Welcome!
Artists (writers, painters, composers, cooks, architects) create works that inspire contemporaries and future generations. Each of us will select works that resonate with who we are and where along the journey we are.
Where to we come from?... Who are we?... Where are we going?... are the three eternal questions asked by Paul Gauguin when he painted an immortal triptych:
Emily Dickinson wrote:
The soul selects her own society,Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
choose one --
Then close the Valves of her attention --
LIke Stone.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, wondered:
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn? For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
The Japanese monk, Yoshida Kenko, mused:
"The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known."
And so, you too, during this month will (mostly) read communications from others; but also, hopefully, will explore this valley as solitary beings or with others, listen to immortal music, view art, and experience the pleasures unique (as far as we know) to sentient beings.
I have selected some books and poems to consider and invited a few speakers. You are expected to engage with this material -- but these are only one person's choices. Ultimately, you will walk your own path, compose your own canon. Did not the great haiku master Matsuo Basho write?
Don't imitate me --
It's as boring as
Two halves of a melon.
References:
Paul Gauguin: The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little Brown and Co. 1969
1984 by George Orwell
Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko
Basho's Haiku, in The Essential Haiku by Robert Hass
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