100th Monkey Books

Cultural Matrix & Social Change



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Coming Into Being: Artifacts & Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
William Irwin Thompson (1996) 336pages

This book is addressed more to the imagination of culture than to the academic management of scholarly research. it would be impossible for any individual to have scholarly or scientific expertise in all the areas that I need to consider in examining the human evolution of consciousness; so, clearly, the only way to go from one end of history to the other, covering many different fields, is to shift from an academic to an aesthetic mode of cognition. Sometimes, I may know a little more about some subject than others, but my orientation is always that of a male heterosexual writer trying to understand his literary tradition at a time when neither one's traditional culture nor one's traditional sexual mode of being in a body is sufficient to understand the cultural transformation engulfing us on a global scale. My impulse was not to retreat defensively into a tight canon of masterpieces for a vanishing "Western civilization," but to try to expand imaginatively into a global canon of masterworks that expresses our new sense of identity in a planetary culture in which Enheduanna, Valmiki, and Lao Tzu speak to us as much as - and not in place of - Homer, Sappho, and Vergil...Although my orientation to the texts is that of a writer and not a scholar, my way of living out loud with these ideas and visions is also that of a talker. - from the author's Foreword (St.Martin's Griffin)



A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist
Robert Levine (1997) 258pages

In A Geography of Time I seek to understand the richness and complexity of views about time and the pace of life among cultures and cities and people around the world. Since time is the very cornerstone of social life, the study of a people's temporal constructions offers a precious window into the psyche of culture, including our own. In researching other places I have learned as much about my own culture as I have those of others....If I have done my job well, this book will set a clearer focus on the pace of our own lives as well as that of others. How do we use out time? What is this use doing to our cities? To our relationships? To our own bodies and psyches? Are there decisions we have made without consciously choosing them? Alternative tempos that we might prefer? Perhaps we can be led, like Hawthorne's Wakefiled, to "look back and see what's true there," and in our own ways, to achieve temporal prosperity. - from the author's Preface: Time Talks, With An Accent (Basic Books / Perseus)



The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
Lewis Hyde (1979) 327pages

It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two "economies," a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art. There are several distinct senses of "gift" that lie behind these ideas, but common to each of them is the notion that a gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us. Thus we rightly speak of "talent" as a "gift," ...We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift.... These two senses of gift refer only to the creation of the work - what we might call the inner life of art; but it is my assumption that we should extend this way of speaking to its outer life as well, to the work after it has left its maker's hands. That art matters to us - which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience - that work is received by us as a gift is received....I have hoped to write an economy of the creative spirit: to speak of the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture. I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, not those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us. - from the author's Introduction (Vintage)



Look, Listen. Read
Claude Levi-Strauss (1993) Translated by Brian C. J. Singer(1997) 202pages

For more than half a century, many of the great breakthroughs in anthropology have come from the mind of Claude Levi-Strauss, one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. The illuminating works of Levi-Strauss have redefined how we look at culture, society, and the human condition. In Look, Listen, Read, he focuses on our aesthetic sensibilities and explores how timeless works of art exert their hold on the human psyche. Drawing from the visual, musical, and literary arts, Levi-Strauss reflects on the work of various artists, including painters Poussin and Ingres, tying them to the musical innovations of Rameau, the poetry Rimbaud, and the aesthetic theories of Diderot, Rousseau, and others. In a profound concluding synthesis, Levi-Strauss shows how these works of European culture, touch our essential humanity in a way that transcends nationality, converging cultural differences into universal principles and redefining the role art plays in the human mind. (Basic Books / Perseus)



Peripheral Visions: learning along the way
Mary Catherine Bateson (1994) 243pages

