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« Be Primal: Voice, Humanity, and Customers as Us | Main | Wondrous Happiness Lane »

Jul 12, 2005

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Marilyn

I smiled when I saw the link to your "Big Sky Mind" post...I think that was the first post I ever read here. Enjoy Taos. We were hoping to get there this summer, having purchased a little plot in Tres Piedras which we still haven't seen. It's beautiful country. May your voice find its mojo there...and vice versa...

Evelyn Rodriguez

Marilyn,
New Mexico itself is humming with mojo. What an awesome place to renew yourself. I only got as close to Tres Piedras as the Earthship community (see www.earthship.org).

Romy

"Sometimes I wonder, maybe, just maybe, a connected voice doesn't need to do somersaults."

The painter Ben Shahn said, "The universal experience is that private experience which illuminates the private and personal world in which each of us lives the major part of his life. Thus, in art, the symbol which has vast universality may be some figure drawn from the most remote and inward recesses of consciousness; for it is here that we are unique and sovereign and most wholly aware. I think of Masaccio's "Expulsion from the Garden", so intensely personal that it leaves no person untouched. I think of a di Chirico figure, lonely in a lonely street haunted by shadows; its loneliness speaks to all human loneliness. As an experience, neither painting has anything of the average; both come from extreme limits of feelings and both paintings have great universality."

My thoughts are that the voice of the artist can only be drawn from the more inward recesses of consciousness because it is there where he is more wholly aware. Wholly in the sense that he no longer perceives within the boundaries of opinions, conditionings, memories etc. These are the stuff of the outer layer of consciousness, that is called the "smaller mind" in Zen, the individual or outer self that Jorge Luis Borges once called the "other Borges".

I think that the more wholly aware we are, the more unique the configurations of our experiece would be. We somersaults into greater solitude. And yet the more universally connected we would be at the same time. This primal awareness is what we intimately share with everybody. And the artist proclaims this primal and universal awareness by mirroring it on the personal and unique expressions of his art. Allen Ginsberg was talking once about the mind but I think he was referring to this primal consciousness. He said, "If you can show your mind, it reminds people that they got a mind. If you have a vivid moment that's more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments." I look at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and I hear his unique voice and I also know that sometime, somewhere I had been aware of life in the same way too.


Evelyn Rodriguez

Romy,
This comment is so astoundingly beautiful. In the "smaller mind" I am fragile, scared, feeble; whole, "I" am vastness itself.

Thanks!

passing through

James Frey is a fraud; his memoir is a hoax. See http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

Voice? How about "I am a Loser and a Liar and a Millionaire"?

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