"Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-pane.."
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Melancholy
Two contradictory states of mind...
...That is modern life.
I find at the moment my days move between two modes of thought. On the one hand, I very much believe in mindfulness. It's something i've got into over the last few years, beginning when my friends dad lent me 'The Miracle of Mindfulness' as an in roads to Buddhism. Mindfulness is the attaining of the ability to sort of at once be clear minded but also directly focused; it is the cultivation of this ability. Also, inherently moulding a mindset that says "Wow! We are here! What are the chances?" and really basking in the joy of this. To quote some wise man - "The miracle isnt to walk on water; the miracle isnt to fly; The miracle is to purely walk on Earth".
At the same time, I find myself very given over to the '21st century scizophrenic' mindset that Jameson outlayed. That today with all the signs, all the morsels of information that line our streets & days, we have become almost scizophrenic in our thought process - we absentmindedly jump from one ship to another in mind, thoughts of 'whats for lunch' one second, then suddenly, without concious reason, thoughts of a dead pet, or murmers of an ex girlfriend spring the next. We are sort of rolled from the beginning of days to the end picking up signs and churning them in such way. It's a rather disparaging way to think, atleast, when levied alongside the clear virtues of 'mindfulness'; However I find for the creative thinker its a rather attainful way to think. I find thinking like this, ideas spring up out of nowhere, tangents are thought-up and felt-out; a brisk walk back home from the shops may be the kiln for a feverous new idea, built on nothing more than seeing a car drive by or a bird fly low.
It's a mindset that Virginia Woolf personified in To The Lighthouse, perhaps only now (almost 100 years later) we have cranked it all the way to 11 in our 21st century ways. An absolute overdrive of information as you walk the streets, or look around your room (much different from the simple Victorian fixings she would have surrounded herself with). Standing still, how many labels can you read? How many ideas are in ear-shot?
So this is my contradiction of thought-process. On the one hand I am very fond of attaining that fruitful insight that mindfulness brings, but on the other, I like to be the pebble dropped in the river, washed this way & that from wave to wave. I find myself cushioning up in either way, from one day to the next. For animating, I find the mindful thought-process the best; being all over the place (mentally) absorbs you in elsewhere ideas when trying to animate & before long you find yourself hunched over Facebook or the kettle, procrastinating.
I find at the moment my days move between two modes of thought. On the one hand, I very much believe in mindfulness. It's something i've got into over the last few years, beginning when my friends dad lent me 'The Miracle of Mindfulness' as an in roads to Buddhism. Mindfulness is the attaining of the ability to sort of at once be clear minded but also directly focused; it is the cultivation of this ability. Also, inherently moulding a mindset that says "Wow! We are here! What are the chances?" and really basking in the joy of this. To quote some wise man - "The miracle isnt to walk on water; the miracle isnt to fly; The miracle is to purely walk on Earth".
At the same time, I find myself very given over to the '21st century scizophrenic' mindset that Jameson outlayed. That today with all the signs, all the morsels of information that line our streets & days, we have become almost scizophrenic in our thought process - we absentmindedly jump from one ship to another in mind, thoughts of 'whats for lunch' one second, then suddenly, without concious reason, thoughts of a dead pet, or murmers of an ex girlfriend spring the next. We are sort of rolled from the beginning of days to the end picking up signs and churning them in such way. It's a rather disparaging way to think, atleast, when levied alongside the clear virtues of 'mindfulness'; However I find for the creative thinker its a rather attainful way to think. I find thinking like this, ideas spring up out of nowhere, tangents are thought-up and felt-out; a brisk walk back home from the shops may be the kiln for a feverous new idea, built on nothing more than seeing a car drive by or a bird fly low.
It's a mindset that Virginia Woolf personified in To The Lighthouse, perhaps only now (almost 100 years later) we have cranked it all the way to 11 in our 21st century ways. An absolute overdrive of information as you walk the streets, or look around your room (much different from the simple Victorian fixings she would have surrounded herself with). Standing still, how many labels can you read? How many ideas are in ear-shot?
So this is my contradiction of thought-process. On the one hand I am very fond of attaining that fruitful insight that mindfulness brings, but on the other, I like to be the pebble dropped in the river, washed this way & that from wave to wave. I find myself cushioning up in either way, from one day to the next. For animating, I find the mindful thought-process the best; being all over the place (mentally) absorbs you in elsewhere ideas when trying to animate & before long you find yourself hunched over Facebook or the kettle, procrastinating.
Books
Over the last few years i've really got into my reading. I didn't really begin reading properly until I was about 17. First few books were Fear & Loathing, The Beach, Nick Hornby. When I went travelling for the first time & always had a book handy - The Road Less Travelled, American Psycho, Love on the Dole. During my time in Falmouth, having the excess of a uni library at hand, plus housemates that were studying English literature, gave me the opportunity to really dig my nose in.
