conskeptical

do you see what I see?
Mar 11
Permalink

a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way

From the Rigpa Glimpse of the Day:

March 9th

Sometimes we have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind. These can be inspired by an exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday situation. They can arise simply while watching snow slowly drifting down, or seeing the sun rising behind a mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace, and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us.

I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses. But then, modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to comprehend them. Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore them more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we try to share them. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization—its ignorance and repression of who we really are.

Society provides plenty of warnings and advice to us about the dangers, problems or irrelevancies regarding various (usually ‘external’) groups of people (‘us against them’). If we apply these warnings and advice to society itself, I think we can learn a lot, and start to free ourselves of hidden cultural assumptions that might be reducing our capacity for truly free self-expression and awareness.

Mar 05
Permalink
The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare
by G. K. Chesterton
(A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE)
I propose a group reading of this interesting looking story. Details:

Provider: the DailyLit

 Start: the week of the 15th March
Frequency: 2 installments per week (I’ll read it on Tuesday and Saturday, but exact timings aren’t crucial)
Discussion: DailyLit forum

Deconstruction: Google Wave (message me or comment on this post to get added to the wave. I have a few wave invites left as well.)

So, why read The Man Who Was Thursday? My answer:

Intriguing bits of it were scattered through the rather excellent Deus Ex, which is where this book was first raised in my awareness.
This rather wonderful recommendation from wikipedia: The novel has been described as “one of the hidden hinges of  twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis  Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the  nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges.”


If you’re interested, sign your name on the forum and let’s have a nice read together!

The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare

by G. K. Chesterton

(A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE)

I propose a group reading of this interesting looking story. Details:

  • Provider: the DailyLit
  • Start: the week of the 15th March
  • Frequency: 2 installments per week (I’ll read it on Tuesday and Saturday, but exact timings aren’t crucial)
  • Discussion: DailyLit forum
  • Deconstruction: Google Wave (message me or comment on this post to get added to the wave. I have a few wave invites left as well.)

So, why read The Man Who Was Thursday? My answer:

  • Intriguing bits of it were scattered through the rather excellent Deus Ex, which is where this book was first raised in my awareness.
  • This rather wonderful recommendation from wikipedia: The novel has been described as “one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges.”

If you’re interested, sign your name on the forum and let’s have a nice read together!

Feb 28
Permalink
And that’s why chopsticks are the coolest eating implements in the world
Backstory
Not so long ago I was at a Korean restaurant in Cambridge (Little Seoul, it’s good: tasty food in a setting that takes you right away from the city, and indeed, life in general, for the relaxing space of a single meal). Dinner came with some rather elegant metal chopsticks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so elegant to go with them. Anyone with poor chopstick skills knows that eating at chopstick establishments can be a bit of a drawn out experience, leaving you with cramped hands and a much clearer understanding that many small bites does indeed fill you up MUCH more effectively than a few big bites.
Story
So, I equipped myself with some sticks for home use, with the idea that eating anything compatible (that is, solid) with them at every opportunity, as a matter of routine, would enable me to really relax into the calming space of a Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Thai (any others?) restaurant in future.
Sidenote
It turns out my current chopsticks are Taiwanese, of Chinese design. They’re pictured in this Wikipedia article, at the top of the photo here. I got them from Oriental Direct on Mill Road.
Lessons Learned
Little did I realise the true wonder of chopsticks. Eating with chopsticks, can, I am now convinced, be considered a Zen art, in the true tradition of Eugene Herrigel (author of Zen in the Art of Archery, now recognised to be the misinterpretations of an early Japanese fanboy, but so popular that they got imported into Japan as a result, and eventually installed as part of Japanese culture anyway, or so I am led to believe).
Too much muscular tension is manifested as acrobatic food and tired fingers, too little muscular tension is manifested as falling food, and even falling chopsticks. (Eating with chopsticks encourages that mental and muscular poise that sits in the tiny sweet-spot between over-tense and over-relaxed: it teaches ‘alertness’ of the hands.) Attention must be paid to the food: trying to use a computer, or read, while eating with chopsticks, is a non-starter, although I suspect this may change with time. Picking up chopsticks with one hand (as opposed to clumsily ‘setting them up’ with the other hand) is a nice exercise in digital choreography. Advancing this to the stage where the chopsticks can be put down and picked up at will throughout a meal, without the thought of having to ‘set them up again’ being a soul-destroying one, is another challenge which is nice to get past.
The process of gaining true physical understanding of the positioning of the fingers on the chopsticks for maximum mechanical advantage and avoidance of unnecessary muscular tension can truly be compared to picking up any Zen skill, be it breathing, meditation, martial arts, flower arranging or the tea ceremony.
Recently the idea of ‘experiential learning’ as compared with ‘theoretical knowledge’ has been raised in my awareness. I think the Zen arts can be a wonderful demonstration that this is a false dichotomy: in my experience experiential learning and theoretical knowledge are just two complementary sides of the same coin, each one benefiting from appropriate application of the other, until in the final analysis one cannot be distinguished from the other. (What is theoretical knowledge anyway? What is knowledge without application?)
And that’s why chopsticks are the coolest eating implements in the world.

