Art 4

Art four. And I want to start with a little reminder from a one of Japan's great female poets. Her name was Komachi. And she wrote at one time, a long time ago, when she was old and wandering in the world, just a pilgrim going from shrine to shrine. And she kept thinking of her youth and of her lovers and of her gorgeous life, in contrast to her roaming. And she wrote, it is because we are in Paradise that all things in this world wrong us when we go out from Paradise. Nothing hurts for nothing matters. It is a curious quality about the realm of art, that art does not belong in the flow of nature. Though great art always has a sourcing in nature, its source is in the mystery of nature and not in the existential. So that the ritual repetition is obviated when the creativity of art comes into play, and vice versa, so that art does not belong in the same square of attention as ritual. And one of the curious qualities of art is that its square of attention, its frame of regard for the world, is founded on myth. It's founded on the mythic horizon, a feeling, a feeling toned experience, a feeling toned experience that needs to cry out and be heard. And this is the source of language we have several times in the last 20 years told the story of how Sanskrit poetics began with the great sage Valmiki. Valmiki in Sanskrit means a white ant hill. Sage. He was so patient, yet his asanas in the jungles of ancient India that the ants built their little mountain hive over him, and meditating one time deep in the forest for years on end, a hunter came in and shot a bird that Valmiki was listening to, and the sage, without even thinking, cursed the hunter. And there was just this little soot vapour where the hunter had been, and he began meditating on the fact that his curse, his crying out from a deep, primordial silence, had a form, and the form was two lines together when you write it out, Called the Ric in Sanskrit poetics. Ric. Related to like Rig Veda, and this turns out to be a primordial way in which a poetic in language comes out. Ancient Hebrew poetry also has the double line. The second line always modifies the first, so that in the ancient world there was an understanding that there is a formed ness that comes into play in art, and that while it has some affinity with ritual action, with the doings of existence, there is an enormous difference between them that ritual action and art action are actually incommensurate in the sense that they displace each other so that if you're involved in a habitual response, creativity is not possible. This produces a very deep difficulty when it comes to running empires. When it comes to formulating tyrannies, and the first thing that authoritarian hierarchical systems do is they close off the avenues of creativity because they don't want variations. And so art is one of the first things that goes. The first list of the Nazis included most of the artists of the day, the most successful artists to waylay this onslaught of the National Socialist Party was the last director of the Bauhaus, and he is one of the great architects of the 20th century. His name is Mies van der Rohe, and Mies had taken over the Bauhaus when it had fallen into complete ruin because of a director who wanted to mechanize the productivity of artists being trained in the Bauhaus so that they could prove that they were of service to a society that was very Germanic in its efficiency of applying new technology to a better world, and that being good technicians of efficiency, the state should allow them to Continue. And this unfortunate little error in the Bauhaus was a complete obviation of the beginnings of the Bauhaus, when its director was another architect named Walter Gropius. So in between two architects, the Bauhaus in Germany was run by someone who would have fit in to the Nazi state program for so-called education. Very well. Mies van der Rohe at the end of the Bauhaus, when it had been closed down. Its origins were in Weimar, Germany, the city of Goethe. And it was there in Weimar that Kandinsky and Paul Klee and a number of other great artists had come together to create an environment in which art could occur. And they saw very clearly that art can only occur out of a visionary realm. And so the original Bauhaus was a visionary realm, and its straight line arranged typical kind of composition that came later on to be identified as the Bauhaus style. The sparse geometric unity of things was more the initial getting rid of the superfluous, of the excesses, the purifying to get down to that zero base, that Dao out of which a new sense of composition could arise, a Visionary openness, not an emptiness. And unfortunately, if a population is not trained to understand this, they mistake a ritual barrenness for this kind of visionary openness. And so the Bajau suffered the in miniature, the career which a great deal of art has suffered in civilization. They went from Weimar, the city of Goethe, to the city of Schiller, the great cultural experiment in the middle of Germany under Walter Gropius, where it was really a very good school. They closed down there and went to the industrial city of Dessau. And when it was finally closed down in Dessau, Mies van der Rohe took over the school and hoping to find a way to keep alive an art thread in a Germany that was fast declining. This is in the mid 1930s. They moved it to an abandoned two story warehouse in Berlin. And, courageous as Mies was, the Bauhaus struggled for a few months to try to keep its curricula alive. And then even that was finally crushed out of sight by the emerging tyranny. And Mies, like almost everyone else of creativity, left the