10 Rules for Appreciating Art by Sister Wendy Beckett (RIP), the Nun Who Unexpectedly Popularized Art History on TV

While life lasts, let us live it, not pass through as zom­bies, and let us find in art a glo­ri­ous pas­sage­way to a deep­er under­stand­ing of our essen­tial human­i­ty.

- Sis­ter Wendy Beck­ett (1930–2018)

Sis­ter Wendy, a clois­tered nun whose pas­sion for art led her to wan­der out into the world, where she became a star of glob­al pro­por­tions, enter­tained the tele­vi­sion mass­es with her frank human­ist assess­ments.

Unfazed by nudi­ty, car­nal­i­ty, and oth­er sen­su­al excess­es, she ini­tial­ly came across as a fun­ny-look­ing, grand­ma-aged vir­gin in an old-fash­ioned habit, lisp­ing rhap­sod­i­cal­ly about appendages and entan­gle­ments we expect most Brides of Christ to shy away from.

Attempts to spoof her fell flat.

Hav­ing beat­en the jok­ers to the punch, she took her rapt audi­ence along for the ride, barn­storm­ing across the con­ti­nent, eager to encounter works she knew only from the repro­duc­tions Church high­er ups gave her per­mis­sion to study in the 1980s.

She was grate­ful to the artists—1000s of them—for pro­vid­ing her such an excel­lent lens with which to con­tem­plate God’s cre­ations. Eroti­cism, greed, phys­i­cal love, hor­rif­ic violence—Sister Wendy nev­er flinched.

“Real art makes demands,” she told inter­view­er Bill Moy­ers, below, speak­ing approv­ing­ly of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Andres Serrano’s con­tro­ver­sial Piss Christ.

“Great art offers more than plea­sure; it offers the pain of spir­i­tu­al growth, draw­ing us into areas of our­selves that we may not wish to encounter. It will not leave us in our men­tal or moral lazi­ness,” she wrote in the fore­word to Sis­ter Wendy’s 1000 Mas­ter­pieces, her hand­picked selec­tion of the great­est paint­ings of West­ern art. (“A thou­sand sound­ed like so many until we got down to it and then began the anguish of choice,” she lat­er opined.)

A lover of col­or and tex­ture, she was unique in her abil­i­ty to appre­ci­ate shades of grey, delv­ing deeply into the psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tions of both the sub­jects and the artists them­selves.

On Fran­cis Bacon’s Fig­ure with Meat (1954):

Here, he shows the pope, father of the Catholic Church, both enthroned and impris­oned by his posi­tion. Bacon’s rela­tion­ship with his own father was a very stormy one, and per­haps he has used some of that fear and hatred to con­jure up this ghost­ly vision of a scream­ing pope, his face frozen in a ric­tus of anguish.

On Hen­ri De Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Clown Chau-u-Kao (1895):

Toulouse-Lautrec, as the last descen­dant of an ancient French fam­i­ly, must have been bit­ter­ly con­scious of his own phys­i­cal defor­mi­ties and to many peo­ple he, too, was a fig­ure of fun…He shows us Chau-U-Kao prepar­ing for her act with dig­ni­ty and seren­i­ty, the great swirl of her frill seems to brack­et the clown so that we can tru­ly look at her, see the pathos of that blowzy and sag­ging flesh, and move on to the nobil­i­ty of the nose and the intense eyes. This is a degra­da­tion, but one that has been cho­sen by the per­former and redeemed by intel­li­gence and will pow­er.

On Nico­las Lancret’s The Four Times of the Day: Morn­ing (1739):

Morn­ing is filled with wit­ty obser­va­tion — a delight­ful young woman (who is clear­ly no bet­ter than she should be) is enter­tain­ing a young cler­ic, seem­ing­ly unaware of the temp­ta­tion offered by that casu­al­ly exposed bosom. He holds out his cup, but his eyes are fied, alas, on that region of the fem­i­nine anato­my that his pro­fes­sion for­bids him.

On François Clouet’s Diane De Poitiers (c. 1571)

The impli­ca­tion would seem to be that this shame­less beau­ty with her promi­nent nip­ples and over­flow­ing bowl of ripe fruit, is a woman of dubi­ous morals. Yet one can­not but feel that the artist admires the nat­ur­al free­dom of his sub­ject. Her chil­dren and her grin­ning wet-nurse are at her side, and, in the back­ground, the maid pre­pares hot water. /surely this domes­tic scene is no more than a sim­ple and endear­ing vignette. 