And that’s why chopsticks are the coolest eating implements in the world

Backstory

Not so long ago I was at a Korean restaurant in Cambridge (Little Seoul, it’s good: tasty food in a setting that takes you right away from the city, and indeed, life in general, for the relaxing space of a single meal). Dinner came with some rather elegant metal chopsticks. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so elegant to go with them. Anyone with poor chopstick skills knows that eating at chopstick establishments can be a bit of a drawn out experience, leaving you with cramped hands and a much clearer understanding that many small bites does indeed fill you up MUCH more effectively than a few big bites.

Story

So, I equipped myself with some sticks for home use, with the idea that eating anything compatible (that is, solid) with them at every opportunity, as a matter of routine, would enable me to really relax into the calming space of a Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Thai (any others?) restaurant in future.

Sidenote

It turns out my current chopsticks are Taiwanese, of Chinese design. They’re pictured in this Wikipedia article, at the top of the photo here. I got them from Oriental Direct on Mill Road.

Lessons Learned

Little did I realise the true wonder of chopsticks. Eating with chopsticks, can, I am now convinced, be considered a Zen art, in the true tradition of Eugene Herrigel (author of Zen in the Art of Archery, now recognised to be the misinterpretations of an early Japanese fanboy, but so popular that they got imported into Japan as a result, and eventually installed as part of Japanese culture anyway, or so I am led to believe).

Too much muscular tension is manifested as acrobatic food and tired fingers, too little muscular tension is manifested as falling food, and even falling chopsticks. (Eating with chopsticks encourages that mental and muscular poise that sits in the tiny sweet-spot between over-tense and over-relaxed: it teaches ‘alertness’ of the hands.) Attention must be paid to the food: trying to use a computer, or read, while eating with chopsticks, is a non-starter, although I suspect this may change with time. Picking up chopsticks with one hand (as opposed to clumsily ‘setting them up’ with the other hand) is a nice exercise in digital choreography. Advancing this to the stage where the chopsticks can be put down and picked up at will throughout a meal, without the thought of having to ‘set them up again’ being a soul-destroying one, is another challenge which is nice to get past.

The process of gaining true physical understanding of the positioning of the fingers on the chopsticks for maximum mechanical advantage and avoidance of unnecessary muscular tension can truly be compared to picking up any Zen skill, be it breathing, meditation, martial arts, flower arranging or the tea ceremony.

Recently the idea of ‘experiential learning’ as compared with ‘theoretical knowledge’ has been raised in my awareness. I think the Zen arts can be a wonderful demonstration that this is a false dichotomy: in my experience experiential learning and theoretical knowledge are just two complementary sides of the same coin, each one benefiting from appropriate application of the other, until in the final analysis one cannot be distinguished from the other. (What is theoretical knowledge anyway? What is knowledge without application?)

And that’s why chopsticks are the coolest eating implements in the world.