What I love about books is the sheer excess available, it's very easy to come across something of worth. To quote Socrates;
Below i've compiled a list of books i'd like to recommend.
As I walked out One Midsummer Morning.. by Laurie Lee
I found this book really liberating of an idea; just get up & go. I really loved it for that simplicity of spirit. It's all about a man who one day gets up, and walks to London. He then continues & walks down to Spain. It's full of great quotes about him rubbing with the salt of the earth, him lying nose down in the dirt smelling the earth. Really lively book, full of random-wisdom.
The Art of Happiness By Howard Cutler & The Dalai Lama
This is a great book to serve as an introduction to Buddhism. Every chapter, in a different way, you're reminded how great the Dalai Lama is - always refreshing with his plain & earnest insight... all about compassion & just right.
Plato's Republic
Again, another refreshing read - only this one is 2000 years old. All takes place in the form of a conversation between a group of men - one of them inquisitively asks Socrates - "What is Justice, Socrates?". he replies that to answer, they must build a city that is pure justice - and so it begins. They build the whole hypothetical city in their minds (and your's), full of Socrates' brilliant genius. Refreshing because, you realise that Socrates was more clued up than we are today, he just know's. What I also love is the language - being written as a conversation it is not unnecessarily wordy, Socrates was a man of the people, and as such this is written for the people. Just read it, it's great. Also, Theatetus by Plato/Socrates, where Socrates outlay's his vision of his role - he is not intelligent, he is more like a midwife, bringing birth to the ideas of intelligent young men. He decides, Socratically, whether they are good and true, or are phantom births.
Here's a brilliant introduction to Socrates:
The Beach by Alex Garland
This is a good place to start for people new to reading. It's one of them 'hard to put down' kinda books. All about travelling, the search for some utopian society - if you've seen the film, it's not quite the same - there's quite drastic differences & it's also not a love story. One of my favourite novels though it's been a while.
When you start reading it certainly can be a chore. I believe it comes from a life time of television-education, sitting down & switching off, passive entertainment etc. At first those words on a page look boring, but when you forget about the telly & your fingers aren't twitching for a remote (or your phone) you suddenly find yourself lost in it.
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
A friend lent me this book last summer. I read it all in a marathon bus journey back from Glasgow. It certainly left a notch in my mind - it changed my perspective on work. Reading such a cyncial & nihilistic outlook on life too is intriguing. I think this, as much as positivity & beauty, can be just as intriguing as you are weighing up your own point of view alongside it. Simillar to this is reading American Psycho - although, I will warn you, it can be pretty distressing - no women or children. Seriously it's pretty rough.
Mr.Palomar by Italo Calvino
an intriguing thoughtful & playful book. The last time I read this I was sat on the stairs of Grand Central NYC - another great reason to read, to reminisce, of long train rides or lost hours in some city.
That'll do for now, I could get caught up doing this.
---
Final thought on books. I find reading is a nice counter position to being creative. When you're all boiled up from working & thinking too much, your hands too tired to craft or paint, your mind whirring or on it's last legs - reading is a great antidote. However it's not just the antidote its the catalyst - I find whatever i'm reading infects my days - be it buddhist texts or Virginia Woolf contemplating the mind, they all seep into your life & your thought's, colour your days, and then - bring on some new idea or chain of thought.
What I love about books is the sheer excess available, it's very easy to come across something of worth. To quote Socrates;
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”This is it for me. I believe that youthfulness is all about experience. I think it every time I see kids playing. The other day I saw a little boy, rolling back & forth onto his head, not smiling, not joking, not putting on a show, just doing it - for no reason other than that bodily desire to feel & learn. As we get older, experiences get fewer and far between, and people give up on new-experience. I feel reading is an extenuation of this lust for new-experience, and is a virtuous way to carry through the youthful spirit into adulthood. In reading we keep learning, especially about events & happenings we have never/will never be a part of - Dostoyevsky, stood before a firing squad moments from death (The Idiot). The experience of civilized desolation in dreary grey 1930's Manchester (Love on the Dole) The chance to climb inside the insane, articulate & more-than-often accurate mind of Hunter S Thompson (Fear & Loathing)
Below i've compiled a list of books i'd like to recommend.
As I walked out One Midsummer Morning.. by Laurie Lee
I found this book really liberating of an idea; just get up & go. I really loved it for that simplicity of spirit. It's all about a man who one day gets up, and walks to London. He then continues & walks down to Spain. It's full of great quotes about him rubbing with the salt of the earth, him lying nose down in the dirt smelling the earth. Really lively book, full of random-wisdom.
