Art 10
Presented on: Saturday, June 5, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Art 10, which means that we're getting close to the most difficult of all of the phases of our inquiry, and that is history. History is the most difficult. It's more difficult than Science even, because history is the sand pit in the golf course, and we've been stuck there for two hundred years, unable to get out and move forward. And the difficulty of history is compounded because we have been in it so long in what John Bunyan called "the slow of despond". That there's a point in one's development, individually and as a race upon a planet, where you can't get out and the more that you try to get out, the deeper goes the hole. And so we are now very deep in a hole. And one of the most poignant images of the contemporary scene is a Japanese movie called Woman Of The Dunes, where there's this deep pit and there's a, something in the pit, a mineral that's needed, salt, for the village to survive. But the pit is so deep that it's difficult to go down, in fact someone who goes down has to stay there. And so the village has provided this attractive beautiful woman, a nice house down there. And the woman's mate has died and so they find this Japanese photographer from Tokyo and they tell him that there's an interesting story that he can report. And they lower him in the pit and they leave him there, and there's no way out.
We're in a kind of a historical situation that for two hundred years we have not been able to get out, and now it is almost impossible to get out and the sides of the pit are crumbling and we're going to be buried alive, so what do you do. And we're in that kind of situation, now at the close of the twentieth century, at the close of the second millennium. And the difficulty of the historical pit that we're in is compounded, not only because of two hundred years, but because of two thousand years, which are another vibration, they are another reverberation of the same disease, the same illness, the same sand pit. And we are stuck historically, because the last two hundred years have not really changed the most important aspect of the historical situation and that is man. Man has not changed. Styles of cultural expression has changed. Dress has changed, costuming has changed, entertainment has changed, but the nature of man has not changed. And in fact when we look at classical authors from two thousand years ago, there has been no change in man for two thousand years. That is to say, two thousand years ago, human sociological reactions were very much what they are today. Big league sports is a Roman gladiator show, just put (?).
And so we're in a difficulty where history is an impossible challenge, and the assignment that I have given to help us find a way out of history has never been successfully accomplished. No one has ever done the assignment successfully. The assignment is very simple. The assignment is write your own history of the last two years of your life. It sounds simple. No one has ever been able to do it, and many thousands of people have been through this kind of process. Thirty years ago in Canada I taught a variant of History, it was called Parallel Lives. From two thousand years ago, the genius who was trying to deal with the historical problem then, his name was Plutarch. You may have heard of Plutarch. Parallel lives. He was a Priest of the high mysteries. He was a Hierophant of the sacred Hermetic mysteries, but he was also a very great historian. But he didn't write histories of this or that country. He didn't write histories of Greece or histories of Rome, he wrote biographies. He wrote histories of Persons which is very much more difficult than to write the history of Rome. The great Roman historian Livy was extraordinarily refined and his Latin, in fact, is called the milky lines of Livy; just enormously erudite and learned and beautifully rounded. He was like a Roman Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson. And he wrote a great history of Rome. We have, I think about a third of it, and it takes up about fifteen volumes.
But Plutarch's insight was that the history of even Rome is not the gauge to find the real. The gauge to find the real is in the human personality, the human person. The history of a human person is the center of the mystery of history. And that the problem is that one cannot find a form accurate enough, concise enough to present the mystery of the person at play in history. And Plutarch tried a very ingenious ploy. He thought since the human person is so complex, I need a complex background against which to see the form of that person's complexity, so I will use another person. I will put a pair of persons, parallel lives, and I will see one person in terms of this other person, and this person in terms of this person. And so the old Hermetic wisdom was that by pairing, equanimity, you can bring two complexities to comprehension. And Plutarch tried mightily. In fact he gave a very special spin to his parallel lives, he took one Greek and one Roman. He took Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and paired them together. And two thousand years ago that was as good as someone could do. But there is a flaw, there's a fatal flaw in that kind of parallel lives. And the fatal flaw is rather obvious once someone says it. You, none of you are either Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. And the important of dealing with history is WHO ARE YOU. And the fact is, that in a very precise formulation, no one knows who they are, and that's the problem in not being able to negotiate history. No one alive knows who they are. And so we are all orphans in the storm (to use a D.W. Griffith epithet). We are all orphans in a storm, and we belong together, We belong together, because we're conscious orphans. And that's about as far as we've been able to go. It's not far enough.
So History is coming up, and in order to help us get to the threshold where history presents its challenge in its realistic terms, because that's what we want to know; what are we really up against. And the fact that we are up against a tidal wave of incomprehension, though scary, though 'terr'ific, never the less, it's better than not knowing and being swept away by an undertow without any chance whatsoever of doing anything about it.
