"I'm happiest when I'm alone and engaged in looking at something" 

William Delafield Cook

Water and Irigary's 'knowable and unknowable'

" ... when we are immersed in a new landscape, in an extraordinary cosmic manifestation, when we bathe in an environment that is simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible, knowable and unknowable, visible and invisible to us. we are then situated in a milieu, in an event that escapes our control, our know-how, our inventiveness, our imagination. And our response to this 'mystery' is or could be astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation.

"We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life. A life always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us. ...

"If we could analyze each element of energy that reaches us in the explosion of spring, we would lose the global state that we experience by bathing in it through all our senses, our whole body, our whole soul. ...

Luce Irigary, 2002 Between East and West

Babblings: Dipping into - or plunging through the water's surface with the camera allows an (albeit delayed) embodied experience of seeing the layers of conscious/subconscious/unconscious in the later viewing of the images trawled from below. The act of capturing this is more than recording a physical state - it is a trawling of the layered quality of consciousness. I pull up from below, treasures, the unknown, creatures/forms, alike the minotaur of ancient mythology. Shadow and light exist together (down there). 

From my (I)island [ I= Self / boat () ], through my eye [lens

] 'I' descend through a portal () and I 'see' through an inner eye what lives below the i(I)sland

(Watson's Heron Island Water Lens is perhaps another instance of this physical apprehending - revealing more than  phenomena)

islands ~ remembered, embodied + manifested

I am island / only - Islands have drawn and gathered souls for millenia. Crossing water, a mirror world rises in front of the boat - transporter of souls between worlds - circle,  cir-cum-navigate, cir-come, i-mmerse. I (i -land): King, Tasmania, then reluctantly stranded on a larger One where I found many.

Now islands, small /uninhabited/wild, console the island self; I-self
Viola plunged into water and claims domain over an Other world now reachable through technology alone, I claim two ancient vessels, body and boat to navigate my own psyche.

Somehow, a 'pre-literate' knowing returns on these journeys. Back to water, wilderness, watery forest, the forest of fairytales - unknown and known, hidden and revealed.

Then images trawl back the relics for remembering and forgetting

The myth and symbolism of the boat in Early Europe ...

Boat as a metaphor for transcendental energy and eternal life

Celestial vehicles of the divinities

Soul boat, traditional means of transport for the souls of the deceased over water

... boat a a symbol of the goddess, the Great Mother

Medvedev-Mead, I “Soul Boats,” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2005, 24:3, 10-28 (see abstract: http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1525/jung.1.2005.24.3.10)

 

Thought Experiments : navigations in time, light + space

Re-presentations are always more than mimetic; they embody personal psychologies (aesthetics/archetypes and perhaps, remnants of the collective unconscious) Are these the  ‘places’ where the liminal nature of self is held and caught – embodied in communicable form, uttering directly to the viewer. These dredgings from underwater / on the flux line / reflected on the moving surface of water, are both metaphoric and real, straight but made strange by perspective.

The liminal is a mysterious space much like the body, with similar associated fascinations and fears. On a metaphoric level Fear of the Deep and Fear of the Body trigger the same visceral reactions, they are places where psychological shadows lurk, an opportunities exist to engage the Other.

Navigating time, light and space, using still and video cameras and HD sound recording equipment, often at night, the images employ a poetic visual language with the intention of moving between the real and sur-real. The movement of the carrying vessel is both linear directed by intent through space, and unpredictable; caught in the natural flux of tide and swell. While the photograph records light and captures time, here the quality is timeless, catching only the natural world in image, but the sound is a layering of organic with mechanical thereby reconciling "maternal" time with linear time (Kristeva). In this sense also, the kayak/boat/vessel becomes an elliptical portal between there realities – both an ancient vessel and transportation vehicle for exploration, and an embodied symbol (archetype: portal/doorway/birth canal) (Medvedev-Mead). Peering below the waterline is akin to entering an Other space, an unremembered realm - familiar and potent.

It was a childhood ritual to go flounder hunting with my father on Saturday nights in Tasmania. Using underwater spotlights, the world opened up as we explored the waterways – clear water, clean white sands, fish, crustaceans, octopus, squid even sea dragons at times … then there were the long returns through the country by car headlight after a long Sunday drive – glimpses of trees, country, frogs in the rain, possums in verge hedges, Next, then photograph of a pink tee shirt in a rock pool at sunset at Angourie  in 1980 and the late night wanderings with camera flash and slide film in Low Head over the following years. I’ve had an ongoing fascination with the creation of what I call ‘atmospheric fallacies’ –  bringing back (imaginary) immersive spaces to share with others.

