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“The more time we spend visiting places that others have described, the more we follow the paths others have made, reading what we’re told, seeing what the algorithm recommends, listening to what crowd-sources admire and eating what’s already been photographed, tasted, marketed and measured, the less capacity we have to see what we didn’t expect, to hear what we weren’t told about or to ask questions that haven’t already been answered. We lose our own perspective and imagination and in this everyone is impoverished: ourselves and anyone who looks to us in vain for fresh insight or understanding.” Margaret Heffernan

Three more charcoal and pencil drawings

 

 

And,  I’d also like to share a big part of Margaret Heffernan’s chapter around art and living with the uncertainty and ambiguity intrinsic in life with the title: Living the Questions from her book: Uncharted: How to Map the Future, in which she explores questions.

“How is it that Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, written in Italy 135 years ago by a fussy, middle-aged Norwegian man, holds this cosmopolitan audience rapt? …….. Artists are frequently ahead – that’s what avant-garde means – but what makes that possible? How does art stay relevant in times and circumstances well beyond any future its makers could have imagined? What is it about the way that artists live and work that puts them in touch with ideas and themes that last so long? What lasts is, to some degree, random or accidental. We don’t know whether ancient Greece had greater playwrights than Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides, only that they are the ones whose work has been discovered. You need only look at ads for wildly hyped but now forgotten authors in the back of old books to see how ephemeral art can be. But all generations go back to art, discovering or rediscovering sources of meaning and insight that their makers could never have planned. There’s no evidence that artists contemplate ‘future proofing’ – artists don’t see the future as something to manipulate or guard against – yet we look to them for insight, perspective, ways to understand our own times that they themselves did not know. And, in work made decades, centuries, millennia ago, we find what we’re looking for. Read more…. Notes

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Sharing a few more drawings and two quotes from a book I am reading at the moment: Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan,

“When we trade the effort of doubt and debate for the ease of blind faith, we become gullible and exposed, passive and irresponsible observers of our own lives. Worse still, we leave ourselves wide open to those who profit by influencing our behaviour, our thinking and our choices. At that moment, our agency in our own lives is in jeopardy.”

“Instead of abdicating the future to those who know no more than we do, experiments are bolder, enlisting every kind of imagination in pursuit of more options. They show us what we miss when we cling to the shore, pinioned by forecasts or orthodoxies, doubt or fear. Each new insight adds detail to pictures of the future as they start to emerge.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?”
“Body exposed in the golden wind.” (Zen haiku)

“When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.” (From When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Chödrön, Pema., p. 11)

Today I’m sharing some charcoal drawings I’ve started making this month (excuse me for the poor quality of the photos, but I currently don’t have access to a scanner). Lack of canvases due to the lockdown has made it necessary for me to turn to things available on the arts supply shelf, but it’s also something I’ve felt I needed to do for some time now, but kept postponing it. Actually, I don’t think I have used charcoal for over a decade. One of the last charcoal drawings I made was the artwork posted in the previous post, and a portrait of the national poet of Bulgaria, as part of something I was asked to do for a small art exhibition I took part in, while supporting my husband’s work concerning outreach programmes at the time. In the past I’ve mostly used charcoal to make portraits of people, but this time I decided to focus less on precision and detail, and allow for more spontaneity and rawness to enter the images.

 

Also, sharing two links for two podcasts I’ve listened to over this last week. Both podcasts contain humor and it’s a pity there are no transcripts to make it easier for people in Greece to read.

One is a talk between Dr Rick Hanson and his son Forrester on the holidays and the difficulties that can come up as old traumas and past bottled up emotions can collide with current difficulties and expectations, as well as, the impact of Covid-19 on people’s circumstances and capacity to get together this year. It’s titled: Sadness and Disappointment around the Holidays. It moves through topics like the associations that we make between current sad experiences and unmet expectations and our past material, ways to soften around emotions and release them, the use of imagery to deal with sadness, identifying underlying beliefs, how to let in positive experiences alongside the painful ones, finding agency in the midst of disappointment, communicating our needs and discerning sadness from depression. They conclude that having strong hopes and intentions and weak expectations could potentially help us.

In the second podcast: https://humanism.org.uk/what-i-believe/,  Natalie Haynes , a British writer and broadcaster, talks with Andrew Copson about the modern relevance of the work of the ancient classical world and the value of curiosity and inquiry. Haynes values open inquiry, being curious and interested in learning and considers these as the root of happiness without underestimating luck and circumstances. She refers to generations of people being penalized for curiosity when they were young or were judged as not good enough to study the classics or other things by educators, and how this has robbed people of opportunities. Many of us may go back and think about our own experiences in Ancient Greek and Latin classes if these subjects were part of the school curriculum, She refers to the study of the Ancient Greek and Latin as limited to the elite and the importance of exposing all children to classics, which is our collective history and can help us journey through life. This she says is one reason why she has dedicated her life to taking classics to schools and working on giving everyone the opportunity to choose to learn. She also refers to her book, Pandora’s jar, and mentions how most modern narrators of Greek myths, for instance, have been men, who have not shown much interest in telling the stories of the women in these ancient stories.

A quote from Natalie Haynes’ book: A Thousand Ships

“But this is a women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.”