Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

"We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us"

The Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie, . . . a tragedy with a happy ending,” and yet he misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in the Mozart Requiem, the sculptures of Donatello — “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Barnes is not comforted by the contemporary religion of therapy, the “secular modern heaven of self-­fulfilment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, . . . the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.”



I don't believe in God, but I miss Him. That's what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: "Soppy."

Thanatophobia is a fact in his life — he thinks about death daily and sometimes at night is “roared awake” and “pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world . . . awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’ in an endless wail.” He dreams about being buried and “of being chased, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, of finding myself bulletless, held hostage, wrongly condemned to the firing squad, informed that there is even less time than I imagined. The usual stuff.” He imagines being trapped in an overturned ferry. Or locked by kidnappers in the trunk of a car that is then driven into a river. He imagines being taken underwater in the jaws of a crocodile.


Beyond the big knock-down stuff, he dreads the diminution of energy, the drying-up of the wellspring, the fading of the light. “I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendships.” He has seen his parents through their decline and deaths — “however much you escape your parents in life, they are likely to reclaim you in death” — his father, a teacher of French, felled by strokes, reading the “Mémoires” of Saint-Simon at the end still tyrannized by his wife “always present, nattering, organizing, fussing, controlling” — a few years later, his mother in a green dress, in a wheelchair paralyzed on one side, “admirably unflinching, and dismissive of what she saw as false ­morale-boosting,” and what he sees there is hardly comforting.

So Barnes turns toward the strict regime of science and here is little comfort indeed. We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won’t care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion. Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely “a story the brain tells itself.” Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of “self” — it is something we’ve talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. “The ‘I’ of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.” Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope. (Barnes refers to “American hopefulness” with particular disdain.)

if i knew there was an afterlife, i wouldn't fear death at all[/guote]



Did you ever go to the Eastern Orthodox church on Eastern Avenue between Broadway and Caroline Street?

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stilltrucking Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 3:21 pm


resident prime8

Joined: 24 Oct 2004

I don't mind if there is an after life.. Just so I don't have to remember my social security number in the afterlife.

<center>
Writing in the Afterlife---billy collins
A hell of a poem.</center>

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Tired, long day, just felt like talking about this.

good night compadre where ever you are
sincerely
jt.

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don't try to read that till I edit, so many awkward turns of language and typos

I got to go now

fix it later, I think there a couple good bits in it worth saving I will repost it later. Tonightt I fell like the bear in the old Pogo comic strip that could write but not read.

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stilltrucking Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 8:06 pm


resident prime8

Joined: 24 Oct 2004



I would appreciate your patience as I try to make something out of it.

I believe in an after life, but am having trouble articulating what I mean.

Not that it matters

INteresting thing I learned about heaven from a TV preacher the other day... He seemed like such a sweet guy, not like most of them.
yes if you get saved on your death bed you will still get to heaven but you will have to walk around naked because those righteous heavenly robes are woven from our good deeds.


Quote:
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
-- Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955



The afterlife... I had some roomates when I was going to college who were Buddhists, we got to talking about the after life and they told me I would not be "me anymore" not this person with a social security number a name etc etc, I was disappointed. I wanted to live for ever as I am. Now I look forward to the death of this personality, I am sure I would become very bored if I had to be jack tilles for all eternity.


When I am done with all this I will try to stitch it together in one coherent post. Thanks for the inspiration.

Sorry if I am being insensitive dino, just you have opened a vein and I can stop my thoughts yet. I would not be offended if you deleted all this drivel.



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stilltrucking Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 8:31 pm


resident prime8

Joined: 24 Oct 2004

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Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
I have read that so many times. He talks about the creative process of mourning.

My mind a blank. Too much turkey and tryptophan

Just bits and pieces. All I can do now.


Quote:

Freud says the need to be an artist comes from early childhood and a sense of loss that enables the artist to see things differently. This vision rules his life. Not entirely neurotic, not entirely normal, the artist is endowed with a creative personality and a ruthless passion that allows him to separate his own grief feelings of melancholia from his grief feelings of mourning (death/rebirth or creativity cycle). Longing for normalcy, the artist is constantly fought by his need for art, by his vision, by his inner life. Beset by melancholia, his ruthless passion for his inner life during his session (days, weeks, months) of producing an art work separates him from his neurosis. Grief is interpreted as mourning, not depression. Mourning, a positive process in life, leads the sufferer to change and growth, to a kind of rebirth, to a condition previously unknown.

The Creation of Creativity

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