O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!
I ran 10 Kilometers in my first Jazz Marathon. Unfortunately I was probably the only runner who had to walk out a stomach cramp for about 3 minutes, which cut into my side as well as my time. I still beat more than half of the field, proving absolutely nothing. But with that non-achievement, I have started my week with unbearably stiff legs, not to mention a mind that has jellied in recent months.
Where does one put oneself in order to reflect on the world, in a world where reflection is looked at as an 'escape', as a means to avoid facing reality? Reflection is by nature the act or acts in which one faces reality ("Better to see the face than hear the name"), although currently most people expect reality to consist only of what their social group--i.e. the current predominant voices in culture, science, politics, etc.--has demarcated as the 'expected,' the empirically given (no matter how ridiculous it sounds to be, or is). Susan Sontag wrote something to the effect that all generations must reinvent spirituality for themselves--spirituality being terms, methods, proscriptions, and (most importantly) symbolic acts with which men and women deal with the inherent paradox of their condition.
Take, for example, this blog. While it may seem to someone who reads it as a cryptic and unreadable dialogue with myself, it is intended, i.e. if one reads closely with patience and generosity (the antidotes to many cynical, cursory readings that normally are elicited from us by our unreflective habits) to be not only what it says. It is a needless and blind habit to recapture my day in the most trivial and minutely detailed account of events, objectified and dessicated to a scientific, lifeless pulp. "Literature is a matter of instances," and so when we read or write, we must be willing to stand in the water of life and see where it takes us. We must look inside one or two things, and then see the whole world around us.
I have nothing planned to update my enormous readership about this week. I will read R.H. Blyth's "Haiku" (vol. 1- Eastern Culture), study Japanese, keep going to the gym, and perhaps take the train south to the tip of the Kii peninsula, where I will visit a friend and a waterfall. Sounds good, right? What will you be doing, o silent reader? (*hint*comment fodder)
"The mouth desires to speak, but the words disappear;
The heart desires to associate itself, but the thoughts fade away."
-Zenrinkushu
Where does one put oneself in order to reflect on the world, in a world where reflection is looked at as an 'escape', as a means to avoid facing reality? Reflection is by nature the act or acts in which one faces reality ("Better to see the face than hear the name"), although currently most people expect reality to consist only of what their social group--i.e. the current predominant voices in culture, science, politics, etc.--has demarcated as the 'expected,' the empirically given (no matter how ridiculous it sounds to be, or is). Susan Sontag wrote something to the effect that all generations must reinvent spirituality for themselves--spirituality being terms, methods, proscriptions, and (most importantly) symbolic acts with which men and women deal with the inherent paradox of their condition.
Take, for example, this blog. While it may seem to someone who reads it as a cryptic and unreadable dialogue with myself, it is intended, i.e. if one reads closely with patience and generosity (the antidotes to many cynical, cursory readings that normally are elicited from us by our unreflective habits) to be not only what it says. It is a needless and blind habit to recapture my day in the most trivial and minutely detailed account of events, objectified and dessicated to a scientific, lifeless pulp. "Literature is a matter of instances," and so when we read or write, we must be willing to stand in the water of life and see where it takes us. We must look inside one or two things, and then see the whole world around us.
I have nothing planned to update my enormous readership about this week. I will read R.H. Blyth's "Haiku" (vol. 1- Eastern Culture), study Japanese, keep going to the gym, and perhaps take the train south to the tip of the Kii peninsula, where I will visit a friend and a waterfall. Sounds good, right? What will you be doing, o silent reader? (*hint*comment fodder)
"The mouth desires to speak, but the words disappear;
The heart desires to associate itself, but the thoughts fade away."
-Zenrinkushu
posted by Jeffrey at 9:23 AM
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