Thursday we watched another music video directed by Michel Gondry. We then disected it in a way similar to how we examined Come Into My World by Kylie Minogue. These videos mafe me think of some other music videos that I consider visually engaging-they may not have as "deep" narratives as those we watched in class, but they are still interesting:
OK GO
RJD2
FINGER ELEVEN
Then, we discussed our first reading assignment, "The Whole Ball Of Wax," by Jerry Saltz. While we started with the question posed by the article, could art change the world, we also moved onto other thoughts spurred by a variety of art pieces ranging from cave paintings of early man to Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Mona Lisa.
In regard to the reading "What is Time?" by G.J. Whitrow:
Starting with a brief history of the Mayas' (Mayans'?) concept of time being both "magical" and "polytheistic", and the expectation that it would repeat in "cycles of 260 years," Whitrow sets the stage for discussing the current way we view time, and how we (humans) got to thinking of time the way we do today. Whitrow does not just draw on history to construct this article however; one of the first points he makes is, "It seems that all animals except man live in a continual present." This led me to question, what if we did live in a continual present (or the mindset that life is a contiual present)? Our lives, our world, are so centered on/around time that while we probably could survive, life would cease to exist as we know it. Of course that rather dismal thought can easily be tied into Whitrow's next point about man coping with life ceasing in the form of eternal sleep we've come to know as death. Moving forward from burial traditions, Whitrow contiues to compare/contrast various interpretations of time which seem to fluxuate between magically focused and occasionally scientifically organized.
Some of the things that stuck out in my mind as I read were not only the ways in which Chrisitanity has shaped so much about the way time is viewed/measured today, but how much Christianity absorbed from other traditions/ways of thinking at the time its calendars/etc. were taking shape. Another thing that caught my attention was how different the linear and cyclical views of time were. The Stoics belief, "according to Nemesius" that time would literally repeat itself and everything would be "just as it was" reminded me faintly of how time is viewed in Hiduism (to my understanding anyway/he also eludes to this late one)...time/life repeating itself until it has been perfected/corrected, until there is no lonfer a need to repeat itself again. As the article progresses, Whitrow seems to get more technical in his explanations discussing why the "eschatology" (or undestanding of "the end") of the "early Hebrew prophets" was as it was, and further discussion of the rivalry between "magical time" and "scientific time". According to Whitrow the scienetific approach did not overcome the magical one until the "tempo" of everyday life for the majority of people changed-- enter "time is money". As scientific views pushed forward more people began to pursue routes like that of Kepler, rejecting "quasi-animistic magical" (spirits in inanimate things) and ways of measuring this new scientific time became steadily more accurate with the invention of the pendulum. I think it would have been slightly more effective to save the closing sentence of his second to last paragraph for the very end of the section, but wither way I think including James Hutton's conclusion helps to fraw this section together well- "We find no vesitge of a beginning - noprospect of an end."
Two questions?
I was not really sure what to question this week, but I was really grabbed by the "continual present" idea that was mentioned in the article, so I suppose a couple of questions could be drawn from that idea alone...
-If one were to equate living a "continual present" as "living in the moment" can one live in a continual present at times and not at others? Does it have to be an all or nothing existance?
-As the generally accepted view of time is at the center of international business, among other things of course, would not accepting the popular view on time doom a business, a nation, a people to failure, or exclusion from the rest of the world? (Ref. The aboriginie children not grasping time the same way other children did...)
I spent a lot of my time setting up my new computer and trying to get my internet here to work with my odd virus-protection software, so I did not have much time to just research other things. However, I did try to put some time into making this blog my own- so I decided to edit one of the basic templates. I just messed around with the settings for text style, link colors, CSS stuff, etc., for now anyway. I also made my background with an amusing web page that allows anyone to make electronic Jackson Pollock works! (http://www.jacksonpollock.org/) Oh, and "callidus" means "clever" in Latin (Yes, I took a dead language in high school, so bits and pieces show up when I write-sorry).
Mariana-Thank you for posting these videos. They are pretty interesting. I like the way that the RJD2 video uses still photos to communicate a story.
ReplyDeleteI am interested in your first question. The idea that we could exist in the fast paced contemporary world, and still find time to be in the moment is really interesting. I think to some extent, we have to accept some of the constructs of time to live in this society (if that is what we want), but perhaps it would do us all good to go outside and leave our watches, cell phones, and computers behind occasionally to remember what natural time is like.