Dedicated to Lincoln Phayze who always goes with the flow except for the times when he doesn’t.  Both of us are lost…

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/b37bd4f91ab74c2b5be4a419893cfda7/

That was an advice from somebody like me.  The gentleman in question works in the arts (I almost said “arts industry” and I was appalled by the ugliness of the expression).  Correction:  he used to work in the arts, but now he is in as much mess as I am.  He told me that once he was taking the program “The Artist’s Way” and one of the requirements was keeping a diary.  Yes, a diary.  Keeping a diary in order to awaken one’s creativity, reconnect with one’s creativity, and welcome one’s creativity back.  So the rules were simple enough – you wake up and write three pages without letting the pen stop.  The rule to remember is “Don’t get it right, get it written…”

It is a very catchy and encouraging phrase.  But no matter how encouraging a phrase may be, it still took me a while to actually start writing in my diary.  But I did.  I have some “volumes” completed, mostly filled with crap worth only getting rid of (by shredding, this detail is very important! LOL), but it does not matter.  It was not right, it was written.  My web-site contains very little of my private diary entries, it is more polished and edited. Of course.  Which course?  Moving on…

Of course. Which course? Do we know where we go?

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/kallini2002/d09d182bdef53d9a4b384576a47df417/

Am I creative?  We all are supposed to be creative, by the way…

Well, anyway, when I started this web-site, it was nearly impossible to find things to write about, and I stopped almost as soon I started.  Then I came back to it and I was more or less consistent.  There were some large gaps due to my mood swings.  When I am depressed, I feel like drowning, when I am high, I feel as if I am resurfacing…and what does it have to do with water I have no idea…  Maybe because I am a Water Sign?  Sometimes I dream that I fly so high and so skillfully…

In my dreams I fly so much higher

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/9f878a2f026418e54ca53b7917b261e9/

Coming back to the gaps.  There some of them, all due to polarity of my moods, doubts, losing faith, not really knowing what to do.  The last one started early in May when I finally found a part-time job, started dancing more and generally was busy with I don’t even remember what.  But I tried to come back.  There must be something about writing that I either like or need or maybe both.  Self-expression?  Letting out the pain?  Sharing my experience?  Pleasure of typing? LOL – yeah, that must be it, “pleasure of typing” – exercising my fine motor skills.

Exercising fine motor skills

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/kallini2002/5dc33cf6576d5f43e0de16fa8bf43253/

But the idea of “not getting it right, but getting it written” is very appealing.  I was reading some of my own posts from January and it turned out to be pleasant enough.  I have already forgotten the pain and the joy and details.  And it was nice to come back and see – my insanity (at one point), my pain, my suffering, and the progress I made.  So the verdict is “YES”, the point may very well be ZERO, but I should keep at it.  My diary, my web-site, “My life, my universe and everything”.  Life goes on and diary is only a reflection.  We all love mirrors, don’t we?

Or yes, we do.  Reflections, reflections, reflections…

 Source: http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/continental/Marxism/Fromm/Fromm2.jpg

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

From Robert Greene “The 48 Laws of Power”.

Law 48 – Assume Formlessness

Page 419

Judgment

By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack.  Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move.  Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed.  The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order.  Everything changes.

Source: http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/eduoff/vt-2004//mt-2003/mt-mercury-map6-normal.jpg

In martial arts, it is important that strategy be unfathomable, that form be concealed, and that movements be unexpected, so that preparedness against them be impossible.  What enables a good general to win without fail is always having unfathomable wisdom and a modus operandi that leaves no tracks.  Only the formless cannot be affected.  Sages hide in unfathomability, so their feelings cannot be observed; they operate in formlessness, so their lines cannot be crossed.

The Book of the Huainan Masters, China, Second Century B.C.

Character Armor

To carry out the instinctual inhibition demanded by the modern world and to be able to cope with the energy stasis which results from this inhibition, the ego has to undergo a change.  The ego, i.e., that part of the person that is exposed to danger, becomes rigid, as we say, when it is continually subjected to the same or similar conflicts between need and a fear-inducing outer world.  It acquires in this process a chronic, automatically functioning mode of reaction, i.e., its “character”.  It is as if the affective personality armored itself, as the hard shell it develops were intended to deflect and weaken the blows of the outer world as well as the clamoring of the inner needs.  This armoring makes the person less sensitive to unpleasure, but also restricts his libidinal and aggressive motility and thus reduces his capacity for achievement and pleasure.  We say the ego has become less flexible and more rigid, and that the ability to regulate the energy economy depends on the extent of the armoring.