The Art of Happiness By Howard Cutler & The Dalai Lama
This is a great book to serve as an introduction to Buddhism. Every chapter, in a different way, you're reminded how great the Dalai Lama is - always refreshing with his plain & earnest insight... all about compassion & just right.
Plato's Republic
Again, another refreshing read - only this one is 2000 years old. All takes place in the form of a conversation between a group of men - one of them inquisitively asks Socrates - "What is Justice, Socrates?". he replies that to answer, they must build a city that is pure justice - and so it begins. They build the whole hypothetical city in their minds (and your's), full of Socrates' brilliant genius. Refreshing because, you realise that Socrates was more clued up than we are today, he just know's. What I also love is the language - being written as a conversation it is not unnecessarily wordy, Socrates was a man of the people, and as such this is written for the people. Just read it, it's great. Also, Theatetus by Plato/Socrates, where Socrates outlay's his vision of his role - he is not intelligent, he is more like a midwife, bringing birth to the ideas of intelligent young men. He decides, Socratically, whether they are good and true, or are phantom births.
Here's a brilliant introduction to Socrates:
The Beach by Alex Garland
This is a good place to start for people new to reading. It's one of them 'hard to put down' kinda books. All about travelling, the search for some utopian society - if you've seen the film, it's not quite the same - there's quite drastic differences & it's also not a love story. One of my favourite novels though it's been a while.
When you start reading it certainly can be a chore. I believe it comes from a life time of television-education, sitting down & switching off, passive entertainment etc. At first those words on a page look boring, but when you forget about the telly & your fingers aren't twitching for a remote (or your phone) you suddenly find yourself lost in it.
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
A friend lent me this book last summer. I read it all in a marathon bus journey back from Glasgow. It certainly left a notch in my mind - it changed my perspective on work. Reading such a cyncial & nihilistic outlook on life too is intriguing. I think this, as much as positivity & beauty, can be just as intriguing as you are weighing up your own point of view alongside it. Simillar to this is reading American Psycho - although, I will warn you, it can be pretty distressing - no women or children. Seriously it's pretty rough.
Mr.Palomar by Italo Calvino
an intriguing thoughtful & playful book. The last time I read this I was sat on the stairs of Grand Central NYC - another great reason to read, to reminisce, of long train rides or lost hours in some city.
That'll do for now, I could get caught up doing this.
---
Final thought on books. I find reading is a nice counter position to being creative. When you're all boiled up from working & thinking too much, your hands too tired to craft or paint, your mind whirring or on it's last legs - reading is a great antidote. However it's not just the antidote its the catalyst - I find whatever i'm reading infects my days - be it buddhist texts or Virginia Woolf contemplating the mind, they all seep into your life & your thought's, colour your days, and then - bring on some new idea or chain of thought.
tree of life
Watched tree of life tonight for the 2nd or3rd time in the last six months. If you haven't seen it, I wouldn't read on, not because of spoilers, but because I think its usually a negative, rather than a positive, to go into a film already with a slant.
Also, try as you can to watch it in the highest quality. Its a very beautiful film and I think that's partially important to the understanding of it.
Its a film that you come away each time with a new impression, however, I personally find this film to be the most like visual poetry than any other I have seen, and this is certainly my lasting impression. The shots and scenes are delicately strung together, succinct, full of ideas. I think the camera style too aligns it with poetry - its an always wondering eye, looking after something or towards something, trying to understand. It bows down to children's height so's we can understand the world from there perspective.
Most individual shots in this film are of the quality of a photography exhibition, the themes and motives too remind me allot of contemporary photography's themes and motives (despair, teenage angst, family closeness or distance, isolation). Seeing the shots in this manner reminded me of something learnt playing guitar. Each shot is like a seperate chord. Played by itself, (let's stick to just the seven major chords for this analogy), it offers something, some beauty, but is an isolated voice. When you put another chord behind it tho - thats when we begin to feel some emotional incling - I think - not because of the notes themselves, but because of the correlation (or reaction) between them. The shots in this film (beautiful, like isolated photographs), strung together have this same emotional effect - (much like animation too) its not what happens in the shots or the frames, its what happens between them.
Watching it this time, I really linked it to V Woolf. It reminded me very much of her autobiographical text "a sketch of the past" (from Moments of Being). It is here that she describes her idea of 'moments of being', those moments in life where we truly be, and experience burns into us, scolding us and sculpting us. These moments can be few and far between, but they are the times we shape ourselves by. Where we learn to cope with new experience, + where we realise ourselves.
The film feels very much like a series of these. Rather than the viewer, assertively searching for any overarching plot, I think the audience is to pay-witness to these series of moments, of relationships building & turning, and emotions thickening & stirring.