Germany of that day. The origins of the Bauhaus was in a great, visionary artistic generation that began probably early in the 18th century. In the 1700s, with the ability to translate a new cosmology into a new sense of creativity, one of the first indications of art emerging into a new kind of a powerful vision was the era called romanticism. And the Romantics came out of the previous era, which was characterized as the enlightenment, a great era, but one in which the intellectual understanding, the rational understanding was the dominant for the romantic era. It was that the artist, that heroic person who could explore the vast mysteriousness of nature alone could bring out of that vast mysteriousness a personal art. And so one finds that the hero of the romantic era in painting. We talked last week about him, Goya, Francisco Goya, that somehow being the greatest academic painter in Spain was not enough for Goya as an artist. He was the first court painter to the King of Spain as high as you can get. His salary was about 50 times higher than the average salary. He could not remain satisfied with this. And Goya is the first great romantic artist who takes his own home. As the scene, as the site of making a sequence of mural paintings. They're called the Black Paintings because ostensibly, when one looks at them, one is horrified at the subject matter. It's about occult witchcraft haunting the world until it's fully demonized. But these were not paintings made by a madman, and they're not paintings made in some kind of church to illustrate hell. They're not made for some kind of court building to illustrate to the population that they better behave and be good. The artist made it in his own home. Two stories. The house was called Quinta del Sordo. The house of the deaf man, he had gone through a disease and he was deaf like Beethoven. And in his personal romantic acceptance of the challenge of the deep, profound mysteriousness of nature that coursed underneath the beautiful court etiquette, the flounced mini petticoated dresses of ladies holding their little lap dogs in a salon, rooms where there were ribbons on everything. Underneath it all, Goya, who was as good as anyone could ever be at this on the level of Velazquez for court paintings, made his black paintings, and out of that came the whole turmoil of the romantic era. At Delacroix, who scoffed at court paintings, but especially the technique of the late personal Goya became one of the one of the clues, one of the indications that there was a complete recalibration of the understanding of art's place in the ecology of the real. In England you found a little bit later than Goya, an artist named Turner, just a few years younger than Goya. And Turner's work, his watercolours, his paintings, instead of going into the portraiture, went into the landscape paintings. And in Turner's landscapes. Eventually you find the heavy clouds of yellows and golds and reds of a sunset misted harbor where the ships and their masts become just squiggles of vaporous lines. You find the beginnings, along with Goya's late paintings, the beginnings of a vision which came into the art world as Impressionism and the great inheritor of those landscapes of Turner and those portraits of Goya was Monet. And while there are half a dozen great Impressionist artists, Monet is really the genius of the whole lot. And it is out of Monet's color visionary color field that you find the developments of modern art late 19th century, like the 1890s into the beginnings of the 20th century, that you find abstract art and Cubism and all of the great art movements of the time collected together out of those early 20th century movements, the one that is really pivotal, that shows a deeper understanding than all the rest isn't Cubism, but it's a movement called Orphism. And the hero of the art movement called Orphism was a male female pair, Sonia and Robert Delaunay. And Sonia is the genius of the two. She lived to be 95, died in 1979 with the Legion of Honour from Pompidou and many other things. When the Delaunays were working on trying to develop an aesthetic, not a theory of art as in a philosophy of art, but an aesthetic in the sense of a working vision out of which an art can emerge in its technique. They focused on the way in which light diffracts, not just in a spectrum that Newton's prismatic diffraction of light to produce a rainbow spectrum on the opposite wall in his dark room. In art. The spectrum is not a line, but is a circle, and that that circular rainbow was the way in which light diffracts in a conscious dimension added to that of space, and that that conscious dimension adds like a further dimension to space, and also changes the dimension of time. That whereas all ritual is a sequence that is time bound, consciousness has no such limitation whatsoever. So that when consciousness comes into play in art, in the vision out of which art emerges, the quote nature out of which art emerges is truly supernatural in the sense that it is not bound to time sequence and therefore has no need to be responsive to cause and effect, has no need to consult the line of plot. It doesn't have to be concerned with beginning, middle, and end, and it also has an imperviousness to logic so that art belongs in a completely, radically different world. It is a different realm. It is a realm of conscious space, which includes time in such a way that time becomes recalibrated and redistributed. Now, as long as Nature in its emergence existentially, is linked to a time bound sequence. As long as it is in that kind of mode, it is always susceptible to a chaos. Because as soon as one scrambles that time