INSIDEOWL: In What Furnace Was Thy Brain?

In What Furnace Was Thy Brain? · 1 May 2008

I committed petitio principii.

Not sex act, sorry. A phallacy. With an F. It’s circular reasoning. The form of my fallacy was a little lacking, but I did beg a question in stating that "Power of Now is not by a long shot the most stunning spiritual manifesto."

Presuming there is a most stunning manifesto.

I don't know. I can't even name what has moved me most. Maybe in 50 years this will be possible, as I am saving most of the world’s mystic writing for my old age. Kind of like I’m saving vacations to Europe for my old bourgeois years and spending my youth traveling to more challenging places. Economical, but also: kind of arrogant. Is reading Rumi or St. John of the Cross same as a week in Mallorca or Provence? Outside consolation?

You know the readers I want are those who will tell me that spiritual manifestoes are necessary.

I wish I kept track of what I read. But maybe not thinking about this question before answering will generate the most accurate response.

What are the most stunning manifestoes? What has stunned you? Actually changed your way of being?

Posted by (0v0)
Categories: spirituality

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Off the top of my head…
Ecclesiastes
Franny and Zooey (not sure if this a manifesto)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Brothers Karamasov (Grand Inquisitor)
The Power and the Glory
The Bone People
I and Thou
Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
The Rubiayat
American late 21st century meta-lit (Pynchon, Delillo, those guys, again not really manifestoes but I read them as such, oops)
Early Marx
Pema Chodron
Pierre Bourdieu
The integral shit

Weird what's is missing from this list. Things I could have absorbed on a cellular level but relate to more superficially. So… none of the literature on yoga and little that qualifies as eastern spirituality has really moved me. I wonder if I’m still capable of being metaphysically blindsided...

Posted by: (0v0) · May 1, 04:10 PM · #
“Is reading Rumi or St. John of the Cross same as a week in Mallorca or Provence?”

I don’t know; but a week in Barrio La Luz (Managua) kicks the shit out of either of ‘em.

Posted by: R · May 1, 06:24 PM · #
No shit!

How bout a year? At the address: de la Rotunda Santa Domingo, cinco cuadras al sur, dos y media abajo, mano izquierda (wonder if anyone will ever google that).

And why the heck was I reading Proust and DeLillo there? Escapist.

You never told me a book that stunned you though, R. Because you don’t want to admit it’s Lao Tzu.

Posted by: (0v0) · May 1, 06:35 PM · #
The Awakening
Portrait of a Lady
Madame Bovary
Ulysses
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
To The Lighthouse
Huang Po
Dogen
Hongzhi
The Artifice of Absorption
Continuous Project Altered Daily
Four Quartets
Ariel
Mad Love
Anything by Marguerite Duras or Carole Maso

Posted by: karen · May 1, 06:39 PM · #
Oh!!! I’m excited to read all the last nine here. Thanks.

Speaking of escapism, read To the Lighthouse while sick in the mountains of Honduras. It was strangely perfect there and I’m glad that that perfection was not just the result of my giardia-and-tapeworm-inspired fever dream.

I have been wondering if I was twisted to like Carole Maso.

Maybe we are.

Posted by: (0v0) · May 1, 06:44 PM · #
“Is reading Rumi or St. John of the Cross same as a week in Mallorca or Provence?” Wow, you’re creative. That is an interesting construct. I haven’t read Rumi, but have had some of his poems read to me. However, I have read St. John of the Cross (I was aged 16 to 20 then) as well as all other mystics. I can see that if you apply what he talks about you could end up with similar mental relaxation that a week in Mallorca or Provence. However, the weeks in those places would stimulate the senses, while reading the mystics would drive you to do the opposite.
Cheers
Arturo

