Mandatum Novum

Today is Maundy Thursday, the Christian holy day commemorating The Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples.

The word Maundy is derived through Middle English, and Old French mandé, from the Latin mandatum. It refers to the "new mandate" given by Jesus to his apostles. The Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus illustrating the significance of this mandate by washing the feet of his disciples before sharing his last meal with them on the night before he was crucified.

 Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos.

“A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another as I have loved you.”

John 13:34

Thomas Merton wrote: True emptiness is that which transcends all things and yet is imminent in all. For what seems to be emptiness in this case is pure being. But it's not this or that. Whatever you say of it, it is other than what you say. The character of emptiness, at least for a Christian contemplative, is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined by any thing or held down by any special relationship. It's love for love's sake. It's a sharing through the Holy Spirit in the infinite charity of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends rain alike on the just and the unjust. This purity, freedom, and indeterminateness of love is the very essence of Christianity.

I Squirrel

"I don't make deals, I don't party and drink with sources, and I don't play a game of leaks. I read, I listen, I squirrel information. It's fun."

~ Seymour Hersh

No More Real than a Dream

From The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind by B. Alan Wallace:

By mindfully and discerningly attending to all kinds of perceptual appearances—material, mental, and otherwise—we can begin to distinguish between what appears to be our immediate sensory experience and our conceptual projections. In doing so, we start to discover the extent to which our waking experience is illusory. But the dreamlike nature of our experienced world may go a lot deeper than that. In the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras the Buddha makes the more radical claim that the world of our waking experience is fundamentally no more real than a dream. In a non-lucid dream, we mistakenly grasp onto all objective and subjective appearances as if they were inherently real, bearing their own intrinsic existence. Likewise, in the normal (non-lucid) waking state we do the same thing, imagining the physical world to be really “out there,” existing independently of our conceptual constructs, and we grasp onto our thoughts and other subjective experiences as being really “in here,” existing by their own inherent nature. In philosophical terms, we reify—or project as a substantial, independent existence—everything we experience while awake and asleep.

…Phenomena appear to exist inherently, independently of our conceptual frameworks, and we deludedly grasp onto them as existing just as they appear. But this simply perpetuates the dreamlike nature of experience of all kinds. When you become lucid in a dream, you begin to recognize that things are not as they appear, and now your challenge is to recognize the extent to which things in the waking state are no more real than a dream.

Unfold Your Own Myth

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop
Now there's a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins,
Suddenly he's wealthy.

Don't be satisfied with stories, with how
others have done things. Unfold
your own myth, simply and directly,
Let yourself open to your truth.

Start on the path. Your legs may get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling
the wings you have grown, lifting you
gently.

~ Rumi

Fleetingly Happier

From “When All You Have Left Is Your Pride,” by Benedict Carey, New York Times (April 6, 2009):

Psychologists have found that wearing a sad or happy face can have a top-down effect on how a person feels: Smile and you may feel fleetingly happier. The same most likely is true for an expression of pride. In a 2008 study, the Northeastern researchers found that inducing a feeling of pride in people solving spatial puzzles motivated them to try harder when they tackled the next round.

Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have theirs, and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is.

However much pride may go before a fall, it may be far more useful after one.

[Thanks Dōshin!]

The Neuroscience of Architecture

From "How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood," by Emily Anthes, Scientific American Mind (April 2009):

Architects have long intuited that the places we inhabit can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Now behavioral scientists are giving their hunches an empirical basis.

Scientists are unearthing tantalizing clues about how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep students focused and alert, and lead to relaxation and social intimacy. The results inform architectural and design decisions such as the height of ceilings, the view from windows, the shape of furniture, and the type and intensity of lighting.

Such efforts are leading to cutting-edge projects such as residences for seniors with dementia in which the building itself is part of the treatment.

Outside of All Places

Of Other Spaces, curated by James Voorhies, explores how the origins and functions of spaces shape human behavior. It considers the ways in which places become charged with socio-cultural authority to act in service and in suppression of our activity.

Columbus College of Art & Design
Canzani Center Gallery
hours & location

From “Of Other Spaces,” by Michel Foucault (1967):

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.

I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.

But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

[Grazie Deborah!]

