Do Buddhists Watch Telly?

Tue - August 16, 2005

THE BLOG HAS MOVED...

Hello,

For all those of you who have kindly subscribed to my blog, this address is now a dodo.

The blog has moved, lock, stock and smart new barrel to a new address:

www.alistairappleton.com/blog

Please resubscribe there. It's much snazzier.

All best,

Alistair

Posted at 04:35 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Sun - July 24, 2005

THE JUNGLE IS CALLING...

In September this year, I'm going to be returning to Brazil to help with another seminar on Ayahuasca , the Shamanic tea that I tried last year with profound effects. (See AYAHUASCA and JANUARY THOUGHTS ABOUT AYAHUASCA in Blog Archive). I've had loads of people ask about the seminar and its benefits. So I'll summarise as follows.

1) Ayahuasca is an ancient psychotropic plant medicine used by the Amzonian shamans for hundreds of years as a way of communicating with the Bigger Aspects of the Universe. Recently it's been used by Western psychologists to explore new ways of healing alcoholics and addicts. I went to Brazil last year to do a documentary The Man Who Drank The Universe, about Ayahuasca and the effects it can have on ordinary people, ie. me. It was a profound and disturbing experience - but one with extraordinary benefits.

2) The 10 day seminar takes place in a beautiful coastal resort in the North East of Brazil, in the state of Bahia, near to the town of Itacaré. The jungle surrounding Itacaré is a UNESCO world heritage site. The setting, food, and ambience is very supportive although the sessions with the tea can be quite disturbing.

3) Participants take the brew 3 times over 6 nights (one day off in between each session). The dark brown, foul-tasting tea is drunk in the evening and induces an 8 hour trance in which participants can expect to experience very intense visions and psychological journeying. Many people also vomit profusely.

4) Silvia Polivoy, the Argentinian psychologist who runs the seminars, is resolute that the session take place without any external coercion. The visions are allowed to unfolded and work on people as they need, unlike traditional Shamanic practice where a Shaman will guide the trip with drums and singing. There is music but it acts mainly as a common thread to unite the group.

5) The sessions take place communally in a hall by the sea. There are people to tend you through the session and the group dynamic is very important in the experience.

6) Many people experience frightening and distressing visions. An equal number have incredibly blissful sessions. Regardless of the content of the 8 hour trips, almost all find that afterwards the visions acted as important keys, unlocking a whole expanse of mental landscape that had previously remained uncovered. My first trip was awful and sad. My second was spectacularly euphoric.

7) The true benefit of Ayahuasca, I believe, comes in the psychological liberation is seems to enable after the visions are over. As a practising Buddhist, with deep ambivalence to the use of external drugs to achieve liberation, I found that a vast amount of anxiety and self-consciousness melted away after my experiences in the Jungle and that those benefits have lasted and integrated totally into my daily life.

I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND AYAHUASCA FOR EVERYONE - although I'm sure its benefits are universal, the process can be very frightening and distubing . But I am aware that my writings about the trip last year generated quite a lot of interest and those who feel drawn to the extreme experiences I went through can follow their own noses.

Ayahuasca is used by several Christian churches rooted in Brazilian culture - Santo Daimé being the most famous - but I should point out that its use is criminalised in all countries apart from Brazil, where its spiritual properties have been honoured. Silvia's course in Bahia is a wonderfully supportive and genuine framework for exploring the tea's use and the seminars offer a fortnight's holiday that will tear the roof off your normal life.

As I mentioned, I'm over there this autumn teaching some basic meditation which I think helps navigate the intensity of the Ayahuasca experience. The course begins on the 18th September and finishes 10 days later on the 28th.
Unfortunately, it's not a cheap affair. When you factor in airfares and the course fees you're looking at more than $2000. I'm afraid I'm not responsible for that. We're trying to organise cheaper accomodation for future seminars but at the moment that's how much it costs.

If you're at all drawn to this then please contact Silvia or myself.

Posted at 04:53 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Sat - July 9, 2005

HOLY ISLAND 2005

Had an amazing time on Arran this year. Went up a day early - straight after 3 weeks in the States - slightly jetlagged and very tired. Got off the big ferry at Brodick and caught a bus up to see Zangpo in Glenscorrodale just before he went into the 4 year long retreat.