PS
I don’t think I’m answering your question, though, about what I read that changed my way of being.
The Imitation of Christ
The biography of St Therese of Lisieux
The writings of Therese of Avila
The many, many psycho-biographies I’ve read on important people in history such as: Lord Byron, Shelley, Georges Sand, Victor Hugo, Phillip Johnson, IM Pei, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, La Princesse de Nohaille, (I was steeped in French history for a few years), Napoleon III and Eugenie, Carlota and Maximillian, Nicholas and Alexandra, Alexander the Great, Queen Victoria, her niece who traveled the world before anyone else did, the last of the French autocrats who unified the tribes of Northern Africa, Rupert Murdoch (I picked up a biography of his while in college for a few dollars – it was a fascinating read), books by Gabriel Coussens, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron of course, Arthur Jeon, I’m falling asleep. Have you had the chance to meet Arthur Jeon? He lives in Santa Monica and also teaches some yoga, besides writing Buddhist books.
hugs
Arturo

Posted by: arturo · May 1, 07:02 PM · #
ok ok. going with the narrower criterion of “actually changed your way of being”...

(in chronological order)

1. tao te ching
2. on the road
3. early recordings of elliott smith
4. the communist manifesto
5. jesus and the disinherited
6. rider-waite tarot deck
7. as i lay dying
8. i and thou
9. the ideas of wittgenstein (by osmosis)
10. hodges’ intellectual foundations of the nicaraguan revolution
11. the brothers karamazov

[6 years of intellectual death by empiricism]

12. andean tarot deck
13. v
14. various poems by ee cummings
15. various poems by elizabeth bishop

Posted by: R · May 1, 07:46 PM · #
The Tao of Pooh, Dead Eye Dick, I Am That, Siddartha, and Charlie and the Chocolate factory.

Posted by: Susan · May 2, 06:33 AM · #
I once stayed with a family in Mystras, near Sparta. It was home of the last Byzantines, with a castle up the mountain. Goats bells clinking in the morning as they went to their next graze, the breeze through the olive and lemon groves, the stove top coffee the suns heat rising, and a backyard with hens quietly telling us their stories in this background of tranquility.

That was over ten years ago, and the books I have read since then all point to that somehow. Isn’t that strange. It says that my mind says too much about what it thinks, ad nauseum.

But here are some that flicked me onto a good path, slightly off the sheep trail…

Now I am a feeler so these tend to be more ‘knowledge’ based, because that is my weak spot. The books that work I’d wager are the ones that awaken your own weak spot… and therefor ‘balance and ground’ the monkey in the head!

1. A Theory of Everything
2. In over our heads
3. Good to great
4. Siddartha
5. The fourth way
6. Love in the time of cholera
7. The fifth discipline
8. The hero with a thousand faces
9. The middle passage
10. The Road (doh…)

Posted by: Gregor · May 2, 07:49 AM · #
My list of stunning texts is so deeply and totally based in my own experience and “quests” if you will, that it’s almost inaccessibly biased. Nonetheless:

Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (and all else)
Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest” (and all else, with special love for Zarathustra)
Bataille, Story of the Eye
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (and all else)
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Robbins, Even Cowgirls get the Blues
The New Testament
Yoga Sutras, particularly Book 2
(unknown), How to be a Couple and Still be Free
Schnarch, Passionate Marriage
Hesse, Steppenwolf (I’ve always preferred this book to Siddhartha)
Hardly spiritual, but couldn’t possibly be more influential: Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Mallarme’s poetry

That’ll do for a starter list. A film list (not requested, but offered) would have to include pictures by:

Godard (60s)
Inarritu
Coppola (70s)
Leone

More than this starts to become fandom rather than sublimity (of various kinds).

Posted by: patrick · May 2, 09:43 AM · #
Film list Yeah!

In order of enlightening!

Ikiru
Solaris (Soderbergh because it made me cry)
Rashomon

Posted by: Gregor · May 2, 09:59 AM · #
Momo

Posted by: V · May 2, 11:57 AM · #
A visit to the Musee Picasso when I was “vingt-deux ans” (you had to say you were a student and your age in order to get into the museums at a reduced price, so I learned it)

Oulipo Compendium

The REAL Solaris (Tarkovsky) (ok that was snarky but I can’t help it; I hated the remake)

Bitches’ Brew

Persian Surgery Dervishes (Terry Riley)

the original Prince of Persia video game (like, 1988 or 1989 or something)

But I have to admit, when I look back at these things, I remember them vividly and they may be influences or things I admire and/or have a kinship with, but “changed my way of thinking”? Permanently? I don’t think so. Is that truly, truly possible? I don’t know if I believe in that. I think experiences and people change your ways of thinking, over months and years, and that most experiences with art and music are too fleeting to influence in quite the same profound way.

