4v: 2013

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Louisa May Alcott's ORCHARD HOUSE

Louisa May Alcott's ORCHARD HOUSE
Home of the Alcotts & Little Women

Part 1

Part 2

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Animation by Schwizgebel & Te Wei

The Man Without a Shadow (2004)

Georges Schwizgebel

Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988) Shan shui qing

Te Wei

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Schwizgebel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Wei

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Filmmaker Ladislas Starevich

Ladislas Starevich with his daughter Irene

Starevich with his puppets

Vladislav Starevich (Russian: Владисла́в Алекса́ндрович Старе́вич, Polish: Władysław Starewicz; August 8, 1882 – February 26, 1965), was a Russian and French stop-motion animator notable as the author of the first puppet-animated film (i.e. The Beautiful Lukanida (1912)). He also used insects and other animals as protagonists of his films. (His name can also be spelled Starevitch, Starewich and Starewitch.)

"The Insects' Christmas" by filmmaker Ladislaw Starewizc (1913) is one of the earliest examples of stop-motion animation. Music by Tom Peters.

Fétiche Prestidigitateur - The Ringmaster (1934)

An excerpt from Le Roman de Renard - The Tale of the Fox (1930-1939)

More on the work of Ladislas Starevich at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladislas_Starevich

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Much Ado About Nothing

The 2011 Globe's version of Much Ado About Nothing

Act I

Act II, Scene I

Act II, Scene II-III

Act III, Scenes I-II

Act III, Scenes III-V

Act IV

Act V, Scene I

Act V, Scene II-End

For more see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Philosophy 101 - Notes on Carl Jung

Carl Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961)

Excerpts taken from the following online sources:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/125572/collective-unconscious

http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Jungsum.html

http://changingminds.org/explanations/identity/jung_archetypes.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(Jung)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

http://www.butler-bowdon.com/carl-jung-archetypes-collective-unconcious
http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/tp/archetypes.htm

Key terms and concepts:

Psyche

In psychiatry the Psyche is the mind functioning as the center of thought, emotion, and behavior and consciously or unconsciously adjusting or mediating the body's responses to the social and physical environment. By psyche Jung means the totality of the human mind, both conscious and unconscious.

The unconscious

A basic tenet: All products of the unconscious are symbolic and can be taken as guiding messages. What is the dream or fantasy leading the person toward? The unconscious will live, and will move us, whether we like it or not.

Personal unconscious
That aspect of the psyche which does not usually inter the individual's awareness and which appears in overt behavior or in dreams. It is the source of new thoughts and creative ideals, and produces meaningful symbols.

Collective unconscious

A form of the unconscious (that part of the mind containing memories and impulses of which the individual is not aware) common to mankind as a whole and originating in the inherited structure of the brain. It is distinct from the personal unconscious, which arises from the experience of the individual. According to Jung, the collective unconscious contains archetypes, or universal primordial images and ideas.

That aspect of the unconscious which manifests inherited, universal themes which run through all human life. Inwardly, the whole history of the human race, back to the most primitive times, lives on in us.

“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche… there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

Archetypes
These primordial images reflect basic patterns or universal themes common to us all which are present in the unconscious. These symbolic images exist outside space and time. Examples: Shadow, animus, anima, the old wise person, the innocent child. There also seem to be nature archetypes, like fire, ocean, river, mountain.

Important archetypes
Persona. The "mask" or image we present to the world. Designed to make a particular impression on others, while concealing our true nature.

Shadow. The side of our personality which we do not conscousnly display in public. May have positive or negative qualities. If it remains unconscious, the shadow is often projected onto other individuals or groups. The shadow is an archetype that consists of the sex and life instincts. The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts and shortcomings. This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness, chaos and the unknown. These latent dispositions are present in all of us, Jung believed, although people sometimes deny this element of their own psyche and instead project it onto others.

Jung suggested that the shadow can appear in dreams or visions and may take a variety of forms. It might appear as a snake, a monster, a demon, a dragon or some other dark, wild or exotic figure.

Anima. Archetype symbolizing the unconscious female component of the male psyche. Tendencies or qualities often thought of as "feminine."

