2 PAGES ESSAY

FOLLOW THE REQUEST 

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POETRY

Part I. La muerte y el vivir (Death and living)
Art, philosophy, literature, our “Humanities”, what life do any of them have if they do not
connect to and enrich the actual lives we live? But they never have a life of their own, they only
come alive if you make them, where in the same movement they make you come alive. We have
relationships with art, and with ideas, much like how we have relationships with people. Can you
imagine just one person controlling the relationship? So how then can you imagine a writing, or
an artwork, creating all the meaning for you? Maybe in science, maybe in math… but not
everywhere, not in the Humanities, where you become aware of your own creativeness, of your
own being.

And so, our time now presents two ideas that can be useful to how we exist, and how we dream.
The two ideas I have in mind are Death and Living, which aren’t necessarily opposites, if you
can imagine that Death is a part of Life, its echo always haunts Life, and it is only fictionally
separated from Life. So these two themes: Death and Living (or ‘how we live’) swirl around
thoughts now. And of course, the maneuver of the Humanities is to connect what swirls around
thought today to Eternity, to human history, so that we can imagine that we are not alone in our
present, and we are not the first to step foot here – only the shoes we are wearing are new, but
that’s just fashion. What I think to do here, in the first part of this lesson, is to present two
creations – an image and a poem – that speak about Death and Living, imagining that they can
give us a gift that can make our lives better. They are from long ago and far away, but maybe so
are we.

Be aware, dear students, that the representation of Death in art has nothing to do with Halloween,
with horror movies, or with the sentiment of fear. To augment a person’s fear is a form of
cruelty, which has no place here. Instead, Death represented in art has generally had the purpose
of reminding the viewer of the precious value of Life, so as to say: ‘You will die one day, how
then do you want to exist? What do you want to do with the time that you have?’ Death is
invoked to remind us of Life’s value – not to be afraid of Death, but to appreciate Life. Here,
look at this….

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It is a tile mosaic from ancient Rome, from the city of Pompeii in southern Italy that was buried
in ash, volcanic ash, and so preserved for many centuries in a frozen form, without life, but only
its souvenirs. It was in the first century AD that this tile mosaic was made. It represents visually
the Latin expression memento mori, which means, “remember that you will die.” It is a tile
mosaic, it was built into the floor of someone’s house, it’s about the size of a big carpet, and it’s
something that would be looked at everyday, like a reminder. A reminder of what?
The symbolism of the image: The skull in the center, representing Death. The wheel below the
skull, representing Fortune. Like the wheel of Fortune. You know by now that the meanings of
words change, actually it seems that they degrade, that we lose their poetry and simplify their
meanings… but yet we believe we are progressing! “Fortune” today generally means “luck.” But
“fortunate” and “unfortunate” have an implication that go beyond the simple, reductive and
plebian notion of “striking a fortune,” or of the “Fortune 500”… But enough pedanticism, let’s
look back at the question: What is Fortune? We see it in the pair “fortunate” and “unfortunate.”
Fortune implies an awareness of the part of life that you do not control. That you cannot control.
But that effects how you are. Fortune denotes that a person’s power is limited, that a person’s

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knowledge (which is a form of power) is limited. According to the ancient notion – because
fortune after all is a Latin word – a person does not make his or her fortune or misfortune – it
simply happens, almost arbitrarily, and is received, not made. So Fortune can be tragic and
fatalistic, or it can also be magical and enrapturing. The point is that a person’s power to control
his or her own life is limited. There is the other side, beyond our control, and that was called
‘Fortune.’ Of course modern science, and even modern ethics, all want to ‘expand our individual
power’ and reduce the role of the unknowable and uncontrollable in life to a minimum, maybe
even to abolish them all together. Yet has it worked? Are control freaks secure or insecure
people?

