#Maria Popova @brainpicker

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The North Star of their native moral compass September 2019 (Vol. XXXII, No. 8) "Under conditions of terror," Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, "most people will comply but some people will not...No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation." Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the deliberate protections we must place between unrelenting evil and our own sanity and goodness, for among the most insaning aspects of tyrannical regimes is the Stockholm syndrome of the psyche they inflict upon us — upon ordinary people, not-evil people, people who consider themselves decent and good, but who slowly, through a cascade of countless small concessions, lose sight of the North Star of their native moral compass.

~ Maria Popova in the brainpickings.org newsletter, "Against the Slippery Slope of Evil"

[slowandsweet]

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Jeff Buckley on Music and Life: A Rare Interview with a Rare Soul

BY MARIA POPOVA

In 1995, while working for an Italian radio station, journalist Luisa Cotardo conducted a candid, soulful, and profound conversation with beloved musician Jeff Buckley (November 17, 1966–May 29, 1997). His only studio album, Grace — which includes Buckley’s now-iconic cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — had been released a few months earlier and he had just performed in the town of Correggio in Northern Italy as part of his European tour. Less than two years later, at the age of thirty, he would drown by a tragedy of chance while swimming in Tennessee’s Wolf River during a tour. Rolling Stone later proclaimed him one of the 100 greatest singers of all time.

Cotardo has kindly shared with me her recording of this rare and remarkably rich interview, in which Buckley discusses with great openness and grace his philosophy on music and life. Transcribed highlights below.

On why he chose not to include lyrics in the album booklet, a deliberate effort to honor music as a deeply personal experience interpreted and inhabited differently by each listener:

So that instead of people being compelled to read through the blueprint of the songs — instead of them looking at the dance steps ahead of time, they would just go through the dance. So that they would let the songs happen to them. Later on, they will find out what the meaning is, but for now — I mean, you know, we’re just meeting for the first time and it’s better… It’s better to grab your own reality from it right now instead of like, you know, read.

On what he seeks to communicate with his music, echoing composer Aaron Copland’s conviction about the interplay of emotion and intellect in great music:

[What I want to communicate] doesn’t have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding. But I don’t really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it.

On the problem with Western charity efforts like LiveAid:

I would like for the starvation and oppression to end in Africa. I like for money from concerned people to go there, you know, to go to Africa, to aid. But … the real solution will come from Africa ruling Africa and not Britain ruling Africa, not America ruling Africa — it’s the only real key. If Africa rules Africa, that’s the only way that pattern of oppression from the outside can be stopped — not money, not only money. Money is a tool and it can be, I don’t know, I really don’t… It’s great that Mandela came out and took office in Africa. I think that’s the real revolution.

On place and what constitutes home and belonging for a global nomad like himself:

I don’t know what belonging means… I can only use my brain and intellectualize. I really wouldn’t able to tell you from the heart what belonging means… My memories of that place are my link to the place — memories of your experience in a place is your link… All people belong to the world. There is no exclusivity in that… The soil from America can differ from the soil in Malaysia, but its soil, it’s still the same. And the color of people’s skin can differ from place to place but it’s still skin. And, in that regard, there is no difference. People must belong to the earth and a traveller must belong to world somehow and the world must belong to her or him somehow. But, you know, then there’s the social level — that’s just the archetypal level, people usually live in the social level.

Echoing what Jackson Pollock’s father so poetically told his son in 1928, Buckley parlays this into his humble yet wonderfully wise advice on being in the world:

I have no advice for anybody except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time and how that is beautiful and has poetry inside, even in places you hate.

On one’s journey of self-actualization and the organic letting go of dreams that no longer fit that journey:

It’s part of maturity, to project upon your life goals and project upon your life realized dreams and a result that you want. It’s part of becoming whole … just like a childish game. It’s honest — it’s an honest game, because … you want your life to hold hope and possibility. It’s just that, when you get to the real meat of life, is that life has its own rhythm and you cannot impose your own structure upon it — you have to listen to what it tells you, and you have to listen to what your path tells you. It’s not earth that you move with a tractor — life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in… It’s something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience — you can’t mold it — you can’t control it…

[fhear]

"All the books of the world will not bring you happiness, but build a secret path toward your heart." Hermann Hesse on what books give us and the heart of wisdom https://t.co/hVlyzi1zsK

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) December 22, 2023

[sepdet]

Note: this is Lowell's loose translation of Sappho Fragment 31, borrowing phrases from some of her other poems, in his collection of translations/adaptations called Imitations. The speaker is Sappho, watching an unnamed man flirt with Anaktoria, named in another of her poems. I think the "you" in this one is female, according to the adjectives, although I may be mixing it up with the hilarious prayer to Aphrodite in which the goddess is like, "Okay, Sappho, which gal is it this time?"

