Er..why do you ask?
Dunno. Just like that.
Guess I was until I had to think about it!
Perhaps there's something in the soul that hankers for darkness, that desires to be lost in something that is totally foreign to itself. But it's impossible to think that way when one is surrounded by light (wish I'd brought The First Man with me now) . All this striving for narrow confines, all this melancholic brooding, is beginning to become a touch boring (I can only imagine the Internet leading to an expansion of self-pity and introspection).
What is it?
You ask too many questions!
Perhaps you find the world trivial, people superficial, life a bit fake..not quite the real thing.
Perhaps you find the world full of meaningless suffering, inexplicable contingencies. Understandable. No one can think otherwise, no-one can live like a Stoic. But there are escapes, and then there are escapes....
Why do I watch a film expecting it to be profound, something deep, something that will move me? Is it to fill some vacuum? Isn't that what we expect of all art? (Plato, that old wahabi, might have something to say on that!) . Why do we think eccentricity, madness, is the only form of genius, the only thing worth talking about (The Romantic legacy, perhaps)? What would it mean to have sound instincts, to live heartily, with attachments and bonds-and not as an exile, as a fanatic, estranged from one's life, one's times? (Roberto Calasso is brilliant here : the American woodsman as the future, the cowboy who "discovers" the frontier", the colonialist who from inner boredom is compelled to go "where no man has gone before", the 'settler' who sees only wasteland where there is the Red Man, the Palestinian...).
What could be worse than having simple desires, what could be more difficult than saying 'Yes!' to life. Not only must we live with the void, and not be too hasty in filling it with our own private fantasies, remedies, but we must also recognize that to see only the void is not right-seeing and is an act of profound and startling ingratitude.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise
W.H. Auden
There will be blood.
What utter crap!
Fitzcarraldo.
What utter crap!
No, Hollywood always/usually trumps because it shows real people. For similar reasons, all this Sufi jargon and 'mysticism' seems, to my mind at least, to miss the point. We have to speak about our times, and in our language. I'm sure all this convoluted thought of the Europeans is very intelligent at its own level, but please, give me a break...what price naivete and what would we give for some solid English writing, for some pragmatism to dispel the hold of these evenings of the mind ?
'Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful than the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the source of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of the intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space.'
---Useless Knowledge.
This is one of my favourite passages, and is full of homely wisdom, good advice. But something else holds my attention today. Yesterday, at the Sunday market, amidst the onions and carrots, the plastic baskets and smuggled crockery (which was spelt crochery) was a small book stall. Most of the stuff was Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins (man, they're really popular here!) but there was also a dusty, well-worn copy of old Russell. How amazing that one can find such things amongst the necessities of the world! In it were underlined the following words:
Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
3 comments:
Great post - I couldn't agree more that whether from a pragmatic, or a principled moral point of view, focussing only on the voids and abysses in life is pointless and as escapist (and lacking courage) as denying that the world is more often than not an unjust, unequal and barbaric place and that we all have limited time.
As regards modern city dwellers being cut off from 'nature' and being bored, I feel this particularly keenly in music. I feel that an overreliance on technology has squeezed out the sheer pleasure in being creative with one's own voice or by playing an instrument (or the pleasure in listening to someone else doing this). The way technology 'improves' sound means that it is now so difficult to exercise any true discernment or to feel that you are having a genuine experience.
hope all is well
Beth
Hello
There are phases and moods that we have and we outlive. nothing is constant or permanently changeable. that we know also, hence life.
re expectations from art.....we read what we want to, see what we want. to get anything out is a useless exercise.how can one search from some other experience...only understand nuances, states. everything is inside and outside us. we are helpless.
i recently read a book, in itself polemical, called The malady of islam by Abdelwahab Meddeb.it mostly focuses on Wahabi doctrine and its ills,and i remembered it after reading your post, as you said, plato the old wahabi. can you explain?
Boredom and spiritual malaise are not the same. people who want new experiences in any form might not be neccessarily victims of machinery but just a bit intrigued.
ciao
Beth, hello.
Yes, I think you're right. Have you listened to Barenboim's online Reith lectures? Nothing to add, really, to your words.
Kubla, hello.
"we are helpless" . Not so sure, not so sure.
Plato..see Iris Murdoch's fascinating 'Fire and the Sun'.
Of course, it goes without saying that the wahabis are a sort of curse, and have, more often than not, a fanatical mindset.
But, there's also something else going on here..I think it's a mistrust of images. In a purely negative sense, this is the iconoclasm of the Protestants, the wahabis. But I think there's another sense , one in which it is held that the truth is fluid, cannot be 'fixed' or bound to one particular state or form:the aniconic.
And the "shattering of forms" then takes on a spiritual meaning.
as Iris says, it's a bit too easy to just think of Plato's objection to poetry and painting as representing a "puritanical" spirit, a fear of decadence.
Perhaps, in its own way, it is a testimony to the magic of images?
Yes, agree with you. Might not *necessarily*. But I wonder why compulsions are becoming such a feature of modern living despite (because of?) all this freedom?
(Jonatahn Jones has a very intersting article, online, called 'the Wild ones')
Keep well,
b.
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