on care, creativity and other mysteries @merelvisse - Tumblr Blog

David Salle in NYRB:

“Think of a border collie running in a wide loop around a flock of sheep—sometimes a compressed mass, other times scattered in randomseeming clumps. The sheep don’t know they are being herded; the collie knows that it’s doing the herding, but is not thinking about creating form. The sheep and collie can’t have the overview that is provided to the artist. This is one of the central, and I think lovely, paradoxes of art: the artist is both the sheep and the collie, as well as the aerial photographer documenting their interaction from above.”

Baraitser will argue that care is bound up with histories of the antithesis of care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that may also need to be taken care of and involve the temporal practices of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed.

A talk by Lisa Baraister on care and time. Baraitser will argue that care is bound up with histories of the antithesis of care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that may also need to be taken care of and involve the temporal practices of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed. Source

#care #time

Two poet/contemplative/social creatives. To make sense in times of senselessness. Prayer is words and shape and art around desperation and delight and disappointment and desire. “Shame’s first language is the body.” Dignifying the desires we wish to name. “We erase our stories, we erase our existences.”

Two poet-contemplatives. To make sense in times of senselessness. “We erase our stories, we erase our existences.” Prayer is words and shape and art around desperation and delight and disappointment and desire. “Shame’s first language is the body.”

Gordon Hoke still sends me letters with clippings and notes (in red). Like this one. Read more

#clippings

This seminar examines how fictional representations of trauma deal with the problem of care (for oneself or for others) in precarious and systematically broken modes of collective existence. We are particularly interested in how the anxiety of potential trauma to come (in contexts marked by ongoing and collective violence, for example) shapes the material response to recovery and healing. More & Source

Oh, the Humanities!

humansofnewyork

“Recently I went home to Dublin for six months to spend time with my father. He’s in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. While I was there, I noticed that the bank where I worked was moving along fine without me. It made me realize that my contribution was dispensable. So when the sabbatical ended, I just couldn’t go back. My friend happened to approach me around that time with an opportunity to start a company. We’re developing an app to help manage the construction process. It feels good to be learning so much again. Everything was so specialized at the bank. There was an expert for everything. Everyone just stuck to the things they were good at and recognized for. But there’s no bureaucracy in our start-up. It’s just the two of us. There’s only what needs to be done. I can last about a year before things get financially stressful. I’m hoping that the company will be viable by then. Because even if it doesn’t make a lot of money, as long as it survives, I’ll have been a part of creating something.”

The busy urban worlds of “zoekboeks” and “wimmelbooks” have a lot to say about everyday European life.

The busy urban worlds of “zoekboeks” and “wimmelbooks” have a lot to say about everyday European life (with thanks to Gary Richmond, who just shared this article with me).

#netherlands

Sanctuaries of Silence: Silence just might be on the verge of extinction, and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton believes that even the most remote corners of the globe are impacted by noise pollution. In Sanctuaries of Silence, Hempton takes us on an immersive listening journey into Olympic National Park, one of the quietest places in North America. He also teaches us about his presence and using a microphone - not judging or categorizing while it listens. And through his presence as a witness, the sounds in the Park change from an incident into a public event. In research, there is a difference between observation and witnessing, as Steen Halling aptly discussed in a 2010 paper on Truth and the Rhythm of Phenomenological Research. One quote:

“In an essay on "Testimony and Existentialism", the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1946\1991) elaborated on the meaning of witness by contrasting the witness with the observer. While Marcel referred at some length to the witness in the courtroom, this was not his central concern. Rather, Marcel’s aim in this essay was to present key aspects of his understanding of existentialism, contrasting it with Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. A number of the points he made are especially germane to the present discussion. First, he suggested that when we speak of observation, it is a matter of indifference who the observer is. Testimony, in contrast, is the witness of the whole person – it comes from the individual as such. Thus, for the witness there is the requirement that one make a commitment to testify before others, that one be personally willing to stand behind what one says” (Halling, 2010: 131, italics added by me).

