as seen on Facebook, 08 September 2012
“If ignorance is bliss,” they say, “’tis folly to be wise.” The same experts also say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Perhaps the answer to Stephen Fry’s question lies more deeply buried than we might have imagined.
Each time I’ve skipped a
day (not posted on my blog),
it’s been easier.
Habits, corroding, themselves
become the new regimen.
“You used to compose music,” a friend said to me a few days ago, going on to reminisce about his years as an art teacher – which freed me from the need to respond.
Later that day, I did formulate something I might have said: “My head is still full of music. I just don’t bother writing it down.”
amateurs t-shirt
Eventually, we recognise that we’re not going to be discovered, not going to be stars, not destined to rise to meteoric fame, not headed for international careers … lucrative commissions … world-wide recognition …
Does that mean our creative impulses are destined to shrivel and die?
Several of my friends are painters. None of them are household names. But they all love to paint. It’s the love that makes us amateurs.
.
PS: I’ve unpacked the music manuscript box.
99% of what goes on in your mind is none of your business. (Stephen King)
Most of what we deem to be real (especially when it causes us to suffer) is made up of negative ideas, beliefs, judgments and thoughts that we’ve come up with as a defense or justification. By questioning our truths, we expand our thinking and begin to see new possibilities. (Mike Robbins)
When you’re sure something’s obvious, or it’s what “everyone knows,” or that it goes without saying … that’s the time to remind yourself not to believe everything you think. (Renee Garfinkel)
When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky. ([fake] Buddha)
Sky over Washington Monument
Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher and author living in New Hampshire, considers that this now widely-known and popular saying “bears no resemblance to anything the Buddha’s recorded as having said.”
Bodhipaksa subsequently remarks that “Gautama doesn’t seem to have been big on laughter!”
To me, this fake Buddha quote certainly sounds like authentic Zen!
Commenting on the quote, Choying Lhundrap writes about the Tibetan teacher Minling Khandro Rinpoche, who, in her 2012 New Year address, combined it with words from Jean Houston:
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back
and laugh at the sky. At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of possibilities.”
Which, for me, gets right to the heart of the matter.
But let’s give the last word to Albert Einstein: “Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.”
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George Draffan, responding to Bodhipaksa’s remarks, says it sounds like a stanza from a Tibetan Dzoghcen text that translates as:
Since everything is but an illusion,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection,
One might as well burst out laughing!
(from chapter 1 of The Great Perfection’s Self-Liberation in the Nature of Mind, by Longchenpa, 1308-1364)
ensō
.
.
Did I suddenly,
unimagined, come to be
exactly like this?
You speak, expecting
to be believed, perhaps … but
what’s at issue here?
The pursuit of silence is dissimilar from other pursuits in that it begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. (George Prochnik)
The subtitle of George Prochnik’s latest book is “Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise”.
George Prochnik
“Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Listening to doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet. He shows us the benefits of decluttering our sonic world.” (from the book description on Amazon)
“As we all know, absolute silence is impossible – it’s the ending of all vibrations, total death,” states Prochnik.
“Rather than just being against noise and telling people who have no experience of silence, ‘be quiet,’ people who at this point literally don’t know what the [word] means, we’ve got to start showing them what it means to be for silence,” Prochnik told us. “We’ve got to give them the space to do it and it’s got to be experiential.”
Did it occur to you, at any stage, that “A Twisted Pair” might somehow relate to the double helix of DNA? … and to “the ordinary copper wire that connects home and many business computers to the telephone company”?*
Reading that this blog explores the “twinfulness” of the writer, did you consider implicating Mercury/Hermes, messenger of the gods and ruler of Gemini, the astrological twins?
Caduceus
Which brings me to the reason for today’s title. The symbolism of the caduceus “represents Hermes (or the Roman Mercury), and by extension trades, occupations or undertakings associated with the god. In later Antiquity the caduceus provided the basis for the astrological symbol representing the planet Mercury. Thus, through its use in astrology and alchemy, it has come to denote the elemental metal of the same name. (from the Wikipedia article, Caduceus)
The article also points out that “The caduceus is sometimes mistakenly used as a symbol of medicine and/or medical practice, especially in North America, because of widespread confusion with the traditional medical symbol, the rod of Asclepius, which has only a single snake and no wings.”
The US Army Medical Corps’ confusion notwithstanding, a liberal table of correspondences might well relate both to “the crucified serpent” – an alchemical symbol for fixatio – and to the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses in the wilderness to heal those who had been bitten by snakes (see the Book of Numbers chapter 21).
You might also want to read about Nehushtan (literally, a piece of brass).
Connecting closely with this, it is interesting to note that John Donne (Sermons 10:190) uses “crucified Serpent” as a title of Jesus Christ – who, according to the Gospel of St John (3:14-15), said: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
As Walter Burkert asserts, Mercury’s caduceus is “really the image of copulating snakes taken over from Ancient Near Eastern tradition”.
__________
* The definition of twisted pair – “the ordinary copper wire that connects home and many business computers to the telephone company” – comes from http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/twisted-pair
"Mewlānā" – Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207-1273)
I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.
Empty-headed, I have no idea what I have to say today … but I do know there’s something waiting to pop out from between these blog-lips of mine. I knew it, in fact, the instant I spotted the Rūmī quote, on another blog.
On that blog, I noticed the word simplify … and I called to mind the years of complexity, the years of depression, the years of fear.
That’s all a long time ago. Life is so much simpler these days.
a twisted pair 