#senses

[c-pills]

IMAGES HAVE BEEN reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close – without the mediation of an image – is still just watching.

Some of the reproaches made against images of atrocity are not different from characterizations of sight itself. Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off (we have lids on our eyes, we do not have doors on our ears). The very qualities that made the ancient Greek philosophers consider sight the most excellent, the noblest of the senses are now associated with a deficit.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision – the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.

There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: “Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”

Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. Picador.

[a-ginlynn]

[rockattitudegr]

SENSES: “Love Is A Lie” (single) | Review

Οι Senses ανήκουν ξεκάθαρα στη δεύτερη κατηγορία. Με το νέο single και official video "Love Is A Lie", το αθηναϊκό σχήμα κάνει ένα ακόμη αποφασιστικό βήμα

Οι Senses ανήκουν ξεκάθαρα στη δεύτερη κατηγορία. Με το νέο single και official video "Love Is A Lie", το αθηναϊκό σχήμα κάνει ένα ακόμη αποφασιστικό βήμα

[an-angel-and-a-dog]

[scaphismpriest]

soronoi

[realmofthesensual]

The River

[asmallorthodoxblog]

On Beginners Acquiring Virtues

,,In the spirit of the teaching of Saint Symeon the New Theologian, his disciple, Venerable Nikitas Stethatos, observes: "The swift path toward the elevation in virtue for beginners is the silence of the lips, the closing of the eyes, and the deafness of the ears." This quieting of the senses by closing the entrances "from the outside toward oneself" helps the mind "to know itself and its movements" and to stand "like a king in the midst of thoughts, both judging and discerning the good ones from the bad ones," accepting the good ones and placing them "in the barns of understanding... with which then, feeding itself, it grows strong and becomes filled with light," and rejecting the bad ones "into the depth of oblivion, shaking off their bitterness."

-Hierotheos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos