Placelore

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Space for Mind

Space for Mind, Space for Art

From 28th of May to 3rd June 2012, an exhibition of Tibetan Buddhist Art entitled ‘Space for Mind, Space for Art: treasures of Tibetan Buddhism, and contemporary responses’ will be hosted by Diamond Way Buddhism in Lambeth. (The Spring Project, 100 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5EL)

Together with the extraordinary Tibetan Buddhist Art exhibition, a collection of contemporary art from both the local community and a national collection will be displayed, offering local artists from the area of Lambeth an opportunity to be have their artwork displayed alongside pieces of national importance.

Daily guided tours will acquaint visitors with the significance of the exhibits, which are not only beautiful artefacts, but have significance and practical use in the development of positive personal – and beyond-personal – qualities through meditation.

Lectures by experts in the field of Tibetology and Tibetan Buddhist Art will provide invaluable insights into fascinating fields as diverse as consciousness between lives and Buddhist Symbolism. We are also honoured to host Lama Jampa Thaye, who will give an address during the private view.

Any profits from the event will go to The Spring Project, a social enterprise that provides employment training for young people, and Diamond Way Buddhism UK, a registered charity that provides authentic Tibetan meditation to the public.

We are very grateful to the British Council, for the generous loan of ten pieces of contemporary art from the British Council Collection.

This will be the most significant exhibition combining contemporary art with the art of Tibetan Buddhism in Lambeth in recent years, and we do hope you can join us.

 

Stillness in Movemnt

This workshop date has been changed from Sunday 3rd June to Saturday 2nd June

http://www.welltemperedmusician.com/index.php?q=stillness-in-movement.html

 

Full Steam

(Received from a friend)

David Gray said of this track in publicity materials: "It's a song with quite dark sentiments. I see it as a broad political thing, I think of the line from TS Eliot, 'a patient etherised upon a table', that's the state we're in as a collective mass. We're just sedated, talking s--t. We're so disconnected from the guts of life most of the time."

David Grays single ‘Full Steam’, a duet with Annie Lennox.  All proceeds from the sale of this single will go to Children In Need.

Here you can watch the official video for the song.

David Gray - Full Steam Lyrics featuring Annie Lennox

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEUjWO4KV4s

All our lives we’ve dreamed about it
Just to find that it was never real
This sure ain’t no great Valhalla
Coming closer each turn of the wheel
Forlorn, adrift on seas of beige
In this our Golden Age

Even in our darkest hour
Never thought that it could get so bad
Bullied, suckered, pimped and patronised
Every day your tawdry little lives
So loose your head
And step within
The silence deafening

Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming but still
Running full steam ahead

In and out of consciousness
It breaks my heart to see you like this
Crying, wringing hands and cursing fate
Always so little far too late
It’s 3am I’m wide awake
There’s still one call to make

Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it

Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
But still running full steam
Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming but still
Running full steam
Now you
And I
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
Now you
And I
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it

 

We are What we Wear: Kathakali

We are What we Wear: Kathakali

Information

• What:
  Special Events
• When:
  Sun 13 May 2012 10:30
• Where:
  Sackler Centre

SPECIAL EVENT: Find out about Kathakali, a male classical dance drama that originated in the temples of Kerala, South India.

Watch the fascinating application of the dancer's make-up, a demonstration of Kathakali gesture techniques and a performance that tells an epic Hindu story.

 

 

Victoria and Albert Museum London UK

 

Life and Death - I wont turn ten

You may wish to put aside some time and listen to some interviews with Maurice Sendak.

"You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson — she’s probably the top — Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life."

Maurice Sendax 1928–2012 

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak

Life and Lies

Towards the end of the novel Butchers Crossing[1] there is an exchange between two of the characters, Mr McDonald an old trader who deals in hides particularly those of buffalo, and Will Anders, a young man influenced by Waldo Emerson, had set out to find something of his true nature in the Western wilderness.     

McDonald states, “You always think that there’s something to find out ... Well, there’s nothing, … You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you are ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”

Although Andrews feels a vague creeping terror through what has been said he is unable to face it and declares, “That’s not the way it is.” However Macdonald persists and both are left to face their situation, the older man acknowledging that “I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learnt a long time ago. I let the lies come back.” For his part through hard experience earned high in the Rockies the young man is left uncertain, not knowing, but he senses that he will never return to a shape of life that had now relinquished him.

How do I know what I ‘think’ I know?