The work of Bill Viola was a powerful influence, conjuring the magic of water-filtered light and slowed sound, engaging the senses while exploring metaphysics and symbol. The haunting work Swell, by Patricia Piccinini also had a sharp impact on my thinking about art making, suggesting possible ways to explore notions of the real and the non-real in video works. Paralleling my photographic practice, I have also worked with drawing; internal landscapes of the body. The symbols of bones have appeared through my work over decades and the work of Linde Ivemey contains resounding elements of my personal aesthetic in relation to the body.

Using digital video, still images, sound and layered imagery, I intend to create a body of photographic and time-based pieces. The works will investigate notions of reality in flux. Like our bodies and  our imagination, our grasp of certainty is represented in layers formed from fragments of information. Individual images and video will be taken apart from their original context, reconstructed in order to probe other possibilities, and situated to provide catalysts for conjecture – a new immersive reality of the ‘in between’ 

 

circle + arc

One is the half of the other, yet one is contained within the others reality - shadow and ego. Invisible and visible - Hidden / Known

Unconscious and conscious ....


Alterity ~ where other and self make something else


Thomas Berry - circle and arc from Plotkin's Nature and the Human Soul

 

nature and the human soul

Abram - about the talking stone

Atavism

 1
 Sometimes in the open you look up
 where birds go by, or just nothing,
 and wait.  A dim feeling comes
 you were like this once, there was air,
 and quiet; it was by a lake, or
 maybe a river  you were alert
 as an otter and were suddenly born
 like the evening star into wide
 still worlds like this one you have found
 again, for a moment, in the open.

 2
 Something is being told in the woods:  aisles of
 shadow lead away; a branch waves;
 a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
 path.  A withheld presence almost
 speaks, but then retreats, rustles
 a patch of brush.  You can feel
 the centuries ripple  generations
 of wandering, discovering, being lost
 and found, eating, dying, being born.
 A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
 the fur you no longer have.  And your gaze
 down a forest aisle is a strange, long
 plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
 For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
 wider than your mind, away out over everything.

-- William StaffordNature and the Human Soul


Interview between David Abram + Bill Plotkin

David Whyte

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.
  -- David Whyte
      from Songs for Coming Home
      ©1984 Many Rivers Press

http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_opening.html

Leonard Shlain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izuHSfOaUnA
/ Tiffany Shlain about Leonard Shlain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESVfGVQmk6Y 
  
Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain L/R hemispheres - http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-10-25&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email  

David Bohm - Perception
Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm

learning is actually remembering

“There is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.” ~ Carl Jung - "unforgotten wisdom"

For Jung, the psyche is not in each of us, but we are in the psyche. And since psyche and image, for Jung are inseparably connected (“image is psyche, then imagination becomes the clearest, primary expression of psyche. 

Carl G. Jung, 1929, Commentary on the Golden Flower, CW13, §75.

"we speak of 'the environment,' which makes it sound as though this is something that's far away from us. But if we hold our breath for a few minutes while we consider the matter, we quickly realize that 'the environment' is constantly cycling through us through the air we breathe, through the water we drink, through the food we eat."
John Seed ~ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/newdimensions/stories/2006/1791140.htm

"There's only one thing that's going to be of any use, and that's a huge transformation in consciousness. Then we won't need to dig everything up and cut everything down in order to be satisfied, because we'll have found true satisfaction for that sense of emptiness inside of ourselves." http://www.abc.net.au/rn/newdimensions/stories/1999/45860.htm

Others:
David Abram ~ The Alliance of Wild Ethics ~ http://www.wildethics.org/ 
http://www.wildethics.org/essays/waking_our_animal_senses.html
http://www.wildethics.org/essays/reciprocity_and_the_salmon.html
http://www.wildethics.org/essays/eairths-imagination.html

Francis Weller ~  http://www.wisdombridge1.net/ 
http://www.wisdombridge1.net/?page_id=196
Joanna Macy ~ http://www.joannamacy.net/  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/newdimensions/stories/2010/2963821.htm
Paul Rademacher ~ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/newdimensions/stories/2010/3003245.htm
Catriona MacGregor ~ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/newdimensions/stories/2010/2977198.htm

Homo sapiens - time for a new name?  Facts about the planet and its destruction at our hands: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3294576.htm

Julian Cribb: It is high time the human race had a new name. The old one, Homo sapiens - wise or thinking man - has been around since 1758, and is no longer a fitting description for the creature we have become. When the Swedish father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, first bestowed itⁱ, humans no doubt seemed wise when compared with what scientists of the day knew about both people and other animals. We have since learned our behaviour is not quite as intelligent as we like to imagine, while some other animals are rather smart. In short, ours is a name which is both inaccurate and which promotes a dangerous self-delusion.