Jan 30
Permalink
Me getting destroyed by an artificial intelligence
This is me (black) against the Many Faces of Go version 12 which now is apparently ranked 2 kyu even on a 19x19 board!
To make matters worse, I haven’t played 19x19 for a good long time, so I’ve forgotten a LOT. This is an 80 point loss: check out the embarassing dumpling centre left, and the way black seems to have a LOT of fatalities scattered all over the board…
It seems that new developments in computer Go may mean that Go will eventually go the way of chess… something that computers can beat pretty much anyone soundly at, even on consumer hardware.
But in the cases of both Go and chess, that doesn’t make the challenge of getting good at them any less worthwhile! In fact, computers can be a very useful tool for acquiring strength rapidly… that’s the hope anyway :)

Me getting destroyed by an artificial intelligence

This is me (black) against the Many Faces of Go version 12 which now is apparently ranked 2 kyu even on a 19x19 board!

To make matters worse, I haven’t played 19x19 for a good long time, so I’ve forgotten a LOT. This is an 80 point loss: check out the embarassing dumpling centre left, and the way black seems to have a LOT of fatalities scattered all over the board…

It seems that new developments in computer Go may mean that Go will eventually go the way of chess… something that computers can beat pretty much anyone soundly at, even on consumer hardware.

But in the cases of both Go and chess, that doesn’t make the challenge of getting good at them any less worthwhile! In fact, computers can be a very useful tool for acquiring strength rapidly… that’s the hope anyway :)

Jan 26
Permalink
splat splat splat
do you know what type of vegetable this is?

splat splat splat

do you know what type of vegetable this is?

Jan 24
Permalink
Jan 22
Permalink

Fenghuang City Match: Coolest Go Game Ever

Via 361points.com. For some background on the match, a previous entry from 361points.com.

Jan 21
Permalink

Blank Spaces In The Witch of Portobello

(A book by Paulo Coelho that provided just the right form of words to help me link together some of my understanding of blank spaces, or emptiness.)

On the role of imagination in literature (and all art):

“…you’ll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader’s imagination.”

On Athena’s (the central character) development as a calligrapher:

“When you’re concentrating, your hand is perfect, but when it jumps from one word to the next, it gets lost.”

On human interaction:

(Athena accepts a student, and spends the first part of the first meeting in silence, causing great consternation and confusion in the student.)

On buildings: how spaces are shaped by their boundaries:

“A curse on those who never listened to the words of Christ and who have transformed his message into a stone building.”

***

“…you’ll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader’s imagination.”

This point hammers home the idea that ‘the film of the book is never satisfying because it never tallies with how you imagined the book’.

A book is a series of abstract symbols, which causes us to dream up imagined experiences. When we read a book, we don’t experience what the author experienced, we experience a uniquely personal remix of our own past experiences and ideas.

Films aren’t like that: they aren’t made from abstract symbols: they are proxies for vision and hearing. A film is more like sitting in someone else’s head.

But this is no argument for books being better than films: experience is not just raw sense data: it is also the interpretation of that sense data. A book allows you to generate your own sense data from an inspiration of abstract symbols, but a book is also uniquely positioned to bias your interpretation of your self-made sense data using direct, verbal instruction. A film gives you sense data pretty much ready made, but is far more constrained with regards to how it can influence your interpretation of that sense data. Film and literature are very different modes of expression that can reveal very different things to us in very different ways. Perhaps films give you time for more committed interpretation, because you’re not so busy generating the sense data first… (or largely skipping over generating it altogether…)

And the blank spaces? Next time you are reading a book just think, of your experience from the words, what did you bring to the table and what did the author bring to the table? Perhaps a good book is more gaps (for you to bring your own ideas) than anything else… a scaffolding for you to enjoy your own thoughts. And next time you’re watching a film, just notice how staggeringly much is left out, and yet the continuity is (in a half passable film) still there. Without blank spaces, art, and life, would be an oppressive, disorienting, incomprehensible babble.

***

“When you’re concentrating, your hand is perfect, but when it jumps from one word to the next, it gets lost.”

For me, this point links in beautifully with martial arts. In randori, improvising multiple attacks (or successfully defending against them) is difficult: although each technique has been rehearsed and can be carried out relatively easily and automatically, there is inevitably a little pause between one technique and the next.

Unless you can stay calm through the pause (ie, allow it to be a true blank space, rather than a source of distraction), and allow yourself to enter and exit the pause at the right time, in the right position, and with the right frame of mind, each pause causes your form and intention to deteriorate a little until eventually you end up unable to continue the sequence. With that broken form you have to recompose yourself, ready for the next sequence.

