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The Story of Your Death

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Arequipa

How one is remembered can be sad. Or even incorrect. They said he had protested the way the priest was treating the women and girls in the community. He had been brought by the priest to paint religious stories of the others. Once before he had found himself in the square he was thinking about what he would paint Christ and how he would make the colors provide a discourse. But he ended burned piece by piece with candles by the follower of another god. An example that rippled across centuries in that village high above and far away from Spain. I don't want to be remembered by my death.

The Unbeliever

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - At the Temple

Being an unbeliever, I still believe in the unseen strength that drives me towards a belief that there are things one can't do and that one should do. It's not a moral code but more like a feeling that dominates my inner being. In this sad era when even the leaders of the world disregard obvious boundaries, it hurts perpetually to see the lack of empathy pervade from the top. I have a strong belief that this will end in the near future-it's a feeling that lingers in the morning and becomes stronger as the day is complete.

Some Scenes from the Convent in Arequipa

Vallejo nocturno 2019- Convento de Santa Catalina en Arequipa

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Monasterio de Santa Catalina

We travelled to Arequipa in southern Peru to familiarize ourselves with its history and its colonial past dating back from the 1500's. We 
discovered a vibrant city with a  great past and present. This covent is a must see as the architecture and history are very unique when you consider its time and development. It is still a functioning convent.

From Wikipedia:

The foundress of the monastery was a rich widow, Maria de Guzman. The tradition of the time indicated that the second son or daughter of a family would enter a life of service in the Church, and the monastery accepted only women from upper classSpanish families. Each family paid a dowry at their daughter's admission to the monastery. The dowry expected of a woman who wished to enter as a choir nun--indicated by wearing a black veil—and who thereby accepted the duty of the daily recitation of the Divine Office, was 2,400 silver coins, equivalent to about $150,000 (U.S.) today. The nuns were also required to bring 25 listed items, including a statue, a painting, a lamp and clothes. The wealthiest nuns may have brought fine English china and silk curtains and rugs. Although it was possible for poorer nuns to enter the convent without paying a dowry, it can be seen from the cells that most of the nuns were very wealthy.

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - El Convento en Arequipa

In 1871 Sister Josefa Cadena, O.P., a strict Dominican nun, was sent by Pope Pius IX to reform the monastery. She sent the rich dowries back to Europe, and freed all the servants and slaves, giving them the choice of either remaining as nuns or leaving. In addition to the stories of outrageous wealth, there are tales of nuns becoming pregnant, and amazingly of the skeleton of a baby being discovered encased in a wall. This, in fact, did not happen in Santa Catalina, and there are rumors of the same story in the nearby Santa Rosa monastery, as well.

At its height, the monastery housed approximately 450 people (about a third of them nuns and the rest servants) in a cloistered community. In the 1960s, it was struck twice by earthquakes, severely damaging the structures, and forcing the nuns to build new accommodation next door. It was then restored in stages by groups including Promociones Turisticas del Sur S.A. and World Monuments Fund and opened to the public. This also helped pay for the installation of electricity and running water, as required by law.

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - El Convento en Arequipa

From TASA.Com:

The Santa Catalina Monastery is located in Arequipa, Peru. It was built in 1580 and was enlarged in the 17th century. The terms 'convent' and 'monastery' are used interchangeably. It is a large complex of rooms, picturesque plazas, ornate fountains and a maze of narrow, cobblestone streets. The colors are absolutely stunning and the complex evokes feelings of true devotion.

The monastery is a city within a city and is a must see when you are in Arequipa.

The founder of the monastery was a rich widow, Maria de Guzman, who only accepted nuns from the best Spanish families. All the nuns had to pay a dowry.

Traditionally, the second daughter of upper-class families entered a nunnery, supposedly to live in poverty and renounce the material world. In fact, each nun at Santa Catalina had between one and four servants or slaves, and the nuns were able to invite musicians to perform in the convent, have parties and generally live the style to which they had become accustomed while growing up.

The dowry that had to be given by the most important nuns, who wore black veils, was 2,400 silver coins, equivalent to US$50,000 today. The nuns also had to bring 25 listed items, including a statue, a painting, a lamp and clothes. In the case of the wealthiest nuns, these included the finest English china and wonderful silk curtains and rugs.

All these nuns entered because of the family tradition that the second son or daughter had to enter religious service. Although it was possible for poorer nuns to enter the convent without paying a dowry, it can be seen from the cells that most of the nuns were very wealthy.