Animus. Archetype symbolizing the unconscious male component of the female psyche. Tendencies or qualities often thought of as "masculine."

The anima is a feminine image in the male psyche and the animus is a male image in the female psyche. The anima/animus represents the "true self" rather than the image we present to others and serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.

The combination of the anima and animus is known as the syzygy, or the divine couple. The syzygy represents completion, unification and wholeness.

The Self. The self is an archetype that represents the unification of the unconsciousness and consciousness of an individual. The creation of the self occurs through a process known as individuation, in which the various aspects of personality are integrated. Jung often represented the self as a circle, square or mandala.

Other archetypes
Jung said that there are a large number of archetypes. These are often linked to the main archetypes and may represent aspects of them. They also overlap and many can appear in the same person. For example:

Family archetypes
The father: Stern, powerful, controlling
The mother: Feeding, nurturing, soothing
The child: Birth, beginnings, salvation

Story archetypes
The hero: Rescuer, champion
The maiden: Purity, desire
The wise old man: Knowledge, guidance
The magician: Mysterious, powerful
The earth mother: Nature
The witch or sorceress: Dangerous
The trickster: Deceiving, hidden

Animal archetypes
The faithful dog: Unquestioning loyalty
The enduring horse: Never giving up
The devious cat: Self-serving

Jung talks about the Anima, the female Archetype

Psychological types
People differ in certain basic ways, even though the instincts which drive us are the same. He distinguished two general attitudes--introversion and extraversion; and four functions--thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting.

- Extravert: Outer-directed, need for sociability, chooses people as a source of energy, often action-oriented.
- Introvert: Inner-directed, need for privacy and space; chooses solitude to recover energy, often reflective.

Word association test
A research technique Jung used to explore the complexes in the personal unconscious. Consisted of reading 100 words one at a time and having the person respond quickly with a word of his or her own. Delays in responding can indicate a complex.

Individuation
Jung believed that a human being is inwardly whole, but that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our dreams and waking imagination, we can contact and reintegrate our different parts. The goal of life is individuation, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness, we can undertake a process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human being has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own, and unless these are fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious, the person can become sick.

For Jung, the goal of life was to see the 'individuation' of this self, a sort of uniting of a person's conscious and unconscious minds so that their original unique promise might be fulfilled. This larger conception of the self was also based on the idea that humans are expressions of a deeper layer of universal consciousness. To grasp the uniqueness of each person, paradoxically we had to go beyond the personal self to understand the workings of this deeper collective wisdom.

Active imagination
A concept embracing a variety of techniques for activating our imaginal processes in waking life in order to tap into the unconscious meanings of our symbols.

Mandala
The Sanskrit word for circle. For Jung, the mandala was a symbol of wholeness, completness, and perfection. Symbolized the self.

The Red Book

The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus (Latin for New Book), is a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between approximately 1914 and 1930, prepared for publication by The Philemon Foundation and published by W. W. Norton & Co. on October 7, 2009. Until 2001, his heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he began after a falling-out with Sigmund Freud in 1913. Jung originally titled the manuscript Liber Novus (literally meaning A New Book in Latin), but it was informally known and published as The Red Book. The book is written in calligraphic text and contains many illuminations.

The work is inscribed by Jung with the title Liber Novus (The New Book). The folio size manuscript, 11.57 inches (29.4 cm) by 15.35 inches (39.0 cm), was bound in red leather, and was commonly referred to as the "Red Book" by Jung. Inside are 205 pages of text and illustrations, all from his hand: 53 are full images, 71 contain both text and artwork and 81 are pure calligraphic text. He began work on it in 1913, first in small black journals, during a difficult period of "creative illness", or confrontation with the unconscious, and it is said to contain some of his most personal material. During the sixteen years he worked on the book, Jung developed his theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and individuation.

The Red Book was a product of a technique developed by Jung which he termed active imagination. As Jung described it, he was visited by two figures, an old man and a young woman, who identified themselves as Elijah and Salome. They were accompanied by a large black snake. In time, the Elijah figure developed into a guiding spirit that Jung called Philemon (ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ, as originally written with Greek letters). Salome was identified by Jung as an anima figure. The figures, according to Jung, "brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life."

