Poetic lives and brushes

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then...

As you may know, poet Mary Oliver recently passed away, and while I did not know her work while she was alive, I am grateful to have read her verses as they have popped up in the media and on NPR. One is easily inspired to read more of her poetry, as her refreshing love for words and her in-tuneness with nature is refreshing and delightful, as sensed in poems like this:

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And then, the next poem, her four-poem series on her brush with death/cancer, strikes a nerve with me as I recently was at the Cancer Center and was told that they cannot tell me if I will have cancer or not--something I knew but only know the more I read. There has been a lot going on with the discovery of certain things that other FAP patients have had happen, things shared on our forum, and the growing concern over the polyps I actually have is... deafening at times. But then I read this poem, and I understand the overtones of grief AND hopefulness. 

But still... cancer has taken many great people, one of which was my aunt, for a sole example. Mary Oliver beat lung cancer: "It feels like death has left its calling card" and though she survived she was "all the same, kind of shocked." Having had a similar experience in beating cancer, in a way, I appreciate her words. It's hard to speak of, and that is perhaps why it is so important that cancer patients share their story if they wish--first because it is therapeutic. 

I would contend that the arts, literature, music--not to mention chanting hare krishna hare krishna--are the best for any patient, as it helps us look beyond the material, the terminal, the fatalism, the fear, and to hear something else. One can reflect on the end of life with writers and poets. With artists and musicians and good huggers. 

You can also listen to an interview with Mary Oliver as she talks about her cancer episode and reads the following poems aloud:

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac

by Mary Oliver

1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest

without a sound.

The hunter, strapped to his rifle,

the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.

2.

The question is,

what will it be like

after the last day?

Will I float

into the sky

or will I fray

within the earth or a river—

remembering nothing?

How desperate I would be

if I couldn’t remember

the sun rising, if I couldn’t

remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t

even remember, beloved,

your beloved name.

3.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

4.

Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,

all the fragile blue flowers in bloom

in the shrubs in the yard next door had

tumbled from the shrubs and lay

wrinkled and fading in the grass. But

this morning the shrubs were full of

the blue flowers again. There wasn’t

a single one on the grass. How, I

wondered, did they roll back up to

the branches, that fiercely wanting,

as we all do, just a little more of 

life?

The dash between the opening and closing dates of her life is a deeply poetic one. She seems to have gracefully lived up to her goal in life, a beautiful sentiment that she phrased so wonderfully: "When it's over, I want to say all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement." This quote is an invigorating source of inspiration, if recalled daily--and the world needs more of this perspective.

And to my dear aunt Robin, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your arm around my shoulder the other night. I thank you for the example of strength and the model of a courageous mother that you continue to be to me.

Thank you for your shining love, a bright star listening in on it all.

January is David Bowie month

There is a lot I could say about David Bowie, and particularly on connecting with his song Space Oddity before a scary eight-hour operation. (This was at a time when it was hard to connect to anything in the real world.) David Bowie was a unique outlet for many people. Imagine how much for his widow, Iman. I was recently touched in this month of his birthday (the 8th) and death (the 10th) to read here some of her beautiful sentiments about her late husband. They were a fantastic couple, and hearing either one talk about the other, the few times I have, was enough to be so glad that their stars aligned. It's moments like that make the world seem right, with all the quirky people and mess in it.

And if you're not Iman, you can still love the man who fell to earth. Not as much, and not loving him for the man he actually was as she did, but as a fan for his mind and the clever moves, lyrical words, and surreal aspects he brought to us when he strutted into the music world. What a unique splash in the world of rock-n-roll.

He was a brilliant individual talking about duality and duplicity and fragmentation, and if you don't believe me listen to him predict what the internet would be and do ("nihilistic" being just one of the terms he uses)--and see how the journalist is just boggled by the insights Bowie shares in the following, profound interview from 1999 where he says: "I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we are actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying." Brilliant. "It's an alien life form," he said, twenty years ago.

And now, this musical interlude....

If you have the chance, go see the David Bowie Is exhibit if it comes near you.
I saw it at the Brooklyn museum, and it blew my mind to see just how prolific and creative he was.

Srila Prabhupada

A. C. Bhakti Vedanta Swami Prabhupada

"We don't learn in 5 minutes, 10 minutes. It requires time."

Q: And can we really undo the karma of all our past lives in this one life? 

A: "It takes one minute"

"What Krishna says to do?" ...quoting the Gita...

Full surrender; then you come to me without any doubt.
Everything is there. Krishna has given everything fully.
If we accept it, it is very simple. There is no difficulty."

