Kerouac's Wake Up; Review, Part II

->->-> What I value about this account more than any other is how Kerouac succeeds in removing himself utterly from daubing on any muddying patina of authoritative interpretation even while at the same time, in between the accurate tracking of the approved versions, he animates the scenes with poetic vitality, and at times he scripts arch maxims from his Buddha’s mouth. The introduction is however rendered by a preeminent authority on Tibetan Buddhism, Robert Thurman, and well-known Kerouac admirer (and, incidentally, actress Uma’s father). Thurman tests the text for accuracy, and it is not found wanting. He applauds Kerouac’s authenticity of style, with its tendency to characteristic stream-of-consciousness writing and imaginative literary flares. Sadly, Kerouac died prematurely from alcoholism in 1969.
Kerouac included without judgement a couple of exchanges which show how the Buddha, despite declarations of equal regard for all sentient beings, remained a product of his society and era. For example, once, when a monk of the older traditions questioned the Buddha’s claims to enlightenment due to his youth, the answer was given:
“There are four young creatures who are not to be disregarded or despised because they are youthful…a noble prince; a snake; a fire; a monk”

It was no doubt of major benefit to him, a sort of springboard and safety net in one, that his options were infinitely more numerous than his peers, such as that of knowing that his place back at the palace with his beautiful wife, children, harem, every luxury imaginable, was still available to him if he changed his mind. Could anything be better for self-confidence than ruling a kingdom? He was never mendicant of necessity, whereas congenital poverty, sorrow, cruelty were common elsewhere.

Today there is an agreement in principle that all should have equal opportunity, even if background still dictates success for most people. At least Buddhism offers consolation for all, regardless of station.

Another noticeably dated attitude is discerned in the Buddha’s response to a request for a woman to be ordained as a monk:

“Better far with red-hot iron pins bore out both your eyes, than encourage in yourselves lustful thoughts, or look upon a woman’s form with such desires.

Lust beclouding a man’s heart, confused and woman’s beauty because of the maleness in his Karma, his mind is dazed; and at the end of his life, having demeaned himself with women for a few sexual feelings, evilly involved in the snare of mutual agreement which is her chief delight, that man must fall into an evil way. His life spent in house and home, a hole-and-corner life at best, he comes to senility jabbering multitudes of runes, religious in regret…Thus everyone should consider well and loathe and put away the form of women”.

Yet he admitted Lady Amra to the Sisterhood of Bhikshunis, and did so at the risk of criticism, as earlier orders refused female admissions. In these instances, an evolution of social values is not an unreasonable hypothesis. Buddha helped to reform the rigidly oppressive caste system of Hinduism, making a simple method of personal redemption universally practical. 500 years later, Jesus Christ set out to challenge and humanise the Jewish power structures. Gandhi and Martin Luther King are more recent liberators, and even Kerouac was part of a movement, the Beat Generation, that put poetic street rhythm back into prose. To Wake Up, then, and pass it on…
- goinghome

Kerouac's Wake Up; Review, Part 1

WAKE UP by JACK KEROUAC: A NEW BOOK REVIEW.

Last year, a little bomb was lobbed out of the book-world with the first-time publication of another biography of the Buddha, Prince Siddartha Gotama, written in 1955 by none other than the iconic 20th century novelist Jack Kerouac. Three years after finishing this work, Kerouac launched his groundbreaking novel The Dharma Bums, which was considered to be largely responsible for spawning an indigenous American Buddhism. Aptly entitled Wake Up, the new posthumous release is a very careful and ardent (“the purpose is to convert,” he admits at the beginning) approach to the epic story of the Buddha’s opulent childhood, his search for enlightenment and his teachings. Though raised Catholic, Kerouac immersed himself in Buddhism in the early 1950s to the extent that his spiritual ideas overflowed into his writing from Mexico City Blues to The Dharma Bums. Drawing on diverse sutras and canonical scriptures, Kerouac transcribes concisely for the reader (and perhaps as a grounding assignment for himself) the central ideas and events of the Buddhist saga. The result is a lucid wholehearted meditation on suffering, desire, wisdom and on the nature of being.

The royal prince was born into boundless wealth. To fend off an augury that Siddartha would become a famed travelling holy man, his father protected him inordinately from signs of human suffering and plied him with every comfort. His mother died giving him birth, in 563 B.C. in India, and he was brought up by an aunt. The sick and dead were removed from the kingdom, until one day when in his late twenties, he accidentally met a very old withered man and witnessed a deceased body. Already melancholic, these encounters turned his world upside down. And why wouldn’t they, really, if someone intelligent, furnished with proofs of an immortal safe world, now faced the reality of imperfection and decay? The betrayal of trust, for one granted so much autonomy and honour in everything else, must have been overwhelming, and like Oedipus Rex’ parents, the actions taken to avoid fate simply became part of the ‘problem’, substantially serving the fulfilment of the feared prediction.

On departing the kingdom, he wandered homeless, clad only in rags, and he proceeded searching for truth in the traditional ways but he became disillusioned with the methods available. He resolved to risk his life for a revelation in stillness. As he sat in vigil under the Bodhi tree, his awareness of his ears expanded: "... the pure sea of hearing, the Transcendental Sound of Nirvana heard by children in cribs and on the moon and in the heart of howling storms, and in which the young Buddha now heard a teaching going on, a ceaseless instruction wise and clear from all the Buddhas of Old that had come before him and all that Buddhas a-coming."

Thus he came to understand the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path out of suffering. After some uncertainty, he decided that he should now share knowledge of this new route to freedom with other beings, and he embarked on a life of itinerant teaching. ->->->
- goinghome

Travel Keepsake Complications...

The Present

A woman goes to France to attend a 2-week, company training session.

Her husband drives her to the airport and wishes her to have a good trip.

The wife answers, “Thank you honey, what would you like me to bring for you?”

The husband laughs and says, “A French girl!”

The woman kept quiet and left.

Two weeks later he picks her up in the airport and asks “So, honey, how was the trip?”

“Very good, thank you”.