And so the phase before history that is important is Art. Art is extraordinarily important because it involves the objectivizing of the person. The person is an objectivization of a life. But the object called a person is not an integral object, it is not a thing. It doesn't have the tangibility of a body, it doesn't have the coherence of a mind. The person, in fact, is a diametrically contrary objectivity to the body or the mind. And one of the insanities of our educational heritage of the last two thousand years is the assumption that the person is an integral form, and it's a lie. There have been many super-Yogis on this planet and there have been some super-Yogis that have been meta-super-Yogis like the historical Buddha. And when you are a meta-super-Yogi and you carry integration to its nth degree, you do not find anyone there. There's no one there, especially anything that you could call you. What you find is that there's no one even looking. So someone says, 'oh I found myself through a superior technique of integration', that is a lie and it's also grossly naive. And someone who charges you money or allegiance because they're going to help you find yourself through some powerful yogic technique; it's not true, because it's structurally impossible.
The best that you find is a hole in the threshold of expectation that allows you to go beyond, and that beyond; the Greek word for it was Para, in fact the Sanskrit for it was Para, the same word. In India and Greece they had the same word for what's beyond, Para. The Buddha did not teach Mahayana or Hinyana or Theravada or whatever, but taught Parayana. When asked about the person, when asked about the self, he refused to talk about it. And so it became a famous principle, the principle of no self. Anika. Or the phrase Neti Neti, not this not that. And there were always clever metaphysicians who thought well if it's not this or not that, maybe it's something exactly in the center, and I can make a mint and get a lot of disciples by teaching the exact center. And the exact center is an infinite openness that never achieves form.
And one of our figures that we're taking now, Stravinsky, eloquently talked about that at Harvard University. In the Spring of 1940, when the second world war was crashing around Europe, Stravinsky talked about the arrogance of false teachers who believe in false selves. And that there's no art involved in that at all, just a regressive stupidity.
This beyondness, this going beyond has something to do with Vision. It has something to do with consciousness, and that the person is an objectivity in the stormy winds of consciousness. That consciousness is such a hyper jet propelled stream of openness that has a tangibility of exploration, largely symbolized by an arrow, philosophically labeled, in a stupid way, as the arrow of intention, or the arrow of intentionality (you'll read it in phenomenological literature). Not only is there no arrow in consciousness, there also is no arrow of time in consciousness, because all of those qualities are integral qualities and they don't have any place in a differential realm. And so Stravinsky hit upon a fortuitous phrase which I will use as the title of today's lecture. Art 10 is entitled the realm of dissimilarity. And the realm of dissimilarity is where art happens, where art is made, where works of art and works of spirit, which are persons, actually occur, and that the person, like a work of art, is very objective and not at all integral. Persons, like works of art, occur within the fierce winds that constantly blow in the realm of dissimilarity. So that any metaphors, any kind of associations that one had before, have to be let go. Or in a more sophisticated way, have to be held in suspension and not be brought into play. And it's very difficult to do because every habit of expressive learning that's there from Ritual, Myth and Symbol; from existentiality in the body, from language experience and the feelings, from the mind's symbolic integration, all of that has to be held in suspension in order to achieve the differential conscious form of art and the person. And this is very difficult to do. And yet, difficult though that is to do, there are men and women, time and again, who have done this and their works, their lives are there for us to appreciate if we could, if we would.
The poignant secret is that in appreciating their work of art, in appreciating their lives, we must become ourselves as a work of art. That there's a secret there in the Plutarchean parallel lives mystery initiation, that you could not understand something which you are not. You have to achieve a personhood differentially for yourself before you can appreciate it in someone else. You have to become an artist, though you don't have a great work to show, you have to become enough of an artist to appreciate someone else's art. And so the parallel lives was actually a slight off center misstatement. Plutarch didn't have very much Yoga. His contemporary in India, Nargajuna, could have tied Plutarch's mental stream of consciousness into an infinity of bows. Nargajuna is the man who developed the idea of zero as a mathematical expression, for instance.
This quality, this quality of differential consciousness is at the core of Stravinsky's art. It's at the very nature of the way in which the transformation of art over the last two hundred years has been accelerating. So that in our time at the end of the twentieth century, there's no longer any interest in old pseudo art. But what has taken the place of old pseudo art is a new pseudo, the pseudo of being constantly open. And Stravinsky says that this especially is just as bad, because the illusion that you are then O.K. because you are constantly open is an invitation into a kind of a metaphysical pseudoness that has no self reflexive quality whatsoever. He says eloquently in his Charles Elliott Norton lectures, at Harvard, 1939-1940, in that winter; six lessons in music, and after he finishes the sixth lectures, they were over a period of several months, he writes: "In the course of these lessons, I have on different occasions referred to the essential question that preoccupies the musician, just as it demands the attention of every person moved by a spiritual impulse. This question we have seen always and inevitably reverts back to the pursuit of the one out of many. So in concluding I once more find myself before the eternal problem implied by every inquiry of an ontological order". What's an inquiry of an ontological order? It means that in trying to study the essential beingness of what is, there's a problem that's there that does not go away because of the success of the traditional way of dealing with the problem of what is. The more successful you are at being refined at dealing with what is, the more unconsciously you impute to what is not an isness. And you come to believe that ontological fundamental negations are things, and they are not. In fact there's no 'they' there. In fact the idea of an integral person is a negation fantasy that structurally haunts the successful mind. That's why meta-super-yogis turn off the mind. It's very great, it's very useful, it's totally gumming up the works, once you cross a threshold of differential consciousness. It has to be held in suspension. That's why the old asana was to put consciousness, put your mind 'There' and leave it alone. Just let it be there. If the chakras lead up to here and you put your mind here, then what happens to the saharastra chakra. It means that you have curved the one chakra before the saharastra, you've curved it reflexively back down here to the manipura chakra. And by making that hair pin turn, you have freed and released the saharastra chakra to be, not a part of the schematic of the integral mind's self conception, but to be what it is, which is free.