Her gen­er­ous takes on these and oth­er art­works are irre­sistible. How won­der­ful it would be to approach every piece of art with such thought and com­pas­sion.

For­tu­nate­ly, Sis­ter Wendy, who passed away last week at the age of 88, left behind a how-to of sorts in the form of her 2005 essay, “The Art of Look­ing at Art,” from which we have extract­ed the fol­low­ing 10 rules.

Sis­ter Wendy Beckett’s 10 Rules for Engag­ing with Art

Vis­it muse­ums

They are the prime locus where the unique­ness of an artist’s work can be encoun­tered.

Pri­or­i­tize qual­i­ty time over quan­ti­ty of works viewed

Soci­ol­o­gists, lurk­ing incon­spic­u­ous­ly with stop­watch­es, have dis­cov­ered the aver­age time muse­um vis­i­tors spend look­ing at a work of art: it is rough­ly two sec­onds. We walk all too casu­al­ly through muse­ums, pass­ing objects that will yield up their mean­ing and exert their pow­er only if they are seri­ous­ly con­tem­plat­ed in soli­tude.

Fly solo

If Sis­ter Wendy could spend over four decades sequestered in a small mobile home on the grounds of Carmelite monastery in Nor­folk, sure­ly you can go alone. Do not com­pli­cate your con­tem­pla­tion by teth­er­ing your­self to a friend who can­not wait to exit through the gift shop.

Buy a post­card

…take it home for pro­longed and (more or less) dis­trac­tion­less con­tem­pla­tion. If we do not have access to a muse­um, we can still expe­ri­ence reproductions—books, post­cards, posters, tele­vi­sion, film—in soli­tude, though the work lacks imme­di­a­cy. We must, there­fore, make an imag­i­na­tive leap (visu­al­iz­ing tex­ture and dimen­sion) if repro­duc­tion is our only pos­si­ble access to art. What­ev­er the way in which we come into con­tact with art, the crux, as in all seri­ous mat­ters, is how much we want the expe­ri­ence. The encounter with art is pre­cious, and so it costs us in terms of time, effort, and focus.

Pull up a chair, when­ev­er pos­si­ble

It has been well said that the basic con­di­tion for art appre­ci­a­tion is a chair.

Don’t hate on your­self for being a philis­tine.

How­ev­er invi­o­late our self-esteem, most of us have felt a sink­ing of the spir­it before a work of art that, while high­ly praised by crit­ics, to us seems mean­ing­less. It is all too easy to con­clude, per­haps sub­con­scious­ly, that oth­ers have a nec­es­sary knowl­edge or acu­men that we lack.

Take respon­si­bil­i­ty for edu­cat­ing your­self…

Art is cre­at­ed by spe­cif­ic artists liv­ing in and fash­ioned by a spe­cif­ic cul­ture, and it helps to under­stand this cul­ture if we are to under­stand and appre­ci­ate the total­i­ty of the work. This involves some prepa­ra­tion. Whether we choose to “see” a totem pole, a ceram­ic bowl, a paint­ing, or a mask, we should come to it with an under­stand­ing of its iconog­ra­phy. We should know, for exam­ple, that a bat in Chi­nese art is a sym­bol for hap­pi­ness and a jaguar in Mesoamer­i­can art is an image of the super­nat­ur­al. If need be, we should have read the artist’s biog­ra­phy: the ready response to the paint­ing of Vin­cent van Gogh or Rem­brandt, or of Car­avag­gio or Michelan­ge­lo, comes part­ly from view­ers’ sym­pa­thy with the con­di­tions, both his­tor­i­cal and tem­pera­men­tal, from which these paint­ings came.

…but don’t be a pris­on­er to facts and expert opin­ions

A para­dox: we need to do some research, and then we need to for­get it…We have delim­it­ed a work if we judge it in advance. Faced with the work, we must try to dis­pel all the busy sug­ges­tions of the mind and sim­ply con­tem­plate the object in front of us. The mind and its facts come in lat­er, but the first, though pre­pared, expe­ri­ence should be as unde­fend­ed, as inno­cent, and as hum­ble as we can make it.

