Middle Season#9

 

Gottman relationship questions

 How would you answer them?

1. Do you and your partner engage in outside interests together?

a. All of the time

b. Some of the time

c. Very rarely

d. Never

This question is from the section of the Adviser that measures overall relationship satisfaction. Understanding if you and your partner spend time together doing new and exciting activities is an important factor in measuring your relationship happiness. 

2. I can list my partner's major aspirations and hopes in life.

a. True

b. False

This question measures Love Maps. We use this term to describe the part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life. Happy couples remember major events in each other’s history, and they keep updating their information as the facts and feelings change.

3. I would say that we still have our tender and passionate moments.

a. True

b. False

This question helps us measure intimacy, sex, and passion. The quality of your sex life is important to overall relationship health, and helps us determine if this is an area of opportunity in your relationship.

4. Our conflicts seem to come out of nowhere.

a. Never

b. Almost Never

c. Sometimes

d. Almost Always

e. Always

This question measures conflict management. Questions like this one allow us to understand how you handle issues that arise, which in turn provides a snapshot of the effectiveness of conflict management, compromise, and repair in your relationship.

5. I feel confident that I will stay in this relationship even if we go through hard times.

a. Strongly Agree

b. Agree

c. Neutral

d. Disagree

e. Strongly Disagree

This question measures levels of trust and commitment in your relationship. Trust and commitments are the building blocks of strong, healthy connections. 

Mostly positive answers may indicate that your relationship is on the right track. On the flip side, if your answers are neutral or negative, you may need to identify your areas of opportunity.

Committed to Yourself

Mikiko Noji

Leo Babuata writes about how we let ourselves down; we commit to doing something - like meditation practice - then don't follow through.  

While it is easy to show up to appointments we make with other people … I’ve noticed that most people struggle with commitments they make with themselves.

If you say you’re going to exercise, meditate, write, journal, work on a project … but then you don’t stick to that commitment … it can feel like you’re letting yourself down.

We start to form the mental habit of letting ourselves off the hook, so that we don’t trust ourselves to stick to our own commitments, if other people aren’t involved. This creates a belief that we aren’t as important to ourselves as other people are.

These suggestions make sense:

1. Make a date with yourself. 
2. Treat it as sacred. As I said, don’t treat it lightly — we often treat our commitments to ourselves as something that don’t matter, that can be pushed back without consequence. But what if this were a sacred appointment? Something elevated beyond the ordinary, that we treat as really important to us? Something that is a way to honor ourselves and our best intentions? Something that we’ll even enjoy!
3. Bring a sense of curiosity, play, appreciation.

To affect the quality of the day

Shiro Kasamatsu

I've been listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn pandemic youtube videos.  This is from #33.

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

We need to "tune our own instrument"

How do we get out of bed?  with drive, anxiety or with wakefulness?

We need to see appreciation, beauty, mystery, wonder, bewilderment, delight, curiosity, playfulness

When the Earth Started to Sing

 David George Haskell in Emergence Magazine: "When the Earth Started to Sing" (link)

This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forest to oceans to human music—emerge from life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination.

We recommend that you listen with good headphones if you can. Let your ears experience, explore, and enjoy in an open-ended way.

The essay traces "terrestrial sound" from the elements to simple pre-historic creatures to humans.  When he gets to humans, there's this great section about musical instruments which all rely on "interbeing" of humans and animals and plants (bones of animals, skin of animals, wood, hair of animals, even plastic from ancient animals).  I think inter-being is a Thich Nhat Hanh word.  The simple essay becomes a meditation on inter-being and a call to be grateful for our inter-being and with the "blessings' of rich forest sounds.  

Here are some transcriptions from a second listen:

we "merge our bodies with substances of other bodies" to make music with musical instruments.  "Bird bones animated with breath" A relationship to other species: skins on drums, metal ores, hair in bows.

But, "we hide or are unaware of ecological connections."  We are "immersed in inter-being"; "we draw ancient sunlight" (from coal)

We are in a "crisis of inattention and disconnection"... Through "choice, apathy, dislocations of global economy"... "sensory disconnection"

"sensual embodied understanding"

"If we listened, would we tolerate..."

