kurt vonnegut | do art and do it for the rest of your life

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

 

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana. 

 

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

 

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

 

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

 

God bless you all!

 

Kurt Vonnegut

photo | bertrand carriere | they all just went away

 

photo by Bertrand Carriere

illustrates They All Just Went Away, by Joyce Carol Oates

The New Yorker

emmanuel carrere | the adversary

On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.

the opening of The Adversary, by Emmanuel Carrère

quoted in The First Rule Is Not to Lie
The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2022

muriel nissen | churning around in the dregs

 

ikigai / not ikigai

 

*   *   *

Often referred to as the ikigai diagram, the ikigai chart or the ikigai symbol, the Venn diagram above is not the ikigai concept. What you are looking at is the Purpose Venn Diagram. The framework does not accurately represent the concept of ikigai. Japanese don’t follow this framework, nor contemplate the four questions when they think about their Ikigai.

Ikigai Westernised

• Are you doing something that you love?
• That the world needs?
• That you are good at?
• And that you can be paid for?

The misconception being perpetuated is that one can only achieve ikigai and true happiness by meeting all four conditions, so if you are doing something you love, but it isn't generating you money, then you haven't achieved ikigai - this is false. If you were to show this Venn diagram to a native Japanese, they would not recognise it as ikigai.

Your Ikigai:

• isn't something you need to make money from
• doesn't have to be something that the world needs
• isn't something that you have to be highly skilled or proficient at
• isn't something you have to necessarily love

Japanese use the word casually in conversation and understand its meaning and nuances, but don’t make it up to be a grandeur concept of any sort. You could call the Venn diagram a Westernised version of ikigai, but the truth is, it is a misrepresentation of ikigai. Your ikigai does not lie at the center of those interconnecting circles.

The Zuzunaga Venn Diagram of Purpose

Full credit for the Venn diagram of Purpose should go to Spanish author and psychological astrologer Andres Zuzunaga, who created it in 2011. It first publicly appeared in the book Qué Harías Si No Tuvieras Miedo (What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?) by Borja Vilaseca in 2012. The diagram was translated into English and then started being used by HR managers and life coaches as a simplistic overview to finding purpose in your career. It is now used to help people create a more balanced work situation. Personally, I actually think it makes a very accurate visual representation of entrepreneurship. If this framework inspires you, motivates you, gives you a sense of purpose and makes you want to get out of the bed in the morning, then keep using it. Just remember, that it's not an honest representation of ikigai.  Your ikigai can be anything from simply taking the time to enjoy your morning coffee to catching up with old friends to working towards a life-defining goal.

Ikigai Is Not About….

It’s not about making money.
Ikigai is not the pursuit of professional success or financial freedom. Most Japanese would not associate making money with ikigai. Success and the accumulation of wealth could be a by-product of your ikigai, but it would not be the focus.

It’s not what the world needs from you.
Ikigai is not about what the world needs from you. Ikigai lies in the realm of community, family, friendships and in the roles you fulfill. When you pursue your ikigai, you are not out to save the world. It is more about connecting with and helping the people who give meaning to your life - your family, friends, co-workers and community.

It’s not about what you're good at.
You don’t have to be good at something to find your ikigai. Ikigai can be a very simple daily ritual or the practice of a new hobby. Ikigai is more about growth rather than mastery.

It’s often not about what you love.
Ikigai can be something you love or are passionate about, but you can find ikigai in areas of your life you would least expect. Ikigai is more about living your values and finding meaning and purpose in daily living regardless of what constraints you may have.

from ikigaitribe

ron reed | ashes are butterfly bones made of light and dust (2014)

Ashes Are Butterfly Bones Made of Light and Dust: 

God's Bones in their Wings 

(for Peter Norman) 

His bones are light, 

(radiant, bone-barred): 

Even the smallest bone in his inner ear, the bone chapel— 

bone etchings, 

bone song, 

bone dance, 

bone dream,

bone silence. 

Old momma teach me nerve ends 

made of juniper and bone, 

bear bones and feathers, 

bread and not bone; 

the bone broker. 

Here is a bone resembling a word; 

milk tooth bane bone 

seed-bone and hammer. 

When the bone fragments arc to earth 

the bone's song will be pulled, 

descending to my ankle-bones. 

The wind picks up the dust from the ashes, 

the white of bone; 

your bone, Morgan's bones, lean and boneless, 

the jazz-loosened loose bone thing he is. 

We will have only bones to hold; 

the bone ash of 

a red herring-bone skirt clasped with a bone button 

buried among femurs and knuckle bones 

where the bones of the child are hid. 

The stone’s praise 

for the sparrow’s ankle bone 

rising like a frozen flood 

of stone bone birds on the wing singing. 