Cel­e­brate our com­mon human­i­ty

Art is our lega­cy, our means of shar­ing in the spir­i­tu­al great­ness of oth­er men and women—those who are known, as with most of the great Euro­pean painters and sculp­tors, and those who are unknown, as with many of the great carvers, pot­ters, sculp­tors, and painters from Africa, Asia, the Mid­dle East, and Latin Amer­i­ca. Art rep­re­sents a con­tin­u­um of human expe­ri­ence across all parts of the world and all peri­ods of his­to­ry.

Lis­ten to oth­ers but see with your own eyes

We should lis­ten to the appre­ci­a­tions of oth­ers, but then we should put them aside and advance toward a work of art in the lone­li­ness of our own truth.

Sis­ter Wendy’s tele­vi­sion shows can be found on PBS, the BBC, and as DVDs. Her books are well rep­re­sent­ed in libraries and from book­sellers like Ama­zon. (We have learned so much in the year her dic­tio­nary-sized 1000 Paint­ings has been parked next to our com­mode…)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Rules for Stu­dents and Teach­ers Pop­u­lar­ized by John Cage

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load 502 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City this Jan­u­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Where Did the Monk’s Haircut Come From? A Look at the Rich and Contentious History of the Tonsure

One might assume from a mod­ern view­point that the hair­styles worn by monks arose to deal with male pat­tern bald­ness anx­i­ety. As in the school uni­form approach, you can’t sin­gle out one person’s bald­ness when every­one is bald. But this, again, would be a mod­ern view, full of the van­i­ty the tonsured—those with reli­gious­ly shaven heads—ostensibly vowed to renounce. Accord­ing to the Catholic Ency­clo­pe­dia, the ton­sure (from the Latin verb for “to shear”) began as a “badge of slav­ery” among Greeks and Romans. It was adopt­ed “on this very account” by ear­ly monas­tic orders, to mark the total sur­ren­der of the will.

Would it sur­prise you, then, to learn that there were ton­sure wars? Prob­a­bly not if you know any­thing about church his­to­ry. Every arti­cle of cloth­ing and of faith has sparked some major con­tro­ver­sy at one time or anoth­er. So too with the ton­sure, of which—we learn in the Vox video above—there were three styles. The first, the coro­nal (or Roman or Petrine) ton­sure, is the one we see in count­less Medieval and Renais­sance paint­ings: a bald pate at the crown sur­round­ed by a fringe of hair, pos­si­bly meant to evoke the crown of thorns. Next is the Pauline, a ful­ly shaved head, seen much less in West­ern art since it was “used more com­mon­ly in East­ern Ortho­doxy.”

The third style of ton­sure caused all the trou­ble. Or rather, it was this style that served as a vis­i­ble sign of reli­gious dif­fer­ences between the Roman Catholic Church and the church­es in Britain and Ire­land. “Celtic Catholi­cism was ‘out of sync’ with the Roman Catholic Church,” notes Vox. “Roman Catholics would use the dif­fer­ences between them to por­tray Celtic Catholi­cism as pagan, or even as an off­shoot, cel­e­brat­ing the pow­er-hun­gry magi­cian, Simon Magus.” The Celtic ton­sure fell under a cloud, but how exact­ly did it dif­fer from the oth­ers? Since it dis­ap­peared in the ear­ly Mid­dle Ages and few images seem to have sur­vived, no one seems sure.

Daniel McCarthy, fel­low emer­i­tus at Trin­i­ty Col­lege, Dublin set out to solve the mys­tery. He spec­u­lates the Celtic ton­sure, as you’ll see on a com­put­er-sim­u­lat­ed monk’s head, was a tri­an­gu­lar shape, with the apex at the front. When the Roman Catholics took over Ire­land, all of the vest­ments, dates, and hair­cuts were slow­ly brought into line with the dom­i­nant view. The prac­tice of ton­sure offi­cial­ly end­ed in 1972, and fell out of favor in Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries cen­turies ear­li­er, accord­ing to the Catholic Ency­clo­pe­dia. But in any case, McCarthy sees the ton­sure not as a spurn­ing of fash­ion, but as a cult-like devo­tion to style. In that sense, we can see peo­ple who adopt sim­i­lar hair­cuts around the world as still visu­al­ly sig­nal­ing their mem­ber­ship in some kind of order, reli­gious or oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bal­ti­more Hair­dress­er Became a World-Renowned “Hair Archae­ol­o­gist” of Ancient Rome

Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church

50 Years of Chang­ing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Ani­mat­ed GIF

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

A Short Video Introduction to Hilma af Klint, the Mystical Female Painter Who Helped Invent Abstract Art

It can be both a bless­ing and curse for an artist to toil at the behest of an influ­en­tial patron. Finan­cial sup­port and pow­er­ful con­nec­tions are among the obvi­ous perks. Being ham­strung by some­one else’s ego and time­frame are some of the less wel­come real­i­ties on the flip side.

