Ai Weiwei, one of China's and the worlds best-known contemporary artists, was taken away April 3 as he prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong from Beijing's Capital International Airport.
Photos on Facebook from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego 24 hour protest "Sit in Solidarity" for Ai Weiwei started May 19th at 11am ended May 2oth at 11am.
Photos on Facebook from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego 24 hour protest "Sit in Solidarity" for Ai Weiwei started May 19th at 11am ended May 2oth at 11am.
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| Hand-painted porcelain sunflower seed - one of 100 million - Ai Weiwei The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei - TATE Modern |
::: 60 Senses :::
Radiation is what brings me to what I’m thinking about in this post. Our senses. When I was told I would lose the sense of taste during and after the radiation treatments for up to six months to a year, oddly one of the things I thought about was a book I had and a particular essay in that book by Lewis Hyde. The book “The Nature of Craft and the Penland Experience” marking the 75th anniversary of the famous craft school in the North Carolina mountains and the essay “The Senses of Penland”.
Lewis Hyde was invited by the Penland School of Craft to contribute something to this wonderful 75th Anniversary book. He agreed to the project as long as he could spend time with Paulus Berensohn (Finding One’s Way with Clay) a philosophical potter and a potter who for many years chose not to fire his pots.
Lewis Hyde had met Paulus briefly over twenty years ago at another renown & famous place, the Haystack School of Craft. Lewis Hyde had a student at the time Hannah Levin Paulus in his class who interviewed Paulus for one of her class assignment. In that interview Paulus said he felt there were more human senses then the five we knew (smell, hearing, touch, taste, seeing & the 6th, mind added by the Chinese) or thought about. At that time he had a list of sixty senses. This list was compiled from his own ideas and observations plus he looked to Alan Walker, Joan M. Erikson (Wisdom of the Senses), Rudolph Steiner, Guy Murchie (The Seven Mysteries of Life) and Michael J. Cohen and others I presume for their views and lists as well.
Coming forward to Lewis Hyde’s essay . First, I'll leave the reading of it to you. I will say this. There is a very interesting story, with interesting ideas, with a lot to "chew on" and think about. Here are two excepts from the essay and with Paulus's list of senses below:
"When Paulus taught clay he used to suggest that students put their faces in the slip bucket and then go sit in the sun and feel the slip dry, the sun drawing the moisture from the clay and the clay drawing it from the skin."
"The senses are verbs (to touch, to see, to tell a story), and being alive as an activity. “
Paulus Berenshon's List of the Senses:
Radiation, feeling, chemical and mental senses.
Radiation:
1. sense of light and sight - including polarized light
2. sense of seeing without eyes, such as heliotropism or the sun sense of plants
3. sense of color
4. sense if moods and identities attached to colors
5. sense of awareness of one’s own visibility or invisibility and consequent camouflaging
6. sensitivity to radiation other than visible light including radio waves, x-rays, etc.
7. sense of temperature and temperature change
8. sense of season, including ability to insulate, hibernate and winter sleep
9. electromagnetic sense of polarity, including the ability to generate current as in the nervous system and brain waves
Feelings:
10. hearing, including resonance, vibrations, sonar and ultrasonic frequency
11. awareness of pressure, particularly underground, underwater and to wind & air
12. sensitivity to gravity
13. the sense if excretion fir waste elimination and protection from enemies
14. feel, particularly touch on the skin
15. sense if weight, gravity and balance
16. space or proximity sense
17. coriolis sense or awareness of effect of earth rotation
18. body movement sensations and sense of mobility
Chemical:
19. smell with and beyond the nose
20. taste with and beyond the tongue
21. appetite and hunger
22. hunting, killing or food-obtaining urges
23. humidity sense, including thirst, evaporation control and the acumen to find water
24. hormonal sense as to pheromones and other chemical stimuli
Mental Senses:
25. pain external and internal
26. mental and spiritual distress
27. sense of fear, dread of injury, death or attack
28. procreative urges, including sex awareness, courting, love, mating, paternity and raising young
29. sense of play, sport, humor, pleasure and laughter
30. sense of physical place, navigation senses, including detailed awareness of land and seascape, of the position of the sun, moon, and stars
31. sense of time
32. sense of electromagnetic fields
33. sense of weather changes
34. sense of emotional places, of community, belonging, support, trust and thankfulness
35. sense of self, including friendship, companionship and power
36. domineering and territorial sense
37. colonizing sense, including receptive awareness of one’s fellow creatures--sometimes to the degree of being absorbed into a super organism
38. horticultural sense and the ability to cultivate crops, as done by ants who grow fungus, by ants who farm algae or birds that leave food to attract their prey
39. language and articulation sense, used to express feelings and convey information in ever medium from bee’s dance to human literature
40. sense of humility, appreciation ethics
41. sense of form and design
42. reasoning, including memory and the capacity for logic and science
43. sense of mind and consciousness
44. intuition or subconscious deduction
46. psychic capacity such as foreknowledge, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychokinesis, astral projection and possibly certain animal instincts and plant sensitivities
47. sense of biological and astral time, awareness of the past, present and future events “next” (left brain)
48. the capacity to hypnotize other creatures
49. relaxation and sleep, including dreaming, meditation, brain wave awareness
50. sense of pupation, including cocoon building and metamorphosis
51. sense of excessive stress and capitulation
52. sense of survival by joining a more established organism
53. spiritual sense, including conscience, capacity for sublime love, ecstasy, a sense of sin, profound sorrow and sacrifice
54. sense of awe
55. sense of imagination
56. sense of tension and release of the body
57. sense of chi
58. sense of balance
59. sense of story and it links us up with the cosmic -- the universe story
60. sense of being known--Bushmen “wherever they went they felt they were known”
Please check-out some of the other sections ... Enjoy your journey!
Please check-out some of the other sections ... Enjoy your journey!
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