“And, what happened to my present?”

“Which present?”

“What I asked for…. the French girl?

“Oh, that? Well, I did what I could, now we have to wait a few months to see if it is a girl…”


The Frog and the Princess
Once upon a time, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess happened upon a frog in a pond.

The frog said to the princess, "I was once a handsome prince until an evil witch put a spell on me. One kiss from you and I will turn back into a prince and then we can marry, move into the castle with my mom and you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children and forever feel happy doing so."

That night, while the princess dined on frog legs, she kept laughing and saying, "I don't think so."

Read the Declaration on the Principles of Equality at - The Equal Rights Trust is an independent international organisation whose purpose is to combat discr

Redemption Song - Bob Marley

YouTube - bob marley - redemption song

Reflections on Exile, Edward W. Said

The collection of literary and cultural essays by Edward W. Said entitled Reflections in Exile published in 2001 was hailed as reconfirmation of the towering intellectual critical skills of the author. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was the author of more than twenty world-acclaimed books, and he died in 2003.

The opening essay deals with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty but Said displays a playful side in discussing elsewhere Johnny Weissmuller's career as Tarzan. A vivid account of his boyhood in Cairo is included, and an original debunking of the more extravagant mythologies sprung up around the figure of George Orwell. Fearlessly he also calls for reconsideration of other major writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams.

His own exile from Jerusalem, where he was born, and the protracted unsettled destiny of the Palestinians has fuelled many of the topics Said has explored.

"Much of the contemporary interest in exile can be traced to the somewhat pallid notion that non-exiles can share in the benefits of exile as a redemptive motif. There is, admittedly a certain plausibility and truth to this idea. Like medieval itinerant scholars or learned Greek slaves in the Roman Empire, exiles - the exceptional ones among them - do leaven their environments. And naturally "we" concentrate on that enlightening aspect of "their" presence among us, not on their misery or their demands. But looked at from the bleak political perspective of modern mass dislocations, individual exiles force us to recognise the tragic fate of homelessness in a necessarily heartless world.

A generation ago, Simone Weil posed the dilemma of exile as concisely as it has ever been expressed. "To be rooted," she said, "is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul." Yet Weil also saw that most remedies for uprootedness in this era of world wars, deportations, and mass exterminations are almost as dangerous as what they purportedly remedy. Of these, the state - or, more accurately, statism - is one of the most insidious, since worship of the state tends to supplant all other human bonds. Weil exposes us anew to that whole complex of pressures and constraints that lie at the center of the exile's predicament, which, as I have suggested, is as close as we come in the modern era to tragedy..."

The above and other quotes from the title essay can be viewed here -
Defining Travel: Diverse Visions - Google Book Search

Terry Eagleton: Class warrior

Terry Eagleton is a brave erudite humanist and Professor in Manchester University, UK. His book Sweet Violence - the idea of the tragic revolves around the fall-out inherent in the following observation: "There is no reason why men and women should delight in what is more than strictly necessary for their physical survival, a superfluity known as culture". While Eagleton admits that desire for excess is a part of human nature, his concern is with the glorification of this inherent greed to the point where tragedy and sacrifice become aesthetically justifiable, and ultimately, under perverse social morals, people are killed as a means to a cultural end.

In After Theory he expanded: "There is a potentially tragic conflict here between the means and the end. If we have to act instrumentally in order to create a less means-ends-obsessed form of life, then we have to live in a way which by our own admission is less than desirable. At the worst, it may mean that some people tragically, may feel the need to sacrifice their own happiness for others. To call this tragic means that such sacrifice is not the most desirable way to live. Morality is about fulfilling the self, not abnegating it. It is just that for some people, abnegating it may be historically necessary for bringing that desirable form of life about. There are, tragically, situations in which the self can be fulfilled only by being relinquished. If history were not as dire as it has been, this would not be necessary. In a just world, our condition would not need to be broken in order to be re-made".


Columnist with The Independant, Paul Vallely, summed up Eagleton's life and works non-sycophantically in a piece in 2007, which included these excerpts:

Eagleton's central concern was that scarcely one British poet or novelist was willing to look beyond their fear of Islam to scrutinise the pressures which generate the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed religious fundamentalism. Global capitalism, he insists, requires a moral critique...

...At the heart of his philosophy is an attack on postmodernism, which he has described as "a sick joke". The cynicism and irony of postmodern thinking, he says, do not reveal the truth. Its lack of absolute values, and relativist notion that all ideas are of equal value, is a moral abdication. More than that, it is reactionary, because while it purports to embrace a nihilist neutrality, it endorses a capitalist status quo that oppresses the poor...

...But it is also because, he insists, Marxism offers the blueprint for a moral society. The failure of the Soviet Union discredits Marxism only to the extent that the Inquisition invalidates Christianity, he says. He is adamant, with the young Marx, that "philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it". The overthrow of capitalism has its counterpart in the religious concept of redemption: the world is so deeply flawed that only a complete transformation can cure it.

For Eagleton politics, religion and literature teach the same lesson. He quotes one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians, "God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong", to show that morality begins with a recognition of one's weakness and mortality.

One of his most recent books, The Meaning of Life, argues rigorously for a sense of purpose grounded in happiness and fulfilment, both individually and collectively. Happiness, he writes, "springs from the free flourishing of one's powers and capacities". And love, he concludes, is "the state in which the flourishing of one individual comes about through the flourishing of all".

It is not where you might have expected this great exponent of Marxism to have ended up, aged 64. It is some distance from the Dave Spart caricature offered by Amis's friends. At least, says Eagleton with a twinkle, he has avoided the usual fate of the militant leftist who has matured with age into a sceptical liberal or jaded conservative. "Sheer horror of cliché, if nothing else", he says, has preserved him from that.