Wilhelm Reich, 1897 – 1957

Observance of the law

When you want to fight us, we don’t let you and you can’t find us.  But when we want t fight you, we make sure that you can’t get away and we hit you squarely…and wipe you out… The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

Mao Tse-Tung, 1893 – 1976

Keys to Power

The human animal is distinguished by its constant creation of forms.  Rarely expressing its emotions directly, it gives them form through language, or through socially acceptable rituals.  We cannot communicate our emotions without a form.

The forms that we create, however, change constantly – in fashion, in style, in all those human phenomena representing the mood of the moment.  We are constantly altering the forms we have inherited from previous generations, and these changes are signs of life and vitality.  Indeed, the things that don’t change, the forms that rigidify, come to look to us like death, and we destroy them.  The young show this most clearly: Uncomfortable with the forms that society imposes upon them, having no set identity, they play with their own characters, trying on a variety of masks and poses to express themselves.  This is the vitality that drives the motor of form, creating constant changes in style.

The powerful are often people who in their youth have shown immense creativity in expressing something new through a new form.  Society grants them power because it hungers for and rewards this sort of newness.  The problem comes later, when they often grow conservative and possessive.  They no longer dream of creating new forms; their habits congeal, and their rigidity makes them easy targets.  Everyone knows their next move.  Instead of demanding respect they elicit boredom: Get off the stage! We say, let someone else, someone younger, entertain us.  When locked in the past, the powerful look comical – they are overripe fruit, waiting to fall from the tree.

Power can only thrive if it is flexible in its forms.  To be formless is not to be amorphous; everything has a form – it is impossible to avoid.  The formlessness of power is more like that of water, or mercury, taking the form of whatever is around it.  Changing constantly, it is never predictable.  The powerful are constantly creating form, and their power comes from the rapidity with which they can change.  Their formlessness is in the eye of the enemy who cannot see what they are up to and so has nothing solid to attack.  This is the premier pose of power: ungraspable, as elusive and swift as the god Mercury, who could take any form he pleased and this ability to wreak havoc on Mount Olympus.

Human creations evolve toward abstraction, toward being more mental and less material.  This evolution is clear in art, which, in this century, made the great discovery of abstraction and conceptualism; it can also be seen in politics, which over time have become less overtly violent, more complicated, indirect and cerebral.  Warfare and strategy too have followed this pattern.  Strategy began in the manipulation of armies on land, positioning them in ordered formations; on land, strategy is relatively two dimensional, and controlled by topography.  But all the great powers have eventually taken to sea, for commerce and colonization.  And to protect their trading lanes they have had to learn how to fight at sea.  Maritime warfare requires tremendous creativity and abstract thinking, since the lines are constantly shifting.  Naval captains distinguish themselves by their ability to adapt to the literal fluidity of the terrain and to confuse the enemy with an abstract, hard-to-anticipate form.  They are operating in a third dimension: the mind.

Image:

Mercury.  The winged messenger, god of commerce, patron saint of thieves, gamblers, and all those who deceive through swiftness.  The day Mercury was born he invented the lyre; by that evening he had stolen the cattle of Apollo.  He would scour the world, assuming whatever form he desired.  Like the liquid metal named after him, he embodies the elusive, the ungraspable – the power of formlessness.

Authority:

Therefore the consummation of forming an army is to arrive at formlessness. Vitory in war is not repetitious, but adapts its form endlessly… A military force has no constant formation, water has no constant shape: The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting according to the opponent is called genius.

(Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.)

Discourse

When I talk about definitions, I think it is important.  For me, at least.

A discourse – a conversation, talk. (apart from other meanings).

Origin: Latin dis – in different directions + currere – run.

An example?  Oh, my goodness!  I often listen to the songs on the www.youtube.com.  And how many times I had encountered absolutely insane conversations!  Most of the time I just don’t even pay attention to what is there.  But once I was asked whether I am aware of the discussions under the clips.  Then I sort of started paying attention.

I picked a clip teaching beginners’ steps for Salsa.  And a discourse jewel on top.  Here it is – a priceless example of meanness and creativity.  And one of the participants had a good point, when he mentioned the importance of definitions.

************************************************************************

Participant 1:

Following your line of thinking, Spanish is actually a retarded deformation of Latin and Arabic.

Notwithstanding the fact that you are unaware of the definition of the words:

1) retarded

2) language

3) dialect

the fact remains that you are neither intelligent, nor insightful, nor useful as a human being. I hereby order you, in the name of the survival of the species, to cease existing immediately.

************************************************************************

I was just wondering what drives those conversations.  Some people would say anger.  But I am beginning to think that it is pure loneliness.  Maybe both.

Quotes on Discourse:

1. “All discourses but my own afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent, and irksome”

(Ben Jonson)

 

2. “Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.”