Here's classicist and poet Anne Carson's excellent translation.

Three Letters to Anaktoria by Robert Lowell

I set that man above the gods and heroes — all day, he sits before you face to face, like a cardplayer. Your elbow brushes his elbow — if you should speak, he hears. The touched heart madly stirs, your laughter is water hurrying over pebbles — every gesture is a proclamation, every sound is speech … Refining fire purifies my flesh! I hear you: a hollowness in my ears thunders and stuns me. I cannot speak. I cannot see. I shiver. A dead whiteness spreads over my body, trickling pinpricks of sweat. I am greener than the greenest green grass — I die!

[yesadanlerma]

March 27, 2021 - Interesting Tweets This Morning

March 27, 2021 – Interesting Tweets This Morning

Good Morning Bird Poster ©Felipe Adan Lermahttps://felipeadan-lerma.pixels.com/featured/birds-and-fun-at-butler-park-austin-birds-3-detail-macro-poster-good-morning-felipe-adan-lerma.html I figured, for the header image, I’ll just post one of my pics that appeals to me that day, why not!Below are random tweets I liked for some reason – uplifting, funny, inspiring, informative, hopeful,…

[thingsworthsaving]

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

-Maria Popova

[somerabbitholes]

richard feynman’s letter to his wife arline; october 1946, “four hundred eighty-eight days after her death” (from figuring by maria popova)

[nomadbuzz]

Gardening as Resistance

"Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere."

- Olivia Laing via

“Gardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise ” Maria Popova, The Marginalian https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/04/23/gardening-art-resistance/

[imaginationstimulation]

Some of the very earliest myths, probably dating back to the Paleolithic period, were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the sky — infinite, remote and existing quite apart from their puny lives — people had a religious experience. The sky towered above them, inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness. Human beings could do nothing to affect it. The endless drama of its thunderbolts, eclipses, storms, sunsets, rainbows and meteors spoke of another endlessly active dimension, which had a dynamic life of its own. Contemplating the sky filled people with dread and delight, with awe and fear. The sky attracted them and repelled them. It was by its very nature numinous, in the way described by the great historian of religion, Rudolph Otto. In itself, without any imaginary deity behind it, the sky was mysterium tremendum, terribile et fascinans [the terrible, fascinating, and fearsome mystery].

This, [theologian and scholar Karen] Armstrong argues, sheds light on an essential element of our mythical and spiritual consciousness: We often assume that people turn to religion because they want to enlist some higher power in bending the world to their will, to persuade a god or goddess to grant them health and wealth and immortality — but beneath this impulse lies a deeper longing for transcendence all the more resonant amid our secular culture. She writes:

This very early hierophany shows that worship does not necessarily have a self-serving agenda. People did not want anything from the sky, and they knew perfectly well that they could not affect it in any way. From the very earliest times, we have experienced our world as profoundly mysterious; it holds us in an attitude of awe and wonder, which is the essence of worship… The experience of pure transcendence was in itself profoundly satisfying. It gave people an ecstatic experience by making them aware of an existence that utterly transcended their own and lifted them emotionally and imaginatively beyond their own limited circumstances. It was inconceivable that the sky could be “persuaded” to do the will of poor, weak human beings.

And yet, paradoxically, in any successful mythology transcendence exists on a bell curve of satisfaction — too little, and we feel spiritually bereft; too much, and we feel cut off from the reality of life. Armstrong explains:

The sky would continue to be a symbol of the sacred long after the Paleolithic period. But a very early development showed that mythology would fail if it spoke of a reality that was too transcendent. If a myth does not enable people to participate in the sacred in some way, it becomes remote and fades from their consciousness.

[eucanthos]

– Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides - Brainpickings (Maria Popova’s blog)

[piecesofreiss]

“...presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.”

[goodloop]

Merry Christmas, people!

[prousthetics]

Like worship, admiration is only counterfeit love.

Maria Popova, Figuring