Sphere 1998 Quotes

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

they do not see the ways in which the majority of the institutions that frame their coming of age journeys are steeped in therapeutic ideology. Their schools, for example, may appear to them as sites of betrayal that act against their interests; but they learn the therapeutic language through school psychologists and social workers that teach them to take responsibility for managing their emotions. Similarly, while the state may confront them as heartless and cold, whether stealing their hard-earned money or failing to protect their families, its subsidized alcohol and drug recovery programs or support groups reinforce the language of individual empowerment through accepting sole responsibility for one’s self (Nolan 1998). Through everyday interactions and practices, these institutions foster a culture of neoliberalism outside the economic sphere (see Illouz 2007) which I argue is central to reproducing social inequality and exploitation at the most intimate level of the self.

Iyengar sees the relationship between art and science as follows: “Art in its initial stages is science; science in its highest form is art.”6 That is to say, at first the artist must master technique (the scientific part of art), just as the scientist who wants to master science must see beauty in truth. The delight and awe of mathematicians when looking at a particularly concise formula is a well-known manifestation of artistic sensibility. Long ago, Pythagoras knew of the meeting place of science (in the form of mathematics) and art (in the form of music). Even before him, the Indians had discovered the same connection, as expressed in their Shulba-Sūtras. Yoga practitioners look upon their own body-mind as an artistic instrument that can be explored fairly precisely by carefully observing the timehonored rules of the yogic heritage. This effort yields what the Western esoteric traditions call the “music of the spheres”—the mystical sound om reverberating throughout the cosmos followed by the wondrous realization of absolute oneness (ekatva) beyond all qualities.