THINKING
THOUGHTS 12/29/2000 10/3/2008 |
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Thinking thoughts are thoughts for their own sake, thoughts as thoughts, thoughts as an end in themselves.
Love and Compatibility |
We are mistaken if we think we understand the limit of what can be. We think we understand the nature of love well enough to make rules about it. We say, “If you loved me,” and we suppose that we can utter a conclusion that has meaning. But there is no rule. Nothing is incompatible with love. Love has no more to do with anything else than the weather has to do with the day of the week. 6/26/2003 |
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Old Is Younger Than It Used to Be |
Our generation—the
generation that came of age in the sixties—has carried
its youth with it into old age. Consequently we are much younger than our grandparents
were when they were our age. 2/26/2003 |
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Formative Mind |
Magic, religion, and myth are all transformational. And so are
art and science. They are the imagination of man working to give the world
a human meaning. 11/26/2001 |
The Complex Life |
I have a love of complexity that I suspect many
others do not share. I suspect that others do not share it on the basis
of their reactions to it, which typically range from bewilderment to frantic resistance.
I have an instinctive bond with those who do share it, a fellowship with a small
but not insignificant minority. Simplicity has an undeniable beauty and power, and I am attracted to it as one among many possibilities; but I believe that a simple life would suffocate me. To me the Buddhist robe and bowl represent realism as fundamental as it gets, and I am full of admiration for them; but as long as they represent anything at all, they are encumbered by a layer of complexity that I have added and that does not inhere in them; to see them as symbols is to fail to see them. But in my construction, everything is fraught with meaning; meaning and symbol and metaphor are among the elements, like nitrogen and xenon and ytterbium. My basic reality will coincide with that Buddhist simplicity only in the instant in which it exceeds it, at my death, when not even clothing or food have relevance any longer. When I practice Zen, I learn to break through my own overlay of complexity and see Ding an sich. But when I practice Zen I am actually sitting within a circle of simple truth that adds a level of complexity to my being the moment I stand up. Even more than complexity, I have a love of chaos and disarray as a rich and unprejudiced source of possibilities that can have no existence within the strictures of tidiness. All combinations are possible, leaps are possible, leaps across boundaries occur naturally, subtle links and Indralike reflections abound. Every separate thing coruscates with potential, and the secondary dimensions of which metaphors are made shine as lucidly as the primary. The synapses among heterogeneous elements, whether disparate concepts or items of knowledge or physical objects, create bursts of luminance, moments of brilliance, of full-spectrum diamondlike rainbow light that I experience internally as an almost palpable radiance. I can see the radiance, taste it, feel it emotionally, and be swept by it in a kind of intellectual rush that has an orgasmic quality, even in minute doses. This is not unlike the joy of learning, the pleasure of insight, and the receipt of inspiration; but it occurs in a multiplicity of tiny ways in trivial everyday experience, a source of pleasure and entertainment as much as of deep life-altering illumination. It is no judgment on the perfection of simplicity to say that I cannot attain it; I hold myself below those who can. To those who have an aversion to complexity I extend my regrets for any discomfort caused but offer no apology. Instead I say this: ambiguity is another path to enlightenment. 11/10/2001 |
Hexerei |
It occurs to me that in another time and place
I might have been regarded as a witch. For if there is no magic, if the words and deeds of men and women are only words and deeds, if there is no summoning and controlling the forces of nature, if there are no forces outside the forces of nature, then what is a witch but an ordinary person, perhaps an ordinary person like me? 11/10/2001 |
Thoughts on September Eleventh |
A painting I wish I could paint: American refugees in Mexico. |
The attacks on September 11th were a trial balloon from which the terrorists gained a tremendous amount of information about us and our responses and our weaknesses. |
The use of airplanes to deliver death by violence is an exact analog of the use of mail to deliver death by powder: perversion of a conventional and pervasive system that is internal to our borders and that we cannot purge of danger. |
Destroying one's comfort in the familiar, such as the delivery of mail, has a profound psychological effect. |
We should learn the names of the heroes of September 11th and teach them to our children along with the names of Davy Crockett and Ethan Allen and Nathan Hale. |
Having something to say about the event and saying it: that's who we are. |
England under Henry, Mary, and Elizabeth, when church and state were
as one: perhaps the British understand something about our enemy that we
cannot comprehend. 11/10/2001 |
Child of My Mind | ||
I was
pregnant for nine months, in some sense an expectant mother for quite a lot longer
than that, and a prospective mother for a very great deal longer than that—indeed,
from the time the x and y chromosomes came together to determine the sex of the
zygote that was to be me. And in all that time I have also had a mother
of my own. Yet in the first fifteen minutes of motherhood I suddenly understood
so many new things about the parent–child relationship that it was as though I
had been seeing with only one eye, and that half blind.