The full article is at:
Terry Eagleton: Class warrior - Profiles, People - The Independent

Media Shape the World - Thomas de Zengotita

Mediated: how the media shapes the world around you is a head-spinning socially solipsistic literary voyage, written by Thomas De Zengotita. He says:

"...getting in touch with you feelings [as in therapy, method acting] is a reflexive process that transforms the immediate into the mediated. You learn, through that process, how to have your feelings, how to express your feelings - which means, how to perform them. So there is a self-consciousness, a reflexivity about you that makes your parents or grandparents look like automatons in comparison".

Zengotita claims that we now "have been consigned to a new plane of being engendered by mediating representations of fabulous quality and inescapable ubiquity, a place where everything is addressed to us, everything is for us, and nothing is beyond us anymore".

He goes on:

“A new America is on the drawing boards for the twenty-first century. Various versions are being designed and promoted, and the great assembly of flattered selves is shopping again, shopping for a representation [economic models, revenge movie scripts…] of the world that will distract us most convincingly from the reality of unrepresentable possibility. As the chosen versions, whatever they turn out to be, take hold of the way everything gets represented and therefore, eventually, of the way everything gets constituted, the surreal atmosphere will dissipate and virtuality will fuse with reality again, to create a good-enough semblance of normality. Masses of people who found themselves and their world projected into the existential nothing after 9/11, will find relief from that state of suspense, and great industries will be devoted to providing it, and profiting from that provision. That state is one is which world-transforming questions can be raised, but it is the very opposite of comfortable. It is the state that existentialists and surrealists once prescribed for the sensibility of an avant-garde adjusting to mechanized madness and slaughter in the early twentieth century. We saw that sensibility democratized, for a while, at the beginning of the twenty-first. But it will not last, for it is vulnerable to unbearable truths. The bubble of self-regarding self-representation that has insulated us for so long from the suffering of millions in a world dominated by our interests and institutions – that bubble will reform around us…” – p. 291, “Mediated” by Thomas De Zengotita

There's a brief introduction to the author and his work here, which includes the option of listening to an indepth interview - Thomas de Zengotita: Mediated: The Effects of Media on Consciousness

More excerpts from the author's desk can be viewed at: Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It

The review from The Guardian newspaper suggests why the book is special - Observer review: Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita | From the Observer | The Observer

Hypnotic Principles of the Mind

The Awareness Continuum

Total attention To:
Inner Reality_____________Outer Reality

Most of the time, people move backwards and forwards along the continuum which connects the two extremes. Orientation and adaptation is assisted by being mindful of both aspects as appropriate.


The Rules of the Mind are as follows:

1. Every thought or idea causes a physical reaction.

2. What the mind expects tends to happen.

3. Imagination is far more powerful than reason.

4. Conflicting ideas cannot be held simultaneously (without anxiety).

5. An idea fixed in the subconscious remains forever, or until replaced. The longer the idea is held, the harder it is to change it.

6. Established, emotionally induced symptoms tend to cause organic changes.

7. Suggestions acted upon reduce the resistance to further suggestions.

8. Conscious mind activity reduces the subconscious response.

Suggestion is at the heart of hypnosis and, if understood, that is sufficient knowledge of hypnotic induction theory. “There is a rule in hypnotism that everything we get in trance can also be obtained by means of the post-hypnotic suggestion. Also, anything that we find in either can be found in auto-suggestion; and finally, that everything we obtain in any of the three will also be encountered in everyday life” (G. Estabrooke, 1943). One of the reasons why Erickson was so successful, relative to some of his contemporaries, was simply because he took ANYTHING he considered to be an unconscious response as an indication of trance development.

The dominant Laws of Suggestion are as follows:

1. The law of reversed effect – the harder one consciously endeavours to do something, the more difficult it becomes to succeed.

2. The law of concentrated attention/repetition of suggestion – repeated concentration of attention on a goal or idea tends to make it realised.

3. The law of dominant effect – stronger emotions tend to take precedence over weaker ones, regardless of reason.

4. The law of delayed action – once a suggestion is inferred, the mind will be predisposed to react to it whenever a condition or situation used in the original suggestive idea presents itself.

5. The law of association – whenever someone repeatedly responds to one particular stimulus in the presence of another stimulus, both stimuli become associated so that each recalls the response in the future.

6. The law of self approval – success is much more likely when the person’s inner desires and motivations match the suggestions.

7. The law of anticipated judgement – concerned with formulating realistic goals which are achievable in a time frame consistent with a person’s objectives.

The real secret of success is observation as to what can excite the creative imagination.

People have the resources within themselves to solve any problem. They have either seen the solution, experienced the solution or can be guided to piece the proper solution together, as the subconscious is wise and benevolent when future orientated and met flexibly at its frame of reference. Temporary trance can be evoked by reminding of everyday such experiences e.g. daydreaming. Truisms build acceptance of whatever emerges. The use of negatives such as ‘are you not, doesn’t it” discharge minor inhibitions and resistances. Reframing allows stuck negative attitudes, or anything that is encountered – doubt, perfectionism - to be utilised and transformed into opportunities.

Permission for diversity of response, and validation, which can be attribution of any response, are vital, while prediction nudges openness and alternatives in the mind. Splitting pits interfering conscious against emerging healing unconscious; linking bridges emotions, experiences, etc as do analogies, while matching can do so by verbal and physical mirroring. A basis of trustful rapport is fundamental for encouraging and eliciting growth and development. The idea is that everything is good if learning for life can follow.

Related story here about the science bit - Comment: Hypnosis is good for more than stage tricks - science-in-society - 15 October 2008 - New Scientist

Happiness - You Think You're in Control?

Daniel Gilbert's 2005 volume Stumbling on Happiness provoked quite a stir, proposing, via an entertaining stream of evidence-based scenarios, that planning for happiness with any certainty about a joyous return is a fool's game.

