TOOLS OF IMAGINATION from Kristyna on Vimeo.
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return. ~Bertrand Russell, 1912
1.01 'Circles Within Circles' from Simon F A Russell on Vimeo.
I raised a beer mug to toast to Cleveland “being this unusual town where music and sports are held in the highest regard.” I was a guest of Warren’s at a dinner populated with members of the Long Live Rock donor group, at the Rock Hall. People were checking their phones while the game that would decide the ALDS was being played in Toronto. The main course had been served, but the tenderloins just sat there until a guy at the end of the table turned out to have the phone with the least delay. As he turned to the group we instantly understood the last out had been recorded. Uproar of positivity!
Tonight the Cleveland Cavaliers inaugurate their defense of their NBA world championship, the first for the city since 1964. At the same time, the Cleveland Indians, initiate a world Series against a loaded Chicago Cubs team and hope to reel in a baseball crown, and bring home a title that has eluded our baseball team since 1948.
Two confluences have never happened until this year: two Cleveland teams have never played for a major world championship in the same year, and, following from this, nor has a Cleveland team played to earn the city a second major sports championship in the same year. The first has happened, and the second may well happen.
Cleveland put together a safe RNC Convention, the Cavs won a historic come-from-behind victory over the Warriors, and now the Tribe sets its sights on vanquishing a Cubs team that won 103 games in the regular season.
My mantra as a sports fan is: you have to actually play the games. In believeland, the goal is turn anything is possible into four wins in a seven game matchup.
Underdogs, thunderdogs! Play ball!
We’ve managed to put together enough free play personnel to play half field. Players who were regulars during the season lose their stones and are gone, while the hard core core remains.
It seems we’re all going to vote for Hillary–so, there’s that!
I dislike half field, but I’ve been in the worst slump of my softball career over the last few months, and it hasn’t been because for half of those game right field has been absent as a target due to playing the half field. Meanwhile, my declining skills are so apparent as a fielder in the field that all I can do is own it. Still, the golf course, my athletic Plan B, remains far away from consideration.
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
John Keats, 1795 – 1821
Filed under play
It would be somewhat illogical to make the Tribe the underdogs, but if it must be so!
After years of pain, Cleveland is four wins from being America’s sports town
We’ve seen teams go from worst-to-first in a single year before, but never an entire sports town. It’s unprecedented. And win or lose the World Series, there’s no reason Cleveland’s stay at the top – or at least near the top – of the sports world won’t continue. LeBron and 24-year old Kyrie Irving aren’t going anywhere and the Indians have their own franchise cornerstones in Kluber, the 22-year old Lindor and manager Terry Francona, who has proven he can win with any team, any payroll, anywhere.
My mom would have got a super kick out of this.
Whoever the “rapist of Persephone,” whether it be Cephisus or Dionysus–and the Eleusinian Mysteries were carried out near the river Kephisos, indicating a link between the two gods–the disordering attack must be reexperienced and lived through, else the redemption of soul will not progress. The way is as much through chaos and death as it is through ecstacy and joy. (Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Narcissism and Character Transformation, p145.)
But, when the narcissistic structure escapes its trial, and the public figure soaks up the larger-than-life projections, projections based in the similar refusal or resistance to soul-making regression, then there is no depressive breakthrough, there is just the steady march to psychzoid splitting.
W.H. Auden:
Patriots? Little boys,
obsessed by Bigness,
Big Pricks, Big Money, Big Bangs
Without a blow to inflated phallic pride no wisdom is possible. – Eugene Monick
There’s a lot of trending collective identifications streaming wildly about as the USA aims to land its messy electoral democracy on the landing strip November 8. I ask myself what the point of my own research (into folk political economies cast under the light of archetypal psychology,) is when I also sense that it is almost pointless to reveal my abductions under the current circumstances.
That the potential battle of all against all is fantasized by ‘white nationalist manly types’ as arriving at an extremely violent battle of all against all, at a literal civil war, because this is the only way the joined forces of global finance, Democratic and GOP party establishments, non-white races and ethnicities, feminists, so-called social justice warriors, cultural marxists, environmentalists, may be finally defeated, stitches together a prospective tyranny of what is, by definition, a minority.
Practically, then what? Psychologically, might such warriors actually contemplate being killed for such a cause?
I remind myself that those with the time to fantasize always are pointing at the conflict between different utopian wishes for be-all and end-all social engineering. On a blog I have been visiting for over a decade, the ethos of its main commenters decries the utopian dreams of Mrs. Clinton ‘and her kind,’ without any ability to sense that all anti-utopias are nevertheless prescriptions for utopian engineering.
