Learning The Real Value of Summer
With Jasmin overseas, endless postboxes worth of bills to pay, groceries to buy, laundry to do, social contacts to maintain and two summer courses to keep me occupied in an otherwise empty house, the desire to write becomes fluid, though by no means effortless. In the absence of excessive stimulation, the mind somehow manages to find the inspiration to push you to look for something to ponder and chew over in the time of the calm before the storm rages. Presently, I’m in my summer courses, monentary work is out of the picture, and as though looking at the canvas from a skewed angle, a sort of soft clarity to day-to-day life has become more apparent to me. It could be the Dilmah tea speaking to me, the rough responsiveness of the keyboard and the tapping of the fingers against the letters or the lucidity that comes about when writing at the strike of midnight. Somehow, whatever the magic involved, I have managed to survive the arduous, repetitive cycle of 2-hour lectures preceeding a 2-hour intensive workshop of the themes and values raised in the reading literature of the summer school course. I have covered everything from Daoism to Derrida and all things in between with a short four days.
So, what’s the value of this story?
Well, while I am tapping out the seconds, minutes and moments of the lecture that stretches on in drear, my attention is caught from time to time, when we are to be reminded about the Buddhist “middle way”, the extinction of the ego, the self-mortification ideal, the conquering of the flesh, the Confucist and Daoist oppositions and reminded that pain and suffering are inevitable aspects of our lives. To keep my eyes open and my ears attentive, I will frequently seek out a piece of Big Red gum and chew until the explosion of peppery cinnamon rouses me into a state of alertness once again. Thankfully, by the time I come to the workshopping stage of the day, there is much food for though that keeps me wide awake and full of defiant energy.
But it’s not what you think; I’m not some big, debating ogre in the workshops. Honestly, the amazing thing about friendly intellectual dialogue is how intense and engulfing it can become. In those moments of rapture when comparing some of the world’s most contentious and profound philospohies, one cannot help but feel as though they have been planted upon the shoulders of giants and given a thorough catapault through the vaults of history. Imagine, then, if religion (as defined as an organising schema of theological or philosphical ideas) were a shopping basket and the world a playground of ideas. We could easily think of it in such an idealistic way, but in truth we are all much more critical than that. When we come across new theories, we have to test them against what we already hold to be true within our own schematics.
One tendency I have noticed to be common (and excrutiatingly annoying) is the desire to essentialise, to quantify in the merest molecule of concise phrasing, the ideas of philosophy and religion. This comes about as I was having a debate in class recently about the Buddhist notion of nirvana as the ultimate catharsis of all things; a pure nothingness. Somehow, I was misinterpreted and our conversation took a turn that compared quantum physics to the Noble Eightfold Wheel, just because in one of the most oblique ways, the two schools of thought held an ounce of similarity. Would you compare a carrot and a crane and decide that the phenomenological experience of the crane was fundamentally similar to the carrot? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense even in trying to explain it.
At the core of what’s going on here, it would, no doubt, be foolish to believe “I think, therefore I am” refers only to Descartes’s reasoning of the human intellect or that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra meant that everybody was actually a Superman in disguise.
If we put ourselves in an walk through imagination for a while, let’s picture this: if I walked through the supermarket of philosophies, traversing the aisles and scanning the items, I would make damned sure to read the label before I added it to my basket. After all, how much verbiage does Derrida really contain? Is Foucalt really inferring that something is actually nothing, because of our limited perception? Perhaps these philosphers would put buzzwords or catchphrases onto their long theorised and debated ideas; you might be inclined to find Einstein’s Patented Theory of Realitivy (Now with Time Travel Potentiality) or some corny, oblique reference such as Socrates’s ‘Man, know thy muscle. Consume quality protein shakes!’
Perhaps you might be inclined to buy the budget brand of Nietzche, saving yourself from nihilist existentialism and instead satisfying with self-morification and minimalism, with a cherry on top. Whatever your persusation in the battlefield of philosophies, spare a thought or two about the ideas you are hearing and learn to be inspired anew. Quite often the restrictions of language make it impossible to express so concisely what is actually intended. There may just be, as on numerous occassions with myself, that you are hearing only the echoes of your voice responding with criticism to external ideas coming toward you.
Comments are closed.