And so, back to the mosaic, the wheel of Fortune appears under Death – when will Death arrive,
how will it arrive? How will she enter the room? What will she look like? Do you think she will
be wearing a name-tag? The wheel spins for the gambler, and it stops where it wants. But look
again. Between the Skull and the Wheel is a Butterfly. Yes, that’s what it is, a Butterfly. A
symbol of the soul that leaves the body and flies away at the time of death. Free and eternal,
reminding us of life’s happinesses.

What is that strange thing above the Skull, that wooden object with a string, perched evenly atop
the Skull? It is a Balance, and instrument for weighing things. And do you see that it is balancing
two things of equal weight? One isn’t heavier (meaning move valuable) than the other. What are
those two things that are equal, the same, when measured by Death? Look at the two sides of the
image, at the things hanging from the Balance. Do you see? More symbols. On your left: Those
are clothes, nice clothes, a dress the color purple (royalty!), a nice gold belt, and a well-matched
white scarf. You know, that actually is a cool outfit. And running through the dress is a spear – a
symbol of power. So there on the left you have very nice clothes, which signify material wealth
(but even if you don’t have material wealth today you can at least have good taste, which is a
wealth in itself… and then we can talk about the people who have a lot of money but no taste, but
we won’t, because that would be in bad taste…) I was saying: nice clothes on the left, a symbol
of material wealth, and a spear, a symbol of power. “Wealth and power.” Hurrah!

And on the right? Oh, but those are rags. Rags, clothes again. Tattered and un-dyed. So a symbol
of material poverty. And what is that running through the rags? It is a walking stick, and on it
hangs sack, where the vagabond puts all his things, and wanders around – using the walking stick
– because he has no place to go. They are symbols of desperation and abandonment, the walking
stick and the sack, the opposite of the spear of power. On the right we have poverty and
desperation, the other side of wealth and power.

And yet these two opposites, wealth-power and poverty-desperation are equally balanced when
the wheel of Fortune stops at Death, and it is time for the butterfly of the Soul to fly away. What
does it mean? From what possible perspective in your mind do wealth-power and poverty-
desperation appear indifferent, equal, and therefore unimportant? Is it amazing that such a
perspective can be imagined? What insight does this perspective make possible, and what can
you do with this insight? Insight (Einsicht in German) is a moment when we look at the way we
normally look at things, when we become aware that the way we look at things effects what we
see, and when we become aware that in our normal way of looking at things there was something
important that we didn’t see. An insight is a moment of revelation. It is a truth that we reach

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beyond common sense, and so it is rare, not common. And certainly can’t be taught didactically.
What is the insight in the tile mosaic? Well, there is wealth on the left, and poverty on the right.
And common sense has always said that we should spend our lives working to move from the
right to the left. Because of course the left is better – it certainly weighs more in our system of
values – and the right, poverty, is a plague and a curse: avoid it, escape it, for the sake of a better
life. But dear students, if it were that simple – or even that easy – then there would be nothing to
think about, and nothing to remember. And yet, we think. How dare we! A life is spent valuing
what? Pursuing what? Despising what? We all die, rich or poor, and “you can’t take it with you”
they say in English today, but how does your Soul fly away? What did we spend our lives doing?
What did we give importance to? ‘Death is the great equalizer,’ says a proverb. It is the equalizer
of the physical world and its corollary the material world (wealth-poverty). And yet the spiritual
world? Here the question is different, it is not ‘what you can take with you’ but what did you
leave behind, in the lives of others? And so kindness, compassion, love and an appreciation for
life are the real components of wealth – the ones we don’t appreciate enough, the ones maybe we
only see in a moment of insight, when we step outside of our common sense that sees only with
its eyes and not its heart.

Memento mori is the title of the tile mosaic, “remember your death.” How to live then, what to
live for…? We need to be reminded sometimes, is it true? When we waste our time we forget our
death, and hence live badly. What rat race are we in? Where do we think we’re going? And what
will it be like when we get there, to our “goal”, to our purple dress and gold belt and white scarf?
Which still is a very nice outfit.