In a letter to Nature I am proposing there should be a worldwide discussion about the formal reclassification of humanity, involving both scientists and the public. The new name should reflect more truthfully the attributes and characteristics of the modern 21st century human, which are markedly different from those of 18th century 'man'.

Consider the following: Humans are presently engaged in the greatest act of extermination of other species by a single species, probably since life on Earth began. We are destroying an estimated 30,000 species a year, a scale comparable to the greatest extinction catastrophes of the geological past.ⁱⁱ We currently contaminate the atmosphere with 30 billion tonnes of carbon equivalent every year.ⁱⁱⁱ This risks an episode of accelerated planetary warming reaching 4-5 degrees by the end of this century and 8 degrees thereafter, a level which would severely disrupt food production.^iv Estimates for the ultimate losses from 8of warming range from 50 to 90% of humanity.^v
We have manufactured around 83,000 synthetic chemicals^vi, many of them toxic at some level, and some of which we inhale, ingest in food or water or absorb through the skin every day of our lives. A US study found newborn babies in that country are typically contaminated by around 200 industrial chemicals, including pesticides, dioxins and flame retardants.^vii These chemicals are now found all over the planet, and we are adding hundreds of new ones, of unknown risk, every year. Yet we wonder why more people now die of cancer.

Every year we also release around 121 million tonnes of nitrogen, 10 million tonnes of phosphorus and 10 billion tonnes of CO2 into our rivers, lakes and oceans, many times the amounts recirculated by the Earth naturally. This is causing the collapse of marine and aquatic ecosystems, disrupting food chains and causing 'dead zones'. More than 400 of these lifeless areas have been discovered in recent times.^viii
 
We are presently losing about 1% of the world's farming and grazing land every year. This has worsened steadily in the last 30 years, confronting us with the challenge of doubling food production in coming decades off a small fraction of today's area. At the same time we waste a third of the world's food.^ix
 
Current freshwater demand from agriculture, cities and energy use will more than double by mid century, while resources in most countries - especially of groundwater - are drying up or becoming so polluted they are unusable.^x
 
We passed peak fish in 2004^xi, peak oil in 2006^xii, and will encounter growing scarcities of other primary resources, including mineral nutrients, in coming decades. Yet demand for all resources, including food, minerals, energy and water, will more than double, especially in Asia.

Humanity spends $1.6 trillion a year on new weapons^xiii, but only $50 billion a year on better ways to produce food. Despite progress in arms reduction, the world still has around 20,000 nuclear warheads and at least 19 countries now have access to them or to the technology to make them.^xiv
 
Finally, we are in the process of destroying a great many things which are real - soil, water, energy, resources, other species, our health - for the sake of a commodity that mostly exists in our imagination: money. While money has its uses as a medium for exchange, humanity is increasingly engaged in mass self-delusion as to what constitutes real wealth, as is quite clear from the current financial crisis.

All of these things carry the risk of catastrophic change to the Earth's systems, making it difficult to justify our official sub-species name of Homo sapiens sapiens, or wise wise man. This not only looks like conceit, but sends a dangerous signal about our ability to manage what we have unleashed. A creature unable to control its own demands cannot be said to merit the descriptor 'wise'. A creature which takes little account of the growing risks it runs through its behaviour can hardly be rated 'thoughtful'.

The provisions of the International Code on Zoological Nomenclature provide for the re-naming of species in cases where scientific understanding of the species changes, or where it is necessary to correct an earlier error. I argue that both those situations now apply.

This is not just an issue for science; it concerns everybody. There needs to be worldwide public discussion about what is an appropriate name for our species, in the light of our present behaviour and attributes. Here are some names suggested by eminent Australian scientists. Marine scientist and author, Charlie Veron, suggests Homo finalis. Desert ecologist, Mark Stafford-Smith, proposes Homo quondam et futures - the once and future human. Spatial ecologist, Hugh Possingham, likes Homo nesciens - ignorant man. And atmospheric scientist, Barrie Pittock, suggests Homo sui deludens - self-deluding man.

Down the track we should not rule out an eventual return to the name Homo sapiens, provided we can demonstrate that we have earned it - and it is not mere flatulence, conceit or self-delusion. The wisdom to understand our real impact on the Earth and all life is the one we most need at this point in our history, in order to limit it. Now is the time humans get to earn, or lose forever, the title sapiens.