sequence, you will find that the plot becomes muddied. Thus, the cause and effect becomes a problematical. But the chaos also emerges. If you repeat again and again with exact repetition, you will also produce a chaos. The development in the mid 1980s of chaos theory from Bernard Mandelbrot. The Mandelbrot set. Whereas the repetition is a ritual word, the mathematical word for it is iteration, iteration, and that if you take a single habitual form, like a mathematical formula, and you hook it up to an exacting iteration of itself again and again, so that whatever effect is produced, this iteration comes in and works on that product, and that same iteration of is repeated again and again. You will come up with a fractal universe where every single nano bit contains the entire fractal distributed surface of any part of it, and one could go into infinity into this kind of fractal splitting. It is a chaos of infinity and one of the most radical differences, something very difficult to understand, which ancient wisdom was always founded on is that infinity is not eternity. An infinity can be produced by infinite iterations and repetitions, or by a confusing of the original iterations. And one goes into infinities, so that an infinity is actually a function that is built into the way in which an integral happens and is devolved from the time dimension, not the space dimension, but from the time dimension, so that when art comes out of conscious vision, it does not have that built in propensity. So that works of art and artists respond not to infinity so much, but to eternity. And one of the ancient ways in which this was expressed going to come here to a book on Kandinsky, uh, published by Oxford University Press. Rose, Carol Washton long, The development of an abstract style. And on page 142, she talks about how one of the paintings of Robert Delaunay called Circular Forms, which was a whole series of things that he made. Delaunay's choice of the sun moon image for the Circular Forms series may also be related to themes implicit in the legend of Orpheus. Orpheus was not only a symbol of poetic creation, but also a symbol of the light which stood out from the darkness. One of Delaunay's major contentions was that art was equivalent to light. Understand here the light like an insight, like a foresight. In one of his versions of his famous essay La Lumiere, and in several letters one to Franz Marc, great friend of Kandinsky, one of the founders of the Blue Rider school. He quoted from Apollinaire, a French poet of the time, cortege de Orphee, to explain rather cryptically his beliefs. And then he quotes and she quotes from Apollinaire art is the voice that light causes to be heard, and of which Hermes Trismegistus speaks in his poemander. And we've talked about how, in fact, our education at the beginning of vision we took that ancient dialogue, wisdom, dialogue, the poemander, the mind shepherd from about 90 A.D. in Alexandria that Hermes Trismegistus talks about in there, the way in which a conscious time space has its cosmology and the spirit not in existence. It's not subject to the birth, the existential extension and the death. It's not subject to the perils of infinities on both sides, either of too much iteration, or of a scattering of no possibility for a repetition that this timeline, in exactness, becomes more and more the razor's edge, which is generally the metaphor for it, and that as one becomes more and more refined in integration, the straight and narrow path becomes straighter and narrower, and that this is all a function of the way in which the whole principle of integration happens in the first place in nature. And yet, Apollinaire being quoted here soon one reads in the poemander that shadows descended, and from them came an inarticulate cry, which seems to be the voice of light. It is this voice of light that influences drawing, influences painting, and when light expresses itself freely, that expression is color. Painting is a luminous language. And of course, one of the great paintings of the time that illustrated that Sonia Delaunay. Uh, this is 1914. It's called, uh. Prisms. Electric. Electric prisms. And you can see the quality that the diffraction is not in a line spectrum, but in overlapping circles. This was 1914. By 1948, she was painting like this. Uh, this one is entitled, uh, rhythm, color, color, rhythm, that there is a rhythmic vitality to the way in which color courses out in the experience of art. And this, of course, is the very essence of the Chinese, the traditional classical ancient Chinese understanding of art. Of aesthetics. The very first aesthetician in Chinese history. He flourished about 500 A.D. in our time scheme. Hsieh ho. He had six principles of painting, and the first one is always the one that is referred to. The other five are techniques that devolve from the first, and the first has a very curious career because it's difficult for people to translate in Mandarin. Nobody knows how to pronounce a fifth century Mandarin very well. Chi yin Sheng tong. It means. What does it mean? It means resonance of the spirit. Movement of life so that it is spirit resonance. Life movement. One of the easiest ways to understand this is extremely profound distillation of a transformed idea about art. The the great transformer of this would have been Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching. He. What did he transform? He transformed the way in which They each styled the cosmos. How does each style the cosmos in the I-Ching? Um. Heaven suspends its symbols. The symbols are not resting on anything else. They are suspended so that instead of symbols in heaven