The two things I share with you in this lesson – the artwork and the poem that you’ll see now –
were originally intended for the last lesson of our semester, titled Καλό ταξίδι (Kaló taxídi): bon
voyage in Greek. It was my way of saying goodbye to you, and wishing you happiness on the
journeys of your lives. But because the question of Living now comes into focus in our collective
solitudes, or better still the question of appreciating life, which is itself an art, I thought to
change the order of things and lessons. We are easy and we can do that, because the topics of our
conversation must follow life and not a syllabus… Ok, the intermezzo is over now, onto the
poem.

This is the poem:

The City
You said: ‘I will go to another land; I will try another sea.
Another city will turn up, better than this one.
Here everything I do is condemned in advance
and my heart – like a dead man’s – lies buried.
How long can my mind remain in this swamp?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I gaze
on the ruins of my life here, where I’ve spent
and botched and wasted so many years.’

You will find no new land; you will find no other seas.
This city will follow you. You will wander the same

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streets and grow old in the same neighborhoods;
your hair will turn white in the same houses.
And you will always arrive in this city. Abandon any hope
of finding another place. No ship, no road can take you there.
For just as you’ve ruined your life here
in this backwater, you’ve destroyed it everywhere on earth.

By Constantine Cavafy, a modern Greek poet writing in the 1890s, in the eastern Mediterranean.
This poem, so interesting, it only look depressing if you don’t make out its faint little halos, like
in Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna. You see? How you look at things determines what you
see. What does the poem say literally, with its words? To ask this questions means to
immediately ask another: What does it let you say, as you complete its meaning? The first
question first: What does the poem say? It says: “My life here sucks. I want to get out of here,
because I can’t figure out how to live here. Everything around me is an obstacle, nothing I do
works, no one appreciates me, and I am wasting my life.” But then it says something else, it
creates something, it creates an Elsewhere. “If I go to the Elsewhere – the not-here, the ‘city’ –
then everything will be cool. Then, and there (not here) I will have the life I want, I will be
happy, and everything will be great, it will be the opposite of what it is here and now.” So the
narrator is waiting for her life to start – she imagines it will start when she leaves where she is
and gets there, to the elsewhere, to the city. Or maybe, when she graduates her life will start, or
when she finds a good job her life will start, or when she loses 20 pounds her life will start…
Here, and now, nothing is possible, but there and then, everything will be possible. And in the
meantime? Wait, work, complain, and ‘try to get there’ – in the physical sense (graduate, look
for a job, whatever). This Elsewhere and this Hope, what do they mean? This Dream, what does
it mean? Could it be that these hopes and dreams and elsewheres can oppress the present? Can
they oppress reality? They can – says the poem – if we are foolish enough to think that the
Elsewheres, the Hopes and the ‘cities’ are places out there in the world that we just have to
arrive at physically. But that isn’t where they are. The city we want to live in, the person we want
to be, the life we want to live, are really places within ourselves that we have to go to, in the here
and now. Happiness is in the here and now if we know how to see it, and if we leave the
backwater of our own sad habits of seeing only obstacles in life and not possibilities, of seeing
only the world and not ourselves. The ending of the poem is strong, the voice says, “you’ve
become bitter and weak, and those habits of being you will take with you wherever you go…
Because ‘the city’ you are looking for you haven’t built yet in yourself, and yet that invisible city
is the only one you will ever really inhabit: The city of your soul.”

Well dear students, as I’ve written this I’ve combined and moved back and forth between the
first question (What does the poem itself say?) and the second question (What does the poem
allow the reader to say?), but such mixing and blending and frolicking of thoughts is the nature
of interpretation. You see, we have conversations with poems, and there are so many
conversations to be had.

