records of the xiaoping era
i actually did set up an account to post comments; this is me trying again.
objects scattered on the ground become narrative when strung together. an open doorway, a line of laundry and i'm looking out; an open doorway, an electric fan upon a chair and i'm looking in. i remember learning about paradigms and syntigms in first year linguistics, only then we thought about closets and outfits. but you know this.
what i'm wondering is when the quantity and variety become the point, when the ability to string together meaning fails us and what that failure allows us to do otherwise.
mary ann
Thank you for your comment. In your last sentence, you precisely describe the intent behind this piece. I'm afraid many of those who survived the storm are still living in great difficulty. Let's hope they are not forgotten.
For the few who might actually read this, Ms O'Donnell maintains a fascinating, erudite and personable blog of her own called Shenzhen Fieldnotes, which also showcases many of her beautiful photos. I very much recommend taking some time to see the city through her eyes.
yisa
"We create names to keep meaning." Again with the Buddhism.
A name is a convention, a conventional truth. Names do not only keep meaning, they create it. Pluck the petals from a flower, destroy its "innards," and where is its "flower-ness"? The aggregates and atoms that are sitting here together right now are called "James," but what is the essential "James-ness"?
There is great truth in the statement "Everything we recognize, we understand as a narrative": everything is a narrative, in itself, without being "strung together," because everything is a process. There is no "thing-ness."
And Mary Ann's question of "when the ability to string together meaning fails us and what that failure allows us to do otherwise": Wow. That breakdown is the point of breakthrough. Classical Buddhism would say that the exact phenomenon of "escape from meaning" is the Buddha's moment of insight under the Bodhi tree. So what it allows us to do is everything.
There is a tyranny in meaning. I have spent my life seeking it, and have become increasingly convinced that it's not just a chimera, but one with bad intentions!
Joseph Campbell put it simply. What we really need, he said, is not to know "the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive." I think he means to be engaged in the process. He said, when an artist paints a mountain, he is not trying to convey the meaning of "mountain," but to give you an experience of one. So seeking "meaning" is a misuse of time, in life as in art. In fact, meaning is often a barrier to experience. Huston Smith used the word "veracity" to convey the idea of "seeing things as they are"--not as we wish them to be, or as we fear they might be. Meaning seems then to be a sibling or offspring of Fear and Desire.
(And yes, Du, I see the problem with all this talk about meaning in order to deny that meaning is important. It's a Zen thing.)