"A diseased man if he doesn't care for medicine, he dies, he suffers, that's all."

Lyrics: "When I see his love I know
I have a long, long way to go
When will I taste the love he is feeling inside?"

The following text en rose is taken from a blog I stumbled onto called The Door Ajar to Vraja, and is dated February 3, 2018: In the imaginary scene of the poem Krishna is speaking confidentially to a friend sometime after Kurukshetra, in a mixture of reminiscences and emotions, from Dwarka, to the rasa dance, to the meeting in Kurukshetra. In doing so Krishna reveals the secret depths of his love. Krishna never puts his devotees through something which He does not take also upon Himself.

SD 32.21 "Even when I removed Myself from your sight by suddenly disappearing,
I never stopped loving you."

GC 23.39 "O dearest Gopis! The first separation has been most difficult for me."

My solitude nestled
in the recesses of the night,
and like shadows that come forth
with brighter light,
its agony too appeared,
by moonlit memories
of their love for Me.

With the ardent desire
for a tidal wave
of this ocean of their love and my love,
to flood the hearts and the stars,
I disappeared,
causing their lamentation,
and thirstily I drank from the same (1)
chalice of longing emotions
welling up from purest love.

Spying unseen
upon their absorption and tribulation
while they searched for Me,
with breathless glances,
in incessant meditation
unwavering, on Me only,
I also endured separation, (2)
and could wait no more
for their embraces (3)
as the tears of love,
furrowing their faces,
were gushing like ecstatic rivers
of their sweetest love.

And impatient,
covetous of the mellows
flourishing in their hearts,
in that innermost hollow I stood,
a restless spectator of their total love,
incapable of repaying
the wealth of devotion
of my most beloveds.

In the most famous and also infamous (4)
state of Godhood of being self-satisfied,
no one could fathom why I cried,
why my heart sighed,
breathless from feeling separation,
dragged and dependent on
their selfless adoration.

I smiled anew
to soothe their hearts,
and hiding my anguish,
asked for forgiveness.
They offered their fragrant ghee of love, (5)
and the dense honey
of sulkiness,
thus plundering my love,
so that I, delighted, sold myself. (6)

Transcribed below is a salient quote from Prabhupada's lecture in the video just below:

"I, you, everyone of us, we have the trouble at the time of death and at the time of birth, birth and death. We are living entity, we are living soul. Birth and death take place of this body. The body takes birth and the body is vanquished. Death means sleeping for seven months, that’s all. That is death.

The soul is when this body is unfit for living, the soul gives up this body and, by superior arrangement, the soul is put again into the womb of a particular type of mother and the soul develops a particular type of body[.…] So, it is a great science: How the soul, the living soul, is in contact with this material body and how he’s transmigrating from one body to another. The example is given just like: We are just like when the garment or shirt or coat becomes too old, we give it up and we accept another shirt or coat. Similarly, I, you, every one of us, we are spirit-soul. We are given a type of body and shirt and coat by the arrangement of material nature. That particular body is given to us for our particular type of standard of living. Just like you: European, American, Australian… You have got a particular type, and you are given an opportunity, a particular standard of living.... So if an Indian comes [to your city--Melbourne, Australia--in this case], they will be surprised by this standard of living [....] 
'I am suffering! Why you have to accept birth? Why you have to accept death? Why you have to accept disease? Why you have to accept old age?' These are the problems. There are the problems and these problems can be solved in human form of life--not in the life of cats and dogs. They cannot. So our only request is that you make your life successful, come to the real understanding of your existence, and this is possible simply by chanting Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare”

 

This last video may produce an impression, a disclaimer for sensitive viewers. It is of Prabhupada preparing to depart, as devotees chant and give love.

Noel, Noel

Nothing like Christmastime with lots of family--and four generations together--

to make one feel hopeful, grateful, expectant again. . .

Joy, peace and love to all: Life is beautiful!

Feeling "greatful" for my mother, nana, and son

Images of love from around the world to celebrate its unique forms and potential:

Wuluk Bu kissing young cafe, just a few days old.
In the Afghan Kyrgyz community, courtesy of National Geographic

In the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Congo,
Courtesy of African Parks Network 

Zebra love, courtesy of Safaridotcom

Syrian artist Tammam Azzam projects Gustave Klimt's The Kiss.
"I chose it as an icon of love, a way of looking for the stories of love 
behind this wall that was completely obliterated by the machinery of war."
Courtesy of Thingsglobe

Emotions: Aklishta or Klishta?

