Motion from stasis

— Akitaoka’s optical illusions

Religio laici

In this extended poetic investigation, John Dryden seeks to justify his Christian faith in the context of ancient animist religions as well as the non-denominational ‘Deism’ that is the fashion of intellectuals of his era.  Here is the conclusion at which he arrives, espousing tolerance, a non-confrontational deportment, and humility in the face all that we do not know:

What then remains, but, waving each extreme,
The tides of ignorance, and pride to stem?
Neither so rich a treasure to forego;
Nor proudly seek beyond our pow’r to know:
Faith is not built on disquisitions vain;
The things we must believe, are few, and plain:
But since men will believe more than they need;
And every man will make himself a creed:
In doubtful questions ’tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say:
For ’tis not likely we should higher soar
In search of Heav’n, than all the Church before:
Nor can we be deceiv’d, unless we see
The Scripture, and the Fathers disagree.
If after all, they stand suspected still,
(For no man’s faith depends upon his will
’Tis some relief, that points not clearly known,
Without much hazard may be let alone:
And, after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our reason runs another way,
That private reason ’tis more just to curb,
Than by disputes the public peace disturb:
For points obscure are of small use to learn:
But common quiet is mankind’s concern.

— John Henry Dryden, born this day in 1631

We decide what is important while we are asleep

‘Sleep is a smart, sophisticated process. You might say that sleep is actually working at night to decide what memories to hold on to and what to let go of.’
— Jessica Payne

Many experiments have established the role of sleep in consolidating memories.  A new Harvard Med School study just published in Psychological Science suggests that memories are filtered for emotional content while we sleep, and the ones that have moved us are selectively retained.

EurekAlert article
4Therapy article

On water’s meaning

... he scissors the waterscape apart
And sways it to tatters.  Its coldness
Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp,
For to swim is also to take hold
On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace
And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.

— Charles Tomlinson, from Swimming Chenango Lake

Nurture thy creative engine!

It’ s the source of your original contribution to your community and to those you love.  It’s the essential ‘you’.   Whatever it takes to keep that part of you healthy and active is what you must do for yourself.

Then you must give it time.  Make your appointment with the muse.  Keep it faithfully, even when your muse is in hiding.

— Josh Mitteldorf

‘All great ideas originate with the lower classes.’

— James Goldsworthy

Sojourns in the Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension -- though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
-- but we have changed, a little.

~ Denise Levertov ~

The Concealed Deer

There was a woodcutter in Cheng who came across a frightened deer in the country and shot and killed it.  Afraid that other people might see it before he could bring it home, he hid it in a grove and covered it with chopped wood and branches, and was greatly delighted.  Soon afterwards, however, he forgot where he had hid the deer, and believed it must have all happened in a dream.  As a dream, he told it to everybody in the streets.  Now among the listeners there was one who heard the story of his dream and went to search for the concealed deer and found it.  He brought the deer home and told his wife, ‘There is a woodcutter who dreamed he had killed a deer and forgot where he hid it, and here I have found it.  He is really a dreamer!’

‘You must have dreamed yourself that you saw a woodcutter who had killed a deer.  Do you really believe that there was a real woodcutter?  But now, you have really got a deer, so your dream must have been a true one,’ said his wife.

‘Even if I’ve found this deer by a dream,’ answered the husband, ‘what’s the use of worrying whether it is he who was dreaming or I?’

That night, the woodcutter went home, still thinking of his deer, and he really had a dream, and in that dream, he dreamed back the place of hiding of the deer and also of its finder.  Early at dawn, he went to the finder’s house and found the deer there.  The two then had a dispute and they went to a judge to settle it.  And the judge said to the woodcutter:

‘You really killed a deer and thought it was a dream.  Then you really had a dream and thought it was reality.  He really found the deer and is now disputing with you about it, but his wife thinks he had dreamt that he had found a deer shot by someone else.  Hence no one really shot the deer.  Since we have the deer before our eyes, you may divide it between you two.’

The story was brought to the ears of the King of Cheng, and the King said, ‘Ah, ah!  Isn’t the judge dreaming again that he is dividing the deer for people!’

— Lieh Tzu, translation by Lin Yutang

A Moment’s Indulgence

 I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side.
The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs;
and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee,
and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

— Rabindranath Tagore

Start by listening...

“I’ve learned that practical solutions to extreme poverty can only come from listening to poor people themselves.”