Zang, a handsome young South African, had been in charge of Holy Island when I'd first visited there 5 years ago and for the last 3 years had been working on demolishing and rebuilding an derelict old farmhouse and turning it into a permanent Men's Retreat Centre where the Traditional Tibetan long retreats could take place. After an bonkers, Milarepa-like building effort in the last 12 months, he and the hardcore of builder monks had created a beautiful shrine room, kitchen, yoga room and bedrooms for 21 men and 3 caretakers. The day after I saw him, he and the other 20 went into the fenced off Centre and kicked off 4 years of solid practice with 16 days of fasting. They won't leave the compound until 2009!

It was weird to see them "closed-in" but inspiring in an odd way too. I set off to Holy Island very fired up. I couldn't ever imagine setting aside that much of my life for Tibetan practice - but the energy those things generate is undeniably strong.

Stepping foot on the springy grass of the island, it was as if the intervening year concertina-ed into a few days. It felt entirely like home.

I mooched around for a few days reading over my notes and letting the incredible peace and energy of the place seep into my bones. I'd been working so hard and intensely in the States, it felt wonderful to relax so profoundly.

By the time my students arrived I was completely soft around the edges.

There were 20 this year which is a great number and they were a dynamic bunch. I think a bigger group allows people to be more committed, strangely. The teaching was remarkably easy. To be honest you could just push people out doors and get them to walk around the Island and they'd probably intuit meditation. But everyone seemed to pick up the practices really strongly - and I managed not to confuse anyone unduly.

Lama Yeshe, the abbot of the island, came for a day and gave a storming talk. Although the content of what he said was nothing new, everyone picked up on his incredibly happy and solid presence. When you watched his face and body-language what he was saying seemed indisputable. Rather outrageously, he claimed that he was happy 100% of the time. Despite the fact we're all conditioned to think that an absolute impossibility, no one in the room doubted him for a minute. The fact is that our economy would completely dry up if we could get happy without buying the newest car, the freshest washing powder, finding a better girlfriend/boyfriend. Suddenly, this jolly, incredibly high-achieving but penniless, celibate monk offered was scandalously suggesting we can get 100% happy and it doesn't cost a penny or involve any change.

With little baby steps, we made a start in this direction.

All the meditation practices I taught were about being curious as to what was happening right now in our minds and bodies. W.H. Auden once said curiosity was the one human passion you could indulge without any fear of satiety. And that endless, attentive curiosity as to what our minds are doing is one of the major prongs of meditation. I can't really speak for my excellent students, but after 2 or 3 days of teaching, I found that my mind became incredibly happy and content on the Island and from that place of happy contentment I was able to observe, with sharp attention, what was happening in my life.

Thoughts affect the emotions: I think about the Canadian I'm in love with and I feel happy. Emotions affect the body: that happiness in my heart makes my body tingle. The body in its turn sparks emotions: my grumbling stomach makes me feel uncomfortable. Emotions colour thoughts: that discomfort makes me worry about the boy from Vancouver. And thoughts combine with emotions to create moods: my worried thoughts gell into a rather anxious mood. Moods sometime solidify into "character traits": I am an anxious guy. Which can lead to a lot of misery - because we believe our character is permanent and can't be changed: "Oh God, I'm never going to shake this anxiety, I'm doomed to unhappiness."

Buddhist thinking, which emphasizes the swirling, infinitely creative but changing nature of a complex system like the "human self", permits us to be constantly different. On the one hand, there's the boon of knowing that bad things end. All difficult emotions, black moods, nasty thoughts will definitely pass and can just as easily mutate into positive moods and creative thoughts.

But more importantly it gives us a standpoint above the good and bad. We get used to occupying that smiling, joyful spot where "bad things" and "good things" can both be allowed to happen. Where both happiness and sadness are seen as changing plays of the same light. Fact is there's always going to be good and bad stuff in life. The secret is how we "hold" things. Working on a gentle, kindly "hold" means that we're only a step away from a happy existence. 100% of the time. With no washing powder or fast cars necessary.

