Provocations 02.11
"An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks would be a good idea to give them." Andy Warhol
"Use the talents that you possess, for the woods would be silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."
Henry Van Dyke
"The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist."
--Ananda K. Commaraswamy
A man’s work is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.” -- Albert Camus
“Art is not self expression but self alteration.” --John Cage
"To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception...The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness." --Robert Irwin
All beauty is making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves. -- Eli Siegal
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” --John Muir
What is not integrated repeats itself until it is integrated. I look at the personal story and the societal story as being one and the same, only in larger or smaller scale. In our families and in our nations, what we see is our disintegration being played out. The journey needed now is the integration of ancestor wisdom into the living community—personally in each of our families, and globally in the human family. -- Angeles Arrien
"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride." -William James
"My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times…Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach." – Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise." --Buddha, Diamond Sutra
"The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see." –Thoreau
“Sometimes the tunnel is as much of a gift as the light at the end of it.” ---Terah Cox
“This principle of soul, universally and individually, is the principle of ambiguity.” –Paul Tillich
I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death."-
Edmund, Eugene O'Neill‘s" Long Day's Journey Into Night."
SHADOW
"Make your darkness conscious, or it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." Carl Jung
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." Carl Jung
"Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." Carl Jung
"Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic stricken" Jack Kerouac
IMAGINATION
"The mind of a child is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled." Plato
Memory feeds imagination. Amy Tan (1952 - )
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. Brenda Ueland
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. Tom Stoppard (1937 - ), "Artist Descending a Staircase"
CAUTION
“The chief enemy of creativity is common sense.” Pablo Picasso
"Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation...is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew.” Dan Millman
"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity." Jean Dubuffet
SAVAGERY
When do you encounter your own savagery: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness
I believe very much in values of savagery. I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness." Jean Dubuffet
CHANGE What do you know about shedding old skins??
“Shedding one's skin. The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. So do the spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be spirit.” Friedrich Nietzsche
"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”Friedrich Nietzsche
"There is more to life than increasing its speed." Mohandes Gandhi
"Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions.. There is a question that a warrior has to ask, mandatorily: "Does this path have a heart?” Carlos Castaneda
"My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry." -Nikos Kazantzakis
"Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes, there will be singing---about the dark times" -Bertolt Brecht
"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind." -Allen Ginsberg
"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
FAMILY
MOTHER/FATHER/ASSOCIATES
Send Appreciations to your family. What have you learned from your least-liked person?
Make a birth totem: reflect elements of the time, nature or your birth
"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." Carl Jung
"I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen." Mahatma Gandhi
“When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth.” Rumi
BIRTH
Learning to MATTER from the Birth Experience
I was breach birth rear-end first. As an NYU drama student Miyka put it in a short play: “I was born a danger to myself”
Matter something that reflects how dangerous you are!
In what ways are overwhelmed? abandoned?
CLAN
Learning to MATTER from the Clan
What have you brought along with you? What are your people like? Just who are your people?
In what ways do your people shape you?
Irish-American and German-American. From Monica McGoldricks Ethnicity and Mental Health:
The Irish place great value on conformity and respectability, and yet the Irish tend towards eccentricity. p311
She quotes novelist Sean O'Faolain as describing the Irish as seeking a synthesis between dream and reality…with a shrewd knowledge of the world and a strange reluctance to cope with it. p314
The Irish sense of personal guilt often leads them to assume their suffering is deserved…In life one makes efforts to improve, but the inner conviction is that the efforts will fail and the Irish tend to get uncomfortable if things go too well for too long… p319
Discipline in Irish families is maintained by ridicule, belittling and shaming. P323
In Irish families tensions and anger may build up over long periods of time without resolution and finally lead to an emotional cutoff of the relationship p325
We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.--Oscar Wilde
Matter in ways that reflect the tensions of the Clan
Matter an object, perhaps a gift, for a rejected or cutoff family member
Matter a brilliantly failed object
Matter a tool of discipline
And of the German-Americans:
The reluctance to claim a German heritage is not unusual p 247
OTHER THEMES to Matter
"thank you"
GRIEF,
kindness
balance the terror of being with the wonder of being
Make something contradictory
Make Pairs: balance the terror of being with the wonder of being activity/dream
Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Rumi
Hillman Pothos
P57 Matter something for a long standing wound. Make something to protect your most vulnerable place. Longing p58
Healing Fiction
P78 AI
P 99Find soul/daimon in the symptoms/the pathologies
In your symptom is your soul: what do you long for?
What are you missing?
What is the area of least resistence?
Natural Responsibilities
You get the kind of world You think it is
Change your mind. Change the world. Charles Potts
"I can't believe that!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
The Darning Needle by Hans Christian Anderson
Once upon a time there was a darning needle who imagined she was so fine that she really was a sewing needle.
"Be careful and hold me tightly!" she warned the fingers that picked her up. "Don't drop me! If I fall on the floor you may never find me again; that's how fine I am!"
"That's what you think!" replied the fingers, and squeezed her around the waist.
"Look, here I come with my train!" said the darning needle, and she drew a long thread behind her, but there was no knot in the thread.
