Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

Two images, for your viewing pleasure. I discovered these on the blog For Me, For You, and I don’t know anything about the artists. But I do adore them. Apologies for my lack of knowledge and if posting these is illegal.

PS: Kate of For You, For Me, claimed she found the lower one on ffffound, which is one of my favorite sites to find new art. The top one was discovered on f letter’s photo stream.

Regular readers of Mindflowers will recall my frothing mouth in reference to Improv Everywhere.  Here is a new one, hot off the escalator.

With silence, laughter, grief,
we share in common prayer
at Eucharist, in play, in mourning
we live in one Body

our words are political events
each has its own electricity that
burns and shakes awake scars
yet a Word has been spoken
that tends them

we dine at common meal
at a table larger than expected
(how we had been fooled!)
we thought the door locked to those that were
already in
(when the crowds blocked the door they were lowered
through ceilings)

each with our common cause
we spoke down Babel’s lines
and somehow missed that between heartbeats
we sang at once in tongues of angels

to dine
together
at common meal
our common prayer

we are sisters
we are brothers
we are not sin

we are praying together
in spirit
in common
and our words bat at each other blindly
(O that we may be one!)

when all is stripped away
(and it will be)
all that will remain will be love

(A poem inspired by “Wisdom of Royal Glory: Kutadgu Bilig” the Eleventh Century Turk0-Islamic wisdom literature epic written by Yusuf Khass Hajib. Translated by Robert Dankoff, published by University of Chicago Press)

When the ascetic’s bald head bowed having finished her instruction she was silent on her seat beneath the bodhi tree

the Emperor’s advisor, having heard her teaching answered in quiet
he gathered his entourage with a gentle movement of his ringed finger
his attentive camp assembled for travel
The advisor and vizier to the Emperor, ruler to the edges of the world,
the lord Emperor Glorious Dawn, mounted his broad horse regaled in the courtly colors and with standard guard both behind and beside began his return to the marbled palace gates

he rode in thought, reflecting on the wise ascetic’s teaching:
‘all returns to dust, the highest are brought low, all is wind and shadow,death and illness leave none untouched, everything changes, dies, rusts. seek only that which is lasting.’

Sun tied on ritual robes, rubbed saffron in her bathing
Earth filled with dusk dust, the world rested, griefless but wise
Virgo sang rising songs through glowing palms
Sky washed her face with embers and ash and flirted with her mists
flying creatures went to roost and flying creatures took silent wing
walking creatures burrowed and walking creatures hunted
and all living things were silent
and the advisor stopped his caravan for prayers

Mars stepped down from his heights, his Ajaxs settled on their couches
Pleides set their table for feasting
Scorpio lurked in the east
the advisor did not cease his museful riding, though his company weary
the aegis of dawn rested below sky but glowed like armor rusted in
storage
and the advisor stopped their sojourn for prayers

Sky wore her jewels
yellow nightengale tremored her throat in first hesitant testings
Sun showed herself like the laughter of daughters
and the advisor dismounted for prayers

sleepless and road sore, the advisor and his cadre came
at last to the walls of the palace
and passing the guards, the archers, and watchmen
by the cemetary mounds in shadows of empty cisterns
he rubbed his neck
and readied to meet Glorious Dawn

Ryan McGivern

            The language of non-contact as a feature of eros in Levinas has two features to the whole of his ethics, first is that love requires Infinity; the continued duality of lovers. Upon this is built the structure of time, in the fecundity of the subject’s desiring. Departing from Parmenides, Spinoza, and Hegel’s Unity of time, Levinas neither supports time as a ‘fallen form of being’ nor an historical return to metaphysical union. Secondly, by way of Levinas’ construction of non-contact, he avoids the tendency towards assimilation supported through philosophies and myths of unity. Levinas’ appeal to the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve as original difference supports duality and multiplicity. “The difference between the sexes is a formal structure, but one that carves up reality in another sense and conditions the very possibility of reality as multiple, against the unity of being proclaimed by Parmenides.”[1]

            This language and reasoning can have its own feminist criticisms, including the entreaty to a sexual dualism in the Biblical myth. To some feminists’ retrievals, dualistic binaries present just as troublesome as originary unity. In duality, other bodies and sexes are exposed to graspable knowledge even in absentee; as Beauvoir writes- “even if a man can subjectively go through erotic experiences without woman being present, she is objectively implied in his sexuality…Man discovers woman in discovering his own sex.”[2] Secondly, Irigaray finds a forgetting or sublimation of bodies in context of the language of non-contact. In Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray returns to Plato’s portrayal in the Symposium of Socrates and Diotima where the embodied, political, and familial features of fecundity are replaced in favor of the spiritual product of ‘immortal children’. Irigaray decides to uncover a fecundity in a sense that does not transcend the flesh, retains maternal creativity and avoid what she sees as an instrumentalization and violent inequality of love; whereby eros become a medium towards transcendence. Of the god Eros, Irigaray writes, the erotic became an intermediary condition; and love an institution of asymmetry; for Eros had been born of Plenty and Poverty.

            Despite Levinas’ attempt to depict human existence and relation as sensitive, creative, and passive, his language of the erotic has in feminisms continually been the subject of criticism revealing instrumentalist propensities. Levinas’ premise of the child, or ‘son’, being a precondition to truth, Iragaray suggests acts as a telos of paternity. Irigaray finds that the subject portrayed as male in Levinas finds the utility of the feminine to return transcendent via fecundity, the feminine remains deferred: “she, the beloved is plunged into the depths.”[3] This violence of the virile male subject who accomplishes the repetition or ipseity return by means of the feminine maintains woman as the modest beloved responsible only for the maintenance of desire.

            Kate Ince reveals that Irigaray does retrieve from Levinas’ voluptuousity a biological and ethical time that saves from the oppressions of Western metaphysics’ determinations of time which endanger with mechanization, and marginalize by the limitations of productivity. Levinas’ open loops of ipseity in continual and non-identical returns are anthropological and moreover ethical-relational erotic movements of time. In these movements, Irigaray finds an organic rhythm that as circular undermines the Modern linear constructions of disembodied time. Irigaray writes that as embodied mutually fecund and responsible subjects, there is a limit to the speed of growth; a relationality to temporality. Ince writes of Irigaray’s erotic temporality; its “rhythm is one in which pausing enables the subject to draw on material resources that remain forgotten and unused in an economy of the tekhne.”[4] The cyclical, agriculture retrieval of feminine time by Irigaray signifies the natural economies of bodies in their creationality and need for replenishment saving bodies from the rigidity of technoscientific demands and its streamlining productivity: “[d]oesn’t the machine unceasingly threaten to destroy us through the speed of its acceleration?”[5] As Irigaray’s work on erotic temporality announces, the technoscientific poses multitudinous opportunities for feminist deconstruction, and warrants a thorough critique for its threats and positive retrievals.

Like writer Heather O’Neil and the band Mum, painter Tiffany Liu tackles beauty, innocence and loneliness from the frame of childhood daydreams and a sugar cereal aesthetic. If I was Kobe Bryant or former Senator Larry Craig or some other rich guy, I’d totally stock up on Liu’s originals. Raise your hand if you appreciate the word phantasmagoria. A print of the first painting below is on sale at apapertiger for $80 — a hair or two out of my price range, but perhaps Mindflowers has a rich benefactor amongst our readers?

My friend Courtney passed this along to me, an affirmation for living the good life:

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.