Mountain, Clouds, Church and Septic Tank (2012)In interviews with Bill Moyers, mythology scholar Joseph Campbell said "aum" is the sound of the mystery of the world.
Campbell also said,
"People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.
"I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plain will have resonances within those that are of our own inner-most being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about....
“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here-and-now which thinking in 'time' cuts out.
"This is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity—right here and now—is the function of life.”
Refrigerator DrawingCriticism is not negative. Criticism is debatable, uses evidence, and persuasives you to see what it sees using a mix of description, analysis, and evaluation.
Description proves the critic can see form in how the artist treats subjects and how we perceive the world.
Analysis is the interpretation of meaning of form based on the clues found during the description.
Evaluation is a judgement of whether the art was successful in conveying some meaning within its own criteria.
Criteria is the curator, the difference in how we evaluate art for the refrigerator, for the best works of the 21st century, and everything in between. Criteria is key to good criticism.
When in doubt of what to think about a piece of artwork, begin by describing what you see "in the frame" and trust the art will cause an idea to emerge.
That trust, when met by genius in excess of our expectations—when we reevaluate criteria itself—that's the bliss of it all.
"This place in the mountains, amid nature’s casualness toward death and birth, is the perfect host for the inspiration of ideas: harsh at times, life-threatening in its winters of destruction, but tender in attention to the details of every petal of every wildflower resurrected in the spring. Nature and creativity obey the same laws to the same end: life."
According to Cynthia Zayn and Kevin Dibble, authors of Narcissistic Lovers, there are 10 traits psychologists look for when diagnosing a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
A person suffering NPD will:
Possess a grandiose sense of self importance.
Exaggerate achievements and expects superior recognition.
Believe himself special and believe only special people can understand him.
Search constantly for "ideal" love.
Fantasize about unlimited success, power or beauty.
Need constant admiration and praise.
Feel entitled to take advantage of others to achieve his goals.
Have no empathy for the needs of others.
Act snobby and arrogant.
Envy others and believe others envious of him.
The Narcissist's constant search for ideal love leads him to make proclamations about his failures (him or her, of course, though narcissists tend to be men by a 3 to 1 ratio).
Statements like, "Oh, I'm the king of bad relationships" usually belie a Narcissist's need for recognition of how bad and numerous his relationships are, even though it is his own narcissism that demands "ideal" love, dooming real relationships with real, unidealized people to failure.
Every time a Narcissist enters a relationship, he believes "this could be the one" in order to fulfill the ideal, "happily-ever-after" fantasy.
When the relationship ultimately fails, the Narcissist must "troll" for "new supply" of narcissistic attention. "Supply" describes the need the Narcissist substitutes for love.
The best mate for a narcissist tends to be another narcissist, though co-dependents will suffice when a narcissist is in search of good supply.
Narcissa Whitman Memorial, South Pass, WY, from www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com
According to Zayn and Dibble, all alcoholics are narcissists, but not all narcissists are alcoholics. The constant need to maintain quality narcissistic supply dominates NPD sufferers in the same way that drugs dominate drug addicts.
Narcissistic supply comes in two varieties: somatic and cerebral. Somatic narcissism is a need for sex and extreme physical desire from a partner. Cerebral narcissism is a need to feel smart and have a supply of intellectual admiration. Both forms of supply require the Narcissist be the focus of sexual or mental attention.
When a Narcissist no longer gets the supply he needs, he usually ends a relationship immediately and walks away on the spot. Often pretending the relationship never happened, the Narcissist will accuse an ex-partner of "stalking" when that person merely seeks normal, healthy closure to a relationship that they had no idea was ending.
The Narcissist rarely needs closure, because he has already lined up another co-dependent to give him narcissistic supply. When a Narcissist returns to an ex- (and many do), the ex- should be aware that their little Nar is in bad need of supply, not an actual relationship and certainly not "love."
Image from Psychologytoday.com
Narcissism has its roots in early childhood relationships with parents or parental figures. The narcissistic child does not receive love or attention based on who he is, but rather based on who a parent wants the child to be. This damages the development of a child's true self, and the child creates a false self as a way to get acceptance, approval and love.
A narcissistic parent may groom a child to be his or her co-dependent narcissistic supplier. The child's activities and accomplishments only matter to the narcissistic parent in so far as they reflect well on the parent's own sense of self. The child's sense of self does not exist to the narcissistic parent.
The child of a narcissist can grow up to become an adult Narcissist himself. The Narcissist is terrified that people will know his true self, so all of his energy focusses on intentional acts and deliberate choices designed to conceal his true self from others. Often these choices will involve elaborate deception of a co-dependent who provides the critical narcissistic supply.
The deception narcissists employ is like a director who demands actors perform exactly as they are told. In fact, many former co-dependents describe relationships with narcissists as performing in a play for which they did not know the script. Confusion and distortion of facts are the Narcissist's best friends in this deceptive stageplay.
The deception has a term: "gaslighting." Gaslighting gets its name from an actual movie in which the male lead flickers lights in a house and denies that its happening for so long that he makes his wife doubt her own sanity.
If you find yourself constantly doubting what happened and you continue to question what you think are objective facts, then you might be under a Narcissist's control. ("There! Didn't you see it? The lights flickered again. I swear they did!")
All relationships are about control to the Narcissist, because a lack of control makes the Narcissist feel vulnerable to exposure of his true self, which he fears is unlovable.
Narcissists tend to hate holidays and gift giving, because holidays take focus away from the Narcissist and give it to the occasion at large. A Narcissist also feels the gifts he receives do not reflect his own magnanimity: Gifts are insults, and show "how little people understand me." Thus, it's not uncommon for the Narcissist to start fights during holiday festivities in order to reclaim control and attention.