After about three centuries of these goings-on, the pope complained that Santa Catalina was more like an exclusive social club than a convent, and he sent Sister Josefa Cadena, a strict Dominican nun, to straighten things out. She arrived in 1871, sent all the rich dowries back to Europe, and freed all the servants and slaves, giving them the choice to stay on as nuns or leaving.

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Memory of Watts

From Longreads and Tom Maxwell:

In 1950, both the world and Alan Watts were at a pivotal point. Russia had recently detonated its first atomic weapon, ushering in an age of global anxiety.

By the spring, Watts himself was undergoing a jarring transformation: his first wife had their marriage annulled because of an affair, and he resigned his position as an Episcopalian minister. Watts left the church, he later remembered, “not because it doesn’t practice what it preaches, but because it preaches.”

And so, the newly single Alan Watts — practitioner of Zen Buddhism, student of Taoism, authority on comparative philosophy, ex-priest and prolific author — began hobnobbing with the likes of Joseph Campbell and John Cage. He moved to a little farmhouse in upstate New York and began writing The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. Given the circumstances, the book was aptly named. What it contains is timeless.

A central thesis of The Wisdom of Insecurity is that the present moment is all we have. Without being doctrinaire, Watts takes us radically beyond “eat when you’re eating, walk when you’re walking” mindfulness: the present is truly the only place we exist. What we call the past is a construct of memory, the recollection of which constitutes a present experience.

To illustrate, Watts asks us to remember a time we saw a friend walking down the street. We’re not witnessing the actual event, he points out, because we can’t shake our friend’s hand or ask him a question. “You’re looking,” Watts says, describing the scene, “at a present trace of the past.”

Understanding this concept changed me: the past ceased to be a tormentor. If recalling past events is a present experience, and doing so (in my case) often involved things that were embarrassing or painful, I simply stopped. The past is no longer needed to provide periodic mortification.

According to Watts, the future is likewise a construct, “and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present.”

Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements—inferences, guesses, deductions—it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead…Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.

So, to know happiness in the future, we must be happy now. Delaying enjoyment of your life is to always live in Christmas Eve, with the many gifts around you staying securely wrapped.

Moreover, to participate in the moment — to be fully aware, is to be unified with the experience, and free from the separating identity of being the experiencer.

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, “I am happy,” or “I am afraid,” you are not being aware of it.

Not only are you not being aware of it, you are creating the “I” who is afraid, and thus, by this separation, guaranteeing fear’s constant threat.

“This is not a psychological or spiritual discipline for self-improvement,” Watts writes. “It is simply being aware of this present experience, and realizing that you can neither define it nor divide yourself from it. There is no rule but ‘Look!’”

A Kind of Tribalism

Interview with Pankaj Mishra at Literary Hub:

Rafia Zakaria: The very first page of your book describes its stages of production: beginning at Modi, writing through Brexit and published with the election of Donald Trump. When you were at the beginning of this intellectual journey, did you foresee how it would proceed, both in terms of the books and the politics it aspires to explain?

Pankaj Mishra: I wish I could claim that kind of prescience. I knew that things were going very wrong in Europe and that inequality was an issue in the U.S. I did not know Brexit would happen or that Donald Trump would be elected. I just thought that there would be very large number of people who would vote for him, but I hoped that not enough would go as far as actually electing a maniac and a troll to the White House. I wrote my book obviously taking into account the state of dissatisfaction, but I could not predict the political outcome.

RZ: A dominant theme in your book is dislodging the post 9/11 assumption that terrorism as a phenomenon must be pinned on Islam and Muslims. You write: “The experts on Islam who opened for business following 9/11 peddle their wares more feverishly after every terror attack.” Who are these “experts,” and to what extent do you see their cultivation as a threat to those they seek to represent? 

PM: We, and by that I mean “the intelligentsia,” made a catastrophic mistake after 9/11 when we located the roots of terror in Islam, saying that there is something peculiar in their political tradition that explains an eruption of violence. That perspective looked past the mixed history of terrorism, and we now see that regardless of whether it is in Burma or Thailand or India, militancy and terrorism emerge out of a confluence of socio-economic factors. It is a sign of desperation and despair. This idea that it belongs to Islam in particular is a very dangerous idea; it was made mainstream and it was legitimated not just by the far right who are in charge of policy today (and have been engaging in this puerile debate), but also by the liberal intelligentsia.

