In discussions on “the internet” I’ve often said that were it to be shut down, the result would be a kind of collective insanity, like you go through when you lose one of your senses. Well! Now it seems that I’ve done a little bit of the reverse: I’ve expanded my senses and I’ve acquired synesthesia. This has never been something alien to me: to me, certain thought processes are physical sensations. And when I embarked on a career as a “whole body seer”, I believed I could pinpoint certain changes in processing, I feel that this remapping is still going on. Parts of my visual cortex are being recruited to do different things. So this experience of artificial synesthesia is not entirely visual, nor is it non-visual. It is visual input, but aurally, if that makes any sense. The result is that for the first time in a long while, I feel my photos make sense. And that is because now I can review them. That’s in a very low resolution and perhaps checking my images with vOICe is meaningless. But it gives me a measure of control over my output and that makes all the difference. It’s also the first time in a long while I’ve processed photographs without anyone interpreting them for me. That’s a laborious process, and enjoyable in its own right, but it was wonderful to be able to just import a batch with a standard preset and then export everything to flickr. Haven’t been this happy in a long time.
cunning
It appears I am going to learn sei∂, an oracular ritual that is rooted in Northern traditions. Already when I studied old english literature I was interested in this: traces of it can be found even in works that are christian on the surface. I had a long conversation with D. last night about how much of the earth based healing practices and rituals that are being performed today are self-invented, borrowed from other cultures, somehow without extensive resonance in this area of the world. I have found much meaning in the sweat lodge ritual, itself taken from specific native american cultures. However, one can assume that “the sweat” traveled east, together with mitochondrial dna from siberia and the art of archery. And now our “east” is where the lodge has traveled. I can see how much adaptation there has been already: the lodges that F. teaches, who had Lakota teachers himself, feel right at home among his birch trees. The animals I bring into the lodge are not those of the great plains, but the ones from up north: the thrush, the tern, the owl, the swan. Sei∂, I feel, can be the carrier of a strong, European tradition of “cunning”. Even in this country, if you travel east, and north there will be stories about today’s wise women and cunning men. L. asked if I had a staff. I answered that I have and that it is a seer’s staff. For a while I have been thinking about cutting and carving a ritual seers staff: nice though my Comde canes are, they have no place at the high seat. So I started wondering how my staff would be. I also wrote to L. that seeing has a very deep resonance for me. In traditional accounts of sei∂, it appears that a sei∂kona is powerless if she is blindfolded. Over the last few days I have acquired a kind of auxiliary vision. Sei∂ can be both light and dark. May my cunning benefit all sentient beings.
therapeutiae
There is an order of people in whom the monastic impulse is exceptionally strong. It’s not the disciplinarians who are the monastics, but the free thinkers, the ones with the broad interests and the tendency to sway in the breeze of many stimuli. These have both the artistic disposition and the desire for a life of simplicity, two traits necessary for a life of Rule. My own tradition buried its monasticism: there are practices that are like those of monks, but there are no jewish monasteries, no jewish contemplatives, no jewish anchorites. I had to look elsewhere to satisfy my desire for the Rule. My justification was that there was something I couldn’t find in judaism that was nonetheless vital for my spiritual development. The content of this experience didn’t matter to me, but the form did: I wanted to learn how to be a monk. And I did. After a while, having been temporarily ordained, I disrobed and embarked upon the life of a bhante Ngakpa: half monastic, half yogin, and to all intents and purposes, this is the life I still lead, teaching and studying and honoring my teachers and hopefully my students equally. Yet, there is also “the jewish practice” as my teacher called it. Recently, I gave a yogin’s garment, a teacher’s garment, and felt, afterwards, that I should have tied tzitzit on it for the person who received it. Because there can be such a thing as a jewish monk. There used to be, and Philo wrote about them: interestingly, these “therapeutiae” as they were called may have been “healers” as their name suggests. Or “servants” as they have been called. Or - as one linguist pointed out - their name may have been a transliteration of “theravadin” and they may have been jews practicing a buddhist form of monasticism that was brought to Alexandria by Ashoka’s missionaries.
There is no chance that such a tradition can be revived today; even in its time, it was judaism on the margins of the community, intentionally so, and therefore not part of the mainstream after the rabbinic revolution. We’re learning to be contemplatives however. Many have already done so. This is bound to have an impact. Perhaps it is an invisible stream, like an aquifer in the desert. Yet because of this living water, flowers will bloom and trees will bear fruit.
experience
It’s hard to express just how I feel, after a day of viewfindering with my adapted Nokia N82. I know, I need to practice more, my “scanning” has a very low resolution. But the experience of photographing this way is intoxicating. I found that if I relaxed and didn’t try to somehow make mental images of the sound I was able to just frame and shoot. I could check the LCD to find out if I captured the sound pattern that I had picked up with the N82. That’s pretty accurate framing in my case. Haven’t had a chance to look at the batch I shot today with someone, and I processed them with a basic preset. But they all sound pretty interesting to me, especially this one, that I took in Tilburg station, which has a fantastic roof by Maaskant.