Art by Estonian artist, Mirjam Siim,
who lives in Porto, Portugal

We might not think of it unless it is pointed out, but emotions, according to leading research on this "new" topic, help us prioritize and organize our strategy of behavior and inquiry within the complex web of human social life, as Dr. Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto) says in an interview.

EMOTION. "At first blush, the things we ordinarily call emotions differ from one another along several dimensions. For example, some emotions are occurrences (e.g., panic), and others are dispositions (e.g., hostility); some are short-lived (e.g., anger) and others are long-lived (e.g., grief); some involve primitive cognitive processing (e.g., fear of a suddenly looming object), and others involve sophisticated cognitive processing (e.g., fear of losing a chess match); some are conscious (e.g., disgust about an insect in the mouth) and others are unconscious (e.g., unconscious fear of failing in life); some have prototypical facial expressions (e.g., surprise) and others lack them (e.g., regret). Some involve strong motivations to act (e.g., rage) and others do not (e.g., sadness). Some are present across species (e.g., fear) and others are exclusively human (e.g., schadenfreude). And so on." [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

My mentor recently directed me to interdisciplinary research being done on emotion and health at the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE). I was struck by the comments that seasoned scholar and author Ronald de Sousa makes while discussing his research on emotion and language, as well as the implications of the findings for perception, literature, and art. His thoughts provide insights to the way we actually live our lives: the relation of emotion to truth, a highly individualized experience. The validation of emotion coupled with the search of truths is what I hope to reflect on, as noted in my post from October 26, "Formality of a Punch Line," when I looked to ways of thinking about aklishta versus klishta in order to determine whether emotions are leading me on the right path: As I mused, "To detangle ourselves from our identification with mental thoughts, which are either klishta or aklishta, sounds very easy to say and I wonder how hard it is to do--especially when all areas of life seem to be bound up into one giant ball. But again, the next step is to observe whether our thoughts are colored or uncolored, useful or not useful, and it is said that this can be done as one goes about one's day." De Sousa's work certainly seems to take my question to a more informed level.

What a never-ending effort: sorting out illusions and emotional truths, sifting through them in an analytical way so as to make life decisions that are emotionally and rationally sound. This is essential to directing one's energies in the most efficient, healthy, authentic way, and so this interview is very thought-provoking for anyone looking to be more aware of the role feelings play in our lives.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with De Sousa, courtesy of ISRE. Keep reading for the fuller context, or see the full interview.

To a considerable extent, our emotional life is conditioned by ideology, which in turn is shaped to some (but exactly how large?) extent by words. A leading question concerns the extent to which that ideology is dependent on and malleable on the basis of explicit norms. How, for example, can an experience of indignation, envy, love or jealousy be explicitly rationalized? Emotions are modulated by verbal expressions and descriptions. They also influence behaviour, both intentional and reflexive. The ways in which they do this raise a number of puzzles. One stems from our susceptibility to recalcitrant emotions, i.e. those that subsist despite the removal of their cognitive basis. Another is “imaginative resistance”, which is our inability, first noticed by David Hume, to imagine ourselves endorsing judgments that conflict with our current evaluative and moral commitments. Both raise the question of how our explicit reasons relate to our felt emotions. Yet another example stems from the difficulty of communicating aesthetic judgments by explicit verbal description of works of art, as well as the converse question of the ability of art and literature to influence our emotional repertoire.

Other issues concerning the relation of language to emotion pertain to the norms governing acceptable emotional responses and expressions, such as the quasi-moral demands for sincerity, spontaneity, and emotional authenticity; the culturally variable aesthetics of understatement; the contrary effects on erotic experience of explicit sexual language in different ‘registers’; the power of verbal information on the effects of drugs; the effects of ‘priming’ (subliminal exposure to certain words) on cognition and behaviour; and the surprising enhancement of well-being by sessions spent in writing about emotionally trying experiences demonstrated by some of the work of Jim Pennebaker. All of these phenomena call for a general theory of the way that our emotions relate to our capacity to reason explicitly about them, as well as to their verbal expressions.

This makes me want to delve into De Sousa's book, The Rationality of Emotion, which is described as a urbane and witty book in which Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists. He argues that emotions are a kind of perception, that their roots in the paradigm scenarios in which they are learned give them an essentially dramatic structure, and that they have a crucial role to-play in rational beliefs, desires, and decisions by breaking the deadlocks of pure reason.

Here follows more of the interview with Ronald de Sousa, courtesy of ISRE.

When did you first turn your attention to emotion? What was it that drew you to it?

