El tema central de este Blog es LA FILOSOFÍA DE LA CABAÑA y/o EL REGRESO A LA NATURALEZA o sobre la construcción de un "paradiso perduto" y encontrar un lugar en él. La experiencia de la quietud silenciosa en la contemplación y la conexión entre el corazón y la tierra. La cabaña como objeto y método de pensamiento. Una cabaña para aprender a vivir de nuevo, y como ejemplo de que otras maneras de vivir son posibles sobre la tierra.

jueves, 31 de mayo de 2012

ESTE DEBE SER EL LUGAR



COFFER
by thismustbetheplace Plus



Produced and directed by Ben Wu and David Usui, of Lost & Found Films (lostfoundfilms.com). 

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

There's no place like home. It's where we live, work and dream. It's our sanctuary and our refuge. We can love them or hate them. It can be just for the night or for the rest of our lives. But whoever we may be, we all have a place we call home.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is a series of short films that explore the idea of home; what makes them, how they represent us, why we need them. 

We're always on the lookout for dwellings of all sorts. If you've come across any curious or eccentric homes, feel free to send them along.


Music Credits: 

"Parsnip Snips" Michael Hurley 
"Lonesome Graveyard" Michael Hurley 
"First Light" Marisa Anderson 
"The Golden Hour" Marisa Ander



E.B. WHITE y la "buena vida" en su cabaña





"Todo en la vida está en otra parte, y allí se llega en coche." 




E.B. White in his boathouse in Allen Cove, Maine. "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world," White once remarked. "This makes it hard to plan the day.” (Photo by Jill Krementz)


Hurricanes are the latest discovery of radio stations and they are being taken up in a big way. To me, Nature is continuously absorbing— that is, she is a twenty-four-hour proposition, fifty-two weeks of the year— but to radio people, Nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments. The radio either lets Nature alone or gives her the full treatment, as it did at the approach of the hurricane called Edna. The idea, of course, is that the radio shall perform a public service by warning people of a storm that might prove fatal; and this the radio certainly does. But another effect of the radio is to work people up to an incredible state of alarm many hours in advance of the blow, while they are still fanned by the mildest zephyrs. One of the victims of Hurricane Edna was a civil-defense worker whose heart failed him long before the wind threatened him in the least. 

— E.B. White, from the essay The Eye of Edna, September 15, 1954 from the book Essays of E.B. White, one of my favorite books I’ve read in many years. Photo by Jill Krementz of White in his writing space in Allen Cove, Maine.


E. B. White
(De Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre)

Elwyn Brooks White (11 de julio de 1899 - 1 de octubre de 1985), escritor, ensayista y distinguido prosista estadounidense. Es muy conocido gracias a una guía de estilo para escritores, Los elementos del estilo (The Elements of Style en inglés), y por tres libros para niños que son considerados clásicos estadounidenses del género.

Breve biografía:

E. B. White nació en Mount Vernon, Nueva York y se graduó en Artes en la Universidad Cornell en 1921. Antes había sido repartidor de hielo y reportero del frente de batalla. Por varios años se desempeñó como escritor para el Seattle Times y el Seattle Post-Intelligencer y también trabajó como publicista. En 1924 regresó a la Ciudad de Nueva York.

En 1925 publicó su primer artículo en la para entonces recién fundada revista The New Yorker. En 1927 se unió a la planta de redactores. A lo largo de las siguientes seis décadas produjo una larga serie de ensayos, mientras que sus "Notas y Comentarios" (publicadas sin firma en la revista) fueron muy leídas a medida que la revista ganaba influencia. Gradualmente se convirtió en el más importante colaborador del The New Yorker cuando ésta era la más influyente revista literaria estadounidense. En este medio desarrolló las preocupaciones que acompañarían parte de su obra y su vida: el miedo a la guerra y a los fenómenos irracionales, el internacionalismo y el humor. Fue un escritor que abogaba por la paz.

En 1933 escribió un pequeño cuento de ciencia ficción, La supremacía del Uruguay, que a pesar de su calidad literaria inferior al resto de la obra de White, fue incluido en varias antologías. En esta narración, Uruguay conquista el mundo.
White también fue columnista para la revista Harper's entre 1938 y 1943.

A finales de los años 30, al convertirse en tío, empezó a escribir ficción para niños. Su primer libro para niños, Stuart Little (llevado no hace mucho al cine), fue publicado en 1945, y La Telaraña de Charlotte (en inglés Charlotte's Web) apareció en 1952. Ambos obras fueron aclamadas y en 1970 obtuvieron conjuntament la Medalla Laura Ingalls Wilder, un importante premio estadounidense en el campo de la literatura para niños. El mismo año, White publicó su tercera novela para niños, La Trompeta del Cisne (The Trumpet of the Swan). En 1973, ésta recibió el Premio Seqouyah de Oklahoma y el Premio William Allen White de Kansas.

En 1959 editó y actualizó el clásico The Elements of Style, un manual de estilo gramatical del inglés estadounidense escrito originalmente por William Strunk Jr. y publicado en 1918. Strunk había sido profesor de White en Cornell en los años posteriores a la Primera Guerra Mundial. Posteriores ediciones de The Elements of Style aparecieron en 1972, 1979 y 2000. Aún hoy es una herramienta para escritores y estudiantes estadounidenses.
En 1978 obtuvo un Premio Pulitzer especial por su obra. También recibió la Medalla Presidencial de la Libertad (Estados Unidos) en 1963 y la medalla de oro a los ensayos y críticas del Instituno Nacional (estadounidense) de Artes y Letras.

Fue admirado hasta la idolatría por personajes como Groucho Marx.

