by @ssnnas
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Western scholarship has turned its eyes away from the reality of life in yet a different way. Western thinkers, beginning with the early Greeks, have become used to grasping all existence solely by reason. This is grasping the meaning of things by establishing their precise relationship to other things, or grasping things in terms of definitions. Because of this approach, some Western philosophers try to grasp “self” and even the life force itself by definition. The life of the self deoes not come about by being defined. Life lives as real experience even if it is not understood or defined. Even the power to understand things by means of definitions is the power of our own life. This ought to be clear to us naturally, but all the Western rationalists’ attempts at explanation leave it muddled. If one thinks about a reality that exists before the definitions of speculative thought, that in itself creates a kind of definition, recreating the problem. The speculated-about and redefined reality no longer exists prior to definition. You can easily wind up thinking that definitions are reality.
Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought: The Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice
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92-Year-Old Grandmother Makes Stunningly Intricate Temari Balls
A ninety-two-year-old-grandmother from Japan creates stunning embroidered balls known as “temari,” (meaning “hand ball” in Japanese) which showcase a skill she learned in her sixties. A traditional folk art, which was conceived in Japan in the 7th century, the craft is tedious and highly demanding craft. The unknown woman has constructed 500 unique designs, which are photographed by her granddaughter NanaAkua. Overall these beautiful trinkets are a symbol of happy life and good fortune, which originate from friendship and loyalty.
(Source: culturenlifestyle.com)
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at 上海 外灘 the Bund Shanghai
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View from the Hyatt bar in the Shanghai World Financial Center (at Shanghai World Financial Center)
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Installations by Rowan Mersh
Rowan Mersh is a textile based sculptor who explores form and fuses concept with technique, emphasizing experimentation as the focus of his practice. A celebrated graduate of the Royal College of Art, Mersh has developed a unique aesthetic, which is at once obvious upon encounter of his various sculptural forms, whether it be textiles, sculpture or any other experimental agenda in which he embarks.
You need the art in order to love the life. We guarantee you that!
(Source: crossconnectmag)
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One of the most powerful moments I experienced as an ancient history student was when I was teaching cuneiform to visitors at a fair. A father and his two little children came up to the table where I was working. I recognised them from an interfaith ceremony I’d attended several months before: the father had said a prayer for his homeland, Syria, and for his hometown, Aleppo.
All three of them were soft-spoken, kind and curious. I taught the little girl how to press wedges into the clay, and I taught the little boy that his name meant “sun” and that there was an ancient Mesopotamian God with the same name. I told them they were about the same age as scribes were when they started their training. As they worked, their father said to them gently: “See, this is how your ancestors used to write.”
And I thought of how the Ancient City of Aleppo is almost entirely destroyed now, and how the Citadel was shelled and used as a military base, and how Palmyran temples were blown up and such a wealth of culture and history has been lost forever. And there I was with these children, two small pieces of the future of a broken country, and I was teaching them cuneiform. They were smiling and chatting to each other about Mesopotamia and “can you imagine, our great-great-great-grandparents used to write like this four thousand years ago!” For them and their father, it was more than a fun weekend activity. It was a way of connecting, despite everything and thousands of kilometres away from home, with their own history.
This moment showed me, in a concrete way, why ancient studies matter. They may not seem important now, not to many people at least. But history represents so much of our cultural identity: it teaches us where we come from, explains who we are, and guides us as we go forward. Lose it, and we lose a part of ourselves. As historians, our role is to preserve this knowledge as best we can and pass it on to future generations who will need it. I helped pass it on to two little Syrian children that day. They learnt that their country isn’t just blood and bombs, it’s also scribes and powerful kings and Sun-Gods and stories about immortality and tablets that make your hands sticky. And that matters.
It’s a Western thing to claim the whole human race, isn’t it - to think and act as though all human variety is there for your taking? The Mesopotamians are only my “ancestors” in the broadest possible sense, through their influence on the subsequent civilisations like Greece that formed the basis for the modern West. I envy, and am humbled by, these Syrians, with their straightforward and direct connection to the ancient past, especially given the role of my culture and country in the current crisis in theirs.
