serendipityoucity

I am reading Anathem at the moment.  It is a massive tome that is really hard to hold but even harder to put down.  The book keeps reminding me why seemingly ridiculous archaic activities, traditions, and practices are important and relevant - more so than ever. I think this is why I like neo-Victorian moray’s infused with a bit of subversion.  Manners and irreverence steeped in intuition fueled tradition rounded off with an aesthetics I like. I keep thinking of my time working on my Ngondro Practice with a sangha in Tokyo that can be characterized as nothing less than a batch of very funny yogis in development - each requiring a few more life times before becoming anywhere near enlightenment. The knowledge of the impermanence of our lifetime kept us all taking risks, acting on what came along the path and maintaining a rather rambuncous sense of humour irrespective of the dire circumstances that came our way.  Ours is the Karma Kagyu path and at the time the band of merry wild cats would gladly jump into the water to understand its essence - we still do even though some of us practice less than others.  The chanting in Anathem reminds me of Tibetan mantras, which change the essence of your mind and your surroundings.  Reconfiguring conceptual and material matter.  This is the practice of the Avout in the book. The vibrations from the chants emanate into a series of waves which effect into the world.  The practice of spinning prayer wheels and chanting the compassion mantra of Om Mani Peme Hung is the most tangible example of this, as the chant and the act of spinning the wheel that is embossed with these words are thought to propagate just that - compassion.  People spend a significant portion of their lives on long distance journeys not walking but prostrating in steep mountainous terrains to reach an undefined spiritual destination that keeps changing and to spin those wheels.  Crazy, but no less so than commuting to spend the day in a place one does not want to be, doing something one does not want to do in exchange for currency that allows one to purchase stuff to mask the pain of of having spent 60 hours a week repeatedly doing that.

This morning, I read about a Chinese conceptualist artist,  an elderly British conductor who chose to die along side his wive in the presence of his children with the help of Dignitas in Switzerland and the Episcopal debate over the consecration of gay and/or lesbian bishops.  Again, I was reminded about why I love it when people follow their hearts, challenge norms and act in accordance to what is right and change the world I think for the better by doing so.  We collectively change, ever so slowly, the acts ripple across our collective consciousnesses.

The conceptualist art form is idea.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art (1)(2)(3).

The artist Song Dong has created an homage to his mother called Waste Not.  It is the preservation of her life’s belongings which she hoarded, an effect of the cultural revolution, now carefully attended to by her two children and displayed at the MOMA.  

It is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence (4). 

His work connected my thinking of the Avout in Anathem, the Tibetans, of seemingly useless practices loaded with meaning and the significance of impermanence and the traces we leave in conceptual conscious space. Some of his work:

keeping a daily diary, writing the entries on a flat stone, using clear water instead of ink so the words disappeared.

On a visit to Tibet he had himself photographed repeatedly striking the surface of the Lhasa River with an archaic Chinese seal, a stamp of authority that left no imprint.

he lay face down in a deserted Tiananmen Square for 40 minutes until his warm breath had created a thin sheet of ice that shimmered on the dark pavement for a few hours before disappearing.

He did the same thing on a frozen lake called the Back Sea in a park in Beijing, only there his breath made no impression: he couldn’t create ice on top of ice.

That two-part piece clearly had a political dimension, though an ambiguous one. It seemed to suggest that in a powerfully antagonistic setting like Tiananmen Square, a single person might effect a change, though it could only be minor and fleeting. In nature, that great source of Taoist art, no change could be made because none was necessary: everything, positive and negative, was absorbed into it.

The Back Sea is near Beijing’s old center, and increasingly the city became the subject of Mr. Song’s work. Both he and his wife, the artist Yin Xiuzhen, watched in dismay as the neighborhoods they had known as children were obliterated. Both artists scavenged fragments from demolished buildings and made public installations from them, treating the fragments, in the Chinese way, as material that retained the vital essence of all the people, dead or relocated, who had once come into contact with it.

Wonderfully loving. In Anathem the material world is a reflection of consciousness, for Tibetans form and formlessness are the same,  in academia materials are social constructions.