Murió el 1 de octubre de 1985 en su hogar en Maine.

El estilo de White es definido como el estereotipo del "Yanqui": torcido, reticente, reflexivo y culto. Se le consideró como un maestro de la lengua inglesa, reputado por su prosa clara, bien compuesta y cautivante.




(...) White had a hankering for the farm life. He bought an oceanside farm in Maine. Then he quit his job at the New Yorker and went to live at his farm. White’s experiences at the farm and in the rural community where he lived were the inspiration for his most famous book, Charlotte’s Web. Two other children’s books followed. It was the income from these books that enabled White to live his version of “the good life” in Maine. (...) (http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com.es/2009/03/little-bits-from-e-b-white.html)



E.B. White's boathouse/ writing cabin 


"(...) We are having splendid weather and I am building a stone wall. I understand that all literary people, at one time or another, build a stone wall. It's because it is easier than writing.(...)"
- Excerpt from a letter to Harold Ross. August 1936 










http://blog.jayparkinsonmd.com/post/9503349452/hurricanes-are-the-latest-discovery-of-radio
http://www.gwarlingo.com/tag/creative-process/ 
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._White
http://freecabinporn.com


miércoles, 30 de mayo de 2012

Murmullos




Murmuration por  Sophie Windsor Clive

A chance encounter and shared moment with one of natures greatest and most fleeting phenomena.


www.islandsandrivers.com


Matemáticas y cabaña







Log Cabin Calculus T-shirt






CABIN PORN, poesía y belleza de un blog sobre cabañas

  • 1947 schoolhouse outside of Boulder, Colorado. Submitted by Joe Grant.
    • 1947 schoolhouse outside of Boulder, Colorado. Submitted by Joe Grant.
  • Rackwick Bothy (also known as Burnmouth Cottage) on the Isle of Hoy in the Orkney Islands, Scotland.
    • Rackwick Bothy (also known as Burnmouth Cottage) on the Isle of Hoy in the Orkney Islands, Scotland.
  • Log cabin in rural Nebraska, 1974.
Via Emma Brooke. Photographer unknown.
    • Log cabin in rural Nebraska, 1974.
CABIN PORN 

(http://freecabinporn.com/)


"Estar despierto es estar vivo. Nunca he conocido a un hombre que estuviera completamente despierto . ¿Cómo podría haberle mirado a la cara?"
"No importa lo que digan los relojes o las actitudes y trabajos de los hombres. La mañana llega cuando estoy despierto y hay un amanecer en mi"
"El viento matinal siempre sopla, el poema de la creación es ininterrumpido, pero pocos son los oídos que lo oyen"

Banda Sonora:

viernes, 18 de mayo de 2012

La cabaña de Ryōkan Taigu (大愚 良寛)

 
Ryōkan Taigu


Other names Eizō Yamamoto. Born 1758 Niigata, Japan. Died 1831
Tradition Tibetan Buddhism School Sōtō
(Image source: Opensource) 


Ryōkan Taigu lived much of his life as a hermit. Ryōkan spent much of his time writing poetry, calligraphy, and communing with nature. His poetry is often very simple and inspired by nature.


“Ryōkan and Nun Teishin” by Yasuda Yukihiko
The Japanese painter Yasuda Yukihiko (
安田 靫彦 1884–1978) perceived Ryōkan’s character through his calligraphy.

Ryôkan (1758-1831)


Ryokan (良寛, Ryōkan), también conocido como Taigu Ryōkan fue un monje budista Zen, calígrafo y poeta que vivió en Niigata (Japón) del 1758 al 1831. Descendiente de una familia acomodada, su padre poeta de cierto renombre ejercía la jefatura del poblado, el joven Eizo pasó su juventud dedicado al estudio. A los dieciocho años decidió entrar en un monasterio zen. Allí su vida dio un vuelco. Estudió con el famoso maestro Kokusen de la escuela Sotô. El monje budista Ryōkan compuso muchos wakas (poemas) en un estilo naif evadiendo intencionalmente las reglas complejas y el estilo tradicional del waka.

Después de la muerte de su maestro, Ryokan fue reconocido como el único heredero y depositario de la Transmisión. Pero a pesar de haber sido designado como sucesor de Kokusen, elegió dejar el monasterio de su maestro. Pasó los veinte años siguientes en una ermita en la montaña. La llamó Gogo an. En los últimos años conoce a Teishin, una monja zen joven, con la que mantuvo una íntima amistad. En el final de su vida, abandonará Gogo an para instalarse en la residencia de su amigo Kimura Motoemon. El "gran tonto", 'taigu' en japonés, cómo él mismo se llamaba, murió en 1831, a los setenta y dos años.



五合庵
Gogō-an, the cottage where Ryōkan lived from 1804 to 1816 (reconstructed in 1914)

Gogō-an: Long associated with famous monk, Ryōkan Taigu. 20-year retreat used by famous monk Ryōkan during the Edo Era


A Japanese monk of the Sôtô school of zen during the Edo period. After receiving a Confucian education (see Confucianism) in his youth, he turned aside from the path of governmental work laid out by his father and entered the Sôtô order at 18. This was a period in which, under the influence of Chinese Ts'ao-tung monks, the Sôtô school was undergoing a wave of reform, and many were advocating strict regimens of meditation and the study of Sôtô founder Dôgen's works. Ryôkan fell in with this reformist programme, and studied with several strict and uncompromising masters. In 1792, he received word that his father had travelled to Kyoto to present a work to the government denouncing political intrigue and corruption, and had then committed suicide, apparently to call attention to his protest. Ryôkan arranged the funeral and subsequent memorial services, and then set out on religious pilgrimage for several years. Only in 1804 did he settle down on Mt. Kugami, where he stayed for twelve years. He is remembered for the depth of his enlightenment that manifested in the spirit of acceptance and equality that he showed to all, from officials to prostitutes. He played with children, composed poetry in praise of nature, was renowned for his calligraphy, lived in extreme simplicity, and showed love for all living things to the extent of placing lice under his robes to keep them warm, allowing thieves to take freely from his possessions, and letting one leg protrude from his mosquito net at night to give the mosquitos food.
Buddhism Dictionary