I'm guessing it's been adapted from his new book Sounds Wild and Broken

Weekly State of the Union Conversation

 The State of the Union is a time to reflect on the relationship and share both things that are working well and things that need to be addressed. What I see with the couples I work with is that things build up over time and lead to either big fights or distance. Having a State of the Union conversation can help you stay connected and engaged in your relationship in an otherwise distracting world. 

So, what does this conversation look like? The State of the Union has four parts to it. They are as follows: 

Give one another 5 appreciations 

In the first part of the meeting, take turns sharing five things your partner did in the past week that you appreciated. Note what the positive trait means about your partner. For example,  “I appreciate how considerate you were this past week when you picked up the clothes from the dry cleaners when I ran out of time.”

Talk about what went right in the relationship

Next, take some time to discuss together what is working, improving, or going well in the relationship. For example, perhaps your family faced difficult stress this past week and you both worked well as a team in navigating it. Or maybe you were both good at scheduling date night and following through. This would be the place to say so. Acknowledging the work you and your partner put into the relationship will help you stay motivated to continue.  

Select an issue to talk about or process any regrettable incidents  

At this point, take turns sharing any concerns you may have from the past week. Conflict is inevitable and necessary in any relationship. When handled constructively, it will leave you feeling more connected. For that to happen, you must work on attuning to one another. 

To help you stay attuned to one another, Dr. John Gottman has developed an  acronym to easily remember what to do during these conversations: 

Awareness – of your partners feeling and experience 

Tolerance – that there are two different valid viewpoints for negative emotions

Turning Toward – recognizing your partner’s need and turning toward it

Understanding – attempting to understand your partners’ experience and their perspective 

Non-defensive Listening – listening to your partner’s perspective without concentrating on victimizing yourself or reversing the blame 

Empathy – responding to your partner with an understanding, awareness, and sensitivity to their experience and needs 

To attune to one another, you should take turns being Speaker and Listener. When it is your turn to share, it is your job as Speaker to express your feelings and needs without blaming or criticizing your partner. To do this effectively, you can follow the rules for a softened start-up.  

I feel… (share what emotions you have such as worried, scared, sad,  lonely, hurt, etc.) 

…about what… (share the situation you are concerned about, not what’s wrong  with your partner) 

I need… (express what you need in positive terms, i.e., what you need to happen versus what you don’t like that is currently happening) 

This can look like: “I am feeling tired and overwhelmed from cooking the past seven nights. I need us to come up with a plan for this coming week where we  share the cooking or eat out more.” 

When you are the Listener, it is your job to listen non-defensively and help your partner feel heard and understood.

What can I do next week to make you feel more loved? 

Lastly, you end your State of the Union discussion by each sharing one thing your partner can do to help you feel connected in the coming week. Share what you want to see happen. For example, you may share, “One thing that would help me feel more loved in the coming week is if we spent some time cuddling in bed on Saturday morning.” 

Check-in weekly

When couples make the time on a weekly basis to check in with one another, it helps you both feel heard, understood, and appreciated in the relationship. It prevents issues from building up and gives you space and time to practice solving problems together. 

Foot Arch Sterngtheners

 Outside magazine https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/fallen-arches-overpronation-workout-moves/

Meditations on Interbeing

 “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

“Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be”, we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Inside the tree leaf are different species of bacteria, millions of individual bacterial cells, fungi, nematodes and if these inhabitants of the leaf are taken away the leaf can no longer function.

This is also true for roots below ground. The root is made from conversation – between bacteria, fungi and the plant cell themselves. There is communication at the most intimate level, at the level of DNA from one cell to another. They are exchanging information, they are exchanging material. So the tree is a nexus, a hub for a set of relationships.

In fact, just to call something a tree, a noun – a singular being is wrong. This individuality is an illusion. All trees exist only in relationship. So do people.“

— David George Haskell

 I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.

