Recollecting fulfilment

This is a quote from an article that was in the SMH Good Weekend last Saturday, which I've been thinking about since. It's a conversation between Matthieu Ricard, "The Happiest Man in the World" (according to neuroscientific results obtained by the Univ. of Wisconsin Madison) and a grumpy pommy journalist called Robert Chalmers.

***

"Bring to you mind a past occasion of inner joy and happiness," writes Matthieu Ricard in his new book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. "Recall how you felt. Consider the lasting effect this experience has had on your mind, and how it still nourishes a sense of fulfilment."
"Now this," I tell Ricard, "was the point where I started to run into trouble. However long I worked at this meditation exercise, the memory that kept coming back to me was of the evening in May 1999 when I was sitting in the Nou Camp in Barcelona, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the injury-time goal that won the Champions League for Manchester United."
"I would suggest that what you experienced that night was elation. And elation is not really what we mean by happiness. It would be an interesting experiment for you to relive that night, and assess what you actually gained from it."
"You're right," I tell him, remembering how, once the euphoria had worn off, I was left contemplating the same void that has been described by countless sports fans. "When I woke up the next morning,"I tell him, "my head still ached, I was still working for a magazine editor who loathed me, and my laptop was still broken. Now that I come to think about it, Manchester United had done absolutely nothing for me."
"Because elation is a transient thing - not true spiritual fulfilment."
"But if I achieve spiritual fulfilment, will I lose interest in going to Old Trafford?"
"Absolutely not. That's one of the mistakes people make: that a serene, balanced mind is a dull mind. I love football."

Robert Chalmers, "The Happiest Man in the World," Good Weekend March 24, 2007, p. 48

Locked up in the attic of the tower of Babel

It's a familiar feeling, why? Realised - because I am the Japanese girl from Babel. I keep trying everything I can think of - smiling flirtatiously, staring a bit too long, making awkward passes at inappropriate men (he used the word "awkwardness" in an email...), everything. Walking back across the road from the grocery store just now I was looking into the dodgy pub on the corner and had a momentary fantasy of walking in, taking off all my clothes, and saying to the drunks and directless fellows inside, "Come on, boys? Who wantsa piece a this?" Just like the scene in Babel where she appears nude in front of the cop.

But I know what would happen. They would say "Eeew!" and recoil just like the inappropriate men in the movie did to the Japanese girl. Or some fatherly type - a barman? bouncer? cop? - would put his coat over me and walk me outside. Like her, I would collapse in desparate tears - still needing to get laid, still no closer to my goal, but closer to what I really need, which is just a little bit of kindness and a little bit of understanding. From a man, though. Gotta be from a man.

What is it about me...

What is it about me that REPELS SEXUAL ADVANCES? Why is it that even the most notorious lotharios, sexual harassers of students, swingers, legendary womanisers, polyamorists, all of them decide I need to be treated with respect, and kept at a distance, and not touched or snogged much less anything more, and kept aside for something deeper and more pure. Why, why why? I get an obvious womaniser, multiple serial marrier, person with a complicated love life (that he still hasn't of course mentioned to me), I get him in my house, twice, but all he does is drink water and look at my books and then leave. Why?

Is it that I'm too standoffish? Or that I'm too forward? Too smart- probably? Too obviously in control - I'm not duped at all by the scenario, I see everything but I accept their terms and want to see what I can work out, you know, a casual/secret/ meaningless thing - but they run, they treat me with respect and friendship but I can't even get the other topic on the table. Damn! Why?

It's the same boys who always think I'm really into classical music when they first meet me. Why can't they see the Def Leppard in my soul?

I can handle it, I promise. Even a once off thing and they never call again, it would be fucking better than fucking nothing, which is all I can manage to arrange these days. Argh! Why?

Wittgenstein

Opera class has finished, and the new class is about Ludwig Wittgenstein. This week, in the second meeting of the class, we watched part of Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein, script by Terry Eagleton. It's a weird but great film, sort of puts the philosophy in a human context. One scene struck me in particular. I've been looking for the exact quote and when I find it I'll put it here, but the gist was:

Western philosophy has rested on the assumption that each of us is a mind isolated from all other minds by the walls of our skin (the Cartesian assumption, that the only thing you can be sure of is that you think). But Wittgenstein wanted to argue against the possibility of a private language, and to argue that our thoughts are created by us being embedded in a form of life, a community of other people.