The fingers aimed the needle straight at the cook's slipper, where the upper leather had burst and had to be sewed together.
"My! What vulgar work!" sniffed the darning needle. "I'll never get through! Look out! I'm breaking! I'm breaking in two." And just then she did break. "I told you so," she said. "I'm much too delicate!"
"Well, she's no good now," thought the fingers, but they had to hold on to her all the same. For the cook dropped a little sealing wax on the end of the needle to make a head, and then she pinned her kerchief together with it in front.
"Look! Now I'm a breastpin," said the needle. "I knew perfectly well I'd be honored. If you are something you always amount to something."
Then she laughed, but it was inwardly, because no one can ever really see a darning needle laugh. There she sat on the cook's bosom, proud as if she were in a state coach, and looked all around her.
"May I be permitted to inquire if you're made of gold?" she very politely asked a little pin near her. "You look pretty, and you have a head of your own, but it's rather small. You must be careful to grow bigger. Not everyone can have sealing wax on one end like me!"
Then the darning needle drew herself up so proudly that she fell right out of the kerchief into the sink, at the very moment the cook was rinsing it out.
"Looks now as if we are off on a journey," she said to herself. "Let's hope I don't get lost." But she really was lost down the drain.
"I'm too fine for this world," she observed calmly as she lay in the gutter outside. "But I know who I am, and that's always a satisfaction." So the darning needle was still proud, and she never lost her good humor. She watched the many strange things floating above her-chips and straws and pieces of old newspapers.
"Look at them sail!" she said to herself. "They don't know what's down below them! Here I sit! I can sting! Look at that stick go, thinking of nothing in the world but himself-a stick! And that's exactly what he is! And there's a straw floating by; look at him twist and look how he turns! You'd better not think so much about yourself up there! You'll run into the curb! There goes a newspaper. Everybody has forgotten what was written on it, but still it spreads itself out, while I sit quietly down here below. I know who I am, and I shall never forget it!"
One day the darning needle saw something beside her that glittered splendidly in the sunbeams. It was only a bit of broken bottle, but because the darning needle was quite sure it was something valuable like a diamond she spoke to it, introducing herself as a breastpin.
"I suppose you're a diamond?" she asked.
"Yes, something like that," was the reply.
Then, since each thought the other was very important, they began talking about the world, and how conceited everyone was.
"I used to live in a lady's case," said the darning needle. "And this lady was a cook. On each hand she had five fingers, and you never saw anything so conceited as those five fingers! And yet they were only there so that they could hold me, take me out of my case, and put me back into it."
"Did they shine?" asked the bit of bottle glass.
"Shine? Not at all," said the darning needle. "They were arrogant. There were five brothers, all belonging to the Finger family, and they kept close together, although they were all of different lengths. The one on the outside, Thumbling, who walked out in front of the others, was short and fat and had only one joint in his back, so he could only make a single bow. But he insisted that if he were cut off a person's hand, that person could not be a soldier. Lickpot, the second one, pushed himself into sweet and sour, and pointed at the sun and the moon, and it was he who pressed on the pen when they wrote. Longman, the third, looked over the heads of the others. Guldbrand was the fourth-he always wore a golden belt around his waist. And little Peter Playfellow didn't do anything at all, and was very proud of it. They did nothing but brag all the time; that's why I went down the sink."
"And now we just sit here and glitter," said the bit of broken bottle. But just then a flood of water came rushing down the gutter so that it overflowed and swept the bottle glass away.
"See now! He's been promoted," remarked the darning needle, "but I'm still here. I'm too fine for that sort of thing. But that's my pride, and that is very commendable!" So she sat up straight, lost in many big thoughts. "I almost think I was born a sunbeam, I'm so fine; besides, the sunbeams always seem to be trying to get to me, under the water. I'm so fine that even my mother can't find me. If I had my old eye, the one that broke off, I think I might cry about that. But no! I think I wouldn't cry anyway; it's not at all refined to cry."
One day some street boys were grubbing in the gutter, looking for coins and things of that sort. It was filthy work, but they were having a wonderful time.
"Ouch!" one cried as he pricked himself on the darning needle. "You're a pretty sharp fellow!"
"I'm not a fellow; I'm a young lady," replied the darning needle. But of course they couldn't hear her.
Her sealing wax had come off, and she had turned black; but black always makes you look more slender, and she was sure she was even finer than before.
"Look!" cried the boys. "Here comes an eggshell sailing along," And they stuck the darning needle fast into the shell.
"White walls, and I am black myself!" cried the darning needle. "That's very becoming! People can really see me now! I only hope I'm not seasick; that would surely break me!" But she wasn't seasick, and she did not break. "It's a very good protection against seasickness to have a steel stomach and to remember that one is a little finer than ordinary human beings. Oh, yes! I'm all right. The finer you are, the more you can bear."
"Crack!" went the eggshell at that moment, for a heavily loaded wagon ran over it.
"Goodness, I'm being crushed!" cried the darning needle. "I'm going to get really seasick now! I'm breaking! I'm breaking!" But she didn't break, though the wagon went over her; she lay at full length along the cobblestones, and there we'll leave her.