Memento mori and live the life you want. Don’t wait for the future, for when you arrive in ‘the
city’ to be happy, to be the person you want. Now is the time to live, to love, and to be happy.
And with this feeling of such energy stored inside, when the doors are opened again and we can
be in each other’s company and be free, who would be so foolish as to ignore all the life and all

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the possibilities around him or herself, staring into the tunnel of a small screen or even smaller
obligation that now is all that we can physically see? Who can ignore the beauty of life after this,
after we’ve been deprived of it for a while? Who will still want to live invisibly and blindly after
this? Who will still take life for granted after this? Who will ignore the humanity that will
surround you again after this?

“It was in my darkest winter that I discovered my warmest summer,” wrote Albert Camus, the
summer that you can carry with you forever. You are lucky when you visit that summer in your
inner world, in your invisible city. You are fortunate, because life reverberates with the sound of
your own music. Here, look at this, and Italian proverb from the sixteen hundreds…

“When Fortune is playing for you, you dance very well,” it says at the top. And Fortune will play
its music again. Maybe it’s already started, maybe it’s playing here:

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Part II. Dolce far niente (Sweetly doing nothing)
The hologramish weather of these days solidifies the ambiance of misery that fills up the world
of empty streets and empty places where we use to meet. But we are far from it, contained within
our houses, and there, there are candles to light that no one else can see. Our inner worlds can be
places of joy, of candles, hiding amidst the empty grey, which we were use to anyway. The
exceptional doesn’t contradict the normal, but reveals its truth more lucidly – in these
exceptional times we can learn a lesson that applies to all times, and that just now perhaps is
more obvious: Beauty hides in the world. The way we are hiding now, and the way our dreams
might even be hiding from ourselves in our immobile time that is so well disposed for doing
nothing. It is when we do nothing that many things happen – but they happen within us, within
the closed houses of our souls, and they don’t appear outside on the streets of the social register
of productivity. Yet what happens inside, in hiding, can haunt the physical world, or the social
world, like a spellbound aura of dreams that never end. What better thing is there to take from
our solitude than our dreams? What better use is there of solitude than to dream? Yet to dream,
one must know how to do nothing, and that is the topic of this lesson from a distance: The magic
of doing nothing.

Is it a white magic or a black magic? Of course it depends from which point of view its creations
are regarded – because doing nothing is in fact, and in secrecy, one of the most creative states
that a person can exist in. I have arrived at the idea of writing to you about doing nothing through
a consideration of the ways that it is being impeded, even at a distance, by certain providers of
busywork who view it, quite simply, as a form of black magic. It is as though they are trying to
perform an exorcism against doing nothing – wishing to expel it from your lives as though it was
a virus. Points of view are entitled to exist, and points of view are entitled to view each other and
speak what they see. From my point of view I see this: A stream of busywork is at this moment a
direct impediment and a denial of the fecund possibilities contained within doing nothing. It is
always this way, now it is just more clear, because our situation is perfectly suited for doing
nothing most intensely, which means most creatively. There is a desperation, quite sad, in current
efforts to reestablish the order of social time, with its register of days and nights, the hours of the
clock, scheduled activities, and its apotheosis of anxiety: the deadline. Doing nothing exists
outside of the social register of time. The time spent doing nothing can’t be counted, because its
essence is a communion with eternity that laughs at clocks and to-do-lists. It floats above the
labyrinth of the reality principle so as to contemplate it for what it actually is: A collective
neurosis as disproportionate to life as a catcher’s mitt is to the amount of toilet paper really
needed to clean oneself properly. Doing nothing is a moment of revelation, and that is why the
coloring of its magic takes on different hues for different people – because there are different
types of people who each see the world as refractions of what they themselves are.