Less and Less

Cantillations
by Emily Warn, from Shadow Architect

How do you remain faithful when boredom sets in? Sages
offer numerous rules of piety, precepts, commandments,
vows, proverbs, and aphorisms, all compiled after revelations
that shattered the structure of existence. The purpose of all
rules of piety is to extend revelation into ordinary life. They
are survival tactics that help us withstand tedium, our
disappointed expectations that something dramatic will
happen—the sky open, a pillar of fire light our way—if we
do this and that. For example, if you stand in a field in the
month of Elul when the red dwarf rises above the tree where
the shepherd has tethered his goats, you’ll see divine light.
Instead, you are preoccupied with stamping your feet in the
cold, with muttering and gossiping with friends. Without
knowing it, you’re storing a memory of being knit together
that will help you survive later. You’ll remember one friend
who rolls her eyes in mock disapproval at such religiosity;
another concentrates as hard as she can on what the sages
said would happen if you gathered in the fields during the
month of Elul. She focuses on waiting to see a flash. The
other observes what can be seen, the night sky, its billions of
unnamed stars, impossible to count, immeasurable depth,
formless space, black, blank; receding as she is, less and less
visible, less and less impatient at nothing much happening.
The other shouts, witnessing the birth of a star.

[Narrative’s Poem of the Week]

Zero and One

Shinzen Young talks about zero and one as the two main paradigms used to describe the path of enlightenment. He then talks about having a complete experience of feel, image, and talk—or the subjective self—and experiencing ordinariness as extraordinary, and experiencing the extraordinary as ordinary. Filmed in Santa Barbara in January 2009.

• www.shinzen.org
• www.basicmindfulness.com

Thirsting for Silence

From “Author of the Week: Anne LeClaire,” The Week Magazine (April 10, 2009):

If you were to run into Anne LeClaire on April 6, she wouldn’t talk to you, said Anne Stein in the Chicago Tribune. Every first and third Monday of every month, the Chatham, Mass., novelist carries a card that reads, “I am having a day of silence.” Don’t expect to get through to her by phone, either. On those days she also refuses to listen to the radio, watch television, or surf the Internet. “My single determination when I began was not to speak,” she says of a practice she first undertook 16 years ago. “But the more comfortable I became with silence, the more I thirsted for it, and the sounds I’d accepted unquestionably became noise.”

In her new memoir, Listening Below the Noise, LeClaire admits that her experiment in playing mute at first annoyed her fisherman husband, said Julia McKinnell in Maclean’s. LeClaire points out now that her silence has saved him more spats than he knows. “How many times do we jump into an argument when, if we waited a day, our words would be tempered?” she says. Keeping mum apparently puts everything in perspective. “Much of what we think is urgent,” she says, “can wait a day or two.” She’s convinced that holding her tongue has also made her more creative and productive. Every day spent in silence is so energizing, she says, “I feel like I’ve been to a spa.”

It’s All About Pleasure

From “Got Poetry? ” by Jim Holt, New York Times (April 2, 2009):

The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.

That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in. If you don’t have one left over from your college days, any good bookstore, new or used, will offer an embarrassment of choices for a few bucks — Oxford, Penguin, Norton, etc. Or you might try Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (Norton, $29.95), edited by the former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

*     *     *     *     *

Check out Poems Out Loud, a site inspired by Robert Pinksy’s book. “In honor of National Poetry Month, Pinsky will elaborate on the nature of reading poetry out loud throughout the month of April 2009. Other poets will be invited to add their voice as well.”

For more poetry read aloud, check out the following:

• The Favorite Poem Project
• Poetry Out Loud
• Poetry Foundation
• Academy of American Poets
• From the Fishhouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets

Complete in this Moment

Excerpt from Eihei Dogen’s Genjokoan, the text being studied by participants in Tricycle Magazine’s 90-day Zen meditation challenge called The Big Sit:

Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete at this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

Planting Tips

“Lilies prefer their faces in the sun and feet in the shade.”

~ From a box of Stargazer Lily bulbs.

Virtual Collaboration

From “Master Class,” by Sasha Frere-Jones, New Yorker (April 6, 2009):

In August of 2008, the twenty-seven-year-old Israeli musician Ophir Kutiel (known as Kutiman) was browsing YouTube for instructional clips, looking for, he says, “new licks, you know, something for piano or guitar or drums”—all instruments that he plays. He found a tutorial video from the legendary funk drummer Bernard (Pretty) Purdie, whom he had never heard of. Kutiman downloaded the clip and began to play with it using a software package called Vegas Pro. Out of the clips uploaded to YouTube by other musicians, Kutiman stitched together more than a hundred performances, created an album, and uploaded the entire project to thru-you.com, where each song has embedded links to the sampled musicians.

