Issues with research and blogging

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Before I start with the post itself, a question, if I may: Ever had the problem that you start a post and leave it for a day or two and when you come back to it you find that the energy you thought was present in the post... just... suddenly disappeared? And then, when you try to keep working on it, you start deleting all the phrases you though were good, and the post goes from good to bad to "Oh my God! where's my post, I lost it in all these words!!" Well it happened with this post so I had to restart it from scratch.

Now back to the topic at hand: Research.

Well, I don't know about you but this material I'm using to create my video installation isn't coming from nowhere. Actually I didn't know anything about stupas before I took my Asian history of art class, so I was pretty much had no knowledge on the subject. So I asked a professor in the history of art
department if he knew any good material to learn more about Buddhist
stupas and he recommended this book from Lama Anagarika Govinda called:
Psycho-cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stūpa. And here is when the issues start. If you don't feel the even slightly overwhelmed by the title or the author's name there's something wrong with you. Of course this isn't a problem, it's just more of a sign of issues to come. One of the problem that I had was that I had to catch up on a lot of material that the book takes for granted the reader knows. Which in my case is pretty much the core concepts of Buddhism and its history. But I think that the main problem was translating the ideas he put forth and finding what sort of material I could use to represent visually in the installation. But either way it was a book of great help for me and if anyone out there wants to learn more about these structures this is a great book to read. Actually quite a bit of the stuff you see posted on the internet about Stupas comes from this book.

I think I'll leave this post here as I can feel it draining my powers from me and leaving me with less time time to work on this project. Right now, I think I'll start with the models of the three stupas I'll be using in the video.