I was in my late twenties when I went ‘mad’, so called, for what is madness and who defines it so? Like dark clouds amassing over a mountain range the events leading to the eventful occasion had been gathering for some time. So obvious now upon reflection — the life I was leading was no longer compatible to the life I was being called to live, something needed to give, fortunately it did. Among other matters the employment I had at the time revealed irrefutably that so much that is taken as fact and truth is nothing but lies. It is easy enough to have it said to you, ‘don’t believe what you read in the newspapers, or what others tell you’ but when these words are eventually fleshed out in the body and are felt, it is a different story, you can go then in an instant from having an identity, a name, to having none. There is a ‘breakdown’ but that is only one way of looking at it, it can also be a break though or a break up which is a much healthier approach to the situation.

The overriding fear I felt that particular day was clear – what would occur if those without understanding reached me first and gave medication to help ‘calm one down’, instinctively I felt that if one drug was placed in the body, a fine and delicate process would be interfered with, hindered, maybe even irrevocably so. 

The passage of a living body through time involves a chemical process; this also applies in what many refer to as the spiritual path. It reveals a gross lack of understanding to call this, as one popular ‘spiritual’ writer stated, blasphemy. 

As the character MacDonald indicated we forget, forget to remember, thus there is constant repetition although it may not appear so. Contrary to Rhonda Byrne’s[2] advocacy there is no secret, its just that we do not see. Thus the first, long, fundamental step is to see – this is how I am, this is the essential step to becoming free of all lies and lying, firstly to oneself and then to others.      

_______________

Recognition not of habit, but of the FORCE of habit.

 

  

---

[1] John Williams Butchers Crossing p.250, nyrb New York, 2007 edition

[2] Rhonda Byrne The Secret Simon & Schuster 2006

 

Storytelling at the Crick Crack Club

 A LOVE LIKE SALT

8th MAY 2012   7:30pm

Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth University 

Box Office: 01970 623 232 orwww.aberystwythartscentre.co.uk

11th MAY 2012   7:30pm  

Rich Mix, London E1
(Shoreditch High Street/Liverpool Street stations)

Box Office: 020 7613 7498  or www.richmix.org.uk 

A woman's resolve to love an absent husband is put to the test; a desperate man surrenders his soul to satisfy his desire, and a knight embarks on a year-long quest to find out what it is that women really want.  

 

With their distinctive blend of storytelling, haunting music and driving rhythms, The Devil's Violin Company weave a powerful and mysterious spell.

 

Performance storyteller Daniel Morden untangles half forgotten tales that have gripped us for hundreds of years. Full of passion, longing and danger, these are stories of lust and obsession; bargains and betrayals, and of life and death. They also happen to be the tales that inspired Shakespeare to write King Lear, and which can be found deep within Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  

http://www.crickcrackclub.com/

transcendence

Dew drops into sunlight

quietly touching, 

be so

accepted

flow through

 

to a childhood river

hard bouldered 

by turbulent beatings

 

the violent 

crossing 

currents of others

left a wounding 

 

dark hole

made desperate

lonelier

by a vacant God. 

 

Come

hold my hand

watch

let go

there is no redemption

 

For us and snow

My love

There is only

transcendence

 

 

 

 

 

To Know Nothing

Two quotes from the remarkable Ursuala Le Guin which point towards the fundamentals of a quest …  

"To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing."

 

“We are a carbon-based life-form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering.”

 

Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes, Ace Books (New York) Pps.160 and 222  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/21/ursula-k-le-guin-realism 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/

http://www.enotes.com/ursula-k-le-guin-criticism/le-guin-ursula-k

http://greenbooks.theonering.net/tributes/files/ursula_leguin.html

 

 

 

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things

 

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I.

'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.'

 

'Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,' I cried.

'My friends are gone, but that's a truth

Nor grave nor bed denied,

Learned in bodily lowliness

And in the heart's pride.

 

'A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.'

 

W. B. Yeats 

 

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

 

...Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,

See more in a truth than the truth's simple self,

Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street

Sixty the minute; what's to note in that?

You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;

Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands!

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist, demireps

That loves and saves her soul in new French books—

We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway: one step aside,

They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line

Before your sages,—just the men to shrink

From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad

You offer their refinement..

 

Robert Browning 

 

 

Selections from Last Poems

 IX

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers

Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,

The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.

Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

 

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,

One season ruined of your little store.

May will be fine next year as like as not:

But ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

 

We for a certainty are not the first

Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled

Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed

Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

 

It is in truth iniquity on high

To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,

And mar the merriment as you and I

Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

 

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.

My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;

Our only portion is the estate of man:

We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

 

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours

To-morrow it will hie on far behests;

The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours

Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

 

The troubles of our proud and angry dust

Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

Bear them we can, and if we can we must.

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

 

A.E. Housman