Community with those who sense that bhakti yoga is: Strong Spirit, Calm Mind, Love, and the release of what no longer serves you. Landscape photo is from a special town on the coast of Sicily.
We live in our world of buttons, where if I press UP on the thermostat, I expect the heat to come instantaneously to warm me, but life and evolution have not categorically been instantaneous, though much has happened in an instant. We mere mortals live with the illusion that our ego is capable of producing phenomenal results, as I press the switch and a fireplace comes on, I turn a dial and the kettle begins warming water, I enter digits and hear a friend's voice, I click and receive a book in the mail. We try to use buttons resourcefully yet we neglect to think of their machinelike way of mediating our world. I didn't control time on the screen or calculate algebra or produce a moving picture with sound. The button did it all. I just pressed it.
Some could distort the use of buttons by making the hour false or the temperature extreme or the attendant too busy. Buttons can be abused. But more than that, the quarter-inch or half-centimeter press of a synthetic surface and poof, a change occurs, a door opens, a light turns on, a connection is made. Comparable to push-buttons are books, which when opened, allow our perspectives to shift along with the universe. Here, the button becomes a button, an intermediary that is not just an automatic gesture. It also becomes the fastener like the fabric button.
A button can be worn or undone, pressed or dismantled, acknowledged or jammed. It can be all of these things and it remains a button, in service to man. Only a button could reveal the power we humans have--and the extreme dependency, frailty, and futility with which we seek to control the world. We are bound by age and form, electricity and matter. What was the world like before all these buttons?
The energy we gain from the existence of buttons, may we use it to illuminate a smile or kindness around us.
There is a voice beyond the button saying it's okay, it's okay...
Because my memory is weaker than I would like, I pressed ON to video record the affection I shared with a little girl some summers ago... With a button I hoped to somehow capture the adorable cleverness of a little girl who wanted to tell me a tomato was not red (rosso) but yellow (giallo), all because she knew I'd kiss her if she did so one more time... And so buttons also have to do with the emotions and not just the drive we feel inside to do, accomplish, manipulate, build or destroy.
This post is inspired by the following images, which came from a previous post touching on Jean-Luc Godard's film, Contempt (Le Mépris). A creative and exemplary film of French New Wave, the film jumps to colored Classical statues, which stand out from the rest of the cinematography.
Brigitte Bardot in Contempt
After listening to an interesting lecture on the
interiorization of self in modernity this morning, I began to realize a bit
more the relation between the coloring of ancient Greek statues in Contempt and
the content of the film, which is the story of a production of a film on
Odysseus and Penelope which, in its reinterpretation, parallels a tragic love
between the screenwriter character in the film and his wife, played by Brigitte
Bardot. As this film (1963) evokes the ancient Greek epic poem, Homer's Odyssey,
it draws on rich archetypes, smartly modernized in the trailer to the film: woman,
man, the kiss, the crazy man, the sea, tenderness, vengeance, sufferance. Then
the stairway, tragic love, betrayal, death, love, fatal beauty. All the themes
are there for une tragique histoire d'amour.
While I wondered what the greater picture was behind the unusual coloring of ancient Greek statues in Contempt, aesthetically and symbolically speaking, I didn't give it due thought until I listened to the lecture by Dr. Larry Norman today. The talk was on the tragic passions and the interiorization of self as a mark of modernity. I began to think that perhaps the coloring of the statues is Godard's modernizing or romanticizing of the ancient Greek statues--or rather, subjects--in this film-within-a-film. In the film, there is a German director, an American producer, and a French screenwriter and cultural incongruences in between. The producer and screenwriter agree on one thing only: the theory that perhaps Odysseus left on his voyages because of his wife's infidelities.... thus obliterating the essence of marital fidelity that the Classical Penelope came to incarnate and symbolize.
Penelope (1896), Franklin Simmons
It is easy to see the evacuation of meaning as we move (through the arts) from one worldview to another, Antiquity to Modernity. Everything in the strange age (Kali yuga) we are living in begins to make a bit more sense as one contemplates the times in which we live and their difference with ancient times, revealing not least of all the way that the individual's sense of the divine, the self, and the world is carved within the context of art and literature, as these communicative forms become the fossilized reflection of the individual's sense of self and place in the world. What became palpable is something we all seem to live with in modern day--the disconnection of the self from x, y, or z.
Modernity is the period beginning at the end of the Middle Ages (mid- to late 1400s) through present-day, although some French historians have said that modernity ended with the French Revolution--and that we are now in the Late Modern period. In the French Wikipedia source, this new contemporary epoch is poignantly described as as a time in which "living people, in significant numbers, can testify to historical, political, economic, and social events and a time in which the trace of these events remains relatively alive in memories and oral transmission. This period corresponds to the atomic era and the computer era, as well as to decolonization and the Cold War." Exactly.
How was the Classical carried into the modern in arts and literature? At the start of modernity, the Renaissance (1500s) looked to Antiquity, or Classicism, for artistic and literary inspiration, as evidenced by the formalization of the Greco-Latin tradition in terms of its works of art, which also developed in interesting ways in what became known in France as the French Classical period (late 1600s). We are more concerned in this post with Romanticism, a literary and artistic movement that began in Europe in the mid-1700s, where artists and writers began to free themselves of the rules of thought and form associated with classicism. This was no small break with national tradition and took several decades to take root, but in fact the movement has everything to do with the modern psyche, as Professor Norman discusses in his lecture.
Odysseus, Museo Archeologico
Nazionale Sperlonga
As Professor Larry Norman (University of Chicago) points out, the literature and arts of Antiquity privileges exteriority, taking for its subject human action fully as it is engaged in the world, which can be observed in its exemplary images from physical nature and the human body. Inversely, Romantic literature and arts privilege interiority, taking for its subject la conscience intime du sujet (the intimate consciousness of the subject), preferring the nuances of intention and feelings to the brightness or loudness of action. However nice it is to celebrate the body, this penetrates the heart. [my translation, paraphrasing]
To support his argument, he refers to a beloved French tragedy by Jean Racine, which was inspired by the classical Phaedra of Euripides. Norman makes an excellent point: While in the Classical Greek tragedy, Phaedra is plagued by an outside force and divinity, Venus, in Racine's French version of Phèdre (1677), the torment stems more from her own psychological makeup and her awareness of the unstoppable tragic therein.
When I think of Racine's Phèdre, I think of the complexity of her psychological portrait and of her own self-condemnation, as she is hyper-aware of her psychology and how it imprisons her: she was pre-written by the infamous history of her mother, Pasiphaé, and the minotaur, as well as the scandals of her father, Minos. As Racine brilliantly indicates in his Préface, no one condemns Phèdre's criminal passion more than she: she is neither totally guilty nor totally innocent. Witness Phèdre’s declaration of love to her stepson, “J’aime / Ne pense pas qu’au moment que je t’aime, / Innocente à mes yeux je m’approuve moi-même” (v. 673-74) / "I love / Do not think in the moment that I love you that, innocent in my own eyes, I approve of myself." Racine is highly adept at handling the complexity of human emotions. Moreover, it is important to know why Racine's Phèdre loves her proudly chaste stepson: he is the purer version of her adulterous husband, Theseus.
In the first image, we see where the Phaedra of Antiquity is afflicted by incestuous love from an external source, the goddess of eros. In the second image, the modern Phèdre of Romanticism languishes in her own psychological world of demise.
In the Classical tragedy, Phaedra is plagued by a winged Eros (350-340 B.C.)
Phèdre (1880), Alexandre Cabanel's romantic rendition
of the 1677 version of the tragedy, where the torment comes from within
To return to Professor Norman and the broader strokes of Antiquity and Modernity that he sketches, he makes a very interesting claim: that the aesthetic polarity between exteriority and interiority indicates an even deeper schism between two radically different world views, signaling an anthropological break between Antiquity and Modernity---which is to say how the man of Antiquity conceived of self and the divine and his place in the universe versus how the modern individual does. To draw out this contrast, he explains: "Classical art is an expression of paganism, seen as a materialist religion where divinity was perfectly incarnated in corporal form---while the Romantic connection expresses Christianity as a spiritualist religion, where the individual profoundly feels the imperfection of his terrestrial life, sees himself alienated from the divinity, tormented by this separation, and haunted by the sharp conscience of self that results" [my translation].