The Philemon figure represented superior insight and communicated through mythic imagery. The images did not appear to come from Jung's own experience and Jung interpreted them as products of the collective unconscious.

For more on The Red Book see:

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(Jung)

NPR Radio Interview with Sara Corbett

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2009/09/21/carl-jungs-secret-book

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious by Sara Corbett

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

A Beginner's Guide to C. G. Jung's Red Book

By Mathew V. Spano, Ph.D.

http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=928&Itemid=40

Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1953)

Article by Tom Butler-Bowdon

http://www.butler-bowdon.com/carl-jung-archetypes-collective-unconcious

Why did primitive man go to such lengths to describe and interpret the happenings in the natural world, for example the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the seasons? Carl Jung believed that the events of nature were not simply put into fairytales and myths as a way of explaining them physically. Rather, the outer world was used to make sense of the inner.

In our time, Jung noted, this rich well of symbols – art, religion, mythology – which for thousands of years helped people understand the mysteries of life, had been filled in and replaced by the science of psychology. What psychology lacked, ironically given its borrowing of the ancient Greek term, was an understanding of the psyche, or the self in its broadest terms.

For Jung, the goal of life was to see the 'individuation' of this self, a sort of uniting of a person's conscious and unconscious minds so that their original unique promise might be fulfilled. This larger conception of the self was also based on the idea that humans are expressions of a deeper layer of universal consciousness. To grasp the uniqueness of each person, paradoxically we had to go beyond the personal self to understand the workings of this deeper collective wisdom.

The collective unconscious

Jung admitted that the idea of the collective unconscious “belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.” He had to defend it against the charge of mysticism. Yet he also noted that the idea of the unconscious on its own was thought fanciful until Freud pointed to its existence, and it became part of our understanding of why people think and act the way as they do. Freud had assumed the unconscious to be a personal thing contained within an individual. Jung, on the other hand, saw the personal unconscious mind as sitting atop a much deeper universal layer of consciousness, the collective unconscious – the inherited part of the human psyche not developed from personal experience.

The collective unconscious was expressed through 'archetypes', universal thought-forms or mental images that influenced an individual's feelings and action. The experience of archetypes often paid little heed to tradition or cultural rules, which suggests that they are innate projections. A newborn baby is not a blank slate but comes wired ready to perceive certain archetypal patterns and symbols. This is why children fantasize so much, Jung believed: they have not experienced enough of reality to cancel out their mind's enjoyment of archetypal imagery.

Archetypes have been expressed as myths and fairytales, and at a personal level in dreams and visions. In mythology they are called 'motifs', in anthropology 'représentations collectives'. German ethnologist Adolf Bastian referred to them as 'elementary' or 'primordial' thoughts that he saw expressed again and again in the cultures of tribal and folk peoples. But they are not simply of anthropological interest; usually without knowing it, archetypes shape the relationships that matter in our lives.

Archetypes and complexes

Jung highlighted a number of archetypes, including the 'anima', the 'mother', the 'shadow', the 'child', the 'wise old man', the 'spirits' of fairytales, and the 'trickster' figure found in myths and history. We look at two below.

The anima

Anima means soul with a female form. In mythology it is expressed as a siren, a mermaid, a wood-nymph, or any form which 'infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them'. In ancient times, the anima came represented either as a goddess or a witch – that is, aspects of the female which were out of men's control.

When a man 'projects' the feminine aspect within his psyche onto an actual woman, that woman takes on magnified importance. The archetype makes itself present in a man's life either by infatuation, idealization or fascination with women. The woman herself does not really justify these reactions, but acts as the target to which his anima is transferred. This is why the loss of a relationship can be so devastating to a man. It is the loss of a side of him that he has kept external.

Every time there is an extreme love or fantasy or entanglement, the anima is at work in both sexes. She does not care for an orderly life, but wants intensity of experience - life, in whatever form. The anima, like all archetypes, may come upon us like fate. She can enter our life either as something wonderful or as something terrible – either way her aim is to wake us up. To recognize the anima means throwing away our rational ideas of how life should be lived, and instead admitting, as Jung puts it, that “Life is crazy and meaningful at once”.

