Home is where the…huh
My parents divorced when I was four, so I grew up in two figurative houses. Each of my parents, separately, moved on average every four years – possibly more, but that’s my best estimate. At my Dad’s house, I shared a room with my younger sister until I left for college.
Once I left for school in San Antonio, I no longer had a room at either parents’ house (due to my mother moving, and my sister occupying the former shared room), so summers and holidays were tricky. Plus I lived in a dorm, so I moved my possessions around every semester, in addition to those aforementioned breaks to Dallas.
So yeah, I have a weird relationship with the concept of “home”.
Even my first apartment(s) weren’t ones I chose for myself; I relied on my mother to help me scope out places and my final choices were based on her approval of the area’s safety and amenities.
So this new apartment of ours is great leap forward into constructing my life to my own vision. It’s come with a hefty price, though. To start, our utilities weren’t turned on in time, so we moved in all weekend in what was easily 100 degree (or 38 for my Celsius-based friends) heat.
Though now that I think about it, the price extraction started quite early on, with the sorting and purging of my apartment’s contents, which included three years’ worth of accumulated detritus as well as plenty of miscellaneous stuff I’d brought with me from four years of school.
Every time I look at a stack of papers from an old university class, I think of two things, Niecy Nash from Clean House (“mayhem and foolishness!”) and this passage from “The Artist’s Way”:
You probably won’t have time to complete all of the other tasks in any given week. Try to do about half. Know that the rest are there for use when you are able to get back to them. In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist. Leave the more neutral ones for later. Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.
Truer words were never spoken, Julia Cameron! Shedding my accumulated ‘Stuff’ has been like a snake sloughing off its skin. It’s hard and emotional and makes me grumpy as hell, but it’s freeing in the best way imaginable.
Plus, definitely the best argument for asceticism is having to schlep your stuff down three flights of stairs and up two more in the Texas summer.
Beauty in transience
Within just a few days I’ve read about Tibetan prayer flags and Brazilian santos bracelets and I think they’re both lovely.
D6 – Prayer Flags Special by Purple Cloud
A prayer flag is a colorful panel or rectangular cloth often found strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas to bless the surrounding countryside or for other purposes. Traditionally they are woodblock-printed with texts and images.
Traditionally, prayer flags are used to promote peace, compassion, strength, and wisdom. Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread the good will and compassion into all pervading space. Therefore, prayer flags are thought to bring benefit to all.
As the Buddhist spiritual approach is non theistic, the elements of Tantric iconography do not stand for external beings, but represent aspects of enlightened mind i.e. compassion, perfect action, fearlessness, etc.
The prayers of a flag are released and become a permanent part of the universe as the images fade from exposure to the elements. Just as life moves on and is replaced by new life, Tibetans renew their hopes for the world by continually mounting new flags alongside the old. This act symbolizes a welcoming of life changes and an acknowledgment that all beings are part of a greater ongoing cycle.
The santos bracelets have a similar though theistic concept:
Originally from Brazil, the bracelet – made of cherry wood or plastic – features a different Saint on each square. But unlike other wrist candy, this one’s got ‘meaning’ (or so we hear). Over time, the pictures of the Saints fall off, leaving just one man standing…well, that Survivor’s your patron Saint. It all sounds kinda ridiculous to us, but times are tough…we’ll take any divine intervention we can!
I really dig the universality of releasing ideas and energy into the universe. When I die I’d like to be buried as a whole body under a tree or plant, so that my atoms once again become part of the circle of growth and life.
I got got got got no time
I frequently feel like I don’t have enough time to read everything I want to read, or watch all the incredible films I want to see, especially during release-heavy seasons like summer or pre-awards, or learn all the skills I’d like to acquire. And the projects…my god, the projects I’d like to do.
But any time I start to feel overwhelmed, I find that something is waiting around the corner to remind me of my blessings and to give me perspective.
