Best Post Ever

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I haven’t blogged since Friday, and I truly truly meant to yesterday, but obviously that didn’t happen. So I truly planned to make this up by writing the BEST POST EVER.
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[Insert BEST POST EVER here]

I don’t even have the BEST EXCUSE EVER–I went home to Georgia for a week. I got back late Sunday night. Yesterday I spent about three hours opening everything that had been sent to me and a solid hour dithering before I weakly began to do something about it. Then I succumbed to TV shows and two historical novels I wanted to finish. This is not the stuff blog posts are made of. I could tell you a bit about how I painstakingly listed each scene of my novel, cut up the paper into scenes, and played with their order until I had restructured my plot. (It was a more refined version of the post-its I showed you.) Then, however, you would know how long I’ve been stuck on it! I wish I had just written it this way in the first place, but ultimately I’m really glad to be excited about it again. It was like an albatross hanging on my neck.

So yes, this is just a ‘hello’ for now. I have to make myself a cup of tea and get some work done. Tomorrow: a MIDDLING – BEST POST is on the agenda! (I promise : )

Mandalas and Computers

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I was drawn to the Rubin Museum because of the special Red Book exhibition (more details of Jung’s work here), but what I enjoyed the most was the museum’s Mandala: The Perfect Circle exhibition. Mandalas from the 8th C. onward are displayed in a variety of styles and mediums and for different purposes. They often show a circle bound in a square. Within the circle, like in the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) mandala above, the circle contains a four sided structure that radiates out from a central point.


Mandalas are created as aids to spiritual visualization, especially in diety yoga in which Tibetan buddhists imagine themselves as ideal beings in the form of a buddha. The one above is devoted to Yamantaka, symbolized by the blue thunderbolt at the center. The archectonic form within the circle is his palace. It soars upward at each level, and he is housed at the very center and the very top. The circle around is actually circles, representing different places that must be crossed before entering the palace of the god and ascending. The outermost circle is a ring of fire, followed by a ring of charnal grounds, followed by a ring of lotus blossoms. A monk would use a mandala to cross these circles and enter the palace, then to walk down the hallway, up the stairs, around the next level, etcetera all in his minds eye. The mandala is a 2 dimensional representation, like a map, to aid in the visualization of a 3 dimensional reality. It is difficult–especially for someone like me– to look at a mandala and truly understand the visualization involved.

Enter, computers! The Rubin Museum has computers displaying virtual mandalas, in which computer graphic designers turn the 2D image into a 3D environment. The point of view of one is of a person dwarfed by the gorgeous and elaborate palace he/she is ascending. I gained such a better understanding of how mandalas were used and what a monk might see. The virtual mandalas are brilliant. Seriously, the coolest thing I have seen in eons. I didn’t have time for the rest of the collection, so I hope to go back soon. Not to mention, the museum is gorgeous, not at all overcrowded, and has a lovely cafeteria with samosas and white wine.

Keats and Autumn

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I saw Bright Star yesterday, a very romantic film about Romantic poet John Keats. Liberties may have been taken with the poet’s love life, but the quiet, well shot movie is a beautiful period piece nonethless. Ben Wihshaw certainly looks the part of the 25 year old Romantic poet dying of consumption. There are some gorgeous shots of the English countryside. However the chief virtue of Bright Star must be the way it slowly takes you through some of Keat’s verse.

It skipped the poem that I hoped to hear; his Ode to Autumn being very perfect for this time of year.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

j