Hilma af Klint, the sub­ject of a high pro­file exhi­bi­tion at the Guggen­heim, does not fit the usu­al artist-patron mold. She made her paint­ings to suit a spir­it named Amaliel, with whom she con­nect­ed in a seance. Amaliel tapped her to con­vey a very impor­tant, as yet inde­ci­pher­able mes­sage to humankind.

Although af Klint was an accom­plished botan­i­cal and land­scape painter who trained at the Roy­al Acad­e­my in Stock­holm, “Paint­ings for the Tem­ple,” 193 works pro­duced between 1906 and 1915 upon order of her spir­it guide, are bright­ly col­ored abstrac­tions.

As the Guggenheim’s Senior Cura­tor and Direc­tor of Col­lec­tions, Tracey Bashkoff, points out above, af Klint’s work was trad­ing in sym­bol­ic, non-nat­u­ral­is­tic forms ten years before abstrac­tions began show­ing up in the work of the men we con­sid­er pio­neers—Vasi­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, and Paul Klee. Yet, she was nowhere to be found in MoMA’s 2012 block­buster show, Invent­ing Abstrac­tion: 1910–1925. Cura­tor Leah Dick­er­man implied that the snub was af Klint’s own fault for con­sid­er­ing her work to be part of a spir­i­tu­al prac­tice, rather than a pure­ly artis­tic one.

In his 1920 essay, Cre­ative Con­fes­sion, Klee wrote, “art does not repro­duce the vis­i­ble; rather, it makes vis­i­ble.”

It was a sen­ti­ment Klint shared, but the spir­i­tu­al mes­sage encod­ed in her work was intend­ed for a future audi­ence. She instruct­ed her nephew that her work was to be kept under wraps until twen­ty years after her death. (She died in 1944, the same year as Kandin­sky and Mon­dri­an, but her work was not pub­licly shown until 1986, when the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art orga­nized an exhi­bi­tion titled The Spir­i­tu­al in Art.)

Per­haps af Klint did not fore­see how dra­mat­i­cal­ly the respectabil­i­ty of spir­i­tu­al­ism and seances—a pop­u­lar pur­suit of her time, and one shared by Mon­dri­an and Kandinsky—would decline.

Her ded­i­ca­tion to car­ry­ing out her spir­it guide’s mis­sion may remind some mod­ern view­ers of Hen­ry Darg­er, the Chica­go jan­i­tor who cre­at­ed hun­dreds of art­works and thou­sands of pages of text doc­u­ment­ing the Glan­de­co-Angelin­ian War Storm, a strange and gory series of events tak­ing place in an alter­nate real­i­ty that was very real to him.

Thus far no one has ful­ly divined the spir­it’s mes­sage af Klint devot­ed so much of her life to pre­serv­ing.

As crit­ic Rober­ta Smith notes in her New York Times review of the Guggen­heim show, af Klint, a mem­ber of the Swedish Lodge of the Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, was well versed in occult spir­i­tu­al­ism, Rosi­cru­cian­ism, Bud­dhism, Dar­win­ism, and the sci­ence of sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles.

Hints of these inter­ests are thread­ed through­out her work.

Col­or also helps to unlock the nar­ra­tive. She used blue and lilac to rep­re­sent female ener­gy, rose and yel­low for male, and green for the uni­ty of the two. The Guardian’s Kate Kell­away reports that the artist may have been influ­enced by Goethe’s 1810 The­o­ry of Colours.

Mov­ing on to geom­e­try, over­lap­ping discs also stand for uni­ty. U‑shapes ref­er­ence the spir­i­tu­al world and spi­rals denote evo­lu­tion.

Af Klint’s spi­ral obses­sion was not con­fined to the can­vas. Rober­ta Smith reveals that af Klint envi­sioned a spi­ral-shaped build­ing for the exhi­bi­tion of The Paint­ings for the Tem­ple. Vis­i­tors would ascend a spi­ral stair­case toward the heav­ens, the exact con­fig­u­ra­tion described by archi­tect Frank Lloyd Wright’s inte­ri­or ramps at the Guggen­heim.

Per­haps we are get­ting clos­er to under­stand­ing.