Posted at 09:48 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

5.00am, SATURDAY 9th 2005

Written in pink lipstick on the pale yellow tiles of the Ladies loo at the Cross:

THEIR SORDID LOVE OF DEATH IS AS NOTHING NEXT TO OUR LOVE OF LONDON

Posted at 05:10 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Fri - July 8, 2005

LONDON, THE BEAUTIFUL

Unable to stay in, as instructed, watching increasingly pornographic news coverage of the bombings - "How many injured? What kind of injuries? How many dead?" - I ventured out on my bicycle. The numbing rain that had mirrored everyone's mood was being replaced by kinder sunshine. Somehow I felt that I wanted to be out and about in London - not stuck in doors. I was fine, completely unaffected by the biggest attack on the city, but I felt I wanted be out IN the city, not hidden at home.

The streets were quiet, but when I got to Kensington Gardens on my bike, there was vast crowds of people walking out of Central London. All the transport was down - no buses, obviously no Tubes, taxis all taken - so most people walked westward through the park. There was a steady stream of people in the sunshine. All heading one way, like in those disaster movies, but smiling mostly. Getting on with it. It made me happy to see Londoners just "getting on with it". I suppose we've all been waiting for it so long, that when it came it was a horrid relief. There was definitely a surge of "we survived it" gluing us all together.

I continued into town. There were a few police cordons near the American Embassy, otherwise it was deserted. Like a quiet Sunday afternoon. No buses which left the streets feeling very spacious. Peaceful even.

I had too much energy to stop. So I headed to the gym. Although I wasn't at all conscious of being in shock - infact, I felt rather detached from it all - I guess my body needed to reassert itself, relish the fact that it was still around. Not bashed or torn in a underground tunnel. So I did a workout. In an all-but-deserted gym.

The whole of Soho was 3/4 shut. Most bars, restaurants, shops closed. I met a few friends wandering round, bemused. I thought the streets might be full of people celebrating their continued existence. It was actually very quiet. Though as the evening came there was an amazing almost surreal light over the city. The sort of lurid sunshine you get directly before or after a storm.

Joshua cycled in and we went for a drink. Vaguely euphoric. We wandered down through Leicester Sq and down to Trafalgar Square. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with love for the city. Much more than winning the Olympic bid, the stoic beauty of London in the face of such hateful violence seemed wonderful to me. Big Ben was distant down Whitehall, the column with Nelson's back to me, those comically mournful Lions, the words of Ken Livingstone, that London will always be a beacon for freedom and people will always come here to be free. How strange that London and Londoners can turn such carnage into something so strong. I felt honoured to live here.

Posted at 12:29 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Thu - July 7, 2005

THIS MAJESTICAL ROOF FRETTED WITH GOLDEN FIRE

Posted at 11:52 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Wed - May 25, 2005

FORSAN ET HAEC OLIM MEMINISSE IUVABIT

Posted at 11:23 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Mon - May 9, 2005

THE MOMENT OF GREAT SEEING

Posted at 12:04 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

TARNATION

My iPod just did it again.

I was cycling back from the cinema in town and humming the achingly beautiful melody of Rufus' "The Consort". When I got home, fetched in the washing from the dark garden and went upstairs to put it on the bed, I thought I'd like to listen to some music. Putting on the shuffle of the whole library - that's 11.7 days worth of music - the third track it played was "The Consort". Is still playing in fact.

More beautiful New York boys this evening in Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation ". Broken, nervy, cross-dressing, abused, but beautiful. I absolutely loved it. It's an extraordinary piece of self-dramatization. Nearly 20 years of filming himself and his brain-damaged mother and his possibly abusive grandparents. Then edited together by his 31 year-old-self.

Watching it you constantly think - "how could he film his mother like that?", "how staged are his tears, his breakdowns, his freak outs?" - but somehow that extreme self-staging is part and parcel of the Big Brother, reality tv age we live in. What's extraordinary that his footage dates back from the mid 80s. I mean how many 11-yea-olds had video cameras back in the mid 80s? Let alone filming themselves in a chillingly mimetic performance of a woman describing her abuse at the hands of her husband?

But then how many highschool kids in Texas get to stage musical versions of David Lynch's Blue Velvet?

