Songs on Sunday: Some avians

Saturday is Shah-t'day: Some more Idries Shah selections

KNOWING HOW TO KNOW
A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
by Idries Shah
The Octagon Press: London, 1998

Previous post, HERE.

HUMAN DUTY

To help others, to try to be kind and to avoid cruelty, to heal the sick and to protect the weal: these are among the elementary social, not spiritual, duties incumbent upon man as a social animal.
Those who have confused social uplift and psychological ministrations with 'higher' endeavour, end up being in a state of bewilderment or forced into sophistry when they find that they no longer have the monopoly of social service.
The fault is at least partly theirs; they should not so readily have taken the easy way of equating something 'other' with something merely civilised.


STUDENTS

A teaching attracts an artificial selection of students (those interested in the way in which the teaching is projected) unless its sponsors are careful to prevent this.
No 'teaching' with a single dogma or unified message can avoid processing its adherents.


Selections from SOCIAL CONCERN

"If you love other people, for instance, because it is you who really want to be loved, you are not loving at all, and people (especially the object of that 'love') will hate you, at least in part, and will turn against you, perhaps by turning against your dearest beliefs or practices. There is something in men which can detect real love."

"Knowledge may not be superior to love, but it is the essential prerequisite. If you do not understand, you cannot love. You can only imagine that you love."


TO BE REMEMBERED

People in history who were bad are remembered much more than people who tried to make others bad. The same is not the case with goodness. You will notice, if you care to verify this, that it is not the people who were only good who are remembered, but the people who told others to be good, whether they themselves were so or not.


THERE COMES A TIME

There always comes a time when instruction-materials originally employed to direct the attention of certain people towards a certain aim are adopted as 'gospel', or else simplified out of all usefulness and shallowly interpreted.
An example of the latter is the current idea of the meaning of Diogenes' looking with a lamp in broad daylight for an honest man.
People think that he did this to indicate how rare were honest men. In fact, this procedure is a perfectly obvious example of directing attention to the whole question: not only to the rarity of honest men, but to the whole question as to how they might be found.


THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHING

The influence of teaching is very little greater than the capacity of its pupils. When pupils are mainly of low quality, teaching momentum is lost, and the pupils dominate what is taught. The teacher has to select, therefore, who can best benefit, for the sake of all.


WORDS AND VIOLENCE

First, man had no words. The he learned to use words instead of physical violence.
Now he uses words to lead him into violence. He has to unlearn the misuse of words. He has to learn the use of the physical and of words. This is the creature which is called man.


WHAT SELF-EXAMINATION IS

Keep a journal. Write daily about the things that happen to you or strike you as significant. Start studying it after a lapse of time and see how your behaviour was partly due to a desire for self-inflation. Also try to see what useful or interesting concomitants there were to each event.

Film on Friday: The Kings of Summer (2013) Dir. Vogt-Roberts

Spoilers! This review/discussion contains some mild spoilers.

I suppose this could be a defence of The Kings of Summer, but unlike the Tideland defence the only thing this film needs defending from is itself.

Released in 2013 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in that year, it received wild critical acclaim and while the full release did not gather as much praise, it is still a pretty well regarded little film with 76% on Rotten Tomatoes and 61 on Metacritic, which indicated a generally favourable attitude towards the young actors and the first-time director and writer involved with the project. What more therefore needs to be said about this film? Just another coming-of-age comedy (Stand-By-Me-esque) whose whimsical charm gives it a uniqueness. Well, I think coming-of-age is the wrong genre to classify it under, it's more like nostalgia for a simple teenage boyness. I was not surprised to discover the director has worked mostly in short films on the internet, as the aesthetic attitude and especially it's own attention span is obviously influencing this film.

Anyway, here's what I want to describe. What works about this film are the honest glimpses of life as a teenage boy in the 90's in the States, but there's enough similarities for me to recognise many things there too. So, when it's good it reminds us a little of our own boyhoods and the stupidity therein (punching each other in the arm, for example), whether there is anything similarly female there I cannot say, but I doubt it very much (although the only central female part is played reasonably well, considering she's just there to split the friends up and force something like a plot). I say it is a nostalgia for a 90's boyness rather than coming-of-age because although the boy's ages are given in the film (15 years old) it really doesn't seem fixed. Their age is incidental, what is important is that they are young, but not children either. It is the series of visually crisp vignettes that is the emphasis rather than developing a specific time and place from which the character's are shown to grow. For me, the characters act variously between the ages of 12-18 and thus it seems like a collection of the writer's own memories about his childhood. The time of the setting suffers in much the same manner, as some point it seems early 90's (Street Fighter on the console, hooray!) and then the characters are talking on phones that cannot be any earlier than 2002 (at a guess). Setting and character specification then, are not the important features here. Additionally, the 'plot' seems straight out of screen writing 101 and although obviously telegraphed from the start (the main character has a 'dead mom' trope) it still doesn't quite manage to fit within all the goofing around and general fun that is going on. At it's heart this film is primarily a comedy and not one that finds itself too concerned with realism, even the realism of it's own nostalgia.