The concept of doing nothing comes wrapped to us like a gift, under different layers of
perception that we remove like children on their birthdays, unwrapping the paper to see what’s
inside. The first layer of wrapping paper is the perception of doing nothing accorded by our
society and its dominant ideas. Here, at the most superficial level, which is the best place to
begin – and to forget like wrapping paper – doing nothing appears as a manifestation of laziness.
And laziness signifies non-productive activity. Yet “productivity”, in this equation, is strictly
identified with the social circuit board of value whose organizing principle is money. Read
Benjamin Franklin, if you dare to know one of the architects of the concerns that organize your

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mind. “Time is money,” he says, and time that is not money is consequently nothing. So he did
not appreciate nothing, or perhaps he appreciated it too much and as such felt compelled to deny
it to himself. It is not from a consideration of an external necessity – the need to make things –
that a person denies his own inclination to doing nothing, it is instead from a consideration of an
internal necessity that is stronger – the need to dream – that a person builds labyrinths of reality
to hide in. The United States, and all countries imbued with the Protestant ethic, or “work ethic”,
have imagined themselves as being very different from the rest of the world, but especially from
the Catholic countries which constantly reappear in the Protestant field of vision as lazy. All this
means is that the fecundity and creativity of doing nothing are not perceptible from this point of
view, or from this point of denial. So very well, color me bad if you must as you see me doing
nothing, but your perceptions are just a wrapping, the gift you still have not seen. And know that
these perceptions of yours are destined to be forgotten, at least by me, at least for now.

But in the language and in the perception of Catholic countries – and in Italian in particular –
there is a different way of naming and of experiencing the gift wrapped under the first linguistic
layer of laziness – and this we can call the gift’s second and final layer of concealment, its
greatest moment of anticipation. In Italian there is the expression dolce far niente, which means
sweetly doing nothing. Some people don’t like sweets, they taste lazy to them. But maybe the
problem is with their palates and not with the sweets themselves. Could it be? Sugar is most
fascinating when it melts, and it is in the slowness and serenity of melting that doing nothing
finds its metaphor in sweetness. To sweetly do nothing is contrary to anxiously doing nothing
and to passively doing nothing. To anxiously do nothing is akin to running away from one’s
body, which is not a sign of health but a sign of misery that leaves one short of breath. To
passively do nothing is akin to consuming mass-produced dreams, which creates nothing but
voids that leaves one short of words. To sweetly do nothing is to love and to perceive the wealth
of things that you are actually doing in your state of trance, and to be amused by the melting of
the perceptions that have hid this idyllic place from you like obtrusive walls. Dolce far niente
can be coupled with an aphorism that speaks to its journey towards bliss through layers – through
wrappings – of judgmental perceptions: Rebel, you have been damned, why is it then that you are
so happy?

The gifts of doing nothing are ready to be seen now, shall we look at them? First let’s look at the
part of ourselves that we can see with our eyes – our bodies. In doing nothing our bodies’
movements and its aura are not determined by an external object – by a goal, by a machine, or by
a place to go. Our bodies serve nothing when we do nothing. Nor are our bodies merely in the
shadow of an external object when we do nothing – they are not simply resting and recharging
and preparing for another bout of activity, this would make our doing nothing serve an activity –
a future activity – which would deprive doing nothing of its charm. Our bodies are like a balloon
when we do nothing, a balloon that has been let go of by gravity’s personification – work. We’re
floating. What do our bodies do, and how do we see them when we float? When a body is not a
conduit of work, or of exercise which is a continuation of work’s logic, then it becomes a conduit
of an inner energy whose destination is the body itself. Interiority is manifested in the body when
it does nothing – when it does nothing for anybody else except its own. The meaning of that
interiority is perceived through sensuality. Look at art, dear students. Art is full of people doing
nothing. That is because people are at their most beautiful when they do nothing. Because when
we do nothing our bodies simply exist to be enjoyed, and to be enjoyed without any other

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purpose than enjoyment itself. The value of our bodies change when we do nothing, and so does
our posturing of them. We can pose in our repose, and make our bodies objects of art in the field
of physical reality, which is always hiding there under the field of work’s movements, and the
circuit boards of panic’s routines. Here we have crossed the bridge to the other side of panic: We
are now on the side of sovereignty. Sovereignty is a being serving itself and its own existence,
doing nothing, immobile in its own serene enjoyment and contemplation of itself. There are of
course an abundance of examples of bodies in motion and even at work in art, but consider that
as a rule the bodies shown in art are doing nothing. Yet in that state of doing nothing they are
creating beauty, which art then re-presents in its paintings and sculptures, in its poems and
songs.

