13 August 2005

Soul


Abbas Kiarostami, The Taste of Cherry

Another sleepless night.
Rather than suffer in silence now I get up and make my tofu: a 3 hour labour of love which at least results in something alive, unlike the processed rubber you buy in the shops. The making has many stages with waitings between so is ideal for blogging. At the moment the hot ground pulp is straining through the nylon muslin Rita gave me.
The computer screen is the only light in the room. I learnt when the kids were here that a dim ambience is more soulful.
Kiarostami (the greatest film-maker of his generation?) said that when watching a great film (presumably on DVD) he needs regular breaks, to make a cup of tea or a telephone call, the truth being almost too much to bear. When watching a Hollywood blockbuster though he is pinned to his seat like everyone else: an experience he doesn't value.
Egami's question really struck me: In going beyond traditional karate and making it evolve, have I gone too far, putting too much emphasis on the soul?
I can't imagine any other martial artist of his generation except Dr Chi (which includes Cheng Man-Ching and Tohei), having the humanity to say such a thing. He really stripped himself bare for and with his art (he weighed 37 kilos when he died in 1981), realising that soul requires nakedness (forgetting of self).
Cheng Man-Ching copped out. When he refused those years of solitude his progress required he effectively gave up Tai Chi, preferring instead to bask.

When John asked his Tibetan Rimpoche whether ch'i was internal he received an emphatic and resounding No. (Liang had told John that if he wanted to develop his ch'i then he should find a Tibetan teacher.)

Soul is not developed, it is uncovered. It precedes everything else including energy and spirit. What can be developed is the passion for it. The soulful yearning.

Soul is content.
Form is no more than an extension of content. (Robert Creeley)

The soul
is an onslaught

1 comment

taiji heartwork said...

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
Emily Dickinson

Love is the beauty of the soul.
Saint Augustine

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
DH Lawrence

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
DH Lawrence

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
Walt Whitman

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
Walt Whitman

Until you know that life is interesting - and find it so - you haven't found your soul.
Geoffrey Fisher

I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.
Carl Jung

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.
Henry David Thoreau

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.
Plato

What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When action come from another section, the feeling disappears.
Rumi

Living is being born slowly.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
Ferdinand Foch

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.
Martha Graham

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.
Woody Allen