For fur­ther study, check out the Guggenheim’s Teacher’s Guide to Hilma af Klint: Paint­ings for the Future. See the exhi­bi­tion in per­son through mid-April.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Syncs His Abstract Art to Mussorgsky’s Music in a His­toric Bauhaus The­atre Pro­duc­tion (1928)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City through Decem­ber 20th in the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta, and the book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Alan Watts Dispenses Wit & Wisdom on the Meaning of Life in Three Animated Videos

Since his death in 1973, the pop­u­lar British philoso­pher, writer, speak­er, and one­time-Epis­co­pal-priest-turned-stu­dent-of-Zen-and-wild­ly-eclec­tic-coun­ter­cul­tur­al-spir­i­tu­al-thinker Alan Watts has become a cot­tage indus­try of sorts. And if you were unfa­mil­iar with his work, you might think—given this descrip­tion and the men­tion of the word “industry”—that Watts found­ed some sort of self-help sem­i­nar series, the kind in which peo­ple make a con­sid­er­able invest­ment of time and mon­ey.

In a sense, he did: the Alan Watts Orga­ni­za­tion (pre­vi­ous­ly known as the Alan Watts Elec­tron­ic Uni­ver­si­ty, the Alan Watts Cen­ter, or the Alan Watts Project) main­tains Watts’ pro­lif­ic audio and video archives. Found­ed in the last year of his life by Watts and his son Mark, the Orga­ni­za­tion charges for access to most of his work. The col­lec­tions are pricey. Albums of talks on such sub­jects as Bud­dhism and Com­par­a­tive Phi­los­o­phy and Reli­gion are exten­sive, but come at a cost.

Though the orga­ni­za­tion offers free con­tent, you could find your­self spend­ing sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars to hear the col­lect­ed Watts lec­tures. It’s mon­ey the Mark Watts sug­gests cov­ers the “sub­stan­tial under­tak­ing” of dig­i­tiz­ing hun­dreds of hours of record­ings on lac­quered disks and mag­net­ic reels. These are noble and nec­es­sary efforts, but fans of Watts will know that hun­dreds of selec­tions from his deeply engag­ing talks are also freely avail­able on YouTube, many of them with nifty ani­ma­tions and musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, like the videos here from After Skool.

Watts would like­ly have been pleased with this situation—he loved to give out wis­dom wide­ly and kept no eso­teric trade secrets. But he was also, by his own admis­sion, “a spiritual/philosophical enter­tain­er,” who made a liv­ing telling peo­ple some of the most unset­tling, coun­ter­in­tu­itive meta­phys­i­cal truths there are. He did it with humor, eru­di­tion and com­pas­sion, with intel­lec­tu­al clar­i­ty and rhetor­i­cal aplomb.

So what did he have to tell us? That we should join the church of Alan Watts? Attend his next lec­ture and buy his book? Shape our lives into an emu­la­tion of Alan Watts? Though he wore the trap­pings of a West­ern expos­i­tor of East­ern thought, and embraced all kinds of non-tra­di­tion­al beliefs and prac­tices, Watts was too iron­i­cal and detached to be a guru. He couldn’t take him­self seri­ous­ly enough for that.

If there’s any one thread that runs through the incred­i­bly broad range of sub­jects he cov­ered, it’s that we should nev­er take our­selves too seri­ous­ly either. We buy into sto­ries and ideas and think of them as con­crete enti­ties that form the bound­aries of iden­ti­ty and exis­tence: sto­ries like think­ing of life as a “jour­ney” on the way to some spe­cif­ic denoue­ment. Not so, as Watts says in the ani­mat­ed video at the top. Life is an art, a form of play: “the whole point of the danc­ing is the dance.”

But what about the mean­ing of life? Is Alan Watts going to reveal it in the last course of his ten-week ses­sion (payable in install­ments)? Will we dis­cov­er it in a series of self-improve­ment pack­ages? No. The mean­ing of life he says, is life. “The sit­u­a­tion of life is opti­mal.” But how is any­one sup­posed to judge what’s good with­out unchang­ing exter­nal stan­dards? A clas­sic Zen sto­ry about a Chi­nese farmer offers a con­cise illus­tra­tion of why we may have no need—and no real ability—to make any judg­ments at all.

