Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

Wabi-Sabi

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

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(Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, by Leonard Koren)

Wabi-sabi is the essence of Japan. The art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity of nature. It means accepting the life cycle – growth, decay and death. It is simple. It is slow and pure. It reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi are all the changes that appear on things with time and use – crack, crevices, rust, spots, frayed edges. Marks of time are are kind of quiet beauty – beauty that waits to be discovered.

It is a fragmentary glimpse: the branch representing the entire tree, shoji screens filtering the sun, the moon 90 percent obscured behind a cloud. It is a richly beauty that is striking but not obvious. For Japanese it is the difference between kirei – just pretty – and omoshiroi, the interestingness that kicks something into the realm of beautiful (Omoshiroi literally means “white faced”, but it’s meanings range from fascinating to fantastic).

D.T. Suzuki described wabi-sabi as “an active aesthetical apprectation of poverty”, with “poverty” having more romantic meaning like being satisfied with the little hut, a room of two tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau. Wabibito means a person free at heart. Simple, unmaterialistic, humble by choice and in tune with nature.

Wabi stems form the root wa, which refers to harmony, peace, tranquility and balance. A common phrase used in conjunction with wabi is “the joy of the little monk in his wind-torn robe”:) A wabi person is free from greed, indolence and anger and understands the wisdom of rocks and grasshoppers. Sabi by itself means “the bloom of time”. It connotes natural progression-tarnish, hoariness, the extinguished gloss, the understanding that the beauty is fleeting. It is a gift of time, an aching poetry in things that carry their years with grace.

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Lecture on nothing for the Year Twenty.Ten

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

1950 now-famous “Lecture on Nothing” by John Cage exemplifies his outlook on art and music. Cage inspired artists such as Rauschenberg and Kelly, whom he made friends with in 1949, to approach their art without preconceived ideas and with great openness. Actually, it was probably mutual influence taking into consideration “White Paintings” by Rauschenberg (below) and 4’33” by Cage.

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At the beginning of this lecture, Cage tells the listener that the lecture has no point and will go nowhere :) “I am here and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment” (Cage Silence 109). He implores the audience to enjoy each and every moment of the lecture even though he admits that it is pointless. Asks why are we the Westerners forced to see value only in things seeming to have deep meaning or that have eventual goals or aims? “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss” (Silence 110). Openness to new things, pure openness, I just love his way of thinking and feeling.

But it is a below excerpt I wanted to dedicate to the New Year Twenty.Ten:

“I begin to hear the old sounds – the one that had thought worn out, worn out by intellectualization – I begin to hear the old sounds as though they are not worn out. Obviously, they are not worn out. They are just as audible as the new sounds. Thinking had worn them out. And if one stops thinking about them, suddenly they are fresh and new.”

Well, I wish you all the ability to see old things in fresh perspective, not worn out.

Posted in art, living, music, philosophy | 1 Comment »

On randomness, part 1

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The notion of randomness has been within my top interests for some time now. Random is defined as “made, done, happening or chosen without method or conscious decision” (Oxford American Dictionaries) or “having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; haphazard” (Oxford English Dictionary).

Most often used in mathematical theory of probability arose from attempts to formulate mathematical descriptions of chance events and in statistics where random process is a repeating process whose outcomes follow no describable deterministic pattern, but follow a probability distribution.

In religious systems a highly deterministic worldview makes randomness not possible; the concepts of purpose and meaning exclude randomness completely (except for Discordianism:). In evolution theory, on the other hand, the selection is applied to the results of random genetic variation.

In regard to our lives, what seems the most the most fascinating is whether randomness equals unpredictability? Does it mean floating within a chaotic system? And how can you say whether a process is truly random?

