Marsilio Ficino's "Book of Life"

Marsilio Ficino's Book of Life arrived today.

The Book of Life was a surprise . . .

I'm exchanging journals with Kate from Wyoming. You remember the Moleskine Project I talked about in "The Unknown Aspect of Human Creativity" . . .

She included a translation of the underground classic from 1480.

I thought of Lin Yutang and The Importance of Living . . . . a book that is very important to me.

Ficino talks about the Muses, Mercury, Apollo, and Venus as if they were real people. The language is infused with metaphors the author seems to take literally.

The Book of Life is a book of advice, of counsel, on healthy living. Ficino sees himself as a physician of the soul. He writes, "I have done the healing medicine of souls for a long time now . . ."

Here is a curious passage:

How diligently one must take care of the brain, the heart, the stomach, and the spirit

Runners take care of their legs, athletes take care of their arms, musicians take care of their voices. Those who study and write ought to be at least that much concerned about their brains, and their hearts, their livers and their stomachs. They should even be more concerned, since these parts are more important, and more often used. A skilled craftsman takes great care of his instruments, a soldier his horse and weapons, a hunter his dogs and birds, a lyre-player his lyre, and so on.

Only the priests of the Muses, only the greatest hunters of good and truth, are so negligent and so unfortunate that they seem to neglect totally that instrument with which they are able to measure and comprehend the universe. The instrument is the spirit itself, which doctors define as some vapor of the blood, pure, subtle, warm, and clear. From the warmth of the heart, where it is produced from thinner blood, it flows to the brain, and there the spirit works hard for the functioning of the interior, rather than the exterior, senses. That is why the blood serves the spirit, the spirit serves the senses, and the senses, finally, serve reason.

On the surface, many of these claims sound absurd. Nobody living in the 21st century would agree with a sentence that begins with, "Only the priests of the Muses". And yet, this writing somehow still evokes the truth.

Complete falsehoods interwoven with truths.

The mind is important to me. I just realized this two weeks ago when I immediately stopped smoking pot.

Earlier this evening I was sitting in Border's, where I go every evening to read. As I said, the mind is important to me. Without it, I couldn't read the New York Times, which gives me so much pleasure. And I couldn't write these essays for the Blog of Innocence, which challenge me.

It would be harder every night to write a chapter of my novel. But instead I settle for a task which is hard but not too hard. My mind is able to concentrate better when I'm not frustrated by the task.

I think when I die my ghost will stay here on earth, mainly to roam through Border's and wait for the cafe girls to fill up my coffee. The cafe girls will probably end up ignoring my ghost because they won't know it's me . . .

While I was reading Kate's journal in Border's, I had a palpable sense of her, like she was there beside me.

At the end of the first entry in the journal, I began to draw in the remaining space left on the page.

I drew for about an hour, completely engrossed in squiggly lines.

Doodling has a certain effect on me. I disappear into my doodles. I stop thinking. There is nothing . . .

During the day, I'm ceaselessly striving. I'm striving for a picture in my mind. Every morning I wake up and try to attain this ideal.

You can imagine I'm regularly disappointed. But I brush off the disappointment--I've learned to.

A number of days go by when I'm possessed by a flurry of intoxication over my perceived accomplishments. I feel as though I am really getting there, I'm nearing that perfect thing I want so bad.

It's a dream, a rush, a hallucination. I feel the pulse of achieving whatever it was in my head, whatever seemed so beautiful I had to chase after it.

There are moments when I am thrilled to be me. There are moments when I am giddy over nothing. Because everything feels so right.

The instrument is the spirit itself, which doctors define as some vapor of the blood, pure, subtle, warm, and clear. From the warmth of the heart, where it is produced from thinner blood, it flows to the brain, and there the spirit works hard for the functioning of the interior, rather than the exterior, senses. That is why the blood serves the spirit, the spirit serves the senses, and the senses, finally, serve reason.

I don't even know what it means to be spiritual anymore. I used to meditate. But then I changed my habits, I acquired bad ones again, such as smoking and drinking.

Every day I am caught up in the picture in my mind. There is a larger picture, a landscape, like the city of Oz. But there are pieces too, fragments of the dream, and I try to grab these. I try to snatch them out of the air . . .

Melancholy . . .

Melancholy, that is, black bile, is something double: some of it is called natural by doctors, but another part touches on burning. This natural type is nothing other than a part of the blood getting thicker and dryer. The burning type is divided, however, into four kinds: for it is produced by combustion of either natural melancholy, pure blood, bile, or phlegm.

Nonsense, isn't it? Or maybe, the most sense. It kind of sounds like when a psychiatrist explains a mental disorder by calling it a chemical imbalance in the brain.

What doctor can explain sadness or joy? We are a living cocktail of emotion all hours of the day.

Maybe the only doctor who can explain us is Ficino and his Book of Life . . .

I wouldn't take every word literally. Unless you know that words are metaphors to begin with; that nothing can be taken literally. We say, "dog". But what is a dog?

Those are my thoughts tonight. They are jumbled, irrelevant. I'm making a post on the Blog of Innocence every day. This is part of the picture in my mind.

Image Credits:

http://www.mgscarsbrook.com/profile

Preface to the Blog of Innocence

I like to think of myself as someone who is drafting and re-drafting his life until it makes sense. Life, being irrational, never fully makes sense and so I am continually making up new stories about myself in a creative and naive way.

