The Latest Version: the "You're Worth It" Commodification Syndrome

 

As Laurie Penny recently wrote, for The Baffler, the risk of promoting individual self-care as a solution to existential anxiety or oppression is that victims will become isolated in a futile struggle to solve their own problems rather than to collectively change the systems causing them harm.  - NYT, 3-16-17

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”  -Laurie Penny, The Baffler

It is at this point that I confess to you that I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

...Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system.

...The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

I've arrived at a low place.  The doors are closing, corridors narrowing, tunnel lights dimming. It's the aging, the losses, the regrets.   I see myself with the visage of an Easter Island stone atop a mountain, gazing far, grim and dark and sure and centered and sad, a watcher, a listener.

Zen and the Art of: (substitute any verb)

Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", has died.  He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and suffered much while undergoing treatments available at that time: electroshock, harsh drugs. He himself regarded his catatonic schizophrenia as the state of Buddhist enlightenment.

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower,” he wrote. “To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.”

"Acceptance that there is no wholly satisfactory answer is part of moving forward."  - NY Times, editorial about Senator Bob Kerry's Vietnam civilian massacre.

Do you get to - do you have the right to - move forward after you've done something so heinous?

I guess [so]. Gotta go on with daily life. Forgiveness is better.

My stretch class trainer plays a Deepak Chopra recording.  In his smarmy cheesy voice, he is profound.  "...let go of all recriminations, revenge, and regret..." Something like that.  Otherwise you're always a victim.

Speak memory, seek memory

camera the shield against forgetting

seek existential time, not clock time

stay in silence to look to see

See, inquire, learn, know, look again

Engage memory - make it your partner

by writing, noting details, names

accept that contradictions live in art and

don't have to be resolved

...reveals the fault lines of our ludicrous attempts

to make sense of experience, our faulty knowledge of ourselves and the world 

Paraphrase of Phillip Kennicot, Wash Post Culture Critic

“A talent is a kind of imprisonment. You’re stuck in it, you have to keep using it, or else you get ruined by it. It’s like a beaver’s teeth. He has to chew or else his jaws lock shut.” --Wallace Stegner

The result is an empirical behemoth built on the foundation of a few simple propositions. One, that our awareness of death creates tremendous potential for anxiety or terror. Two, that we learn to manage that terror by embedding ourselves in a cultural worldview that imbues reality with order, meaning, and stability. Three, that we gain and maintain psychological security by sustaining faith in that worldview and living up to the values it convey

While teaching at Pomona College in the early 1970s Williams revisited his typewriter drawings, including some of them in a new booklet called "Random Notes On Painting." Not yet into his 40s, Williams' prose in "Random Notes On Painting" is wearily eloquent:

I find in my life fragments of happiness and delight, more doubts than I can account for, empty and restless afternoons spent bumping off the walls, a vainglorious awareness of my own ambition, a fondness for books, maps, seashells, Black Blues Artists, the habitual use of noisy prose, the pretense that making art is a way to interfere, if only for a moment with death, shame at the forbidden memories that reveal themselves in the dark belly of aberrant dreams, outrage at hunger and sickness and the loneliness of men, anger at my own uneasiness in the world, my fear of being wrong, and my daily confessions of incomprehension.

One tries to work with care, with sagacity, to make things with calm. I would wish my paintings to be abundant, generous-nothing dim, no shadows; to stand in the full light of summer. I would wish my paintings to illuminate. -Guy Williams

As is clear from the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi and so many other saints, the gift of knowledge gives rise to grateful contemplation of the world of nature and joyful praise of the Creator...Pope Francis in a Vatican Radio broadcast yesterday