Posted in living, philosophy, science | 3 Comments »

Claude Levi-Strauss Turned 100

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

(photo: independent.co.uk)

On 28th of November in Paris, one of the last icons of 20th century French intellectual life turned 100. Claude Levi-Strauss not only reshaped the nature of how anthropologists do their work: he changed the world’s perception of so-called “primitive” tribes in Asia, Africa and America. His structuralism (Structural anthropology, 1967) revolutionized anthropology and sociology and is still considered a foundation for the social sciences, but it was with his 1955 book “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, when he became world famous. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest minds of humankind!

Some media coverge:
NYT, 100th-Birthday Tributes Pour in for Lévi-Strauss

Open Democracy, Claude Lévi-Strauss at 100: echo of the future

The independent, Grand chieftain of anthropology lives to see his centenary

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The most important is hidden

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

This artists is incredible: always fills up the space with something just right and in time, inspires, when the inspiration seems to be far away, creates a feeling of some connection with the Other. Stunning. Powerful. Human and metaphysical. Even if not revealing a new territory, the fact that the thoughts are going the similar way is truly delightful.

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Silence, the wisdom of the desert

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Silence is white, cold, empty, alone, flying, deep, tastes eternal. Inner silence can be depressive, not the silence of silence, but your own silence, as Sylvia Plath said. It can be never written down and it’s easy to miss it.

I’ve just found something like this:

“It was said of abbot agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent”

From The wisdom of the desert, translated by Thomas Merton

(via airform archives)

and:

Silence is the true friend that never betrays. ~Confucius
Silence is a source of great strength. ~Lao Tzu
Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment. ~Henry David Thoreau

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Time is dancing, living means dancing

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Time is not linear. Time is not singular. Time is not an immutable constant (as Newton supposed). Time is a cluster of concepts, events and rhythms. As people do different things (write, play, schedule activities, travel, sleep, dream, perform ceremonies, meditate), they unconsciously participate in different categories of time. There is sacred and profane time as well as physical and metaphysical time. There is also biological clock – a build-in rhythm of a body. And clock time itself. But in fact – a clock can be anything – the drift of a continent, a chronometer, a calendar of religious ceremonies, or a schedule of production…

The clock one is using focuses on different relationships in our personal lives. Edward T.Hall in his book “The Dance of Life. The Other Dimension of Time.” uses mandala, one of the mankind’s oldest classification devices, to classify different types of time. Each division in mandala represents a radically different type of clock. The rules of one category cannot be applied to another category, because they are different universes with different laws. What is common for them – they are all the rhythm.

We dance our lives according to the rhythms. The light and the dark, the ebb and and flow, seasonal rhythms established by the travel of the earths around the sun – even early life forms on earth adapted and internalized the rhythmic change. From that point on, no form of life could evolve in a timeless nonrhythmic world. All humans are instinctually linked to the rhythm of life and – according to Hall – being unsynchronized can harm us, bring us to depression. Rhythm affects our entire being.

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Talking to heaven (pantheist ver.)

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

… which actually means talking to the trees :)

Text by Herman Hesse, Wandering

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neighter here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’ suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thought, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives that ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve and incomparable joy. Whoever has leaned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

(via kerrismith)

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Insatiability questioned, part 1

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Is insatiability exclusively a destructive value? It is said that all human suffering is caused by the sense-dominated mind and the desires. Can passion bring only self-burning or suffering? What about fulfillment? Passion is an instinct, an enormous appetite, a great power which directed to some ideas, knowledge, values in fact keeps the world moving, I believe that.

Yet passion seeks for consumption, and thus for annihilating itself (and in that case one passion replaces another leading inevitably to unhappiness and bitterness). And what about physical attraction? It is experienced as the urge to possess the other sexually. This passion is an almost insatiable bodily appetite centred exclusively, as an erotic fixation, on the other person. The lover can become obsessed with breaking through the barrier of otherness. Isn’t it (this illusion?) what we want the most and fear the most?

And where were we without the passion? Isn’t it a driving force of personality, a source of everything, craving for life itself? It definitely is.

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