rid of these things, now?    

                                       

-          It’s possession by random demons all passing through the electrified air and sucking in into your very nervous system

-          They’re in there, there, where it’s warm, controlling you

-          Total possession is oneday expected, the oneday puppets

-          ***Why is It so hard to talk about this stuff seriously?!?  

HYPERLINK: See Spot Run

A
black
dog
running
in
water
fetches
the
bone.

Tragedy, Writ Large

Art used to be about stuff.  The role of art was once that of a sage, explaining what it was to be human, imparting wisdom, inspiring.  Art and its movements were the province of rebels; an artist expressed him/herself by abiding by tradition but doing something new as well.  It was violent and large.  Since the advent of the current age, this past quarter-century, we’ve gradually lost that presence in art.  It seems art today should be light-hearted and bold and play the role of a court jester, like Lear had with his Fool.  We can't seem to handle big ideas, big statements anymore these days.  Our consciousness of the world around us has shrunken to the size of the head of a pin.  McLuhan said we live now in a Global Village; maybe that village needs a Town Crier, or maybe that village needs a Town Drunk.  Maybe a bit of both.  Haha - I find myself slipping into the old "Artist" modalities again.  The art world has had enough with "booming voices from on high" as well as with drunkards and junkies.  We need a slippered mensch. A good soul. A modest soul.  Someone who could approach a subject playfully and gently -- however you put it these days, it should be put in a soft, small box.  If we can’t have art and artists as they used to be, we should receive truth by some other means, such as from funny-people and the universe of cartoons. We need good bomb-defusers these days; we need tonics for the bile.  More than anything, the age demands ticklers of funny-bones rather than slappers of faces!