Posted by: katie · May 2, 11:58 AM · #
Reflections encouraged by Katie’s last point (thanks Katie):

I don’t think it’s about the difference between art/ideas on the one hand and “real” experiences/interactions on the other. And I don’t think that art is too fleeting or superficial to have the kind of profound impact being discussed here. (Call me a misanthrope—many do—but, if anything, I’d have made the pessimistic argument about people, not art.)

I can honestly say that the “me” that existed post- each item on my list is clearly and distinctly different from the “me” that existed pre- that item; further, that each experience with art/literature/music had such a defining impact on who I’ve become, that it’s inconceivable for me again to be who I was before.

That said, I do agree, in a sense: I do think that “people and experiences change your ways of thinking, over months and years.” But they do so along with everything else that we experience as integral to our lives—which, for me at least, includes art, music, literature, architecture, philosophy, history, etc. For me, these latter items are “experiences” in the same sense that travel or meaningful conversations are “experiences” (to return to a point of the original post, if I remember correctly). But I do agree on the gradualness point. It’s not as straightforward as “I was one way, then I read/saw/listened to this thing, then I was another way.” It’s just that this is how it appears in retrospect. (Uh oh; coming up on a theme from about 6 months ago: gradualism vs. personal revolutions…)

Change, at least for me, is a gradual process, influenced by all the contextual elements noted above, and characterized (for better or worse) by a process of iteration and re-iteration, trial and error, action and critique, conscious activity and habit, consumption and production.

But once in awhile you chance upon an experience (reading a spiritual manifesto, seeing a film, having a particularly profound late-night pub conversation—all the same in my book) that’s perfectly placed. That is, it’s sufficiently resonant with the change that’s already been going on to be meaningful; it moves things sufficiently beyond where they were at (or crystallizes, in a particularly profound way, what was already there but had been unclear) to constitute a mini-revolution. (If the experience is too out of left field, we’re likely to dismiss it or be incapable of assimilating its relevance or meaningfulness. If it doesn’t push the boundaries of already-existing experience far enough, it’s likely to be overlooked.) This moment then becomes (at least in retrospect, but I think also in reality) a ratchet-point—a bell that can’t be unrung (at least not without some serious denial).

One example. Before reading I and Thou, I’d already been thinking plenty (for quite awhile) about most of the issues with which it deals: God, love, relation, objectification, the (in?)capacity of the human mind for true empathy, quotidian simplicity, etc. I’d been thinking/experiencing these issues via my relationships, my reading, my various experiences. Reading I and Thou at that moment took what was already almost there and synthesized it and pushed it over the edge into an ineffable clarity; just as importantly, it gave it a name and a moment in time. While the bulk of the internal changes captured by this moment had happened gradually, they would have dissolved into the ebbs and flows of my ongoing development—and maybe never have stuck—if it weren’t for this profound moment of artistic experience. There’s now a clear “me before I and Thou” and “me after I and Thou”—a distinction that actually makes plenty of sense from the perspective of my internal narrative. (Even though I sound like a profound ass saying it. [Back off Milton. Mo.])

Last point: the momentousness is not, then, entirely (or even primarily) a product of the profundity of the thing itself. The profundity is in many respects bestowed upon the thing by its context of experience. Solaris (the REAL one) was not on my list; but seen at another point in my life, it very well might have been. On the Road would not have made my list if I’d first encountered it after the age of 18—but that’s right when I read it (and at an immature 18, at that). Finally, given who I am, I venture to say that hearing Elliott Smith’s “Angeles” for the first time would have made my list regardless of when I heard it.

Posted by: R · May 2, 01:43 PM · #
Well said! Nodding throughout! Indeed, there are people (real live flesh and blood people) who were essential to me at 22 and who are not in the least essential to me at 37, perhaps misanthropic as that sounds.

Posted by: patrick · May 2, 02:36 PM · #
Wait….

Alyosha isn’t a real person?

Posted by: (0v0) · May 2, 10:29 PM · #