Ryōkan Taigu (大愚 良寛, Taigu Ryōkan?, 1758-1831) était un moine et ermite, poète et calligraphe japonais. Né Eizō Yamamoto (山本 栄蔵, Yamamoto Eizō?), il est plus connu sous son seul prénom de moine Ryōkan (良寛?, signifiant « Grand-Cœur »). Ryōkan est l'une des grandes figures du bouddhisme zen de la fin de la période Edo. Au Japon, sa douceur et sa simplicité ont fait de lui un personnage légendaire.

Sa vie d'ermite est souvent la matière de ses poèmes. Un soir que sa cabane a été dépouillée de ses maigres biens, il compose ce qui deviendra son haïku le plus connu et dont il existe de nombreuses traductions en diverses langues ; en voici deux en français :

« Le voleur parti / n'a oublié qu'une chose – / la lune à la fenêtre. »
— (trad. Titus-Carmel, 1986)

« le voleur / a tout pris sauf / la lune à la fenêtre »
— (trad. Cheng et Collet, 1994)

Biographie: 

Dans la forêt verdoyante,Ryōkan est né à une date incertaine, en 1758, à Izumozaki, petit village sur la côte ouest du Japon, dans l'actuelle préfecture de Nīgata, le pays des neiges. Son nom de naissance est Eizō Yamamoto (山本 栄蔵, Yamamoto Eizō?). Son père est chef du village et prêtre shinto. Enfant, il étudie les classiques japonais et chinois. Vers l'âge de 20 ans, Ryōkan se rend dans un temple zen Sōtō du voisinage et devient novice. Il y rencontre un maître de passage, Kokusen, et part avec lui pour le sud du pays. Pendant douze ans, il se forme à la pratique du zen. En 1790, Kokusen le nomme à la tête de ses disciples et lui confère le nom de Ryōkan Taigu (大愚 良寛, Taigu Ryōkan?, « esprit simple au grand cœur », ou litt. « grand benêt bien gentil »). À la mort du maître un an plus tard, Ryōkan abandonne ses fonctions et entame une longue période d'errance solitaire à travers le Japon. Il finit par s'installer, à l'âge de 40 ans, sur les pentes du mont Kugami, non loin de son village natal, et prend pour domicile une petite cabane au toit de chaume, Gogōan.

Dans la forêt verdoyante, 
mon ermitage.
Seuls le trouvent
Qui ont perdu leur chemin.
Aucune rumeur du monde,
le chant d'un bûcheron, parfois.
Mille pics, dix mille ruisseaux,
pas une âme qui vive.


Mendiant chaque jour sa nourriture selon la stricte règle monacale et pratiquant assidûment la méditation assise ou zazen, Ryōkan cependant ne célèbre aucun rituel ni ne dispense aucun enseignement. Jamais non plus il n'évoque un point de doctrine ou ne fait état d'un quelconque éveil, petit ou grand. En été, il se promène ; en hiver, il souffre, trop souvent, du froid, de la faim et la solitude. Parti pour mendier, il s'attarde pour jouer à cache-cache avec les enfants de ses voisins, cueillir un brin de persil au bord d'un sentier, soigner un malade au village ou partager un flacon de saké avec les fermiers du pays.

Demain ?
Le jour suivant ?
Qui sait ?
Nous sommes ivres
de ce jour même !


Les calligraphies de Ryōkan, aujourd'hui très prisées par les musées, suscitaient déjà bien des convoitises autour de lui. Aussi, chaque fois qu'il va en ville, c'est à qui, petit boutiquier ou fin lettré, se montrera le plus rusé pour lui soutirer quelque trésor issu de son pinceau. Ryōkan, qui a pour émule Hanshan, le grand ermite chinois de la dynastie Tang, calligraphe et poète comme lui, n'en a cure.

Moine benêt l'an passé,
cette année tout pareil.

Son mode de vie non conformiste, sa totale absence de religiosité, ont suscité bien des querelles d'érudits. Son bouddhisme était-il authentique ? Était-il oui ou non un homme éveillé ? À ces questions, Ryōkan, pour qui le zen ne pouvait être que profonde liberté, avait livré sa réponse :Au bout de vingt ans passés dans la forêt, affaibli par l'âge, Ryōkan doit quitter Gogōan. Il trouve alors refuge dans un petit temple un peu à l'écart d'un village. Il soupire après la montagne, compare sa vie à celle d'un oiseau en cage. À l'âge de 70 ans, il s'éprend d'une nonne appelée Teishin, elle-même âgée de 28 ans. Ils échangent de tendres poèmes. À Ryōkan qui se lamente de ne pas l'avoir vue de tout l'hiver, Teishin répond que la montagne est voilée de sombres nuages. Ryōkan lui réplique qu'elle n'a qu'à s'élever au-dessus des nues pour voir la lumière. Il meurt entre ses bras le 6 janvier 1831, âgé de 72/73 ans.

Que laisserai-je derrière moi ? 
Les fleurs du printemps, 
le coucou dans les collines, 
et les feuilles de l'automne.