ⁱ Homo sapiens Linnaeus 1758. http://www.eol.org/pages/327955
ⁱⁱ See, for example, Eldredge N., The Sixth Extinction, http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html
ⁱⁱⁱHarvey F. Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink. The Guardian, 29 May 2011.
^ivSee Schnellnhuber HJ, Climate Change - the Critical Decade. (video)http://www.aclimateforchange.org/profiles/blogs/climate-change-the-critical
^vSee for example: Martin J. Commonwealth lecture 2010 or Schnellnhuber HJ in http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warming-could-cut-population-to-1-billion/
^viUS EPA Chemical Substances Inventory (2011)
^viiEnvironmental Working Group, 2005. http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden2/execsumm.php
^viiiDiaz RJ and Rosenberg R, Spreading Dead Zones. Science, June 2008.
^ixGlobal food losses and food waste, FAO, 2011
^xChartres C and Varma S, Out of Water, FT Press 2010
^xiFAO State of World Fisheries 2010
^xiiBirol F, IEA 2010.
^xiiiSIPRI 2011,http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/resultoutput/trends


 

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
Dogen

king island ~ residency

http://kingislandculturalcentre.blogspot.com/

Wade Davis again

ABC Big Ideas

H4N

Zoom H4N
Tutorials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHBAAcaPjaM

jung, Nature + consciousness

"We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness - our Promethean conquest - may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature." (Collected Works,8, par 750)In 1952, Jung was interviewed by Ira Progoff, who asked if individuation didn’t always involve consciousness. Jung replied, “Oh, that is an overvaluation of consciousness” and explained that individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a tree and a human a human; he said that consciousness can just as well interfere with the natural growth process as aid it. Jung felt that Western consciousness was seriously one-sided in that it has expanded in the spatial dimension but not in the temporal, for we do not have a sense of living history.

Consciousness is a very recent acquisition, still quite fragile and easily disrupted. Jung pointed out that, in the West, consciousness has been developed mainly through science and technology—not through art, social interaction, cultural development, or spirituality. The unconscious has been left behind, and is thus in a defensive position.(Letters II, p81)
“We in the West have come to be highly disciplined, organized, and rational. On the other hand, having allowed our unconscious personality to be suppressed, we are excluded from understanding primitive man’s civilization… The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries.”  (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, p397)
Consciousness is a gift and could be used to go along with Nature, were we to align it in that direction. Jung’s concern was that, as a very young species, we have an inflated idea of our own importance... His conclusion was that we have reached the limit of our evolution and can go no further until we attend not to the development of more consciousness, but to an unbiased understanding of all that we are:
“Discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”  (Letters, I, p537)The above was excerpted by permission of North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, CA) from Dr Meredith Sabini's Introduction to her book, The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life  (2002). She suggests purchase through local independent booksellers in the first instance. 

http://www.ecobuddhism.org/wisdom/psyche_and_spirit/sabini_jung/

entering the healing grounds

Working with the soul, you work at geologic speed, learn its rhythm because this is how the soul moves ~ Clark Barry                                                            Part of this has to be a discussion about wisdom

We must reintegrate perspective deformations, and possiblities, back into being which means we must stop definining being as pure plenitude (or extension) and reconceive the world as abyss.

Merleau-Ponty  The Visible and the Invisible (Studies in Phenomenology and Existental Philosophy)

 

NOTE: Go back to Hylo as a concept of matter: hylo - series of 5 red images from 2001 

after the exhibition

 QCP catalogue
June 2011 exhibitions
“things beyond resemblance”  Theodor W. Adorno / Hullot -Kentor, R., ‘Things Beyond Resemblance,’ 2006 Columbia University Press.

There seems to be a compelling semblance featured in each artists work. A somewhat strange psychological signifier has been stimulated by an inherent culture and re-defined by a new-founded orientation. A strong interplay of order and disorder, and placement and displacement is undeniably evident. A disruption or an interlude becomes the catalyst. These artists share a resemblance. By addressing different aspects of orientation, they re-examine both the imagined and the observed.

Alana Hampton: Underwaterworld
Alana Hampton’s clever tampering and deconstruction of the natural, is undoubtedly compelling. Her works, hinge at a strange juncture, a melting point where the underworld meets the visible. These works carry sound to the silence. It’s a contemplative space, tracing one of nature’s most powerful forces being the transition of tidal time. To be underwater is to become internal, isolated from sound, and estranged from the human sphere, as we know it. Here Hampton’s narration lends itself to the examination of our internal dialogue void of time, and order. Although alluding to images of rivers, mangrove swamps and nature’s own beasts, Hampton’s fragmentation of the natural seemingly denies the literal.
Her vernacular is intelligent, floating in a world that bridges two aesthetic styles being both the physical and its manifestation. Hampton anchors the spectator into a realm of unknowingness, a powerful intersection that examines nature’s own relationship, the outer and the inner. These works become a romantic mediation.

http://www.qcp.org.au/exhibitions/previous/exhibitions-2011/album-642/91

i have always learned from trees

  

s the largest plant on earth, the tree has been a major source of stimulation to the mythic imagination. Trees have been invested in all cultures with a dignity unique totheir own nature, and tree cults, in which a single tree or a grove of trees is worshipped,have flourished at different times almost everywhere. Even today there are sacred woodsin India and Japan, just as there were in pre-Christian Europe. An elaborate mythology of trees exists across a broad range of ancient cultures.