Although the film hit Sundance in 2003 and has been all over the world it's only just arrived in Britain - I say 'only just', it's been out a month and I 've only just got round to seeing it. But then I'm a great believer in seeing things when you're meant to. Good art is always a little bit of chemistry between the subjective moment of viewing (slightly in love, aching from the gym, sitting next to Gill) and the objective artefact of the thing (Tarnation). So I found the stability Jonathan finds with his boyfriend, David, in NY really touching and I was conscious of Gill's worry about her mother as Jonathan's mother, Renée, deteriorates on screen. Mostly I was moved by the fondness of it. The by-line was cute: your greatest creation is the life you lead. I came out of the cinema feeling electric with wide-arching, plans to recreate London and fill my life up with glugging emotions and bruised loves.

And what a beautiful puzzling word: tarnation.

Posted at 12:31 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Sun - May 8, 2005

JC at ELECTION TIME

Went to see the Deborah Warner Julius Caesar at the Barbican on Election Night. I've never seen it staged before - infact, I'm not 100% sure I've ever read it. I have a vague memory of some school-annotated copy picked up at a bookstall, back when I was obsessively buying Penguin Shakespeares to have the complete set. I remember the big set speeches were laced with heavy pencil markings and Collins notes transcriptions. "Irony", for example, underlined three times.

Anyway it came alive on stage. As it should. It's so nice to go to a production where the verse isn't rushed over like some embarassment - "Hmm, better speed through this till I get to a laugh". Shakespeare productions - particularly British Shakespeare - can be unspeakably bad, all jolly-hockey-sticks and pantomime and - heavens forfend - no seriousness. That seems to be the English disease: whatever you do, don't be pretentious. Don't really say anything too profound. Especially in this Blair-lite political ethos. Where a whole campaign was fought on dogwhistles and a smeary racist Immigration card. Whatever happens: don't talk about economy, public services, ethics.

Of course, Julius Caesar, talks about big things all the time. And it's a great production. Even though it clocks in at about 3 hours, I didn't flag once. Though my buttockbones were aching by the end. Simon Russel Beal is a fantastic verse speaker - he makes every line sound like it was carved out of conversation. Each word, the perfect fruit hanging off the breath. Raph Fiennes was puppy-like and wonderful as Mark Anthony. (Though distressingly like Leonard Rossiter at times). I wasn't so keen on Anton Lesser. He's a bit shouty and hoarse - which is a shame since it really is Brutus's play. But I loved the huge staging - with literally hundreds of extras for the crowd scenes and the sort of stark chaotic stage I grew to love in Berlin. There's a moment when a skip-load of domestic debris falls from the flies after a battle scene which was pure Castorf or Pina Bausch.

But my real admiration was for Shakespeare. I was shocked and amused a couple of days ago to hear Gary slag off Shakespeare as a colossal bore with no resonance for him at all. To me, it seems fatuous to imagine that all art should have a direct resonance to our personal lives. I'm never going to be a Scottish Thane who kills a King and talks with witches. Nor am I likely to sleep inadvertently with my mother and put out my eyes. But standing by and experiencing something other than our personal lives, seems to me the very essence of good art.

Julius Caesar is a political play. It's about the ethics of citizenship and action within a political world. Is it right to kill a statesman who has become a tyrannt? Or who might become one? Or to be more contemporary: is it right to depose a tyrannical ruler who has WMDs? Or might have them? The parallel with the Iraq war is made evident in Warner's production. But when Caesar first enters in a swarm of sunglassed security men and smart suits, it's not Saddam I thought of but the hubristic Tony Blair. And it was that sliding identification that most impressed me. Of course, Shakespeare was writing unconcerned with Iraq or the 2005 Election, but what is fascinatingly fresh about him is that he never sides. He never polarizes. In the age of "you're either with us or against us", he gives us an endlessly subtle picture of the mirrors and simultaneities of human endeavour. Here more perhaps than in other plays.

In Macbeth, although one identifies with Macbeth, the moral trajectory of his decline is never in doubt. Similarly in Othello, our emotional compass is pretty firmly set towards Desdemona and the Moor's suffering. Here in Julius Caesar however, we can never rest morally or emotionally on any of the three main protagonists. Is Cassius a bad man? Is Brutus a noble one? Is Mark-Anthony shallow? None of them can be reduced. And at different times in the play we sympathize with all of them. And the end of the play - which seems so problematic to modern audiences - is problematic precisely because it doesn' t allow us to wrap things up nicely. Brutus and Cassius are dead but Mark Anthony is left with a weedy counterfeit Caesar and he mourns his nobler enemy : This was a man.