The anima is profoundly irrational – and yet she carries great wisdom. When she comes into your life it may seem like chaos, but it is only later that we are able to divine her purpose.

The Mother

The Mother archetype takes the form of personal mother, grandmother, stepmother, mother in law, nurse, governess. It can be fulfilled in figurative Mothers such as Mary Mother of God, Sophia, or the Mother who becomes a maiden again in the myth of Demeter and Kore. Other Mother symbols include the Church, country, the Earth, the woods, the sea, a garden, a ploughed field, a spring or well. The positive aspect of the archetype is Motherly love and warmth, so celebrated in art and poetry, which gives us our first identity in the world. Yet it can have negative meaning – the loving mother or the terrible mother or goddess of fate. Jung considered the Mother the most important archetype because it seemed to contain all else.

When there is an imbalance of the archetype in a person, we see the Mother 'complex'. In men, the complex may give rise to 'Don Juanism', which can make a man fixated on pleasing all women. Yet a man with a mother complex may also have a revolutionary spirit: tough, persevering, extremely ambitious.

In women, the complex can result in an exaggeration of the maternal instinct, with a woman living for her children, sacrificing her individuality. Her husband becomes just part of the furniture. Men may be initially attracted to women with a mother complex because they are the picture of femininity and innocence. Yet they are also screens onto which a man can project or externalize his anima, and he only later discovers the real woman he has married.

In other forms of the archetype, a woman will go to any lengths to not be like her biological mother. She may carve out a sphere of her own, for example becoming an intellectual to show up her mother's lack of education. A choice of marriage partner may be to antagonize and move away from the mother. Other women in the hold of the archetype may have an unconscious incestuous relationship with the biological father and jealousy of the mother. They may become interested in married men or having romantic adventures.

* * * *

Jung noted that in evolutionary terms the unconscious came well before the development conscious thought. Yet in its youthful enthusiasm the conscious mind feels it can defy or deny its deeper counterpart; it is all-powerful while the unconscious seems a murky irrelevance. Yet he believed that “Man's worst sin is unconsciousness”. We project everything we internally don't like or can't accept onto the world, so that we wage war instead of studying ourselves. It is a case of 'anything but self-knowledge' – but in the end we pay the price, whether as individuals or collectively.

Spiritual archetypes

Why is psychology as a science so young? Jung suggests it was because for most of human history it simply wasn't necessary. The wonderful imagery and mythology of religions was able to express the eternal archetypes perfectly. People feel a need to dwell upon ideas and images relating to rebirth and transformation, and religions supply these in abundance for every aspect of the psyche. The Catholic Church's strange ideas of the Virgin Birth and the Trinity are not fanciful images but packed with meaning, Jung wrote, archetypes of protection and healing that administered to any ruptures in the minds of the faithful.

The Protestant Reformation reacted against all this. The rich Catholic imagery and dogma became nothing but 'superstition', and in Jung's view this attitude made way for the barrenness of contemporary life. Genuine spirituality must engage both the unconscious and the conscious mind, the depths as well as the heights.

Jung observed the trend of people in the West flocking to Eastern spirituality, but felt this was hardly necessary given the depth of meaning embedded in the Christian tradition. Another result was that people are attracted to political and social ideas that were “distinguished by their spiritual bleakness”.

Humans have a religious instinct, Jung believed, whether it is a belief in God or in some secular faith like communism or atheism. “No one can escape the prejudice of being human” he observed.

Individuation

'Individuation' was Jung's term for the point when a person is finally able to integrate the opposites within them - their conscious and unconscious minds. Individuation simply means to become what you always were in potentia, to fulfil your unique promise. The result is an individual in the real sense of the word, a whole and indestructible self that can no longer be hijacked by splintered aspects or complexes.

But this reintegration does not happen by thinking about it rationally. It is a journey with unexpected twists and turns. Many myths show how we need to follow a path that transcends reason in order to fulfill ourselves in life. Jung went to some length to define the self. He understood it to be something different from the ego; in fact the self incorporated the ego, “just as a large circle encloses a smaller one”. While the ego relates to the conscious mind, the self belongs to the personal and collective unconscious.

