Tag: thinking aloud

Reading: Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

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Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Enigmatic read. Stories like her Polaroid photographs, collaged together.
Sometimes I am loosing touch with what I am reading, because I am taken on my own journey by her musings and by her melancholic voice. It is like a reading meditation.. it’s lovely to get lost in your own garden of thoughts in such a way..

7/ .. some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots. The last gasp of 2015, a spray of vomit ushering in the New Year. A good or bad sign? Well, considering the state of the world, who could tell the difference?”

Always amazed how much she reads! In every of her books I discover some new authors that I mark for myself “to read”..

While reading this personal account of 2016, was thinking back of my own version of it. The Time Perspective conference in Copenhagen.. recently over various conversations was transported back into that year and the one that followed it, 2017.. Both were turbulent in different ways, but also with pockets of very peaceful times and places. Lots of travels, dancing, drawing and painting, beginning of the musical journey as well..

42/ .. book he’d set on the table, Pascal’s Arithmetical Triangle
– Are you reading that? I asked
– You don’t read books like that, you absorb them..

I think I absorb books by Patti Smith more, than I read them..

20/ “the trouble with dreaming is that one can be drawn into a mystery that is no mystery at all, occasioning absurd observations and discourse leading to not a single reality-based conclusion.”

Theme of the dreams and dreaming – echoes in me every time, and my project on the topic somehow finds its way into other people’s books. I keep on thinking of dreams and dreaming described in The Khazar’s Lexicon by Milorad Pavic.. still entertaining the idea of making illustrations to some of those passages.. dreams travelling from people to people and through time.. my Dream Guardians project that started in 2017 about the goddess that dreams the world and we should not disturb her sleep if we don’t want out world to disappear.. and mysteries and melancholy that permeates Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book..

31/ .. – let’s say they were real, does being inserted by Bolano within a work of fiction render them fiction?
– the writer must know his characters so well that he can access the content of their dreams…
– who creates the dream? …

79/ I notice that my own tears burn my eyes, that I am no longer a fast runner and that my sense of time seems to accelerating.
Marcus Aurelius “Meditations”: Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live”. .. he asks us to note the passing time with open eyes..

80/ The Game of Havoc: Havoc, an uppercase game with a lowercase deity, spelling nothing but trouble for the unwary participant. One finds himself assailed with components of a dreadful equation… … unsuspecting Dorothy in a hypnotic fields of Oz..

82/ My logic may have been full of holes but so was Wonderland.
The hare presided over an endless tea party, as calculable time had been slain long before the party began. It was the Hatter who did the slaying, spreading his arms and singing the immutable Wonderland theme.
When Johnny Depp embraced the role of the Hatter he too was drawn into this multiplicity of being and ceased to be just Johnny.
Will we die a little?

78-79/ Ten thousand years or ten thousand days, nothing can stop time, or change the fact that I would be turning seventy in the Year of the Monkey. Seventy. Merely a number but one indicating the passing of a significant percentage of the allotted sand in an egg timer, with oneself the darn egg. The grains pour and I find myself missing the dead more than usual.

Lots of existential themes in this small passage: time, getting older – changes in own body, death and dying, loosing close friends and relationships, aloneness.. in Yalom’s words: “the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love.. our ultimate aloneness..” My mom turned seventy in 2019.. very similar discussions we had with her, especially about “missing the dead”..

122/ Cammy and Ernest and Jesus and the blonde, all characters in an alternative reality, black-and-white cutouts in a Technicolor world. .. A world that in itself was nothing, yet seemed to contain an answer for every unutterable question in early winter’s impossible play. ..

170/ not exactly a telescope but an instrument of beyondness.

175/ standing our ground with mental plow, burdened with the task to stay balanced in these unbalanced times..
– > I find this is still relevant although Smith mentions that this book might seem irrelevant years after all of the events of 2016 and 2020. But 2022 is even more unbalanced, and we are even more burdened with the task to stay balanced and standing our ground with the mental plow..





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Books in my life

Reading: Event by Slavoj Žižek

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“What is really happening when something happens?” says on the book cover.. The notion of “event” has been on my mind since the discussion this February during the Psychological Winter School organized yearly by the Saint-Petersburg State University. Which was an event on its own. It was 20st consecutive edition of the Winter School and during one of the workshops we had a super interesting discussion on what is an event? …

Therefore I was thrilled to see this book in a London book shop, and hence the journey of discovering an event has begun.

All Aboard – Event in Transit

1/ Event can refer to a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision…

2/ Something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation.

.. something ‘miraculous’ in an event..

Examples:

  • eventual nature of Christianity – belief in the event of the death and resurrection of Christ;
  • love is eventual;
  • political event – Tahrir Square in Cairo and Mubarak regime;
  • rise of a new art form: film noir.

