gangkhar puensum

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670.

“He descubierto que toda la desdicha de los hombres proviene de una sola cosa, que es no saber permanecer en reposo, dentro de una habitación” (fragmento 139 de la edición Brunschvicg).

(Véase James Vincent, “We’d rather give ourselves electric shocks than be alone with our thoughts, says new study”, The Independent, 4 de julio de 2014).

¿Y si no subiéramos a las montañas más altas?

aesthetics

¿No lo he dicho ya? – escribía Rilke en “Los cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge” – Estoy aprendiendo a ver. Sí, este es el comienzo. Todavía no se me da demasiado bien. Pero me esforzaré al máximo. Por ejemplo, nunca me había preguntado cuántas caras existen. Hay una cantidad enorme de personas, pero hay muchas más caras porque cada persona tiene varias.

[FACES] by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time. For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face. Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”

suburbia

Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the we.

The environment suddenly shifts in an unforeseen and unwelcome manner.

 

Move to strangeness

 

Human beings need security, order, love, and connection

 

Memories about the past guide this thinking about the future

 

Reactions to a volcano-like event that shook the foundations of the social world.

 

Holding an attitude of benign neglect or cynical indifference

 

A blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that one can not react to it effectively

 

An important part of the self has disappeared… “We” no longer exist as a connected pair or a linked cells in a larger communal body 

 

Truth goes underground

 

One cannot simply leave behind

 

Buried in the unconscious, the event is experienced irrationally, in the nightmares

 

Denials that insist on looking to the future and forgetting the past

 

Fragmented and polarized social order

 

Bridging the gap between event and representation

 

A spiral of signification

Source:  ALEXANDER_Cultural-Trauma

Arpeggio

“La felicidad no se compra, se construye” // “Happiness can’t be bought, It is built”

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Nightcrawler (2014)

 

No cesaremos en la exploración
Y el fin de todas nuestras búsquedas
Será llegar adonde comenzamos,
Conocer el lugar por vez primera.
A través de la puerta desconocida y olvidada
Cuando lo último por descubrir en la tierra
Sea lo que fue nuestro comienzo;
En la fuente del río más largo
La voz de la oculta cascada
Y los niños en el manzano
La voz no conocida porque no fue buscada,
Pero escuchada, o semiescuchada, en la quietud
entre dos olas del mar.
De prisa, aquí, ahora, siempre—
Una condición de sencillez absoluta
(Cuesta nada menos que todo).
Y todo irá bien
Y toda clase de cosas saldrá bien
Cuando las lenguas de la llama se enlacen
En el nudo de fuego coronado
Y la lumbre y la rosa sean una.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, Cuatro cuartetos, Little Gidding.

 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942).

Corps-sans-organes

Afueras de París desde el tren. Octubre, 2016.
Afueras de París desde el tren. Octubre, 2016. // Peripheral areas of Paris. Photos taken from a train. October, 2016.

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CLASS TEN

BUILDING A VOCABULARY OF ACTIONS

 

In an action you must know what you do, where you do it, when you do it, and why you do it. But you don’t know how you do it. The how is spontaneous and unexpected.

An action can be broken up into steps or “beats.” (The expression beats, by the way, isn’t a musical reference. We began calling steps “beats” because members of the Moscow Art Theatre, in discussing their techniques with American actors some years ago, couldn’t pronounce “bits.”)

As an action, “to escape” is to run away from a troubling thought or image, or to run away from danger, but wherever you run you see the danger, take it in and run away from it, like confronting your own image in a chamber of mirrors again and again and never finding an exit. Going from danger to danger is the action “to escape.” It’s the action of Hamlet, Ophelia and Macbeth. The dramatic anatomy of escape is there’s no escape.

The end of the action determines the action and makes it strong or weak.

Beats

Periferia de París, octubre 2016.
Periferias de París, octubre 2016.
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Paris Periphery, October, 2016.

wrestling with the ideas

Another way of describing “to chat” is to say you’re “shooting the breeze.” That’s a way of saying that chatting is pleasant, it’s polite, it’s airy, it’s light, but it’s empty. It doesn’t matter. Nothing depends on it. It’s a way to pass the time.

It’s normal. It’s fake.

it’s a form of verbal badminton. (Shuttlecock)

…vs to discuss

 

Even when you begin, you must react.

 

Our national temperament is intolerant of listening.

 

Through the actor’s actions, a series of separate but logically connected physical or psychological activities that breathe life into the play and create the moment-by-moment truth.

“To reminisce,” is to soliloquize

reminiscing is itself a means of escape from the sometimes unbearable realities of the present.

When I reminisce, I become detached and my words take on a poetic quality. To reminisce is to reinvent the world. Remembering is simply experiencing it all over again, which is closer to description.

To reminisce is different from telling a story.

Reminiscing has in it longing, pain and loss.

The reminiscence has a sequence of ideas. Paraphrase the sequences so that the ideas are in you, not in the words. Fill in the sequence with your own words without the text in order to make the words of the author belong to you.

Stella Adler. The Art Of Acting.

They say I lie or feign/In all I write. Not true. It’s simply that I feel/ By way of imagination. The heart I never use.

Fernando Pessoa. Autopsicography.