The healing mandala

Jung included in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious many reproductions of mandalas, abstract patterned images whose name in Sanskrit means 'circle'. He believed that when a person draws or paints a mandala, unconscious leanings or wants are expressed in its patterns, symbols and shapes.

In his therapeutic practice, Jung found mandalas to have a 'magical' effect, reducing confusion in the psyche to order, and often affecting a person in ways that only became apparent later. They worked because the unconscious is allowed free reign; what has been swept under comes to the surface. Motifs such as egg shapes, a lotus flower, a star or sun, a snake, castles, cities, eyes, etc. are produced for no obvious reason, yet reflect or draw out processes that are going on deep below that person's conscious thinking. When a person became able to make a meaningful interpretation of the images, Jung observed that it was usually the beginning of psychological healing. It was one step taken in the individuation process.

Final comments

We think we are modern and civilized with all our technology and knowledge, but inside, Jung says, we are still 'primitives'. He once observed in Switzerland a Strudel, a local witch-doctor, remove a spell from a stable – in the shadow of a railway line on which several trans-European expresses roared by.

Modernity does not do away with the need for us to attend to our unconscious minds. If we do neglect this side of us, the archetypes simply look for new forms of expression, in the process derailing our carefully made plans. Usually the unconscious supports our conscious decisions, but when a gap appears the archetypes are expressed in strange and powerful ways; we can be ambushed by lack of self-knowledge.

The universe of ancient symbols we once used for deciphering life's changes and larger meaning has been replaced by a science – psychology - that was never designed to understand the soul and cater to it. Writing of the scientific mindset in general, Jung wrote: “Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists...But 'the heart glows,' and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.” Modern man or woman lives with a spiritual emptiness that was once easily filled by religion or mythology. Only a new type of psychology that actually recognized the depth of the psyche would be able to quell this secret unrest.

When it seems you are helpless in the face of problems, it should be remembered that this deeper mind carries the totality of human experience, a vast store of objective wisdom and perfect solutions. It only has to be recognized and accessed.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Philosophy 101 - Existentialism

From Merriam Webster
EXISTENTIALISM

A chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad.

From the Free Online Dictionary
ex·is·ten·tial·ism
n.
A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.

WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?
http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/whatis.html
By Bob Corbett
March 1985
Webster University

Existentialism. A difficult term to define and an odd movement. Odd because most thinkers whom the intellectual world categorizes as existentialists are people who deny they are that. And, two of the people whom nearly everyone points to as important to the movement, Soren Kierkegaard and Fredrich Nietzsche, are both too early in time to be in the group, thus are usually called "precursorers," but studied and treated as members of the group.

Major figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus all flatly deny they are in the movement (at least at times they did), yet everyone says they are central.

Secondly, the term is very difficult, if not totally impossible to define. What is existentialism? I've been asked that a thousand times, have read most intro type books on the field, have spent much of my teaching life "doing" Existentialism, yet cannot give a coherent and relatively short definition. It's sort of a spirit or aura of how one responds to human existence, much easier to characterize (rather than define) in negative terms -- what Existentialism is NOT that philosophy generally is -- than in positive terms of a definition.

However, I can define certain characterists that most Existentialists (and precursors to Existentialism) seem to share:

- they are obsessed with how to live one's life and believe that philosophical and psychological inquiry can help.

- they believe there are certain questions that everyone must deal with (if they are to take human life seriously), and that these are special -- existential -- questions. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence, the place of God in human existence, the meaning of value, interpersonal relationship, the place of self-reflective conscious knowledge of one's self in existing.
Note that the existentialists on this characterization don't pay much attention to "social" questions such as the politics of life and what "social" responsibility the society or state has. They focus almost exclusively on the individual.

- By and large Existentialists believe that life is very difficult and that it doesn't have an "objective" or universally known value, but that the individual must create value by affiriming it and living it, not by talking about it.

- Existential choices and values are primarily demonstrated in ACTs not in words.

- Given that one is focusing on individual existence and the "existential" struggles (that is, in making decisions that are meaningful in everyday life), they often find that literary characterizations rather than more abstract philosophical thinking, are the best ways to elucidate existential struggles.