This morning, Guy P linked me to the Longplayer, “a one thousand year long musical composition”:
Longplayer is composed for singing bowls – an ancient type of standing bell – which can be played by both humans and machines, and whose resonances can be very accurately reproduced in recorded form. It is designed to be adaptable to unforeseeable changes in its technological and social environments, and to endure in the long-term as a self-sustaining institution.
Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time. While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1000 year long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies. More than a piece of music, Longplayer is a social organism, depending on people – and the communication between people – for its continuation, and existing as a community of listeners across centuries.
This canny and gorgeous project of course brings to mind Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, with its cloistered monastic communities deliberately living outside the too-rapid ebbs and flows of culture and society.
Anathem was, in turn, inspired by the Clock of the Long Now, “a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.”
Obviously, no clock can have a guaranteed lifetime of 10,000 years, but some clocks are designed with guaranteed limits. (For example, a clock that shows a four-digit year date will not display the correct year after the year 9999.) With continued care and maintenance the Clock of the Long Now could reasonably be expected to display the correct time for 10,000 years.
Whether a clock would actually receive continued care and maintenance for such a long time is debatable. Hillis chose the 10,000-year goal to be just within the limits of plausibility. There are technological artifacts, such as fragments of pots and baskets, from 10,000 years in the past, so there is some precedent for human artifacts surviving this long, although very few human artifacts have been continuously tended for more than a few centuries.
(There’s even a music project inspired by the musical compositions in the books, a very pleasant merging of the human body and the mathematical concepts Anathem explores. It’s appropriate that it draws upon monastic musical tradition, and the 1,000 year composition is played on Tibetan singing bowls.)
I’m constantly astonished by how much things change in relatively tiny spans of time. Surgical sanitation (ie, the surgeon washing their own hands between patients) really only emerged in the 1840s, about 160 years ago. Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” hit right at the turn of the century, a mere 100 years past.
We look back on our Victorian and Edwardian ancestors and think of them as awfully quaint. But it’s going to be remarkably similar a hundred years from today. Even yesterday, someone on the radio mentioned that during an artifact recovery in 1997 (for a potential landing spot of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane), they handled items without gloves because even at that point it wasn’t possible to extract DNA from touched items, while it is now. I think the next really big advance will be how we view the human brain and its functions; we can see the mechanics of the body down to tiny levels of detail, but there’s still a lot of mystery about its chemistry.
What a fascinating mystery, though. NPR recently did a story on prayer and meditation and how it affects the brain. In short, meditation is a bodyhack that darkens the area of the brain which perceives one’s sense of self and the passing of time; hence, “oneness” with the universe.
Sitting back in this manner and considering time on a geographical scale instead of a human one really helps me feel less agonized by the day-to-day drudgery I’m dealing with now, as we purge, pack up and prepare to move to our new apartment. There’s enough there for me to discuss to want to craft a separate blog post about the gentle, constant pressure required for personal growth. But for now, I’ll resume the trudge forward to new spaces, physical and mental, with the final result firmly in mind.
New news
Jey took this walkthrough video of the new flat while I snapped some photos.
Decorative tile on the new fireplace.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”
- Henry David Thoreau.
To Ponyo, Or Not To Ponyo
I don’t just watch films; I research, listen to commentary tracks, read biographies of the authors or directors, learn about the production and trivia, immerse myself in the context of the work. You might say I’m addicted to DVD (now Blu-Ray) extras. Or that I’m a research geek at heart.
Another habit I enjoy is following a director’s or actor’s ouvre. At home we’ve started on some Akira Kurosawa films, intending to watch them in (more or less) order. (Though as in this Slate article on keeping discs for forever, we’ve had Seven Samurai languishing at home for months. I even carried it to England and back.)
But slightly easier to digest than the the above “existential cinematic vegetables” are the works of Japanese animation Studio Ghibli.