representing something else, they present themselves so that the stars do not have little erector set of metal bars holding them apart. They're just suspended. So the I-Ching is that heaven suspends its emblems, and the later understanding of the I-Ching at the time of the Zhou dynasty was that A man in his Dao also is capable of suspending his cymbals so that they do not have to remain attached to things of this world in order to function. That while they can originate in this world, man has the ability to transform his cymbals in the way in which heaven holds the cymbals. And out of this comes the the I-Ching, as refined by the Zhou Dynasty. In fact, an alternate name for the I Ching is the Book of Joe, and the whole understanding here is that Lao Tzu transformed that Ching. The Man is the bridge between heaven and earth. And since heaven suspends its symbols. Man can learn to bridge the suspended symbols of heaven and bring them into a presentational suspension on earth, and that such a man is then a great spirit, a great spirit man. And this great spirit man or woman is not just a bridge like linking something together, but is the intermediary that forms a proportionate ratio between heaven and earth, and that he or she who carries the ability to make that ratio of heaven and earth, so that what you do on earth is suspended in a presentational array of symbols like heaven is he who carries that, then carries the mandate of heaven and carries that mandate not to themselves but to the earth, so that the earth then fits with the way in which heaven works. And this bridge, the classic understanding in ancient China, was not that it was a bridge so much, but a pivot, a pivot, and that this pivot has the ability to be pivoted on four corners. And if you pivot on four corners, you can build the Celestial City on Earth. And if it has a fifth pivot in the center of those four pivots, then you can live in the city of heaven on earth, so that when it came time to translate the title of Confucius's Analects, the Lunyu Ezra Pound called it the wobbling pivot. That is, that the fifth pivot is the central pivot, and it's of the person who can live within the city of the four corner pivot. And that this quality, this ability is the Dao brought into play in nature, and that nature accepts this Dao because nature is primordially mysterious. That the bottom base of nature is not existence, but mystery. And it is the transform in Lao Tzu of this mysteriousness of nature into the quintessential Dao after Lao Tzu. The development in China goes towards alchemy. You don't find it before Lao Tzu, and after it you find Chinese alchemy, and you find the ability to take a transform and apply it in such a way that there can be a distillation of that transformed realm later on. You can call it a second transform if you want, but the great figure in that distillation of the transform of Lao Tzu is the father of Chinese poetry. Chao Jian. Tao Yuanming Honorifically called Tao Jian, Tao Chien lived in the Three Hundreds, and he is the first of the great nature mystic poets that founded the whole lineage of Chinese art that went not only into poetry, but into painting before Tao Chen. You don't find Chinese poems or Chinese paintings that have that characteristic quality of the Taoist landscape, of the appreciation of a realm where the earthly human being no longer is there. What is there instead is a transformation of that earthly human being into a supernatural spirit and the distillation of that supernatural spirit into an artistic presence, so that when one takes a thousand years after Tao Chen, you take a great song landscape painting. You unfurl this great landscape painting only on special occasions where you yourself are going to go on this landscape journey, or perhaps a dear friend of yours has come and sits with some tea or some wine, and during the course of a moonlit evening you will un scroll this landscape, and you will sit together and address it, and you will together take that journey through that landscape painting. Well, you don't want your uncles and your aunts in that landscape painting. You don't want the butcher and the baker in that landscape. You want the landscape. But the journey is not a journey in nature. It's a journey in supernatural, magical vision, out of which comes the art. And the art is made every time you take that journey. And the appreciation rises to the transform so that you carry yourself into the scroll, into that landscape, and that the distillation happens in that journeying, in that visionary magic, and the art comes out and emerges and you become a Shen, a spirit yourself. When such person comes back into the world, they are called a gentleman. You are different from what you were before. You belong now in a great complementarity of the real. You have been supernatural as well as natural. You have been natural down to the mystery, and you've been supernatural into the spirit. And there's something about the spirit wandering freely in the mystery of nature that ties no knots and leaves no trace. Let's take a little break. Does that register? This is the living room of Taliesin. Frank Lloyd Wright, Spring green, Wisconsin. Built about 1913, and it burned down and then rebuilt in 1925. Very similar to the bathhouse and very different. Whereas the bathhouse went to Geometric City to transform it. Right. Went to the mystery of nature to transform it. And right belongs not so much in the tradition of the West as in the tradition of the Far East. Even though before he was born, when his mother was carrying him, she wanted to have an architect. And she dedicated that Foetus to architecture, and