Powell's books website has hosted summaries, reviews, an interview, product details, and a question and answer round with the author, from which two exchanges are featured here:

Q. How did you come to study affective forecasting? What do you find to be most exciting about the field?

A. Ten or fifteen years ago I was getting divorced, my teenage son was in deep trouble, my mentor died unexpectedly, my best friend and I had a serious falling out, and I was…well, not too bad thank you. Now, if you’d asked me a year earlier how I would feel if any one of these events (much less all four) were to happen, I would have told you that I’d be devastated for a long, long time. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t euphoric, of course, but I wasn’t nearly as distraught as I would have imagined. And that made me wonder whether my mistaken predictions about the emotional consequences of events like these were unique to me or shared by others. So I teamed up with the psychologist Tim Wilson, and together we began to do surveys and experiments to find out. And what we found out amazed us: People dramatically and regularly mispredict the emotional consequences of future events, both large and small. This finding set me on a research trajectory that has not yet ended, and Stumbling on Happiness is a report on what I’ve learned so far. It took me 15 years to answer the question I had asked myself, and I wrote this book so that the next person who asks that question can get a somewhat quicker reply...

...Q. Being a cynic, as so many of us are these days, I imagine that everything that can go wrong in a situation will. What does your book have to say about the low-level anxiety most of us experience?

A. You probably think it would be good if you could feel perfectly happy at every moment of your life. But we have a word for animals that cannot feel distress, anxiety, fear, and pain: The word is extinct. Negative thoughts and emotions have important roles to play in our lives because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go, they often take actions to make sure those things go terribly right. Just as we manipulate our children and our employees by threatening them with dire consequences, so too do we manipulate ourselves by imagining dire consequences. Sure, people can be so anxious that their anxiety is debilitating, but that’s the extreme case. For most of us, anxiety serves a purpose. It is what keeps you from sending your nine-year old to the rough part of town one night for a loaf of bread. If someone could offer you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on NORTH is worthless.

Powell's Books - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Some quotes:
“Starting points matter because we often end up close to where we started”…regardless of our conscious intentions. D. Gilbert

“Any brain that does the filling-in trick is bound to do the leaving-out trick as well…” distorting our imagined futures”. D. Gilbert

“Because it is so much easier… to remember the past than to generate new possibilities…” we erroneously do. D. Gilbert

“Some of our cultural wisdom about happiness looks suspiciously like a super-replicating false belief..” D. Gilbert

“The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless…” [of truth] D.G.

“Because we value [individual] uniqueness, it isn’t surprising that we tend to overestimate it”. Daniel Gilbert

Cos individuals don’t usually believe it’s their personal duty to preserve social systems, such is disguised as prescription for happiness, realises D.G.

"..almost everything we know is 2ndhand...the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today". D. Gilbert

A helpful chapter-by-chapter summary is here - Stumbling on Happiness Summary at WikiSummaries: Free Book Summaries

Kahlil Gibran on Joy and Sorrow

The greater the cross, the more potential ecstasy, Kahlil Gibran implies here, from The Prophet:

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.”

For more mystical and comforting quotes such as these, the full text of The Prophet has kindly been made available at The PROPHET, by Kahlil Gibran

Escaping the Happiness Trap.

Dr Ruth Harris' new book on reasonable living expectations brings a refreshing realism to the self-help maze:

"...In the western world we now have a higher standard of living than humans have ever known before. We have better medical treatment, more and better food, better housing conditions, better sanitation, more money, more welfare services and more access to education, justice, travel, entertainment and career opportunities. Indeed, today’s middle class lives better than did the royalty of not so long ago, and yet, human misery is everywhere.

The psychology and personal development sections of bookstores are growing at a rate never seen before, and the bookshelves are groaning under the strain. The titles cover depression, anxiety, anorexia nervosa, overeating, anger management, divorce, relationship problems, sexual problems, drug addictions, alcoholism, low self-esteem, loneliness, grief, gambling — if you can name it, there’s a book on it. Meanwhile, on the television and radio, and in magazines and newspapers, the ‘experts’ bombard us daily with advice on how to improve our lives. This is why the numbers of psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family counsellors, social workers and ‘life coaches’ are increasing with every year. And yet — now, think about this — with all this help and advice and worldly wisdom, human misery is not diminishing but growing by leaps and bounds! Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

The statistics are staggering: In any given year almost 30 per cent of the adult population will suffer from a recognised psychiatric disorder. The World Health Organization estimates that depression is currently the fourth biggest, costliest and most debilitating disease in the world, and by the year 2020 it will be the second biggest. In any given week, one-tenth of the adult population is suffering from clinical depression, and one in five people will suffer from it at some point in their lifetime. Furthermore, one in four adults, at some stage in their life, will suffer from drug or alcohol addiction, which is why there are now over twenty million alcoholics in the United States of America alone!

But more startling and more sobering than all those statistics is that almost one in two people will go through a stage in life when they seriously consider suicide and will struggle with it for a period of two weeks or more. Scarier still, one in ten people will at some point actually attempt to kill themselves.

Think about those numbers for a moment. Think of the people in your life: your friends, family and co-workers. Consider what those figures imply: that of all the people you know, almost half of them will at some point be so overwhelmed by misery that they seriously contemplate suicide. And one in ten will attempt it! In the past two centuries we have doubled the span of the average human life. But have we doubled the richness, the enjoyment, the fulfilment of that life? These statistics give us the answer, loud and clear: lasting happiness, in the common sense of the word, is not normal!...

...We all want it. We all crave it. We all strive for it. Even the Dalai Lama has said: ‘The very purpose of life is to seek happiness.’ But what exactly is this elusive thing we are looking for?

The word ‘happiness’ has two very different meanings. Usually it refers to a feeling: a sense of pleasure, gladness or gratification. We all enjoy happy feelings, so it’s no surprise that we chase them. However, like all our other feelings, feelings of happiness don’t last. No matter how hard we try to hold on to them, they slip away every time. And as we shall see, a life spent in pursuit of those feelings is, in the main, unsatisfying. In fact, the harder we pursue pleasurable feelings, the more we are likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

The other meaning of happiness is ‘a rich, full and meaningful life’. When we take action on the things that truly matter deep in our hearts, when we move in directions that we consider valuable and worthy, when we clarify what we stand for in life and act accordingly, then our lives become rich and full and meaningful, and we experience a powerful sense of vitality. This is not some fleeting feeling — it is a profound sense of a life well lived. And although such a life will undoubtedly give us many pleasurable feelings, it will also give us uncomfortable ones, such as sadness, fear and anger. This is only to be expected. If we live a full life, we will feel the full range of human emotions..."