I'm chilled clean through to the bone. 

by Ron Reed 

with Margaret Avison, Leonard Cohen, Joy Kagawa, Lorna Crozier, Lorne Daniel, Daniela Elza, Moira MacDougall, Michael McAloran, Cassidy McFadzean, Kath MacLean, Jill Battson, Joe Blades, Louise Halfe, Ben Ladouceur, Dennis Lee, Christine Murray, Carol Shillibeer, Anne Simpson, Elizabeth Zetlin, and Robert W. Service. 

* 

What the critics are saying; 

"Most of all it’s felt experience, what’s close to the bone – feelings, emotions, combined with a sense of craft." 

Cyril Dabydeen "The poem does not hang straggled and bone-whitened like rags in the bleaching sun. His engagement is with a burned and ruined corpse left out to dry and fossilize with its rag-remnant of torn flesh and chilled bone, an empty jaw-bone, a leaving from a physical life. Here is a victory-song for life pushing up through human-remains, detritus, stink and bone." Bone Orchard Poetry

"Cuts to the bone and then into the bone, to find the marrow." Turtle Island Native Network 

magritte | personal values | 'every time i look at it i feel ill'

In October 1952, René Magritte’s New York dealer, Alexander Iolas, a champion of the Surrealists in the United States and elsewhere, wrote him in protest. He had recently unpacked Personal Values(1952), the first of what are sometimes called Magritte’s hypertrophic images, in which oversized objects appear to crowd their settings. In this case, a lusciously painted tortoiseshell comb, a vivid blue-green glass, a gargantuan bar of soap, and other personal items dwarf a modest bedroom. The colors made him sick, Iolas reported. Had the work been hastily painted? He begged Magritte for an explanation:

"I am so depressed that I cannot yet get used to it. It may be a masterpiece, but every time I look at it I feel ill.... It leaves me helpless, it puzzles me, it makes me feel confused and I don't know if I like it."

One has to admire this freshness of perception in a man who also represented Max Ernst and was no stranger to disturbing imagery.  Perhaps Iolas’s honesty disarmed Magritte. “Well, this is proof of the effectiveness of the picture,” he replied. “A picture which is really alive should make the spectator feel ill.”

from an article by Regina Marler

The New York Review

October 25, 2018

aug 8 | the feast of the holy crossing

 

mary reuffle | i would rather wonder than know

It used to be if you were having dinner with people and someone said, “Who’s the fastest animal on earth?” An amazing conversation would ensue. And now someone pops their phone out and looks up the answer. And it breaks my heart….

Mary Reuffle

photos | william eggleston

 

self-portrait

more Eggleston here

photo | prarthna singh | my mother in her garden

 

The Guardian

photo | michael pasche | gct deltaport

 

hugh gallagher | college admissions essay

3A. ESSAY: IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:

ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?

---

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. 

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. 

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. 

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me. 

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. 

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis. 

But I have not yet gone to college.

*

"It seems that Hugh Gallagher wrote this for a national writing contest, and that an Urban Legend has since arisen that he wrote it as an actual application essay.

"18 June 1998, update. Hugh Gallagher emailed me(!), and said: "I was happy to see my college essay on your site (by the the way, I did send it to colleges)". So that's that Urban Legend laid to rest, then? He also said "... and my first novel, Teeth, was published by Pocket Books this Spring. ... It's a coming of age tale about a guy with really messed up teeth, who goes travelling around the world instead of fixing his mouth." If it's told with anything like the style and wit of what follows, it should be great!"

Susan Stepney, 
Professor of Computer Science, University of York, UK

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm

shelley roden | i had fun making it

The cue sheet for “Lightyear” had more than a thousand entries. Not every cue would make it into the final mix, a reality the team addressed with admirable ego detachment. When a sound gets cut or drowned out, Roden told me, she tries to take the attitude “I had fun making it. I loved it. It was loved at one point.”

Shelley Roden, sound effects artist

ramon kubicek | bees of the invisible

Bees of the Invisible

In a 1925 letter the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of the artist’s task in transforming objects into art: “We are the bees of the invisible. We…gather the honey of the visible in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” [qtd in notes (p. 70) to Duino Elegies, North Point Press, 2001]. This task of working with materiality until it becomes a part of our inner lives and then offering it up to the world as “honey” or “art” is not about making money or a big social splash. It is about receiving, and then giving, to others, to the gods, a gift.

I like Rilke’s articulation. Art and honey. It might be easy to see each as non-essential, until one imagines them gone from the world. Today, we live in a time of ecological stress and our heedless treatment and killing of bees threatens both the natural world and our own survival. This mistreatment exists in parallel with our loss of inner life and our confusion about the role of art.

People have been making art for at least 10,000 years. The earliest cave paintings celebrate the sacred and the wondrous, be that through healing, giving thanks, or supplication to the gods.

Bee cultivation and honey gathering are at least 8,000 years old. Cave paintings in Spain show bees and the collection of honey. Other petroglyphs suggest that people collected honey from as long ago as 10,000 years. So, making art and raising bees for honey have a similarly ancient past.

We also know that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians built their temples on sites belonging to specific gods, and created temple art and rituals (afterwards changing to dramatic plays) to such an exacting standard that their enactment would attract the presence of the sacred. The theory being that the god had no choice but to come if the preparations were perfect. (See Jane Harrison on the theory of “dromenon”).

What a wonderful basis for the making of art! And wherever there are people gathered to appreciate art, the theory goes, the sacred is present—as long as the mood is not too somber or overly serious. The belief in such a construction maintained ancient Greek culture. People went to the ancient Greek drama festivals to see their favorite plays. In the process they might experience catharsis, healing, transformation and entertainment.

Similarly people have consumed honey for thousands of years because of its sweetness and as a base for herbal medicines. Bees were also studied as builders of communities and it has long been known their collection of pollen allowed for the fertilization of plants—both flowers and food-bearing crops. Bees do what they do; they gather, they transform. Honey is the result.

When Rilke writes in his letter that the artist enters the realm of the invisible (feelings, imaginings, spirit) as part of the process of making art, he is not simply referring to the work of great artists. Anyone who dedicates himself or herself to this process is included in this transformation. This process is seen as similar to collecting pollen for the making of honey. The resulting art, honey, is a gift.

In these paintings, I have explored the idea of making art and how it might connect to other activities, states, and even other realms.

I have deliberately chosen a bright, searing palette, using oil paint, acrylics, oil sticks, crayons, pens, minerals, glass, collage of drawings, and occasional photo fragments. I gather materials and mix them with intensity. And then I offer up.

artist's statement

ramonkubicekart.com

Byzantium

Divo Goes Swimming

Melissae

Bee Lines

lauren groff on flannery o'connor

In some ways, I’m a Southern writer (though not exclusively one), and I think it’d be impossible to be any kind of Southern writer writing about the nineteen-fifties without thinking of Flannery O'Connor. I have a deeply complicated relationship with her work; though I do feel in conversation with it, it’s not always a civil conversation. Sometimes, it’s a blistering argument. I love so much about O’Connor—her wit, her daggers, her fury—and, at the same time, I also find her brand of Catholicism hard to take, or maybe internally incongruent, since her stories read to me as if she actually ascribes to the Calvinist idea of double predestination, that God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned. I get the impression that she sees nearly everyone as already damned, which strikes me as both cynical and fundamentally untrue. I love human beings enough to trust that they will try to do their best, and will always be disappointed when their worst selves take over. I think we’re all equally saved and damned, and all of our dark and light angels wrestle ceaselessly, and there will never be a clear winner even at the moment of death. In the case of some artists, those same angels will keep wrestling in the work after death, as long as there is an audience to witness it.

the new yorker, july 4, 2022

conversation about her short story To Sunland

tim klein | the mercy-go-round

 

tim klein

ian frazier | bullshit detector

I do not have a bullshit detector. I used to have one, but I don’t even know where it is anymore—maybe out in the garage. It was an awkward thing, like one of those little roll-aboard briefcases, but made of bright-orange high-impact plastic, and it didn’t work very well. It was O.K. on ordinary, everyday bullshit, but it could not detect cant. It was also not too reliable on sanctimony or pomposity, and only so-so on hypocrisy. Supposedly, it could puncture self-importance, but I could never get that feature to turn on. Over all, the detector was more trouble than it was worth, so I quit using it.

I read recently about someone who had a “built-in” bullshit detector! I am completely unable to picture how that might work, but, then, I would not be the person to ask. Kids, I’m told, have built-in bullshit detectors, so maybe you need to be young. Like a lot of older consumers, I have not kept up on the technology. 

Living without a bullshit detector can be peaceful and relaxing. As you know, there is a lot of bullshit out there, and I got sick of having the alarm go off all the time. On the other hand, I do feel a need for the ol’ detector occasionally.

etc...

Ian Frazier

The New Yorker | May 30, 2022

tomas transtromer | allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

 

The keys are ready.  Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

 

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

 

I shove my hands in my hadynpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

 

I raise my haydnflag.  The signal is:

"We do not surrender.  But want peace."

 

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

 

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

 

 

by Tomas Transtromer

tr Robert Bly

tomas transtromer | the scattered congregation`

I.
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.

II.
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.

III.
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.

IV.
But the church bells have gone underground.
They're hanging in the sewage pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.

V.
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address.  Who's got the Address?
Don't know.  But that's where we're going.


tr. Robert Bly

karina svalya | approaching union square

 

approaching union square