A simpler way, the Hopi Indians came up with a kind of a blessing for babies, and the blessing was always a charm song put here on the top of the baby's head. When babies are born the skull is not closed completely, there is a soft spot at the top. And the Hopis understand that it is through this soft spot that our prayers go to God. And so the blessing, the prayer's to keep the soft spot soft when you grow up so that your prayers can be heard. How else can you send a voice? In other words, if you close off your form, your body and your mind in an integral fashion, you leave no openness to allow concourse with the rest of the Cosmos. It's another way of being a meta-super-yogi.
This quality, where differential consciousness must have a permeation of integral form, is known as a mystery. Because there's no integral way to understand that. There's no way that images can image that. There's no way that associations of images can bag that. There's no way that mental concepts can understand that and that's why it's called, I think the religious phrase is, the peace that passes understanding. That term peace in that phrase comes from about twenty-eight hundred years ago in India. Twenty-eight hundred years ago in India the term was used for the first time in that kind of a symbolic way. The term in Sanskrit which translates as peace is Shanti, Shanti. Which is cognitively related to the Sanskrit term Kashanti which means patience. So that the patience of Job has something to do with the Peace that passes understanding (to give it a Jewish flavor for a moment).
Shanti occurs for the first time symbolically in Indian literature about twenty-eight hundred years ago in the first Upanishad, the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad. Brihad means great breath, Aranyaka was the forests. So it's the Great Breath Teaching in the Forest Upanishad. And at the end of the Upanishad it's said and repeated three times, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. And every Upanishad ends with that. And that formulation is not like etc. etc. etc. It's like the form of the mind understanding is limited because it cannot understand its own echo. And by repeating it - Shanti, Shanti, Shanti - it means that there is a reverberation into the unknown of the form of the mind's final understanding. And that while the mind has a beautiful final understanding, if you were a meta-super-yogi, you could be very clear about what is real. And what is very real in what is clear is that there is a beyond of indefinite extension beyond where you just realized. And that the best realization is to allow for the flow of peace to go through you on out. And in that outward boundness of peace, there's a flow of blessedness. The blessedness does not come because you have a fat portfolio that's safe from other investors. Not because you've got hold of every competitor the way that you want, but that you are open to, how did a medieval mystic woman, Mecthild of Magdaburg said, the flowing light of God passes through one and that you are permeable enough to allow this to pass through you, gives you a blessedness, because you are not limited then to the form of integration. You are open to the spiritual form of the differential person. And only such a form has any chance of navigating history. History grinds up bodies, now by the tens of millions, in wars, in famines, in plagues, in madness, in death. And the mind doesn't fair much better. A couple of lines from one of Wallace Stevens poems, he talks about how the Greek Gods that have come down to us are the metal heroes that time granulates. There are even images that were made into some little pastiches by some French Baroque painter like Watteau. But especially history grinds up the gods of myth. Because history is like a torrential hurricane of differential process that blows heaven and hell out of integral forms, especially the mind. There's no way that it can stand up to that and the image of that is the Bardo wind that blows the false identification ego to smithereens as the energy of the impress wears paper thin after death and all that one is left with is this kind of false credit card of pseudo identity that you thought you were, and of course that just blows away, it atomizes, the atoms fractalize, the fractals disappear into nothingness and you might come back as a turnip, if your level of identification is stubborn enough, if you're arrogant enough, if you want to keep that sense of identity, you don't come back as the content of the identity but as the structure of that willful identification. I guess that's why there are so many grains of sand in the universe. Such is the ocean of ignorance.
Stravinsky, in the Poetics Of Music, he's writing about art, he's writing at one of the worst times, early 1940, not just for Europe but for the whole planet, was an era of madness, real madness. He writes "So in concluding, I once more find myself before the eternal problem implied by every inquiry of an ontological order. A problem to which every man and woman who feels out of their way through the realm of dissimilarity. Whether an artist, a physicist, philosopher, theologian, whatever, inevitably led by reason of the very structure of their understanding". In other words we don't do this because we're dumb, we do this because we're smart. What happens is not so much due to ignorance, but due to being smart. We just don't know when to stop being smart, and that's the problem. Because everything that has been effective, and the more effective it is the more of a sand pit it becomes. So if you've been successful in life, dealing with bodies and minds and integrals, to that extent you have dug a hole. So that the saying in early psychology is "watch out for the compensation". The more that you do this, the that just got deeper. And that there's also no saving grace in doing so little of this that there is so little of that.