Those utopian dreams are, obviously, projections. The infantile /nobody is going to tell me what to do anymore/ is joined in our body politic with the masculine’s damaged feel for its lost potency.
So it seems that the ultimate fantasy is to return to manly swordsmanship. Not in the least incidentally, this mimics the dream and aims of another ripping collective of damaged men, daesh/ISIS.
‘obsessed by bigness, big wins, “winning so much winning will become boring.” Tyranny of the chaotic masculine, of the paradoxically powerful impotent tiny men, would beckon, except this collective thrust is about to be turned back.
Whether this particular collective complex will turn back into its self enough to own this new trial, and to begin to individuate, is the deeper question.
Numerous complex specifics of the current societal context in the USA aren’t supportive of this psychological shifting in the underlying currents.
(To me, there are significant questions about whether the archetypal framework for understanding conspecifics of collective change can actually do developmental duty here.)
That this piece jumped out of the generative stream and its title was discovered immediately makes it a fitting post on the cusp of halloween.
My non-mirror symmetry Legacy Art in the old artist’s blog are having their links archived at the Legacy Art Page.
My curation of my current catalogue of finished symmetry pieces is available at artiststephencalhoun.com.
Filed under art - legacy works, visual experiments, my art
Problem-solving oriented version of a four-square matrix.
I’ve added (and overlaid,) two valence drivers–these are the typical pairing used to deploy evaluation of antipathy and sympathy, a basic starting point.
An intention for learning is articulated.
Two dichotomies are randomly drawn from the master set of 96 dichotomies, a part of the tool, Playing With the Opposites. These are next plotted, with Plot #1 placed first.
Comment:
The obvious location of a dialectical tension first jumped out from the upper left quadrant.
Bring creative work to the world pushes away the mysterious element in the actual problem, yet, this antipathy is conjoined with a sympathetic mystery located in the setting.
The question for further wandering or exploration is to, I propose, locate the nature of the sympathetic mystery in the setting of the problem, in the art world. This mystery’s nature would be something deeply obscured yet attractive as a matter of what little is known about it.
The other drivers, familiarity/unfamiliarity might serve as kernals for winding up/down the dialectical reflection.
In each quadrant of the matrix there are two dialectical loops given by each pair of valences. For example, in the lower right quadrant are:
Problem / toward / inner masculine // (2) Setting / away from / inner masculine
Problem / familiar / inner masculine // (2) Setting / unfamiliar / inner masculine
Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, my research, self-knowledge
Sally Mann Photos at Edwynn Houk
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
?—Oscar Wilde
Filed under art, artists, creative captures
Man can live the most amazing things if they make sense to him. But the difficulty is to create that sense. It must be a conviction, naturally; but you find that the most convincing things man can invent are cheap and ready-made, and are never able to convince him against his personal desires and fears. — C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings, p. 90
One day the Nasruddin went with some men a-fishing. They cast the net into the sea, and the Nasruddin cast himself into the net. ‘O Nasruddin,’ said they, ‘what are you about?’ ‘I imagined myself a fish,’ he answered.
Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, psychology, self-knowledge, sufism
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Triumphant
I.
I forget when the following happen, yet it happened sometime during the time I was an elementary school student. This event occurred at some point during third, fourth, fifth, or sixth grade. Although both my twin brother also went to the same school, we rarely walked together. He much enjoyed taking shortcuts and running to school. Whereas I preferred to take the sidewalk to the light, turn left, and make my way the third of a mile to the school itself. As it turns out one day I could have used his protection.
Everyday, coming in the opposite direction and headed toward the large Catholic school located three quarters of a mile in the opposite direction, were its denizens. One day, walking alone to school, I was jumped by two boys, tackled to the ground, and roughed up a bit. I ended up with one of the boys sitting on my chest, with my upper arms pinned to the ground. He looked into my face, spat in my eyes, and told me,
You know you’re going to hell!?
It was shouted in a combination of mockery, exhortation, and, at the same time, it retained its questioning facet. I have no idea if I answered, and tend to think almost fifty years after the fact that I likely did not answer affirmatively. I didn’t understood what my brusque antagonist was even speaking about.
Although my family wasn’t the least bit religious, I do recall asking my parents about what the question meant. Most of the time, questions like that caused both my dad and mom to send me back to the 1960 World Book Encyclopedia, (whose many volumes served as my closest early confidant, in a autodidactiv sense–ever since I had skimmed/read my way through each volume.) I read about the Catholic Religion, the Holy Roman Church, The Bible; who knows–maybe this is why religion came to interest me so much.
