The Theme for Week 3 is "Technology & the Mythic Poetic Landscape"
READING ASSIGNMENT FOR WEEK 3:
"The Virtues of Caution: A Call to Awaken our Aesthetic Responses"—James Hillman: http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article1269-the-virtues-of-caution.html
ACTIVITY/HOMEWORK FOR WEEK 3:
Watch the music video, “Moonlight Rain”—(music by Amethyste): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYuekhDVQ0&list=PL6O_9_P0cq7YGv6_TFI4Q7KmzXTPd98tr&index=6
(also located on Depth Psychology Alliance YouTube channel – saved in “Numinous” collection.
Watch it more than once. Give it your undivided attention.
Notice what’s happening in your body as the images and music move you.
When it’s over, write a few sentences of response—or even a haiku format--with your NON-DOMINANT HAND and share here in the group if it moves you. Note: Using your non-dominant hand allows access to emotional and unconscious content you may not otherwise access.
Look for other videos that “feed your soul” and post them here if you are so inclined.
*If you can, Robert suggested you may also want to watch the 1979 film, "Being There" with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine.( There are a handful of trailers and related short clips about “Being There” on YouTube if you want to poke around)
Synopsis: A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. After a run in with a limousine, he ends up a guest of a woman (Eve) and her husband Ben, an influential but sickly businessman. Now called Chauncey Gardner, Chance becomes friend and confidante to Ben, and an unlikely political insider.
Replies
My words from watching the video: Sensuality can be found in the stillness of the turning of the world...
Response to the video:
Sublimation of hate into matter -
It is hard to be pure, just thinking about sand that went trough the fingers
Body asks for colors:
macrobiotic for Soul is passion.
Frustration of the potentials turn the particles into parasites
1...2...3... done
Thank you for the recording. It was beautiful and thought provoking to watch it. Why poets are on margins?It might also be because of dominant epistemology that asks for facts and information. Knowledge that has to be in the service of production and profit. If "time is money" there is no space for being lost in reverie. Epistemology became a part of economy /knowledge economy and learning is reduced to functionality where functional is to produce and have outcome... There needs to be I guess huge paradigm shift... material that does not mean "goods" but poetic.... Material as a letter to a lover.
Looking forward to seeing you tonight
Hi All -- Along with this music video (link below), I want to recommend the 1982 documentary which presents as a cinematic poem, KOYAANISQATSI. It is a film that speaks to the theme of the session this week. It was actually during the session that I was reminded of this film.
For those unfamiliar, Koyaanisqatsi (a Native American term meaning “Life out of balance”) was a vision born of the collaborative fusion of 3 giants in their respective fields: Gregory Riggio, Producer/Director, Philip Glass, Composer, and Ron Fricke, Director of Photography. It was the first film of “the Qatsi Trilogy” -- and it would be a mind bending 23 years before the trilogy saw completion! Produced by Francis Ford Coppola.
While it is not available on Youtube, it may be accessible on some of the other services like Netflix. Amazon Prime rents it for $2.99. I hope you have a chance to experience it while we explore Poetic Sensibility In A Wired World.
Video
This music video poem, Koyaanisqatsi, spoke to me more than the video, Moonlight Rain. I experimented watching Koyaanisqatsi w/o sound, then with sound but no visuals with interesting results. I noticed different emotions depending on what sense - sight, hearing - was absorbing it. Putting the two elements, sound and visuals, together produced the authentic whole. I wondered, then, about a poem...do we need to hear it and visualize it to find the whole? That takes time. Watching Koyaanisqatsi takes time and patience. Does our wired world skew that process or promote it?
Moonlight Rain was just...pretty, no matter how you experienced it and, for me, it did not evoke a variety of emotions; it was just...pretty, and perhaps too staged which is the advantage, maybe, of technology. The poem I wrote with my left hand was monotone, all pretty words. Perhaps then, we need disparity and contrast - beauty & unsightfulness, harshness & tranquility, slow motion and speed, powerful and meek - to find balance, like a discordant note that is finally resolved. You can't appreciate the final note without the dissonance.
But yet..there is no sound in the poem on a piece of paper, a painting, a photograph. Yet I can feel the bass and tenor in a particular painting, I can hear the rhapsodic melody in a photograph and experience all sorts of feelings. Perhaps a poem, a work of art, a film or documentary, a landscape needs our imagination to complete it, like the photographs in Eyes as Big as Plates (see link below). Perhaps it all boils down to imagination.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyne-politanoff/eyes-as-big-as-pla...
Yes on Koyaanisqatsi!
I still recall ow that film impacted my work on technology
Robert
Awesome video, Bonnie. I watched it in the Alliance library first then went to You Tube to watch it full screen. What a ride!
Indeed. Aren't the images amazing? It's a beautiful combo of nature, art, and music-- made possible by technology....
If you can, you may also want to watch the 1979 film, "Being There" with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine.
Synopsis: A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. After a run in with a limousine, he ends up a guest of a woman (Eve) and her husband Ben, an influential but sickly businessman. Now called Chauncey Gardner, Chance becomes friend and confidante to Ben, and an unlikely political insider.
Thank you for that movie recommendation! It was a ... ponderous movie! And so Peter Sellers!