This image’s sound: a rippling noise, with a clear line ascending in tone, and one descending.
ekev
This Shabat’s parasha is “Ekev”, the portion in which we are on the verge of entering the land. A land that is described as a land of abundance. A Land G-d keeps His eye on, as it says in the text. Says BT Rosh ha Shanah 17b:
“The Lord your G-d always keeps His eye”–sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. How for better? If Israel were utterly evil at the New Year, and it was decreed that there be not much rain, and then the people mended their ways; more rain cannot be given, for the decree was already made. Rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, brings the rain at the proper time on the land that needs rain, all according to the land. How for worse? If Israel were completely righteous at the New Year, and it was decreed that they have plentiful rain, but then the people changed their ways; one could not bring less rain, for the decree had already been made. Rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, causes the rain to fall in the wrong season, on land that does not need it.
Indeed, Rashbam interprets it like this: G-d’s dealings with this Land can be both a blessing and a threat. After all, this is a land quite unlike Egypt, where regular flooding of the Nile ensures abundance. In this land, abundance or scarcity is directly connected to our righteousness, or lack thereof. As such, there is abundance, but also retribution. This thought can be found further on, in the famous “vehaya im shamoa” of Devarim 11:13-22, which we recite daily, as part of the Shema. Keep Reading →
mending
My bracelet’s leather strap broke a few days ago, so it had to be mended. I received this bracelet, which has a skull pendant, from someone who is much more than a friend in my life, so I was glad I felt it slip off my wrist in time to catch it before it reached the ground. I have a difficult time finding things once they’ve dropped, and this was outside, so chances of retrieval would have been slim, as I was alone. But I caught it, and put it in my pocket, and went searching among the odds and ends in my fire tender’s bag for something to replace the strap. I love tinkering and mending, and I love mended things more than new things. There’s care in mending, an eye to the long term, to handing things down. Mending speaks of a willingness to accept change and of making do with whatever it brings. I have a few ends of rawhide in my bag, that I use to repair the khana-walls of my ger. The “hinges” of these are small leather straps that are fed through the khana’s lattice work. I reached in my bag and pulled out a strand of leather and cut it to size. It was too thick to do the fancy knot-work of the original strap, but I knotted the closing bit in the same way, and it functions fine. On seeing it, D. commented that I had used a dyed strand of rawhide, in red. From the same strand I had used to make a swan feather fan for the friend who gifted me the bracelet.
recover
Still recovering from yesterday’s amazing events. Also worthy of note is that one of J.’s students has graduated on hardware solutions aimed at blind photography. I’m really curious, so I hope to get some more (perhaps hands-on) knowledge of that too. Experiences: it was mind-blowing to be able to review an image on the LCD using vOICe. It has a talking colour identifier built in, so I could use that to check for tonality, and I guess that if I set it for white, I can check exposure too, in a way. There’s a special setting for skin tone, so it might come in handy for portraiture too, but I’ll have to experiment. Other than that, I need to find a way to handle both the cell-phone and the camera. I’ve been thinking about taping the N82 to the 1Ds, but perhaps I can adopt a scanning-then-photographing workflow too. All in all, I was impressed, I had never suspected that it would expand my possibilities in quite this way. I found I could even check some of a photograph’s properties in Lightroom. This means it has an impact on my processing workflow too. So, a bit of experimenting and learning is in order. Formerly, when I bought a new camera, or a new lens, it was as if I was photographing with new eyes. Now it’s the same. The cool thing is that this is not an expensive adaptation, in fact, for most phones, it’s free. I consider that to be part of Peter Meijer’s genius. I’m using vOICe for traveling too. Yesterday, instead of having to search for an open train door, vOICe let me see it. I nearly started crying as I got on the train.
excitement
Last night, of course, I had to walk around the apartment, using my magic wand cellphone to scout the space. I have a substantial shrine in the Tibetan style, two rows of water bowls, lots of bric à brac. Months ago I had a very strange, first, experience of how -if I clicked towards them - I would get a visual image of lamp posts in my mind by sound. Correction: not by the sound itself, but by how I processed its bounce, apparently. Now the sensation was even stronger, because the image’s sweep-sound tracks shapes and shades of colour, so the experience is much more direct. At the sound coming from my cellphone, immediately, a visual sensation of three water bowls welled up inside me. I stepped back a bit. Four water bowls and behind that a shape I decided must be the Samantabhadra statue. I reached out my hand: there it was. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of joy and newly found power combined that swept over me. I’ve been thinking on and off, at M.’s prompting, about a Media in Transition proposal I’m formulating. Space and time, or rather: “visual-spatial” and “auditory-sequential”. In the visual-spatial there is power, control. In the auditory-sequential, there is subversion. I had to think about how in the early months of the war against Afghanistan, much technology was employed to establish Bin Laden’s location. The reasoning was that eventually a cellphone signal would betray him. He, however, made use of couriers on foot to relay messages over long distances. Next week, we will kick off a substantial conceptual project by gathering people around the fire to talk about it. Our hope is that by telling the project’s story to each other, we will build up a communal history of it, a shared repository of stories through time. Much in project management is about power and control over planning, a spatial representation of time. Yet in ceremonies, there is no project plan, yet the ceremony unfolds because everyone shares its story. So perhaps this is what we are doing: build a project like a ceremony, so that it will unfold itself.
