Meditation on a Cat Picture and a Flamingo Statue

I am a very visual person. As a student studying cinema, I’m interested in creating stories that can be woven together into a film. Even when something isn’t “supposed to” contain elements of narrative and fiction as defined by its medium, I do my very best to put them in there anyway. I want to make my own unique stories, in pictures and in words. Optimally, they end up being amusing.When making anything, I tend to hack a jagged path through the whole mess as fast as possible, and have something technically defined as a finished product as soon as I can. Then the real work can begin. I read or watch what I’ve put together more times than I can count, making changes, large or small, each time. When a piece is near done, it’s a family member I am dying to distance myself from. I have to take long breaks after making any work before I can survey it without it nagging me to consider switching the order of two shots, or to say “stupid” instead of “lacking of brains”. Whatever the work is, it usually ends up embodying my emotional state during the project, and contains themes and ideas that have recently been rolling around my head.My meditation on a flamingo statue is the most fun I have ever had writing something described as nonfiction. I researched as I wrote, and the research helped me gain momentum and interests in the themes I attempted to cover of real versus fake and a search for meaning and purpose. I have been a lifetime vegetarian, and this guided some of the pieces ideas as well as my research on salmon, unexpectedly teaching me that many of the salmon found at the supermarket could be another fish entirely, something interesting to learn and fun to play with thematically. The sculpture of melting flamingos I chose to marinate my thoughts over haunted me with a dark feeling of decay, which I attempted to portray throughout the piece. My goal in writing it was to build an uneasy adventure through imagination to bring my thoughts and feelings into a physical space and over a narrative arc instead of leaving them as just words on a page

Almost a proper Buddhist : the post-secular complexity of heritage Buddhist teen identity in Britain

This qualitative study explores how Buddhist affiliation relates to practice, how Buddhist teens define and experience their religious identity and which sociological paradigms are helpful in understanding the dynamics of Buddhist teen identity. Focus group methodology was used to examine attitudes to superstition, stereotypes, prejudice, religion and society, convictions, and friends for 65 heritage Buddhist teenagers from Britain. Shared identity was expressed in terms of spiritual teachers, eclecticism within the Buddhist tradition, Asian heritage, openness to the supernatural, relevance of Buddhism in the present day and temple-going. Practice rather than belief seemed to represent the operational difference between how Buddhist teens defined 'Buddhist' and 'proper Buddhist'. Buddhist teens experienced little negative prejudice on account of their religion but experienced being grouped with Buddhists of other ethnicities in others' eyes. Secularization, modernity, projection and especially post-secularism were found helpful as sociological paradigms for explaining various aspects of Buddhist teen identity

WRITING UTOPIA NOW: Utopian Poetics In The Work Of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This thesis examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), Audience Distant Relative (1977) and Reveillé dans la Brume (Awakened in the Mist) (1977). The premise of the thesis is an exploration of the various ways in which these works both perform and gesture toward the possibility of a ‘utopian’ experience of nonalienation. In Cha’s vocabulary, this takes the form of ‘interfusion’ and is related to the role of the artist as alchemist. Cha employs formal and linguistic innovations in her text, mail art and performance works to invite active participation from her readers and audience in a gesture toward embodied intersubjectivity. Her grappling with the challenges relating to the articulation of subjectivity place her work at the centre of contemporary critical debates around subjectivity and innovative poetics. In particular, recent scholarship on race and the poetic avant-garde has called for cross-disciplinary approaches to reading DICTEE as a text that explores the intersections of subjectivity and its performance in contemporary innovative poetics. Developing a theory of Utopian Poetics from my reading of Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy, I explore the ways in which DICTEE and Cha’s other works perform a yearning for non-alienated subjectivity that remains necessarily open and incomplete. My reading of DICTEE, in particular, is primarily informed by my own practices of yoga and meditation, and these practices form the basis of both my scholarly and creative engagements with this research. This scholarly thesis comprises Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2 comprises my own creative experiments with UtopianPoetics