- Martin Buber, I and Thou

Gratitude Prompts

 

1. A strength of mine for which I am grateful is...
2. Something money can't buy that I'm grateful for is...
3. Something that comforts me that I'm grateful for is...
4. Something that's funny for which I'm grateful for is...
5. Something in nature that I'm grateful for is...
6. A memory I'm grateful for is...
7. Something that changes that I'm grateful for is...  
8. A challenge I'm grateful for is... 
9. Something interesting that I'm grateful for is... 
10. Something beautiful I'm grateful for is...

The Beauty of Relationships, Friendship, Love

Shiro Kasamatsu

I've been listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn pandemic youtube videos.  This is from Episode #33.

Not knowing what we don't know... this is why we need each other... to point out to us where we're blind.  This is the beauty of relationships, of friendship, of love.  It's illuminating, liberating when we don't take it personally.

5 Ways to Simplify

Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom (1890) 

 

Leo Babauta writes about "5 Ways to Simplify Your Life"

1. Curate your day.  This process starts with identifying the things you want in your day, as if you were curating a small but thoughtful collection. What handful of things would make your day amazing? For me: meditation, reading, writing, calls with team & clients, time with loved ones, simple foods and movement. Whittle it down so your day isn’t overly full. Then start to let go of everything not on the list. Let go of social media and news sites and other distractions, if they don’t fit into your curated day. Let go of doing too much, leaving space so that the curated lovely activities feel spacious and not rushed.
2. Start living in fullscreen mode. My favorite way of going through my day is to do every activity in fullscreen mode. When I can remember. That means if I’m answering emails, I give myself full space to read and reply to each email instead of having a thousand tabs open. If I’m writing, I’m just writing. If I’m eating, I’m just eating. Fully be present for every activity, from brushing your teeth to washing a dish to reading a book.
3. Weekly clearing ritual.  Each week, you might consider a ritual where you clear everything out. Sunday is a good day for it, but so is Friday.  Spend a short time clearing out your various inboxes, getting them to zero. Clear out your desk and computer desktop/download folder. Get your todo list and calendar in good shape. Clear out clutter and papers.
4. Eat simple foods & move.  Make a list of simple foods you enjoy, and base your eating on these. Don’t be crazy strict about it, it’s about eating simply not being rigid. Move every day, throughout the day.
5. Slow down & enjoy quietude. You don’t need any material things in order to slow down. You just do less, and savor each activity. Take some breaths, and give yourself more space. Leave space between things, and enjoy that in between space. Notice when there are moments of quiet, and savor that as well. Create moments of quiet if needed.

Middle season #8

 

Recent Meditation Instructions

When you re-read a book, you hear and understand different things.  Different things land with you.  I've been finding the same thing while I'm listening to guided meditations.  Even though I've listened to them many times, I "hear" different things.

(note: during February I created a monthly schedule of guided meditations that I listen to in the morning... each day of the week has a different guide... and I have 5 different meditations from each of the guides)

Goldstein - the wanting mind

• settle back : open to different sensations as they appear, being aware of thoughts appearing and disappearing
• getting stuck "in the wanting"... wanting/expecting to get things from our practice... make a mental note: "expecting" "wanting"
• notice the attitude of 'wanting' or 'desire': see how it arises and passes away
• creates space for wise discernment

Salzburg - LK in your body

• in the spirit of gift giving, in embracing not rejecting

Tara Brach

• regard what arises with kindness and gentleness
• "receptivity"
• sense the quality of your heart

Patrick Briody

• set intention
• feel appreciation for this opportunity
• notice if there's any internal 'quarrel'

Jon Kabat-Zinn - #33

• listen to what is here to be heard, even the silence
• invitation to get out of our own way
• this is all we've got; can we make maximal use of it by inhabited awareness?
• nature of our attention and relationship to experience
• it's just life emerging and being met with wakefulness

Reframing and Cognitive Distortions

Reframing is: (according to the APA) n. a process of reconceptualizing a problem by seeing it from a different perspective. Altering the conceptual or emotional context of a problem often serves to alter perceptions of the problem's difficulty and to open up possibilities for solving it.  In psychotherapy, for example, the manner in which a client initially frames a problem may be self-defeating. Part of the therapist’s response might be to reframe the problem and the thoughts or feelings that the client associates with it, so as to provide alternative ways to evaluate it. 

