Only One View

Biblios by Guy Laramée

"Because of your unique history, you have evolved a series of stories that you repeatedly return to throughout your life. These stories determine how you see yourself and how you interpret what is happening to you. You may well be overidentified with your stories and not see that they represent only one view of your circumstances. Your stories can limit what you believe to be your choices and define what happens to you in your day. They may not have even come from you but may have been suggested by someone else. You may not even recognize them as stories; to you they may seem like worries or just the way you are."

~ Phillip Moffit, from "The Fallacy of Story-Making," Emotional Chaos to Clarity, Chapter 7

Strategic Patience

Art and architecture history professor Jennifer Roberts requires her students to write a twenty-page research paper on a single work of art. Before they begin the research, however, they are expected to spend three hours in front of the actual work. No electronic devices. No distractions. They have to rely on their vision, curiosity, and skills of observation to navigate the slow passing of time.  

John Singleton Copley, Boy with a Squirrel (1765), oil on canvas.

"Just because you've looked at something doesn't mean you've seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms, just because you have access to something doesn't mean you have learned it.What turns access into learning is time and strategic patience…

For me this is not just a lesson for people who are going to become art historians or go to museums. It's a key lesson for students to see the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and—I think most crucially—it's a lesson in being skeptical about immediate surface appearances. And I can't think of very many skills that are more important in the twenty-first century than that."

~ Jennifer Roberts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching 2013 conference on "Essentials"

Nothing Beside Remains

Ozymandia
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

[annotated]

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Talking About The Indescribable

Reza Aslan speaking with Terry Gross about his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (July 15, 2013):

People like Meister Eckhart professed this kind of understanding of the relationship between God and humanity, the relationship between creator and created. The purpose of the mystics, whether they're Sufis or Jewish mystics or Christian mystics or what have you, the purpose is to break down the wall that separates us from God to have an intimate divine union with God. And so that's why some of this language would sound familiar to a lot of people of different faiths....

I think that if you believe that our experience of the world goes beyond just the material realm, that there is something beyond, that there is a transcendent presence that one can commune with, then it's only natural to want to reach out to this transcendent presence, to want to experience it in some way. That's what religion does.

I mean, you have to understand that religion is nothing more than just a language made up of symbols and metaphors that allow us to describe to each other and to ourselves the ineffable experience of faith. I mean, when we talk about God we're talking about something that is, by definition, indescribable, indefinable. You need a way to talk about God and so what religion does is it provides a readymade language that allows you to be understood when you're talking to your own community.

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See also (from Shinzen Young): 

• World Mysticism (with a capital "M")
• To Get Back There
• Return to the Source 

Lost Poems, Legends, and Proverbs

Excerpt from "The Last to Speak Wichita Language": 

Doris Jean Lamar McLemore, 82, the last Wichita Indian fluent in the language of her people.The Wichita language is one of 199 that is critically endangered, meaning there are fewer than 10 elderly speakers, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

All told, some 2,500 languages are in danger of becoming extinct or have recently disappeared, taking with them poems, legends and proverbs, according to the organization, which released its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger in mid-February.

Several hundred people spoke Wichita four decades ago, when University of Colorado linguistics professor David Rood started studying it. Today, only two or three know many of the words, and only McLemore is fluent, he said.When she’s gone, a unique form of expression will disappear.

“Language reveals a lot about our cognitive system, about how you recognize the world you see around you,” Rood said.

“Every time you lose a language, you’ve lost part of the picture of what the human intellect is capable of.”

...

In 1864, 1,500 members of the Wichita and affiliated tribes had been forced by Confederate troops to leave their reservations in Oklahoma. They settled at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers in an area between what is now Murdock and 13th Street.

According to a history provided by the tribe, they had no land to farm and few friends. Many starved, and others suffered from smallpox and cholera epidemics. They had only 822 people when they returned to Oklahoma after the war.

J.R. Mead, an early Wichita developer, suggested naming the city after the tribe, and the name first appeared in print in 1868 on an advertising circular distributed to cattlemen moving their herds north along the Chisholm Trail. 

More... 

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See also: "Language and Meaning: An Ojibwe Story," On Being, October 1, 2009