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Monday, January 21, 2019

Mary Oliver: The Most Regretful People Are Those Who Did Not Nourish Their Creative Power

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Alan: Thanks to friend Tig for drawing my attention to Mary Oliver's passing.

Mary Oliver
Wikiquotes
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_Oliver


The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity“world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration arises.

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But just as self-criticism is the most merciless kind of criticism and self-compassion the most elusive kind of compassion, self-distraction is the most hazardous kind of distraction, and the most difficult to protect creative work against.
How to hedge against that hazard is what beloved poet Mary Oliver explores in a wonderful piece titled “Of Power and Time,” found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays (public library).

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Mary Oliver
Oliver writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIt is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.
Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.
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Echoing Borges’s puzzlement over our divided personhood, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self in order to understand its parallel capacities for focused creative flow and merciless interruption. She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity(“The child I was,” she writes, “is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”); the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.
The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists — it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides. She writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngCertainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
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Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngSay you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
[…]
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

"My work is loving the world."

Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist’s work cannot be separated from the artist’s whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written beautifully about how habit gives shape to but must not control our inner lives).

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Echoing Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” Dani Shapiro’s insistence that the artist’s task is “to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s counsel that as an artist you ought to be “keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Oliver considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIntellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
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In a sentiment that calls to mind Van Gogh’s spirited letter on risk-taking and how inspired mistakes move us forward, Oliver returns to the question of the conditions that coax the creative self into being:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngNo one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
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Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngOf this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.
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She returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the ultimate form, of consecration:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.
[…]
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
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Upstream is a tremendously vitalizing read in its totality, grounding and elevating at the same time. Complement it with Oliver on love and its necessary wildnesswhat attention really means, and the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Jane Hirshfield on the difficult art of concentration.

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Saturday, January 19, 2019

"Shep Smith Fact-Checks Fellow Fox News Host Christ Wallace To His Face Over Shutdown"

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"Shep Smith Fact-Checks Fellow Fox News Host Christ Wallace To His Face Over Shutdown"
Wallace said “both sides” were to blame for the government shutdown. Smith vehemently disagreed.

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Fact Check: "Trump’s Desperate, Nonsensical Claim That Mexico Is Paying For The Wall"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/01/president-trumps-desperate-nonsensical.html

Pat Buchanan On Vladimir Putin

Pat Buchanan: "In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. | made w/ Imgflip meme maker
Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong" 



"Trump Pleads Fifth"

"Sorry Gentlemen, I Plead The Fifth." | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

"Trump's Blinding Blizzard Of Bullshit": A Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts


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"Could The Pope's Call To End The Death Penalthy Keep Catholics Off Juries"

Supposed "Religious Rights" Let "Christians" Refuse To Bake Cakes For Gay People. But Religious Opposition To The Death Penalty Bans Christi | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

"Could The Pope's Call To End The Death Penalthy Keep Catholics Off Juries"
By Aliza Cover  •   Read more »

"Indiana, A Great Place To Be A Bigot!" Excellent Video Spoof

Indiana's "Religious Bigotry Law": The Re-Legalization Of Segregation

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George Will: "The Shabbiest U.S. President Ever Is An Inexpressibly Sad Specimen"

"The Shabbiest U.S. President Ever Is An Inexpressibly Sad Specimen" George F. Will | made w/ Imgflip meme maker
"The Shabbiest U.S. President Ever Is An Inexpressibly Sad Specimen"

George Will

January 18, 2019
Half or a quarter of the way through this interesting experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation has become accustomed to daily mortifications. Or has lost its capacity for embarrassment, which is even worse.
If the country’s condition is calibrated simply by economic data — if, that is, the United States is nothing but an economy — then the state of the union is good. Except that after two years of unified government under the party that formerly claimed to care about fiscal facts and rectitude, the nation faces a $1 trillion deficit during brisk growth and full employment. Unless the president has forever banished business cycles — if he has, his modesty would not have prevented him from mentioning it — the next recession will begin with gargantuan deficits, which will be instructive.
The president has kept his promise not to address the unsustainable trajectory of the entitlement state (about the coming unpleasant reckoning, he said: “Yeah, but I won’t be here”), and his party’s congressional caucuses have elevated subservience to him into a political philosophy. The Republican-controlled Senate — the world’s most overrated deliberative body — will not deliberate about, much less pass, legislation the president does not favor. The evident theory is that it would be lese-majeste for the Senate to express independent judgments.
And that senatorial dignity is too brittle to survive the disapproval of a president not famous for familiarity with actual policies. Congressional Republicans have their ears to the ground — never mind Winston Churchill’s observation that it is difficult to look up to anyone in that position.









