Seared & Cauterized

Jack Kornfield
A Path With Heart

Sometimes when the demons are most difficult, we can use a variety of temporary practices that function to dispel them and act as antidotes. For desire, one traditional antidote is to reflect on the brevity of life, on the fleeting nature of outer satisfactions, and on death. For anger, an antidote is the cultivation of thoughts of loving-kindness and an initial degree of forgiveness. For sleepiness, an antidote is to arouse energy through steady posture, visualization, inspiration, breath. For restlessness, an antidote is to bring concentration through inner techniques of calming and relaxation. And for doubt, an antidote is faith and inspiration gained through reading or discussion with someone wise. However, the most important practice is our naming and acknowledging these demons, expanding our capacity to be free in their midst. Applying antidotes is like using Band-Aids, while awareness opens and heals the wound itself.

The brand name leads me to contemplate alternatives: dressing, bandage, plaster. And the French translations as pansement and its Middle French homophone pensement. The Thinking Wound. Like a pharmakon. A name. A brand.

And so for day 2340
10.05.2013

Making Room

Lisa Robertson. Thinking Space

There is a series of rooms. Each room frames a table, a book, and an opening to the outside—an aperture of some sort. At times they may be called studies or observatories or libraries but they are only rooms. Each has shaped a research.

This is the bold pared-down opening. Towards the end she quotes Carlyle and asks us to consider the "description of the study of the disappeared Herr Teufeldröckh".

It was a strange apartment; full of books and tattered papers and miscellaneous shreds of all conceivable substances 'united in a common element of dust.' Books lay on tables and below tables; here fluttered a sheet of manuscript, there a torn handkerchief, or a nightcap hastily thrown aside; ink bottles alternated with breadcrumbs, coffee-pots, tobacco-boxes. Periodical literature, and Blücher Boots.

Frame and framed. Flow and channel.

And so for day 2010
14.06.2012

Uncoupling Suffocation

Parked in a car looking out on a body of water. A man and a woman think back. Well one of them thinks.

'Remember,' he says,
'we'd walk by this lake
in the evenings,
when we were first married.'

The woman thinks
of the mornings
before she married
when she would run on the sand,
pushing her anxious silence raw
and breathless, stop
cradled by sky,
alive.

Helen Humphreys. "The Dock" in Nuns Looking Anxious Listening to Radios.

And so for day 1419
01.11.2010

Think Forget Replay

I first came across his critical writing (a review of sorts of books by Steve McCaffery). And then I went cruising. And found this nugget.

Again. Writing is an aid to forgetting.

For those of us fastidious about words writing is
a way of getting some of them out of the head in
order to make way for new experiences.

Without writing we'd hold on to words at the
expense of those experiences which happily (at
times) give rise to them.

Writing is letting go.

To write is to let go.

Writing is a way of getting younger.

(It's a way of getting younger so that we can
age.

Gracefully.

Gracelessly.

Or otherwise.)

from Alan Davies This Is Thinking
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/davies/p5.htm

I do like that elegant degradation at the end — it almost looks like repetition and then you see it is a way of making a plurality of possibilities emerge from a stark dichotomy. It's a trick worth remembering even it it is in the service of forgetting.

And so for day 999
07.09.2009