02023-02-18 | Environment, Philosophy
There is Nietzsche in the Air…
I would walk for six or eight hours a day, composing thoughts that I would later jot down on paper.
That summer, he composed The Wanderer and His Shadow — the third and final installment in his aphoristic roadmap to becoming oneself — almost entirely on foot, filling six small notebooks with penciled-in peripatetic thoughts. In it, he considered “the wanderings of the reason and the imagination” by which one becomes a truly free spirit — wanderings that, for him, took place with the mind afoot across mountains and meadows. Long before modern science shed light on the role of the hippocampus in how landscapes shape us, Nietzsche became himself in his wanderings.
Nietzsche on Walking and Creativity – The Marginalian
02023-02-05 | Philosophy
“Today this process, known as sortition, is familiar to us from jury selection, but the original democracy, as practised in Athens in 300 BCE, used this method to assign almost all the important positions in government. The Athenians believed that the principle of sortition was critical to democracy. Aristotle himself declared that: ‘It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.’ Sortition – randomness – was the foundation of radical equality.”
from Ways of Being by James Bridle
I did not know that Athenians used a lottery to select people for government positions. At first I thought it was a crazy idea but then I warmed to it. And to think it’s a 2,500 year old idea. :-)
02023-02-02 | Philosophy
About 1,500 years passed between these two statements. I am slowly working my way through the James Bridle book. Highly recommended.
To be non-binary, in human and machinic terms, is to reject utterly the false dichotomies that produce violence as the direct consequence of inequality. A culture of binary language splits us in two, and makes us choose which parts of ourselves fit existing power structures. To assert non-binariness is to heal this divide and to make different claims of agency and power possible.
from Ways of Being, by James Bridle
The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
Third Patriarch of Zen
02023-01-15 | Philosophy
Yesterday’s post about viewing people as trees, which helps to accept them as they are, got me thinking. What we think of as our personality or character is actually the consequence of many, and often unknowable, forces.
Research involving the gut biome of mice showed that when the gut biome of timid mice was replaced by the gut biome from bold mice, the timid mice became bolder, and vice versa. In addition to the old saying you are what you eat, this means you are who you hang around with, and which bacteria you allow to join you. It may change your appearance (yes, gut biome from skinny mice can transform fat mice) and, more importantly, it can change your personality.
Here are a couple of human examples. In the fall of 1994 my mother started getting angry at my dad. She would talk to him and he would not understand, which would make her furious. She believed him to be deliberately obtuse. Eventually it was discovered that she had a tumor, located in the language center of her brain, and she was, in fact, speaking gibberish. The second example comes from a friend, a man I knew as a gentle and soft spoken person. When I met him, last summer, I hadn’t seen him in many years and asked him how he had been. He was fine he replied, but had gone through quite an episode. Friends had been concerned because he was acting very mean, which seemed completely out of character. He had a health checkup and it was discovered that he had a tumor. The tumor was removed and he was back to his gentle self.
What we perceive as an “I”, a personality, a character, an individual, a self, is actually the sum of a huge amount of separate data points. Some of those lines we can control, others we are helpless about. Like a tree bending to catch light or bending from the wind.
02023-01-14 | Philosophy, Quotes
Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.
How to Be Less Harsh with Yourself (and Others): Ram Dass on the Spiritual Lessons of Trees – The Marginalian
02023-01-13 | Guitar, Music, Philosophy
There are, for those with the requisite sense, currents, energy flows, and dialogues to be discerned in the Japanese garden. Shunmyo Masuno contends that when arranging rocks, for example, one must “converse” with the stone, waiting “until it seems to speak and say where it wants to be put.” According to some of the subjects of Listening to Clay, a similar collaboration, or consulting, takes place between potters and their material. Artist Michiko Ogawa, for example, is very specific on this point, stating that she attempts to, “listen to what the material has to say,” posing the question, “What does the clay want to be?”
Listening to Clay
Some will read this and wonder whether that conversation is entirely imagined by the artist, and will question whether it can, in fact, be a dialog. I believe that not only is it a dialog, it’s more real than the consentual hallucination of regular life.
I think there are a few different movements that are part of this experience, several steps of this dance. There is getting out of the way. There is getting into the flow. There is also, acknowledging being part of a larger web of things. We are all just molecules dancing in space, whether we are humans, rocks, or melodies.
I feel kinship with these words: Listen to what the material has to say and What does the clay want to be is analogous to my experience of What does this piece of music want to be. The sentence It seems to speak and say where it wants to be put relates just as well to the notes of a melody as it does to a rock. I get out of the way of the flow and allow the music to materialize itself. The music moves my hands — that is the feeling when it really works. I don’t know where my music comes from. It doesn’t feel like it’s mine. It comes through me is the sensation I have.
Now I am lying here wondering whether that’s how a tree feels about their branches and leaves. They simply grew where they needed to go.
I woke up at 0200 and was wide awake. Now it’s 0322. Better try to get out of the way of sleep.