The three 'Kings of Summer' building their dream house.

The comedy works fairly well, there are some genuinely funny moments, well acted (the 'adult' characters are especially good seasoned comedy actors, who really take a bite out of the script) and there's enough of them that the not-so-funny moments slip past pretty quickly. The comedy character Biaggio (played by Moises Arias) has a number of funny lines and is amusingly endearing if you forget the lack of anything like a character background, other than amusing 'ethnic' weirdness. Indeed, the non-white characters (all 3) are all comic relief; Biaggio himself, Joe's sister's Latino boyfriend, and the Indian Chinese-food delivery guy (ha ha!). That and the fact the main characters are two middle-class white boys lacking in anything like real problems might distance some people. Joe does have a dead mother, but his father cares for him, he does get 'bullied' at school (once, we see his shirt ripped off) but he is also able to talk the girl he likes, and gets invited to parties. Patrick, his friend, is a popular athlete who's only failing is that his parents are embarrassingly smothering towards him, also he has to wear a boot on his foot because he, previous to the film, broke his foot (i.e. not a permanent disfigurement, just a 'thing'). Both families are well-off and the boys aren't in any trouble prior to running away, so when the film tries to force something like real emotion or conflict, it is very jarring.

While watching, I could't help but think that it would have worked better as a TV show. This is because, edited as it is, it feels like we're missing some actual development and are always joining the scene after several previous situations have been passed over. It just cuts in, nothing is explained, and then punch-line, scene over. At the time I wondered if it was this way because the director had relied on a lot of improvisation from his actors, but I now think it was just scripted like this and that this represents an attempt (albeit a failed one) to convey a youthful free-spirited-ness, but that this aesthetic comes from montage heavy short film technique. At any rate, the film reminds me of the British comedy TV show 'The Inbetweeners' that deals with much the same type of group dynamic; all teenage boys, all idiotic and pathetically funny,  the friendship between the 'main' characters and the disruption of girls to that friendship, and the interaction between the adult world of the parents and the boy's own outcast existence. 'The Kings of Summer' TV show, would have much the same feel, although replace the British sourness with the sort of cheery surrealism found in 'Arrested Development' and as a TV show this would give the naturally funny actors some time to find and develop their characters beyond their rather two-dimensional stock.

The Inbetweeners

The mixed bag dynamic of this film is best emphasised with the totally unnecessary Terence-Malicky cinematography of nature we receive, which although quite pretty seems totally at odds with everything else that's going on in the film, both the comedy and the false emotional seriousness. Something I enjoyed about the boy's escape to the 'wild' is that we are shown they aren't very far at all from civilisation. Indeed, they are able to go shopping for supplies regularly and it's possible to get there in a morning's walk, indeed, nothing about it seems to be that rugged or remote and apart from the plot necessary snake they are not in any natural danger. Even the snake-bitten Biaggio is easily taken to hospital in plenty of time to be saved, something accomplished with no real risk or providing anything like a conclusive character development. In short, it doesn't feel like a natural environment at all, more like a comedy stage. Nature is purely incidental here. Compare this with Into The Wild for example.

All this reminds me of my own boyhood and building a much less impressive 'fort' when I was twelve during my school lunch breaks with my friends. However, I suppose there isn't much (if any) wilderness in the UK whereas there is more than enough to get lost in the USA, which makes me question the realism of their ages (15, just to remind you). If I was going to run away and 'be a man' living in the wild at the age of fifteen, I'd get on a bus and head into the actual wilderness, not just the woods near my house, that is much more like the behaviour of younger children (young teenagers at the very best) rather than boys who are very nearly men. Still, I suppose that level of realism isn't the main concern here as I've mentioned earlier.