He says it much more eloquently than that. The quote is especially moving in the film because he utters it in bed, in the arms of a lover who is gazing at him adoringly. That's a time when yes, you can feel isolated as a pure mind within your own body who can't connect with anyone, but you really want to live out in the space where you two bodies connect, you want that to be the primary metaphysical plane of reality. And also, I am continually struck with how close my PhD thesis view is to Wittgenstein. Perhaps I read him and then never actually thought anything new, just wrote his stuff down. I'm looking forward to getting into the books again to see.

***

And also, the class is quite big with lots of people to meet, and I think it will be easy. During the break I had little friendly exchanges with all sorts of people. I think it's because I have a default smile for strangers now that's a "Hi, can I help you?" smile. It's left over from the work at the Art Gallery, but it's handy even when you're not in a position of authority - it makes people smile back and talk to you.

Made it the whole way, one break

Today was a really nice day outside. One of those days when you walk out the door and go, "Ah! What a nice day!" Pretty blue sky, clear air, and a temperature that was coolish but still summery, maybe a degree warmer or cooler than room temperature but just gorgeous. And tonight when I left work it had the feel of a lovely summer evening in my parents' back yard sitting on the patio after dinner.

However, inside I did not feel this way. I'd had another adrenaline-filled day of staying calm and trying to look competent. I've been eating out too much and not exercising enough for the last few days, and once again I had cook's block, just couldn't think of anything I wanted to eat and couldn't bear the thought of shopping for or cooking it. Couldn't even think of any restaurant I wanted to go to. I went to the park across the road from work and sat on a bench and soaked up the atmosphere, and noticed how this perfect lovely evening is kind of beside the point when you're just struggling home from work and thinking about errands and groceries and all the boring mundane obligations of living. But I tried to imagine sitting in my parents' back yard and how that would feel.

I finally got up and moseyed down Crown Street and made all sorts of vows to myself about the virtuous things I would try to do tonight. I tried to soak up more of the perfect evening feel. It was not quite dusk, and kind of still, and the people walking around all seemed pretty happy, even though it's mid-week so it didn't have that festive Thursday or Friday night feel. About half-way home I had got sort of energised, and when I got home, even though by then it was dusk and turning dark, I decided to just keep moving toward fulfilling my vow.

I got my running shoes on and tracksuit pants, and I went for a run. I've been vowing to get up early and do this every morning since I worked out I couldn't afford my gym membership anymore now that they've raised my rent, but I keep resetting the alarm and not going, and feeling as a result lots of pent-up stress and negativity. When people hear about my commute they always say, "But you do all that walking!" but my body knows that 20 minutes each way is not nearly enough to burn off all the work stress. I need some serious cardio activity for that.

I was also putting it off because I remembered the other times in my life when I decided to start running - in San Diego, and on Dornoch Terrace in Brisbane. I remember the burning of the lungs and the heavy legs and vowing to make it to the next light pole and then you can walk. I was expecting even worse this time. And when I was going to the gym, I'd walk on the treadmill mostly and would only run for two-minute bursts. My plan was to head up the road, run around the park, and then home. Walk when I needed to. Which would probably be after the first 10 steps. Just get that far, and we could go from there.

Well, you'll never believe it. I ran the whole way! I only stopped once to re-tie my tracksuit pants because they were falling down, but otherwise I didn't have to walk at all. I had a little bit of lung-burning but felt like I could have kept up the pace for heaps longer. And it's such a nice journey - past lovely Surry Hills houses and around a lovely park on a pretty brick path. Turns out "all that walking" really does raise your base level of fitness. I am amazed. And vowing to set the alarm early tomorrow and go out and do it again!

Crying in class

Tonight was the last meeting of my continuing education course in Opera. It has been completely, truly life-changing. From the very first night the class kindled a new passion, and now I want to buy a whole swag of $80 CDs and subscribe to the entire season of Opera Australia in the winter for $2000. (My new hobby could be an expensive hobby....)

Tonight the teacher spent the last hour in an exercise inspired by a now defunct web site called "The One Book List". Here's the blurb from that, and she asked people to bring in CDs that had played the same role in their relationship to opera:

"My proposal is this: I would like for each of you to decide on a single book that you would most like for the world to read for inclusion in the list. The book that, for you, was the most influential, or thought-provoking, or enjoyable, or moving, or philosophically powerful, or deep in some sense you cannot properly define, or any other criteria you wish to set."