3/11/2001 | ||
The Well of Magical Desire |
What accounts for the human appetite for magic?
On a getaway weekend in the San Lorenzo Valley, my husband and I were remarking on how many religious retreat centers and facilities have established themselves in that area of the Santa Cruz mountains. He observed that the twenties and thirties had seen the spread and popularization of religious movements of various kinds in this country. “If we were to look back into the history,” I remarked, “I’ll bet we’d find that this was a sacred site to the Indians or whoever were the oldest inhabitants of this area.” He shot me a speculative look, as though gauging my degree of seriousness. “Do you believe there are places like that?” I asked him to specify exactly what he meant by “places like that.” “Sacred places,” he said, “where people can feel some sort of magnetism or vibrations, where they can actually feel themselves in tune with some kind of power.” “I’ll answer your question,” I said, “but first I really want to know what you think I’m going to say.” I was wondering if he thought I found the idea compelling enough to overcome or even just slightly affect my hard-nosed skepticism. “I’d really like to hear. I think you’re going to say no.” “What I say is that I think there are places where people have a feeling like that,” I said, “and so they use religion or magic to explain it.” That is the essence of my view of belief in supernatural powers, whether magical or divine, whether described in terms of gods or men or devils, human or superhuman agencies, dogma or spells and incantations. "And if the Hindus find out about it,” I added, “they’ll pour colored powders on the spot, and then it will be sacred.” In fact, I knew that there were already ashrams in those hills; I was speaking facetiously of what it takes to make a place holy. I went on to explain that my thinking on this is tied to my view of man as a creature who habitually and compulsively explains: who, confronted by behavior or phenomena, immediately starts to form hypotheses about them; who begins describing them in the present tense, just as this sentence is doing; who seeks and finds patterns, who observes and records, seeks cause and effect, and predicts. It is in the nature of our minds—our dharma, if you will—to do this. Probably it was an adaptive trait from the outset. Seeing patterns and predicting events tells us where to place the altar stone—and why; when to begin planting and when to harvest; when to put in to port, when to run for shelter, when to invest and when to sell our shares. When we can’t see the agency, when the pattern involves powers we can’t recognize, we hypothesize other beings or realms or forces. [Note: This last sentence marks the precise point at which something rational and intelligible turned into bullshit. What follows is sketchy and incomplete because once I left the rails I never really got back on them again.] When we experience something that we can’t explain, we may appeal to science now, but the older science is magic or the supernatural. Anyone who could claim to influence the powers or explain the mysteries would have extraordinary influence over other people. Our appetite for magic, then, is connected not just with our desire to explain phenomena and to influence outcomes but with what we are as beings. And it is our feeling about what we are, our own awe-struck reverence for ourselves, that makes us think of the subjective experience of being us as something magical, in the same way that places become known as sacred spots. We are overcome by the wonderfulness of ourselves and have just enough becoming modesty to call it by another name. Notes:
9/27/1999 |
Change |
Everything living depends on change. The breeze
stirring that branch above us is moving the leaves in such a way that—who knows?—the
exact same combination may never recur. Change is what allows me to breathe
in and out, allows my heart to beat. Without it there is no life or even
death. The fact that we cannot go on as we are is the only thing that enables
us to go on as we are. 9/27/199 |
The Selfishness of Virtue |
When I was about 13 or 14, I came to a somewhat cynical conclusion about
virtue that I formulated exactly thus, taking a certain wry intellectual pleasure
in the rebellion it represented: Virtue is that which most tends toward
the comfort of others. At that point in my life I was surrounded by people (parents, schoolteachers, Sunday school teachers, ministers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and Camp Fire Girl leaders) who devoted vigorous attention to teaching my peers and me what was considered to be virtuous behavior. In analyzing what that consisted of, I saw that the more I followed their precepts, the more I was simply serving them; in other words, teaching virtue to others is essentially a selfish act. That is how I saw it as a junior high school student, and the thought still lingers in my mind after all this time. There is an implicit bargain that goes with this: Ill serve you if youll serve me. Calling it virtue makes it sound like something to aspire to and attain for the good of one’s character, but really its nothing