To my mind, this is to realize that we all suffer from modernity and to appreciate how the arts and literature reflect on this deep sense of lost-ness or twistedness of self within the contemporary era, let alone man's confusion, dismissal, or manipulation of the divine. As Norman says of the two world views: "This dualistic paradigm of history has the great advantage of [hoping] to explain all the formal differences that distinguish works of art throughout time." One can note in a stroll through any great museum of art that the Harmony between spirit and body, form and content, is first and foremost in Classical art, while the grotesque, the irregularity and the sublime of some modern works of art can be quite jarring.
While in ancient tragedy, as Norman says, "the tragic forces were from external sources like the oracles, the will of God, the values of the city, in the modern tragedy, the tragic interest lies in the psychology of the characters, in their hesitations rather than in their actions, in their evaluation of their own behavior or of the impotency of their inaction. So in Racine's Phèdre, one does not know if this tragedy, based on the original Greek tragedy, is truly Classical--or if it should be classified, despite Racine's homage to Euripides, as more romantic than classical. Any reader of this tragedy will ask themselves: Does the criminal passion of Phèdre for her stepson come from outside or from within? from Venus or from an interior impulse? Is the interest of [Racine's] tragedy in the passion--or more in the sharp consciousness that the character has of his/her passion (la conscience aigu que le personnage a de cette passion). Is it about mythology [divine play] or psychology?"
Or, as with Godard's 1963 film where the Greek statues are colored and the screenwriter and producer (within the film) want to empty Penelope of her reputed faithfulness: Are the interior forces exteriorized, while the interior is simply emptied out to the point of lost-ness? Thus the post World War themes such as alienation, irony, absurdity. And in all of this, where are we now? These questions can be terrifying if taken seriously, and that is precisely what theatre, particularly tragedy, helps us to see (see Antonin Artaud's modern work on the theatre of the absurd). Is the human situation of the Late Modern period one of radical absurdity, devoid of purpose, as philosophers like Albert Camus intimated during WW2 with Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942)? As Walter Benjamin wrote regarding the trauma of the first world war and the impact on storytelling it had, "Was it not noticeable after the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?"
I was always struck by the alienation of self from language and its remarkable quality in Racine's 1677 spin on the ancient Greek tragedy. In many ways, Racine's Classical tragedy is a very postmodern one. To speak is to stumble upon self-awareness – or rather, to venture away from it – as Phèdre so aptly illustrates: “Insensée, où suis-je? Et qu’ai-je dit? / Où laissée-je égarer mes vœux, et mon esprit?” (v. 179-80) / "Insane, where am I? And what did I say? Where did I let my vows and my spirit wander?" Whether trailing off or making a declaration, whether intimately confiding or failing to suppress and letting something slip out, the questions of how one speaks – or does not speak – provides an emotional map by which the spectator gains intimate access to the character’s fears, obsessions, and desires. These qualities seem to mark modernity at every turn.
Does any of this give cause for painting the eyes, the mouth, and the hair of ancient Greek marble statues in blue, red, or black? I cannot say. But in the film, I can say I think it works très, très bien.
A wise man's thought: In broadening one's view of time and of the world, perhaps one can hope to not be so locked into modernity.*
Scenes within scenes in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris
As I filmed the following in Place Saint-Michel a few summers ago in Paris, it took on a life of its own and became what I dare say is an art video. If you appreciate the song "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen / Italian / French and youth cultures, you may also find it a bit tantalizing.
It became a multi-layered life video, with the threads intersecting and leaving the trace of a certain je ne sais quoi. I personally love the cigarette draw and kiss that unexpectedly occurs in the foreground. It evokes the tight rope between art / life / camera while also capturing a quintessential French stereotype, which is well-earned and born from a period of remarkable French innovations in film during the 1960s with the Nouvelle Vague. The cigarette & kiss is classic, representing a tradition that the French New Wave film forever encapsulated and rendered un peu tropchic.