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ryôkan (1758-1831). The Complete Haiku:











http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dkan
http://terebess.hu/english/haiku/ryokan.html

miércoles, 9 de mayo de 2012

La cabaña, una experiencia radical en el cineasta coreano Kim Ki-duk


Kim-ki-duk 




Kim Ki-duk - Arirang (2011)


En mai 2011, après une "disparition" de trois ans, le célèbre réalisateur sud-coréen Kim Ki-duk revint au Festival de Cannes pour présenter son nouveau film, Arirang, dans la section "Un certain Regard". Le film n'a rien à voir avec ses précédents films, quinze tournés en treize ans, et presque tous excellents, parmi lesquels on peut citer L'Île (2000), Bad Guy (2001) et Locataires (2004). Arirang est un film expérimental tourné avec un Canon D5 Mark II, avec Kim Ki-duk pour seul acteur. Celui-ci se filme en pleine dépression alors qu'il vit depuis trois an en autarcie dans une cabane en bois. Dans ce film cathartique, on comprend très vite pourquoi Kim Ki-duk avait cessé son travail de réalisateur.

Pour lutter contre le froid, Kim-Ki-duk a installé une tente dans sa cabane.

Kim Ki-duk nous montre ses talents manuels en construisant une machine à café.

Pendant le tournage de son précédent film, Dream (2008), l'actrice principale, Lee Na-young, avait failli mourir lors d'une scène de pendaison. Plus de peur que de mal, heureusement. Très choqué par cet événement, Kim Ki-duk a commencé par remettre en question tout son travail de cinéaste. DansArirang - la chanson traditionnelle et folklorique de la musique coréenne la plus connue - Kim Ki-duk se filme lors des derniers mois de sa "retraite", au début de l'année 2011. Comme l'écrit Excessif, "ce qui est impressionnant, c'est que cette auto-psychanalyse est clairement montée comme une œuvre posthume, comme s'il avait pensé se tirer une balle dans la tête avant même de la finir". Une œuvre "différente" de cinéma-vérité qu'on aimera ou qu'on détestera en criant au nombrilisme et à l'onanisme.

Kim Ki-duk répond à son ombre.



Arirang es un documental autoreflexivo que Kim Ki-duk nos presenta de la siguiente manera:

“Arirang es una historia en la que Kim Ki-duk interpreta tres papeles. A través de Arirang, franqueo una colina de mi vida. A través de Arirang, intento comprender al ser humano, le doy las gracias a la naturaleza y acepto mi situación actual. Estamos ahora en el mundo de los hombres, donde se entremezclan los deseos, en el mundo de los fantasmas, repleto de dolor, y el mundo imaginario, donde se esconden nuestros sueños, sin principio ni final, volviéndonos locos lentamente. ¿Qué es el afecto, que anida aquí y allí en mi corazón y me pudre de esta forma? ¿Por qué se mantiene sobre mi cabeza para cuestionar mis emociones? ¿Por qué se esconde en el fondo de mi corazón para poner a prueba mi compasión? Cuando no le abro mi corazón a alguien, me convierto en una mala persona y le olvido, pero cuando le abro mi corazón, no le dejaré partir nunca, como un ser despreciable. ¡Oh, Arirang! De acuerdo. Matémonos cruelmente en nuestros corazones hasta la muerte. Incluso hoy, aún controlándome, me dejo invadir por la rabia con una sonrisa en los labios, me estremezco de celos al querer, odio al tiempo que perdono, tiemblo mientras ardo en ganas de matar. Esperad. Voy a suicidarme, yo que me acuerdo siempre de vosotros.”


Rompe años de silencio en Cannes
Kim Ki-Duk se confiesa

El surcoreano Kim Ki-Duk, uno de los cineastas más solicitados del circuito de festivalesinternacionales en la primera década de siglo, habla a corazón abierto, tras años de silencio en 'Arirang', la película que trajo a Cannes.
Desde su debut 'Crocodrile' (1996), el cineasta saltó rápidamente al estrellato con su tercera película, 'La isla', distinguida en Venecia. Tras más de una quincena de cintas y cosechar todo tipo de premios, el cineasta desapareció tras estrenar en 2008 'Bi-mong' ('Dream'). La causa fue que una de sus actrices sufrió un accidente por el que casi pierde la vida.
Las circunstancias de los hechos no llegaron a esclarecerse del todo y circularon informaciones que señalaban un intento de suicidio por parte de la actriz. El hecho es que desde que se estrenó esa cinta, Kim Ki-duk desapareció de la vida pública y se recluyó en una precaria cabaña en una zona boscosa de su Corea natal, donde vive aislado, como un ermitaño sin agua corriente y con un limitado suministro eléctrico.
Todo ello lo muestra en 'Arirang', la película que ahora presenta en la sección Un Certain Regard. Empujado por la necesidad de rodar, el autor de las aclamadas 'Hierro 3' (2004) o 'Primavera, verano, otoño, invierno... y primavera' (2003) se compra una pequeña cámara, la coloca en su cabaña delante de él a forma de espejo y comienza a hablar de todos los fantasmas que le han acompañado estos últimos años.
Kim Ki-Duk relata cómo ha vivido aislado, sin amigos y evadiéndose con la bebida. Además, cuenta la traición que sufrió por parte de algunos colaboradores, reflexiona sobre su papel como cineasta, sobre los límites de su oficio y la contradicción que suponen los premios.
La dureza y precariedad de su vida solitaria y la honestidad a la hora de exponerla difícilmente las ha mostrado antes en la gran pantalla cualquier otro director. "Muchos considerarán esta película un documental, pero para mí es un drama", afirma el realizador en el metraje.
"Hacerle justicia en una breve crítica es imposible. No sólo porque Kim proporciona una comprensión revolucionaria sobre su línea de trabajo, sino porque también aborda temas que muy a menudo son ignorados como irrelevantes o pedantes por parte de profesionales que deberían tener un conocimiento más profundo", dijo el crítico de 'Screen'.
'Arirang' es el título de una canción coreana que conmueve profundamente al director e incluso le hace llorar. También el espectador queda desarmado al ver como el cineasta abre su alma.
(Fuente: http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2011/05/16/cultura/1305561380.html)