he was born into a room where all of the illustrations on the wall were of the great Gothic cathedrals and all the important buildings, and. But unbeknownst to her, she also included some of the landscapes of Timothy Cole. And it is the picturesque landscapes of Cole that come from the era of Turner, that come from the romantic era. And it is out of those landscapes that one finds a connection with the great art of China and Japan, the East Asia landscape tradition. By the time that Wright built Taliesin as a home for himself. There was a deep impress on him of the Japanese print, especially Hiroshige and Hokusai and Hiroshige and Hokusai. In the late 1700s early 1800s were the Japanese print version of the great landscape tradition, from Chinese painting and the Chinese landscape painting, as we were saying earlier, because all the way back to the foundations of Chinese civilization. Fushi, who made the first etching, lived about 3000 B.C. so the Chinese have been civilized a long time, but the recalibration of the etching about 1100 BC by the Zhou dynasty, the founders of the Joe the Chinese Book of Songs, the first collection of poetry in the world, comes from the time of the recalibrating of the I Ching about 1100 BC, and in the Book of Songs, the poetry of the Joe. People speak of their brightness, their grandeur, that whereas the Shang dynasty that they were throwing out had become decrepit, and that the Shang was based on these ritual bronzes for which the Shang is known Ritual household implements that were appliance versions of armor. The Joe are supple and you find in their poetry the gorgeous dancing women, the beautiful quality of the brightness of the men, not because of bronze weapons and armor, but because they had personalities that were like jade and they had the ability to recalibrate the world. And so it is the bright new people of the Joe and that their homelands in the western part of China at that time, that the great fields of grain of the Prince of Millet were was the landscape of fruition and fulfillment, and that there was this human mobility to the Joe Cosmos. And it was that level that Lao Tzu transformed. He transformed it into the Tao Te Ching, which is like an angle of vision into the I Ching, so that that angle of vision is like a prism, out of which a completely new spectrum, a transformational spectrum which became Chinese alchemy and out of Chinese alchemy. Unlike Western alchemy, which was contemporaneous with it, Western alchemy was all about metals and the transformation of metals not just lead into gold. But the transformation of metals was the main emphasis of Western alchemy. Chinese alchemy had a double emphasis not only the transformation of metals, but because of the Shang. They weren't interested in that particular aspect so much as they were in the organic biological. The transformation of minerals and herbs. And so Chinese herbology and Chinese medicine and Chinese bio organics is a great, uh, theme of Chinese alchemy. And so you find there is such a thing after Lao Tzu as the transformation of life and body and energy in oneself. And out of this comes, uh, the acupuncture, the meridians. The whole emphasis that somehow there is a transformational body to man. Where he no longer has the dependence upon the post and beam structure of existence, but that there is something spiritual where it's presented in a suspended correlation, where correspondence by resonance is what carries the developmental structure, that if you went to find the meridians on the human body, while you could find the liver line so-called or the heart line, and you could number even the points. Liver 13. You cannot find a physiological structure. It's not there. But the resonance proportionality is there as a structure even deeper than if it were bone or blood or tissue that the spiritual structure of proportionate ratio thing has a harmonic, which definitely impresses a life structure like we have and does not just structure it, but transforms it. It's no longer a form like the skeleton, or a form like the cardiovascular system, or a form like the neural system, but it is a Form, it can recut and redo so that the body is no longer just natural in terms of existence, but can become magically supernatural. Going back and pulling out of the mystery of nature, something that wasn't there, and bring that into existence. And so out of that comes the art of medicine. And one finds after Lancer for a couple of hundred years. This is gingerly handled because it is so potent and so powerful that it could undercut dynastic authority. And so you find, for the first time in China, the desirability ability of really wise people to slip out of town. To hit the high ground. To go where nobody is around. And later on, one of the most potent of all of these figures, he came, um, about, uh, 1800 years after Lazar. His name was Nisan. Nisan. And he's a distant ancestor of Mastroeni, whose two sons practice medicine here in Santa Monica. Mancini and Cheney and their distant ancestor, Nisan was one of the greatest painters in 13th century China. And when you think of 13th century China, you think of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Well, Nielsen was the great painter of his day. He was the Goya of his day. He was the Rembrandt of his day, and he was an enormously wealthy man who gave away all of his wealth to family and friends. And he left. He couldn't stand crowds, and he only felt at home when he was solitary on the shore of some mountain lake. But his painting style is revolutionary in Chinese landscape painting. The dynasty where he lived is called the Yuan dynasty. It didn't last very