It dawned on me that the topic of emotion would provide a pretense of specialization while inviting me to think, like a true dilettante, about just about everything: mind, language, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and even life. So that’s when I started thinking about emotions. I wrote an article on “The Rationality of Emotions”, which was published in 1979. The central idea was that emotions have a narrative structure and tend to rehearse “paradigm scenarios” learned in early life. This remained the core idea of The Rationality of Emotion, much of which was written during a blissful sabbatical year spent at the University of British Columbia in 1984. The book was published in 1987 by Bradford Books, a wonderful small press...

Your book The Rationality of Emotion (1989) has been a reference point for philosophers working in emotion ever since it was published, and has inspired a great deal of further research. What do you think were the most influential ideas in the book? Is there anything you think was overlooked? Is there anything you’d change?

The Rationality of Emotion explored two simple ideas, with a few corollaries. First, emotions play too important a role in our life not to be linked to some biological function. Second, whatever function that might be affects our capacity to make intelligent decisions in complex situations, not just to respond reflexively to threats or affordances of daily life. Emotions, I suggested, solve the “Frame Problem”, which is essentially the problem of knowing what to ignore without wasting time examining every possible consequence of a decision, to make sure it can be ignored as irrelevant. Emotions do this by controlling the salience of information, lines of inquiry, and live practical options. They narrow the focus of attention to ranges of factors that we have “learned”, on both the evolutionary and the individual scale, are the most likely to be relevant in any given situation. Emotions therefore contribute to our capacity for rational decision, even though, as is all too obvious, they sometimes distort judgement and interfere with rational deliberation. Emotions can also be said to be “rational” – contrasting not with “irrational” but with “a-rational” – in a second sense, more or less corresponding to what we mean when we describe someone as “reasonable” or “unreasonable”.

"Away from Near," Aida Nayeban

Although the book is quite frequently cited, I’m not sure it has been particularly influential. One idea that has been picked up here and there is the idea of “paradigm scenarios.” Probably the reason this has been picked up his that it was not particularly original in the first place. The core idea goes back to Freud, if not to Aristotle. On the therapeutic side of psychology it has often, if not always, been regarded as obvious that emotional patterns first learned in early childhood can be difficult to shake – both for good and for ill. Several philosophers, notably Martha Nussbaum, have emphasized the role of art and literature in getting us to refine and modify our more primitive patterns of emotional response and the attitudes that go with them. But the idea was, and remains, underdeveloped. I myself explored some of the problems it raises myself in a paper on “Emotions, Education and Time” published in Metaphilosophy in 1990 [....] Paradigm scenarios raise questions about flexibility in personality and emotional temperament which are vital to educational practice: How is it possible to control one’s emotions, to mature emotionally? Much also remains to be done to understand how similarity among situations, triggering similar responses, is implemented in the brain. Recently I have been very interested in the extent to which we can “re-gestalt” situations in such a way as to refashion our emotional responses. This is a domain in which emotional constructionists have much to teach us. We need to be aware of the extent to which we ascribe emotions, not only to others but even to ourselves, in the light of half conscious assumptions about how we are supposed to respond. Our emotional repertoire is partly dependent on our ideology.

We don't see with our eyes and hear with our eyes:
"We see and hear with our brains."
Distinctions help us navigate the world;
it's important that those things be identifiable.
Source: "Gestalt Principles and Why Search for the Whole"

One very influential idea in the book was that in some important ways, emotions are much closer to perception than judgement. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that emotion just is a form of perception. What’s your view of the way in which that idea has been developed since the book was published?

The leading contemporary exponent of the perceptual view is Christine Tappolet, who argues in her most recent book that emotions are essentially perceptions of values. They are therefore susceptible to being either correct or incorrect, depending on whether the value perceived in a given situation or state of affairs is warranted by that situation or state of affairs. This seems to me to be a very nice idea; but I am not convinced that it has any ontological implications. It may seem that if values are perceived, then they must be real and independent of our projections. But perhaps this may signal nothing more than a kind of grammatical fact about the relation between emotions and their “formal objects”.

I am inclined to emphasize the metaphorical character of the analogy between emotions and perception. Analogies are useful in getting us to notice both resemblances and differences. But they don’t really explain anything, and shouldn’t be taken to do more than they can.

‍Another important theme that has emerged in your writings on emotion is that of emotional truth, which you’ve explained in terms of ‘axiological holism’ Can you explain what you mean by that? And why has articulating a notion of emotional truth been important to you?