- Paul Phillips

So people did. They brought in their personal favourites, or the first piece that made them interested in opera, or pieces that they had learned to appreciate differently from being in the class. Everyone stood and introduced the piece as the teacher cued it up, and so when you listened it was really beautiful, I kept wanting to turn around and smile at the selector and say, "Yes, yes, I can hear why it moved you, it is very beautiful, thank you." The genre being so emotional anyway, the combination of the pieces and the personal sentiments made it all very moving. The particular ones that made me teary were:

Placido Domingo, "Ch'ella mi creda libero e lontano" from Puccini, La Faniculla del West
Luciano Pavarotti, "Nessun Dorma" from Puccini, Turandot (lots of Puccini in the list, it's pure Romantic emotion after all, and can't help but make people emotional)
Maria Callas, "La mamma morta" from Andrea Chenier by Umberto Giordano (actually played off the Philadelphia soundtrack)
Marilyn Horne, "Mon coeur s'ouvre á ta voix" from Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saens

I'm sad that it's the last class, but I know that I will continue to pursue all of this on my own, and there's so much to learn! A whole lifetime of finding libretti and comparing singers and watching performances and developing preferences (I'm thinking a little Puccini will go a long way for me, since I'm more of a structuralist-modernist sort of gal and like mathematical precision in my music; and I think Cecilia Bartoli might already be my favourite soprano and it's not just because she features on The Sopranos soundtrack). To that end, on my way to the train station I dropped into a record store and picked up volume 2 of the ABC The Classic 100 Opera moments - not both volumes because I couldn't afford them, and volume 2 by accident because it was the first one I picked up in the rack. And guess what? First track is by my mate Monteverdi! So enough other people like early opera to vote him into position #51.

Ah! The first disc is playing through as we speak and there's a tenor reaching a point of high emotion for some reason or other (Puccini again, ten bucks says), and it makes my heart swell with joy.

What has happened to me? Maybe this is the music for people who no longer need a career direction....

Career direction

In the last issue of Look magazine, the periodical of the Art Gallery Society that comes once a month and hangs out in my bathroom waiting to be read, there's an article on a woman who will be curating a big show of Islamic art later this year. She got the gig through a friend, sort of by accident, because her PhD was more in history than art, and at the end of the article it said, "While she is enjoying the work - and her first taste of Australia - it has helped her decide that she probably wants her career to take a more academic direction, and most likely in a [natural history] museum than an art gallery."

I read this and was startled by one of those feelings that marks the fact that you're past a certain boundary in life, that you've grown older and have changed in fundamental ways. This time it was the notion of a "career direction". I remember the old, nearly constant panic and feeling of obligation to figure out what I was going to DOOOOO, and the compulsion to try on every profession that I ran across as a possible candidate. "Orchid farmer? Maybe I should be an orchid farmer. I should, I should go get some horticulture books right now and spend my weekends reading them...."

But reading the article in Look I suddenly realised that the old familiar panicky companion is now completely gone. Gone. Utterly. I don't have a career direction, I have a career. I'm here. I've arrived. It's right here, this is exactly what I do and want to do and have been working toward doing. I think the magic combination that got me here - to my career destination, not my career direction - is the combination of the web day job and the philosophy stuff on the side, as a kind of serious avocation.

Amazing. Strange feeling but good - I suppose it's always good when you see the back of an old panicky feeling. And the main sense I have is of lots of time freed up, to have experiences and fun and learn new things just for well-roundedness and not because they might one day be supposed to define me.

Good luck, Islamic history chickie. But I am older than you, and I don't have to worry about career direction any more. I'm there.

Art experiences

Today walking home from the Art Gallery I was doing the meditation of imagining myself 20 years in the future again, and thinking of how I will remember this time. The impression was of something rich and multi-coloured, full of vividness and varied designs. Like my calendar looks on my wall at the moment - three things a day in all different colours. And the art book section of my book case - lots of new volumes of the gorgeous and novel things I've seen and am learning about.