But this is how children think. Nothing is absolute. Everything is provisional for a child. Tell the child one story, she will believe it, because any story to a child has the possibility of being true.

Adults on the other hand conform to a rigid set of beliefs, true or untrue only according to their own reality.

I write because it is a door I once opened and I continue to go back and forth through that door. I explore the byways and the tunnels of myself.

Whatever I write always has the possibility of being true--at least to me--and to write down my reality is satisfying.

The question of whether what I do is art or not. Sometimes I am intentionally creating art and sometimes I am just writing. The best writing comes out when I am not intentionally doing anything--in fact the best writing comes out when I don't know what I'm doing or saying. But I think I like to write because it feels like someone is listening. It feels like what I am saying is not only true to me but true to others as well.

In a way, I am a compulsive writer. I will write because it's a drive.

Maybe I should stop.

Sometimes I do. But when I stop writing, I read a lot and reading activates my imagination and soon I am writing again.

Whatever I've been saying in the last few paragraphs, I'm not aiming at anything. I'm circling around the mood and the moment of my experience, gladly touching the borders and playing with the edges.

Everyone has their own secret life. We all have minds which are islands--between those islands flow the rivers of our hearts, but the mind itself is lonely. Which is strange, because we retreat into our minds so often. We retreat into our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, and we find solace in them even though they are ridiculous.

But there is safety in one's private mind, the thoughts of which no one can read. Because they are private entertainments of the self.

If you have pets, then you know the comforts of having non-human company. The human-animal connection is unique, and for obvious reasons, animals are incredibly loved by humans.

Ultimately, I think what we are stuck with is habit. Whatever habits you cultivate within your lifetime, those are the heavens and hells of your existence. Many habits fall between these two extremes and that's why our lives are pretty mundane.

Most of our habits are mundane in the everyday sense. We go to work, we eat meals, we tend to our homes and our families, we do chores. Perhaps that's why novelty is so interesting and stimulating.

I seek novelty. If I am not seeking novelty in dramatic and bizarre ways, I am seeking novelty in the miniature sense.

I do appreciate a well-ordered life, everything manageable and in its right place. This stems from the pure gratification of a sense of control. But as far as I can tell, control is something that most people try to exert over themselves and their environments.

My habits are deeply fulfilling mundane rituals that I carry out, such as going to Borders every morning to have my coffee and read the New York Times. To me, the Times is my mainstay to a normal, functioning adulthood. I am not saying the specific paper has the same magical effect on everyone. But for me reading the paper is very soothing and it reaffirms my sense of self.

I admire the quality of the writing in the Times and I believe it improves my own writing. But there is something else about the ritual which stabilizes me.

And yet, I seek novelty.

Women provide men with an immediate burst of novelty and distraction. If you are ever bored, start a romantic relationship and you will find how interesting your life gets.

But I believe that I ultimately retreat back into my own private mind, and that shared space between me and another person gradually lessens or dries up and dies.

I believe in long-term relationships, I am cynical towards permanent ones.

Right now I don't know where I am in terms of the opposite sex. Do I want to get married? Do I want to have children? Would I prefer to stay single?

The opposite sex is delightful. Loving can also be a doorway to a higher potential for one's being, but in most cases, we are not mature in love for long enough. We stop loving and I cannot explain or understand that.

Love gets degraded over time, diminished, and terribly distorted until it is not even love but something representing its opposite: hate.

Now my cats are quiet. The heater has stopped humming and the only sound in the room is of my keys clicking.

I think about my past life, my life in Spain and Las Vegas. I think of the adventures I once had and now being here in this moment of early, untainted adulthood.

I'm making the right choices now. Thank God. I am rational about things. I am aware of habit and how it has the power to lull me into a state of unconsciousness.

We grow ourselves. We grow our personalities and our behaviors. Like a garden, we grow ourselves--and once we were sick gardens but now we are growing healthier. Once we were patches of weeds over a dusty mound of dirt, but now we are seeking wholeness and fruit.

We want to bear fruit. For ourselves, for others.

We learn in time to survive, and even better, we learn to thrive.

It is the unfortunate fact of being human that we are constantly working against ourselves. We like to be our own enemies. And I think it is better that we just accept this as a matter of fact, that we accept the demons inside of us which want to destroy us, even if that destruction is a slow-going poison.

Because, ultimately, we must die and we know we must die. So the destructive force inside each one of us is familiar and close. We know the destructive side as much as we know the creative side. We know when we do good to ourselves and our bodies, and we know when we do bad.

Good and bad are only relative to our own individual experiences. Doing wrong to others is doing wrong to oneself.

But it is almost impossible to escape the cloud of unconsciousness that hovers over each one of us. And in an ironic display, we can see everyone else's flaws but not our own.

It is like the inability to smell one's own scent. The smell is palpable to others, but not to yourself.

I don't repress the mystery about myself; I form it.

I also celebrate it.

I have been called naive before, and after all, this blog is called The Blog of Innocence.

We are all innocent in life. We are innocent to the radical mystery of it.

No matter what we do, what errors we make, what horrors befall us, we are all human, we are all innocent.

Read a recent essay, "Loving Her" . . .