Clouds of Unknowing is a monthly newsletter by @original_chills, mining the present for unserious sermons, other worlds, and little rituals.
On the fifteenth of December we went to the Tantra exhibition at the British Museum. The next day the museum was closed, as was the wonderful Italian café on the north-east corner of Russell Square where the three of us had lunch. Engage: disengage. The trip was worthwhile, but to be honest a lot of the exhibition didn’t make a big impact, despite being the first I’d gone to since the March lockdown. The rigmarole of keeping apart from everyone and wearing masks made the usual awkwardness of navigating the busy Reading Room space even more acute.
Perhaps the most memorable thing was the immersive recreation of of an open-roofed yogini temple, complete with sound effects (you can find the video at the end of this page). As well as catching something of the beautiful terror of the yogini/dakini (see also David Chapman’s Buddhism for Vampires), it seemed to point most directly to the communities that innovated and incubated tantra. It was these transgressive practices and ideas which later found such vivid expression in the art and material forms that comprised the rest of the exhibition.
Last year in the middle of the first lockdown I wrote about the process of learning, the difficulty of actually getting started, and the need for communities of practice. I didn’t really express it in that piece, but losing my physical communities of practice, especially for music making, was one of the most difficult parts of last year. The various virtual substitutes offered something, and even had a few advantages, but there was still a great lack. The occasional foray back into live music-making has often been almost surprisingly emotional; it viscerally engages something that is nearly impossible over the internet.
This engagement is part of what appeals to me about tantra, and something that I’m really looking for in my spiritual practice too. Tantric practice signifies a commitment to engage with the world in all its messiness and complexity, using desire and other such ‘unwholesome’ states as fuel for transformation. Sutric Buddhism on the other hand is grounded in the principle of renunciation, disengaging so as to avoid falling into desire, anger, etc (n.b. this is an over-simplification!).
So much modern discourse around modern life, especially in the spiritual space, seems to encourage us to simplify, reduce our mental load, dive into deep work, Waldenponding or new monasticisms. Maybe to some extent you can try reducing the number of things you need to think about to match your personal bandwidth. But in the long run, aside from us all being dead, it seems to me that it might be more satisfying to see if I can expand my bandwidth instead, and thrive in the partly managed chaos of the everyday.
The Logbook
I really loved this thing on Movement Radio called The Sonic Reader, reading from Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash while playing contemporary bits of jungle tunes and pirate radio ads.
I’ve also been enjoying this bouncy, bright EP by Two Shell, on Livity Sound.
I can thoroughly recommend Lucy Keer’s Speedrun on Sensemaking if you also feel in need of a primer on where the word came from.
For more links I’ve been doing occasional commonplace updates over on Tumblr.
And wasn’t that boat getting stuck fun? “And maybe the boat can stay stuck for just a minute, so I can keep on cherishing a situation that makes sense.”