A 90's video-game kitsch poster for The Kings of Summer

To conclude, although this film is neither as clever nor as unique as it thinks it is and would've probably worked better as a comedy serial (like The Inbetweeners), still it is an interesting film, one that is worth seeing and was worth making. I'd rather something like this was made than Transformers 4 or anything similarly vacuous. So, I hope the director continues to refine an individual voice, that the screenwriter takes chances on his own ideas and doesn't fall into cliched safety, and that the young actors continue to show their promise. Perhaps this is the thing that we find so appealing and lures us back time and again to nostalgia of our childhood, when things were all promise, untested and full of potential.

Mystical Mondays: Idries Shah, Sufi philosopher

Idries Shah

A Brief Biography

Idries Shah was a teacher in the Sufi tradition and a prolific author with over three dozen books on various topics published. Shah was born in Simla, India, in 1924 the descendant of Afghan nobility. He spent most of his life in London, but traveled extensively and his parents exposed him to a wide variety of cultures during his childhood to show him a "multiplicity of impacts." Shah later described this unconventional childhood as the "Sufi approach" to education. In 1960 he started his own publishing house, Octagon press, and in 1965 started an educational charity, the Institute for Cultural research. As of 2013 the institute has suspended its activities following the formation of a new charity, the Idries Shah Foundation. Shah died, in London, in 1996.

His Works, My Discovery

I discovered the work of Shah last year while we were moving stock on the third floor in preparation for the refurbishment. Since then I've been reading his book 'Knowing How To Know' which is described as a practical philosophy in the Sufi tradition. I appreciate the honest practical writing of Shah and will share some of the more inspiring aphorisms from that book. However, I would recommend anyone interested in mysticism, practical philosophy, or especially Sufism to seek out his works. The book was published posthumously in 1998 (the edition I have) and in paperback in 2000. It represents the completion of a series of Shah's books that, the study of which, form a course he had developed during his life.

Some selections from Knowing How To Know (1998)

Are Men Machines?

People do not like being called machines. And yet most people are not even machines in lacking faculties for evaluating the qualitative nature of experience. Instead of being able to perceive the spectrum of influences in a single experience, they feel it transcendental if it moves them. Unlike a machine, too, the human being has no switching gear to turn experience on and off. And man has no means of engendering experience except by the most hazardous trial-and-error ones such as throwing himself into random situations or ingesting drugs.

One of the purposes of a real esoteric training is first to acquire lower control, control such as a machine might have, before higher controls can be attained.

Criticism

You ask me why I criticise only one side, when I could be pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of both.

By doing so, you ignore the fact that nobody nowadays needs to write a book criticising, say, the plague virus.

Equally, when antibiotics are so well known, you merely record their efficacy or otherwise: You do not have to rhapsodise about them when this has already been done.

One must know the difference between constructive description and sheer wallowing in words.

In order to know this, one must have a basis of knowledge as to how words are used, and what is didactic and what is not.

Otherwise, you will merely be at the mercy of the conditioning power of words and personalities.

Cause and Effect

Every person must learn to ask himself:

'Am I attributing this or that thing, this appearance or that effect, to some cause or origin which may not be its cause?'

All cultures teach their people to do this in certain subjects and in a few areas. But the net result of this has been for people to do it in as few, not as many, instances as possible.

Selection from p. 81

"There is nobody more trivial than a person in authority who spends his time telling others what to do and who does not do things himself."

Emotion

How sad that people dignify their activities too much.

They use fine words to describe processes which, if only looked at in the face, would enable them to acquire some humility.

People often have to 'burn off' surplus evaporating volatile substances.

But this is still regarded as significant, because self-esteem is so powerful that a man has to conceal his absurdity and even his normal needs by using bombast.

People do not like to be described as machines. It is true that only a man - not a machine or even an ape - could go so far as to describe the processes of physics and chemistry, even electronics, in lyrical, pejorative and hallowed terms.

Every Feeling is Qualitative

If you feel love, joy, excitement, interest, focused attention, confusion, disinterest, as the result of sitting down on a pin or hearing bird sing - these and other feelings all contain some negative functions, some self-indulgent ones, and some constructive ones.

This information is the result of higher knowledge, panoramic vision, call it what you will.

You will never reach a higher aim by means of increasing the volume of feelings without any training for perception of the spectrum within feelings.

Only by the last manner of working will you isolate 'worship', 'understanding', 'love', from dross.

More, HERE.

Haunted by Christmas Carols: The Holly and the Ivy

Why? WHY? It's almost April, why do I have a Christmas carol ear-worm? WHYYYYY?

Can't. Stop. Singing.

This carol has been running around my head non-stop for the last three hours.

Make it stop!