(Thomas Carlyle)

 

3. “It’s our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It’s a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.”

(Deborah Tannen)

4. “The only privilege literature deserves – and this privilege it requires in order to exist – is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.”

(Salman Rushdie)

 

5. “Discourse may want an animated “No”

 

To brush the surface, and to make it flow;

 

But still remember, if you mean to please,

 

To press your point with modesty and ease.”

(William Cowper)

 

6. “The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.”

(Carl Bernstein)

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.” (Albert Einstein)

 

 

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” (Albert Einstein)

 

“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” (Jean Dubuffet)

 

 

“In order to act, you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.”  (Georges Clemenceau)

 

 

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they’re ok, then it’s you.”  (Rita Mae Brown)

 

 

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”  (Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”  (Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

 

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”  (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

 

 

“Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.”  (Vladimir Nabokov)

 

 

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”  (Toni Morrison “Beloved”)

 

From the book “They Changed the World. 200 Icons who have made a difference.” By Barbara Cady

FOR MARTHA GRAHAM (1894 – 1991), THE intense theatrical doyenne of modern dance, movement – not beauty – was the embodiment of truth.  Movement could never lie, her doting father had told her when she was a child growing up in Allgheny, Pennsylvania, and through some sixty years of influential performance she focused all her energy and talent in giving expression to this simple dictum.  What bloomed – or rather exploded – from her creative stance was a revolutionary approach to dance that rejected the codified forms of classical ballet for an earthier, more emotionally charged choreography.

[…]  As an explorer of the psyche, she created a starkly new kinetic language to express the secrets and yearnings of the human soul, using movement not for its own sake, but to illustrate psychological states.  Graham taught her students how to contract the solar plexus so that releasing it would send them spiraling into the air, how to use tautly controlled gestures to express primal feelings.  She also introduced starkly sexual movements into dance and claimed that her bold, theatrical approach – spectacular backfalls, pendulum-like leg swings, great upward thrusts of the torso – flowed through her from the past, expressing timeless, universal truths.  Critics often scoffed at her stylistic audacity and her decidedly abstract approach, but contemporary audiences all over the world were awestruck.  Their seduction was complete after witnessing such compelling solo works as Lamentations, in which Graham, imprisoned in a huge wrapping of fabric, portrayed the anguished search for release from a self-inflicted inner torment through violent movement.

So, is that the way?  Out of my misery?  Through violent movement?

Protecting from Unnecessary Hurt

By Donald W. McCullogh

Taken from “Write to be Read” (Reading, Reflection, and Writing) by William R. Smalzer

Verna claims that I said her baby was ugly.  I can’t imagine being that insensitive, though it was a long time ago and my memory isn’t exact in these matters.  I do recall Verna holding up her newborn and saying, “Isn’t she cute?”  And I, seeing a splotchy, scrunched little face and being committed to complete honesty, must have said something like “Well, she really is … a baby?”  Or maybe, “It takes an infant a few months before she can really be considered cute.”  Or I suppose there is a small possibility I said, “Strictly speaking, she is kind of ugly at the moment but will undoubtedly become a ravishing beauty.”

Nearly thirty years have passed, but whenever I run into Verna she reminds me that I called her baby ugly.  I don’t know her daughter; for all I know she became Miss Universe or perhaps my words lodged in her tiny subconscious and she has spent the last fifteen years in psychoanalysis working on low self-esteem.  In any event, I now wish I had lied.  It would have saved all of us a lot of grief.

Occasionally, courtesy calls for a lie.  Let me hasten to stress I’m talking about white lies, not black or gray or even off-white lies.  Show-white lies.  But even so, I realize I’ve just launched this chapter into very dangerous waters, with though ethical questions all around us.  We had better navigate through this subject very carefully, wit a firm grip on the tiller…

… How can we speak truthfully about lying?  The ancient philosopher Aristotle may be of help to us.  He said that honesty was more than unloading everything to everyone.  Rather, it is speaking the right truth to the right person at the right time in the right way for the right reason.

Not every truth is mine to tell: a truth shared in confidence and a truth that would needlessly hurt another is not mine to tell.  Not every person has a right to know the truth.  Some willfully distort what they hear; some use facts to cover a larger, more important truth: some have blabbermouths with unrelenting and undiscriminating tongues.  Not every time is appropriate for the truth: some seasons call for tactful silence: they day your friend’s daughter dropped out of school is not the day to tell her about your daughter making the honour roll.  Not every way of communicating honours the truth.  Sometimes the manner in which something is said subverts reality, as when a preacher says all the right words about God’s love but through a tone of voice and a concluding string of “oughts” (therefore we ought to do this and we ought to do that) that makes you feel guiltier than ever.  Not every reason deserves the use of truth: some motives for telling the truth are simply too destructive to deserve the respectability of being clothed in the truth.  Some expressions of “honesty” are really attempts to demean and belittle another person.