(On a side note, I remember being oddly sad for the French when the law was passed to ban cigarette smoking on their café and restaurant terrasses in the early 2000s--I didn't think they would ever be able to resist. Anecdotally, when they passed the law that Parisiens needed to pick up the crottes left behind by their dogs--and thus everywhere on the streets--this was not abided by. It has been speculated that this is certainly because the policemen thought it much too beneath them to issue a ticket for dog poop. It was not enforced--thus the advent of the motocrotte, which is a perfect blend of the word for motocyclette and crotte and had the feature of a long vacuum.)
Even though cigarettes are disgusting (in my opinion), it is somehow gratifying to see that the French did not entirely shake the image of chic nicotine drags coupled with amorous arousal, long after the huge letters FUMER TUE appeared on the cigarette pack--as witnessed by the orality of attachment in a modern puff that ended with a young kiss in the art video above (which should be noted: is wrapped in the French flag,) the very transfer of semi-addiction! O to be young and Parisienne!I digress...
The coloring of the antiquated in
Le Mépris
French New Wave films helped weave the inhale of the cigarette into trendy passion as it took filming to the streets in the '60s with natural lighting, unknown actors, jump cuts, and other expressionist breakthroughs --totally innovative for the time. Ultimately, the French New Wave turned established cinematic fabrication on its head. The rift between the old and the new is characterized by the mockery Godard makes of the cinema business in the film, this mockery being incarnated with the character of the American filmmaker who comes to meet the Parisian filmmaker at Cinecittà in Rome in Le Mépris (Contempt). He fits the American stereotype quite well. The film is an amazing mise-en-abyme, with the tricolore (blue, white, and red) shared by the flags of the two countries appearing throughout the film. Par exemple:
The film being made within the film is an adaptation
of the story of Odysseus and Penelope
I would be neglecting my history as French professor and teacher of French film if I did not pay homage to the work of Jean-Luc Godard with the following 1963 teaser, which, with its musical score, already gives a sense of the intellectual, meta-reflective, and creative aspects of New Wave film.
Trailer: Le Mépris (Contempt), by Jean-Luc Godard
Filmed in Rome and Capri, Italy (La cinématographie est sublime)
From a very early age, we are conditioned to see failure as something to avoid. This week, as I battle with reality and shortcomings, I am seriously interested in re-examining the experience of failure. Ultimately, failure is just a perception--it is like a plastic bottle that we can throw in the garbage where it will have a negative impact on our planet, or we can repurpose it and give it new life.
How does the world around us shape our notion of failure? How might it encourage our fears about failure? And how might we as individuals transcend the experience of failure (since it is a natural part of living) and view it as a pivotal learning point?
Pierrot, Pablo Picasso, 1918
Besides viewing the play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (No Exit), what can we do to face the crux of existence? As Sartre believed, existentialism precedes essence--we do not come prepackaged to fit in some essential category. We see his characters each condemn one another over the failure to live up to the image that, now dead and in hell all together, each one still maintains of him or herself. The message: We are not what we think we are, as we can change from day to day. Rather, our existence, i.e. how we live, will determine our essence. Nothing, in reality, is pre-given. We must take full responsibility for our actions. This means A) to not blame another for our situation and B) to care too much about what the "image" is that we have of ourselves. Are we really living our "image"? If the answer is no, there's no sense trying to convince ourselves or others of what we think we are. Yet everyone can think of something who demonstrates bad faith--i.e. one who thinks they are a great person or a connoisseur of this or that, when really they are talking from a place of ego, with very little knowledge and experience to go with.
Muhammed said, Do not theorize
about essence. All speculations
are just more layers of coverings.
Human beings love coverings.
~Rumi, "Body Intelligence"
We need to see try harder to things as they really are. This is cultivating awareness and perception. Then, we can see the question is not if we are living our image, but perhaps: How alive are we?
Turning the light on ourselves in all the deepest recesses and crevices of our heart is deep excavation work, but is the only way to eliminate bad faith and those coverings. This is an opportunity for true individual growth and development, where the audience is only the humble self who can be amazed by the grace that helps us to learn in life. It is possible to discovers the joys of surrender, vulnerability, acceptance, and tolerance even while suffering.
“The nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”
~Bhagavad Gita 2.14
Likewise, we should learn to tolerate success and failure. Thinking beyond this dichotomy, why not just pursue one's passion in life? And so, a thought to help us along is this: Allow failure to help you loosen your attachment to outcomes.