It's easy to get into the mindset that your outlook is the only way to look at a problem. Cognitive reframing teaches you to ask yourself questions like, "Is there another way to look at this situation?" or, "What are some other possible reasons this could have happened?" Pointing out alternatives can help you see things from another view.

Don't try to deny or invalidate what you are feeling. If you are helping a child or teen reframe a situation, remember to validate their feelings by saying, "I know you are nervous that she hasn't called you back. I know when I feel nervous I always imagine the worst-case scenarios but often, those things I imagine aren't even true."

Here's a recent example:  At work, Lisa did some on-the-spot refaming: "He said (after we read the text), "this is last year - we already know this stuff" and I said, "so .... you feel reaffirmed in your practices" and Mal said, "you were just therapized by Elo."

Carla complains bitterly that her mother is overly involved in her life, constantly nagging her about what she should be doing. In attempting to shift Carla's negative view of her mother, the therapist offers this reframe: "Isn't it loving of your mother to teach you ways to take care of yourself so you'll be prepared to live on your own without her?"

A person in individual therapy is struggling to accept the limitations of having a chronic illness. The therapist attempts to reframe how they view their illness by saying, "Can you think of your illness as a built-in reminder to take care of your health throughout your life?"

A man is upset that he wasn't chosen for a promotion. The therapist asks him what positive things could come from not being promoted.

While you can practice cognitive reframing on your own, it requires time, effort, and patience. It may be challenging to be honest with yourself and spot the negative thought patterns getting in your way on your own. When you know what to be on the lookout for, however, it becomes easier.

Some common cognitive distortions, or tendencies and patterns of thinking or believing, that can cause negative thought patterns include:

• All-or-nothing thinking: Seeing situations in absolute terms
• Blaming: Attributing complex problems to a single cause
• Catastrophizing: Always imaging the worst thing that can happen in any situation
• Discounting the positive: Ignoring or discounting the good things that happen to you
• Mental filters: Focusing only on the negatives and never on the positives
• "Should" statements: Always feeling like you've failed to live up to expectations of what you "should" do in a situation

Circle all the nouns

 From Verlyn Klinkenborg's "Several Short Sentences"...

Copy or print out a couple of pages by an author whose work you like.
(For example, the opening of John McPhee's Coming into the Country.)
Gather some colored pens or pencils.
Choose one color and circle all the nouns.
Pause to consider them.
Then choose a differenct color and circle all the verbs.
Ditto the articles, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections."

***
Now perform the same experiment with an author whose work has a different feel.
(Try Joan Didion's essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.)

Try it again with a page from a different context --
A business article or a best seller or a critical essay in an academic journal.

What do you find?
Different patterns of usage, different lexicons,
Which create, in turn different textures and rhythms in the sentences themselves.

Try the same experiment on some pages of your own prose.
What do you notice?

Make some comparitive lists:
How does the menagerie of Didion's nous compare
with the menagerie of McPhee's nouns or the nouns in a critical essay or a business article -- 
or omething you're writing? 

A pinpoint of awareness

From "Several Short Sentences About..." by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Is it possible to practice noticing?
I think so.
But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning
And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself.
Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world,
Rathing than siphoning the world into you
In order to transmute it into words.

Practing noticing will also help you learn more about patience
And the nature of your mind.
Noticing means thinking with all your senses.
It's also an exercise in not writing.

So what is noticing?
A pinpoint of awareness,
The detail that stands out amid all the details.
It's catching your sleeve on the thorn of the thing you notice
And paying attention as you free yourself.

What do you notice? Whatever you notice.
Behavior, thought, overheard words, light, resemblance,
Emotion, totality, particularity,
Whatever you find in the habitat of your perceptions,
Anything, no matter how minute,
Whether you're working or reading or taking the subway.
The pattern is particular to you,
An element in what gets construed as "style."