That sort of psychological maturity - letting everyone co-exist and honouring all with attention but not with judgement - is Shakespeare's greatest asset. But personally, I also love the artifice of his stagecraft. I love being sat infront of an artificial contraption - a play - which unwinds in front of my eyes for a few hours and creates a little hologram of another world. I went to see A Winters Tale 2 weeks ago with Simon and although it was much less satisfying production, the extreme - almost torturous - artifice of that play pleased me even more. The mysterious implacable madness of Leontes, the weird juxtapositon of that with the pastoral idyll of Florizel and Perdita, the extreme suspension of disbelief needed to pull off the Statue scene. The arbitrariness of late Shakespeare appeals to my love of the incommensurate, the awkward. It was just a shame so much of the verse in that production was hidden under hammery.

It reminds me of the story of my Director of Studies at Cambridge, JH Prynne , a fiercely intellectual poet and my academic hero back then. He went to see a student production of The Tempest in a church in East Anglia. (I can't think why he went since he had ferociously exacting standards of performance. Perhaps because he also a great deal of kindness to his students.) Anyway, he went and sat through the whole thing
and came out thinking it was the best production he'd ever seen. On further reflection, he realised the reason it had been so great was because, sitting at the back of the church, he'd actually been unable to hear any of the actors in the terrible accoustic and so had run through the entire play's poetry in his head.

Posted at 11:54 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Mon - May 2, 2005

OF COURSE

Posted at 10:13 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

FOREIGN FLUID EXCHANGE (Mainly Sweat)

Been away on two epic filming shifts - one in Antwerp, Amsterdam and the Hague, the other in Amiens, Rouen, Calais - for the new BBC show.

When I tell people I'm doing a show about shopping abroad - most people spit feathers, spluttering at my good fortune. And not without reason. It's a cool show to film. Though the hours can be a bit ferocious: 6 x 14-hour days back-to-back plus travel. We all merged into that filming family pretty quickly - largely because the intensity of filming made blood brothers and sisters of us all.

I'm hoping it will be great. Kimberly, my beautiful American co-host, is dazzling. And the fun my little mini-team have tooling round the cities she shops in makes for cute viewing. I wonder how it will go down?

Posted at 01:49 AM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Tue - March 29, 2005

BEATUS BENIDORM

Went walking in the mountains above Alicante with Simon over Easter. Acres of almond blossom. Good sinew-hardening walking. Climbing the Sierra de Bérnia and getting stuck on a 20m rockwall, giggling. Learning the meaning of the word egregious and hortatory. Rainbows and full-moon shadows. And Good Friday procession in the mountain village of Castels de Castel that completely overwhelmed me.

We arrived knackered from a full day's hiking at around 7 and went to one of those working-man's bars in Spain that serve scrotum-tightening tapas. Then we found out the procession was starting at 10. Outside the church families were arriving, grans and grandchildren, chatting happily. Then on the dot of 10.30, a solemn drum-tap and three effigies lurch out of the church doors into the town square, carried on the shoulders of 10 or so men marching in step which gives the images the strange loping movement of a galleon. A large Mary, a crucified Christ and a Christ laid out for burial. All the men of the village march in line down one side of the street, the women on the other, all holding long candles. Suddenly it's silent apart from the drum tap and then, the band - 30 or so amateur brass and woodwindplayers - who up until now have looked like they could barely scratch together a "Cucharacha", break into a stunningly beautiful and textured lament. Starting with the low brass, it rolls onwards into an really, really beautiful orchestra piece as the entire population solemnly march in step around their village. A full moon above the candlelit streets.

Clearly it's an annual event. Something to be enjoyed. But it's a wonderfully solemn, dramatic and beautiful thing. I find myself smiling and crying all at once as I fall into step behind the band.

And as we walk on and the music is repeated and I enjoy the girl flautists at the back chatting and comparing haircuts, laughing discretely until their cue comes. I enjoy the elderly clarinettist shushing them. I enjoy the staginess of it. The way that once we've found our way back to the church and it's over, everyone's chatting, laughing, normal again. But normal together.