Stravinsky writes here "To that point, it seems that the unity we are seeking is forged without our knowing it and establishes itself within the limits which we impose on our work." It's very profound, Stravinsky was over sixty when he delivered this and you have to understand Stravinsky is very intelligent. Probably the most brilliant intellectual composer since, probably since Bach. Whatever are the liminalities in our process of integration, whatever are the boundaries, the capacities, the applications in our integration, in our way of ritualizing, in our ways of mythography, in our ways of symbolizing, whatever we actually do do, whatever we really experience, whatever we have thought about our experience doing that, all of that are really the boundaries, the limitations of a form which needs to be born. Which is born whether we will it or not. That it actually happens that such a form is an artifact of the process of integration and the wise thing is to recognize that that always happens. And to pay attention to that and to see what it was that happened. He says "For myself, if my own tendency leads me to search for sensation in all its freshness by discarding the warmed over, the hackneyed". in other words Stravinsky was always after the new, he hated leftovers, he hated warmed overs, he hated anything that had been done before, to the point that he almost hated to even repeat anything of himself. And yet he understood that here was the very trigger of his arrogance. Because by having a taste for the new, it set him up to unknowingly have a taste for the pseudo. The constant new is also a pseudo, one of the worst. He says, and it turns out in print and it reads this way "For myself, if my own tendency leads me to search for sensation in all its freshness by discarding the warmed over, the hackneyed, the specious, in a word, I am none the less convinced that by ceaselessly varying the search, one ends up only in futile curiosity. That is why I find it pointless and dangerous to over refine techniques of discovery." Which is why the best technique of discovery is play. There's nothing worse than pre-planning openness.
In the late sixties everyone was going for the new modular education. You couldn't offer a course unless you could pre-chew each little iota and put it down like an engineering flow chart. I remember one time taking an administrative officer to task who asked for something like this. I did such a complex flow chart that he couldn't follow it. I was only twenty-nine and I said, why you son of a bitch. There was this belief that by systematizing the presentation of modular units, you could then teach, you could instruct in a repeatable way, and you would have an effective efficient educational force. And this was as bogus as 1920's permissiveness.
Stravinsky says "That is why I find it pointless and dangerous to over-refine techniques of discovery. A curiosity that is attracted by everything betrays a desire for quiescence in multiplicity." (Quiescence in multiplicity). "Now this desire can never find true nourishment in endless variety. By developing it we acquire only a false hunger, a false thirst. They are false in fact because nothing can slake them. How much more natural, how much more salutary it is to strive towards a single limited reality than towards endless diVision". Then he says "Is this not then inviting monotony?" Are we not letting ourselves in then for exactly the compensational opposite of that. Because finally the problem is the problem of opposites.
If you look at the problem of opposites through pairedness; Pythagoras was the first teacher who put the rows of opposites before someone and the square of the quintessence of those Pythagorean opposites were formulated together as a pair of pairs that characterized the mind's farthest integral reach: moist and dry, hot and cold. Then it became the pair of pairs that eventually got transformed in alchemy. And you'll see that square in all alchemical literature. That that transformation is not reconciliation. If you reconcile the hot and cold you are what, you're at a medium? A million degrees hot and 999,000 degrees hot? You can see that it's a bogus, because the calibration is extraneous. Moist and dry the same way. A monsoon is more moist than a thunderstorm. You're still going to be wet. The hottest driest desert on earth is nothing compared to anyplace on Venus.
In this universe, one has to watch out the betrayal of the mind because the mind's conceptual fragility seems to itself to be invincible and it's not only paper thin it's like a veil that is pseudo paper, you cannot write on it. The neural nets only hold a gestalt as long as the split nano second in which it happens and then only echoes occur. And in fact when you get to be a meta-super-yogi you can see that at that split nano second nothing records whatsoever. That's why there's no trace in enlightenment at all. There's no soot. So then how does anything happen? And that's the issue we'll look at when we come back from the break.
SECOND HALF
How then does anything happen? Have you never heard that life is a gift? If it were not that there were Vision in this Cosmos, nothing would be real. The integral cycle has no power of reality. It can force existentiality, it can force experience, it can force essence, all of that would be but samsara were it not for it being rescued by the lovingkindness of consciousness. It would occur to the point of extinction (the phrase was moksha) immediately and nothing would obtain. So that the entire scope of reality is a gift of love. That this is a certainty, can be achieved. It takes a long, several thousand years of discipline, but it can be achieved; the understanding that this is how it is, this is the way things are; that our reality is courtesy, is gratis of someone's gift to us. Someone who did the real work. And so it is ignorance, precisely, which believes otherwise.