Rushing to notice never works,
Nor does trying to notice.
Attention requires a cunning passivity.

Let yourself wonder why this thing, this instant, this suddennes, caught your attention.
What you're noticing isn't only what struck you.
It's also how your mind, your attention, gets from place to place,
From the steady current of your thoughts to their sudden interruption.

Notice what you notice and let it go. 

Turn every sentence into its own para graph

From Verlyn Klinkenborg - "Several Short Sentences About Writing"

Here's another way to make your prose look less familiar.

Turn every sentence into its own paragraph.

(Hit Return after every period. If writing by hand, begin each new sentence at the left margin.)

What happens?

A sudden, graphic display of the length of your sentences

And, better yet, their relative length how it varies, or doesn't vary, from one to the next.

Variation is the life of prose, in length and in structure.

Having all your sentences in a column, one above the other, makes them easier to examine.

Suddenly you see similarities in shape.

You notice, for instance, how your sentences cling to each other

Instead of accepting their separateness.

And you can begin to stand koto/to retimple one,

that will help you understand how to revise

And make better sentences.

How many sentences begin with the subject?

How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject?

Or with a word like "When" or "Since" or "While" "Because"?

How many begin with "There" or "It"?

What kinds of nouns do you see?

Abstractions? Generalizations?

Multisyllabic Latinate nouns ending in "ion",

Or are they the solid names of actual things?

Is the subject of the sentence an actor capable of performing the action of the verb?

Can you adjust the sentence so it is?

Or does the subject of the sentence hide the action of entities that are able to act--humans, for instance?

How close is the subject to its verb?

Are they separated by an inserted phrase?

What does that do to the velocity of the sentence?

How many of the verbs are variants of "to be" "are,» "were,» "was,”1S," and so on?

Are the verbs active, energetic?

Or do they merely connect or arrange or present of relate?

Are the constructions passive?

How often does the word "as" appear, and in  which ofits many senses?

If there's a modifying phrase at the start of the sentence,

does it modify the subject of the sentence? (It must.)

Can the sentence be broken in two or three?

Do these questions sound overly technical to you?

They're basic.

The reader in your imagination

 From Klinkborg "Several Short Sentences"

When your prose beings to stiffen and your thoughts get stuffy, it's sometimes worth reworking the piece you're working as if it were a letter or a long e-mail to a friend, someone who knows you well but hasn't seen you in a while.  What happens? The prose relaxes, the sentences grow more informal. You remember to use contractions. Even the words grow shorter. Suddenly things are clearer and simpler and more direct, as if they were being spoken.  

But something else happens too.  There's suddenly a wider variety of tone, an emotional latitude, a sense that the reader will be able to fill in the gaps, even the possibility of humor.  

...

The reader you construct in your imagination changes the way you write almost without your noticing it.

What exactly am I trying to say?

 Klinkenborg:

It's always useful to ask yourself, "What exactly am I trying to say?"  The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.

Will You Change My Mind?

 

from Adam Grant

An Edited Bible

 Thomas Jefferson made his own Bible, cut-and-pasted from the original:

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper — alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

“I have performed the operation for my own use,” he continued, “by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill.”

We maybe should all make our own Bibles, cutting-and-pasting from the wisdom literature of our choice.  Here's a passage from the Leaves of Grass U of Iowa site that connects a well-know Psalm to one of Whitman's core tropes: 

An Iraqi theater director once told me that on a visit to New York City he deliberately bumped into several people on the sidewalk to gauge their reactions. Americans, he concluded, always apologize—an observation that might have amused Whitman, who would likely not have begged forgiveness, and might well have surprised the stranger by embracing him. “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” the Psalmist sings—an imperative that Whitman follows according to his own lights in his psalm of the democratic self, substituting Life for Lord, seeing things in this section through the agency of touch, tasting the world. He does not shy away from anyone.   link

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much?

From Section 2 of Song of Myself:

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

This section of the poem, directed to the reader, promises
that spending time with the poet will open the reader's eyes, 
will help get at truth.