— Paul Polak is a retired psychiatrist who has devoted himself to the problems of poverty in the third world.  He develops small, ‘obvious’ solutions and finds  ways to reproduce them sustainably. 
Interview in Smithsonian magazine. 
Video introduction

Virtually all ‘dollar-a-day’ people in rural areas own their own houses. But the walls are made of mud and wattle, usually there’ s a thatched roof, and the floor is a mixture of dung and clay. The house has no value. You can’ t sell it and, even more critically, you can’ t go to a bank and use it [as collateral] for a loan. But for $100 you can build a 20-square-meter house—a skeleton of eight beams and a good roof that they can add bricks or cinder blocks to. Then they can go to the bank and borrow against it.

Improvisation for Angular Momentum

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation’s fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

~ A.R. Ammons

What does it take to remind us that the familiar is not ordinary?

Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch.   Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety and contentment.  Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a second, the amazing plenitude of being here.  Sometimes, unfortunately, it is suffering or threat that awakens us.   It could happen that one evening, you are busy with many things, netted into your role and the phone rings.  Someone you love is suddenly in the grip of an illness that could end their life within hours.  It only takes a few seconds to receive that news.  Yet, when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world.  All you know has just been rendered unsure and dangerous.  You realise that the ground has turned into quicksand.  Now it seems to you that even mountains are suspended on strings.

—John O’Donohue

Laughter and irony

«C’est quelque chose, le rire : c’est le dédain et la compréhension mêlés, et en somme la plus haute manière de voir la vie.»

“Consider laughter: it can be disdain; it can be misapprehension; but at its best, it is the highest attitude toward life.”

— Gustave Flaubert

Ironie: Lassen Sie sich nicht von ihr beherrschen, besonders nicht in unschöpferischen Momenten. In schöpferischen versuchen Sie es, sich ihrer zu bedienen, als eines Mittels mehr, das Leben zu fassen. Rein gebraucht, ist sie auch rein, und man muß sich ihrer nicht schämen; und fühlen Sie sich ihr zu vertraut, fürchten Sie die wachsende Vertraulichkeit mit ihr, dann wenden Sie sich an große und ernste Gegenstände, vor denen sie klein und hilflos wird. Suchen Sie die Tiefe der Dinge: dort steigt Ironie nie hinab, — und wenn Sie 50 an den Rand des Großen führen, erproben Sie gleichzeitig, ob diese Auffassungsart einer Notwendigkeit Ihres Wesens entspringt. Denn unter dem Einfluß ernster Dinge wird sie entweder von Ihnen abfallen (wenn sie etwas Zufälliges ist), oder aber sie wird (so sie wirklich eingeboren Ihnen zugehört) erstarken zu einem ernsten Werkzeug und sich einordnen in die Reihe der Mittel, mit denen Sie Ihre Kunst werden bilden müssen.

Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn’t be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of things: there, irony never descends - and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of serious things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments with which you can form your art.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

«Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.»

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but having new eyes”

— Marcel Proust

A century before Rosa Parks

A black woman refused to give up her seat on a bus.  She was brutally attacked and thrown off...and she took the case to court.  It was the summer of 1854, and her name was Elizabeth Jennings.

Here’s how the The New York Tribune reported the Jennings incident in a February 1855 article: “She got upon one of the Company’s cars last summer, on the Sabbath, to ride to church. The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full; when that was shown to be false, he pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence; but (when) she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted. The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered, but she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”

Jennings sued the company, the driver, and the conductor. Messrs. Culver, Parker, and Arthur represented her. Arthur was Chester A. Arthur, then a novice 21-year-old lawyer and future President of the United States. This law firm was hired because it had demonstrated some talent in the area of civil rights the year before.

Elizabeth Jennings claimed $500 worth of damage. The majority of the jury wanted to give her the full amount, but, as the Tribune put it, "Some jury members had peculiar notions as to colored people's rights." They eventually agreed to give her $225, and the court added 10% plus her expenses.

Within a month of the Jennings decision, an African American named Peter Porter was barred from an Eighth Avenue rail car.  He too sued and the company settled out of court. From then on, African Americans were allowed to ride on New York rail cars on an equal basis.

Read more

The Creed of my Heart

The rose-lit clouds of morning; the sun-kissed mountain heights;
The orient streaks and flushes; the mingling shades and lights;
The flow of the lonely river; the voice of its distant stream;
The mists that rise from the meadows, lit up by the sun’s first beam;—
They mingle and melt as I watch them; melt and mingle and die.
The land is one with the water: the earth is one with the sky.
The parts are as parts no longer: Nature is All and One:
Her life is achieved, completed: her days of waiting are done.

—Edmond Gore Alexander Holmes (1850–1906)