Ignorance has its connectiveness. The first formulation of it in language was in Sanskrit and the name given to that dependent chain of causation was called Pratitya Samudpaya. I'll say it again so you can hear it, Pratitya Samudpaya. It has a linked chain of causation and that once it's set into motion, it does not stop, it does not cease. It's a form version of idiot openness. The pseudoness of constant openness that never is graceful enough to recognize that a form has been made even though you didn't intend to make one, is complemented by an endless chain of causation where you are precisely convinced that this causes that, and indeed it does. And that causes another this, and that this causes another that, but eventually it comes back around and you see that this this causes the original that. That's why it's called a linked chain of causation that is a circle, it's an endless circle.
Stravinsky says that this was the original meaning of the word revolution. Revolution means that it comes back to that beginning and begins again and goes back through. And he's writes, he says, and it's written, "I was made a revolutionary in spite of myself. Now revolutionary outbreaks are never completely spontaneous. There are clever people who bring about revolutions", and he goes on. But he says the original meaning of the term to him, recently in English (it was from a writer named G.K. Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown mysteries and other things). He said Chesterton pointed out that a revolution in the true sense of the word was the movement of an object in motion that described a closed curve, and thus always returned to the point from where it had started. In fact, the more power, the more integral power that you give a revolution, the shorter is the circuit. So that in the nineteenth century, when it was found that one could give a kind of a universal power to revolution, it shortened the circuit so that it became only one step, and it went from revolution to counter revolution. And the first time that that was noticed was in the French Revolution.
The French Revolution was the first time that men and women, of exceedingly refined consciousness, understood that something really demonic had happened in history. That we no longer had the luxury of hundreds of years or thousands of years before the circuit came back around and got us stuck, that it happened with the next step. And the most profound way in which that recognition happened was because of Schiller. And in Schiller, The Letters On The Aesthetic Education Of Man, which we saw last week, was the starting point for Carl Jung's first great book, The Psychology Of Types. His whole excursion is based on Schiller's typology. And we saw that it's not a question of just understanding what your type is and then fulfilling your destiny, or what your type is and what's missing, so that you can make up the compensation so that then you're reconciled and thus whole, you're still on that circle where the tail is chewed by the mouth. In fact the symbol, which Jung point out, comes from an old alchemical dream by an alchemist named kukilay, of the serpent swallowing its tail, and Jung brought the old term ouroboros back into play. That this kind of endless cycle is not an eternity. It's a Pratitya Samudpaya. It's a chain of dependent causation that does not stop, it does not end. It grinds up anything, anyone into its maw, and we are but fodder for this.
And so the point that Schiller makes is not one of compensation, in fact Jung does not make one of compensation at all. It goes much beyond that. It's sort of like the third graders who teach the fourth graders fifth grade psychology and then that filters down to the population as if they know something. Like word association tests. You give people a list of words and then you see that they have all these associations, you put the associations together, you get a gestalt and you see what they're secretly thinking right? Wrong! Jung's word association test is to show that there are some words for which you have no association, and isn't that interesting. And it's the pattern, the negative cut out of words for which you have no spontaneous association, that's a meaningful pattern that's truly not conscious. The fact that you have associations, you think of sex for every word on the list therefore you're sexual, that's ridiculous, of course you're sexual. But that you have no association for these few words, whatsoever, instantly, means that something has been held out, something's held down, it's missing. Why is it missing? And where is it missing? That's of interest.
But the [aesthetic revolution on man], The Aesthetic Education that lead to a revolution within man, was Schiller drawing a line saying the French Revolution has shown us that it does, (I can't pronounce the French phrase), it means volte-face. It's so fast that it shows you the other face. You have this revolution and two days later the counter revolutionaries are in charge. One of the best presentations of it was done by Elia Kazan in his movie Viva Zapata where at the beginning of the film, Marlon Brando is Zapata and his side kick Anthony Quinn and all the peasants they come from the village to complain to the president in Mexico City. And because Zapata is noticeable the president circles his name. And at the end of the film, when Zapata is president and the peasants have come, he notices one guy is out of line, he circles his name and he realizes that the revolution has come full circle and he drops the pen and he gets his hat and he says where's my horse.
Schiller is the first one to draw the line and say the revolution is not to continue revolutions, to get off the god damned death march of a closed circle idiocy once and for all. What does he say in the ninth letter? "But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age which besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion." So when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1951, Ramon Jimenez said if they give you ruled paper, write the other way. That the whole purpose is not to play the game of revolution. That freedom is getting out of the gamesmanship entirely. But the problem is how do you get out of it when you yourself are the games master? Fellini's great artistic film about that whole theme is 81/2. 81/2 is the head size of Fellini himself. When you're locked in your head, how do you live differently from that? How do you transfer the energy of integral genius which came to a beautiful understanding in your mind, to a thing which is not a thing? A differential person which is a spiritually 'Other' to that mind, to that body/mind synergy, to that integrated hard wand thing that you call your identity; how do you go beyond your identity? Especially because the time honored manner of finding the perfect identity is to use a technique called abstraction. And so the mind becomes like super yogi in abstracting from experience the essence and then making the identity on that basis, and it is absolutely convinced, and rightly so, that there's nothing more perfect than this. And there is no 'thing' more perfect than the completed mind. But to think that reality is just the perfection of the completed mind is idiocy. The entire differential cycle is beyond it. Vision, Art, History especially, and Science. The Cosmos is not some cartoon thought bubble that comes out of this head. Even though it's a huge head, Cabeza De Vaca. It doesn't matter how poignant, how perfect your integral idea of yourself is, that identity is a brittle crackerjack toy, only for entertainment purposes. It has no real place other than where it is, at the center of a fantasy.
