I express my not-self

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.
– Mark Rothko

 

Mark Rothko: Orange and Yellow 1956

 

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same, it is a time of tons of verbiage activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large, I will not venture to discuss. But I do know that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.

– Mark Rothko

1903-1970 – born September 25th

Gratitude to Luke Storms and Parabola Magazine on Facebook for these quotes from Rothko, and the image.

the soul of the whole

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Photograph: Alan Larus

 

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photograph by Alan Larus

the eyeless eye

the process of perception is one of creation

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

Perception underpins all human behavior and helps interpret sensory information to make sense from the senseless. The brain, to create meaning where there is possibly none, processes perception from the unperceived and thought from the unthinkable. The process of perception is in fact one of creation. What we perceive is not what is out there or within. There is no inherent value in the incredibly complex patterns of light that fall onto our eyes, and yet we see coherent forms and motions that enable us to survive. Exploring the nature of perception can help us glimpse life beyond experiencer and experience, perceiver and perception.

– Science and Nonduality website

This year’s Science and Nonduality Europe Conference is only 5 weeks away.
Hop over to the website and register now!

SAND_EU13

SAND13 EU – “The Science and Mystery of Perception”
Doorn, May 28th to June 3rd 2013.

Instead of saying, ‘An observer looks at an object’, we can more appropriately say, ‘Observation is going on, in an undivided movement involving those abstractions customarily called “the human being” and “the object he is looking at”.
– David Bohm

The observer is the observed.
– J Krishnamurti

There is no separate, inside self and no separate outside object, other or world. Rather, there is one seamless, intimate totality, always changing when viewed from the perspective of objects, never changing when viewed from the perspective of the totality.
– Rupert Spira

Spira: expressing the inexpressible in clay and haiku

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Pure intimacy
parted by thought
becomes a self and world

– Rupert Spira

 

Rupert Spira - Deep Bowl

Deep bowl, embossed poem under Chun glaze
23 cm h x 23 cm d

 

… the writing helps create an unfamiliar space where the pot becomes the carrier of the text and the text the carrier of the pot. Words are supposed to float in two dimensions, but here the pot and the text have a strange pull between them. Is the pot commenting on the text?

Spira pushes these ideas hard: this is not about words as decoration. As with Kenzan, there is the knowledge of how to layer meanings, how to play with the images that words bring forth and with the feelings that forms create. By embossing his poems he takes the connection between reading with the eye and reading with the hand to another level of sensitivity.

Rupert Spira knows about the texture of words. This puts him amongst a wonderful, enlivening group of artists and poets from across the centuries. In his new pots with their words ‘embedded like a vein of quartz‘, to use his own phrase, we can see and feel something special is happening.

– Edmund de Waal

 

Rupert Spira - text detail from bowl

Detail showing embossed poem

 

Edmund de Waal is a leading British potter and writer on ceramics. (Edmund is also widely known for his international bestseller  The Hare with Amber Eyes)

This short extract is from: A single line of writing embedded like a vein of quartz
Read the entire essay at Rupert Spira’s website

Rupert Spira at the artisans’ gallery

nature’s eternity

every time I open my eyes

Love is the discovery that others are not others;
beauty is the discovery that objects are not objects.

– Rupert Spira