The ideal might be to get the pauses right, and never have to break form… or to make it so that ‘broken’ form is not broken, but merely a larger (more centring) pause in an appropriate place…

***

(Athena accepts a student, and spends the first part of the first meeting in silence, causing great consternation and confusion in the student.)

This point is harder to get across, because there isn’t a neat quote to sum it up. But the gist of the encounter is that the student, with nothing to grasp onto except the expectations and preconceptions she brought with her to the meeting, became very agitated as time passed. Her mental state evolved based only on her own mind, with no direct input from the teacher. What a strange way to meet! But this was the point of Athena’s lesson: when we interact with people, our communication is a way to keep on the same page as time progresses. If you take away the communication (create a blank space), but remain present, how can you keep on the same page? There is enormous ambiguity, caused by the space. Given ambiguity, we are liable to fill in the gaps from our imaginations, which can give us powerful insight into ourselves. There are ambiguities and silences in every meeting, of course, sometimes perfectly comfortable long ones, but the combination of expectation and ambiguity can be one that makes for an interesting opportunity for introspection (and confusion).

***

“A curse on those who never listened to the words of Christ and who have transformed his message into a stone building.”

This echoes loudly with Gandhi’s autobiography where he mentioned that he wanted his movement to have no property, because (something along the lines of) ‘property and buildings lead to calcification.’ He said that social change, and satyagraha, should be dynamic and alive, and not constrained by the preconceptions a building imposes. (And that buildings lend an unfounded permanence to an endeavour which can all too easily prolong the endeavour far beyond its appropriateness.)

The idea of religion becoming calcified (and hence losing an understanding of its purpose and core, becoming a cargo cult) through its adoption of highly purpose-made (but nevertheless often very beautiful) buildings seems interesting.

I suppose the idea here is that Jesus’s message is essentially empty and ambiguous, an inspiration for action. But when clothed in the stone of a building, it takes on the shape of the building, embodying a far narrower range of possibilities, and with less scope for interpretation. Messages passed from person to person evolve with each telling, they adapt to the circumstances and people they sit with. Messages passed with the aid of unchanging objects adopt an element of that unchangingness: they are less able to adapt to the people they sit with, and are more liable to impose on those people. This is what can happen when you transform space (ambiguity, and opportunity for imagination) into stuff (comparatively unambiguous, less room for imagination). Moving naturally onto the book/film metaphor: transforming space into stuff (abstract symbols into proxied sense data) perhaps means you have to move from imagining to interpreting…

Perhaps a building says ‘this is the situation, interpret it if you like, but you cannot question the situation’.

This is why I like the quote: Christ, the revolutionary, the embodiment of ambiguity and imagination and new possibilities, in becoming established (transformed into stone), is in danger of losing the very essence of what makes him worth following (unless you can look past the stone).

***

And finally, blank spaces as the bedrock of our minds. This is what The Witch of Portobello is alluding to, illustrated more elliptically by some Rigpa Glimpse of the Days:

August 12
My master had a student called Apa Pant, a distinguished Indian diplomat and author, who served as Indian ambassador in a number of capital cities around the world. He was also a practitioner of meditation and yoga, and each time he saw my master, he would always ask him “how to meditate.” He was following an Eastern tradition where the student keeps asking the master one simple, basic question over and over again.
One day when our master Jamyang Khyentse was watching a Lama Dance in front of the Palace Temple in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, he was chuckling at the antics of the atsara, the clown who provides light relief between dances. Apa Pant kept pestering him, asking him again and again how to meditate, so this time when my master replied, it was in such a way as to let him know that he was telling him once and for all: “Look, it’s like this: When the past thought has ceased, and the future thought has not yet risen, isn’t there a gap?”
“Yes,” said Apa Pant.
“Well, prolong it: That is meditation.”
April 6
In the ordinary mind, we perceive the stream of thoughts as continuous, but in reality this is not the case. You will discover for yourself that there is a gap between each thought. When the past thought is past, and the future thought has not yet arisen, you will always find a gap in which the Rigpa, the nature of mind, is revealed. So the work of meditation is to allow thoughts to slow down, to make that gap become more and more apparent.