Over and Over

“Myth is not about something that never happened. It is about something that happens over and over again."

~ Solon

Artists and Accountants

From Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin:

When a well-respected animal scientist told me that animals do not think, I replied that if this were true, then I would have to conclude that I was unable to think. He could not imagine thinking in pictures, nor assign it the validity of real thought. Mine is a world of thinking that many language-based thinkers do not comprehend. I have observed that the people who are most likely to deny animals thought are often highly verbal thinkers who have poor visualization skills. They excel at verbal or sequential thinking activities but are unable to read blue-prints.

It is very likely that animals think in pictures and memories of smell, light, and sound patterns. In fact, my visual thinking patterns probably resemble animal thinking more closely than those of verbal thinkers. It seems silly to me to debate whether or not animals can think. To me it has always been obvious that they do. I have always pictured in my mind how the animal responds to the visual images in his head. Since I have pictures in my imagination, I assume that animals have similar pictures. Differences between language-based thought and picture-based thought my explain why artists and accountants fail to understand each other. They are like apples and oranges.

[More blog posts related to Temple Grandin and her work.]

Cheaper than Renting an Office

John Wray talks about working on his novel on the subway:

Three years ago, not long after I'd begun Lowboy, I made a decision that—in retrospect—even I find slightly odd: to write as much of the novel as possible on the New York City subway. The reasons for this admittedly drastic step ranged from the practical (subway cars have no internet access, no cell phone reception, and next to no procrastination options) to the wildly romantic, if not outright ridiculous. Like some over-eager method actor, a part of me was convinced that I'd write about the subway more vividly and honestly if I immersed myself in it absolutely. Fully half of Lowboy's narrative takes place underground, much of it in the subway tunnels, so getting the look, smell, and feel of subterranean New York right was crucial to the book's success. It also happened to be cheaper than renting an office.

The challenges of my new workplace weren't the ones that I'd expected. I was amazed at how effectively I was able to tune out the commotion around me, simply by putting on headphones: a good playlist on my laptop was essential, but beyond that, as long as I avoided rush hour, staying focused presented no great problem. The seats in the older cars made my back hurt after a few hours, certain stretches of track in the outer boroughs were so rough that it was hard to type properly, and restrooms were few and far between, but I adjusted to those things in time. The more comfortable I got, however, the more my frustration grew, for the simple reason that the subway was starting to feel like my living room. I was becoming resistant to its strangeness: I was seeing it with the eyes of a commuter. Nothing could have been farther from the point of view of my protagonist, a sixteen-year-old schizophrenic boy, newly escaped from the hospital, to whom even the most familiar things feel alien. The harder I looked, the less I seemed to see.

I'm not sure what triggered the change that came a few weeks later, but I know that it came suddenly. I was riding the Coney Island-bound F in the early morning, staring blankly out the window at the tunnel racing past; I remember feeling bored and vaguely hungry. When I turned around, though, I seemed to be in a different car completely. For the first time, every feature of the interior had a clear purpose to me: the seats stopped short of the floor for ease of cleaning, the orange and brown tones were meant to encourage well-being, and the polka-dot pattern on the walls, which I'd never looked at closely, was in fact made up of the official seal of the state of New York, repeated countless times in brown and grey. The discovery made me a little paranoid--on the lookout, suddenly, for more signs of Big Brother's presence--which was just the state of mind I'd been pursuing. From then on, the novel all but wrote itself.

Correcting an Unbalance

by Hal Sirowitz, from Father Said

I never listen to commercials, Father said.
They're aimed at trying to sell me something
I don't need. If I do need it I want to know
that the need originated from me & not
from others. I don't want to end up with lots
of junk I'm only going to throw out. Half
the things in this house aren't used. We
only really need food, clothing, shelter,
& of course, each other. You do need me.
Don't you? You're mother never gives me
much opportunity to talk. I'm supposed to listen.
I'm able to talk to you, but it'd please me
if you said something once in a while.

[Thanks Garrison Keillor!]

Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

“Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our ‘psychological immune system’ lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.”

From TED Talks (February 2004):

[Thanks JC!]

Suppose

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."

~ John Steinbeck

 

[Thanks Alex!]