The Saunterer

Virginia Woolf on purest ecstasy

    The base of life is specific to the person. Here is Virginia Woolf’s:

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying asleep, half awake, in a bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I could conceive.

    That phrase! -- ". . . hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor. . . ."

    (Quoted from page 64 of “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind. Harcourt, Brace, 1985.)
    For a brief biography of Virginia Woolf, click here. For images of or relating to Virginia Woolf, click here.

Matthew Scully on the lie that animals do not experience physical pain

    If too much of the world does not get it, Matthew Scully does:

The idea that animals do not experience physical pain comparable to our pain . . . has never satisfied anyone without something to gain. That assumption may now once and for all be discarded as rubbish. . . . Modern science has now confirmed what mankind suspected all along with a prima facie case that of course animals suffer, of course they have emotions, and of course they are conscious beings. That is not an expression of sentiment. It is not a statement of ideology. It is neither an avowal nor a denial of any tenet of religion or philosophy. It is a statement of fact, objective reality as best we can discern it. Three centuries after Descartes likened the crying of animals to ‘broken machinery,’ no serious person can say that anymore.

    (Quoted from page 294 of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully. St Martin’s Press, 2002.)
    For a brief biography of Matthew Scully, click here. For images of or relating to Matthew Scully, click here. For an interview with Matthew Scully about Dominion, click here.

Milan Kundera on our unconditional need to be merciful to animals

    Our willingness to put up with our being cruel to animals is, notes Milan Kundera, the root cause of all our debacles:

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

    (Quoted from page 289 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. HarperCollins, 1999.)
    For a brief biography of Milan Kundera, click here. For images of or relating to Milan Kundera, click here.

Gregory Bateson on how our selfishness is killing our own sustainability

    As Abraham Maslow was fond of saying (see his journals), “Time wounds all heels.”
    The Saunterer offers a corollary: the human race is largely a bunch of heels, selfishly shameful in destroying wilderness and environment, and time will not merely wound the heels, it will kill them, perhaps their physical being, and definitely their psychological being. Here are Gregory Bateson’s thoughts:

Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its “progress” ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself. . . . The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line, or the society. . . . The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.

    (Quoted from page 64 of Consulting the Genius of the Place, by Wes Jackson. Counterpoint, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Gregory Bateson, click here. For images of or relating to Gregory Bateson, click here. For a brief biography of Wes Jackson, click here.

W. S. Merwin on a common feature of poets

    W. S. Merwin speaks of certain urges in writing poetry that are common to nearly all poets:

There is an affinity which everyone must have noticed between poetry – certain kinds and moments of it – on the one hand, and such succinct forms as the proverb, the aphorism, the riddle, on the other. . . . There are qualities that they obviously have in common: an urge to finality of utterance, for example, and to be irreducible and unchangeable. The urge to brevity is not perhaps as typical of poetry as we would sometimes wish, but the urge to be self-contained, to be whole, is perhaps another form of the same thing, or can be, and it is related to the irreversibility in the words that is a mark of poetry.

    (Quoted on page 18 of Understanding W. S. Merwin, by H. L. Hix. University of South Carolina Press, 1997.)
    For a brief biography of W. S. Merwin, click here. For news of W. S. Merwin being chosen U. S. poet laureate, click here. For images of or relating to W. S. Merwin, click here.

Akim Volynsky on the art of the human body

    Ballet deliberately emphasizes the dancer’s figure, leaving the head almost unnoticed. Why? Akim Volynsky makes the remarkably perceptive point:

Similarly the body by itself speaks, sings, and occasionally shouts more fully and sonorously than the human word. In the same museum you will find many figures without heads – they have fallen off over the centuries – and when you compare such headless figures with similar statues that have managed to remain intact, you stop regretting the broken-off heads, for the heads on the statues of the early period of Greek sculpture are usually not very expressive. How vividly these fragments of the torso live, how much they say to us through the waves of pleats in their tunics, which Goethe called the thousandfold echo of the human body. In the Athens museum there is no dead flesh.

    (Quoted from page 134 of Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911 - 1925, by Akim Volynsky. Translated and edited by Stanley J. Rabinowitz. Yale University Press. 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Akim Volynsky and a review of the cited book, click here. For images of or related to Akim Volynsky, click here.

Ian McEwan on what being in wilderness does for him

    In a published conversation Antony Gormley asked Ian McEwan, “What is the comfort we seek when we go into the elemental world, and how do we use it?” Ian McEwan’s reply:

I feel bigger, freer. I remind myself (not having any religion) of the arbitrary fact of existence, that it could all be the consequence of an extraordinary chapter of accidents on a beautiful rock surrounded by sterile space. So to cross a landscape is a kind of necessity, and the longer I’m out there – if I can get time to walk days on end – that feeling grows. It’s hard to describe without falling into a well of clichés. It kicked in for me with the hormones, the first stirrings of adolescence. It was very strong, that sense of the earth, the rocks, the trees, the earthly realm really filled me at that age with joy, and nothing, not literature, not even sex could fulfill me in that way.

    (Quoted on page 104 of “Ian McEwan & Antony Gormley: A Conversation about Art and Nature,” by Ian McEwan. The Kenyon Review, Winter, 2006, pp. 104-112.)
    For a brief biography of Ian McEwan, click here. For images of or relating to Ian McEwan, click here.
    For a brief biography of Antony Gormley, click here. For images of or relating to Antony Gormley, click here.

May Sarton on women who need to create works of art

    She said this:

The crucial question seems to me to be this: what is the source of creativity in the woman who wants to be an artist? After all, admit it, a woman is meant to create children, not works of art. . . . A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It’s the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. . . . Maybe it’s this: the woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.

    (Quoted from page 261 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of May Sarton, click here. For images of or relating to May Sarton, click here.

Rupert Brooke on the soothing power of pines

    The Saunterer passes on to you:

PINE-TREES AND THE SKY: EVENING, by Rupert Brooke

I'd watched the sorrow of the evening sky,
And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover,
And heard the waves, and the seagull's mocking cry.

And in them all was only the old cry,
That song they always sing -- "The best is over!
You may remember now, and think, and sigh,
O silly lover!"
And I was tired and sick that all was over,
And because I,
For all my thinking, never could recover
One moment of the good hours that were over.
And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.

Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.
And there was peace in them; and I
Was happy, and forgot to play the lover,
And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;
Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!

    (Quoted from page 28 of the Saunterer’s copy of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, by Rupert Brooke, New York” John Lane Company. MCMXV)
    For a brief biography of Rupert Brooke, click here. For images of or relating to Rupert Brooke, click here.

Tupac Shakur on dreams

    Tupac Shakur put an aspect of his philosophy this way:

Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.

    Is there useful insight in that?

    (Tupac Shakur is quoted on page 19 of Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, edited by Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón. New York University Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Tupac Shakur, click here. For images of or relating to Tupac Shakur, click here. For a much-watched (some have commented “life-saving”) video – Ghetto Gospel – featuring Tupac Shakur, click here.
    For information about Darnell Hunt, Ana-Christina Ramón, and the book, Black Los Angeles, click here.