We can think of our thoughts as the signals in our minds. Typically they might be loud, conscious, deliberate signals. We usually feel that we are going about doing something or thinking something particular most of the time. If we aren’t, we aren’t typically paying much attention, and we very rarely think much of it (unless we happen to know about meditation…).

I think this is what mindfulness is: if you allow the intensity of your thoughts to diminish, but remain aware, you learn to observe your quieter thoughts (which are what really occupy the blank spaces between what we think of as our ‘thoughts’). Not the big thoughts, ‘cake’, ‘pretty girl’, ‘fast car’, but the little thoughts, maybe ‘small pebble under my left heel’, ‘breeze on my face’, ‘small bird singing far away’. As you allow the intensity of your thoughts to dim even further, maybe you can sense very routine aspects of your biology, your heart beat, the contents of your gut, your temperature, and most classically of all, your breathing (perhaps because it is the simplest biology to observe, and interestingly one of the few parts of vital biology that can function normally under either or both voluntary and involuntary control: I think that’s no accident: breathing is the gateway to awareness of the subconscious domain, because it falls under both domains, so you can smoothly and slowly transition from one to the other as you learn).

Perhaps as we allow our thoughts to quiet down we can sense the quieter parts of our psychology as well, to see if we can push aside the veil between the conscious and the subconscious: sentences half formed, before they’ve been vetted or are already committed to the vocal chords or typing fingers, embryonic intentions and plans, the earliest stages of emotional reactions to situations before they’re fully fledged and have already caused a cascade of other thoughts and reactions. The feeling of deciding to move, and committing to move, but before you already have moved.

How far down does this go? I think that’s part of the fun… getting as close to the sound of a single neuron as you possibly can.

And finally, I wonder if our dreams aren’t just this background chatter writ large, without consciousness or external stimuli to distort the undisturbed but ever-evolving shape of the mind.

***

Some more interesting places to look for blank spaces:

EVERYWHERE.

Jan 16
Permalink

Learning to Swim From Scratch

Learning basic skills as an adult can be very fun. So many everyday basic skills were learnt during childhood that it can be easy to forget what it’s like to be a beginner. Which can make it difficult to empathise with the beginners that come across your path. So, the latest thing I’ve decided to be a beginner at is… swimming, which I have almost no prior experience at.

So far I’ve had 4 sessions at the pool. In addition, I’ve done a bit of reading up on the internet (most usefully: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1025331879770 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Immersion), and these are the main points that I’m finding interesting at the moment:

  • Trying to be flat (balanced) in the water (not allowing my legs to sink, placing my weight on my chest), to avoid the feeling of ‘swimming uphill’, and to move more smoothly in the water.
  • Releasing the weight of my head into the water. I haven’t consciously tried this yet, but it sounds good.
  • Controlling my breathing, so that I can avoid the need to keep my head out of the water for long stretches because I keep on panting…
  • Getting habituated to the pressure of water on the chest. I have a feeling this is interfering with my breathing at the moment.
  • Engaging my core muscles: I noticed that when I used my hips and core, kicking became much less effort and much more effective, and also more enjoyable: it feels less like forcing my way forward and more like strolling along in a kind of dance…
  • Working towards not using floats for lengths. I have a strong suspicion floats encourage poor body positions…
  • Playing underwater manoeuvering and breath-holding games with hoops etc. Good fun. I have a feeling the diving reflex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex) might have some relation to meditation techniques, so that should be interesting to explore…
  • Tuning into the resistance the water is providing to my body and limbs. If I can perceive the underwater ‘atmosphere’ well, this should help me develop my skills by allowing me to understand the effect my motions are having on the water around me. (This is interesting, because on dry land, typically the only tactile reference point is the static ground, but in the water, the reference point is MOVING and all around, not just below.) Also, perceiving the water around me should help give me a ‘dancing’, meditative feel that just forcing my way through the water could not give.

So, the keywords for me at the moment are:

  • Balance, core, breathing, habituation, breath holding, perception

Breathing will be the best bit, because then I can ditch the floats and start on the road to learning all the strokes, rather than just flailing around for the next breath…

Jan 11
Permalink

The Valsalva Manoeuvre

While looking up ‘core muscles’ in a bid to speed up my learning to swim, and to refresh my memory so as to improve faster at Shorinji Kempo, I came across the Valsalva Manoeuvre, which, remarkably, is a method in which you can voluntarily and dramatically instantly affect the behaviour of and stresses on your heart:

Core muscles are very important in the Valsalva maneuver, which is when a person’s thorax tightens while holding their breath. This normally involuntary action can be induced by linking one’s hands in front of the chest while standing, and then pulling against the hands without letting go. The Valsalva maneuver assists in lifting, excretion, pushing, and birthing. - wikipedia

Core muscles assisting with excretion? This rung true with a suspicion I have harboured for years, and which now appears to be resolving itself.

The first shades of this suspicion were sown by my father, who expressed a dissatisfaction with Western style sitting toilets, expressing something along the lines of ‘squatting toilets are much better, more comfortable and ergonomic’.

As a child, and thereafter, certain toilet moments have made me think… woah… this is quite an effort. Just how healthy is this? Could I be causing myself health problems like this? But lacking any clear verbal handle to research this, I thought to myself ‘well, everybody lives like this, I can’t be worrying myself with this.’

However, this suspicion was reinforced at some indeterminate date by somebody mentioning ‘careful, you’ll burst a blood vessel like that!’ in response to someone’s (perhaps of a very young age) bowel straining facial expression (or perhaps this was in a film, or perhaps in a dream, who can tell).

So… I was well and truly primed to be receptive to the mention of the engagement of core muscles in excretion, and the Valsalva Manoeuvre fits that bill precisely.

And my suspicion of health problems was very rapidly lent weight:

Excessive straining, expressed in intensively repeated Valsalva Maneuvers, is needed for emptying the bowels in the sitting position.
The Valsalva Maneuver adversely affecting the cardio-vascular system is the causative factor of defecation syncope (fainting) and death. The cardio-vascular system of a healthy man withstands the intensive and repeated straining at defecation, while the compromised cardio-vascular system may fail, resulting in syncope or even death.
The squatting defecation posture is associated with reduced amounts of straining and may prevent many of these tragic cases.” - toilet-related-ailments

This image is particularly illustrative:

(Full description here.)

I recommend that you have a good read around http://www.toilet-related-ailments.com/ and consider adapting your lifestyle towards a squatting toilet position. I know I will. The list of sitting-toilet related ailments listed on that site is long, and true sounding. And it makes me wonder just how many other daily aspects of modern life are so harmful and avoidable…

And any time you find yourself executing the Valsalva Manoeuvre, think, am I overdoing it? Am I doing this because I’m not really strong enough to do what I’m trying to do? Certainly I will be researching this topic further.

Jan 09
Permalink
cellophane noodles
Made like that by snow, freezing conditions and wonderful bright harsh sunlight against a solid blue sky. Just lovely.Is it blossom? Seems like a funny time of year for blossom…

cellophane noodles

Made like that by snow, freezing conditions and wonderful bright harsh sunlight against a solid blue sky. Just lovely.
Is it blossom? Seems like a funny time of year for blossom…

Jan 04
Permalink
It had to happen sometime. What surprises me is that he’s become so startled by the mixup.”
“Oh, you know, Horacio gets something started and then looks at it with the same look puppies put on when they’ve taken a crap and stand there amazed looking at it.
— Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar, 55, p324. Simply inspired.
Dec 21
Permalink
a nice straightforward 30 point win for me playing black against Many Faces level 10 (version 11: version 12 is much stronger, it will be fun to have a go against that). Go is such fun, it will be nice when I’m organised enough to play more.
(click the image to see the whole game in EidoGo.)

a nice straightforward 30 point win for me playing black against Many Faces level 10 (version 11: version 12 is much stronger, it will be fun to have a go against that). Go is such fun, it will be nice when I’m organised enough to play more.

(click the image to see the whole game in EidoGo.)

Dec 20
Permalink

Séraphine

biopic of painter Séraphine Louis (1864-1942). My feelings about this film varied a lot as it progressed.

At first, I was struck by the beautiful colours and textures that persist through the whole film. The natural lighting and detailed and musical ambient sounds help set this film firmly in a rustic feeling Senlis of the late 19th and early 20th century. The whole atmosphere and sedate, thoughtful pace was very immersive and just relaxing to be in.

