5-12-09 praxis
I only quite recently found ‘praxis’ as a word and an idea.
The sense is simple enough, it’s a snappy alternative to finding-by-doing, experimental play, practice makes perfect, learning on the job. It takes the ‘practice’ and focusses on the attention to feedback. It’s about how you alter what you do once you’ve noticed what you’ve done and it fits the way I like to work.
I went through a couple of months of acrylic painting this Summer and was struck by the way each canvas began with a splatter and smear of random texture and over a couple of days an image emerged which was telling you what little details it needed to be ‘finished’. Each painting became a surprise to me.
A lot of my guitar ‘technique’ started with accidents and fumbles I heard and then had to work out what I’d just done to let my fingers learn how to do it again.
Creativity isn’t the ability to do whatever you want, it’s about finding the best use of what you’ve got.
My days in hospital have given me time and reason to practise breath-meditation. If your attention is tuned in even simple breathing becomes as restful as watching waves from a cliff-top or breezes swaying trees in leaf when you’ve nothing better to do.
A friend invited me to a lunchtime introduction to Buddhist meditation and I went on that one occasion to put down a marker for myself that I’d attend for a while and see if it suited me.
My friend is a cognitive therapist and this is from an email. Her specialism helps explain my recollection of our introductory small-talk…:-
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I remember one of the first questions I asked you was about the linguistics of therapy: when you as therapist are able to re-present the clients’ thoughts in a way that allows them to change their concept which in turn has this effect of making them feel ‘better’, what transaction has taken place? Is the ‘feeling better’ the phenomenology or is it the result of a phenomenological change in the brain/mind?
I should say this is not a test-question. I suspect that given a grant and a sabbatical I could cover several football pitches with pages of speculation on how best to frame the questions, let alone outline my answers.
I enjoyed the meditation at the Buddhist Centre because it was in every formal respect a hypnotic induction and I really enjoy that intra-cranial massage; like physical massage, you can do a lot yourself but the pleasure of being worked on is the opportunity to drop away into mental free-fall, surveying the landscape without necessarily looking for anything.
When I had my MRI scan I passed the time in breath-meditation, interrupted by the voice in the headphones occasionally asking me to ‘take a deep breath; breathe out and… hold…. breathe away’ allowing about two seconds for the deep breath (!) which is a tall order even if you’re on the starting-blocks. If you’re halfway through the out-breath there’s a crunch of gears as you consciously haul in air.
It surprised me when at one point I opened my eyes and saw the proximity of the MRI tunnel roof and found my mind immediately feeling not claustrophobia exactly but playing with the idea of ‘what would it be like to have claustrophobia in this situation?’. Given that I was in what amounts to a self-induced hypnotic state I was very open to this new suggestion. I closed my eyes and got back to the routine, having ‘attended to those thoughts which arise’.
The led meditation was similar in that a voice occasionally reminded you that your lucid consciousness was still ticking over. The instructions to direct your compassion towards self and others are invitations to attend to the idea, a verbal representation of extended compassion prompting that interpretive cognitive function to kick in, but the meditation practice isn’t ‘doing’ as instructed but ‘being’ in some way, allowing the whatever-it-is to happen ‘through’ you.
As it happens on that occasion my mind was both muted by the beta-blockers and teeming with concerns and the quality of that solitude was like watching an office-full of waste paper emptying out of a chute into a skip. I was surprised at how much was going on for me but it was more instructive to realise that rather than try to fish out individual agendas and files to revise.
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Enough of that. This is a Randy Newman song I enjoy a lot, simple to play and best played slovenly. A lot of his early songs are character-pieces: portraits of rednecks, losers and lovers in low-rent liaisons.
The lyrics are often shockingly heartless and very funny. This one’s yee-haw vaudeville but you wouldn’t want your car to break down near this farm…:-
My Old Kentucky Home
E
Turpentine and dandelion wine
I’ve turned the corner’n I’m [A] doin’ fine
Shootin’ at the birds on the [E] telephone line
[B7] Pickin’em off with this [E] gun o’ mine
I got a [A] fire in my belly and a [E]fire in my head
Getting [B7] higher and higher ’till I’m [E] dead [E7]
Sister Sue she’s short and stout
She didn’t grow up, she grew out
Mama thinks she’s plain, but she’s just being kind
Papa thinks she’s pretty, but he’s almost blind
We don’t let her out much except at night
But I don’t care ’cause I’m allright
E A7 E
O-oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
E B7
Young folks roll on the floor
E A7 E
O-oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
E B7 E
Keep them hard times away from my door
Brother Gene, he’s big and mean
And he don’t have much to say
Got a little woman who he whooped each day
But now she’s gone away
Got drunk last night, kicked mama down the stairs
But I’m all right, so I don’t care