The only known successful tactic for dealing with a Narcissist is the "Zero Contact Rule," where a co-dependent does not allow any contact with the Narcissist, or, in unavoidable cases, resists any meaningful contact, keeping everything on a superficial level.
As a last ditch effort at control, a Narcissist who feels exposed by an unwilling co-dependent will usually explode in a narcissistic rage episode, where the only goal is to obliterate the target emotionally or physically. This rage is a defining characteristic of the disorder. Rage can come out of nowhere, and the Narcissist usually returns to his normal behavior soon afterward and pretends that it never happened.
Image from thanasis.com
Narcissism gets its name from the Greek myth of Narcissus (and Echo, but Narcissus would likely want the tale to be his alone.) In the myth, Narcissus could find no partner ideal enough or worthy of his love until he sat by the edge of a pond, where he fell in love with his own reflection and died there, gazing at it.
Flowers of the species Narcissus, common name daffodil, grow in wetlands, often around shores surrounding lakes and ponds. The flowers bend on their long stems to overhang the reflective surface of the water.
All flowers of narcissus species contain the alkaloid poison lycorine.
“No, Silly, that’s design.” Not so. It’s great copywriting.
To get the opposite of great copywriting, simply pocket the writing budget and give the directive to make something "clean." Presto! Boring, antiseptic, whitespace: Clear the invisible landing strip for the no-idea airplane!
Whitespace is a safe answer to any question. It cannot be wrong. Those who want to feel en vogue eventually come to terms with the idea of whitespace. It does no harm and can't be blamed.
I admit whitespace is probably better than what would have filled it, especially if what we see in "Blade Runner" is this mess:
Art examines a problem. Commerce provides a solution.
To examine a problem, you work with the elements. You consider the color, tone, shape, form and meaning. You become so intimate with the problem that you ask, “How does this lead to better understanding?”
To provide a solution, you work with agenda. You consider who, what, when, where, how and why. You get past the problem as fast as possible.
To make art, you must be inspired. To make commerce, you must have use a creative brief.
I put my creative brief here, so that I will know where it is. It comforts me and keeps me safe in the darkness.
Argot is a characteristic language of a particular group. It’s quick and laden with meaning. When a heavy says, “We put the grips on him,” he’s using the argot of organized crime. When Violet McNeal, author of Four White Horses and a Brass Band, says, “Never try to trim a young handsome man; all the women will be running after him,” she speaks the argot of medicine show grifters.
However, when a corporate head says, “… generates stellar ROI for our company by optimizing our cross-functional team's blah, blah blah …” he or she uses jargon.
Jargon, by definition, is nonsensical, incoherent or meaningless talk that has an unusual or pretentious vocabulary, convoluted phrasing and vague meaning.
Q: Why do those without argot cultivate jargon instead? A: The need for high adventure
William Strunk and E.B. White sum it up in one of the sharpest passages from The Elements of Style:
"The young writer will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. Today, the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation. Your new kitchen range is so revolutionary it obsoletes all other ranges. It is the language of mutilation.
"The businessman says that ink erasers are in short supply, that he has updated the next shipment of these erasers, and that he will finalize his recommendations at the next meeting of the board. He is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers, caparisoned like a knight. We should tolerate him—every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse.
"Finalize, for instance, is not standard. One can’t be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn’t know, either, and doesn’t want to know."
Portentous is a great word, and caparisoned a huge favorite because of that passage. Tolerate works wonders, as well.
Many writers take issue with Strunk & White, but I find their advice on style valuable to review every so often. The humor in it is undeniable. Here are some selected elements from "The Elements of Style."
Few people sit down and write a story from beginning to end. Beginning-to-end is how you tell a story, but probably not how you should try to write one.
Write the scene that’s burning a hole in your pocket. If it’s the big climax where the girl falls off the boat, then write that first. Don’t worry about why she’s on the boat, how she bought the ticket, or what she ate for breakfast.
Write the next scene that burns you. Then the next. Be a brave painter. Put blobs all over the canvas. Cover the squares with circles, pull mask and tape, go around the side and leave happy accidents. Don't lock up on a scaffold. Don’t start in the top left corner.
See your story woven in layers and movement, not fitted together like plots of land. Eventually, the characters will tell you what parts you’ve written and whether or not they connect.
"You can't change your mind up on a scaffold without the risk of everything going awry. You must solve your problems before you get up there." Thomas Hart Benton
"I make no moves in contemplation of death." Ibidem
"The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth.' But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from?
"Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess. ...
"How can an experiment be 'wrong'? First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong with the apparatus that you did not notice. But these things are easily fixed, and checked back and forth. So without snatching at such minor things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong? Only by being inaccurate.
"For example, the mass of an object never seems to change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a 'law' was invented ... [But] a true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than 100 miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference.
"Well, yes and no.
"For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are.
"Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a very peculiar thing about the philosophy behind the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas.”
“When I was four, just four years old, I went to my mother and I said, ‘What's this hole in my chin?' I saw this dimple in my chin in the mirror, and didn't know what it was.
"And my mother said—get what my mother says—she says, ‘When you're born, you go on a assembly line past God, and if He likes you, He says ‘You cute little thing!’ and you get dimples there (grabs her cheeks with both her hands). And if He doesn't like you, He goes, ‘Go away’ (presses one finger on her chin).
"So about six months later, my mother found me saying my prayers, and I was going, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep...’ (holds one hand over her chin).
"My mother says, ‘What are you covering up your chin for?’
"And I said, ‘Because if I cover up the hole, maybe He'll listen to me.’”
Friday, May 25, 2012 at 1:15PM ;)
Mountain, Clouds, Church and Septic Tank (2012)In interviews with Bill Moyers, mythology scholar Joseph Campbell said "aum" is the sound of the mystery of the world.;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)