There was an American genius, you hardly ever hear of him, and hardly ever of him in philosophic terms, his name was Chuck Jones. I know you never heard of the American genius Chuck Jones. He drew Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. He did two hundred some cartoons. And he did a cartoon in 1953 called Duck amuck about Daffy Duck who gets into an argument with the cartoonist who's drawing him. And he's incensed to find that the cartoonist thinks that Daffy is only a character in his strip, if you can catch it sometime. It's the difference between being frozen in a ritual comportment and the transformation that comes in Vision that looks to Art. Art has nothing to do with integration, it's not further integration. Vision is not a process in the integral cycle. In all the seasons of the world, there is no Vision whatsoever, none. Yet Vision occurs but it occurs, where does it occur? It occurs beyond the forms that can be made in nature. The body and the mind are forms that can be made in nature and they're made all the time. They're endemic in the way in which nature integrally happens. But the beyondness of Vision is something else.
Now when Stravinsky was first becoming an artist, when he was. . . . . He was chosen out of nowhere by a distant cousin of his named Diaghilev. Diaghilev was very very tall, taciturn guy, he had jet black hair that had a streak of white in it. Not like Ahab, Diaghilev was very elegant. And he was with the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Now Stravinsky lived on the same street that had the Mariinsky Theater which became the Kirov Ballet Theater. And just down the street from that was the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, where his family worshipped. So that the Cathedral, the Ballet Theater (The Mariinsky), and Stravinsky's home were all on the same street. Now Diaghilev was a fantastic character in the Mariinsky Theater, but because of his homosexual preferences, St. Petersburg started to turn their noses at him, so Diaghilev went to where he was going to be out of that circuit. He went to Paris and in Paris he flowered. But when he went to Paris, he went as a genius. He didn't go to Paris to become a Parisian, he went to Paris to be his kind of St. Petersburg Russian. That is to say he became a ballet master, but not in the Parisian sense, nor in the limitations of Russian St. Petersburg society, but in a completely new way, in Diaghilev's way. He became his own person. He became a spiritual ring master like Fellini, that brought in his entourage all of the talented people that were getting nowhere with Mariinsky because they didn't fit in. He brought Fokine, he brought the set designer Benois. And they started to thrive because Diaghilev's world was not a Russian world so much, or a French world so much, but it was a Diaghilev personal world of Art. And he's the one that picked his distant cousin out of nowhere, Stravinsky, and he asked him to write a ballet for him. Because Diaghilev had an unerring sense of art. Somebody remembering him fifty years later said "Diaghilev was always a magisterial chess master". He played so that art would win every time, he was very good at this. And so he brought genius people together and kept them from getting ego bound in standard ritual societal relationalities and he kept them always off center, off guard and thus creative. So Diaghilev was the perfect magician because he was real outside of the limited ritual codifications that allowed for false identities to happen. Diaghilev was an artist in terms of the presentation of Ballet and it's his Ballet Russes that was the real breakthrough in the twentieth century for an art form. And Stravinsky was the individual who did this for him.
When Diaghilev first contacted Stravinsky, he wanted him to turn a Russian fairy tale into a ballet and it was the Firebird. And it was an instant success. So the next season, this was 1910, so the next season he got Stravinsky to write another ballet, Petrushka, the puppets, it was another smash hit. This was the second smash hit in a row by Stravinsky, but the third, for Diaghilev, because in 1909 in his first Ballet Russes, in Paris, his ballet was Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade So for three years in a row Diaghilev had turned Paris on its ear, and then turned that Paris back onto its side, and upside down, and people were waiting for the next thing, and so Diaghilev told Stravinsky in certain artistic ways, it's wide open, do your favorite thing. And Stravinsky, who had gotten this idea that was so impossible, impossible because it had never ever been done, and his particular genius allowed him to do it. So he wrote a ballet called The Rite Of Spring. The score is now world famous and when it was first performed, at the first couple of notes, the audience was screaming so loud against the production that they couldn't hear the music. Their own shouts of anger drowned out the music, and the dancers, through memory, were able to go through the ballet. Why? Because to their insensitive ear, the same chord pounded again and again and again. In fact when Diaghilev first heard it, Stravinsky wrote it at Clarense in Switzerland, on the lake. Fortuitously right next to the house where the young Ernst Anstrome (?) was living, the great conductor. And Stravinsky sat at the piano to play for Diaghilev, the first public exhibition of the theme of The Rite Of Spring, Nijinsky was there with Diaghilev and Stravinsky began - - - - - - - pounding the piano. And later in his eighties Stravinsky recalled that Diaghilev was sort of like embarrassed. And finally when Stravinsky stopped, he said pardon me, how long does this go on. And Stravinsky, with this little intellectual elfish grin, said all the way through the piece.