If you have had the chance to become acquainted with works like Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, you may have been amazed by the revolutionary notion that we should not be attached to the fruits of our actions. Yes, do the action that is good, whether for the sake of duty and karma or of devotion. But do not expect a certain result from that action. This helps when thinking about any area of our life where we are hoping for "success." Act like a good x or y, and you will become that through practice and repetition.
We can learn to detach from the notion of failing by focusing on a certain area of our life and simply considering the way we express ourself in that area. After all, a musician who loves music is not a good musician if he does not practice.
They say that our actions are reinforced by a belief we hold. We can change our beliefs in order to align our actions in the right way if we are off the mark. How can I be a good parent, a good business person, a good friend? Reformatting your identity begins in your mind where you view yourself as someone who does something in a spectacular way--and then act accordingly. What does a successful business person do? What does a good parent do? What does a good friend do? Do that. That is good faith. That type of existence may one day lead to bonafide essence, but that is neither here or there. Focus on cultivating the way you live in the now.
Repetition means we are practicing and honing our skills. Sitting around theorizing what perfection is or looks like doesn't get us anywhere. "The only way to get past the failures is to go through the volume of work to begin with," says James Clear in an interview with Srini Rao of The Unmistakable Creative. Volume and repetition may entail lots of failures. But as Clear reminds us: we do not die from failure.
And when we gain comfort in competency after much effort, we should not become complacent with our practice. We can hone our skills further--in fact, for life. Look to the people with a 50-year career span and all the depth and interesting peaks of their work. Picasso was dedicated to art for 80 years and look at the diversity (and impact) of his work! One must do something for ten years before you gain a semblance of excellence. This is something millennials are said to struggle with... They have been so pumped up with the notion that they will make a difference that they get depressed when, in their first job (which they have only had for 8 months), they feel they aren't making an impact. Ask those who have the experience of age: life requires patience and perseverance; life is the true test.
Various styles within Pablo Picasso's corpus
"Most of the time we try to prevent failure," James Clear says. We do this by theorizing how we will succeed, coming up with the best plan, and writing down our best goals. Guilty as charged.
What can we do to cultivate our awareness and perception? Sadhguru responds rather socratically: How long did you take to learn how to read and write? Consider that it took a few years to learn to make sentences; you give so much to learn how to use words....
To quickly increase your awareness, there is the remedy of the realization of mortality--the fact is that many people will not live until tomorrow, yet we all think we are invincible. As Sadhguru says, "Only when you are conscious about your mortality will you want to truly know the nature of this life."
I believe this to be very true, from my experience of having a disease: "If you know you are mortal suddenly you will see that you have no time to do any nonsense which doesn't mean anything to you. You will do only what really matters to your life.You have no time to do any rubbish with anybody. You will have time to only to do the best things you want to do, what you truly care to do in your life, and nothing other than that; and that is what you should be doing because it's a very limited amount of time. I want you to know it's a very brief life, that is, if you're a joyful person. If you're miserable then of course it is a very long life." ~Sadhguru
So basically he seems to say: stop doing the nonsense you are doing (because you think you are immortal)! What a good man to remind us of this.
To be a human being is not easy. Here is a rather pathetic (pathos, related to "suffering") image to inspire us to embrace failure as we blossom, Pierrot, the fool, with "his physical insularity; his poignant lapses into mutism...; his white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the dead; his often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be-vanquished unworldly naïveté—all conspir[ing] to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the commedia dell'arte and into the larger realm of myth: the 'sad clown' of the postmodern era".... [Wikipedia]
Perhaps, to be an artist, to make art,
to be creative, to transcend, or to have a mythic quality,
you must have played the fool and failed.
So how alive do you feel?
Being half-alive is torture, as Sadhguru says.
Our ability to experience must be enlarged!
"Body Intelligence"
There are guides who can show you the way. Use them.
But they will not satisfy your longing.
Keep wanting the connection with presence with all your pulsing energy.
The throbbing vein will take you further than any thinking.
Muhammed said, Do not theorize about essence. All speculations are just more layers of coverings.
Human beings love coverings.
They think the designs on the curtains are what is being concealed.