The president’s most consequential exercise of power has been the abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, opening the way for China to fill the void of U.S. involvement. His protectionism — government telling Americans what they can consume, in what quantities and at what prices — completes his extinguishing of the limited-government pretenses of the GOP, which needs an entirely new vocabulary. Pending that, the party is resorting to crybaby conservatism: We are being victimized by “elites,” markets, Wall Street, foreigners, etc.
After 30 years of U.S. diplomatic futility regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the artist of the deal spent a few hours in Singapore with Kim Jong Un, then tweeted: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” What price will the president pay — easing sanctions? ending joint military exercises with South Korea? — in attempts to make his tweet seem less dotty?
By his comportment, the president benefits his media detractors with serial vindications of their disparagements. They, however, have sunk to his level of insufferable self-satisfaction by preening about their superiority to someone they consider morally horrifying and intellectually cretinous. For most Americans, President Donald Trump’s expostulations are audible wallpaper, always there but not really noticed. Still, the ubiquity of his outpourings in the media’s outpourings gives American life its current claustrophobic feel. This results from many journalists considering him an excuse for a four-year sabbatical from thinking about anything other than the shiny thing that mesmerizes them by dangling himself in front of them.
Dislike of him should be tempered by this consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad specimen. It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump. He seems to have as many friends as his pluperfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in an entirely transactional life. His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a house where much magnificent history has been made. His childlike ignorance — preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion — concerning governance and economics guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartner at a seminar on string theory.
Which is why this fountain of self-refuting boasts (“I have a very good brain”) lies so much. He does so less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself. And as balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his likely contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters’ loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.
Either the electorate, bored with a menu of faintly variant servings of boorishness, or the 22nd Amendment will end this, our shabbiest but not our first shabby presidency. As Mark Twain and fellow novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside together one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked, “Do you think it will stop?” Twain replied, “It always has.”
The Washington Post
George F. Will is a Washington Post columnist.

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Alan: Trump's fundamental preachment is that greed -- and the purchasable pleasures that go with it -- are good things, admirable ends; indeed, virtues rather than vices.
And the relentlessly-conditioned "consumer units" fall in lockstep line, actually believing gold-plated toilet seats are reason for adulation rather than embarrassment that homo sapiens could sink so low.

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Ex-Trumpista Ann Coulter Lambastes Trump's "Joke Presidency Scam" - "No Legacy Whatsoever"


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Trump's Full-Throttled Promotion Of Greed, Traditionally One Of Christianity's "7 Deadly Sins"

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St. Paul The Apostle Comments On Trump's Greed


Trump's Remarkable Basketball Skill

Compendium Of Best Pax Posts About The Relationship Between Trump And Putin
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Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts On Trump, Putin And Russian Meddling

In Rural America Vladimir Putin Is Decidedly More Popular Than ANY Democrat

Trump Will Go Full-Throttle Fascist Following The First Major Terror Attack.
Putin Knows This. (He Also Knows How To Hack The United States.)

The Borowitz Report: "Putin Starting To Wonder If His Puppets Are Smart Enough To Pull This Off"

Trump’s Russian Laundromat
Trump's Impedance Of FBI Investigation Of Russia's Electoral Manipulation. 
Villainy Or Treason?

Azerbaijan: Will The Construction Of This "Trump Hotel" Topple Despicable Donald?

Melania Takes Government Jet To Mar-A-Largo During Government Shutdown

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Melania Takes Government Jet To Mar-A-Largo During Government Shutdown Hours After Trump Denied Jet To Nancy Pelosi
(If Hillary had done this, it would have triggered an investigation as long and impassioned as Benghazi.)

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PBS: Melania Trump Worked In U.S. Without Visa; Took Jobs Away From Native Born Americans And Immigrants Who Got In Line  

If Trump Wins And Your Kids Google "First Lady," Here's What They'll Get
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/08/if-trump-wins-and-your-kids-google.html
This Is America's "Christian" Candidate. Take A Good Look. Call The Kids!
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/11/this-is-americas-christian-candidate.html

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