- They tend to take freedom of the will, the human power to do or not do, as absolutely obvious. Now and again there are arguments for free will in Existentialist literature, but even in these arguments, one gets the distinct sense that the arguments are not for themselves, but for "outsiders." Inside the movement, free will is axiomatic, it is intuitively obvious, it is the backdrop of all else that goes on.

- There are certainly exceptions to each of these things, but this is sort of a placing of the existentialist-like positions.

Another way of doing it is much simpler. There are about a dozen major thinkers who are characterized as "Existentilist" whom most scholars agree are existentialist. Thus, Existentialism is what these thinkers hold and write. I think that in the end, this is probably the best way to understand it.

In response to a question about the above:

I want to address, at least for a first round, the question of decision making for the Existentialists. First of all there is a split among them on their concern for decisions and actions.

One of the most important thinkers in this movement, Martin Heidegger, is very little concerned with deciding and acting, but is concerned with knowing. It's not what you DO that matters to Heidegger, but how you KNOW it and that you KNOW it. Jean-Paul Sartre on the other hand is profoundly concerned with acting.

However, in general the Existentialists recognize that human knowledge is limited and fallible. One can be deeply committed to truth and investigation and simply fail to find adequate truth, or get it wrong. Further, unlike science, which can keep searching for generations for an answer and afford to just say: We don't know yet, in the everyday world, we often simply must do or not do. The moment of decision comes. For the Existentialist one faces these moments of decision with a sense of fallibility and seriousness of purpose, and then RISKS. Sartre is extremely harsh on this point. At one place he says: When I choose I choose for the whole world. Now what can this mean. I think what Sartre is getting at is that first of all when I choose and act, I change the world in some iota. This note gets written or it doesn't. That has ramifications. It commits me to say what I'm saying. It may change someone who may be affected by my remarks. Others can be too if they hear or read them. And so on. The ripples of actions are like ripples on the sea, they go on and on and on.

By my acts I also begin to define and create the self I am, which is, to some extent a public self. Thus an act is like opening Pandora's box, it lets out what's inside the act and there is no getting it back.

That's not a MORAL point to Sartre, it is an ontological fact, that is, a fact about the world. Not a should or an ought, but a description of a reality about the world and human choice.

If:

I am a person serious about my acts.
If they are as uncertain as Sartre describes
They are as potentially momentous as he describes
Then:

It's not surprising that acting, for the Existentialist, is a terrifying responsibility and living and acting is a burden that causes great anxiety for the Existentialists. There is not absolute certainty (for some of the reasons given above and for yet more we can talk about later), thus human acts are the full responsibility of the individual.

Further, in another place in Sartre's major work, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, he talks about creating oneself in action. What he means by this is that I, the human, am free. I can make up my own mind about my acts. What I will BE in some final sense is what I make of myself. Thus my acts are not trivial, but definitive of my very self-hood. Again, acting in such a world of freedom, uncertainty and ontological responsibility (as opposed to moral responsibility), is so weighty that the Existentialists nearly recoil from living and acting under the terror of the weight of it all.

Put in the shortest form: Living without certainty and with personal responsibility is a nearly unbearable burden.

Bob Corbett
March 1985

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.

Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher, though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically").Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
First published Mon Aug 23, 2004; substantive revision Mon Oct 11, 2010
Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,” “existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates—notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus—existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom—for instance Camus and Heidegger—repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works (such as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hamsun and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club; artists such as Alberto Giacometti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliché, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.

It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position; or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartre's philosophy alone. But while a philosophical definition of existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural fate of the term, and while Sartre's thought must loom large in any account of existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as theology (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss to Otto Rank, R. D. Laing, and Viktor Frankl). What makes this current of inquiry distinct is not its concern with “existence” in general, but rather its claim that thinking about human existence requires new categories not found in the conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought; human beings can be understood neither as substances with fixed properties, nor as subjects interacting with a world of objects.

On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices.

“Existentialism”, therefore, may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorial way may seem to conceal what is often taken to be its “heart” (Kaufmann 1968:12), namely, its character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight from the “iron cage” of reason. But while it is true that the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism—dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so on—find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new categorial framework, together with its governing norm.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Philosophy 101 - Plato

Well, you really opened up Pandora’s box when you started talking about Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Plato!!! I took a lot of philosophy courses at University, but as you could tell by our conversation I've forgotten most of what I learned. The good news is you've given me a good excuse to revisit these philosophers and maybe I can give you a brief introduction to some of their ideas. As you go on with your education you’ll need to know more about philosophy. For example, it’s hard to understand Camus’s The Stranger without knowing something about Existentialism.