Sinopsis:
_______________________________________________________________________
Arirang es una canción. La canta Kim Ki-duk en un filme que es tan suyo que él es el principio y el fin, el actor y el director. Después de tres años sin dirigir, el cineasta coreano regresa con un documental absolutamente íntimo, en el que expone sus problemas como artista y el porqué de tanto tiempo inactivo. Decir que Kim Ki-duk se desnuda delante de su cámara sería caer en una frase fácil: en Arirang, el director no le teme ni al egocentrismo ni a la verdad. Muestra el rostro oculto del cineasta, el de las aristas y las dudas. Y lo hace, además, sin ayuda alguna: sin equipo, sin dinero, solo ante el peligro.




Bande-annonce d'Arirang de Kim Ki-duk











http://tomblands-fr.blogspot.com.es/2012/01/kim-ki-duk-arirang-2011.html 

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2011/05/16/cultura/1305561380.html


lunes, 7 de mayo de 2012

La feminista Alix Kates Shulman. Cabaña y soledad en Maine



Tailored army jacket, bold brows, long bob, confident and not too appeasing smile…
I’ve always been into Alix Kates Shulman’s back jacket photo from Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.
Tailored army jacket, bold brows, long bob, confident and not too appeasing smile…
I’ve always been into Alix Kates Shulman’s back jacket photo from Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.  



