年年不掃

慈济 is having a fund raising for the earthquake victims. I gave my share. In times of great natural disasters like this, we feel small, vulnerable, powerless, and yet strangely strong wanting hold on to life, of which we are often unappreciative in peaceful times.

Sibelius – Finlandia

Tchaikovsky – Violin Concerto in D Majoy, op. 35

Ravel – Daphnis et Chloe: Suite No. 2

Block – Schelomo

Mussorgsky – Pictures at an Exhibition [arr. Ravel]

Absolutely fantastic! Years later when these kids become doctors and lawyers and CEOs, they would never find another amateur orchestra like this. So, kids, appreciate the opportunity and enjoy the music.

Bertrand Russell writes in the preface of his book The Conquest of Happiness, “My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilized countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable.” This alleviated my guilt of having no legitimate excuse to be unhappy. When I am unhappy, I accuse myself for being ungrateful to the life that I have. I am not living in war or poverty. I don't have to drive to work. I am my own boss. I arrange my own working hours. In a way I have reached the ultimate goal of a free person. But still, I am unhappy, once in a while.  According to Russell, the cause of my unhappiness is the lack of objective interest in my activity. My reaction to this condition is fundamentally human, therefore, I am entitled to be unhappy, once in a while. Take writing, for example, if I do not have readers to write for, I am writing a diary at most. And with reading, if nobody needs my knowledge, the books that I read will rot in my head. Basically, my problem is the communication of the self and the other. I can see why a long-winded professor is happy when he walks into a packed lecture hall. Humans are social animals, no others, no self.

Now I have theoretically understood the cause of my unhappiness. The task is to make a change toward happiness, a conquest that will take tremendous effort.

Yesterday morning, eight o'clock, I opened the refrigerator. In sight was box and box of half-finished take-outs from Chinese restaurants. My stomach churned. I pushed the boxes left and right hoping to find eggs and bread to make myself a breakfast, but there was none. During the four-day home improvement binge I had neglected other aspects of life. Now I had to do the strange thing of grocery shopping in the morning.

On my way to the grocery store I stopped at Panera Bread, a chain café and bakery shop, to have breakfast. It turned out that Panera Bread did not serve breakfast. They had the same sandwich and soup all day long. I ordered a chicken soup with wild rice in a bowl carved out of sour dough bread. Waiting and looking around, I was surprised by the number of people taking their breakfast here. Some were on their cell phone and some gazed at their laptop. Only few tables had two people eating and conversing. My food was ready. Instead of calling my number, they called my first name. Sorry about my cynicism, I see this as a market strategy to make the consumers feel instantly at ease with the seller. Drop your guard and buy more.

The bread was fresh but the soup was insipid. I could make a better chicken soup even with this western style, I thought, just put more of every ingredient, chicken, celery, carrot, pepper. It dawned on me why homemade food was better. You never calculate the balance between capital and profit. With this thought, I left the soup unfinished and went to the grocery store.

My house rule is “no cooking before teaching.” I believe that the smell of food makes my teaching less serious. I want my students to know what I have here is not a little home-run violin studio. My teaching is as serious as the work of a Russian ballet master. But I could careless about it now. Life, real life, good life, starts with good food. I looked at the clock. There were three hours left before the first student arrived. It was enough time to make a big pot of oxtail soup. I threw the ingredients in the pot, oxtails, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, salt and pepper. Not for long, my house was filled with the aroma of oxtail soup.

Good food is important for the body, maybe the soul, but definitely the mind. When life's basics are taking cared of, the mind is happy and free to wander. Symposium, Plato's great dialogue on the nature of love, is in fact notes from a drinking party, and the word symposium, meaning drinking party in Greek, is used as the title without any other embelishing pretension. Afternoon arrived. I threw out all the restaurant boxes from the refrigerator. Knowing that I would have delicious oxtail soup for dinner, I went downstairs to teach with the peace of mind.

They say that only women have irrational urges such as driving a Volkswagen Beetle back and forth to IKEA in numerous trips for furniture shopping. Yes, that's me, driven mad by the weather. This winter has been a prolonged gray and white that makes me irritable to live, so bad that I start finding faults of my house. I have always loved my house, which I deliberately left open with no furniture and decoration. Once a friend of mine said that he could not tell whether a man or a woman lived here. There is no drapery with small, pink Victorian flower or Martha Stewart do-it-yourself laces in my house; everything is in black and white and natural wood, simple enough to fit the dwelling of a Zen monk. My bedroom can be said as a study with a bed. Books stack up on the computer desk, messy and dusty. The bed is covered by the comforter in muted burgundy that you sit on the bed without noticing it. An old florescent office lamp with one tube dead and the other hums sits lopsided on a small wobbly nightstand. The dinning room and living room link together in one big open space with skylights, contemporary style. The dinning table is accompanied by four cheap folding chairs with beige cushions that have become beige-r. The downstairs living room is my studio. There is an upright piano that takes one side of the wall, four bookshelves in line on the opposite side, and a sofa for the parents. The spare bedroom downstairs is used for storage so messy that you can't set your foot in. But all this never bothered me until last Friday.