We’re following this list of “Films and specials (Excluding short films or Ghibli Museum releases)”. So that is, in order, with ones we’ve watched so far in italics:
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Grave of the Fireflies
My Neighbor Totoro
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Only Yesterday
Porco Rosso
I Can Hear the Sea/Ocean Waves
Pom Poko
Whisper of the Heart
Princess Mononoke
My Neighbors The Yamadas
Spirited Away
Howl’s Moving Castle
Tales From Earthsea
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
So far I have been completely blown away by the films we’ve watched, and am lucky to re-watch several with new eyes.
Each Ghibli story is radically different, but they’re joined together by the same loving, creative spirit. The art is amazingly detailed, and the worlds they portray are unique but familiar, interweaving modern settings and mythology. And I love that many of Ghibli’s films deal with relationships between humans and the planet (the ones touching on harmonious, respectful co-existence often turning out to be the most profound and beautiful).
My favorites so far are Nausicaä and Totoro.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind takes place a thousand years after a war that destroyed the ecosystem of the planet, which is only just starting to heal itself. Every generation contributes its various pollutants to the atmosphere (just think of the Victorians and their coal burning! sheesh) and frets about its impact on the planet, so the film feels timely even though it was created in 1984 — the year I was born, and during the Cold War. In the film, a new war is about to break out, so there’s quite a bit of combat and fiery exploding stuff, but there’s also a truly epic plotline about the insects and toxic forest that are slowly covering the surface of the planet.
My Neighbor Totoro was a welcome balm after viewing Grave of the Fireflies, which is a beautiful but deeply haunting film about two children starving to death during war and famine in Kobe, Japan. Totoro is about two siblings who meet a giant, furry troll (it looks like a cross between a cat and a bear) who lives in the nearby forest. Early on in the film the children and their father enter the forest to visit an ancient camphor tree, to thank it and ask it to continue watching over them. Throughout the film — without getting too specific or spolier-y — they rely on the tree, forest and its inhabitants for help and guidance as they grow from children to young adults, physically and spiritually.
Like plenty of classic literature, lots of the Ghibli films feature children as a way to channel the magic of the world, a sense which fades as one grows older. (In Totoro, Granny explains to the children that she used to be able to see the house’s resident soot sprites, when she was their age.) Also given that there are strong mythological and earth-spirit elements, it makes sense that they’d use young people as vehicles:
“Animism in the widest sense, i.e. thinking of inanimate objects as animate, and treating them as if they were animate, is near-universal. Jean Piaget applied the term in child psychology in reference to an implicit understanding of the world in a child’s mind which assumes all events are the product of intention or consciousness. Piaget explains this with a cognitive inability to distinguish the external world from one’s own psyche. Developmental psychology has since established that the distinction of animate vs. inanimate things is an abstraction acquired by learning.” (via)
Totoro is also one of the most joyful films I’ve ever seen. According to Wikipedia, Totoro is as familiar to Japanese children as Winnie the Pooh is to British kids. I believe it, and I will also show it to my nearly-three-year-old nephew.
Last night’s Kiki’s Delivery Service was excellent as well. It features a young witch-in-training who leaves home at the age of 13 for a year of training in the real world. It’s about finding what you’re talented at, and then discovering what inspires that talent, and keeps you going. Inspired by Kiki, I have left this post as a long, rambling screed instead of trying to edit it down (or just cutting out parts completely), since I’m mostly just relieved I seem to have so much to say about it all.
Anyway, Ponyo is due out in American theatres on August 14, so now we have a dilemma — try to watch the remaining 10 films in 18 days and risk losing details in the rush, and not appreciating each film as a separate entity…or see Ponyo on its release, supporting the box office efforts and helping ensure the future of such films, but also ruining the order of our viewing schedule and the experience of seeing the films chronologically to witness the evolution of the studio.
(Though to be completely honest, we’ll probably see it on opening weekend AND watch when we’ve finished the others. Best of both!)