3 / Event – the effect that seems to exceed its causes, space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes.

4 / Event – an occurrence not grounded in sufficient reasons.

5/ Event of the disclosure of Being – of the horizon of meaning which determines how we perceive and relate to reality (Heidegger). Big Bang (or broken symmetry) – the primordial event out of which our entire universe emerged.

These words brought me back to the Existential Analysis course I’m currently taking, where we also discussing the philosophy of Dasein, and where the exchange with the world is essential – how do we have this dialogue, both as an inner one and external one.

Is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or is it a shattering transformation of reality itself?

Event – Slavoj Zizek

I find this question to be a very inspiring one.. was musing over it for some time.. came to think that it’s probably both, these are interconnected things..

6/ Basic feature of an event: the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme.

Books in my life

On Becoming a Person – Reading Carl Rogers – part 2

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The Person Who Emerges

115/

  1. Openness to Experience

… individual becomes more open to his experience..

if the evidence of our senses runs contrary to our picture of self, then that evidence is distorted -> we cannot see all that our senses report, but only the things which fit the picture we have.

the individual becomes more openly aware of his own feelings and attitudes as they exist in him at an organic level – he also becomes more aware of reality as it exists outside of himself… he is able to take in the evidence in a new situation, as it is, rather than distorting it to fit a pattern which he already holds.

openness to experience = more realistic in dealing with new people, new situations, new problems; … his beliefs are not rigid, that one can tolerate ambiguity.

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“Interaction of greed and fear”

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Amazing how some things never change – I’m currently reading The Heart of Buddhist Meditation by Nyanaponika Thera first published in 1962 – and his words can’t be more accurate to describe our current situation:

“…the turbulence and suffering, that, alas, are generally equivalent with political history, affect increasingly larger sections of mankind, directly or indirectly… Tragic monotony of behaviour that prompts mankind to prepare again for a new bout of that raving madness called war … The same old mechanism is at work again: the interaction of greed and fear. Lust for power or desire to dominate are barely restrained by fear … Fear ..constantly poisons the atmosphere by creating a feeling of frustration which again will fan the fires of hate…”

Some food for thought…

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How to be happy: Don’t compare yourself to others

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Some days are like that – the first thing you want to do is to clean up the space around, to restructure, to create opportunities for new things to happen.

Spending 5-10 minutes for going through some papers that got accumulated over the past few weeks, throwing some things out, putting away some others, creating space for new or more relevant to be in front of you – feels so rewarding!

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I don’t curerntly have an opportunity to set up a permanent table for my creative projects. A friend shared her tips how she does it – she uses a window sill or a small shelf when she is on the go and once more settled, sets up a table. My window sill is currently an extension of my working desk and sudden;y I realized, that actually it doesn’t have to be. Most of my work realted stuff I can bring to another place and actually set up a small creative window sill here.

While cleaning up, I have stumbled upon some interesting previous work. My first attempt at making a cut out poetry from the newspaper headlines, and also my work on vitality from February, when I was rather sick and really needed some strengths to get over a cold. I’ve done it in one of the Creative Rendezvous sessions. We chose a strength that we felt like we really lacking at the moment and tried to picture it while using a non-dominant hand. It was very inspiring – since themovements become more free, since you can’t control the very fine movements that your dominant hand is capable of doing. It felt invigorating and liberating at the same time.

One of my favorite excercises in the Creative Flow as a Resource course is my adaptation of a Life Ring exercise. I believe that it is very beneficial for own mental health and life satisfaction not to compare your place in life to others, but to you, 3 months ago or a year ago. Reflect on how are you actually doing since then? What has changed? What got better? What goe worse? What can you improve? Are your priorities and interests still the same?

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Making connects the hand, eye and brain in a very special way

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An interesting article about transforming and empowering role of creating by Paula Briggs, director of AccessArt:

Creating is not just a ‘nice’ activity; it transforms, connects and empowers

We don’t need to make to entertain ourselves: in the past we might have kept our hands and eyes busy with making in our spare time, but now we occupy ourselves through binary code.

I hope that more of us will choose making and creating instead of the ‘binary code’!

Reading Brassaï about Henry Miller

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While reading “Henry Miller: The Paris Years” by Brassaï I made a few discoveries about Miller, but also about Anais Nin and Brassaï him-self.

Henry Miller by Brassaï

Henry Miller by Brassaï

Revived my interest in the surrealist movement. Currently am looking into finding their essays about the automatic writing and such. But it is amazing what an impact the psychoanalysis had! The power of dreams that became legit in all the different forms of arts — literature, visual and performance arts. At same time it is not really measurable by the impact factor of scientific journals at all! Some of the ideas just go through and nowadays it is even hard to trace their origin and put a tag on it.