There is a spiritual basis to attention, a humility in waiting upon the emergence of pattern from experience. The willingness to assimilate what has been seen or heard draws other life into increasingly inclusive definitions of the self. Looking, listening, and learning offer the modern equivalent of moving through life as a pilgrimage. Even death is a time to learn. This is a book of stories and reflections strung together to suggest a style of learning from experience. ...Our species thinks in metaphor and learns through stories. Many tales have more than one meaning. It is important not to reduce understanding to some narrow focus, sacrificing multiplicity to what might be called the rhetoric of merely: merely a dead sheep, only an atavistic ritual, nothing but a metaphor. Openness to peripheral vision depends on rejecting such reductionism and rejecting with it the belief that questions of meaning have unitary answers. Twenty years after it occurred, in a world increasingly troubled by ethnic conflict, a remembered ritual on the Feast of Sacrifice came to exemplify for me layer upon layer of processes whereby human beings can join and communicate and learn in spite of profound differences. The story grew into this book as memories from Iran resonated with memories of years lived in Israel and in the Philippines. A Persian garden has become a magic carpet. The process of spiraling through memory to weave connection out of incident is basic to learning, so that in this and perhaps other ways the text is a demonstration of its subject matter. - from the author's 1st chapter: Improvisations in a Persian Garden (Harper Perennial)



The Secret Life of Money: How Money Can Be Food for the Soul
Tad Crawford (1994) 287pages



Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art
Lewis Hyde (1998) 417pages

...and the best way to describe the trickster* is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found - sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it , sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms... My own position, in any event is not that artists** I write about are tricksters but that there are moments when the practice of art and this myth coincide. I work by juxtaposition, holding the trickster stories up against specific cases of imagination in action, hoping that each might illuminate the other. If the method works, it is not because I have uncovered the true story behind a particular work of art but more simply that the coincidences are fruitful, making us think and see again. Such goals are in keeping with the trickster's spirit, for he is the archetype who attacks all archetypes. He is an "eternal state of mind" that is suspicious of all eternals, dragging them from their heavenly preserves to see how they fare down here in this time-haunted world. * Hermes/Greece, Eshu / West Africa, Krishna/India, Coyote/North America, among others ** Picasso, Duchamp, John Cage, and Frederick Douglas - from the author's Introduction (North Point Press)



The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science
J. Bronowski (1908-74) selected & edited by Piero E. Ariotti in collaboration with Rita Bronowski (1978) 185pages

This collection of eleven essays focuses on Jacob Bronowski's philosophy of art. The first five discuss The Nature of Art, The Imaginative Mind in Art, The Imaginative Mind in Science, The Shape of Things, and Architecture as a Science and Architecture as an Art. The Mellon Lectures (1969), Art as a Mode of Knowledge, discuss examples from music, poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, industrial design, and engineering artifacts. The six essays are: The Power of Artifacts; The Speaking Eye, The Visionary Ear; Music, Metaphor, and Meaning; The Act of Recognition; Imagination as Plan and as Experiment; The Play of Values in the Work of Art. (MIT Press)



The World's Religion: Our Great Wisdom Traditions Huston Smith (1958/1991) 399pages

What a strange fellowship this is, the God-seekers in every land , lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange, ethereal harmony? Does one faith carry the lead, or do the parts share in counterpoint and antiphony where not in full throated chorus? We cannot know. All we can do is try to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine. Such listening defines the purpose of this book... It is a book that seeks to embrace the world. In one sense, of course, that wish must fail. Even when stretched to the maximum, a single pair of arms fall short, and feet must be planted somewhere. This book, then, has a home - a home whose doors swing freely in and out, a base from which to journey forth and return, only to hit the road again in study and imaginings when not in actual travel. If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and suspects one will never go, this book is born of such homesickness... It is a book that takes religion seriously. it is not a tourist guide. This is a book about religion that exists, in William James's contrast, not as a dull habit but as an acute fever. It is about religion alive. Religion alive confronts the individual with the most momentous option life can present. It calls the soul to the highest adventure it can undertake, a proposed journey across the jungles, peaks, and deserts of the human spirit. The call is to confront reality, to master the self. Those who dare to hear and follow that secret call soon learn the dangers and difficulties of its lonely journey...Finally this book makes a real effort to communicate. I think of it as a work of translation, one that tries not only to penetrate the worlds of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, but to throw bridges from those worlds to the reader's world. - from the author's Chapter One: Point of Departure (Harper SanFrancisco)


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