I don't know how I stumbled upon Wallace Steven's poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," but it made me long for this exact feeling:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
I can imagine the times I felt this way, sitting on my back deck and reading a good book, or practicing yoga first thing in the morning as the sun comes up. Watching the snow fall in a street lamp on Christmas Eve back in New Hampshire. Traveling out of town with Travis for the weekend. Getting a really good massage, the kind that's deep and therapeutic but not insanely painful. I miss it.
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Visual representation of not my mind. |
Experiencing James Turrell's art is a great cure for this. In September, I dragged Travis and Will to Houston for a night so that we could see/experience the retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. I've been really interested in his work for a long time, unsurprising I guess for a lighting designer, but had never experienced anything of his first hand. They might have thought I was crazy with how insistent I was that we go to the exhibit before it closed, but once they saw what Turrell was about, they understood. I think it's nearly impossible to sit in silent awe in the middle of one of his immersive environments and not feel your mind empty and calm while your perception of space is distorted. The only drawback to the experience was that there were too many people - I really wanted to experience these pieces in solitude, not feeling rushed to let the next person in or distracted by what they were saying.
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Also we had Indian food on top of pizza. |
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The Turrell skyspace at UT |
I need to seek out more experiences like this. And it doesn't have to be quiet, hour long experiences of installation art - anything that keeps me away from my phone, my laptop, or the television for an hour or more will do. Sunday I met with local filmmaker/animation artist Jeanne Stern for a one-on-one handmade animation class. For three hours, I played with basic stop motion animation, taking photos, importing them into Final Cut and watching what I had created with very simple tools and some actual time of concentration and quiet. The cold weather had made it so that I didn't want to leave the house earlier that day, but once I was there, working and playing, I relaxed. When I left I could feel how different I was. I will probably be experimenting a lot with some of these kinds of animation in the next few months, especially while brainstorming and working on projections for "Sila."
I still find that I struggle with my use of media. I frequently feel the urge to leave Facebook entirely, just because experiencing the daily updates of a couple hundred people creates so much more noise in my head. I try to be very conscious of my use of my iPhone, I turn it off when in a class, at work, in meetings, in tech, or out with friends or with Travis. It's not easy to step away from it and not constantly want to check my email or text messages. But it's worth it. One afternoon walking on campus to my car I counted the number of people (mostly students) who passed by me while staring at their phones. I try to remind myself that I don't want to look like that, and also that I would probably just trip and fall if I tried.