Re: CHAT illuminati (was: Back again)

In a message dated 2003:09:11 05:34:34 AM, ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:

>On Wednesday, September 10, 2003, at 06:23 , John Cowan wrote:
[. . . ]
>> From bamboogrove.com:
>>
>> # The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese scholars
>> # and poets of the mid-3rd century AD who banded together to escape from
>> # the hypocrisy and danger of the official world to a life of drinking
>> # wine and writing verse in the country. Their retreat was typical of the
>> # Taoist-oriented ch'ing-t'an ("pure conversation") movement that advocated
>> # freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape from extremely
>> # corrupt politics. Their ideal consisted in following their impulses and
>> # acting spontaneously. Their outstanding collective characteristic was
>> # their sensitivity to the beauties of nature.
>
>Thanks - I knew one of the illuminati would enlighten me   :)
>
>While I support freedom of expression, as long as that freedom is
>responsibly exercised (i.e. not to the harm or detriment of the innocent
>among one's fellow members of the human race), I have no truck with either
>hedonism or escapism.
    I think that it's unfortunate that bamboogrove.com choose the words
"hedonistic escape" ... that's not accurate from either a Taoist or a historical
viewpoint. Most of the Sages were either exiled or self-exiled... and, as
Taoists, they took the attitude of "shit happens... might as well enjoy nature to
the hilt out here in the backwaters since we have nothing better to do - Oh!,
there's _nothing_ better than appreciating nature and the Music of Nature...ah,
the usefulness of being supposedly useless... gotta write poems about all of
this... play music on the _qin_/_ch'in_ [5 or 7 string fretless long-board
zither] contemplatively imitatin' nature sounds... brew wine... etc."
    In another words, they were verrry much like Henry David Thoreau and like
contemporary American poet Gary Snyder. Coincidentally, Thoreau was quite
fond of a simple, hand-made wooden Aeolian harp and Snyder - IRRC - plays a old,
battered-up acoustic guitar he has had since he was a park ranger in the early
Beat[nik] period (late 1950's, early '60's)... Synder also has studied and
translated Chinese poetry, Taoism and Buddhism.

[ . . .]
>  IMO there is so much misery, violence and oppression in the world precisely
>because too little reason is used.
>
>Reason does not produce the horrendous genocides that marked the 20th
>century nor the obscenity & evil of 9/11.
    That is precisely similar to what many "reasonable types" said about
conducting the "Great War" - or World War I (1914-1918) - that it was the
"{reasonable} War to End All {un-reasonable}Wars."
    And then around 1916 in Zurich, there were the Dadaists in re-action to
this "insanity." Quite a significant number of the original Dadaists were
combat veterans or draft-dodgers of the recent war.
    Shell-shocked & awed by the vast slaughterhouse of trench and mechanized
warfare, the Dadaists more than questioned the much vaunted "merits of
Civilization and Progress" if unparalleled slaughter was the generation-devastating
result.  The Dadaists mocked Logic and Reason, revolted against "Civilized
Notions" and "Prim and Proper Bourgeois Values"... they were the second
international "anti-Art" movement.
    The very first were the proto-Fascistic Italian Futurists - circa 1909 -
whose battle-cries were "No more 'Masterpieces'!... Burn the museums! a
racecar has more beauty than the Venus of Samothrace!"...  The Futurists directly
inspired the Russian and Dutch Constructivist movements amongst other
international movements - like the Dada, Bauhaus _and_, amazingly, including small
Indian/Hindi, Chinese and Japanese "anarcho-futurist" movements!!!
    The Japanese "anarcho-futurist" movement seems to be still very much
alive and well - esp'ly in Japanese _Shinkyoku_ music - traditional raw, rough
Japanese music influenced/"up-dated" by the avant garde and the "Pan-Asianist"
movement [i.e. the Kodo drummers and Butoh dancers; biwa masters Tsuruta Kinshi,
Yukio Tanaka, and Junko Handa; koto-masters Yuji Takahashi and Yagi Michiyo;
shamisen masters Sato Michihiro and Yoriaki Matsudaira; multi-instrumentalist
Haino Keiji; "shamanistic improv" bands the Taj Mahal Travellers, Vajra,
Tohban Djan and Toho Sara]
- ---and---- the ultra-extreme, virulently anti-CommercialPop "Noise-Music"
genre [i.e. Merzbow, Roughage, Ruins, Ground Zero, Cathode Ensemble, DJ Krush,
Zen'eiteki-Kuso ("Futuristic[design]-Fuck").

>Count me out as one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, please!
>I'll stick with the 7 wise men of the ancient Greeks.
    Change your bloody, blinkin' Aristotlean mind now, eh 0_o?

    Ray?



    ::cheekily taps Ray on head:: Knock-knock!!!, ... Helloo00OOO,
Ray!!!!....    ;)

---  º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º  º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman Zhang, _Gomi no sensei_ [Master of junk]
http://www.boheme-magazine.net

    "To live is to scrounge, taking what you can in order to survive. So,
since living is scrounging, the result of our efforts is to amass a pile of
rubbish."
                            - Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi, China, 4th Century BCE

    "The most beautiful order is a heap of sweepings piled up at random."
                            - Heraclitus, Greece, 5th Century BCE

    "...So what is life for? Life is for beauty and substance and sound and
colour; and even those are often forbidden by law [socio-cultural conventions].
. . . Why not be free and live your own life? Why follow other people's rules
and live to please others?..." ~Lieh-Tzu/Liezi, Taoist Sage (c. 450- c. 375
BCE)

From bamboogrove.com:

# The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese scholars
# and poets of the mid-3rd century AD who banded together to escape from
# the hypocrisy and danger of the official world to a life of drinking
# wine and writing verse in the country. Their retreat was typical of the
# Taoist-oriented ch'ing-t'an ("pure conversation") movement that advocated
# freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape from extremely
# corrupt politics. Their ideal consisted in following their impulses and
# acting spontaneously. Their outstanding collective characteristic was
# their sensitivity to the beauties of nature.

Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.
        [Latin > "Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation."]

"jinsei to iu mono wa, kichou na geijyutsu to ieru deshou"
        [Japanese > "one can probably say that 'life' is a precious artform"]

Replies