long. The yuan lasted less than 75 years. The yuan dynasty is the Mongol dynasty. Genghis Khan's successors, Kublai Khan and the Mongols when they took over China. At first they wanted to just have it all. And then when they had it all and there was nobody to compete with them, then they wanted to sift through and find out, well, what is it that we have? What have we? What have we? What kind of booty do we have? Let's count it up. And when they were counting up the booty, they realized that they were incapacitated. To understand that they weren't refined enough to appreciate the goodies that they had got. And so they tried to educate themselves and to find ways to quickly bring themselves up to this kind of refined speed. And so that Yuan dynasty, for the first time in Chinese history, has plays, has drama, and the great art of the yuan dynasty is a drama. Almost all the great Chinese plays come from that time period. Short as it was, they couldn't compete with the previous dynasty, the song dynasty because its great art was landscape painting, and they were xed out by the return of the Chinese, who through the Mongols out and established the Ming. Ming means literally means really bright. The Ming, the Chinese are back. So between the song and the Ming comes the Yuan dynasty. And the greatest painter in that short bridging lifetime was a Nissan. And Nissan changed the way the song landscapes were awesome. They were the kind of cataclysmic, uh, scrolls that you were stunned that there were forked waterfalls falling maybe 3000ft, that looked in the distant glitter like lightning in crags that went straight up for 4 or 5. Thousand feet above that. And maybe there was some little tiny meditative. Hut perched on some pinnacle someplace, and there was just an ocean of mist. Going off and maybe one little boat off in the distance. The landscape was awesome. Nissan recalibrated all of that into a distributed harmonic. Where the pebbles and rocks and boulders of a gentle stream fit with the brush strokes of the leaves of thousands and thousands of pines and evergreens, and that the whole landscape of Nissan seemed like this gentle harmonic Presentation of complete serenity. That awesomeness from the sun transform was distilled into a cosmic harmony that was like a silent timelessness. Eternity. And with that quality, Chinese art in the landscapes of Nissan comes into an interesting kind of quality. When we look at the way in which romantic painting in the West, the awesomeness of Goya, the stupendous energy of Delacroix and Delacroix writing his journals and just saying, you know, it's time to take our belts off and roll up our sleeves and just, you know, paint these energetic, dynamic qualities. And yet within a generation you began to find again this distributed quality of the harmonic of color being presented, like in the canvases of a George Seurat, the pointillism Sunday Afternoon on the River, and the entirety of the canvas shows like Nielsen Landscape Painting a distributed harmonic because the calibration is eternal rather than infinite, the sung landscapes, like a Delacroix painting of horses in a Battle in turmoil, indicates the infinite complexity of the dynamic that takes over the world. But the other is an eternal harmonic that permeates everywhere. That one's artistic vision has penetrated down to the distributed molecular and atomic level, out of which there is a tapestry not of sameness, but of distributed resonance in ultimate, eternal proportion. And it's out of that vision, that abstract art is born, because it is the abstract vision of someone like a Kandinsky, who is able to see through the neat son George Seurat, surface the two dimensional plane of the painting, the color composition that is there and to see that if this is so indeed, then that harmonic not only exists on the plane of the canvas, but penetrates through to the spirit of the artist and also of the viewer, so that the entire realm of the ecology of art includes the viewer and the artist together. In this distribution of the harmonic, and therefore the work of art doesn't just have an existence, but it has an ecology of involvement calibrated by a harmonic of eternity rather than some kind of dynamic of infinity. And so romanticism is transformed Into? Well, they call it an art history. They call it Impressionism. But Impressionism very quickly becomes distilled through this abstraction and emerges. They call the art movement surrealism. There's a very famous art history, a book published about 70 or 80 years ago now, from Baudelaire to Surrealism, that one goes from the romantic era to the surrealistic era. One goes from Goya to Max Ernst in just a single lifetime. One lifetime and that lifetime. That Last half of the 19th century and the first decade or so of the 20th century. That time is where the ability to dematerialize the world came into full play for the first time. You find the science, the physics, the math of that time dematerializing the existence, the certainty of existence, so that what comes out in the middle of that era are James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. That is a universal harmonic of electricity and magnetism. That's the true invisible structure behind all existence and us and everything else. And it's not at all that things stand because they're connected. They work together because they're related by corresponding resonance into a harmonic. And so you find. In one of the house's first textbooks by Paul Clay called the pedagogical, uh, sketch book Little Sketch 1.9, he numbered them like later on, Wittgenstein would number, uh, his Tractatus logico philosophicus 1.1. In