Joy in Action

Loss of Care

In the early stages of my grief after my husband died, I was grateful for texting because answering any question, especially about how I was doing meant falling apart. The distance and detachment of texting allowed me to communicate without losing control of my emotions. But the level to which this detachment now pervades modern consciousness worries me. Connecting to my last post about the condition of modern attention, I was struck while recently in Ireland, by a column by Joe Humphreys in the Irish Times focusing on the same direction. Referring to the work of an Irish based study group, Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, who draw on the work of Simone Weil and her philosophy of attention, Humphreys asks, “What, after all is the smartphone but a mechanism for drawing your attention away from the physical reality surrounding you?” It’s an important question. What we notice is what we care about, good and bad. With the lack of attention to our environment, the concern that should be generated by what’s being eroded isn’t there. Our image of our world is being blinkered by one small device. The loss of care, of feeling for our surroundings is a casualty of the phone-based lifestyle. The detachment I appreciated when grieving has become a pervasive default state, the full range of emotions flattened by the same inexpressive text. I think to myself of what I wrote about a friend’s piece last month and how deeply expressive each of the fonts of each of the layers of words were, adding a tone of voice and emotional attitude. What she’d done with the style of each font felt like a master orator’s persuasive tones in a monologue. The option to illustrate, in that piece, an open-mouthed reptile near the bottom added anxiety to the whole. It's not the words that are the problem. There is privacy in writing by hand as well as a level of intimacy that is hard to achieve with technology. Sometimes a letter arrives, and I know instantly who it is from, handwritten, hand drawn and collaged, the appearance says more than the words themselves. It’s a multidimensional depth of expression which is why letters are kept for life, expansive personal messages that say they care in every part. We don’t realize how much is lost when we only email and text, all content regimented, made uniform by the mechanism. We make more of ourselves visible when we write by hand. Taking time to look, to notice the world around us, seeing the needs of others and the condition of the environment build care for them. Thinking about how we express ourselves to others offers a choice of how much care we want to give.

Indecision

Unmixed Attention

A friend was showing me her new work a few days ago and I was struck by how well it portrayed the modern mind, so many levels of mental activity, vying for attention. With competing storylines running after so many levels of preoccupation, it’s hard to pay attention to any of them, like a radio station with several frequencies bleeding into the foreground, impossible to follow. Around the same time another friend sent me a video by he and his wife that had a similar effect but expressing the effort to tune out the distracting layers of drone and buzz of multiple conversations with a mandala like emergence that came and went. Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, very hard to achieve in our time. Living today produces so much mental clutter, so much competing for our attention. Though I meditate twenty minutes a day, random thoughts always invade that space. Working on my art, however, is almost always unmixed, and I like the idea that it’s when I’m working, I’m closest to praying, that I’m participating in a flow of consciousness that’s bigger than myself. Other artists have mentioned to me that they see their work as prayer. It is, in fact an offering. As a person who often feels like I’m channeling the work, that it comes from beyond me, and often surprises me, it makes sense that the pure absorption in the task joins with a larger aspect of consciousness. The key to pure focus is absorption in a task. Like in some video games, there’s an alert participation in what’s unfolding that loses the game when attention strays. I’ve had conversations with friends that were occasionally so focused as to qualify as unmixed, and many situations with other people can do that. Arguments might seem unmixed in their intensity, but often personal history, with pre-existing ideas and opinions flood in alongside personal baggage. The distracted nature of everyday consciousness has the mind so full of competing areas that even in intimate contact, there can be mental interference. Weil’s distinction of the personality and the soul might help with sorting through those layers. Personality is concerned with the public self, cares what others want from us and aspires to their esteem, source of so much anxiety. Absorption in any interest takes us out of personality and into the subject of interest. She sees the soul as beyond the personal, our connection to the universal in humanity. That deeper Self is where we know justice, balance, beauty and truth. Any choice in where to focus is an opportunity. The closer you look the more you find, and in a state of fascination we have unmixed attention. The key is to fully be there, attention flowing outward to enfold what draws us in.

Formative Energy

Art Goblin

Nothing is as specific as an image for conveying a feeling. But since language is the currency of everyday communication some languages try harder to offer words where the importance and intensity of the feeling warrants it. The Spanish language is rich with words for emotion, and the one I love best is ‘duende’. I discovered it by accident online and when I inquired of my niece’s partner to see what it meant for sure I was surprised when the answer was goblin. When I googled it the first definition was goblins, associated with folklore. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Languages used by google it also means “a quality of passion or inspiration”. Google’s AI describes duende in art as “a mysterious force that arises from the depths of the artist's soul, compelling them to create, and deeply affecting the viewer.” To think that it took me until my seventies to find the word for what I have so often had the privilege to experience. The examples used by AI mostly regarded music and the powerful effect of live performers on their audience. I’ve heard many students speak reverentially about a concert they attended and the spiritual connection they felt to the musicians and the crowd. The capacity of art to meet such deep layers in our humanity has an integrating effect. Better than any language, art has the subtlety to show more closely the endless variations of melancholy or any other deep feeling. Think of all the ways that people are devastated, from the personal to ecological. One word for such a range of tragedies. For people to develop their emotional awareness we need more ways to see how we feel. The word “duende” and the goblin that represents it also connects to magic. That seals my affection for this word and concept. My lifelong pursuit of illusion is the trickster in me that wants to prod at conceptual certainties. My inner goblin is the part within that has one foot in the collective unconscious, the spiritual realm where inspiration finds its source. The use of an imagined entity, my duende, is a way to refer to something real that can’t be verbally expressed any other way. As representative of the spiritual realm, it’s the resonance music and art offer connecting to the multidimensional life force that mystifies and fascinates. Finding personal connections to the larger consciousness may require more goblins to be conduit for the positive qualities they reinforce. Orwell knew that the ability to think for oneself depended on having the language to describe it. Rather than allowing labels to lessen what it means to be human we need to find the words and images that show how much bigger the picture.

Loosening