Francis Fukuyama, for instance, said there is something intrinsic about Islam which is just not compatible with modernity. Then there is Salman Rushdie and even Martin Amis, talking about mass deportation as part of a thought experiment that he offered to a journalist. In sum, all sorts of mainstream figures were advancing this Islamophobic discourse in very holistic and dangerous ways, and in the guise of teaching Islam or understanding Islam or helping the Muslim moderates. This is why we are where we are today.

Now we see that when bigotry leads the West, and the leading bigot in the U.S. is President, it becomes impossible to explain it in relation to Islam or Christianity. So we are looking at the dislodging of a whole interpretive paradigm that has proven an utterly useless way of understanding the world. We need an analysis that compares the fundamentalists of today, whether they are Muslim or Christian or Jewish supremacists; their misogyny, their antipathy to multiculturalism, is markedly similar.  It is what links them that needs to be explored, the shared experience of disruptive social change, psychological disorientation, scorn, and humiliation.

I just returned from Myanmar where Buddhist monks have become ethnic cleansers. I would challenge anyone to explain their violence from the content of Buddhism. None can be found; it is socio-economic. A large number of the monks feel their power is being in a globalized capitalist economy, and you have to understand that to explain how Buddhists are becoming terrorists. We committed intellectual suicide soon after 9/11 when we started thinking of Islam as a generator of violence

RZ: Your book is an intellectual history at a time that is particularly inimical to history, interested in distortions and revisions. What, in your opinion, is the capacity for an intellectual history to call into question popular history?

PM: I don’t see myself as an intellectual historian; the book follows certain forms, but I really wrote it thinking about emotions, and mentalities, and the ideas that emerge from these emotions. My argument is that in certain kinds of situations we see people arriving at remarkably similar ideas that all harken back to a kind of tribalism. You see this tendency again and again in human history, and so I am describing a repetitive pattern that assumes the shape of ideas and ideologies.

And, yes, I do think this history of emotions is an effective antidote to the popular history. Whichever country we belong to, we learn that to love a particular country is to think of yourself and your country’s place in the world in an insular and parochial way. If you’re British, it’s saying that you presided over a benign and benevolent Empire; if it’s India, it’s waxing on about how great the Hindus are and how treacherous the Muslims were. Popular history shapes political imaginaries, and it is particularly dangerous when it prevents us from thinking about the global and deep structural similarities.

RZ: What mistakes has India, or rather Indian civil society, made in its encounter with Prime Minister Modi, who got elected on a similar brand of divisive populism as Donald Trump, and what can American civil society learn from them?

PM: There are several things we should be very suspicious of: intellectuals, specifically liberal intellectuals who normalize and say we should settle down, that “the people have elected this man and we should respect their decision because the people are sacrosanct.” I disagree; the “people” have made unwise political choices many times, and so the will of the “people” can lead to disaster.

The other lesson is that one has to resist as vigorously as possible the destruction of cultural spaces and intellectual platforms. In India, Modi has made dissent nearly impossible; there are similarities in the American experience already, with the National Endowment for the Humanities and other arts organizations facing massive cuts in the Trump Administration. The conditions are different in some respects, but one has to be very unnerved by the rapid undermining of these spaces. As Arendt says, politics has to be a way of life in this moment; we have to form communities of resistance that create a sense of belonging and truth. We cannot stand alone before a semi-fascist state.

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Interview with Pankaj Mishra

From an interview with Pankaj Mishra in World Post:

WorldPost: Like you, Isaiah Berlin disdained cosmopolitanism and foresaw the forces behind today’s mutiny against it. He thought every culture should sustain its unique identity, or volksgeist, which is incommensurate with others. “I regard cosmopolitanism as empty,” Berlin once told me in an interview: 

People can’t develop unless they belong to a culture. Even if they rebel against it and transform it entirely, they still belong to a stream of tradition. New streams can be created ― in the West, by Christianity, or Luther, or the Renaissance, or the Romantic movement ― but in the end they derive from a single river, an underlying central tradition, which, sometimes, in radically altered forms, survives.

But if the streams dry up, as for instance, where men and women are not products of a culture, where they don’t have kith and kin and feel closer to some people than to others, where there is no native language—that would lead to a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human.

The French philosopher Régis Debray also anticipated the backlash because he saw the same thing as Berlin. For Debray, if borders don’t secure cultural affinity, walls will be erected in their place as a defense against contamination. “Borders are a vaccine against the epidemic of walls,” he has written. So the question is, how do you balance belonging and self-determination with the interdependence of plural identities that globalization has created, including through mass immigration? 