You’ll find many more free excerpts of Watts’ lectures—of vary­ing lengths and with or with­out ani­ma­tions, on YouTube. To get a fur­ther taste of his spir­i­tu­al and philo­soph­i­cal dis­til­la­tions, see the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Take a Break from Your Fran­tic Day & Let Alan Watts Intro­duce You to the Calm­ing Ways of Zen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Philosophy of Hayao Miyazaki: A Video Essay on How the Traditional Japanese Religion Shinto Suffuses Miyazaki’s Films

Even if you’ve nev­er watched it before, you always know a Stu­dio Ghi­b­li movie when you see one, and even more so in the case of a Stu­dio Ghi­b­li movie direct­ed by Hayao Miyaza­ki. That goes for his work’s com­mon aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties as well as its com­mon the­mat­ic ones, the lat­ter of which run deep, all the way down to the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese reli­gion of Shin­to. Or so, any­way, argues “The Phi­los­o­phy of Miyaza­ki,” the Wise­crack video essay above that finds in Shin­to, a belief sys­tem premised on the notion that “we share our world with a vari­ety of gods and spir­its called kami,” the qual­i­ties that give “the films of Miyaza­ki and his team of badass­es at Stu­dio Ghi­b­li that extra Miyaza­ki feel.”

Even view­ers with no knowl­edge of Shin­to and its role in Japan­ese soci­ety — where 80 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion pro­fess­es to prac­tice its tra­di­tions — can sense that “a recur­rent theme run­ning through­out all of Miyaza­k­i’s films is a love for nature.” Going back at least as far as 1984’s World Wildlife Fed­er­a­tion-approved Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind, whose hero­ine takes up the fight on behalf of a race of large bugs, Miyaza­k­i’s work has depict­ed the exploita­tion of nature by the many and the defense of nature by the few.

None of his films have ren­dered kami quite so vivid­ly as My Neigh­bor Totoro, the tit­u­lar crea­ture being just one of the wood­land spir­its that sur­round and even inhab­it a human fam­i­ly’s house. In the world­views of both Shin­to teach­ing and Miyaza­k­i’s cin­e­ma, nature isn’t just nature but “part of the divine fab­ric of real­i­ty, and as such deserves our respect.”

This con­trasts sharply with Aris­totle’s claim that “nature has made all things specif­i­cal­ly for the sake of man,” and indeed to Amer­i­ca’s idea of Man­i­fest Des­tiny and the con­se­quent sub­ju­ga­tion of all things to human use. Any­one who’s only seen one or two of Miyaza­k­i’s movies would be for­giv­en for assum­ing that he con­sid­ers all tech­nol­o­gy evil, but a clos­er view­ing (espe­cial­ly of his “final” film The Wind Ris­es about the design­er of the Zero fight­er plane, which depicts the inven­tion itself as a thing of beau­ty despite its use in war) reveals a sub­tler mes­sage: “Because we’re focused on nature only through the lens of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, we’re blind­ed to the true essence of things.” We’ll learn to live in a prop­er bal­ance with nature only when we learn to see that essence, and Miyaza­ki has spent his career doing his part to reveal it to us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

500,000 Years of Humans Degrad­ing Nature Cap­tured in a Bit­ing Three Minute Ani­ma­tion by Steve Cutts

The Essence of Hayao Miyaza­ki Films: A Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Human­i­ty at the Heart of His Ani­ma­tion

Watch Hayao Miyaza­ki Ani­mate the Final Shot of His Final Fea­ture Film, The Wind Ris­es

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The World’s Largest Collection of Tibetan Buddhist Literature Now Online

FYI: The Bud­dhist Dig­i­tal Resource Cen­ter (BDRC) and Inter­net Archive (IA) announced ear­li­er this month “that they are mak­ing a large cor­pus of Bud­dhist lit­er­a­ture avail­able via the Inter­net Archive. This col­lec­tion rep­re­sents the most com­plete record of the words of the Bud­dha avail­able in any lan­guage, plus many mil­lions of pages of relat­ed com­men­taries, teach­ings and works such as med­i­cine, his­to­ry, and phi­los­o­phy.” In a press release from the Inter­net Archive, Chokyi Nyi­ma Rin­poche, a respect­ed teacher of Tibetan Bud­dhism, expressed grat­i­tude that the teach­ings of the Bud­dha have been made avail­able online. “We can share the entire body of lit­er­a­ture with every Tibetan who can use it. These texts are sacred, and should be free.” It should be not­ed that the texts aren’t writ­ten in Eng­lish, but rather the authors’ native tongue.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Free Online Course: Robert Thurman’s Intro­duc­tion to Tibetan Bud­dhism (Record­ed at Colum­bia U)