#silence #listening #witness #observation #research

Reflections on medicine as practised by someone who knows what to do with stories.

Reflections on medicine as practised by someone who knows what to do with stories: dr. Rita Charon (see also her other three episodes).

#narrative medicine

"My current work is about drawing as a way of knowing and about knowing about drawing as a way of knowing". Gemma Anderson is an artist, researcher and university lecturer whose practice is at the interface of art and science. She has worked on different collaborative projects with mathematicians and natural scientists and has recently completed her PhD ‘Drawing as Epistemology for Morphology’. She is currently artist in residence for the Northern Ireland Science Festival (2016) and also at Imperial College (Mathematics department).

Gemma Anderson: Isomorphogenesis No.13 "My current work is about drawing as a way of knowing and about knowing about drawing as a way of knowing". Gemma Anderson is an artist, researcher and university lecturer whose practice is at the interface of art and science”.

Source: https://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/gemma-anderson/

#science #drawing

“You can turn fear into joy when you receive something that's living, that goes inside you — because it becomes your own.”

“You can turn fear into joy when you receive something that's living, that goes inside you — because it becomes your own.” Wonderful interview with Yo-Yo Ma (click the link above).You can find the written transcript here.

#music

Just returned from the International Human Sciences Research Conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina where I spoke about the relationship between the arts and phenomenology. I wonder how we can ‘poeticize phenomenology’: bring our research back to life, especially how we communicate ‘data’ and findings. In Dutch, poetry = dichten, which means “to thicken”. But when we go all the way back to the original meaning of the word, it relates to “to make”. What can ‘making’ and “thickening” mean for how we practice and think phenomenology?

Sometimes I worry that in research, the complexities and beauties of everyday life are overly reduced and lose touch with our ordinary experiences. In my talk, I explore three ways to access and preserve the richness of human experience whilst developing insights that are of value to a general audience by the use of the arts.

One example I discussed, is the work of Andrei Tarkovsky (see video). I chose Tarkovsky because of a project Job Tamminga and I carried out with visual phenomenology and Tarkovsky’s approach to film. Tarkvosky, for example, deliberately works with foreground-background by positioning his characters against poetic backgrounds (as the image above aptly illustrates). In phenomenology, the lived experiences of people are studied, taking particular foreground-background structures into consideration as well: sometimes an object is at the foreground of our experience, whilst the rest is relegated to a background. There is a continuous movement of experiences between fore- and background (and some, like Tarkovsky, would also include midground). Please mail me when you’d be interested to receive my slides. I’m happy to share them and hear your thoughts.

#tarkovsky #visual phenomenology #poetics

Saw these at the Frelinghuysen Arboretum in Morristown, NJ: children inviting the fairies into lovely fairy homes. They really know the art of play! When you’re around, please come and see the other ones (it’s quite an adventure to find them hidden between the many trees and bushes: https://www.arboretumfriends.org/

#arboretum #fairy #play

On both sides of the Atlantic, art and medicine mingle.

#art #medicine

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love's bladeSizing up the heart's familiar meat?We watch and grieve.

“In my memoir I call poetry a version of the language of the soul (…) I know there are a lot of things that writers of poems say about the mysterious aspects of what they do. An easy thing to do is to liken it to the unconscious mind, that a part of our mind is smarter, sort of probably ageless, and that is thinking in associations and unwitting perceptions and dreams, syntax, that’s you know, that’s also scientific, we know that it’s there. But there are other aspects of creative practices that do sometimes feel like a spiritual practice” (Tracy Smith, interview https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/events/a-conversation-with-u-s-poet-laureate-tracy-k-smithAnd watch this interview with Tracy (from 7 minutes and on): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH2JXub-35s

From the best bookstore in Brooklyn (with their lovely cat Tiny): communitybookstore.net: “The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Even the men in black armor, the ones Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?

We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat. Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

Love: naked almost in the everlasting street, Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

--from "Unrest in Baton Rouge".

#poetry

Diane Carp

An interesting publication!

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