A good philosopher to start with is Plato. He felt like you, in that you prefer talking with someone to gain understanding rather than just reading text. Much of Plato’s philosophy is made know to us through his Dialogues-- question and answer discussions between friends where deeper truth comes to light in the process. You should read some of Plato's dialogues. It's fun to listen to each participant question and clarify previous responses and gradually move toward a better understanding.

Plato was one of the first philosophers to deny the reality of the material world. Plato believed that what we perceive with our senses is only a shadow or copy of reality. True reality can only be known through reason, and through understanding what he called the unchanging Forms or Ideals.

Questions about being, and knowing, and about what is real is a form of philosophy called metaphysics. This branch of philosophy attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g.,existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility.

Here’s a short video about Plato's theory of Forms:

In the Republic, one of Plato's most important Dialogues, there is the famous allegory of The Cave. In this story a group of people are chained in a cave and can only see shadows on the cave wall in front of them. Since this is all they can see, this is their reality. Then one of them is released and brought out of the cave and at first is confused and is in a state of shock. Here's a video about Plato's Cave:

Plato and the Cave

For a more detailed talk about Plato's Cave and his ideas about Forms and human understanding take a look at this video. I think it's a very clear presentation:

Plato's Cave, Divided Line, Forms, Metaphysics,...

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Alice Guy Blaché - First Female Director

Alice Guy-Blaché

Falling Leaves directed by Alice Guy-Blaché

Making the first music videos

Alice Guy Blache Films a Phonoscene in the Studio at Buttes-Chaumont, Paris (1905)

Be Natural Trailer

The Kiss from The Ocean Waif by Alice Guy-Blaché

About Alice Guy-Blaché from Frame by Frame

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Guy-Blach%C3%A9
http://les-amis-alice-guy.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-ocean-waif-alice-guy-blache-1916.html
http://www.aliceguyblache.com/lost-visionary/excerpts
http://blog.unl.edu/dixon/2011/08/24/alice-guy/

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Selected Portrait Photography

Friday, July 12, 2013

Two French Silent Films

La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) (1928) by Germaine Dulac. With Music composed and orchestrated by Giovanni Palumbo.

Germaine Dulac

"It isn't enough to simply capture reality in order to express it in its totality; something else is necessary in order to respect it entirely, to surround it in its atmosphere, and to make its moral meaning perceptible…" Germaine Dulac

Fievre (Fever) (1921) by Louis Delluc

Louis Delluc

La Coquille et le clergyman (Part 1)

La Coquille et le clergyman (Part 2)

La Coquille et le clergyman (Part 3)

Fievre (Fever) (1921) by Louis Delluc
* Note that the intertitles for this film have been lost

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Delluc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Dulac
http://integrallife.com/integral-post/toward-integral-cinema

Monday, May 20, 2013

Victor's 101 Favorite Films

Denmark/France

Purpose

I want to try to help you with your art even though we're apart. So this blog is about things I believe you can do to get better as an artist. As I see it there are several key things you need to do:

- Work on your drawing by drawing as much as you can
- Learn all you can about the work, technique, philosophy, and life of great artists
- Let your enjoyment of and participation in the other arts—writing, music, poetry, theatre, film, photography, dance, and fashion contribute to your art projects and your direction in art
- And…using the first three points as a basic approach, expand your efforts into painting, sculpture, pottery, and fashion design.

That’s basically it!! Note that even though these activities are listed individually, the actual work will overlap and go on simultaneously. The overall approach I’m describing is one of natural growth in your skill and in your sensibility and feeling as a human being and as an artist. You must work through difficulties in an organic, fearless, and patient way. If you are determined and dedicated, then many good things await you and your work will have lasting beauty and truth.

** And don't forget to visit the Vicsmuse inspiration blog from time to time. There's a lot there about art, too, and It goes hand in hand with 4v. **