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/sacredplaces/trees.html

All it has experienced, tasted, suffered:
The course of years, generations of animals,
Oppression, recovery, friendship of sun and - Wind
Will pour forth each day in the song
Of its rustling foliage, in the friendly
Gesture of its gently swaying crown,
In the delicate sweet scent of resinous
Sap moistening the sleep-glued buds,
And the eternal game of lights and
Shadows it plays with itself, content.
-   Herman Hesse, 1877 - 1962

 

Trees serve as homes for visiting devas who do not manifest in earthly bodies,
but live in the fibers of the trunks and larger branches of the trees,  feed from
the leaves and communicate through the tree itself.  Some are permanently
stationed as guardians of sacred places.
-   Hindu Deva Shastra, verse 117,   Nature Devas

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu

This reminds me of Cohen's .. where the light gets in "there is a crack, a crack in everything, that's where the light gets in"

Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

This particular poem is one of my favorites in its use of the moon as a sacred metaphor. The blissful state reveals itself as a shining light, as a luminescence permeating the still field of the mind. There is a sense of light from an undefined 'above,' silence, a fullness of vitality, and deep rest.

In sacred poetry, particularly in Zen poetry, this is often expressed as the full moon in the night sky.

The moon is the individual consciousness that shines only by reflecting the constant light of the sun, which is unbounded awareness. Individual consciousness, like the moon, waxes and wanes, sometimes bright and clear, sometimes dark.

When the moon, consciousness, is full, it is round, whole, complete, perfectly reflecting the light of divine awareness. The full moon is enlightenment. It is Buddha-mind. It is the soft light that illumines the land below when all is at rest.

With this understanding, reread Shikibu's poem. Do you feel the power of the statement beneath its beautiful words?

When she says she is "Watching the moon," she is describing the deep meditation practice of witnessing the radiance of opened awareness. To do so "at midnight" carries the double meaning of a late night meditation (which is often the best time for deep contemplation), but midnight also suggests the depth of nighttime, the great Void. She perceives the enlightened mind shining quietly within emptiness. There is nothing else present but the light of the moon. There is only awareness.

She specifically describes the moon as "solitary" and "mid-sky." In this profound communion, the awareness is recognized as being absolutely alone in the sense that there is no 'other,' nothing outside of its sphere; it is "solitary." And it is the center point of being; it is the heart, it is the core; the moon is "mid-sky."

When we stand silently bathed by the light of the moon at midnight, we finally experience our true nature. We know ourselves "completely" -- all of the seemingly disjointed and conflicting parts of ourselves are seen to be parts of a unified whole, "no part left out." We are the wholeness.

http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/S/ShikibuIzumi/Watchingmoon.htm 

mangrove forest

It's something no one can force
besides knowing it's there there's nothing to know
the moon shines bright above the flowering plum
but who can look past the blossoms
88 in The Zen Works of Stonehouse

dad + me fossicking below the surface

The Essence

The bamboo shadows are sweeping the stairs,

Buy no dust is stirred:

The moonlight penetrates deep in the bottom of the pool,

But no trace is left in the water.

Author unknown (Essays in Zen Buddhism – First Series 352)

 

 

Light Journeys

MARZENA WASIKOWSKA http://lightjourneys.net.au/archive/  http://lightjourneys.net.au/submit/

http://web.mac.com/marzena.wasikowska/iWeb/Site/Home.html

NARELLE AUTIO

http://lightjourneys.net.au/artists/narelle-autio



National Geographic Seahorse - Honduras

art + science

Catherine Truman

Recipient of the 2011 Synapse Residency Program

http://truman2011.anat.org.au/

spinoza ~ Deus sive Natura ~ a Naturalist

An idea, which excludes the existence of our body, cannot be postulated in our mind, but is contrary thereto.

Ethics = on the origin and nature of the emotions

Essence
Being - ' the substance of infinite attributes'
Nature 
Einstein's God
Intuition, Reason, Imagination
Self Understanding
The rational leads to 'blessings'


Spinoza Research Network http://spinozaresearchnetwork.wordpress.com
and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=237344820760
Podcasts: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/05/thinking-with-spinoza-politics-philosophy-and-religion/ 

Whom-so-ever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason ~ Spinoza

Resources
Philosopher's Zone RN http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3231566.htm
From the Transcript:  "Spinoza thinks that there are three ways of apprehending the world. There's intuition, there's reason, philosophy and science and so on, and there's the imagination." (religion is a fiction)
 "the role of religion is really in controlling and kind of helping to manage people's feelings and images when they're in this irrational state."
Philoctetes ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v29FVZ0rry8 

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th4ohThWkzQ  The Life and Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza pt1 
Baruch Spinoza himself said that intuition is the highest attainable form of knowledge.