I discovered also that most of Miller’s novels are not as autobiographical as I thought earlier — it’s just he had a very strong power of imagination and sometimes couldn’t even distinguish between reality and fiction or dream. “…like the Surrealists and the Dadaists, Henry believed that the dreams provided fertile soil for writing, and that the writing did involve the struggle to bring to the surface that which was unknown, hidden, and unrealized” (p. 155). I’ll have to also look up his work “Into the Night Life” which he thought was like the Surrealists were doing.

So much like Brassaï “I live in what I see and hear” and Miller’s “treasures are buried deep within yourself, deep within the bowels of your inner self, and from them you can bring forth copper, or silver, or gold”. I am all about the details which have to match somehow. Scrupulous and pedantic… and so is my art, well, most of it.. Funny fact is both Brassaï and me were born on September 9th.

quote from Brassai

I have also discovered that some of Miller’s prose can actually be read as poetry and it makes a lot of sense. And I am curious to reread his books in English now.

I was hoping that the book will have more photos by Brassaï in it, his nocturnal Paris. But I ordered a few from the library to complement the reading with some visuals. A journey to Paris that doesn’t exist any more. Likewise Istanbul depicted by Orhan Pamuk and Ara Güler. Somehow these poetic city journeys are very interesting for me. Like many other people, I love to walk the city. To see where the feet will take me. What discoveries I will make on my journey.

I wish there was a similar book about Riga. There are so many different interesting corners in my hometown. Every time I go back there, I want to document every street of it. Every story that those streets have…

Books in my life

“What is time?”

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You wake up to discover a knock at your door. A wealthy uncle you barely knew has passed and left you a fortune. It’s more than enough to live out your days in glorious splendor, but there is a condition. To be eligible to collect, you must commit your full-time working energies to the pursuit of an answer to a single question of your choosing for the next 12 months.

You are welcome to continue that pursuit after the year ends, for years or decades if it warrants, but you must remain fully focused on seeking the answer until the last minute of the 365th day. A minute shorter, the entire inheritance goes to your annoying and equally long lost cousin, Philly.

What is your question?

~JONATHAN FIELDS

My question that I’m going to work on through out 2016 is “What is time?”. The upcoming year is going to have “time” as a red thread.

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As a co-founder of International Time Perspective Network I’m organizing Celebrating Time conference and festival in Copenhagen in August 2016. And everyone is welcome!

Celebrating Time: 3rd International Conference on Time Perspective

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In the fall semester I’m going to teach a course “Psychology of Time” at DIS: Study Abroad in Scandinavia. And I’m really looking forward to that!

Psychology of Time – DIS Copenhagen

Very recently I have started “Creative Time Studio” where I aim to use time creatively, to shape time to create and to discover. I will continue my exploration of the relation between creativity and the limited time. Some of it I am offering as a course on Creative Breaks:

Creative Breaks: Amazing Things You Can Do in 20 Minutes

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I will continue to work on our International Time Perspective Network’s online journal Time Talks:

Time Talks
time-talks

And in January I will be launching Temporal Matters Salon in collaboration with Creative Roots: Collective Urbanism. It will be a series of talks and workshops on time, temporality, city life, urbanism and co-creation. Join us for a cup of coffee and a chat about time!

Temporal Matters Salon
Temporal Matters Salon

#quest2016

The art of doing less – observations

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Some observations I made while following the online course on CreativeLive on the Art of Less Doing with Ari Meisel.

People get stressed by how things work. Some other people develop an app / technique to lower that stress. Something that supposedly helps you out, makes you more productive, but then there are so many solutions to the same problem that we actually need a guide, who would review all those available solutions, test them out and pick the best for us. He/she figured it out for themselves, fine-tuned to address the challenges they face and then it works for them. Would it work for us? We don’t know, but we buy the guide anyway.

What I learned from the course:

  • if you have “what” to share, the “how” will follow
  • ideas of setting up an email based course
  • organization, like creativity, needs limits and will-power

What I will act on:

  • have a heard a few times about pomodoro technique by now – will try it out
  • restructure my DropBox

Significance of impact factor

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The best news ever, in my opinion, came in unexpectedly from from Quora forum regarding this issue. Someone asked “What is the significance of the impact factor?” and a very interesting answer came in from W.Gunn:

It has little significance anymore, except among those who haven’t been paying attention for the past 10 years or so. There  is international consensus by bibliometricians on the idea that the IF  should not be used by researchers. Please read the Leiden Manifesto Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics and the Declaration on Research Assessment San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

The  best thing to do, if you’re looking for a journal in which to publish,  is to ask an academic librarian in your field of study. You can also ask  a senior colleague which are the respected journals in the field, but  if they start talking about Impact Factor, give them a copy of the above  referenced materials and go ask someone else.

Even the countries which used to include IF in assessment exercises which determine grant allocation are now moving away from using the metric.

I hope it will change the picture very soon!