Rituals are not about perfection, they're about togetherness. I sussed that on Holy Island on my first Buddhist retreat. Back then I was dreadfully earnest and hunourless about spiritual things and expected the Buddhist ceremonies to be perfect incarnations of some airy Dharma ideal. While I was sitting disapprovingly through one particularly long and messy Guru Rinpoche puja - with monks dropping books, enquiring loudly during chanting which page they should be on and messing up their conch blowing - suddenly all my irritation fell away and I had a moment of blistering clarity, what Zen calls satori. All that mess gelled into simple perfection. Ritual is not like playing a piece of classical music where everything is sublimated to create a perfect interpretation of what's on the page. Ritual is about people together doing stuff, pointing the same way. The giggles, the mess-ups, the pompous people, the bored. They're all part of it.

Walking behind that whole village together was a beautiful priveledge, regardless of what the march symbolised. Walking together with Simon through the lemon, orange and nispera groves up towards the high peaks was just a pleasure. I enjoyed being together with someone so much that when Simon headed off to visit a friend of his in Valencia, and I had the afternoon to myself there, I felt quite winded and melancholic.

I lay in the sunny park and took a weird picture.

Posted at 11:55 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"

Sun - March 20, 2005

GODARD'S KNOCK

Been away filming a new BBC show in Turkey for 2 weeks. I like these long shoots abroad. I feel like I'm floating through a disassociated landscape. No mobile, no email, no TV. The irritants of London fade away and I start to feel very focused. There's something about being with a knot of people, bonded by hours in a crew bus, that is pleasant. Because there's so little to do, no excess of choice, you end up doing the simplest things and enjoying them. There are only these people, this hotel, this meal - so you do that. It becomes like the simplified space I'm familiar with from retreats.

It was suprisingly cold in Turkey. Early on in the first block in Bolu, in Northern Turkey, I had a morning free before I was needed for filming. The landscape outside my hotel window had been annihilated by snow. I had nothing to do for 3 or so hours. So I sat meditation. In that thin-air of stimulation, every thing became very sharp.

It's something about the quality of attention. WH Auden says that curiosity is the one human passion that can be indulged without satiety. And he's right, there's always something to be noticed and then noticed more deeply. It's a self-replenishing source of energy. If we move through the world touching things with delicate attention they come alive under our fingertips. In the snowlit corridors of mountain hotels and long journies across the white plains of Turkey, people and things seemed to sparkle and thrum.

But it also struck me that it's not enough to be attentive. You need to pay attention to the kind of attention you're paying. Otherwise, the quality of our noticing shapes what we notice.

That's apparent in this photography thing. Over the years I've been taking pictures with my camera, I've noticed that I've started to take the same sort of pictures. Framed things in a certain "aesthetic" way. Picked certain objects to photograph and ignored others. I was talking to Laurie and Rob, the camera and soundmen on this shoot, about how boring this was getting.

There's a great story about Jean-Luc Godard. His Director of Photography would get on set before shooting, spend hours setting up lights and camera angles to create a perfect, beautiful shot. Then Godard would step up to the camera, look through the viewfinder, and before calling 'Action' he would kick the tripod and shoot the whole scene on a random skew. Of course, in the film it looked weird but wonderfully correct. Similarly, Lars von Trier says that the best thing an actor can do for him is to fuck up. Sometimes the crap, the ugly and the random generate new beauty.

So towards the end of the Turkey trip we started to deliberately mess-up shots. Holding the camera up in the air, vaguely pointed at people to get an fresh frame. Photographing random things.

My patron anti-saint, Oscar Wilde, said that art is a raid on the predictable. And the skew-whiff art that I think is the best art makes life less boring. It stretches the perceiving eye to perceive more. It's like when I watched Godard's Alphaville on the way up to Haworth and suddenly Yorkshire train stations seemed like 1950s nouvelle vague. Knocking the tripod can surprise us with stuff we didn't expect to notice.

Trungpa (0f course) already nailed this: "Normally , we limit the meaning of perceptions. Food reminds us of eating; dirt reminds us to clean the house; snow reminds us that we have to clean off the car to get to work; a face reminds us of our love or hate. In other words, we fit what we see into a comfortable or familiar scheme. We shut any vastness or possibilities of deeper perception out of our hearts by fixating on our own interpretation of phenomena." Some bonkers film or off-centre photo from way outside our normal parameters can be exactly what we need to shake off our own lazy interpretations of the world. Or at least give us a whiff of vaster ones.

Posted at 01:04 PM /mail@alistairappleton.com"