Ethics: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica-front.html
ON THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE EMOTIONS - http://frank.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica3.html


General stuff on Spinoza http://www.yesselman.com/  

Denies an anthropomorphic God. God is Nature;  there is nothing but Nature that can be apprehended through scientific understanding and inquiry.


Radical Enlightenment ideas: demand for broad education and education for women, a set of view; anti-authoritarian, anti-clerical, anti-moniacal, strong opposition to govt corruption, opp to colonial exploitation and slavery, opp to tax farming, 

Catherine Wilson

 

literature search

 http://www.scribd.com/doc/39528868/Film-Theory-and-Philosophy 

Theodor W. Adorno / Hullot -Kentor, R., ‘Things Beyond Resemblance,’ 2006 Columbia University Press. 

http://dailyserving.com/2007/11/susanna-majuri/ 

 From her Saved with water exhibition

http://www.galerieadler.com/index_e.html

water ~ http://vimeo.com/15385029

marine lover

Speaking Volumes: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

12 May 1995

Nicola Lacey on Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche .

... Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover. I read it only recently, but it will stay with me for a long time. Irigaray is one of France's best known feminist theorists. She has traced the ways in which woman and the feminine have been silenced, devalued and effaced in human history and in particular within its mythologies and intellectual discourses. She is an exponent of ecriture feminine - poetic and elliptical writing, which is often dialogic in form, evocative rather than analytic in style, and seeks to recover the repressed feminine, the unacknowledged body, and to give them a place within language. Marine Lover, the most poetic of her works, falls into three parts. The first, "Speaking of Immemorial Waters", is an imaginary dialogue with Nietzsche, in which the feminine genre is represented in terms of the metaphor of the sea; the second, "Veiled Lips" is a further engagement with Nietzsche's philosophy, this time in the third person; the third, "When the Gods are Born" is a re-reading of Greek and Christian myths, in which the central elements of Irigaray's critique of Nietzsche are realised in a vivid, concrete yet imaginative way.

... For me, Marine Lover represents the intellectual excitement of this kind of boundary-blurring: it speaks to what I first loved in philosophy - the engagement with the contours and power of ideas - in a way that escapes the pretension to objectivity and (dare I say it) tedium of a relentlessly analytic philosophical mode. This is not to say - and this is a second lesson I have learnt from Marine Lover - that there is no analysis in Irigaray's work: it is to show that intellectually compelling analyses are sometimes expressed elliptically, poetically, and metaphorically. So, thirdly, Irigaray also showed me that philosophy could be beautiful, witty, irreverent, literary, and fun to read. ...


Nicola Lacey is a fellow, New College, Oxford.

'mapping'

European mapping is based on Western concepts as they relate to geographical space. From the early 1500s to the 1800s, maps represented religious and political views of the communities that the map makers were serving as well as the scientific knowledge at the time. Artistic beauty was combined with geographical information because of the intention to sell the map or please a patron or employer.

Gradually, during the 1800s, the decorative content of maps was removed in the search for accuracy and scientific precision. One of the challenges of western map making is to represent the earth, a curved surface in a three dimensional space, on a flat surface. The compass, the sextant and the printing press were a few of the inventions that drastically changed the accuracy and distribution of maps.

When Australia's coastlines were being plotted by European mariners and navigators in the late 1700s to 1800s, there was a growing acceptance of a scientific approach to mapping, based on compass points, latitude and longitude, scale and elevation.

In 1810 Matthew Flinders completed the first chart of the Australian coastline including the separation of Tasmania by Bass Strait, naming the continent 'Australia'. Flinders was accompanied by Bungaree, an Aboriginal man from the Broken Bay area, when he sailed on the Norfolk and by Bungaree and Nanbaree on the Investigator.

Both western maps and Indigenous representation of 'country' use conventional symbols. Symbols in Aboriginal maps can sometimes have more than one meaning depending on both the context of the relationship to other symbols and also who is 'reading' the map. For example, a series of concentric circles usually means a camp site, but it may also mean a rock hole, fire or fruit. Spiraling lines can mean water, rainbow, fire, snakes, lightning, a string or a honey storage place for native bees. Indigenous maps are also not necessarily to scale in a linear sense, and may not show every feature of the landscape.