Middle Season #7

 

On an unseasonably warm Saturday (69 degrees) I see couple of flocks of sandhill cranes headed NW. winter aconite (with closed blossoms) at a house near central and maple in WS... more winter bloomers: witch hazel in LG; milkweed seedpods burnished by a winter outside.

"It was one of those March days 

when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold;

when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade."  

                ― Charles Dickens,  Great Expectations

It’s nothing, but the sky is so beautiful

Mikiko Noji

it's nothing
only
the sky
is so beautiful
-Mikio Inoue

Life Paths Open to You

Alastair Humphries shared this on Twitter.  It makes me think of Ellen Langer's Mindfulness idea about old folks whose life seems better when they reflect on their day and think about a variety of paths they did not follow... when they focused on choices they had in life.

Also, this quote from Twitter: “You’re always one decision away from a totally different life.”

Close Reading: W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux-Arts"

 

New York Times has an awesome "Close Reading" feature.  I've noted it before.  Here's one, at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, about W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux-Arts",

No separation between "me" and "awareness"

From JKZ lockdown meditation #33 (link) This happens at roughly 20 minutes in:

Listen to what is here to be heard, even the silence

It's just life emerging

Meet it with wakefulness 

It's an invitation to get out of our own way

This is all we've got; can we make maximal use of it by inhabiting our awareness?

So there's no separation between what we call "me" and what we call "awareness"

Conjuring into existence: Enargeia

Word of the day: "enargeia" - the quality of extreme vividness, radiance or present-ness (Greek ἐνεργής; "visible", "manifest"). 

In rhetoric, a description so vivid it seems to conjure its subject into existence; so powerful it evokes the (unbearable) brightness of being. 

(Robert Macfarlane's word of the day tweet)

John Updike's Description

"In our kitchen, he would bolt his orange juice (squeezed on one of those ribbed glass sombreros and then poured off through a strainer) and grab a bite of toast (the toaster a simple tin box, a kind of little hut with slit and slanted sides, that rested over a gas burner and browned one side of the bread, in stripes, at a time), and then he would dash, so hurriedly that his necktie flew back over his shoulder, down through our yard, past the grapevines hung with buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, to the yellow brick building, with its tall smokestack and wide playing fields, where he taught."

(John Updike, "My Father on the Verge of Disgrace." Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, 2000)

Gretel Ehrlich's Description

"Mornings, a transparent pane of ice lies over the meltwater. I peer through and see some kind of waterbug-perhaps a leech-paddling like a sea turtle between green ladders of lakeweed. Cattails and sweetgrass from the previous summer are bone dry, marked with black mold spots, and bend like elbows into the ice. They are swords that cut away the hard tenancy of winter. At the wide end a mat of dead waterplants has rolled back into a thick, impregnable breakwater. Near it, bubbles trapped under the ice are lenses focused straight up to catch the coming season."

(Gretel Ehrlich, "Spring." Antaeus, 1986)

Iago's Enargia in Shakespeare's Othello

What shall I say? Where's satisfaction?

It is impossible you should see this,

Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,

As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross

As ignorance made drunk. But yet, I say,

If imputation and strong circumstances,

Which lead directly to the door of truth,

Will give you satisfaction, you may have't. . . .

I do not like the office:

But, sith I am enter'd in this cause so far,

Prick'd to't by foolish honesty and love,

I will go on. I lay with Cassio lately;

And, being troubled with a raging tooth,

I could not sleep.

There are a kind of men so loose of soul,

That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:

One of this kind is Cassio:

In sleep I heard him say "Sweet Desdemona,

Let us be wary, let us hide our loves";

And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,

Cry "O sweet creature!" and then kiss me hard,

As if he pluck'd up kisses by the roots

That grew upon my lips: then laid his leg

Over my thigh, and sigh'd, and kiss'd; and then

Cried "Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!"