Alix Kates Shulman

Highlights of a Life

Alix Kates was born August 17, 1932, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She was the daughter of an upper-middle class couple; her father, Samuel, was an attorney and labor arbitrator, her mother, Dorothy, was an aspiring writer and feminist activist. Her parents had already adopted her cousin, Robert, when his mother died in childbirth. A maid served the family dinner every night in their comfortable, Shaker Heights home. Alix had music lessons and play dates as a child, and in high school she couldn’t get enough of cashmere sweater sets.
Alix would eventually denounce this bourgeois upbringing and separate herself as much as possible from her parents and her childhood. But immediately after high school, she was not yet ready to leave. She attended Case Western Reserve’s Flora Stone Mather College in Cleveland, where she studied history and philosophy and graduated in three years, in 1953.
Graduate school at Columbia, in New York, was Alix’s ticket to escape. “I knew I would suffocate if I didn’t leave,” Alix would write in her 1999 memoir, A Good Enough Daughter. “I thought that freedom required my leaving behind the one life I’d ever known,” she said in the Spring 1999 Ohioana Quarterly. “After that… I seldom looked back, restricting my contact to the occasional phone call, the holiday greeting, the annual visit. My parents, involved in their own dense lives, let me go, but were always there for me when I needed them.”
At Columbia, Alix studied mathematics and philosophy, then male-dominated fields. In the CWRU Magazine, Summer 1999, she says, “Math was an impossible field for women then. Even philosophy was impossible. Who would have given me a job?” The inevitability of failure for a woman in these pursuits eventually wore Alix down. She married Marcus Klein, a graduate student in the English department, quit school after two years, and worked as a receptionist, researcher, and encyclopedia editor to support her husband.
This first marriage didn’t last, and Alix married again in 1959, to Martin Shulman, with whom she would have two children, Theodore and Polly. Alix’s children helped her to give birth to a writing career, after she read to them and realized she could write a children’s book to earn some money. She succeeded with Bosley on the Number Line, a book about math concepts for children, published in 1970.
By this time Alix had already gotten involved with the “heady” leftist political and feminist movements of the 1960s. In a 1997 Ms. magazine interview she said, “The minute I heard feminism articulated, I recognized it as an explanation of all my puzzles.” She participated in consciousness-raising groups where “women shared their frustrations with marriage, male infidelities and insensitivities, and educational and professional limitations for women” (CWRU, 18). She told The Plain Dealer May 26, 1998, “The main way in which we learned about the true conditions of women was by talking honestly to each other, to try and understand what had been hidden by ruthlessly and honestly examining our own lives.” Her next children’s book was To The Barricades, a biography of Emma Goldman, anarchist and free-love feminist of the late nineteenth century.
In her article “For Love and Money: The Politics of Solitude,” published in Poets & Writers Magazine, January/February 1996, Alix says:
When I first started writing—which I did partly out of a passion to spread the new feminist ideas, partly out of ambition, and partly for sheer love of the process—the only time I had to myself were the three hours a day my children were in nursery school... It took a tremendous amount of love of the work and faith that something might eventually come of it to pull off even that amount of solitude. (And now I learn that my children, who are now both professionals in their thirties, believe in retrospect that when they were growing up my work meant more to me than they did, whereas I, at the time, thought I was giving them the tremendous gift of a mother who, rather than live through her children, had work that I cared about passionately, as well as a stay-at-home life that left me always available for them…)
In Publishers Weekly, June 5, 1972, Shulman said, “I began by taking the phone off the hook the moment the kids left for school and in time I got up the nerve to leave it off until they came home.
If you want to know what took raw courage, it was closing the door of the room in which I work: The notion of a woman typing at home may not be radical, but typing with the door shut? It blew the family’s collective mind, and it was one of the most liberating experiences of my life…”
In 1969, Alix had done enough writing behind closed doors to publish the article “A Marriage Agreement,” a proposal that a married man and woman split their housework and childcare equally. In “For Love and Money,” she writes, “At the time the idea was so outrageous that my piece was reprinted widely, in New York magazine, Ms., Redbook (where it received more reader letters than any other article Redbook had ever published), and, in 1972, Life magazine, where it was the subject of a six-page spread.”
The publicity generated from this article could be part of what caused a kind of “bidding war” over the rights to print paperback versions of her astonishingly successful 1972 first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. The novel is called a “breakthrough book” for the feminist movement, but Alix described it to Contemporary Authors as a “comic novel about coming of age in the fifties.” Sasha Davis, the protagonist, is “a white, middle-class midwestern girl… who grows to womanhood trying to be everything an ideal woman was expected to be before the women's movement--sexy prom queen, beautiful wife, devoted mother. But nothing works out as expected.”
The Plain Dealer, Tuesday, May 26, 1998, called Memoirs a “devastating portrayal of an era that, Shulman made clear, cheated women by focusing only on their appearance and their ability to catch a man.” In the same article, Shulman explains the discrepancy between the happy childhood and teenage years she spent in Cleveland, and the biting cynicism with which she wrote the book. “I wasn’t thinking then what Sasha was thinking… It wasn’t until my own consciousness was raised through the women’s movement that I was able to get a perspective on it.”
The novel that followed was Burning Questions, in 1978, which she describes as “the story of another kind of woman, a self-styled rebel whose political awakening in the late sixties transforms her. At once a political and historical novel, spanning four decades... Burning Questions attempts to portray the important changes in women's lives and consciousness wrought by contemporary feminism.”
On the Stroll was Shulman’s third novel, published in 1981, a departure from her earlier subjects. “The Stroll” is the nickname for the portion of New York’s Eighth Avenue where pimps recruit young women to be prostitutes. Its main characters are a bag lady, a 16-year-old runaway girl, and the pimp who becomes involved with her. The book earned accolades for its content and style, and for Shulman’s daring in trying a different kind of subject matter.
In 1982, Shulman dared herself to go even further from her comfort zone. At fifty, she “left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the Maine coast. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found to her astonishment that she was learning to live all over again, discovering capacities for thought, feeling, and sensual delight that she had never imagined” (Drinking the Rain press release).
With this time alone to write, and her 25-year marriage ending in divorce, Alix Kates Shulman published her fourth novel, In Every Woman’s Life, in 1987. Contemporary Authors describes the book as follows: “The title refers to the premise that every woman, at some point in life, must think about marriage. The novel focuses on three women: Rosemary Streeter, a successful New York professional/wife/mother who, in the author's words, ‘has made-do’ in a long-lasting marriage; Nora Kennedy, something of a foil for Rosemary, a journalist, single, and opposed to marriage but involved in an affair with a married man; and Rosemary’s daughter, Daisy, who ‘must still decide how to live,’ in Shulman's words.”
In 1989 Alix married again, this time to Scott York. She continued to escape to Maine during summers, finding ways to integrate the awareness that solitary, quiet life taught her into her active, hectic city life. Shulman turned these summer experiences into a 1995 memoir, Drinking the Rain. The book’s press release says this about it:
Drinking the Rain is far more than a paean to the pleasures of foraging for wild greens or intertidal shellfish and cooking them in delicious new ways, of developing a sense for environmentally sound, low-tech thrift, of coming to terms with changes wrought by aging, by new love affairs, by ecological or nuclear disasters. Over the course of an unsettling divorce, a sojourn in the New Age mountains of Colorado and Chernobyl—she came to find true spiritual discipline and liberation. Her book is a literary triumph on that theme, from the pen of a keenly observant, highly focused, skeptical woman who is contagiously delighted with life and dedicated to its betterment.
In 1996, both of Alix Kates Shulman’s parents died (her father was 95 and her mother 89). Six years earlier, she had begun returning to Cleveland to care for them and their estate, in their failing health. At first she resisted “going home” after being free for so long, but once the journey began, she found it wonderful to reconnect with her roots, her parents, and herself. She discovered things about her parents which she didn’t notice as child – their activism, their love for language, and their feminism – things which were crucial parts of Alix Kates Shulman’s identity. She wrote in the Ohioana Quarterly, “As a child I was a good daughter, as an adolescent a bad one, and as an adult a thoughtless one. But having come through for my parents in the end, I think that in sum, as I have titled my book, I was A Good Enough Daughter.” This memoir was published in 1999.
While examining her parents’ house, letters, and memorabilia, Alix discovered things about her adopted brother and what that adoption meant to the family, and found it interesting enough to serve as fodder for a new novel. When this novel is finished, as hopefully it will be soon, it will likely be similar to the rest of Shulman’s novels: witty, realistic, insightful, and life-affirming.
(OHIOANA Authors). (http://www.ohioana-authors.org/shulman/highlights.php#top)

Alix Kates Shulman
photo c by Marion Ettlinger

Drinking the Rain. A Memoir
Alix Kates Shulman. 
North Point Press. Macmillan

At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Living without plumbing, electricity, or a telephone, she discovered in herself a new independence and a growing sense of oneness with the world that redefined her notions of waste, time, necessity, and pleasure. With wit, lyricism, and fearless honesty, Shulman describes a quest that speaks to us all: to build a new life of creativity and spirituality, self-reliance and self-fulfillment. 

