Mantras and Malas
Talismans and Touchstones
Contemplation is an activity we all engage with/in, and perhaps it's the core and essence of spiritual practice; or for those for whom 'spiritual' is too thorny a notion, perhaps contemplation is the mind's signal and noblest creative capability.
In many traditions there are Objects that support or assist practice: mantras, mudras, images, texts, sounds, Objects material and imagined, literal or symbolic... So here's the Question:
A few weeks ago I started working on a Question that was too unwieldy to juggle, but follow that link to an armload of provocative takes on just what Contemplation includes.
I just remembered my very own FIRST Object of Contemplation, a bronze statuette copy of the Rodin Thinker, a fixture in my father's home office. So I grew up meta-contemplating and thinking that was normal... In the first memory I retrieved, the statuette was too heavy for me to lift. And (just to keep you amused) the second thought was of a fragment of Auden's poem "The Geography of the House"
Revelation came to...the sort of fragment that gets collected into my mental archive, and pops out to say "cuckoo!" from time to time...
Luther in a privy
(crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his 'Thinker'
Cogitating deeply
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool
Taking my Collector hat from the several hats on the [metaphorical] rack, I note that every new Acquisition is the product of a Contemplation, so in that sense I have surrounded myself with Objects of Contemplation. Most of them instantly call forth a fragment of the Contemplation that attached itself to them when first encountered —thus, a book from the shelves is likely to be connected by threads to the line of thought that provoked its acquisition, and to those that flowed from it. The faces in an eloquent rock, in image or in lithos, draw me back to (and are evidence of) the moment of Recognition. There's a glorious history of such engagement with rocks (Roger Caillous, whose The Writing of Stones is exemplary)
Marina Warner on Caillois and other useful sources
See also Marcia Bjornerud's most excellent Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
For me, each instrument in my hoard is an Object whose properties invite Contemplation, mostly internal and haptic (how it feels to play this one or that one). To put the Contemplation into words is to relate the instrument's history, and place in my musical evolution, and is basically TMI for all but the most curious aficionado of the Form of the plucked-string instrument. Mostly, the fine distinctions to which I attend are simply not relevant to the muggles, the non-musicians.
And the music the instruments produce is a contemplation too, an internal integration of learned dexterity and physical properties of vibrating strings and resonating chambers and conjoint notes [scales, harmony], with a huge dose of the subjective.
Consider a glissando known to pretty much everybody, from one of the most ICONIC pieces of 20th century American music (the technique has roots in Klezmer clarinet performance practice):
It won't surprise anybody that my Contemplations are in the awaken-the-mind and revel-in-play territory.
Another realm of Objects of Contemplation that I return to again and again is graphic work of surre4alists and their allies and fellow travelers, where the Contemplation is centered upon enigma and imagination, and departure from straight-up reality. Pareidolia lives next door, Cubism is just down the block, and caricature is just over the back garden wall. Quite a few of my most beloved photographers sport in nearby realms. The point with all of these is that I have pored over and absorbed the images —I collect them, and find significance and pleasure in their irreality ...or in the alternate realities they suggest and invoke.
The very first such images that I encountered were surely John Tenniel's illustrations in Lewis Carrol's Alice books, and they made an impression that still reverberates:
Some other examples, in no particular order:
Daniel Heïkalo
see a gallery of Daniel's drawings
Paul Caponigro
Graciela Iturbide
Minor White
Remedios Varo
Frederick Sommer
The Thief Greater Than His Loot
Walker Evans
❧ ❧ ❧
On the horizon of the sur-real is the nearly imponderable but certainly looming future of the products of Artificial Intelligence. I'm tempted to NOT fall into Contemplating such bogosity, but today two examples crossed my path that nudge me toward that slippery slope:
If you look a little more closely, it screams janky A.I.
Which commercial airliner has five seats in a row next to the window?
God knows what army they belong to: There are eagles, and stripes, but no stars.
And what is that writing on their hats? Not English, not a human language....
and
Surrealism in the Age of AI Taylor Dafoe at ARTnews
AI Is Making Surrealism Boring Allise Nicole
What Happens to the Surrealist Mindset in the Age of Artificial Intelligence? Rachel Falconer in Frieze
AI Surrealism: Exploring Digital Dreamscapes and the Collective Unconscious from Surrealism Today
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧
and we could do worse than to end where we began:
Edward Steichen
could scarcely be more meta, right?
it is Rodin doing the Contemplating.