Reading Recommended Reading
My friend Cees sent me a speech by Joanna Chapman, 'a very courageous woman' who has been wrestling with local authorities for quite some time on matters of principle. The interesting thing about the speech is that Chapman advocates for a consensual, non-adversarial political process and contrasts her experiences with two local councils - one of them being the one with which she is currently (and adversarily) engaged. She doesn't think that this is the way things should be. She also recommends that we support and transform our local media making them sources that we want to read and not merely eschew in favour of the news from away.
Cees described the situation as connected to my preoccupation with dreaming/nightmares and he projected my interior life onto our bigger community life in which 'our city council full of their developer-induced dreams create nightmares for all of us'. And I've talked to a few people this past week about the Caledonia blockade in these terms (though the authority in question is not Hamilton City Council) where the struggle is largely about land use and the ethics of urban sprawl.
But I think there are some other questions behind Cees's recommended reading and those are why am I so self-absorbed, seemingly (on the blog) unaware or uncontemplative about what is going on just outside my door? What happens when I read this speech transcript by a 'courageous woman' and measure my response? Why am I writing about my nightmares, the prescription of D&G and my attraction to/reluctance to engage experientially with the nightmare? My identification is with the wanderer, DQ, who is (very close to the end of the book) being partly wound down and concluded and partly lamented and celebrated and revived. Is wandering a flight response? Cervantes has his hands behind his back now with his fingers tightly crossed. As do I.
And we continue...
posted by Anne @ 9:54 AM
5 Comments:
Thanks t,
Of course, you're right. It's sometimes difficult to justify being inside a book too much when there are lots of other things going on around you.
I know very little about Cervantes. I know that he had a physical disability, a war-wound that affected the use of his hand - obviously his quality-of-life as a writer would be compromised by that too.
But a couple of telling quotations near the very end of the book that also underline the complex relations between story and reality:
When Altisidora recounts her 'death' vision at the gates of Hell, she describes a tennis game between the devils with rackets of fire and balls made of books stuffed with wind and fluff. One book being volleyed is the second part of the History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, not composed by Cide Hamete (therefore, the false second part)which the devils eventually throw into the pit of hell.
Don Quixote's response:
"But I have not been disturbed to hear of myself passing like a phantom body through the shades of Hell, nor through the light of earth either, for I am not the person this history is concerned with."
And then a comment about the Duke and Duchess who reenter DQ's life at the end of the text just so that they can play a few more pranks:
"In fact, Cide Hamete says that he considers the mockers were as mad as their victims, and the Duke and Duchess within a hair's breadth of appearing fools themselves for taking such pains to play tricks on a pair of fools."
So I find that the pathology of delusion is often complicated by DQ's clear-sightedness. I stick with him.
P.S. What do you think we should read by Goytisolo? I never thought of him, but that's another potential path to follow...likely very interesting too.
I'm willing to try State of Siege. I went to the library yesterday and found The Virtues of the Solitary Bird, Juan the Landless and Count Julian in English translation (I'd really be wandering if I tried to read the Spanish, yo pienso). I'll go back to the library and see if they have State of Siege. I also got Ivanhoe which for unknown reasons, I suddenly really want to read.
I'm reading about your reading of Anita Day's liner notes about going way out on a limb and I'm thinking about the paradox of wandering, getting lost with purpose in order to experience diversity...
I've been keeping a dream log since november 11/05 and, like you mentioned, the purpose of it is a dream therapy tool. A contemporary monk named Baba Hari Dass wrote that keeping a dream log for six to twelve months helps one see patterns (places, events, recurring dreams) and then the task is to know when the dream is repeating, and to change it in some way. This has ramifications in waking patterns. The idea is that changes are more easily navigable when a person is on to themselves.
I'm reading and really enjoying "My Education" by Wm. Burroughs - a dream log written in his last years. (He is constantly looking for breakfast in his dreams.)
Anyway, in my dream diary book I also use it as a journal on what I'm reading (in late Nov.I was reading Harold Bloom's "Ruin the Sacred Truths" and I made these notes which I think are pertinent to this discussion.
- Continuity comes in the form of rupture.
- "Abraham falls victim to the following illusion; he cannot stand the uniformity of this world. Now the world is known, however, to be uncommonly various, which can be verified at any time by taking a handful of world and looking at it closely. Thus this complaint about the uniformity of the world is really a complaint at not having been mixed profoundly enough with the diversity of the world." Kafka
-"motive for metaphor - the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere, which is Nietzsche's nomadic geneology of the aesthetic impulse." Bloom
and one more...
-"Jewish dualism is neither the split between body and soul nor the abyss between subject and object. Rather it is the ceaseless agon within the self not only against all outward injustice but also against what I have called the injustice of outwardness, or, more simply, the way things are."
-Bloom (Ruin the sacred truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the present.)
Now I'm reading a book on Jasper Johns called "Priviledged Information" by Jill Johnston. Johns' work raises questions about making an object without a narrative about the maker but his work also conceals an intimate S.O.S. It's written like a detective story and Johnston's inquisitiveness, throwing the lights on in places accustomed to mystery, is i think what this form of public dialogue (your particular blog) does as well.
(There is a startling coincidence in the JJ book with your postings about skin as well.)
I've been thinking a lot about the fact that I started doing yoga at about the same time as I started reading D&G and that despite my concern that I don't have enough time to be contemplative, both have made me more so. They have also made me braver. I notice it particularly in my pointe work. I'm not dancing yet, but I'm finally 'on pointe'. I also love the idea of the 'injustice of outwardness' you mention. It's visceral but I'm beginning to believe that it can be addressed. You just need to find appropriate methodologies and resist the urge to merely thrash around.
I like that: "on point."
"One pointedness" is the object of yoga AND it is an art form. Part of my yoga practice (giving asana instruction) is like singing at a coffee house. I know generally what I will sing but I don't know how it will come out, or how it will be sung, until another person arrives.
I have been contemplating the words "point and line to plane" (Kandinsky's aphorism) since I was a teenager and have heard this sequence echoed by Hari Dass as: "it starts as a point, becomes sound (wave), then light (particle)."
Like you, my yoga practice started with reading. It was the poem "The Bhagavad Gita" and the translation I loved was by Juan Mascaro (penguin). I read it as a poem and got inquisitive - and I think of the practice still as a poem.
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