so elevated. Its more like Miss Manners rationale for avoiding rude behavior: so we dont all feel compelled to kill each other. (It also brings to mind what Huston Smith wrote in The Religions of Man about the four commandments that all cultures and ethical systems have in common, because if they dont, then they wont survive.) At the age of about 25 or 26, I saw that the principle driving life is simply more: more air, more water, more food, more time, more sleep, more love, more cars, more video games, whatever. Tropisms. The principle is the same, whether it be tree roots seeking water, cheetahs hunting gazelles, or you making a trip to the supermarket. About two years ago, I added to that concept the understanding that our natural state is a state of deprivation; left to ourselves, we run out of things or use them up or wear them out and need more. And so I dismiss any philosophical system that begins with a premise such as “By nature man is a happy creature” or “The natural state is a state free of pain.” We are not naturally a happy animal. We are naturally a hungry animal, from the moment of birth (or before) onward. We are born wailing to be fed, and that need drives us all our lives. Our natures impel us to act to relieve the pain of want. For us thinking, scheming, and hoarding creatures, the secret is in knowing what’s enough. Last night I read Lewis Lapham's column in the November 1999 Harpers, about how in this age of downsizing and consolidation we can combine the concepts of heaven and hell and eliminate a lot of redundancy. This morning I had my latest thinking thought. As usual it came in two parts. Part 1: All the vices boil down to greed. (Cherchez le buck.) Hence all the virtues also boil down to greed by their relationship to the vices and also by the relationship they create between ourselves and others. But greed in itself is nothing but a disproportionate or excessive form of wanting more. Wanting (needing) more is, up to a point, just what we naturally experience as living creatures, and it's the drive that enables us to survive. It is not a vice unless life is a vice. It is neutral, like everything else: it just is. Wanting more than we need becomes greed, although it is very hard to say what someone actually needs. Also, wanting more than our neighbor has is greed. Wanting more at our neighbor's expense is one avenue to the vices. Part 2: By tackling this tendency head on, religions and spiritual systems serve to keep greed in check to some degree. One reason they all say the same thing is that they all recognize and deal somehow with this fundamental aspect of human nature. We have to satisfy some wants and needs to survive, but if we overdo it, we not only hurt ourselves but also cause others around us to suffer, and nobody wants to suffer. Also, when we make them suffer, they become dangerous to us. We dont want others around us to cause us to suffer, either. So we construct systems that serve to counter that suffering-producing behavior in ourselves and in each other. Take Buddhism and Christianity, for example: their approaches are drastically different, but this is what they are both doing. So, then, what happens to a religious/spiritual system over time? Eventually its adherents learn how to use it to serve their own greed, which will win out in the end. This is the stage that Christianity is at in our time. Past systems have already been there. Present and future systems will get there. Other systems will come along that attempt to accomplish the same aim of countering or mitigating this aspect of human nature. For a while, they do, and then followers begin to see how to profit by them, and so they undo themselves by the very things that gained them strength. This is un unexamined hypothesis, all this last part, this thinking thought. The older components are things I have had years to dwell on, and I am pretty well satisfied that they hold up for me. But todays part 1 and part 2 are new thoughts to me, so I dont know for sure if I am going to embrace them or not. It’s a long way from thinking to believing. Nevertheless, here they are, still fresh and offered for further consideration. 12/21/1999 |
Advertising: The Art Medium of the Twentieth Century |
A prophetic thinking
thought from 1981 Advertising will be looked back upon as the principal artistic medium of the century (& one of its major modes of expression will be recognized as the pun, both verbal and visual). It has huge money resources
behind it. Art in other times has also been something more (or less) than “art for art’s sake”—l’art pour l’art: served a secular or ecclesiastical (or both) power Egyptian, Roman, etc. Those powers are now subordinate to business/commercial/financial concerns, which therefore dominate art as they once did Contemporary American
love affair with the computer Computers will paradoxically bring more power to average citizen Computers the principal art medium of the future? Psychometric evaluation of “what is art”—art to be defined in terms of {millivolts?} of response—?biophysiological response Subjectivity: make it to please yourself 11/5/1981 |
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