Yesterday morning on my way to Zen practice, I stopped to photograph Modica Way, the alley in Central Square, Cambridge, that has been taken over by street artists.
The most democratic of genres, graffiti is an extremely random art form: anyone with a spray can, paint brush, or inedible marker can add their scrawl. Not only is Modica a collaborative work incorporating the efforts of several different artists, the wall reflects various media of street art, with stencil work, free-hand tags, and all sorts of stickers covering the bricks, exposed ductwork, and other building surfaces.
Even at its most random, the Modica mural shows some semblance of order, with different sections being dominated by different artists, including Bren Bataclan, the Boston artist who painted my Christmas present. When I first visited (and photographed) Modica Way over a month ago, I wasn’t sure where the “real art” of the wall’s sanctioned artists ended and the popular editorializing of random punks began. On a wiki-like wall where everyone can write and revise, which version is the truest? After staring a while, I realized the point of pastiche is the ultimate randomness of it all. When your parchment is a palimpsest, every painting is pentimento: every iteration is a literal do-over, today’s version writing over yesterday’s.
I’ve had randomness on my mind all weekend as I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time staring at the gift I gave J for Valentine’s day: a digital frame for him to display his photographs. I figured a digital photo frame was a perfect gift for a photographer who has everything; what I didn’t foresee was the way I’d enjoy revisiting a couple hundred of J’s favorite images from the last year. Now that there’s a frame on J’s kitchen counter cycling in random rotation his various photos of me, our pets, and the places the two of us have explored together over the past year, I find myself stopping to watch these scenes from our shared life, marveling at how many memories two people can cobble together without really trying.
At Zen practice yesterday, I gave consulting interviews, and one practitioner asked about the difference between good thoughts and bad. How can you encourage the former and get rid of the latter?
“There is no difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts,” I explained. “The mind is a sense organ that perceives an endless series of thoughts, just as the eyes perceive an endless supply of visual stimuli, the nose perceives an endless series of olfactory signals, and the ears perceive an endless stream of sound.” Just as we don’t blame our nose for bad smells or gouge out our eyes when they see something ugly, we can’t blame or give credit to our minds for their thoughts. Thinking is what minds do, so it makes no sense to judge our thoughts or to cling to presumably good thoughts while pushing presumably bad ones away. Instead, thoughts will be thoughts, and our minds will be minds: like a digital frame set to “random,” our minds endlessly loop the thoughts and images they’ve taken and stored whether we like them or not.
And so the answer I’d give in response to Annette‘s request that I describe my life in six words or less would be the following Zen-inspired definition of consciousness: an endless series of random stimuli. Some folks wait until their dying breath to see their life flash before their eyes, but I say watching your life is as easy as walking down a graffiti-covered alley or flipping through the virtual pages of an electronic photo album, the accident of your life appearing in all its random glory.
Click here for a photo-set of images from Modica Way, taken yesterday and in January. Enjoy!
Feb 18, 2008 at 9:45 pm
A digital photo frame, eh? Freaky!
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Feb 18, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Yes, it’s very cool!
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Feb 19, 2008 at 3:19 am
I love that six word description – I’m seriously hooked on this process, I keep scribbling my own aphorisms in between meetings and waiting for trains..
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Feb 19, 2008 at 7:30 am
My brother gave my parents one of those a few years ago, loaded up with grandchild photos, etc. I imagine the newer ones hold more photos and have a better display. Nice present! And cool graffiti photos. It’s so Cambridge, somehow.
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Feb 19, 2008 at 11:10 am
What a very interesting post, Lorianne. I hope I remember it the next time my niece comes to me with her questions about existence. She has finally understood what I’m saying when I say there is no such thing as a bad decision. Now maybe this’ll help with the ideas she thinks are “bad” too. I wish she could’ve had a teacher like you in her undergraduate years. But who knows she may yet.
Teresa
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Feb 19, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Thank you for this. A wonderful, thought-provoking and illuminating post.
(Re digital frames – there was a bit of a problem with some recently… sure you are aware of it, but just in case…)
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Feb 20, 2008 at 6:44 am
Thanks, rraw, for the heads-up about digital frame viruses; I hadn’t heard about that, but since it’s a different brand, I think (?) we’re safe.
If your niece is in college, Teresa, she might be too young to “get” most of the wisdom you’re sharing about existence: I don’t think I had a clue about any of this when I was an undergrad. So I spare my students the blather of my Zen-talk; they’re already ignoring me, anyway. But maybe someday your niece will realize that her aunt is wiser than she knew… š
Leslee, the frame’s internal memory isn’t large; I think it can hold something like 30 images. But J’s using a 2G SD card to store photos, so he has 400+ photos on that. With SD cards so cheap nowadays, it’s not a big deal to buy an extra card for the frame: the more photos, the merrier.
And yes…a graffiti wall is very Cambridge!
Annette, I think you should post more six-word memoirs: maybe a month-long project where you did a memoir each day? Or maybe you could branch into haiku, too…?
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Feb 20, 2008 at 9:02 am
That is a fabulous six-word summary of life. Judging your thoughts as good or bad is just another false duality, right?
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Feb 23, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I like the way you conclude this pondering post, Lorianne. Wrapping it up, tying it together — the thoughts like the frame & an encouragement/ reminder to welcome that aspect of life, thought, brain…
Thanks!
Andrea
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Jun 20, 2011 at 11:29 am
I’d love to see some of those photos from Modica Way, but my security settings block flickr. Don’t ask me to get rid of my security settings. They’re there for a reason.
Why don’t put the images on your own server? Why use Flickr?
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Jun 20, 2011 at 12:41 pm
First, I don’t have my own server to house images on. WordPress allows you to store some images, but I have LOTS of pictures to store. Second, Flickr makes it easy for me to store and organize photos, regardless of whether I use them on-blog. I can tag photos by subject or search them by date. It’s also easy to share images via Flickr.
I’m sorry your security settings don’t allow you to access Flickr. It’s a great site!
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Jun 20, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Excellent question, Jusef. First, I don’t have my own server to house images on. WordPress allows you to store some images, but I have LOTS of pictures to store. Second, Flickr makes it easy for me to store and organize photos, regardless of whether I use them on-blog. I can tag photos by subject or search them by date. It’s also easy to share images via Flickr.
I’m sorry your security settings don’t allow you to access Flickr. It’s a great site!
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