Wittgenstein, the world is everything that is the case. Well, Clay goes beyond that considerably. And in 1.9 the natural organism of movement as kinetic will and kinetic execution supra material. And he says because he's a teacher, he has having to write. This is a textbook for the Bauhaus. You see, bones are coordinated to form the skeleton. You got that class? Even at rest, they depend on mutual support. So if the skeleton is not a composition and cause and effect, it's not a hierarchy of post and beam construction. The skeleton is a mutual proportionality built for movement. Our skeleton is built to dance. Then bones are going to dance around. You never heard that song? This is furnished by the ligaments, writes Clay. So the bone coordination into a mutual supporting network is accentuated by the ligaments. Theirs is a secondary function. If one could speak of a hierarchy of function, the next step in motoric organization leads from bone to muscle, and the tendon is the mediary between these two bones and muscles. And so you find this whole thing about the movement that in the world, movement is the basic thing, the dynamic, so that a, an eternal harmonic super structure that animates, as in life, the organic, Proportionate vitality of reality. We inhabit that context and not some other. And so 4.33 very late in the book, Klay comes back to the spinning top, a scale deprived of its material support and reduced to one point of contact, will topple and fall even if its weight has been carefully distributed. But a spinning will create a top quality, and you can, even with a double top, a pair of tops together will dance even on a taut string without falling. Maybe you've seen children's toys where the double top goes along a string and you can just play with it. The Whirling Dervish is Rumi's version of the spinning top of the body, which holds its proportionate harmonic, extraneous to the dizziness of the body's orientation as a stationary thing, and that it takes a re-acclimation to stop identifying with standing straight like your mother told you, and to dance like you knew you should. It's this kind of equality that you find in schools like the Bauhaus, in schools like Taliesin, and there were no other schools like the Bauhaus or Taliesin. So it's in Bauhaus and Taliesin. That one teaches an art not by instruction, But by creating a visionary context where the participation of the students in the mystery of nature makes them available for the evocation of a visionary insight. And out of that comes their art. You don't teach them academic drawing. You teach them to see and how to hold their implements or their range of implements, or make implements and technique. You can teach some of the fundamentals, but you have to all the time articulate that kind of technique. Acclimation to the wild openness of a visionary eternity. Only then does the art happen unbidden or unbidden. And it's this quality that led Clay later on to in his notebooks. One of the notebooks is entitled The Thinking I and the other The Nature of Nature. This quality that there is a singularity of the I is not like the Polyphemus, the single eye, the third eye, or one has opened. The third eye can. You can't imagine how puerile that is. When the third eye is opened, there's no eye. There is only seeing ness. In the Sanskrit it's called shunyata. And what Shunyata seeing sees is its seeing ness. And out of that, that eternity, that context, without any limitation at all, especially no time limitation, especially no space that's blossomed out of a time bound dynamic, then a space is capable of emerging with eternal newness. And what emerges out of that has a quality of the truth of existence emerging out of the mystery of nature. That existence are not really things that when one learns to see them with seeing this itself, you stop looking at things, and you start looking to be participant with the mystery of things. And it's out of that that the artist then realizes that they've gone back to nature in a primordial way, that they circumvented the entire ritual comportment that existence demands, and also the entire mythic experience which flames out of that ritual comportment, out of action. So that one then talks in the Chinese tradition, Wuwei, non-action one does by way of non-action, which is not at all doing nothing, not at all, not even in the same calibration. So that the artist like a in the song one of the greatest artists of that day, Li Cheng. Li Cheng did these fantastic, labyrinthine landscapes where you would look at the scroll and you could go up this tortuous, sinuous mountain path in rocks and trees, and you would see a couple of little figures, the master and a couple of little disciples. And then there would be this vast, awesome sung landscape going into the eternity of the mountain range. Nissan took Li Cheng's landscapes and transformed them into this serene distribution of a harmonic that penetrates through so that you are not awed, but you are Were calibrated by seeing it in his way, so that when you looked away from a neat sand scroll, you could look at the environment in which you were and see with Nissan eyes. Later on. The great master of this in Japanese art is Hiroshige. You can train your seeing so that you could look away from Hiroshige, and you could see a moonrise from wherever you're living in a Hiroshige way. And then art has indeed imbued you with this supernatural, surreal mysteriousness of participation in nature and consciousness at the same time. And that's what's called reality. To think that existence is real by itself is a complete misnomer. It's it's a stupidity. Because if you think existence is