“How can I love what I am doing if I am all the time driven by ambition, trying through my work to achieve an aim, to become somebody, to have a success? An artist who is concerned with his name, with his greatness, with comparison, with fulfilling his ambition, has ceased to be an artist; he is merely a technician like everybody else."--Krishnamurti
I've been gorging on J. Krishnamurti, and applying it not only to my sense of being in the world (a solution which can be reduced in words to "pay attention," or as Ram Dass would have it, Be Here Now) but to my sense of myself as a writer, even a blogger.
As to my Internet presence, Krishnamurti adds this (from Freedom from the Known):
I've been gorging on J. Krishnamurti, and applying it not only to my sense of being in the world (a solution which can be reduced in words to "pay attention," or as Ram Dass would have it, Be Here Now) but to my sense of myself as a writer, even a blogger.
As to my Internet presence, Krishnamurti adds this (from Freedom from the Known):
“I discover for myself that I depend on something—an audience, say, which will stimulate me. I derive from that audience, from addressing a large group of people, a kind of energy. And therefore I depend on that audience, on those people, whether they agree or disagree."
Why are we all online? Why all this publishing/blogging/yelling? Have I lost my way in ambition? As William Deresiewicz has it in his article in The Chronicle Review, the postmodern property is "visibility"; i.e., "look at me."
But why look at me? Because my opinion "matters." Because in a world where we've lost the respect given to true authorities, the result is everyone is an expert (Keith Kahn-Harris and David Hayes have an excellent article on the politics of Me at Open Democracy).
The result, of course, is a surge of Relativism (read Anthony Daniel's fine article in The New Criterion) and art that is reduced to utter Subjectivity (see Theodore Dalrymple's essay in the New English Review). Everyone, apparently, needs an audience.
And so everywhere I look is the Internet equivalent of the need to be seen, to be visible, to connect: Facebook, Good Reads, blog after blog, and so on. This is what Krishnamurti calls "stimulation," the kind that deadens the mind and kills real creativity as we grow dependent on others for validation, for confirmation of our opinion, for whatever reward the ego demands. He connects it with a move away from nature and towards urbanity:
“Most of us have lost touch with nature. Civilization is tending more and more towards large cities; we are becoming more and more an urban people, living in crowded apartments and having very little space even to look at the sky of an evening and morning, and therefore we are losing touch with a great deal of beauty…Having lost touch with nature we naturally tend to develop intellectual capacities. We read a great many books, go to a great many museums and concerts, watch television and have many other entertainments. We quote endlessly from other people’s ideas and think and talk a great deal about art. Why is it we depend so much upon art? Is it a form of escape, of stimulation?...Perhaps it is because you do not know how to look at all the things about you that you resort to some form of drug to stimulate you to see better.”
Naturally, I am fully included. Namasté.
Naturally, I am fully included. Namasté.