What's curious is that when you look at the score, and the score is examined, has been examined by every musician in the twentieth century, it's the manifesto of artistic genius. This is it. Why? There was something radically uniquely brilliant about Stravinsky's person. And in order to understand why it is that The Rite Of Spring is not revolutionary but freeing to Art, one has to go back and sort of feel for a moment, sort of sympathize for a moment, what is it in Stravinsky that allowed him to be the Einstein of Art, which he is, he's the Einstein of Art. Great as anybody else is, Stravinsky was the cream. He said, in a film documentary, he said "my earliest memories are of the sound of the ice breaking up on the Neva River that runs through St. Petersburg. You know St. Petersburg was Leningrad for awhile, now it's St. Petersburg again. Have you ever heard a river that's been frozen break up in the spring? I lived in Calgary Alberta for five years and the Bow River would do that in miniature. And what you hear is at a certain threshold, when the ice is thin enough that the strength of the current is able to break it, it fractures it and it sounds like land lightning, like land thunder lightning. It is like the land itself is the storm. It has a deep cracking crumble quality which reverberates, and the Neva being much bigger than the Bow River, when it cracked every spring, it had this kind of grinding rumble which you hear in the bass chords of The Rite Of Spring. Because the whole mind set of integral music has here been cracked.
Nowhere in the whole history of music would you find a book like this: Yale University Press, 1993, Musical Form And Transformation: Four Analytical Essays. It looks like a physics book because of Stravinsky. They don't mention Stravinsky but it's because of him, because of The Rite Of Spring. Why? Because the sound of the ice breaking of the Neva got juxtaposed with something else. In his childhood he was constantly exposed, because his father was very cultivated, had one of the best libraries in the world and had all these beautiful friends. But he was very religious and he used to take the children with him to church. So the Russian Orthodox service, the church service, the music, the sounds juxtaposed with this intense transcendent rumbling of the Neva's ice thawing. That there is something mysterious that happens all the time in nature and it is juxtaposed underneath the continuity of the massive cathedral music liturgy cycle. They are not opposed, they're juxtaposed. Somehow in the truth of larger things, they go together. So that the rumbling of the ice breaking up in the Neva is not a revolution away from the cathedral music, but is a part of it. Then there is another pair of sounds. He was very often taken to vacations from a child into the country, down in the Crimea, Ukraine, east of the Volga, on the Polish border. And in these country places, because it was always, they were taken in the late spring summer time, folk festivals where men and women, instead of being dour Russians, trying to get through the winter and life, men and women danced and sang together. And so the folk festivals, for Stravinsky, were a part of the cycle of somber destitute lives that somehow happened and connected with that was that in the urban center of St. Petersburg, in the dead of winter is when the ballet season was on. And so the summer folk festivals and the winter ballet season also went together. They were the under side of each other. Not that one was the underside of the other, but each was the other side of the other and these four sounds, the ice breaking and the cathedral music, the folk festivals and the ballet all in Stravinsky became a phased cycle, a network of charm that was there in sound which humanly was expressive of themselves. People expressing their spiritual selves.
And there's a fifth element, there's a quintessence. And that is Stravinsky had a perfect ear. He was born with perfect ear. Not just a perfect ear to hear notes. He was born with something even rarer. He was born with a perfect ear to hear rhythm. That is to say he could hear bits of rhythm clearly. He could hear bits of bits of rhythm clearly. He had a photographic memory for the fractal bits of rhythm. So that when they were trying to get him to speak when he was just a little boy, less than two, and they kept trying to get him to speak. And then one day they asked him, they said well what did you see today Igor? And he said he saw people singing. And then he sang the song that they sang perfect in key. And that's when his father realized that he was a prodigy. But he was a stern practical father, he said you're going to go to law school. But as Stravinsky would say, God had other plans, God prefers the real. And so God introduced him to a young playmate, Andrea, whose father was Rimsky Korsakov. And so little Stravinsky wrote a nice little flourish which when he went to visit his friend, he showed his friends father. And Rimsky Korsakov, looking through this little composition of Igor, said that, well he would allow him to come twice a week to his own home and he would teach him. And so Rimsky Korsakov became the private tutor to the little boy Stravinsky. And it was part of the way in which the real, the real is always paradoxical, the littlest angel is the biggest force in heaven, always.