But around a third of the way through the film I started to doubt the humanity of the film-makers: Séraphine was clearly a bit of a lunatic but I didn’t feel that justified the condescending tone I thought the film was taking. Séraphine’s almost infantile humming/singing as she sauntered along on her daily business or leisure was set at a volume that drew attention to it as more than just a background detail: it seemed more like a ‘hey look at this crazy woman, har har’. Chubby legs dangling unskirted from a thick tree branch as Séraphine meditates in a windy treetop was a little bit too: ‘hey look at this, it’s almost as if she’s meditating!’. Was the detail of Séraphine taking a pee in the grass behind the river (during a communal linen washer’s session) a documentary style description of country life, or a puerile snigger at the bestial nature of lunatic/historical/working-class life?

By two thirds through the film Séraphine’s new found riches were fuelling her lunacy and awakening her ego in a rather extended and dreary way: it was sad to watch and took up too much of the film. The film began to drag, which combined with my previous suspicions of snobbery, left a film that really couldn’t be sustained by beautiful textures and sonic details alone…

However, as the film drew into its last quarter I had a flash of insight, brought on by my enjoyment of the recreations (presumably they were recreations) of Séraphine’s paintings: they really were beautiful and inspiring records of meditation by mutating repetition. And I realised it:

This was a film made in the style of Séraphine’s own paintings!

Suddenly I could fully enjoy and appreciate the film without doubts. Bingo :) The deep textures and ambient sounds reflected Séraphine’s own perceptions as expressed through her work. The snobbishness was nothing of the sort: it was an opportunity to settle into the world as Séraphine experienced it: loud humming/singing reflects what you’d hear if you were doing it yourself… prominent chubby knees in a breezy tree emphasizes the feeling of wind on your legs, as well as losing yourself in the sounds and sights. All in all, I came to see that the film was doing a pretty good job of embodying the embodied quality of Séraphine’s life and perceptions, and the embodied qualities that make her paintings so satisfying. Set that off against the unembodied (perhaps alienated) qualities of modern technology mediated life, and I decided that this was a super film pointing the way to the possibilities of another world.

Some particular things that I really liked about the film:

  • How being unhinged, but synchronized with the environment (as Séraphine is at the start of the film), is a blissful state. In comparison, being unhinged and dislocated from your environment (as Séraphine is from the middle of the film) is an alienating and painful thing indeed. This can be entirely attributable to the contributions of Wilhelm Uhde, who was Séraphine’s patron and chief ego inflater. Without him, she would probably have not become famous or respected, but perhaps her religious expression and satisfaction would have been purer without him…
  • The way the film explores the dynamics between a muse (in this case Séraphine) and the person they inspire (in this case, Wilhelm Uhde). Previously, Séraphine had a muse herself, God, but it seems that becoming a muse herself opened the door to her ego, and perhaps a loss of focus on what was the source of her gift. I wonder if that transformation is visible in her work? I would like to find out…
  • The way the wealthy can interfere in the lives of the ‘true’: money is a way to achieve things without environmental sensitivity, and Wilhelm Uhde’s large and unconsidered financial contribution to Séraphine seems like the main reason for the mental instability in her life (as opposed to her plain lunacy, which she was living quite happily with before).
  • The observation that animals can cry. ‘If you take a calf away from a cow, the cow will cry.’ That is a perception that people who live with animals can understand, and those who don’t, can never really understand. Empirical philosophy. Nice.

Overall, I would say that this is a film about a woman who gained the money to express her madness without proper environmental restraint. A sobering and beautiful tale of the fragility of even strong people.

Dec 19
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Crispin and Chris

Crispin and Chris

Crispin and Tjelvar

Crispin and Tjelvar

snow bikes

snow bikes

bike after journey home!

bike after journey home!

cambridge-shorinji:

Photos of training tonight: Crispin, Tjelvar and Chris, plus the snow bike. We went into training on a dark, cold and bit icy evening and came out to a blizzard!

Aspects covered tonight: eye contact and staying close to your assailant in order to react and be safe (don’t back off and give your opponent attacking distance).

[Crispin says: notice the colour of Chris and my belts… we passed our grading! Thanks to Senseis Dave and Tjelvar for getting us through :)]