(A los cincuenta años, Alix Kates Shulman dejó la vida de ciudad, el activismo político, la familia y la comunidad literaria y fue a vivir sola en una pequeña cabaña en una isla frente a la costa de Maine. Vivió sin teléfono, electricidad o agua corriente y descubrió en ella una nueva independencia y una creciente sensación de unidad con el mundo que redefinió sus nociones de residuos, tiempo, necesidad y placer. Con ingenio, lirismo y una valiente honestidad, Shulman describe una búsqueda que nos habla a todos nosotros: para construir una nueva vida de creatividad,  espiritualidad, autosuficiencia y autorrealización.) 



"Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there’s probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime."

~ Alix Kates Shulman
(Drinking the Rain)



Drinking the Rain, by Alix Kates Shulman. 
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

Subtitled "A Memoir" on the dust jacket cover, this book is a wide-ranging narrative of a couple of years in the mid-1980's in the life of a well-known writer and Manhattanite spending summers in an isolated Maine waterfront cabin. The three sections, The Island, The Mainland, and The World, hover around the paradox of a passage from James Baldwin which the author quotes twice:
One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas, which seem to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are... in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. ... The second idea, of equal power, that one must never in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
This memoir of solitude on a Maine seacoast does not resolve the paradox, more acute given the author's class and hobnobbery among people of relative substance. Section One shines with hope. Her discovery of self-sufficiency in food (foraging daily for wild greens and fruits, daily clams and mussels), simple quarters, basic furnishings, all off the grid, no running water, etc. are ably described and convey an infectious sense of excitement.
But Section 2, with the Mainland as metaphor for her bourgeois lifestyle, plunges us back into the activist world of posturing and false dilemmas, the noise of urbanity and the chatter of chic angst. (Particularly grating is an old friend met at a Thanksgiving feast, who professes Buddhism as "enjoy what you've got" and then raves about the duck pate.) This whole section is exhausting in relating all the contrived issues the author has collected in her life to date, at the age of "five-oh."
The final section is called The World because it does not resolve the original paradox. It is a little more redemptive but by now the reader may be worn out and a little skeptical, especially with the moose roast at the cabin. It's hard to picture a dichotomous Thoreau, though he too did not resolve his own paradox, but unfortunately our author does not even try very hard by the end. The letdown after Section 1 is never remedied; Baldwin's challenge remains.
reviewed 2004 ¶
(http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/solitude-women.html)










Web site: http://www.alixkshulman.com/bio.htm
http://seriousladies.tumblr.com/page/6
http://www.salon.com/writer/alix_kates_shulman/
http://www.ohioana-authors.org/shulman/highlights.php#top
http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/solitude-women.html
http://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/alix-kates-shulman
http://us.macmillan.com/memoirsofanexpromqueen/AlixShulman
http://www.missourireview.com/archives/bbarticle/an-interview-with-alix-kates-shulman/


viernes, 4 de mayo de 2012

Sara Maitland. El largo camino del silencio



Sara Maitland house

Sara Maitland has been living alone for the last 10 years
© Photo: Adam Lee Photography - http://www.adamleephotography.com/welcome.htm


I wanted to explore what this profound pull towards silence might be about. I wanted to examine my conviction that silence was something positive, not just an abstraction or absence. I wanted to know what would happen. In the end I rented a self-catering holiday cottage on Skye.
-Sara Maitland



Sara Maitland's house on a wild moor in northern Galloway, before renovation
© Photo: Adam Lee Photography - http://www.adamleephotography.com/welcome.html


A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland
(London: Granta, 2008; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009)

Sara Maitland skillfully weaves a history of silence and solitude over the centuries with an autobiographical account of her own encounters with silence at her Weardale home, on the Scottish isle of Skye, in the Egyptian desert of St. Anthony, and in the isolated moors of southwestern Scotland where she finally settles. The work is honest, intense, and humane. Maitland's grasp of the subject and its literature, and her own observations of herself and her environs in silence and solitude are fresh and compelling. Maitland writes clearly and engagingly. Plus bibliographical notes and an index make rereading and further exploration easy. A Book of Silence is bound to be a hallmark on the subject.
The book opens with a summary of Maitland's own London and Oxford University upbringing, her mix of intellect, feminism, literary creativity, and religious sentiment. She sets the tone of the book as an adventure on which the reader will want to accompany the author:
In the summer of 2000 I moved north to County Durham, to a house on a moor high about Weardale. I was eager and greedy. I wanted both to be silent and to think about silence. I set out to hunt silence and I have been doing so ever since.
Weardale (in Northumbria, England) becomes Maitland's base camp for the subsequent explorations. Chapter 2, "Forty Days and Forty Nights," describes her stay on the Scottish isle of Skye. Amidst the natural grandeur and silence, Maitland records life in fascinating detail, highlighted by reflections on voice-hearing in natural sounds, changing bodily sensations, and chronicles of solitary mountaineers and sailors. Maitland pays careful attention to the phenomena of silence itself, and how solitude elicits "an extraordinary rhythmical sequence of emotions."
Chapter 3 is "The Dark Side," that is, the psychological side of silence, the reality of surviving in a harsh environment, and accidie, the spiritual lethargy that attacks hermits. Chapter 4, "Silence and the Gods," discusses creation myths from Genesis to the Big Bang. Where non-Western stories see creation evolve from silence, Western myths insist on a loud noise that shatters the nothingness. The initial bang has evolved to noise pollution in the modern world. Western insistence on logos as word pits silence, dreams, and mystery against language, psychology, and meaning.
In Chapter 5, "Silent Places," Maitland notes how exploring silence heightens attention to nature and detail: clouds, birds, stars, wind. She learns to distinguish birds along shorelines and near islands, appreciating the feat of intrepid Celtic monks of antiquity who set out on dangerous seas in tiny boats. Maitland contrasts the evocation of the sea with forests, always historical sources of primordial fear, of Freud's heimlich unheimlich, the uncanny. From here Maitland ranges to fairy tales, linguistics, and the politics of silence.
Chapter 6 is "Desert Hermits," recording Maitland's journey to Sinai for a desert retreat. She writes chiefly of the desert hermits and their spirituality. Chapter 7 is "The Bliss of Solitude." In the desert, Maitland had sought the silence of self-effacement. In chapter 7, she pursues solitude as formative to expression, for she wonders where her creative skill (writing) will next take her given her desire for silence. Inspired by the English Romantics, Maitland pursues walking and climbing in Galloway (southwestern Scotland).
Maitland's forte is her discussion of the Romantic movement. She owns that "on my Galloway walks I took not The Sayings of the Desert Fathers but Wordsworth's Prelude." She notes how older eremitic views of silence emphasize emptying, while the Romantics used silence and nature to strengthen the ego against society. The sad history of the Highlands enclosures, however, shows how fragile is culture's hold on silence and well-being. Maitland is left unresolved, wanting to be both a "silence dweller" and a "silence writer."
In the final chapter, "Coming Home," the author buys an old shepherd's cottage in Galloway. She settles on an 80/20 silence, plugging into phone and internet 20% of the time, doing away with appliances that make noise, praying and meditating 3 hours daily, descending into a composite silence based on experiences related in the book. The fiction writer in Maitland wants to find new expression, while enjoying all of wild nature and the silence. "I am finding it hard to finish this book, because I don't feel that I am at the end of anything," Maitland concludes.
Nor will the reader want to finish the book, either, without hope of a sequel some years hence.
reviewed 2010 ¶
(http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/solitude-women.html)