The Dalai Lama’s Intro­duc­tion to Bud­dhism

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es 

How Bud­dhism & Neu­ro­science Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Best­selling Author Robert Wright

 

 

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The Talmud Is Finally Now Available Online

In South Korea, where I live, the Tal­mud is a best­seller. Just a few years ago the New York­er’s Ross Armud report­ed on the improb­a­ble pub­lish­ing suc­cess, in this small east Asian coun­try, of Judais­m’s “dense com­pi­la­tion of oral laws anno­tat­ed with rab­bini­cal dis­cus­sions, con­sist­ing of about two and a half mil­lion words.” Some of those words deal­ing with such press­ing ques­tions as, “If you find a cake with a pot­tery shard in it, can you keep it? Do you have to report the dis­cov­ery of a pile of fruit? What do you do if you find an item built into the wall of your house?”

The much short­er “Kore­an Tal­mud,” Armud writes, with its para­bles, apho­risms, and top­ics that run the gamut “from busi­ness ethics to sex advice,” makes a read­er feel like “the last play­er in a game of tele­phone.” But Joshua Foer, the sci­ence writer who co-found­ed Atlas Obscu­ra, might say that the Jew­ish Tal­mud has long left even Jew­ish read­ers in a sim­i­lar state of befud­dle­ment — if, indeed, they could find the text at all. Look­ing to get a han­dle on the Tal­mud him­self back in 2010, he found that, shock­ing­ly, the inter­net had almost noth­ing to offer him. And so he began work­ing, along­side an ex-Google engi­neer col­lab­o­ra­tor named Brett Lock­speis­er, to cor­rect that absence.

“Last year, after years of work and nego­ti­a­tions, Foer and Lock­speis­er final­ly suc­ceed­ed in their quest,” writes the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Noah Smith. “Through a non­prof­it they cre­at­ed called Sefaria, the men are bring­ing the Tal­mud online in mod­ern Eng­lish, and free of charge.” Sefari­a’s library, avail­able on the web as well as in app form, now includes a vari­ety of texts from Gen­e­sis and the Kab­bal­ah to phi­los­o­phy and mod­ern works — and of course the Tal­mud, the cen­ter­piece of the col­lec­tion, the rel­e­vant resources for which had not been in the pub­lic domain and thus required no small amount of nego­ti­a­tion to make free.

Sefari­a’s cre­ators have com­bined all this with a fea­ture called “source sheets,” which allow “any user on the site to com­pile and share a selec­tion of rel­e­vant texts, from Sefaria or out­side, sur­round­ing a giv­en issue or ques­tion.” (Smith points to the most pop­u­lar source sheet thus far, “Is One Per­mit­ted to Punch a White Suprema­cist in the Face?”) At about 160 mil­lion words with 1.7 mil­lion inter­tex­tu­al links and count­ing, the site has made a greater vol­ume of Jew­ish texts far more acces­si­ble than ever before. Read­ers, even non-Ortho­dox ones, have been dis­cov­er­ing them in Eng­lish, but if Sefaria wants to increase their traf­fic fur­ther still, they might con­sid­er upload­ing some Kore­an trans­la­tions as well.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Israel: A Free Online Course from NYU

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course

Intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture: A Free Yale Course

Har­vard Presents Two Free Online Cours­es on the Old Tes­ta­ment

Har­vard Launch­es a Free Online Course to Pro­mote Reli­gious Tol­er­ance & Under­stand­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Experience the Mystical Music of Hildegard Von Bingen: The First Known Composer in History (1098 – 1179)

The Ger­man abbess, vision­ary, mys­tic poet, com­pos­er, and heal­er Hilde­gard von Bin­gen “has become a sym­bol to dis­parate groups,” writes Bri­an Wise at WQXR, includ­ing “fem­i­nists and the­olo­gians, musi­col­o­gists and new-age med­i­cine prac­ti­tion­ers. Her chants have been set to tech­no rhythms; her writ­ings on nutri­tion have yield­ed count­less cook­books (even though she nev­er left behind a sin­gle recipe.)” She did leave behind an astound­ing body of work that has made her improb­a­bly pop­u­lar for a 12th cen­tu­ry nun, with a live­ly pres­ence on Face­book and her own Twit­ter account, @MysticHildy (“very into tech­nol­o­gy, love to trav­el”).