PM: This is a complex issue. Of course, a figure like Johann Gottfried von Herder, who Berlin wrote about at length, and who I discuss in my book, also insisted on defining the need for a cultural community and solidarity against a homogenizing cosmopolitan universalism. Some of this can be denounced as nativism, and put down to the ressentiment of a superior elite — in Herder’s case, the Parisian philosophers.

But there is more to it than our liberal sensibilities are prepared to admit. You will remember the controversial speech [French anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss gave on racism at a UNESCO conference in 1971 where he insisted on — let me give the correct quote — “the right of every culture to remain deaf to the values of the Other.” He said bluntly that the project of anti-racism was not going to be advanced by the project of universal integration — quite the contrary. We’ll end up with more rather than less racism. The great value of human and cultural pluralism could only be maintained by an “optimal distance” and separation between cultures. If we accept this, then we have to acknowledge that the kind of cosmopolitanism advanced by a global market contains a devastating contradiction ― by homogenizing societies it works against its own stated goals of universal progress and greater tolerance and democracy. In other words, the cherished ideals of the liberal cosmopolitan elite ― capitalism and democracy and multicultural diversity ― are in opposition to each other.

When you go to countries like Myanmar, which are routinely praised for “opening up” to foreign investors and tourists, you can see this up front: the country’s nascent project of democracy is immediately threatened by not just older ethnic-religious insurgencies but also hyper-individualistic and competitive modes of global capitalism, which undermine old solidarities, communities and networks and unleash new forms of political toxicity.

In a speeded-up version of modern history, ethnic cleansing and refugee camps in Myanmar accompany the earliest stages of democratic representation and capitalistic economic growth rather than following in their wake, or becoming manifest, as they have elsewhere, during a crisis of nation-building. And Buddhist monks cheerlead the ethnic cleansers (making fresh nonsense of the claim that Muslims are predisposed to militant intolerance of the “other”).  We will never know, to take a Lévi-Straussian perspective, what other political possibilities—more tolerant of difference ― the country’s Buddhistic ethic might have contained without its contact with the ideologies and values of a homogenizing modernity.

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Bathild

at Jardin du Luxembourg

From wonderful Wikipedia:

According to Vita S. Bathildis,^[4] Balthild was born circa 626–627. She was beautiful, intelligent, modest and attentive to the needs of others. Erchinoald, whose wife had died, was attracted to Balthild and wanted to marry her, but she did not want to marry him. She hid herself away and waited until Erchinoald had remarried. Later, possibly because of Erchinoald, Clovis noticed her and asked for her hand in marriage.^[5][6]

Even as queen, Balthild remained humble and modest. She is famous for her charitable service and generous donations. From her donations, the abbeys of Corbie and Chelles were founded: it is likely that others such as Jumièges, Jouarre and Luxeuil were also founded by the queen. She provided support for Saint Claudius of Besançon and his abbey in the Jura Mountains.

Balthild bore Clovis three children, all of whom became kings: Clotaire, Childeric and Theuderic.

When Clovis died (between 655 and 658), his eldest son Clotaire succeeded to the throne, aged five. His mother Balthild acted as the queen regent. As queen, she was a capable stateswoman. She abolished the practice of trading Christian slaves and strove to free children who had been sold into slavery. This claim is corroborated by Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, who mentions that Balthild and Saint Eloi (who was also known as Eligius, according to Dado)^[7] “worked together on their favorite charity, the buying and freeing of slaves”.^[8] After her three sons reached adulthood and had become established in their respective territories (Clotaire in Neustria, Childeric in Austrasia, and Theuderic in Burgundy), Balthild withdrew to her favourite Abbey of Chelles near Paris.^[3]

Balthild died on January 30, 680, and was buried at the Abbey of Chelles, east of Paris. Her Vita was written soon after her death, probably by one of the community of Chelles. The Vita Baldechildis/Vita Bathildis reginae Francorum in Monumenta Germania Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovincarum, as with most of the vitae of royal Merovingian-era saints, provides some useful details for the historian. Her official cult began when her remains were transferred from the former abbey to a new church, in 833, under the auspices of Louis the Pious. Balthild was canonised by Pope Nicholas I,^[3] around 200 years after her death.

Pieper's Leisure

From Brain Pickings, Maria Popova writes:

“We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come,” Alan Watts observed in 1970, aptly declaring us “a civilization which suffers from chronic disappointment.” Two millennia earlier, Aristotle asserted: “This is the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled.”