Indigenous co-operation with drawing European coastal charts

In the summer of 1801, Matthew Flinders was welcomed by Nyungar upon his arrival aboard the Investigator and various items were exchanged. On the 1802 voyage from Sydney, Flinders recruited two Aboriginal people, Bungaree, who had sailed with him on the Norfolk, and Nanbaree. The visit of Flinders and other mariners to the coast of Arnhem Land is recorded in the local Aboriginal paintings of 'praus' (Macassan sailing vessels) and European ships at rock art sites.

In March 1812, the Colonial Surveyor George William Evans was sent to explore Jervis Bay, to determine a possible inland route back to Port Jackson as part of the colonial practice of systematic surveying of the land⁶. Bundle⁷, an Eora man who ranged from Port Jackson to Parramatta in the company of Tedbury, the son of Pemulwuy, was renowned for his tracking skills. Bundle was with Evans on board the Lady Nelson. The journey was never publicised by Macquarie, because it almost ended in disaster for the members of the exploration party. This survey expedition did, however, result in the settlement of the Illawarra area in the drought years that followed.

In the Illawarra region, the Aboriginal artist Mickey of Ulladulla⁸ (c.1820–1891), a member of the Dhurga people, drew the world around him with an extraordinary vitality and sensitivity to detail, including a chart of the coastal areas north and south of Ulladulla. Depicting flora and fauna of Ulladulla, Mickey added to the European records of the coastal area. His works are an unequalled record of an Indigenous perspective during the mid to late 1800s, a time otherwise dominated by European artists and writers.

The peoples of the Torres Strait Islands⁹ are sea-faring people known for their navigation skills. The dreamtime stories of their people, the Tagai, usually focus on stars, which they used to navigate a safe journey when travelling across the seas in their double outrigger canoes under sail¹⁰.

European theories of a large southern continent

European ideas of a southern continent date back to Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 560 – ca. 480 BC). His followers were the first to document the theory of landmasses in the southern hemisphere to counterweight the northern hemisphere to ensure a balance in the globe. This idea of a large southern continental mass strongly influenced cartographers until the late 1400s with the belief in the unknown Great South Land¹¹.

In 1570, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (south land not yet known) appears as a gigantic Antarctic continent on a new world map¹² published by Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598). The Spaniard Benito Arias Montano's world map¹³ (1571) displays a portion of Northern Australia with an undefined southern boundary, reflecting the French school of map rendition for the southern hemisphere.

By the late 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish explorers opened a sea route to India and Asia and charted most of Indonesia, the northern New Guinea coastline and several islands in the South Pacific.

In 1581, Dutch merchants needed access to spices in order to fund costly military operations in a war with the Spanish and formed the Dutch East India Company¹⁴. This led to Dutch exploration along Australia's shores and to the making of maps of Australia's north, west and south.


http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/mapping-australias-coastline 

liminality

Liminality is that space between, between time and between physicality; existence may not seem real or solid. Liminal experience may be through the standard five senses, but the other senses, those that we deny and do not understood are often enhanced. It is a different plane of awareness and experience. 

Liminal 1 ~ Angourie, 1979

 

Liminal 2 ~ Lowhead, 1981

One of the simplest ways to conceptualize the becomingness of liminal space in media is to think of the virtual. In his essay “The Reality of the Virtual,” Slavoj Žižek addresses Gilles Deleuze's notion of the virtual as “pure becoming without being,” which is “‘always forthcoming an already past,’” but is never present or corporeal.7 The virtual is a liminal space that consists only of its becomingness-state, and not an actual being or object to become. It exists as pure becoming that suspends both “sequentiality and directionality”; it is a passage, but there is no line of passage.8

Even though both Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner locate liminality within an event (ritual for both of them, and initiation more specifically for Turner), the event is clearly not the only place in media where one can find an understanding of the liminal. Alan Liu, just like Žižek before him, plays on the idea that the liminal can exist as this larger, directionless (or at least, reciprocating) space. He identifies an “encounter” of new media between literary and digital traditions, which he notes is a “thick, unpredictable zone of contact—more borderland (9) than border line.”10 This encounter zone, he explains, adapting Jean-François Lyotard’s concept, produces and accommodates new media that are inherently pagan; that is, they are “other” and “outside,” but also inextricably intertwined with that which they are separated from. Liu elaborates with an explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the essence of new media by stating that “even as [McLuhan] projects the otherness of new media onto the cultural other, he introjects that otherness into the cultural self.”11

Folklore and popular culture have allowed many different manifestations of liminal beings to emergence as representations of ambiguous identity. Turner notes that “liminality is the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence.” 12 He describes the nature of the subject as somewhat incorporeal, dissolved, or even “invisible” during the liminal period.13 The subject, while neither located in the departed stage nor in the arrived-at is still reliant on the presence of both stages. This “transitional-being,” or “liminal persona,” is characterized by a series of contradictions.14 As having departed but not yet arrived, he is “at once no longer classified and not yet classified…neither one thing nor another; or may be both; or neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere.”15 This subject, during the liminal stage, is “‘betwixt and between’” all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification.”16

Whether or not they are identified as such, the notion of liminal beings has been explored by scholars throughout the field of media theory. McLuhan mentions objects of technology, such as the camera or the handgun, as being extensions of the human body. The result of this technological prosthesis is a metaphorical amputation of some aspect of “humanness” from the person, who, having been stripped of what makes him whole as a human being, has now slipped into the liminal state.