Insofar as I do agree with Tappolet that emotions are prima facie apprehensions of value, their rationality will be neither purely cognitive nor purely practical, but rather axiological. This raises the question of how our values can be appraised, reappraised, refined, or improved, when the material for doing so ultimately derives from emotions themselves. The thought behind the notion of axiological holism is that all our emotional responses, including all the reasoning and argument that we might bring to debates about their justification, are potentially relevant to our evaluative stance as we face the world. Reflective equilibrium is the best we can hope for in the realm of values, just as, if we give up on epistemic foundationalism and the naïve correspondence theory of truth, epistemic coherence is the best we can aspire to in science.

My thoughts about emotional truth embody a further parallel between emotion and cognition: just as coherence in beliefs guarantees (only) that they could all be true together, so axiological coherence requires that our emotions could all be “correct” together in a relevant sense of correctness. That correctness is what I choose to call emotional truth. The idea actually arose from some earlier work I published in Mind in 1974. Typical intentional states, notably including belief and desire, have both conditions of satisfaction (a correspondence between the representational content of the state and the objective situation they purport to refer to), and conditions of success (which depends on whether the state in question meets its own inherent point, or defining standard of correctness). For belief, both of these coincide: the truth of a proposition constitutes its satisfaction, and it is also sufficient for its success as a state of belief, because belief inherently aims at truth. Desire, by contrast, aims at goodness. So for desire, unlike belief, the two conditions diverge. If I desire something that is not good and get it, then my desire is satisfied, but it was not successful. A similar pattern, it seemed to me, holds for any typical emotion: its formal object both identifies the emotion in question and specifies its condition of success. Thus if “the dangerous” is the proper object of fear, fear will be successful in its own terms only if its target is indeed dangerous. My proposal was that we should focus on the notion of success, and hence extend talk of truth to an emotion in the light of is success or failure in its inherent point. In truth, this idea has gained little traction. In a very sensible article, Mikko Salmela pointed out that it would seem more natural to speak of “true emotions” if and only if they satisfied both satisfaction and success. Since this is to some extent a verbal issue I chose in my later book to dig my heels in. My reason was that I wanted to suggest that the important dimension in which we should evaluate emotions was the one that measured fittingness, not the one that measured their – much disputed – representational function.

Art by Mirjam Siim

In closing this post, I'll add that further interviews and articles on the ISRE site offer a wealth of research on emotions, trustworthy sources for investigating these sneaky things that "make life worth living and sometimes worth ending"--to return to De Sousa's entry on EMOTION in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . 

"No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the emotions."

Alas!

Why one who seeks, seeks

While this is so true in this world, with all the losses and disappointments we have faced and will yet face, this is also not how is best useful to live life thinking. 

Impermanence points to something that can be intuited and learned about, a devotion that is much more deeply fulfilling than what the world, bound up in time, karma, and violence as it is, offers. 

And so that which is beyond and above those things, that's most likely what inspires devotion of the kind that is never disappointed. Faith is like a butterfly as it becomes rekindled and more deeply felt. Once the light is burning, there isn't much that could take its flame away. This is why many saints and holy men and women survived really crazy scenarios, even torture or death. Only love of the very most compelling, beautiful and true kind can make anyone do that.

December 18th offerings

Love is an attribute of God wanting nothing
repentance is an attribute of man, it is a worm
to Love's dragon, absurd in Love's presence.
Love for anything but Him is unreal
for that which is not Him is a gilded object
shining outside yet empty inside,
light and golden on the outside yet dark within.
The moment divine light disappears
darkness is revealed and unreal love
is extinguished like a candle,
the body is discarded and beauty returns to its source.
The moonlight goes back to the moon
and its reflection disappears from the black wall.
Divine Love is the Sun of Perfection
the Divine Word is its Light
and the creatures are its shadow.
~Rumi

You have been caught in the claws of a lion
my friend, do not look for happiness.
Only harshness can defeat the hidden enemy inside you.
A man beating a rug with a stick does not
aim at the rug but at the dust inside it.
Your ego is covered with many dusty veils
you cannot remove them at once.
With each blow, little by little
they will disappear from the face of your heart.
But do not try to escape into sleep
the Beloved's sharp claws will chase you in your dreams.
A carpenter does not carve a piece of wood out of cruelty
but in order to create a beautiful shape.
The harsh hand of the Beloved is a blessing, my friend,
it will refine you and make you pure in the end.
~Rumi

The lover's concern is passion and madness
the charming game the Beloved plays is aloof detachment.
Learn the dance of light from the atoms
learn to jump into the fire like the moth.
Learn to charge like a lion, not sneak like a fox.
Learn to soar like a falcon, not flutter
from flower to flower like a butterfly.
Spring water tastes sweet but is incomparable
to the majesty of the ocean.
Your being is the cup that holds all secrets
do not let them leak through your eyes and ears.
~Rumi