When it is the wrong truth or the wrong person or the wrong time or the wrong way or the wrong reason, a white lie may have more integrity than a facile, insensitive “honesty”.  But when does a white lie begin to turn a slight shade of gray?  When does it cross over and become an immoral act of dishonesty?

Perhaps a good test would be to ask, Does this lie protect the other person or does it protect me?  Let’s waste no time in admitting that it’s not easy to tell the difference.  On the surface, a lie may appear t protect another person from unnecessary pain; on closer examination, however, it’s actually an attempt to save me from uncomfortable exposure.  In Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter”, a police officer in a West African colony during the war has an affair, and in an effort to “protect” his wife from the pain of the truth, walks down a road of falsehood that leads to disaster.  Greene’s story may be fiction but it’s a profound truth reenacted everyday.  It’s easy to convince ourselves we’re guarding the feelings of another when we’re only trying to protect ourselves – and this sort of deception often ends in more complication and more lying and more pain than we could have ever imagined.

But just because it’s difficult to tell the difference between and appropriate lie and a morally unacceptable lie does not mean we give up the attempt to make the distinction.  Life, after all, is difficult.  So we press on, doing our best, knowing we’re not God, and counting on the grace of God when we blow it.  Though committed to honesty, we know that sometimes courtesy calls for creative stretching the truth.

On Nov. 15, 1934, Virginia Woolf began her rewrite of a novel eventually titled “The Years.”  “Lord! Lord!” she noted in her diary, “10 pages a day for 90 days: three months … now, damnably disagreeable, as I see it will be – compacting the vast mass – I am using my faculties again.  & all the flies and fleas are forgotten.”

Seven years later the flies and fleas and larger plagues drove Woolf, who had fought mental illness throughout her life, to suicide.  An increasing number of psychiatrists, neurologists and geneticists, says an article in this week’s Science Times, believe there’s a link between the genius and madness of artists such as her.  Maybe so.  But as anyone who’s ever read Woolf’s letters and diaries can attest, it’s the link between imagination and self-discipline that got her a place in literature’s pantheon.  Her mind may have had a grasshopper’s fleetness, but her industry was the ant’s.  “People who have experienced emotional extremes, who have been forced to confront a huge range of feelings and who have successfully coped with those adversities, could end up with a richer organization in memory, a richer palette t work with,” said Dr. Ruth Richards, a psychiatrist in Belmont, Mass., which often served as a haven for Robert Lowell, the fine American poet.

At least three fine English poets – Byron, Shelley and Coleridge – also suffered from manic depression or severe depression; and so did the composer Robert Schumann, who starved himself to death when he was 46.  Dr. Robert M. Post, chief of the biological psychiatry branch at the National Institutes of Health, sees the link between bipolar disorder and creativity as “fortunate”, because it is in so many other ways “a devastating illness.”

To be mad is not necessarily to be creative, or there’d be Shelly on every street corner.  And to be creative is not necessarily to be mad, or Shakespeare would not have been a monument to shrewdness and adaptability.  But to be creative is almost invariably to be diligent – and, manic – depressive or no, to swing high, swing low.

Source: Editorial published in the New York Times, October 15, 1993.

2. Communication (yellow). Consult, speak before groups, promote, meeting the public.

3. Leadership/Management (blue).

4. Mental/Analytical (gray). Edit, monitor, manage records.

5. Mental/Creative (pink).

6. Creative Expression (lavender).

7. Physical (green). Operate equipment.

1. Communication: influence, motivate, persuade.

2. Creative Expression: design, food preparation, create images, compose.

3. Physical: use body coordination.

The rest of the skills:

1. Humanitarian. Major: listen, coach, counsel. Secondary: advocate, take care of others. Minor: provide hospitality, train, instruct.

2. Communication. Major: explain, influence/persuade, facilitate groups, motivate. Secondary: interview. Minor: write.

3. Leadership. Major: initiate. Secondary: coordinate, decision-makikng. Minor: plan, mediate, delegate, negotiate, implement, follow through, supervise, organize.

4. Mental/Analytical. Major: solve problems (or opportunities? LOL), observe. Secondary: analyze, research, evaluate. Minor: budget, calculate/compute, categorize.

5. Mental/Creative. Major: use of memory, sythesize, use intuition, visualize, conceptualize, brainstrorm, demostrate foresight, improvise.

6. Creative Expression. Secondary: design, craft-making, food preparation, create images. Minor: compose/author.

7. Physical. Major: use body coordination. Minor: hand dexterity.