Donna Haraway, in her famous essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” discusses the liminality of the cyborg in terms of boundaries and contradictions. She articulates the complexity of the cyborg as being an “image of both imagination and material reality,” a “hybrid of machine and organism”; it exists as both-but-neither of these states.17 Like Turner, Haraway references invisibility as a key classification of the liminal being insofar as it cannot be recognized as any singular, corporeal, or embodied entity. Cyborgs, she notes, “are about consciousness.”18 In a semiotic sense, “they are floating signifiers” that cannot construct a sign as they are not accompanied by necessary signifieds.19

Although the official terminology for the liminal addresses points in time and places of action, one can see that by situating it within the complex context of media—areas and practices of mediation, as well as mediated subjects and objects—the concept of liminal shapes a variety of ambiguous forms (and anti-forms). Keeping in mind more comprehensive set phrases, such as “betwixt and between,” “transitionality,” “becomingness,” and “borderland,” allows a flexible entryway into a sense of pure essence in the liminal—to, literally, its liminality.

Allison Wright

The University of Chicago :: Theories of Media :: Keywords Glossary ::  liminal, liminality

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/liminal.htm

Liminal borderlands in Irish literature and culture By Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Elin Holmsten

Zones / 'i' lands

Island Continent: oceans bordering Australia ~ Indian Ocean, South Pacific Ocean, Southern Ocean, Pacific Ocean

Uninhabited Islands~ http://www.lifewithinme.com/2010/08/lost-cast-away-ten-amazing-uninhabited-islands/

 

The average height above sea level in the Maldives is only 5 feet (1.5 meters) with the highest point rising a mere 7 feet 7 inches (2.3 meters).

The history of Australia as an island

Dad was always fascinated by islands too, tropical islands, uninhabited, no doubt the result of a Robinson Cruso seed planted in his childhood, or dreams of escaping the drudgery of farm life.

The first time I read out loud in front of the class, I pronounced  'island', this unfamiliar word that embodied my nation state, as 'is land' and was made feel small. The sight of the word 'island' has been both a fascination and a reminder of the raw truth self-knowledge ever since. This awkward word represents 'home' to me, but the homecoming, back to Self, like the memory of that Grade Three day, is raw and essential - anticipated, but also avoided for its mixture of pleasure and pain.

Zones = Nation (taking away the Romantic notions attached to the 'nationalistic' nation

Szeman, Imre. Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation, The Johns Hopkins University Press December 30, 2003

Neither nationalist or patriotic, but 'island' is both 'I' and 'home'. To Patrick White Uluru was 'our red heart'.  'Island' is heart, not place - unreachable, un-returnable, unrecoverable, it is a time, liminal space in life, a memory, an 'Avalon'. 

a skirted coastline, rock pools on Sunday afternoon, flounder hunting in estuaries by underwater battery-powered light on barmy summer and sometimes freezing spring nights. Dad and I the hunters, Mum drove the car and stayed alone while I wondered and wandered, pondering the primordial shallow waters and sand drifts.

then they took me to the drivein ... we saw Island of the Blue Dolphin and I had nightmares for 4 years, afflicted not by the plight of poor girl, but poor dogs

Life on islands leaves you free, and your foibles become unique


http://www.amazon.com/Island-Blue-Dolphins-Scott-ODell/dp/0547328613/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303547674&sr=1-10#reader_0547328613


Jung's island = the conscious in the sea of the unconscious
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=uegLZklR0fEC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=Carl+Jung+island&source=bl&ots=D_TFq299hH&sig=vW-fcxGXR8hCThRg8uRA3jkGAaw&hl=en&ei=QVazTeCDApGSuwPaq4DZAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Toilers of the Sea, Albert P Ryder

 

Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul: An Illustrated Biography By Claire Dunne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Dictionary of Symbols By Juan Eduardo Cirlot

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-ECFg1a_6bgC&pg=RA1-PA160&lpg=RA1-PA160&dq=symbol+island&source=bl&ots=rRWL6bo_45&sig=lA7jsgEzzgfSSmyNCqzJcPrya5c&hl=en&ei=aMKzTcGyC4WKvQOC0f2YBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=symbol%20island&f=false