(Iago in Act 3, scene 3 of Othello by William Shakespeare)

"When [Othello] threatens to turn his fury against Iago, as he spasmodically doubts his own torrents of doubt, Iago now lets loose upon the audience Shakespeare's best rhetoric of enargia, in bringing the particulars of infidelity before Othello's, and thus the audience's, very eyes, first obliquely, then finally by his lie that implicates Desdemona in the lascivious movements and treacherous mutterings attributed to Cassio in his sleep."

(Kenneth Burke, "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method." Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955, ed.

by William H. Rueckert. Parlor Press, 2007)

Song of Myself project and online class

 

U of Iowa Song of Myself project

The idea behind the project was to have a conversation, across languages, borders, and time zones, about the multiple meanings of this foundational text. For 52 weeks between fall of 2012 and 2013, Professor Ed Folsom, co-director of the Whitman Archive and Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program, exchanged a foreword and an afterword to each section, then posed a question inspired by the reading. The readers answered these in the Comments section of each section, or on the pages of WhitmanWeb’s social media. In 2016 Folsom’s and Merrill’s commentaries were published alongside Whitman’s poem by the University of Iowa Press.

In 2014, professors Folsom and Merrill co-taught an interactive online study of “Song of Myself” as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The video lectures from Every Atom: Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" are now accessible in IWP’s MOOC-Pack Library.

A Set of Rules for Writing

In the Notes section at the end of Eula Biss's On Having and Being Had, she details how she developed the ideas in the book.  She set herself conditions for writing:

As I wrote this book, I established a set of rules for writing. One of the first rules was that I had to name specific sums whenever I talked about money. Another rule was that I had to talk about money. These rules were a direct refusal of what I understood to be the rules of polite conversation around money: 1) Don't talk about it. 2) If you do talk about it, don't be specific. 3) Minimize what you have. 4) Emphasize that you've earned it. 5) Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money. my

Alternative rules of my own invention dictated not just the content of my writing, but also the form and style. Every piece had to begin in the present tense, with a moment drawn from my life. (I allowed myself to break this rule occasionally, particularly when I wanted to write about a book.) And every piece had to include an exchange with another person. Rules also shaped my research. Initially, I only allowed myself to read articles and books given to me or suggested by friends. This rule enhanced my awareness of how my friends extend and limit what I know and understand. It also offered an opportunity for me to think about the intersection between my social capital and my cultural capital. One is tied to the other I would not know who I know without what I know, and I could not know what I know without who I know-and both are tied to economic capital. Many of my friends belong to my economic class and are situated as I am within the values and assumptions and blindnesses of that class.

I found this idea intriguing... another example of how, like Kleon talks about, (and many others) a set of rules helps you produce art.  In this case, it also provides the series of essays with a coherence.  It's like a series of journeys that all start from the same place.

Biss begins chapters like "At a dinner for work I'm sitting between a botanist and an economist and we're talking about kudzu." And: "You should look into the etymology of scholastic, Vojislav suggests." And "I'm putting away the silverware John has just washed."

Danica Phelps

photo source

I learned about artist Danica Phelps in Eula Biss's "On Having and Being Had."  

Income's Outcome is a project that began when the artist Dan ica Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her s pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those draw ings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands hold ing things, cookies and eggs and apples. "Each time a batch of drawings is sold," she says of the project, "it creates a window into my life where I draw what I spend money on until that money is gone and then the window closes."

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses.

In 2012, she exhibited a series of twenty-five plywood panels covered in 350,000 red gouache stripes for the $350,000 she lost in the foreclosure of the home she had shared with another woman, her former lover. The Cost of Love was the title of this work, which included words drawn from a housing court ruling: "animosity," eviction," "mortgage." When she bought the home, she hired assistants to help her paint the 627,000 gray stripes that represented the loan of $627,000. But when it foreclosed, she painted every red stripe herself, which took five months. "It's like letting go of the house, every single penny of it," she told a reporter. "And once I've painted it, it's gone."

 

I am mad for it to be in contact with me

source

In section 2 of "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, the poet writes about the physical pleasures of contact with the actual world (the atmosphere) rather than "houses and rooms" that are filled with intoxicating perfumes.  He becomes "mad for it [nature] to be in contact with me."

