Music is the only art form I know nothing about, still I see and hear music in all the other arts; rhythm, pattern, movement, balance, silence, emptiness … these are all important qualities also in poetry and visual arts. At the Drawing Room in London the exhibition Everything we do is music is underlining the affinities. You…
Tag: Buddhism
looking down into heaven
– apropos art’s potential to heal Is it a banal idea to believe art can have healing qualities? Adrian Searle and lots of nameless online commentators seems to believe so. Wolfgang Laib on the other hand, original educated as a medical doctor, has a different kind of view. Laib understands art as possessing a spiritual healing function…
it doesn’t all have to be about Christmas –
I have already told you about my experience with Dani Shapiro’s excellent book on writing called Still Writing (2013). Reading it made me curious about Shapiro’s authorship, so I went on to read Devotion – a memoir (2010). I seldom read memoirs, it’s not that I actively avoid the genre – it’s just that memoirs seldom appeal…
HALF-A-WIND SHOW
Yesterday I went to Denmark to see Yoko Ono’s: HALF-A-WIND SHOW at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was great, but Ono isn’t really about exhibited things and objects, her art is about relations, about the meeting between you – the viewer & her ideas and instructions. So in many ways the exhibition could be understood as…
aspiring to an original creative act
For some time I have been reading and listening to the teachings of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, finding her wise words both challenging and instructive. Together with Jack Kornfield, Chdrön has been my main pathfinder into the world of buddhism. Last week I listened to Chödrön’s teachings on the Bodhisattva Mind, where she praises Stephen Batchelor’s…
I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun
Today I read “Dogfish” by Mary Oliver in the light of my own ongoing preoccupation with meaninglessness, fear & creative excess. Here is a short excerpt from the original poem: (…) I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a…
many kinds of elsewheres
For those of you sharing my interest in the work of Rebecca Solnit, here is a very fine review of her newest book: After the artist Georgia O’Keeffe left New York for the mesa of New Mexico, she began signing letters to friends “from the faraway nearby”. The striking oxymoron has given Rebecca Solnit the…
Becoming intimate with fear
—Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value * Maggie Nelson: I’ve often written about things that terrify me—likely out of compulsion more than hope for comfort, or catharsis; as Peter Handke says near the end of his horrified memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,…
to be with what is
Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward. – Pema Chödrön In response to my last post Harold said: A literal view of the particular kind of equanimity mentioned above leaves it open for the continued destruction of the earth, and thus ourselves. Its an important and interesting objection, and a problem discussed in different…
sub rosa 