The Happiness Trap | Stop Struggling Start Living by Dr Russ Harris

Not everyone agrees though that the situation's so gloomy, such as the account of a study here: Wiley InterScience :: JOURNALS :: Perspectives on Psychological Science

Until recently, it was widely held that happiness fluctuates around set points, so that neither individuals nor societies can lastingly increase their happiness. Even though recent research showed that some individuals move enduringly above or below their set points, this does not refute the idea that the happiness levels of entire societies remain fixed. Our article, however, challenges this idea: Data from representative national surveys carried out from 1981 to 2007 show that happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which substantial time-series data were available. Regression analyses suggest that that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and increasing social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world, as the human development model suggests.

The Grimey Past

Folk Lore
Next time you're washing your hands and the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children--last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs--thick straw--piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof-hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor."

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway, hence, a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day.

Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite awhile. Hence the rhyme "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special.

When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale bread, which was so old and hard that they could be used for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times, worms and mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy, moldy trenchers, one would get "trench mouth.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside an they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."

Talking about How to be Happy - MSN Video

Shades of the original positive thinkers, Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, appear in this brief breezy cheesy guide on How to be Happy, with its retro film splicing and bombastic voice-over. It's available on MSN video site:


"The best minds in science and academia want you to be happy."


MSN Video

“Beware of the Dog Rose”

Humorous journalist Frank McNally used to run a column called “The Last Straw” for the Irish Times newspaper on Saturdays. In a late 2004 edition, the following observations issued forth from it:

A while ago, the Irish Times Magazine had a feature about “the language of flowers”, accompanied by a glossary of symbolic meanings. Blue violets represented “faithfulness”; lavender signified “distrust”; red carnations meant “alas for my poor heart”, etc. And as an occasional flower purchaser of the male gender, I read this with a certain amount of what the mandrake plant apparently symbolizes: “horror”. Like many men who dropped out of emotional vocabulary class early, I had often taken the horticultural sector’s self-serving advice: “Say it with flowers”. Now I found myself wondering what the hell I’d said.

Throughout my years of flower-buying, I’d been like a tourist in a dangerous country using a Berlitz phrase-book without the English translations. When I hoped I was asking “where is the nearest post office?” I may instead have blurted: “Stand back! I have a bomb!”

If the glossary was accurate, the mind boggled at where certain flowers could lead your love-life. Take the dog rose, which was said to represent “pleasure and pain”! And not even basic items of fruit were free of significance. You might be safe enough presenting your loved one with a pineapple (meaning “you are perfect”). But it was with some relief I realized I’d never bought any woman a watermelon (“bulkiness”).

Of course it’s possible these meanings are unknown to most women too. After all, the red carnation is a staple of Irish weddings; and many brides also seem to have missed the symbolism of having the service accompanied by the theme song from “Titanic”. But as male readers will agree, you can never be confident that the obscure associations of plant-life will be lost on women; because there’s a whole body of such information, secretly passed down from mothers to daughters, that we know nothing about.

Here’s one example that is common knowledge. For centuries, no doubt frustrated by their menfolk’s inability to express feelings, women have been known to consult daisies (“he loves me, he loves me not”) for insights about their relationships. I rest my case.

Incidentally, the risks of floral misunderstanding are exacerbated by the Internet. A Google search for “say it with flowers” shows that one of the top-ranked websites is an Italian florists’ chain exporting to 100 countries. Obviously a successful business, this site has an English version, albeit one that was apparently translated by computer. In a section on “symbology”, it warns: “Attention also to don’t give a yellow flower to the girlfriend, because it is the symbol of treason”. This is reasonably clear (if alarming), as is the website’s suggestion that men can receive floral tributes, “on condition that it is avoided brittle flowers with romantic meaning and soft colours”. But what of the tip that, on those occasions when a single bloom will suffice, “a violet picked up by the eyelash of a ditch” can be much appreciated?

Unfortunately, even if you choose the right variety and colour, the message conveyed by your bouquet may be simple guilt. For many women, a bunch of flowers from a partner is the equivalent of a failed polygraph test. It won’t stand up in court as evidence of wrong-doing, but it can be the basis for interrogation and a forced confession. Indeed, male guilt is something that florists know well how to exploit.

Walk down Dublin’s Grafton Street, and if you as much as glance in the direction of the tulip stalls, the women there will ask: “Want flowers, love?” For some reason, this always reminds me of the time I strolled through Amsterdam’s red-light district (by accident – I was looking for the post-office), and various strange people approached asking if I wanted things they were selling. Maybe I need counselling: but being asked if I want flowers makes me think I must look like I need flowers. And the women in Grafton Street know that.

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this was the news that Bertie Ahern [then Irish Prime Minister] has had an orchid named after him in Singapore. I thought this might have satirical potential. After all, saying it with flowers is a big tradition in Irish politics, where even the symbols have hidden symbolism. We all know how Official Sinn Fein [reformed IRA] became the “Stickies; because they favoured the adhesive-backed Easter Lily (representing “class warfare and the creation of 32-county Marxist republic”), rather than the Provisionals’ [unreformed IRA] pin-on version (“united Ireland first – details later”).

Disappointingly, it turns out that orchids have nothing unusual to say, even when translated by Italian websites. They symbolize “magnificence, beauty, refinement”, apparently. So only good news there for the Taoiseach [then Irish Prime Minister again], as he seeks to regain his popularity in the polls. Mind you, as a gardening expert told me, orchids are delicate, and it can be hard to get them to bloom twice. [Ends]

Going Sane, Adam Phillips

Shane Hergarty of the Irish Times interviewed Adam Phillips (20 December 2005), the author of a book about something society rarely does, which is to define sanity:

In Going Sane he writes of how relationships are 'not the kind of thing that one can be good or bad at, that one can succeed or fail at, any more than you can be good or bad at having red hair, or succeed and fail at being lucky.' He has not changed his mind. 'From my point of view, the way modern life is constructed and lived, you can't make a relationship work by an act of effort or will,' he says, 'The will can't do that work of imagination in a relationship, and when that happens people grow to hate each other even more,' he says. When a relationship feels like it's over, he believes, it is. We should accept that the man or woman of our dreams isn't someone we could actually have a relationship with, and learn to bear our frustrations. Although, given the implications revealed by Freud, actual sexual satisfaction would be catastrophic. 'The point about sex is that it isn't satisfying,' says Phillips, 'because that's what sustains desire.'