Today, in our culture of productivity-fetishism, we have succumbed to the tyrannical notion of “work/life balance” and have come to see the very notion of “leisure” not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy. And yet the most significant human achievements between Aristotle’s time and our own — our greatest art, the most enduring ideas of philosophy, the spark for every technological breakthrough — originated in leisure, in moments of unburdened contemplation, of absolute presence with the universe within one’s own mind and absolute attentiveness to life without, be it Galileo inventing modern timekeeping after watching a pendulum swing in a cathedral or Oliver Sacks illuminating music’s incredible effects on the mind while hiking in a Norwegian fjord.

So how did we end up so conflicted about cultivating a culture of leisure?

In 1948, only a year after the word “workaholic” was coined in Canada and a year before an American career counselor issued the first concentrated countercultural clarion call for rethinking work, the German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) penned Leisure, the Basis of Culture (public library) — a magnificent manifesto for reclaiming human dignity in a culture of compulsive workaholism, triply timely today, in an age when we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.

Decades before the great Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast came to contemplate why we lost leisure and how to reclaim it, Pieper traces the notion of leisure to its ancient roots and illustrates how astonishingly distorted, even inverted, its original meaning has become over time: The Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school — our institutions of learning, presently preparation for a lifetime of industrialized conformity, were once intended as a mecca of “leisure” and contemplative activity. Pieper writes:

The original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.

[…]

The very fact of this difference, of our inability to recover the original meaning of “leisure,” will strike us all the more when we realize how extensively the opposing idea of “work” has invaded and taken over the whole realm of human action and of human existence as a whole.

Pieper traces the origin of the paradigm of the “worker” to the Greek Cynic philosopher Antisthenes, a friend of Plato’s and a disciple of Socrates. Being the first to equate effort with goodness and virtue, Pieper argues, he became the original “workaholic”:

As an ethicist of independence, this Antisthenes had no feeling for cultic celebration, which he preferred attacking with “enlightened” wit; he was “a-musical” (a foe of the Muses: poetry only interested him for its moral content); he felt no responsiveness to Eros (he said he “would like to kill Aphrodite”); as a flat Realist, he had no belief in immortality (what really matters, he said, was to live rightly “on this earth”). This collection of character traits appears almost purposely designed to illustrate the very “type” of the modern “workaholic.”

 

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Get There Faster-A Mental Retreat

 

From The California Magazine, Chris Colin writes:

In March 2014, the CEO of AirHelp, Henrik Zillmer, appeared on Fox to explain his company to the channel’s business anchors. Are you an airline passenger whose flight was delayed or canceled? For a cut, AirHelp’s app will assist in securing the hundreds of dollars you might be entitled to. On-screen, in his open collar and suit jacket, Zillmer exuded the low-key poise of someone on his tenth startup, which he was. The anchors peppered the Danish-born executive with questions, and he coolly fielded them before a backdrop of downtown San Francisco.

In the two years after that Fox interview, the company Zillmer launched with three people grew to more than 200, with backing from Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Ev Williams, and other high-profile investors. So it was unusual this past spring when, on three occasions in the Peruvian Andes, Zillmer ceased to exist.

Michael Costuros killed him. Or rather, Zillmer paid Costuros to kill him, or at least to facilitate the temporary annihilation of his self by seeing what the hell one of the world’s most powerful natural hallucinogens would do to his consciousness, his spirit, and, above all, his business prospects.

For the past five years, Costuros, a 44-year-old Marin County executive coach, has led an annual trip to South America for entrepreneurs keen on “leveraging the healing power of ayahuasca.” Where ayahuasca retreats typically identify as places for deep healing and spiritual growth, Entrepreneurs Awakening also promises benefits such as “a new level of innovative thinking” and “increased tactical clarity.” Indeed, it’d be hard to conjure an exercise more disruptive than sacramental mind expansion; a recent Onion article proposing remarkably similar retreats for tech CEOs only affirmed that the whole thing makes sense on some level.

Cut to this past spring, when Zillmer, a former lieutenant in the Danish army, was gearing up for ten days in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. He’d be joining nine fellow entrepreneurs there, each having paid a little less than $10,000. Chris Hunter, co-founder of the company behind the alcoholic energy drink Four Loko, signed on in hopes that it would help him navigate some sticky professional relationships. Jesse Krieger, publisher of Lifestyle Entre­preneurs Press, wished for insight into growth strategies. Other participants included the founder of a financial technology company, the scion of a footwear empire, and a firearms executive looking for a pivot. Under the guidance of Costuros and a local shaman, they would participate in a San Pedro ceremony — San Pedro is another powerful plant-based psychedelic — followed by two separate ayahuasca ceremonies.

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