So the dying Rimsky Korsakov's last great work, Scheherazade, is juxtaposed to Stravinsky's first great work, The Firebird. They were one two in the Ballet Russes. It's like this. You know eight years after Stravinsky died, late 1970's, they were premiering in Covent Garden, in the opera house, his great opera The Rake's Progress, and his wife was in the audience. His wife was in her eighties, she lived to be into her nineties. She was in the audience, and in The Rake's Progress, one of the characters takes off the wedding ring and throws it into the audience. It landed in Vera Stravinsky's lap. And when it did she suddenly realized that it was Igor's birthday on that day. There's no way that it happens except exactly, and that's why it's real. Stravinsky had that kind of quality. So when he heard the rumblings of the ice of the Neva, he heard the specific tonal, rhythmic, interval qualities that to other people was just a rumble. In mathematics, if you know higher math, it's called the Hamiltonian of the sound. It means the sound doesn't occur just as a sound, it occurs as a clustered network of slightly different inflection particles that together are the gestalt of that sound. So in The Rite Of Spring, he took the same chord that's repeated again and again and again, and he varied one element and one element only of one of the notes and one note only of the eight note chord. So that there's a constant subterranean subtle variation going on all the time in The Rite Of Spring that you have to get an ear for before you can even hear it. And when you do, you find that you have trained yourself to a subtleness that puts to shame other music, because then other music sounds like cardboard. They're pretending they're composers. They don't know anything about music. It's like when you get used to the language of these lectures, you go and listen to someone else. After five or six years of this kind of sensitizing, this language will make your mind and your person and your body and something Cosmic about you so subtle it's like quicksilver. And you listen to other people and you realize they don't know what they're talking about. They don't even know how to talk. It's all rote instruction ritual choreographed by eighth grade minds. None of it is real. All of it is some kind of a phantasmoragia. No wonder nothing happens. Nothing is going on.
Stravinsky, in The Rite Of Spring, found a kind of a differential conscious version of what Brahms discovered in The Principle Of Developing Variation. Brahms' Principle Of Developing Variation showed that the melodic nature of a musical line can have a varied quality, a kind of an iridescent jewel like quality if you follow the development of it, and there's a certain kind of a freedom. What Stravinsky did was take that melodic variation and put it into rhythm. So that Stravinsky's music has a rhythmic variation that is almost infinitely analyzable and it's almost like somebody who has a computer algorithm to change tempo all the time. So that The Rite Of Spring is more than a revolutionary piece of breaking an old form, it's a movement of freedom just like Schiller talked about in Ode To Joy that Beethoven used for the Ninth Symphony. It is a step out of the entire Ritual Symbol cycle of integration into a differential Cosmos of complete openness. And yet there's the spiritual Grace in Stravinsky to accept that even unintentionally, unknowingly form is achieved. The form of the work of art. The artist cannot be a metaphysician of infinity, he must respect, she must respect her work of art.
Now this was 1913. That's eighty-six years ago. So a lot's been happening.
Now one reductive quality of this crept into the analytical techniques of psychology and sociology, and when it's handled right it's O.K. and when it's handled not right it's demonic. Probably the best figure to look at that particular aspect is a man named Victor Turner, From Ritual To Theater: The Human Seriousness Of Play. He's not famous for this particular little monograph, he's famous because he did work on an African Tribe called the Ndembo. He wrote a great monograph called The Forest Of Symbols. That they do not live in the forest where there are all these trees and jungles, they live in a jungle of symbols. And it's the Ndembo dance rhythm structure that is the way in which they negotiate themselves around in this forest of symbols and find a way to be spiritually free and live, even with all that. One of the concomitants of this was the work of a man named Heinrich Jan who did a book called Munto where he showed that the intelligence of the African people is in their ability to use rhythmic ratio-ing as the philosophy of structure of differential consciousness. And that you have to be able to envision the minute variations in tempo, in the pace of Ritual comportment so that you don't do the same thing twice, even though to an outside it looks like you're doing the same thing all the time. That the infinite subtle variations in the rhythmic presentation and this is exactly where Stravinsky was a genius, an Einstein. He could hear in the way in which an African drummer can hear. Can hear the minute fractal variation within what to others clumsily seems like the same beat but it is varied by always having one aspect different and that one aspect and one aspect only different is a technique used in physics, it's called Gausian named for Gause, Gausian analysis. It's the basis of algorithmic freedom.
When you send an eight hundred million dollar satellite of on its way to Saturn or Jupiter or someplace, it can't just go there. There's no there there. All the planets are moving the whole star system is moving, everything is moving, and so you have to recompute all the time where there is. So you have to build in an algorithmic navigation otherwise you can't go. Because not only is there no There there, there's now to There where. And there's no Where of the There where you are and you would be in complete chaos were it not for the principle of developing variation of an algorithmic navigational transformation, that happens all the time. Not A transformation, one time and one time only, that's a mental idiocy, transformation is an ongoingness. That's why Vision is a process and not objective. Consciousness is the algorithm of reality. It recomputes so that its navigation is real all the time. Not only all the time but everywhere.
So that the Vajra Chadika Sutra, the Diamond Cutter Sutra is the most sophisticated of all the Mahayana Sutras and each phrase is increased by one until it reaches the center of the Sutra and there is a flash and then it backs off exactly at the same increment and flows out. And the center of that Sutra is the flash "awaken the mind by not letting alight anywhere".