Heroes Not Zombies

I went to see the paeonies in Ueno Park in Tokyo yesterday. I’ve been before but I was as delighted this time as I was last time.

(by the way, look how the light just seems to shine out of this flower – like a halo or something)

I recently read these words I noted down from Iain McGilchrist’s superb “The Master and His Emissary”

Smiling, laughter and dance are – gloriously – useless; how many of us really beleive that when we dance, laugh or smile we do so ultimately because of some dreary utility to the group to which we belong?

Perhaps, indeed the fact that so many of our distinguishing features are so ‘useless’ might make one think. Instead of looking, according to the manner of the left hemisphere, for utility, we should consider, according to the manner of the right hemisphere that finally, through intersubjective imitation and experience, humankind has escaped from something worse even than Kant’s “cheerless gloom of chance”: the cheerless gloom of necessity.

I smile a lot – I think I’m known for it. I kinda hope that if there’s ever a little statue left in my name it’ll be smiling…..a bit like this little bohdisattva I saw in Otagi Nenbustu-ji.

And then, this morning I stumbled across this quote from Poincare, the mathematician –

The scientist doesn’t study Nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful

We live in such a utilitarian society these days. I don’t like it. I like to live for the fun of it, for the curiosity, the passion, the love and the sheer pleasure.