Her fame rests not only on the beau­ty of her work, but on her extra­or­di­nary life sto­ry and the fact that she is the first com­pos­er to whose work we can put a name. She was born in 1098 in Berm­er­sheim, the tenth child of a noble fam­i­ly. It being the cus­tom then to ded­i­cate a tenth child (a “tithe”) to the church, Hilde­gard was sent to the Monastery of Saint Dis­i­bo­den­berg to become a Bene­dic­tine nun under the tute­lage of Jut­ta, a high­ly-respect­ed anchoress.

“After Jutta’s death,” notes Ford­ham University’s source­book, “when Hilde­gard was 38 years of age, she was elect­ed the head of the bud­ding con­vent liv­ing with­in cramped walls of the anchor­age.”

Through­out her life, Hilde­gard had expe­ri­enced visions, begin­ning at the age of 3. (Oliv­er Sacks attrib­uted these to migraines). At age 42, she had a pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence that rad­i­cal­ly changed her life. She described this moment in her writ­ings:

And it came to pass … when I was 42 years and 7 months old, that the heav­ens were opened and a blind­ing light of excep­tion­al bril­liance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kin­dled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burn­ing but warm­ing… and sud­den­ly I under­stood of the mean­ing of expo­si­tions of the books…

Over­whelmed, and fear­ful of writ­ing down her visions “because of doubt and a low opin­ion of myself and because of diverse say­ings of men,” she nonethe­less found encour­age­ment from lead­ers in the church to write and cir­cu­late her the­o­log­i­cal work: “With papal impri­matur, Hilde­gard was able to fin­ish her first vision­ary work Scivias (“Know the Ways of the Lord”) and her fame began to spread through Ger­many.” Soon after, she relo­cat­ed her con­vent to Bin­gen, and began an incred­i­bly pro­duc­tive peri­od in the last few decades of her life.

All told, she turned out an “extra­or­di­nary array of cre­ative trea­sures,” writes Wise: a dra­ma in verse, “more than 70 musi­cal works, med­ical texts filled with 2,000 reme­dies, writ­ings pre­sent­ing fem­i­nine arche­types for the divine.” Although she held to ortho­dox doc­trine, oppos­ing the Cathars, for exam­ple, and oth­er “schis­mat­ics,” she was a mys­tic whose ideas far exceed­ed the cramped the­o­log­i­cal con­fines of so many male coun­ter­parts. “Hildegard’s visions caused her to see humans as ‘liv­ing sparks’ of God’s love, com­ing from God as day­light comes from the sun,” writes Fr. Don Miller. “This uni­ty was not appar­ent to many of her con­tem­po­raries.”

Her tran­scen­dent sight did not blind her to the diverse beau­ty of the nat­ur­al world. “She not only had faith,” says Ger­man direc­tor and actress Mar­garethe Von Trot­ta, who made a 2010 biopic about Hilde­gard, “but she was so curi­ous. Today, per­haps she would have been a sci­en­tist because she did so much research on heal­ing peo­ple, on plants and ani­mals.” Hildegard’s tal­ent, intel­lect, and force­ful per­son­al­i­ty made her a for­mi­da­ble per­son, “the only known female fig­ure of her time,” writes Music Acad­e­my Online, “who achieved such intel­lec­tu­al stature and whose con­tri­bu­tions have had last­ing impact.” The revived inter­est in her music coin­cid­ed with “the ‘new age’ chant craze in the mid-1990s,” but Hildegard’s work dif­fers marked­ly from medieval chant writ­ten for male voic­es.

Vary­ing from “high­ly syl­lab­ic to dra­mat­ic melis­mas (swirling melodies on a sin­gle open syl­la­ble,” Melanie Spiller explains, “her music is quite dis­tinc­tive and eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able, with unsu­al ele­ments for the time, includ­ing exceed­ing an octave by a fourth or fifth, and large and fre­quent leaps.” Her music also func­tioned as “a vehi­cle for her own mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ence,” and it con­tin­ues to move listeners—of faith and no faith—who hear in her song cel­e­bra­tions of the divine­ly fem­i­nine and the won­ders of the nat­ur­al world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

A YouTube Chan­nel Com­plete­ly Devot­ed to Medieval Sacred Music: Hear Gre­go­ri­an Chant, Byzan­tine Chant & More

Mashup Weaves Togeth­er 57 Famous Clas­si­cal Pieces by 33 Com­posers: From Bach to Wag­n­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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