Scroll ahead thirty years or so and its the nineties and I’m in my forties. By this time I have a fairly modest, and nevertheless, informed, grasp of the situation of Christianity as a world religion. My principal fascination was with religious experience and, what I came to term, artifactual religion. My curiosity was fulfilled by my learning a bit about how the different religions came to be constituted into their multi-various forms from, as-it-were, scratch.
As a matter of my own arm chair interests, this anthropological frame is for me the central primary feature of religion in historical context. Religions arise from their historical-sociological antecedents. So, for example, if one scrolls backward in time from the arrival of the Summa Theologica (1274 CE) of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the overall scheme of worldly time, one scrolls back before the time of the eventuation of the Old Testament, and, soon enough one scrolls back through those antecedents. Up to a point such antecedents would be specific to the historical development of the Abrahamic religions in a particular location and at a specific time, and then past this point, older antecedents would seem to a knowledgeable traveler (gone back in time, or, simply competent with the evidence,) to become more primitive and increasingly unhinged from what are the recognizable domains of (what strike we contemporaries,) to civilized religions and sophisticated religiosity.
Then, around (very roughly) 500,000 years ago BC, the evidence, so far, for anything resembling symbolic behavior disappears. However, 4.5 billion years of planetary history, prior to this disappearance, remain unscathed by symbolic or religious behavior.
II.
Related to the anthropological perspective is religion’s manifestation as a consequence of human behavior, cognition and experience, for which the frame expands to encompass psychology and sociology. Although I became interested in the work of the psychologists William James and Carl Jung for reasons unrelated to my interest in religion, each in their distinctive ways came to deeply influence my working through to a modest extent the constitution of religion as an intentional individual and social phenomena.
Then, moving to the next viewpoint, the historical, the careful investigator inspects the timeline for religiosity as it unfolds locally over thousands of years in manifestations so brilliantly diverse that it would be ridiculous to then groan that the constituent religions are ‘at odds with one another.’
The fact of the usefulness of first and second order religious behavior is apparent, and at the same time, the investigator’s second order framing and third order analysis is off the side, removed from the local social phenomena. However, to note that a social behavior with a religious motive or objective constitues a “ritual,” “tradition,” or, going farther, reflects the structuring of human purpose in accordance with a priori “propositions, “principles,” or “laws,” is to choose from some menu given by a third order framework.
This is crucial to teasing out the differentiation between the local phenomena of pragmatic mythologizing, and, the properties of “Mythology” as a category of human culture and its intentional artifactual life.
The blunt ramification is simply derived from the basic understanding: as one goes back in time, very soon, the idea and representation of God, or of Gods, of of the sacred, or of the divine, goes “poof!”
Filed under history, my research, Religion
Sunday, Free Play Soft Ball league enjoyed a funny game amidst: the mildness of early autumn, the goose shit, the late rolling ballers.
My ‘worst ever since 1970’ hitting slump continued, yet, because I can play all fielding positions in a mediocre manner, I pitched a scoreless inning. Lost a one run game–that is a win in my book.
Never will you reach that silver mountain which appears, like a cloud of joy, in the evening light.
Never can you cross that diamond of dirt which treacherously smiles at you in the morning mist.
Every step on this road takes you farther away from home plate, from flowers, from spring. Sometimes the shade of a cloud will dance on the way. Sometimes you rest in a ruined caravanserai seeking the truth from the blackish tresses of smoke
Sometimes you walk a few steps with a kindred soul only to lose him again.
You go, and go torn by the windy disputes about what actually happened, burnt by the sun, and the shepherd’s flute tells you “geese have flown”
until you laugh no more
until the puddles in the grass is only your dried-up tears which mirror the mountain of joy that is closer to you than your mitt.
apologies to Ms. Schimmel, for this version adapted from:
~Annemarie Schimmel ‘Nightingales Under the Snow’ Variations on Rumi’s Thoughts
Filed under play
A Green Man 12×12″ Stephen Calhoun 2013
The journey of Moses with his servant Joshua is a lifejourney (it lasted eighty years). They grow old together and lose the life-force, i.e., the fish, which “in wondrous wise took its way to the sea” (setting of the sun). When the two notice their loss, they discover at the place where the source of life is found (where the dead fish revived and sprang into the sea) Khidr wrapped in his mantle,48 sitting on the ground. In another version he was sitting on an island in the midst of the sea, “in the wettest place on earth,” which means that he had just been born from the maternal depths. Where the fish vanished Khidr, the Verdant One, was born as a “son of the watery deep,” his head veiled, proclaiming divine wisdom, like the Babylonian Oannes-Ea (cf. fig. 18), who was represented in form and daily came out of the sea as a fish to teach the people wisdom. (pp 197-198, C.G.Jung, Symbols of Transformation)
CF 18 p199
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