Loie Vaughn

This week I was very distracted by the first real spring weather (as I’m sure everyone else was) but I did manage to accomplish a fair amount. Monday I finished the rough drafts for my proposal, schedule, budget and bibliography, and Tuesday I had a Skype conference with Laurie, Belinda, Ashe, Jeremy and Taylor (the last four are in Los Angeles). Laurie gave me some good feedback for my project, and we decided I need to focus on one specific animation piece, rather than just produce several small animation exercises. So, I decided to read about three different philosophies which have always interested me: Existentialism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism. To start, I gathered books to read: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Essays in Existentialism, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka (I cut this one, though as it was more about the lives of these authors, and though interested, I need to read more about the concepts of Existentialism, not the lives of those who wrote about it), Nothing and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Secret of the Golden Flower (the story used as a guide to Taoism), and ThePsychology of the Imagination (also cut, due to a lack of reading time… I will pick it up later, however). 

I am now almost done reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Zen Buddhism is not a religion. I would call it more of a mindset. The ultimate goal of this practice is to be completely aware of the here and now. Suzuki (the author) often seems to contradict himself, but then works through this contradiction, and somehow the point makes sense. For example, “If you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit, and if you try not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort. The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind. So concentrating is just an aid to help you realize ‘big mind,’ or the mind that is everything (Suzuki, pg. 33).”

As far as my art goes, I have a small storyboard done for a potential scene in my project in which the world seems to fall away in a state of unbalance, and a mouth is saddened by this. The world is soon replaced by the beautiful black of space, which gives the mouth peace and acceptance. “Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony (Suzuki, pg. 32).” To practice some movement I made a couple tiny flip-books. One is a ball bouncing, and one is a black hole grabbing color. For inspiration, I have been watching animation shorts on the Experimental Animation Techniques website and on the Wooster Collective site.

And last, but not least, I finished my proposal packet for week three (which was severely revised this morning).