A lengthy discussion of the abscence in culture for this recommended state is followed by an illuminatingly densely-packed description of what healthy sanity is, in the last chapter:

"Sanity as a supposedly superficial quality is a caricature of normalcy. This sane person, viewed as a kind of cartoon character, is thoroughly reasonable, thoughtful, considerate, and well-balanced; but he is also, by the same token, two-dimensional, soulless and uninspired, a triumph of conformism over idiosyncrasy. Sane here means so well adjusted as to have no character; so in apparent harmony with himself and others as to have no special life. For the superficially sane, sanity means a life without conflict, a life of relative peace, a life without malice or greed...”

"...For the more deeply sane, whatever else sanity might be, it is a container of madness, not a denier of it. This sanity, once again in its cartoon form, often bears the wisdom that accrues from hardships endured and conflicts forborne. This sane person has felt and acknowledged but not ultimately been overwhelmed by the rigours of his nature. His sanity, such as it is, is both the cause and the consequence of not having conformed, of discovering his true nature through a refusal to comply. For the superficially sane, adaptation is their religion; for the deeply sane, adaptation is what corrupts them, and is experienced as a form of submission.”

An incisive review expands on the themes:
Going Sane: Adam Phillips’s Mad, Sane World « Couch trip

Peace Treaty for Right Relationship

The Peace Treaty was developed by the monks at Plum Village, headed by Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, to assist couples overcome conflict in relationships, and sustain a gentle kind attitude and practice towards eachother.

Peace Treaty
In Order That We May Live Long and Happily Together, in Order That We May Continually Develop and Deepen Our Love and Understanding, We the Undersigned, Vow to Observe and Practice the Following:

I, the one who is angry, agree to:

1. Refrain from saying or doing anything that might cause further damage or escalate the anger.
2. Not supress my anger.
3. Practice breathing and taking refuge in the island of myself.
4. Calmly, within 24 hours, tell the one who has made me angry about my anger and suffering, either verbally or by delivering a Peace Note.
5. Ask for an appointment later in the week, e.g. Friday evening, either verbally or by note, to discuss this matter more thoroughly.
6. Not say, “I am not angry,it‘s OK. I am not suffering. There is nothing to be angry about, at least not enough to make me angry.“
7. Practice breathing and looking into my daily life - while sitting, walking, lying down, standing and driving in order to see:

The ways that I, myself, have been unskillful at times.
How I have hurt the other person because of my own habit energy.
How the strong seed of anger in me is the primary cause of my anger.
How the other person‘s suffering which waters the seed of my anger is the secondary cause.
How the other person is only seeking relief from their suffering.
That as long as the other person suffers, I cannot be truly happy.

8. Apologize immediately, without waiting for Friday evening as soon as I recognize my unskillfulness and lack of mindfulness.
9. Postpone the Friday meeting if I do not feel calm enough to meet with the other person.

I, the one who has made the other angry, agree to:
1. Respect the other person‘s feelings, not ridicule him/her and allow enough time for him/her to calm down.
2. Not press for an immediate discussion.
3. Confirm the other person‘s request for a meeting, either verbally or by note and assure them that I will be there
4. If I can apologize, do so right away and not wait until Friday evening.
5. Practice breathing and taking refuge in the island of myself to see how:

I have seeds of anger and unkindness as well as the habit energy to make the other person unhappy.
I have mistakenly thought that making the other person suffer would relieve my own suffering.
By making him/her suffer, I make myself suffer.

6. Apologize as soon as I realize my unskillfulness and lack of mindfulness without making any attempt to justify myself and without waiting for the Friday meeting.

We Vow With Lord Buddha as Witness and the Mindful Prescence of the Sangha, to Abide By These Aricles and to Practice Wholeheartedly. We Invoke the Triple Gem for Protection and to Grant us Clarity and Confidence.

Signed, the ______ Day of _______________, in the Year______, at_____________________.

Sweet n' Sour

Pure Romance

Like Almitra, I wove him clothes of welcome,
Embarrassing him with riches from my heart -
Gestures quietly gracious, unremarkable,
All glamour-less, but transcendental, smart.

Despite my sacrificial sense of giving,
The evidence, reviewed in his defence,
Revealed a soul wise in agape's art,
And prophet's craft that modelled pure romance.

His ship, reloaded, pulls away from shore.
I wave at him, the vision slowly vanishing.
He does not turn, his sights already set
On other welcomes, worthier romancing.

The truth is bitter, sweetness easily sours.
The illusion the most perfect trails a darkness
Hard to fathom in its morbid depth.
Love, unregistered, assures the purest anguish.
- goinghome

Finite and Infinite Games: James Carse

I have read "Finite and Infinite Games - A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" by James P. Carse a number of times because every page bears the quiet stamp of witnessed truth. James Carse is a theologian from New York who presented the slim tome of wisdom to the world in 1976, which is now out of print but still circulating informally.

Alamat.com provides a neat overview of the main themes -

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES
Notes from James Carse's book 'Finite and Infinite Games'. Author unknown.

There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.

Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.

Finite players try to control the game, predict everything that will happen, and set the outcome in advance. They are serious and determined about getting that outcome. They try to fix the future based on the past.

Infinite players enjoy being surprised. Continuously running into something one didn't know will ensure that the game will go on. The meaning of the past changes depending on what happens in the future.