Look at this painting –

Madeleine in the Bois d’Amour by Émile Bernard. She is doing nothing but contemplating
beauty, inner beauty, and that is why she looks so beautiful. The path to her serenity begins from
water, from its calming aura that dissolves concerns, that doesn’t know the solidity of facts, but
that is immersed in the current of feeling. She is in the Bois d’Amour, which is an actual place in

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France, but the meaning of this name is also symbolic in the contextual whole of the painting –
les bois d’amour means the woods of love in French. That is where she is. Love radiates from her
eyes as she looks at the sky, and it fills her face as she is content to contemplate her own secrets.
She is creating life’s meanings in this state of doing nothing, which in French is also called
rêverie, or dreaminess. When we dream like Madeleine we create a sense of our world and of
ourselves, we create reconciliations between all that is free within ourselves and all that is not.
We create reality’s possibilities when we take a distance from reality’s facts. Maybe she is even
creating her lover in the woods of love – the lover she remembers, or the one she hasn’t yet met.
She is pregnant with ideas in her state of doing nothing – this fecundity, or creativity – is
represented symbolically by her hand covering her stomach, which in art is an enduring symbol
of pregnancy, which in its turn is an enduring symbol of creativity. Maybe the best teachers are
only midwives of the ideas you create yourselves.

Says someone: “But most people don’t see this beauty that is idle and serene, that has to be
reached through the path of one’s own aqueous tranquility and delicate perception.” It is true,
most people don’t. But then you have to ask yourself a question: Should you see life, and
yourself, through the They that constitute “most people”? Each person will answer this question
according to the courage of their own innocence.

Here is another painting of a person who knows how to do nothing very well –

This one is actually called Dolce far niente and it is by the English artist John William Godward.
Godward was born in industrial Victorian England where time was money – just ask Charles
Dickens – but he escaped. He followed his imagination. First he changed location and went to
Italy, and then he changed time and went into antiquity, which is where this painting is set. What

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is the bird that she plays with? What has she created in her perception of it? What stories will
she tell about the bird? What stories can we tell about her? Is she floating like the bird? Do you
see it in her face and her arm? No form of consumption can ever make a person as happy as this
form of self-creation – and so businesses of all types must try to exorcize this form of bliss from
the realm of experience, and brandish it with the label of doing nothing – simply because it does
nothing for them.

But even in our California people are good at doing nothing, yes, even here. Look –

This painting is by Jerald Silva, who paints in Sacramento. Do you see the wonderment in her
eyes? What is she discovering? What new forms of life are her dreams creating? Why is it that
we are the best at doing nothing when we lay down, in a position from which we cannot look
down on anything else? Perhaps, in our state of floating as we lay down, we do look down on the
busy world from the far heights of our dreams, and through this reversal of perspective we
reconcile ourselves to the world’s weight.

But sometimes when we do nothing our spines are erect –

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This is a painting of Xochiquetzal, the Aztec goddess of beauty and love, by Rick Ortega, who
paints in Los Angeles. Xochiquetzal, in Nahautl, the language of the Aztecs, means precious
flower. Flowers only look like they’re doing nothing, but what are they actually doing? They are
growing in their apparent stillness so that we can admire them and see our own dreams in them.
She is posing here like a flower because that is what a body can do when it is not directed by the
remote control of a goal, of a future, or of an object. It can grow from within, and exist for the
lucky few who have the eyes to admire it.

May you do nothing better.

Dimitri Papandreu
September 13, 2020