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My computer monitor died this afternoon, but thanks to Rancherfriend and his habit of not throwing things away, I have a replacement. YAY! (I call both my friends at this ranch “Rancherfriend” online. A remarkable couple we’ve known for decades, having met at a small church right after they’d bought the ranch and before there was a livable building on it. They invited us out to celebrate, as they’d just had power restored to one light pole. Plugged a crockpot into the socket on the pole (meant for power tools) and we all ate sitting on an old blanket. E- and I loaded and moved hay a few times; we worked cattle in the chutes with them a few times; I bought my cows from their herd and traded off calves for pasture lease until the drought. We have enough shared experiences and shared jokes to go on with. Good people. My day was like that all day though–problems and then solutions someone had to help me with. We fed Rancherfriend J-, because Rancherfriend E- was home with a migraine and really wanted dark, silence, and time. I had picked up barbecued ribs on the way home from the rehearsal, so we had those, and boiled red potatoes with butter & salt & pepper, and a pumpkin spice cake I’d also picked up at the grocery store.
Lucky to have such a good friend! Now I have to get things ready for an early start tomorrow–and clear the bed of the stuff that was on my desk and had to be moved to get the old monitor out and the new monitor in. Pens, pencils, hair elastics (why???), thumb drives, ink cartridges, sticky notes and 3×5 cards with vital important information on them by the dozens, envelopes covered with more vital notes (every piece of paper requires examination, just in case.) Etc. Lots and lots of Etc. Tomorrow at church we’re singing a Bach setting of a Psalm and William Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus” at both services. Somewhat challenging music. Today’s rehearsal was for the Requiem Mass on All Saints Day, a mix of sections from different composers’ Requiems. My favorite is still Mozart, and we are doing a couple of my favorite bits from it.
I guess this note wasn’t that brief, but it explains why nothing for Paksworld showed up today.
Comment by GinnyW — October 20, 2013 @ 7:22 pm
The music sounds wonderful!
Comment by elizabeth — October 21, 2013 @ 7:04 am
It is, as our director says, a privilege to be in the presence of such genius and part of keeping it alive.
Comment by elizabeth — October 21, 2013 @ 11:00 am
Another odd thing that might be of interest. While goofing off this morning (i.e. checking my Twitter stream, which is loaded with interesting stuff every single day, from shoe styles in medieval Europe to modern discussions of economics or space science to what a friend in NYC is reading or one in Seattle is preparing for a class…) I found a link to a NYT Op-Ed article ostensibly on religion–but with, I think, relevance to creativity.
The article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/luhrmann-conjuring-up-our-own-gods.html?src=recg
The connection: Luhrmann means “tulpas,” a spiritual exercise among some Buddhist monks, who try to imagine another conscious being so strongly that it comes real for them…it seems to act and speak on its own.
People whose main occupation is creating new stuff do that: we imagine something until it is real enough in our heads to bring into the physical world. For some, no “consciousness” of the created thing is required, but for writers of fiction, our characters, in order to seem real to readers, must seem like people with thoughts, feelings, and actions that derive from inside them, even though we all know the writer made them up. Some writers–I am one of those–experience the creation of characters in the process of writing as imagined people “coming alive” and actually having agency.
I had not known about the practice of imagining a tulpa (had never even seen the word before) but it struck me instantly that some of the same cognitive processes must be involved in the monk’s concentration on creating a tulpa and my concentration on a point-of-view character. And some of the same limitations must be operative. Though I often feel that my characters have an independence from me–they can do things I didn’t consciously tell them to do–they are bound by my own preconceptions of human nature or–when writing aliens–general biological principles and what’s known about how nonhuman organisms act (including problem-solving, communication, etc.) I suspect (on no evidence at all, so this is merely a vague hypothesis) that the monks’ tulpas are also bound by their understanding of concepts like agency, intelligence, etc.
The word and basic concept has now spread to other systems of thought about the supernatural (chaos magic? Hmmm) but I haven’t begun to look at any of that. I’m sticking (for the moment) to the concept as I understand it (limited) and as given by Luhrmann in the cited article.
It would be fascinating (to me, anyway) to discuss this with someone who had created a tulpa…to try to understand what it meant to them, how they experienced the process, etc. Meanwhile, I have the characters already created now turning around looking at me again. (Don’t DO that, you lot. You’re supposed to be looking out the other way and letting me inhabit your skulls so I can write more stories.)
Comment by Chuck Gatlin — October 21, 2013 @ 12:41 pm
We also sang a Psalm text to music by Bach yesterday at my church: a chorus from Cantata 71, but with vv. 3-4 of Psalm 121 (“The Lord will not suffer thy foot to be moved”) instead of the original German words (which were something about the soul–or maybe a turtledove–not being given over to the Enemy). I wonder if it was the same music? We also did Isaac’s “O esca viatorum” (“O food of men wayfaring”) as communion anthem. It’s the same tune used as “Innsbruck, ich muss’ dich lassen” (which always struck me as the early music equivalent of “By the time I get to Phoenix”).
Comment by Richard — October 21, 2013 @ 3:23 pm
I’d not heard, nor heard of, Innsbruck, ich muss’ dich lassen before, but what it instantly made me think of is Oh Shenandoah (even before listening to the Innsbruck song on YouTube, and more so after).
Comment by elizabeth — October 21, 2013 @ 3:28 pm
Chuck: Yes! The same music. How fun! Did you hear just a hint of what Mendelssohn did with the same words later?
Comment by elizabeth — October 21, 2013 @ 4:40 pm
Richard: At the moment, I’ve misplaced my headphones and thus can’t hunt up music on YouTube and hear it (my computer has no speakers attached.) They were here when I started cleaning off the desk to change out monitors, but…where did I put them? If someplace safe, it may be months before they’re found.
Comment by Chuck Gatlin — October 21, 2013 @ 10:21 pm
I missed the fore-echo of Mendelssohn, until you pointed it out; but then we do the Bach piece every two or three years, and we’ve only sung that particular Mendelssohn chorus maybe twice in the twenty-odd years I’ve sung in this choir. I found a nice performance on YouTube of that as well, so I hope you find your headphones!