All games are inherently voluntary. There might be consequences of not playing, but there is always a choice required. Driving in the right side of the road, shaking people's hands, and paying taxes are games one has a choice about playing. There are certain rules and boundaries that appear to be externally defined, and you choose to follow them or not. If you stop following them you aren't playing the game any longer.

There is no rule that says you have to follow the rules.

All finite games have rules. If you follow the rules you are playing the game. If you don't follow the rules you aren't playing. If you move the pieces in different ways in chess, you are no longer playing chess.

Infinite players play with rules and boundaries. They include them as part of their playing. They aren't taking them serious, and they can never be trapped by them, because they use rules and boundaries to play with.

In a theatrical play the actor knows that she really isn't Ophelia. The audience knows that she really isn't Ophelia. But if she does a good job, Ophelia can express herself through the actor. The playing is most enjoyable when it is both clear that it is chosen play, that it is the actor doing it voluntarily, and at the same time it is so convincing, following the rules well enough that it seems real.

You can play finite games within an infinite game. You can not play infinite games within a finite game.

You can do what you do seriously, because you must do it, because you must survive to the end, and you are afraid of dying and other consequences. Or, you can do everything you do playfully, always knowing you have a choice, having no need to survive the way you are, allowing every element of the play to transform you, taking pleasure in every surprise you meet. Those are the differences between finite and infinite players.

From:
Finite and Infinite Games

The applications are eh, infinite though. The business world has appreciated the merits of the sytems approach implied; see BOOK OF A LIFETIME: FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES JAMES CARSE | Independent, The (London) | Find Articles at BNET , an article by Pat Kane who used to be in the band Hue and Cry, and not long ago wrote a hefty thesis called The Play Ethic enthusing voluminously about the joys and values of all kinds of modern play.

More focused is an analysis by Mel Toomey of the Generative Leadership Group on the organisational transfer of ideas where a couple of full chapters are quoted - http://www.glg.net/pdf/Finite_Infinite_Games.pdf

The arts, culture, conflict, animal ethics, property are other topics encapsulated into profound observations. The following is a quote on 'romantic' relationships:

“What one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated the other, but to have the defeated other. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated other…In the complex plotting of sexual encounter it is by no means uncommon for the partners to have played a double game in which each is winner and loser, and each is an emblem for the other’s seductive power…By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one’s own boundaries of play. Infinite players recognise choice in all aspects of sexuality, [they] do not play within sexual boundaries but with sexual boundaries, [they] are concerned not with power but with vision. In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole”.

Philosophy Exercise: Play the Fool

Roger-Pol Droit (1949-) is a philosopher, a researcher at the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique and a columnist for the French daily Le Monde. Following on his successful book La Compagnie des Philosophes, he compiled a volume entitled 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life

Instructions are set down on experiencing a variety of unusual situations, such as eating a nameless substance, rowing in a lake in your room, telephoning at ramdom, running in a graveyard. Amongst them is one exercise inviting the reader to enter into a mood of levity and gusty irreverence for staid sacred cows -

25 Play The Fool
Duration: 30 to 40 years
Props: a complex society
Effect: joyful

...Act slantwise. Move like the bishop in chess – systematically diagonal. Walk crablike and crossways. Day in day out, meeting no resistance. Make it a habit to seek the least appropriate, most incongruous answer to any question. Apply it from time to time, and see what happens.

The longest and hardest thing about playing the fool is arriving at the realisation that truly nothing is serious. Occupy the horizon, the point of convergence where absolutely everything becomes, in a sense, laughable: existence, death, humanity, love, the universe, ants, writing, money, careers, bodies, thought, politics. Among other things. Not forgetting laughter itself, and hilarity, and court jesters.

From 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit

There's Nothing Ahead: Rumi

Lovers think they are looking for each other,
but there is only one search: wandering
This world is wandering that, both inside one
transparent sky. In here
there is no dogma and no heresy.
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future, Forget the future.
I'd worship someone who could do that.
On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say "There's nothing ahead",
there will be nothing there.
Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.
When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There's no place like that anywhere in the world.

from 'The Essential Rumi" Coleman Barks with John Moyne. A selection of these is on view here - Lovers think they are looking for each other - Rumi

Rumi is said to have originated the Sufi dervish practise of whirling dancing when he was struck with all-consuming grief at the age of 43, on the rumoured murder of his beloved teacher Shams Tabriz, a wondering wiseman who had befriended him intensely for the previous 4 years. While spinning around a pole, it is said the poems streamed out of him and he wouldn't have cared a whit if any had ever been recorded, but his students, awe-struck, took to scribbling, and the results are still with us 800 years later.

Read an interview about Rumi by his American editor, here -
Coleman Barks on <i>Rumi: Bridge to the Soul</i> - IslamOnline.net - Art & Culture

Running the Numbers Art Installation, Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan is a photographer from Seattle whose last exhibition is available to view on his website, from which the following is an introduction on the subject matter of gross wastage in modern society:

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

To view the impressive compilations, see chris jordan photography

Meat is Murder, Smiths/Morrissey

Morrissey's famous "Meat is Murder" video, performed live, with animal scenes (if audio doesn't work, see below):



YouTube - Morrissey




- Heifer whines could be human cries
Closer comes the screaming knife
This beautiful creature must die
This beautiful creature must die
A death for no reason
And death for no reason is murder

And the flesh you so fancifully fry
Is not succulent, tasty or kind
Its death for no reason
And death for no reason is murder

And the calf that you carve with a smile
Is murder
And the turkey you festively slice
Is murder
Do you know how animals die ?

Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
Its not comforting, cheery or kind
Its sizzling blood and the unholy stench
Of murder

Its not natural, normal or kind
The flesh you so fancifully fry
The meat in your mouth
As you savour the flavour
Of murder

No, no, no, its murder
No, no, no, its murder
Oh ... and who hears when animals cry?
- Morrissey/The Smiths

Eat Your Greens To Live Long

...First, a quick world tour. Healthy at 100 summarizes the lifestyles of the Abkhasians, the Vilcabambans, the Hunza, and the traditional Okinawans - and many of them are healthier at age 90 than most Americans ever are in these times. The common denominators: lifelong physical activity, social bonds, and a plant-based diet (vegan or nearly so). The suite of diseases which so besets industrialized countries–obesity, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and heart ailments–are virtually unheard of in those societies. And when modernization happens, along with factory farming and massive meat consumption come those very same diseases. China is a notable and well-documented example: The country has exponential growth of diseases linked to meat. The most recent reports focus on the epidemic of breast cancer, which was previously unknown in traditional Chinese villages.