the basis of being real, then death is quite real. Huh? And all of us have died more times than there are sands of the Ganges. And we're still here and doing quite well. Thank you. Here is a quotation from Henry Moore. We're going to get to Henry Moore next week. It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work by trying to express his aims with rounded off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged in exposition of conceptions evolved in terms of logic and words. A sculpture can give from his own conscious experience clues which will help others in their approach to sculpture. Clues. Clues. The Greek term clue actually means a thread. It means a thread. The same word that clue, which means thread in India in Sanskrit is called sutra. It means a thread. And the historical Buddha used a sutra. The way in which Pythagoras used clues. It's an art of learning. It's an art of teaching. You never tell anyone anything, but you scatter the seeds of insight through clues without end. Mountains and rivers without end. Because at some time, if they begin the journey of discovery, all of this will come alive exactly in the right way, at the right time for them. And no one predicted anything because it was an eternal field of possibility. It's always available. So if the Buddha, in delivering what they used to call sermons, the Buddha's sermons, they're not sermons at all. Sermons from the Latin. Their sutras, their threads that do not move in any cause and effect way. And if you look at it's difficult to look at the historical sutras of the Buddha because they've been so mulched together and presented in Pali, which is a southern dialect of Sanskrit, that you lose a lot of the potency. So you have to look at the at the later transformed, the transformed sutras become the early Mahayana like the questions of King Milinda, and then those are distilled into the high dharma of something like the Diamond Sutra, the vajracchedika. And if you read through in one motion the Vajracchedika, the Diamond Cutter Sutra, it moves exactly to and right back and leaves you exactly where you began. There's only one moment in the entire sutra which is open, and it's like an open view that only you are the diamond cutter, that all that's being presented to you is a raw lattice of Paradise in a crystalline structure of mirror like exactness. And if you don't know how to go in and recalibrate it, the sutra told you nothing at all. It just repeated itself. It is a reiteration in the second half of the first half, with a slight hiatus in the center, as if someone were just catching their breath so that all that the world hears is nothing. That's why someone who speaks a high dharma. If you play a tape for most people, they don't hear anything. What did he say? What was he talking about? Well, what do you mean? Because they live in the world of the forked tongue. They live in the world of polarity. Time bound language forms which only tell you what you can pound on and what you can stuff away in your portfolio and defend with lawsuits. That's all that you. That's all that's there. Everything else is fluff. Well that's craziness. That's insanity. So our education is getting acclimated to a language style that's not a forked tongue. We're not speaking. We're speaking American Indian style. Early Mahayana style, deep Hellenistic Jewish style Chinese distilled Tao Chen nature poetry style. Because that's the only way that this distributed harmonic field of language is available to you, for you to recut it anytime you want. It's there. You can do that. So that you could play the same tape many times. And if you could hear it a little differently each time, it would be like turning a jewel and you would see the facets in it, not because the facets are there that I cut them and put them there. They're there because you cut them and you put them there. That's the difference in a learning for real from an instruction for lining up. Well, people are queued up and malnourished all over the planet because it's time to stop speaking in forked tongues. Art is we're going to get to it next week with Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Moore. One of the great discoveries of Wright was that the reality of a building is the space. That when you move around in a building, the conscious space of that building is the architecture. And towards the end of his life, one of his last great projects, the Marin County Civic Center up in San Rafael, California. And you look at the building from the outside and it's nestled into the hills. And it's even now, some half century later, it seems supersonic. And. But that's not it at all. That's not the architecture, that's the design. The building is built to come alive at the pace of walking about two miles an hour. And if you tune yourself to experience the Marin County Civic Center at about two miles an hour, the pace of normal human walking the building raises itself off the earth and becomes a living, organic composition in conscious space that has a fully distributed harmonic everywhere, all the time, which you yourself make by doing it. Henry Moore, when he was working, he said when he was young, he loved fat women. He said, I wanted bulk, lots of it. Bigger the better. Let's have £500 models. He grew up in the Midlands of England, next to the slag heaps, and he wanted earth mothers that were huge. And then he discovered that they become eternally spacious if they have holes in them. Gaps. And he transformed his whole idea of what was massive. What is massive? He saw was that it incorporates the holes in spaces so that the resonance is eternal and not just large. More next week.