Sunday, May 19, 2013







East coast perfection: Secret spot, Cape Cod, MA. 
1/2 mile walk through scrub pine and rose hips to a deserted beach. Wishing I had my board. The sandbars that form these glassy little slides are notoriously ephemeral. I think of the the Japanese Zen poets who developed a philosophical-aesthetic mode from the experience of fleeting perfect natural beauty. They called it Yugen; the feeling of beauty mixed with melancholy by virtue of impermanence. This aesthetic feeling corresponds to the Buddhist philosophical understanding that the joy of the recognition of truth is suffused with a joyful sorrow. Truth from a Zen Buddhist perspective is a recognition of the impermanence and flux of all phenomena, including one's own sense of self and of all the relationships between an individual and other people, objects, and ideas that constitute one's sense of self.

In this aesthetic/philosophical moment of experience there is the joy of recognition mingled with the sorrow of loss.  One looses perpetually at the very instance of finding, for there is no-thing to be found. Reality is empty of things.  Emptiness in this sense does not mean absence. Rather emptiness refers to how "things" have no self-inherent nature. What we refer to as things are a composition of co-dependently arising phenomena.

The waves at this secret spot are a perfect example. A few days prior to this morning, somewhere out at sea, a strong wind whipped across the ocean surface in a particular direction. This wind occurred at  a particular distance away from land so that the energy the wind transferred into the water separated and organized itself into coherent waves traveling at defined intervals from one another. Coastal currents, the flux of tides and the violence of winter storms colluded into the perfect mix of dune erosion and sediment deposit for the ocean floor in this spot to extend long, flat and shallow from the shore. The tide at the moment of these waves had to be just so.  The wind energy rolling through the water trips on the shallow sand bar, rises and spills into these "things" that we call waves. But where is the wave in the wave? The thing is many things, and there for it is no-thing. You can't abstract any single wave from all the phenomena that the thing we call a wave depends on. And the existence all these phenomena are in turn, dependent on infinite collusions of various other phenomena, and on an on.  All phenomena are in flux, impermanent, tenuous, precious. We like when they glint and glisten like waves in the sun, when the recognition of beauty becomes the beauty of recognition.

Friday, May 17, 2013

An Existential Aesthete at Harvard Divinity School

Last week I completed the final paper of my Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School. Two years ago I went back to school thinking I'd study Buddhism as a natural extension into a specialization from my undergraduate studies in Asian religious traditions.  I will graduate in a couple weeks  having eschewed the academic study of Buddhism, or anything else explicitly religious. The official title of my degree, Master of Theological Studies, is grossly misleading. From my first semester on, I exercised my freedom to take courses across all the schools at Harvard and quickly discovered that I  wanted nothing to do with theology. This is not an indictment of the quality of the courses at the Divinity school, but a testament to the way the program accommodates the study of material that does not traditionally fall within the bounds of religious studies. From courses in the English, film, and comparative literature departments, in concurrence with anthropology and literature courses taught in the Divinity school, I developed a focus on what art does with experiences that in other realms would appeal to explicitly religious, theological, or supernatural interpretations of  provenance and meaning. 

During my studies I discovered how art aesthetisizes experiences that can be deemed transcendent, unitive, and uncanny. I use aesthetics here in the way Freud did in the opening to his essay "The Uncanny," as having more to do with understanding qualities of feeling than with understanding  qualities of beauty. To the extent that transcendent, unitive, and uncanny experiences are rendered existentially through art without appeal to divine or supernatural explanation, they are made wholly human.  There is much to say here about the reflective and ritualistic power of artistic creation, which I will leave for later. Suffice it to say that when these moments are rendered existentially and aesthetically their poignancy is not restricted or abstracted by modes religious interpretation. They are shown to be independent of any single and fixed ontology, and their significance is broken open to new and individual interpretations, or allowed to glint with the poignancy of experience itself free of extraneous interpretation. Insofar as these moments are rendered aesthetically in their unhindered fullness of existential feeling, they are shown to belong to us all.

Depending on our willingness and ability to exert our powers of association and our sympathetic imaginations, we may both share in the experiences of the artists, as well as re-experience and more dynamically experience our own. 

The fine artist hones and refines the reader's faculties of perception. As Kant points out, when it comes to fine art, refining perception is not merely an experience of new degrees of pleasure or beauty, but most importantly, it generates new dimensions of cognition.

The following passage by David Malouf  in "The Valley of the Lagoons," is a brief example of what I'm on to here. Angus, the sixteen year old narrator, sits in the back of a truck heading out into the Australian bush for his first hunting expedition:

The sky above us was high and cloudless, as it is up here in winter. Stuart followed my gaze as if there was something up there that I had caught a glimpse of, a hawk maybe; but there was nothing. Just the huge expanse of blue that made the air so clean as it tumbled over us; as if all this - sky, forest, the warmth of the big dog between my knees- was part of the one thing, a consciousness- not simply my own- that belonged not only to the body I was in, back hard against the metal side of the truck, muscles flexed in my calved and thighs, belly empty, but also to something out there I had melted into as one melts into sleep, and was infinite.

Monday, April 22, 2013

 
http://www.m-thompson.net/journal/?currentPage=14"And there is something kind of weird about people seeing you seeing."
   Sam Lipsyte, discussing the pit falls of being a writer. Namely, exposing your fixations so that others can see them.