Why are vegetarian diets so closely associated with long-term vitality?...

For the full article, goto:
PETA Prime: Celebrating Kind Choices: The Vegetarian Fountain of Youth: Secrets Revealed

Beethoven, Symphony No 7, II - Karajan, Berliner Phil

YouTube - Beethoven, Symphony No 7, II - Karajan, Berliner Phil

Movie "I'm Going Home" (2002)

The lead character in I'm Going Home, an ageing French actor played by Michel Piccoli discovers at the end of a reasonably long on-screen rehearsal of the play Exit the King, (the first scene of the film) that his wife, daughter and son-in-law have been killed in an accident, leaving only his grandson Serge, alive. Co-stars include Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich and Sylvie Testud.

Action, if slow, cuts to some months later when he is contentedly taking care of Serge with the help of his housekeeper, and looking for work in worthwhile roles with the help of his agent. After finishing a stint as Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest and losing his footing somewhat following a nasty mugging, he is asked to step in urgently for an English language film adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses playing the character Buck Mulligan. Soon he is feeling and showing the strain of performing in a different language, and eventually he quits without explanation, walking out of the studio to seek rest and sanctuary in the privacy of his home. And that's it, at face value, but the ripples touch on many grand themes.

Manoel de Oliveira, now aged 100 and the oldest working film director, both wrote and directed the movie. He was recently interviewed for Euronews: euronews | Manoel de Oliveira: the oldest working film director

He sums up the plot:

I’m Going Home is almost a non-story, as simple as its title suggests, which takes place in “fairytale” Paris at the beginning of the year 2000. The city of lights, center of all our complex western civilization, where the superfluous seems to take precedence over the essential. It is like a game played by innocent naughty children, and its results, may be, or rather, not be, a pathetic and unexpected socio-ecologic eclosion of tomorrow’s world, where to say “I’m going home” has lost its meaning. But no, this is not the story.

In fact, although the action of the film is divided between the city and the theatre plays, etc., we should look at it as a whole. It is certain that we are dealing with a personal drama, undergone by a famous old actor, who is the innocent victim of an unexpected betrayal. The initial idea may seem exaggerated or even out of place, but in truth I must confess that it was exactly that which gave me the urge to write such a simple story.

What the director wishes to convey though is a number of very complex and relevant layers of meaning, primarily concerning the confusion about culture and values in society.

Jeffrey M. Anderson published a rave review on Combustible Celluloid website - Combustible Celluloid film review - I'm Going Home (2002), Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Piccoli, John Malkovich, dvd review

However, most interesting is an interview between the director and screenwriter Jacques Parsi -
Je rentre à la maison - as this excerpt about the lead suggests:

...I respect his ethics, professed by the character himself. Whether as an actor or as a man. I think ethics are fundamental for the rules of human relationships. But I can’t see where there are great works confined to pornography. Sex, the source of all pornography, is an abysmal thing and this abyss perverts and attracts man’s animal instincts. It dehumanizes him. I say man’s animal instincts, because in animals pornography does not exist, nor does shame, while in Man the excesses of pornography pervert him and make him like a kind of assassin, the attraction of which may be similar or even confused with this other type of abyss. Pornography and assassination are outside the law, outside the bounds of morality. They spring from the confines of human nature and become absolute in themselves...

Brian Eno Protests Civil Liberties Slippage

The Exorbitance of Culture

THE EXORBITANCE OF CULTURE

"Art is the heart’s blood” - Edvard Munch

Dickinson’s brave assertions decrescendoed to a sibyl’s whisper;
Bishop laboured to side-step the third rail to the end, like her Man-Moth;
Woolf blundered fatally under her cloud of education,
And poor Plath bowed out with the primal scream of a prima donna -
The glorious cost of the sacrificial gifted child.

Glorious?
To stand apart, be singled out,
For descriptive competence in deconstruction,
Until, as demand intensifies, stage turns into altar,
Under tragic internment for abnormal aptitude,
As artifacts price human capital out of the market?

Merleau-Ponty confounded the validity of laurel wreaths:
“I borrow myself from others”.
Prizes are decided by temporary conspiracies,
But plain meaning emerges from shared speech,
And the instrument of speech is not technically mastered text,
But the provisional impersonal species body, a fact
That no excess of expression or vehemence of repression can undo.

“Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig”
Observed Solzhenitsyn, who should have known.
Dismissing mortality begets immorality,
And the present taste of eternity,
Felt in fun and creative interdependence,
Is sold for a signifier, a particular logo,
In a phobic scramble from the rough ground of reality
To the pure ice of culture,
That slices universal truths into translated forms,
Triggering seditious conflict from historical diversity,
Supposedly personally purveyed.

Order is chaos’s best friend; rules smoke out exceptions;
Life is forever contingent; death is most sure of all things.

Rousseau furrowed his brow to cultivate a kinder civilisation,
Yet forbade the shedding of blood to secure it,
Even of one person alone.
Now that was revolutionary, trans-theory,
To value flesh and breath above ideology,
Through a tolerant, patient politics of organic solidarity.

If art, then, as Auden assumed, is born of humiliation,
The ethical imperative is, according to Lawrence, to cater
To the diagnosing and slow healing of the soul
With more lenient lighter laws of the letter,
So that Van Gogh would not have had to lend an ear,
Or girl-martyr Joplin not had nothing left to lose.

The imperfect we will always have with us,
Whatever the statistics, performance indicators, narratives insist;
In mutual debt we mediate the floodgates of non-being,
Notwithstanding tyrannies or art.

- goinghome