It also too has imprints of To The Lighthouse. Especially the sense of experiencing the scene through various subjective points of view (the child, the mother, the father). And what's beautiful, like TTL, these subjective points combine, and together, paint us an objective view of the family.
Also, to mention the scenes of time passing, all the way back in time. These I feel are so important to the film, you are shown time as being so long, the universe so vast(and all as one), and life so short but on such a long and beautiful chain (each ancestor a link). This; then, we are cast again to the family - zoomed right in on a link in the chain - and we feel all that strife and emotion, and all that life, kicking to and through that is so minute but yet such an explosion.
Overall I think its a very beautiful film that I will return to each year of my life. I wouldnt dare claim to so assertively hold an opinion of what this film is about, or what it says, but I hope to look at it, every now and then, and notice what I didn't see before. Its certainly one of those.
One final tie I found this had with V Woolf; I remember seeing on a book TV show sometime last year, a lady speaking of Virginia, and her skill - to alleviate the vocabulary of the reader, not to merely summarise with the hot and cold taps - (that was good, that was bad) or to paint in black and white; but instead, she gives you all the colours, so you can get to the root of something, and try and put words to what our minds instantly habe already described so fortuitously
This film too shows us all the colours - especially in a world so overloaded with forgetful-Holywood films. However, ask me of what I thought of the film in a few weeks or a few months, when the inflated pantheon of the mere mortals has shriveled and wimpered, and I'll only, boldly be able to claim 'its good'. Unfortunately those colours go grey and the taps dry up.
Also, try as you can to watch it in the highest quality. Its a very beautiful film and I think that's partially important to the understanding of it.
Its a film that you come away each time with a new impression, however, I personally find this film to be the most like visual poetry than any other I have seen, and this is certainly my lasting impression. The shots and scenes are delicately strung together, succinct, full of ideas. I think the camera style too aligns it with poetry - its an always wondering eye, looking after something or towards something, trying to understand. It bows down to children's height so's we can understand the world from there perspective.
Most individual shots in this film are of the quality of a photography exhibition, the themes and motives too remind me allot of contemporary photography's themes and motives (despair, teenage angst, family closeness or distance, isolation). Seeing the shots in this manner reminded me of something learnt playing guitar. Each shot is like a seperate chord. Played by itself, (let's stick to just the seven major chords for this analogy), it offers something, some beauty, but is an isolated voice. When you put another chord behind it tho - thats when we begin to feel some emotional incling - I think - not because of the notes themselves, but because of the correlation (or reaction) between them. The shots in this film (beautiful, like isolated photographs), strung together have this same emotional effect - (much like animation too) its not what happens in the shots or the frames, its what happens between them.
Watching it this time, I really linked it to V Woolf. It reminded me very much of her autobiographical text "a sketch of the past" (from Moments of Being). It is here that she describes her idea of 'moments of being', those moments in life where we truly be, and experience burns into us, scolding us and sculpting us. These moments can be few and far between, but they are the times we shape ourselves by. Where we learn to cope with new experience, + where we realise ourselves.
The film feels very much like a series of these. Rather than the viewer, assertively searching for any overarching plot, I think the audience is to pay-witness to these series of moments, of relationships building & turning, and emotions thickening & stirring.
It also too has imprints of To The Lighthouse. Especially the sense of experiencing the scene through various subjective points of view (the child, the mother, the father). And what's beautiful, like TTL, these subjective points combine, and together, paint us an objective view of the family.
Also, to mention the scenes of time passing, all the way back in time. These I feel are so important to the film, you are shown time as being so long, the universe so vast(and all as one), and life so short but on such a long and beautiful chain (each ancestor a link). This; then, we are cast again to the family - zoomed right in on a link in the chain - and we feel all that strife and emotion, and all that life, kicking to and through that is so minute but yet such an explosion.
Overall I think its a very beautiful film that I will return to each year of my life. I wouldnt dare claim to so assertively hold an opinion of what this film is about, or what it says, but I hope to look at it, every now and then, and notice what I didn't see before. Its certainly one of those.
One final tie I found this had with V Woolf; I remember seeing on a book TV show sometime last year, a lady speaking of Virginia, and her skill - to alleviate the vocabulary of the reader, not to merely summarise with the hot and cold taps - (that was good, that was bad) or to paint in black and white; but instead, she gives you all the colours, so you can get to the root of something, and try and put words to what our minds instantly habe already described so fortuitously
This film too shows us all the colours - especially in a world so overloaded with forgetful-Holywood films. However, ask me of what I thought of the film in a few weeks or a few months, when the inflated pantheon of the mere mortals has shriveled and wimpered, and I'll only, boldly be able to claim 'its good'. Unfortunately those colours go grey and the taps dry up.
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