 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the pass- ing of blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of the wind,

A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,

The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

From the Whitman Project:

The poet in this section allows the world to be in naked contact with him, until he can feel at one with what before had been separate—the roots and vines now seem part of the same erotic flow that he feels in his own naked body (“love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine”), and he is aware of contact and exchange, as he breathes the world in only to breathe it back again as an undistilled poem. All the senses are evoked here—smell (“sniff of green leaves”), hearing (“The sound of the belch’d words of my voice”), touch (“A few light kisses”), sight (“The play of shine and shade”), taste (“The smoke of my own breath,” that “smoke” the sign of a newly found fire within).

Now Whitman gently mocks those who feel they have mastered the arts of reading and interpretation. As we read this poem, Whitman wonders if we have “felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems,” and he invites us now to spend a “day and night” with him as we read “Song of Myself,” a poem that does not hide its meanings and require occult hermeneutics to understand it. Rather, he offers up his poem as one that emerges from the undistilled and unfiltered sources of nature, the words “belch’d” (uttered, cried out, violently ejected, bellowed) instead of manicured and shaped. This is a poem, Whitman suggests, that does not want to become a guide or a “creed,” but one that wants to make you experience the world with your own eyes. We take in this poet’s words, and then “filter them” from our selves, just like we do with the atmosphere and all the floating, mingling atoms of the world. 

The "afterward of this section":

What poet can resist the temptation to “possess the origin of all poems,” to drink continuously from the source of inspiration? This is what Whitman offers in the second section of “Song of Myself,” and much more—“the good of the earth and sun” and all the stars, not to mention learning how to take experience at first-hand: to see for oneself what is truly there, to establish, as Emerson wrote, “an original relationship with the universe.” To forge such a relationship the poet leaves behind the intoxicating perfume of human society and sets out on his own to breathe the odorless, inspiriting atmosphere of nature: a state of freedom, of readiness, in which the poet opens himself—and in flows the world. He invokes all of his senses—taste, touch, sound, smell, sight—in the long sentence fragment with which the second stanza concludes, for he is alert now to what is there: “The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea rocks, and of hay in the barn…” He takes it all in, he makes song out of his meeting with the sun, he extends his hand to anyone willing to stop with him for a day and a night. He promises to teach us to see and sing for ourselves, free of every influence, including that of the teacher. Here are the keys to a kingdom stretching to the very limits of the imagination. And here is how to take the measure of the universe—the grid within which the poems of the future will be written.—CM

Question

How is it possible not to “take things at second or third hand” or not to “look through the eyes of the dead” or not to “feed on the spectres in books”? Don’t we all learn about the world and develop our beliefs by listening to and learning from others, both living and dead? 

Later, in section 27, Whitman takes up the theme of being in contact with the world, comparing it to a clam, which is amazing enough in itself.

If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.     

 

Mine is no callous shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand.

From Whitman Project: 

Even the New England clam (with its ancient Native American name of “quahaug”) would be miracle enough if evolution had proceeded no further than the bivalve mollusc. The clam, of course, can clam up, withdraw its sensitive tentacles back into its unfeeling shell and be immune to touch. But not Whitman, and not us: we have no shell, and our covering—our skin—is in touch with the world at all times. We have “instant conductors all over”: Whitman here uses the then-recent language of electricity to capture the way the body’s sense receptors are like lightning rods, receiving and directing the currents of experience through the self. In another of his poems, Whitman calls it “the body electric.” Our skin is so full of sense receptors that the merest stir or press of any part of our body comforts us, excites us, and—out of our shells, alive and awake to the world—the experience of touching our body fully with another body takes us to the very edges of identity: it is “about as much as I can stand.”

From the Whitman Project

Most languages have some set of images that relate humans to clams or oysters or other shelled creatures. In English, we say that someone who won’t talk has “clammed up.” A shy person may “retreat into her shell.” What is the value of such figures of speech? Is Whitman’s assumption that humans live in skin that is continually sensitive to the world true to your experience, or are imagined shells important too?