The Prefix of Prefixes: Francis Ponge's 'Le Pre' and La Fabrique du 'Pre'

1996-01-01

Theory of Telepathy: an Alternative Interpretation of Psychotic Experiences and Some Tips for Recovery

This article looks at mental illness, in particular psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and spirituality. It argues that the phenomenon of ‘voice hearing’, which is present in schizophrenia (but also other mental illnesses) can be understood at least in part as telepathy and can be explained in a spiritual framework. For this purpose, literatures from the parapsychological field as well as spiritual accounts are used. Both fields recognise the phenomena of voice hearing and telepathy, while so far they have not claimed that mental illness can be explained as a spiritual phenomenon. This explanation, however, resembles more the pre-modern interpretations of this illness. This article will conclude with a list of recommendations and tips for recovery from schizophrenia and psychosis

Postsecular instruments of acculturation : Czesław Miłosz's works from the second American Stay

The article raises the question about the ways in which religious tradition can become an ally in the process of acculturation while serving the modern subject both as a springboard for innovative, creative work and as a tool of self-improvement. Czesław Miłosz's selected works from his second stay in the United States (1961-1980) are analysed from the postsecular perspective which recognises religion as a full-fledged actor in the process of modern transformations that may broaden the field of artistic choice but remains vulnerable to artistic resemantizations or even profanations (Agamben). Such an analysis allows us to interpret the poem From the Rising of the Sun as a form of reconciliation of Miłosz's American and Lithuanian experience (as well as of maturity and childhood, centre and periphery, modern and pre-modern cultural formation) through textual practices inspired by his private Liturgy of the Hours. In this light, the translations of the Books of the Bible on which Miłosz worked, his novel The Mountains of Parnassus, as well as his essays from Visions from San Francisco Bay emerge as instruments of shaping the communal identity with the use of pre-existing rituals, which are, nonetheless, also negotiated in the act of writing

Gold Ash: Contested yet Immortal, The Exceptional Potency of Burmese Alchemy

‘Gold ash’ (shway pya), a substance Burmese alchemists produce through a complex process of the combination and burning of metals, is considered by many Burmese as the most potent medical ingredient existing in the country. In this article, I explore the factors underpinning its exceptional potency. Grounding my analysis on ethnography conducted in Myanmar since 2004, and more specifically on the case study of Master U Shein (1926-2014), the most well-known alchemist of the country, I illustrate the multiple facets of gold medicine’s potency and show how they emerged from the dialogue between the substance and the layers of meanings it has come to acquire by its existence within a specific social and political space. In particular, I show how gold medicine has come to occupy a controversial position given that it both contrasts with the biomedical paradigm and is perceived as a threat to state power. I argue that although this controversial position limits its growth, it also provides it with a specific political power, which, alongside the medical and spiritual power traditionally attributed to it, allows it to circulate in that inimical space. I also show that such resilience has been aided by the blurriness and weakness of the regulatory system as well as the great inadequacy and inaccessibility of the biomedical system

DAOISM AS CRITICAL THEORY

Classical philosophical Daoism as it is expressed in the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang-Zi is often interpreted as lacking a capacity for critique and resistance. Since these capacities are taken to be central components of Enlightenment reason and action, it would follow that Daoism is incompatible with Enlightenment. This interpretation is being refuted by way of developing a constructive dialogue between the enlightenment traditions of critical theory and recent philosophy of action from a Daoist perspective. Daoism\u27s normative naturalism does neither rest on a primitivist call for a return to the past, nor does it suggest future-directed activism. By way of reconstructing its descriptive, explanatory and emancipatory dimensions, it is shown that Daoism constitutes an alternative form of critical theory. In contrast to future-directed purposive action or blind rule-following, Daoism\u27s key normative concept of wu-wei emphasizes effortless non-calculative responsiveness in the present. Drawing on recent insights in the philosophy of action, a reconstruction of wu-wei allows to conceive of a promising form of emancipatory agency