Crashingly Beautiful

“The Practice of Contemplative Photography” by Andy Karr and Michael Wood will be available in other bookstores in US and Canada next week, on April 12.

Dharma/Arte has given the access to “The Color of the Sky,” article by Andy Karr, which is usually only available to sustaining members of D/A.

To read this wonderful article, click on the title link and ENJOY!

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“… There are different ways of knowing things, different ways of engaging with the world. Much of the time, we plot a course through our lives by thinking and labeling. Green light: go. Red light: stop. Flashing yellow: proceed with caution. You can see if you really experience red, green, and yellow, or only the thoughts go, stop, be careful. Distinguishing these different ways of knowing is important. Otherwise it will be as Frederick Franck observed: we can know all the labels, without ever tasting the wine.

Don’t get me wrong: thinking and labeling are useful. You would not be able to make use of maps to navigate your world without concepts and mental images, and you often need a map to tell you how to get to where you want to go. In any event, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of thinking, no matter what you tried.

The problem with relying solely on thinking mind is that it is limited. It does not take in the details and richness of the world. It only knows abstractions of the world’s qualities. If you are always looking at a map, you won’t see what is happening along the road, and you might miss all the scenery. Or end up in a ditch.

The mind that experiences directly—nonconceptually—sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and has direct insight into itself. For lack of a better term, we could call this the contemplative mind. It is mind that is not bound up in thoughts and labels, but knows things precisely as they are.

Normally, we go about our lives making judgments, one after another, about what we experience: I like this, and I don’t like that; these are good things, and these are bad things; this is worthwhile, and this is a complete waste; this interests me, and this is boring; this is beautiful, and this is ugly. We feel that these judgments are part of the things themselves, but when we examine them carefully, we find that they are just our imagination. They are our own personal versions of things, merely our projections. The qualities we project are made up of thoughts and emotions. They are nowhere to be found in direct experience. These projections obscure the vividness and freshness of perception because everything we come across is already know, familiar, categorized, put in its place.

In contrast to engaging the world through thought, when we experience the world directly with contemplative mind, things appear fresh, in their own light. The quality of seeing without judgment is buoyant, joyful. It is pleasing: whether we are seeing colorful, fresh-cut flowers, or dead leaves in the gutter, each detail is clear and precise. This distinction between two ways of knowing has profound implications for creativity in general, and for photography in particular.”

—Andy Karr.

Amazing. Thank you 108zenbooks & Dharma/Arte.

At age 20, Rimbaud renounced his brilliant career as a poet. Why? The answer to the mystery may be simpler than we’d ever imagined.

“… Naturally, the answer I preferred was the one that put the most heroic spin on Rimbaud’s behavior. Like Wittgenstein and Beckett, whose writings I was also discovering at the time, Rimbaud practiced what Susan Sontag called “the aesthetics of silence.” On this interpretation, his poetic experiments led him beyond the limits of language, where he came to see the vanity of writing itself — how, as Auden would remark 70 years later, “poetry makes nothing happen.” And so he hung the mask of the man of letters back in the gallery of history where he had found it and took in its place the mask of the man of action. “Enough seen…Enough had…Enough known,” he writes with sublime world-weariness in a poem fittingly titled “Departure.” Far from marking the end of his career as a poet, I considered Rimbaud’s escape from Europe his greatest masterpiece. To me, his life in the Orient was nothing less than an “immense opus” in which his mind spent its “illustrious retirement” (“Lives”).

“Only now do I see that this interpretation was one that befitted the aura that emanates from a famous photograph rather than one gleaned from an understanding of a flesh-and-blood human being. Adolescence may have been Rimbaud’s great theme, but when I first encountered his poetry, I was too young to realize that he was already writing from the other side, as one who had crossed over into adulthood, a strange land whose geography I could not yet envision. I did not notice that Rimbaud surreptitiously dedicated Illuminations to “the adolescent I was” (“Devotions”). Rereading the poems a lifetime later, I am struck not so much by Rimbaud’s devil-may-care swagger or even his precocious genius, but by the bitter pathos with which he mourns childhood’s end…”

—Ryan Ruby

Thank you, thenewinquiry.

(Source: thenewinquiry)