Here are some recent ones:

Opera
I have one more class in Beginner's Guide to Opera, and it has been positively life-changing. I'm listening to the first ever one, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, borrowed from my ex-neighbours. I want to go out and buy heaps more, but will save up first. In class the teacher said people tend to come to opera late in life, and I've been wondering why that is. I can remember the former irritated feeling when the neighbors (different ones from above) played soprano arias in the afternoons, but now the sound of a colluratura going for it on the high notes gives me chills. The stories are so simple but the emotions so large, and the Italian libretti are fascinating and beautiful. I still get moved by popular music (huge emo-fest on Rage last night and I didn't turn it off or feel above it) but I'm more interested in learning more about this opera stuff and listening to it all the time.

Specifically, La Traviata

A friend send me a link to sign up for two free tickets to La Traviata, broadcast from inside the Opera House onto a giant screen in the forecourt. I went along last night and it was fabulous. The vision and sound were both really crisp so you felt like you were right there, and the voices were so gorgeous I got aforementioned chills. The cast came up and did a curtain call just for us outside, and it was a gorgeous late-summer Sydney night, and the Opera House loomed grandly behind us and the bridge was there and the ferries were going and it was all just wonderful. The season finishes on March 31 but I have grand plans to save up and go along to the winter season, at least one. The only thing I worry about is drifting off a slight bit when going to a live, bought one inside, because it's so expensive and so fleeting (compared to DVDs and CDs) that you don't want to miss a second of it. Grand, though. Just grand.

Howard Arkley

Today I went to the Howard Arkley retrospective at the Art Gallery, which has travelled to us from Melbourne where he was from and which had more pictures in it. I bought the little catalogue and read it through tonight. I remember seeing one of his houses on a poster at MOCA years and years ago - must have had a show of his while he was still alive. He is famous for depicting Australian suburbia, in loving and iconographic tribute. I love the pictures and relate to them in so many ways. He's older than me but part of my generation, definitely - influenced by the Bauhaus and punk and suburbia and the mix of low and high, decorative vs serious, etc. He died quite suddenly of a drug overdose in 1999, I found out on Wikipedia tonight, four years after and in the same way as my intense journalist friend Wanda Jamrozik, who was connected with and influenced by and emblematic of that same period in Australian history - out of the suburbs, into the punk music venues, and out again into vibrant self-expression. His journey is so interesting because his art school stuff was all black and white abstract stuff, and he moved from there into figurative and (urban) landscape - just the opposite of all those Picasso books and impressionists that you read over and over, they had to learn to paint realistic landscapes and bowls full of apples, and then pushed the boundaries during their career to invent abstractionism. Arkley started with modernist minimal non-figurative stuff and pushed and grew and developed and really heard what was inside wanting to get out and express itself and he ended up with neon airbrush realistic landscapes of Australian suburban houses. They really stand out in the exhibition - they just sing. No wonder he's most known for them. Not just because they speak to us, you can really tell that the pictures themselves have something transcendant about them. This is the same thing I feel about Nick Cave, whose face is in fact on the cover of the catalogue. He pushed the form and was true to his inner vision and now does art that's pure self-expression and not part of any other movement. Both of them are inspiring to me - if I really pushed my own self, what would I find? How would my art/thought develop? From this multicoloured patchwork rich time in my personal history, I will keep on going and see.

The Surest Way

I read an article last week containing a powerful meditation that is proving very helpful:

The Surest Way to Cure a Broken Heart
http://www.been-dumped.com/The-Surest-Way-to-Cure-a-Broken-Heart.php

It's on the site Been-Dumped.com, which I spent many, many hours on back when I first had been-dumped, and which not only I but many other members owe their life to. I'm still on their newsletter and this article was linked in the last one.

The assumption of the article is that time heals all wounds, right?

So if you imagine yourself 20 years from now, you know you won't feel as bad about your ex then as you do now.

So what you do is you remember a heartbreak that happened to you 20 years ago, and reflect on how you feel about it now, and all the experiences and emotions you've had since then that had nothing to do with that person or that experience.

And then you imagine yourself 20 years from now looking back on memories of you ex and having those same feelings for him.

It seems to be working, not just for Pointy-Head, but for lots of things. I feel guilty because I need to go grocery shopping - in 20 years, how will I feel about not having grocery shopped tonight? My hair is too short - in 20 years, how will I feel about this haircut? I have smelly shoes - in 20 years, how will I feel about these shoes? I have to get five banners finished at work tomorrow - in 20 years, will I even remember those banners?

Powerful exercise of perspective. And you also get to enjoy fond and unpainful memories of happy times in the past!