7:00pm. I finished teaching and suddenly noticed how unpleasant my house was. Messy, dusty, beige-r and burgundy-er, I saw every speck of imperfection. CHANGE. I heard Obama's voice. He is right! I dashed out of the house. IKEA, the great Swedish furniture warehouse, was only fifteen minutes away. There were no crowds on a Friday evening. $1.99, $2.99, $5.99, for once I could dump things in the shopping cart without thinking about the price. I bought a teakettle, a teapot, coffee cups, colorful towels, yellow striped comforter cover with matching pillowcases, a pair of blue floral pillow cases for my two big square pillows, a white and red striped long cushion cover that ties on the ends like a candy, a white night stand and a table light with white shade, a blue doggie bed for Popcorn, a vase for $1.45, and an area rug for the kitchen, my cart was full. Saturday I went back and bought four sleek black chairs with beige cushions for the dinning table. Nobody drives a Beetle to IKEA. My car looked tiny and lonely among vans and SUVs in the parking lot, and certainly useless. I had to put down the backseat to fit in four chairs flat in the packages.

Assemble-it-yourself, whoever came up with this labor-cost-saving idea was a genius for market economy. It took me six hours to put four chairs together, aching hands and back is expected. My niece assembled the nightstand for me with nails exposed on the surface, one small mistake but irretrievably done, which I will live with as endearing memory. Now I am happy. The wooden dinning table is flanked by four sleek black chairs. The bedroom is all yellow and blue with the $1.45 vase filled with flowers on the white night stand. It is as pretty as a nursery.

Circumstance rules man; man does not rule circumstances, says Horodotus. With all my love for the Greeks, this time I am listening to the Americans. Change is good, big or small, it is always for the better. The home improvement continues: a pretty armchair and a white secretary will be delivered soon.

Friday. I lounged into the bookstore. The art section, B……Fernando Botero, my favorite contemporary painter. Like Piero della Francesca, the expressionless faces in Botero's paintings seem to reveal more than the acted-out expressions of Rubens, Caravaggio, and the German Expressionist. But revelation of what? I cannot pin point exactly. It evokes something indescribable in you like the feeling of listening to non-titled music.  

I was happy to see a new monograph of Botero's paintings on the shelf. The title, Abu Ghraib. It was a big disappointment. I have never flipped through an art book as fast as this one. The paintings depict familiar images I have seen in the newspaper, bloody and disturbing. I understand that Botero is using art to condemn the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, but it is not any more powerful than the pictures on the news and far less than the condemnation uttered with language. Art doesn't work this way. Art is not meant to work this way. Once art is used as means for other ends, it loses its magical power.

Naturally, like everyone else in society, artists have the need to express their political beliefs, and then say something, join a demonstration rally, volunteer to care for the abused, do anything for the cause but don't do it through art. Art is at its weakest for political messages. Anybody who grew up in China would know this. The posters painted on the wall failed to cultivate our love for the Communist Party. They were ignored as if non-exist. A patch of pure color would have caught much attention. Same thing with Botero's paintings. This is how things work. The television news is more effective to convey the horror of Abu Ghraib. The expressionless faces in della Francesca and Botero's paintings reveal something essential and eternal in us. The two matters don't mix.

Piero della Francesca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Piero_della_Francesca_045.jpg

 

 

Botero with his paintings of Abu Ghraib http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0412-06.htm

It's terrible to wake up feeling miserable. For the past a few happy days, I was eager to get up early so not to miss the daylight for painting. But today I didn't want to get out of the bed. Po has become lazy too. She used to be up around 7:00am and now she stays in bed as long as I do; it is 9:00am today. I wonder how her bladder has increased its holding capacity.

I fed Po and went to the computer to check my e-mails and then breakfast. Still feeling restless and miserable, I tried to write hoping it will get me out of this state. Fortunately now we have the computer to delete unsatisfying passages, otherwise I would have filled the wastebasket with crumpled papers this morning.

I remembered the Chinese saying, “without a long-term goal for the future, you are bond to worry about your immediate situation.” Long-term goal? I quickly examined my life. I don't have a long-term goal for anything, but I have always wanted to live like Mary Cassatt, living in Paris, free of financial worries and domestic duty, just paint and paint and paint. I certainly don't need to live in Paris. Chicago provides as much as any world-class metropolitan city. I am semi-free of domestic duty, no children and no husband to take care of, just to feed myself and Po. My financial worries are not real worries but responsibilities, which I happily meet with pride. So what am I waiting for? I can paint and paint and paint for the rest of my life just like Mary Cassatt. This thought brought me much happiness. My eyes rested on Ning's jade bracelet, so simple, merely a circle, but I wanted to draw it. I grabbed the small 3.5"x 5" sketchbook on my desk and drew it with a ball pen, which I normally hate with passion. And then I drew the black leather book-weight. It is ticking. I am happy! I suddenly thought of Toscanini's famous claim, “there are no bad orchestras, only bad conductors.” With art, there are no boring objects, only boring beholders.

To end on this note, I think my depression is over. The bow was broken on Monday night, so Tuesday, Wednesday, and now it's Thursday morning. The depression lasted for only two days?! It felt like eternity. See, everything passes, the bad, the badder, and the baddest.

I just found out that it is a big lie that great artists, writers, philosophers and scientists proclaim that they work for the benifite of humanity. No, that is not the initial motivition. They create because they are hooked on pleasure. When the human mind is in the state of creativity, the alpha wave runs as fast as 30 cycles per second, thus the mind is alert and active and produces endorphins, which are chemistry for pleasure. That's why when the creative juice flows we are happy, and blocks send us into depression.

I have adopted the pleasure principle. When in pleasure, you are doing the right thing. I am painting at the moment.  I can't seem to remember what my real purpose on earth is.