Godfrey Reggio

Last night I pulled the DVD Koyaanisqatsi from the shelf and watched a bit of it. That sent me to the web to see if I could find out what Godfrey Reggio was up to these days. I found an interview from last year (where, coincidentally, GR is being interviewed by someone I know from the SF, Richard Whittaker.) Here is a portion of that interview.

GR: ....I’ll use a reference to Joseph Brodsky, the expatriate from the old Soviet Union. He was an American poet laureate in 1991, I think. I’m a big, big fan of his poetry and books, and especially his essays, one in particular Less Than One which begins with his explanation of the great conundrum of Marx: is it your mind that determines your behavior or your behavior that determines your mind?

Brodsky knew that for most people, clearly, it’s our behavior that determines the content of our mind, because we’re creatures of habituation. So Brodsky’s brilliant insight on how to change one’s mind is to change one’s behavior, and his response to that conundrum of Marx’s was to step outside of the world and yet be in it. That echoes, of course, Christ’s statements of being in the world, but not of the world—very meaningful to me. So I’m referring to the Middle Ages in that sense, of being outside of contemporary American life.

What I learned is that it’s what I did every day that determined what I was going to think. I’ve never forgotten that. Every now and then I’ll give a convocation address at a university and I try to always caution the students to not let their diplomas become their death certificates. If you give up your imagination, if you give up your ability to create for the wages of a good job, then you might give up that which predicates us as human beings, the ability to create our own lives. So I felt that stepping out of this world, yet being in it would be a way of achieving some relative degree of freedom. I’ve tried to live that way and I’m grateful to the church for that experience.

RW: I’m struck by your discovery of the importance of the things you do every day. Can you say more about that?

GR: I’ll give you an anecdote. I was in Albuquerque in the early 90s and the Dalai Lama was at the university of New Mexico giving a talk. The place was packed. He’d just finished giving his talk and said he’d take questions. A woman jumped up and asked, “Your Holiness, what is the single most important thing that I could give attention to?” Without even a thought, he answered, “Routine.”

Now I understood that immediately. In my order, the rule, or routine, was the highest order of attention, that is, being attentive to what one did every day—because what we do is what we become. It’s not just what’s in our minds. That’s an illusion. Our minds are a very small part of who we are. Although we consider our brain our largest organ, it’s vastly humiliated when compared to our behavior.

RW: The attentiveness, that’s the thing, right? Because my routine is usually just a place for daydreaming.

GR: Exactly. In Sanskrit there’s a word ekagrata, which means one-pointedness. Let’s give it a free form translation. It means the ability to focus on something. That ability to focus unrelentingly is what gives one the ability to walk on water, move mountains and do things that are beyond our wildest imagination. But that’s not something we learn. It’s something we have to struggle to acquire. We’re going to have to go upstream to do that.