Compassion

We need to live our lives more compassionately. Too often we float through life self-consumed, self-obsessed, and oblivious to the hopes, dreams, desires, and suffering of those around us- even those we claim to love.
Compassion is a sense of shared suffering, most often combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce such suffering; to show special kindness to those who suffer. Thus compassion is essentially empathy, though with a more active slant in that the compassionate person will seek to actually aid those they feel compassionate for.
Compassion differs from other forms of helpful or humane behavior in that its focus is primarily on the alleviation of suffering. Acts of kindness which seek primarily to confer benefit rather than relieve existing suffering are better classified as acts of altruism, although, in this sense, compassion itself can be seen as a subset of altruism, it being defined as the type of behavior which seeks to benefit others by reducing their suffering.
In the words of Dalai Lama: "Compassion makes one see the picture clearly; when emotions overtake us, the lack of seeing clearly clouds our perception of reality and hence the cause of many misunderstandings leading to quarrels (even wars)."

"As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether? It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognises the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live or whatever culture we happen to belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us. " ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

Abstract Art and Imagination

Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colors in a non-representational or subjective way. In the very early 20th century, the term was more often used to describe art, such as Cubist and Futurist art, that depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced way - keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject. Such paintings were often claimed to capture something of the depicted objects' immutable intrinsic qualities rather than its external appearance.
The abstraction in art that came across so prevalently in the twentieth century angered many of the staid and stuffy bourgeois who thought art must be pleasing, pastoral, and/or biblical. But abstraction in art has been around for centuries. Jewish and Islamic cultures developed abstraction and symbolism in their decorative arts. Wassily Kandinsky posited that modern science dealt with dynamic forces and revealed that matter was ultimately spiritual in character. So then, art should display the spiritual forces behind the spiritual world.

The Female Figure

What does it mean to be female? What does it mean to be physically and physiologically different from the dominating gender?
Wikipedia defines the term as such:
~Femininity comprises the physical and mental attributes associated with the female sex and is culturally determined. Some of these attributes can be traced to the female reproductive role. Others are rooted in the socialization of a girl's early development and adjusted throughout adulthood by picking up or reacting to societal cues. Feminine characteristics are sometimes expressed through female gender roles, which can vary between societies and eras. Roles which are thought of as feminine change from culture to culture and generationt to generation, the only constant being the role of mother. Interesting.....

Estrangement

es·trange ( P ) Pronunciation Key (-strnj)tr.v. es·tranged, es·trang·ing, es·trang·es
To make hostile, unsympathetic, or indifferent; alienate.
To remove from an accustomed place or set of associations.

Synonyms: estrange, alienate, disaffect. These verbs refer to disruption of a bond of love, friendship, or loyalty. Estrange and alienate are often used with reference to two persons whose harmonious relationship has been replaced by hostility or indifference: Political disagreements led to quarrels that finally estranged the two friends. His persistent antagonism alienated his wife. Disaffect usually implies discontent, ill will, and disloyalty within the membership of a group: Colonists were disaffected by the royal governor's actions.

As I sit here listening to Iggy Pop's song "I'm Sick of You," my mind wanders to existentialist philosophy. Since this was the subject of my Master's thesis, you might automatically conclude this a case of "give a girl a hammer, and everything looks like a nail," but you'd be surprised how helpful the thoughts of the existentialists like Satre, Camus, Kierkegaard et al. are in finding meaning in the universe. Many of you are familiar with some of the basic tenents: existence preceeds essence, the subjectivity of value systems, pure being, etc.

What I have been giving much thought to lately is the existential idea of an individual being completely responsible for his or her choices. This sounds like common knowledge, but if you really think closely about the ramifications, it's a terrifying concept. Gone is the safety net that we use every day - blaming other people and situations for impacting our life in a way we don't like. The existentialists state that the individual consciousness is directly responsible for all of the choices he or she makes, regarless of the consequences. According to Sartre, to deny this responsibility is to be in "bad faith."

Another terrifying concept for me is the idea that we humans are condemned to be free. In other words, because we are directly responsible for our own actions and choices, we are condemned to be responsibile for these choices and the consequences they bring.

This brings me to my main point, and the reason I went down this rabbit hole in the first place. A person is responsible for his or her own happiness and must be personally responsible for pursuing, and, once achieved, cultivating or maintaining, this happiness.

Living In Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf amoong the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
envoy from some village in the moldings...
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

~Adrienne Rich

Killer Scene

Welcome to Day One.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-W.H. Auden