A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland

From the dust jacket
In her late forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children and an adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country….Maitland describes how she set out to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye….Her story culminates in her building a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway.

Maitland finds her experiences both euphoric and dark, mirrored in the stories of others who have encountered silence—from explorers and mystics to long-distance sailors….She delves deep into the rich cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairy tale and myth, its importance to Western and Eastern religious traditions, and its use of psychoanalysis and artistic expression....She evokes a sense of peace that includes the reader in its intimate tranquility.

Selected quotes from the book
• It is quite hard in retrospect to remember which came first—the freedom of solitude or the energy of silence. 

• I began to realize that it was not peace and contentment that I craved, but that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world in which words, and even normal emotional reaction, fail or rather step away from the experience and there is a silence that is powerful, harsh and essentially inhumane. 

• I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime, for an environment that, rather than soothing me, offered some raw, challenging demands in exchange for grandeur and ineffability. 
• I find praying difficult, challenging and very hard work, but I also find it necessary, surprisingly lovely and crucially important...It became, and remains, one of the central reasons why I went hunting for silence, and why I am now sitting in the sunshine looking down a long silent valley. 
• Silence had already begun to teach me to listen and hear better, but now I also wanted it to help me to look and see better. 
• You have to wait. This sense of waiting in silence became even more marked when I advanced to sitting in a hide or under a drystone wall and paying attention to nothing in the hope that it would at any moment become a bird, become something.

(http://www.acottagebythesea.net/books.html)


Sara Maitland admires the view over the hills in Galloway, Scotland. Photograph: Adam Lee
(Sara Maitland admira las vistas sobre las colinas de Galloway, Escocia. Fotografía: Adam Lee) 


(...) I left in the 1960s when I was 18, seeking adventure and 'real life'. I found both, but more than 35 years later I came home. The same things that caused me to leave called me back again: the beauty, the isolation and the silence. Last year I moved into my self-built cottage on an austere moor, where hen harriers hunt, curlews cry and barn owls flourish. The clean air and low light pollution make for fully dark nights, and for extraordinary stars. There is a remarkable range of flora and fauna, and there is miles and miles of huge, silent nothing. I love it.
I have taken to walking alone. There are delights in walking with friends, but walking alone has particular charms. It offers an enormous freedom - freedom of time and pace, freedom to stop and start, to go further or to go home. There is an intensity when you do not dissipate experience in words: you travel more quietly, and see more.(...)
Sara MaitlandThe Observer, Sunday 9 November 2008. Article history
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/nov/09/walking-holidays-travelling-solo-scotland)


Bothy médico, Uist
Fotografía: Adam Lee

(...) La casa acababa de ser terminada... (...) en un entorno increíble. El interior es a la vez hermoso y funcional, con una serie de características - especialmente los suelos de madera y una escalera de caracol de hierro forjado - uso de materiales reciclados, y fuera un cobertizo frente a vistas enormes. Su distinción especial es que está fuera de la red: la energía se genera in situ mediante paneles fotovoltaicos y un aerogenerador pequeño (150 vatios por hora en verano que se almacenan en baterías... un ordenador portátil que utiliza 70W por hora y la iluminación de la habitación de la cabaña de 12w. El agua es calentada por una estufa de carbón,  la cocina y el frigorífico son de gas. Debido a la limitación del inversor, no se pueden utilizar aparatos como la plancha, el hervidor de agua, consolas de juegos por ordenador.) (...) Éste no puede ser un lugar para aquellos que necesitan del lujo moderno, pero a mí me convenía. Me gustaba tener a las vacas que inspeccionaran a través de las ventanas, la noche a la luz de las velas, y el suave resplandor de la luz de la luna.(...)
Sara Maitland The Observer, Sunday 27 June 2010. Article history
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/jun/27/hebrides-north-uist-eco-holiday)







http://www.saramaitland.com/Home.html
http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioshow/producers-picks-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/nov/09/walking-holidays-travelling-solo-scotland
© Photo: Adam Lee Photography - http://www.adamleephotography.com/welcome.htm