Art 5

Old yoga art five. The title space and Holes. Space and holes. We're looking at Frank Lloyd Wright, and we're looking at Henry Moore. And we're trying to appreciate that art emerges out of vision and not out of myth. The language of art is not the language of experience. It is the language of vision. Okay. How's our sound? Let's make the point again because it is always missed. It is continually missed and it's missed out of habituation. Art has nothing to do with the language of feeling, tone, experience. It has everything to do with the magical field of vision. It's true that art has an enormous capacity to present the spectrum of feeling toned experience, but it does not come out of that. Art does not follow a plot line, like the little bouncing ball following the lyrics of songs on the screen in the 50s. And this makes a very great difficulty in the appreciation of what conscious form is because our mistake is universal and habitual, and it's very difficult to break. Art doesn't exist. The basis of art is not existence. A work of art is real, but is unconcerned with whether it exists, so that the whole existentiality of ritual is irrelevant essentially to aesthetics. And this is very difficult to appreciate. And the word is well used because art requires of us an appreciation rather than trying to be certain by pounding it or kicking it. I wrote about ten years ago this paragraph. We cannot know the person until we know the self. The adventure of person making is a sequel, organic enough, as we shall see. Yet a sequel nonetheless to the more primal adventure of self-discovery to confuse the two. Blurring this distinction, which is so basic, leads to inflation of the ego and all attendant ills. Or it regresses regresses in deflation to stereotypes. So that we find an extremely difficult watershed, a threshold which we must traverse And the difficulty is, is that there's no way to traverse this threshold in nature. We have to go beyond the limitations of natural process and natural forms to enter into the realm where art is real. And so it is one of the most difficult things. Probably the most difficult thing for human beings is to be able to appreciate art. So that when art begins to appear in the Paleolithic caves about 40,000 years ago, there is a threshold where, for the very first time, a kind of a new magic dimension comes into the world. It is so easy to confuse a ritual concern for images and symbols with the visionary magic that leads to art. Ritual magic. One of its great defaults is that it blinds us to transformation of dimension, and regressively routes us back to either stereotypes or inflation. The problem with black magic is that it makes men stupid. The great, beautiful quality of art is that it wakes us to the real as ourselves, and allows us to find a harmonic by which to participate in the cosmos, so that art is a great threshold, but cannot be crossed by any kind of a plan or by any kind of a plot line. It's a very peculiar thing, the plot lines of mythic development, Peter, out in that threshold of vision. And this is one of the one of the most outstanding lessons. Any human being, male or female, who has ever gone into a visionary dimension, knows that they must suspend all that they know about nature there in what was called in the Latin phrase, terra incognita. They're not on Earth anymore. They're in the land of the unknown. They're in the undiscovered country, as Shakespeare put it. And that there is no way to use the natural reference, the ritual comportment, the mythic plot lines of experience, or even the symbolic ideas and integrals which all occur in the natural ecology. We cannot use those in vision. It's a very peculiar situation, so that when you find deep wisdom, like Uh. Towards the end of his life, William Blake illustrated his great epic vision of of a new earth, a new mankind, and a new earth. And he called the great hundred page epic Jerusalem. In the very first page, the title page of Jerusalem, there is a pilgrim, Blake, holding a lantern, which is like a shimmering spheres within spheres, within spheres, kind of occult light, mystical light. And he's going into a Gothic passage, like going underground in the most fantastically, deeply, profoundly mysterious way, and over the lintel of this Gothic arch, going down into the unknown, under the earth, under history, under everything, is the statement, abandon all hope ye who enter here. It does no good to keep your fingers crossed. It does no good to know about candle burning. It does no good to know all of the qualities that made experience safe and certain in nature, so that the classic wisdom thing is that you must find some way to accept giving up the coordinates by which you know your way around, and be able to step into the unknown without knowing that there is a path there, and that by virtue of your continuing to step a path is manifested by the fact that you continue to step, not because it's there as a function of a plan. It's not there as a function of a mythic plot line. There is no story safety in vision. That vision is this realm where another dimension has come into play, and the and the coordinating dimensions of time and space because of having a fifth dimension added to them, the dimension of consciousness are completely changed, so that consciousness in vision is quintessential. That's the old alchemical term, quintessential. There's a quintessence to it, and it's like adding the movable thumb to four fingers. Consciousness is a dimension allows for us to not grasp, but to un grasp. To un grasp the need for existential coordinates. For certainty that our certainty now is not founded on existential referentiality, nor is it founded on symbolic plans, symbolic ideas. And so the visionary is a kind of an ultimate cosmic magician who opens every aspect to the unknown. And the only way in order to do this is to go through a double process. The classic names for those two aspects of that double process are acceptance and absorption. Acceptance in the sense that one Comes to an openness because acceptance creates out of meaning a sense of truth and absorption into that. The classic Sanskrit term for it is still useful in our time. Samadhi absorption that one is absorbed not as in a trance, which is a ritual absorption, but absorbed in contemplation. That contemplation is quite a different thing from a trance, and so vision as a function is a transformational, quintessential five dimensional realm. And it's out of that that art emerges and art emerges just as Existentials emerged out of nature, there is a great similarity, but not a similarity of referentiality, but a similarity of resonance leading to a harmony so that the work of art comes out of vision, just as the spiritual person comes out of vision and emerges, and does not need to be correlated to an existential base at all, is unconcerned with that has its own ecology of actuality and the ecology of actuality in art and in the spiritual person is to be real, and whether one is existentially there in time and space is rather beside the point, so that Someone who has died has a ongoing reality which they would not have existed in that natural limitation. A literary figure like Don Quixote is real in a quintessential conscious time space. Whereas when you look to see, did he really exist? You can't find him. You can say, oh, well, it was an aspect of Cervantes, or it was a confluence of mid late medieval figures from all the epics of chivalry and Cervantes at the beginning of Don Quixote, despoils this kind of phony aesthetic. He says, Don Quixote read so many books on chivalry that his mind dried up And in the dust of that emptiness came this deep realization that he was the last knight errant, and that he would sally forth not in terms of stories, but in terms of a profound, mysterious spiritual reality. And so Don Quixote and Sancho Panza go forth on Rosinante, who existentially is a broken down hag of a nag of a horse. Thereafter. Me. Space and holes. Los Angeles. You know, I was awakened a couple of nights ago at 230 in the morning. I heard heavy paw prints on the ceiling on the roof of the house, and I could tell from the spacing and the sound and the heaviness that it was a lynx, a wildcat, about £50. So, of course, not wanting to let this go on, I rushed outside. One of the French doors in the bedroom and started to yell at it. And I realized that here I am, standing nude in Los Angeles of the 21st century without a weapon, charging a wildcat who is probably about ten feet above me on the roof, looking down and the surreality of actuality beggars the limitations of existence. Art flourishes in dimensions where nature no longer can go without a transformation. And so the realm of magical consciousness. The realm of art extends an invitation to nature to continue to continue not just to exist, but to become real in a beyond existence dimension. And so art extends to nature the ability to survive death and to survive with great dignity and grace and charm and excellence. So that there is an adventure in art, there's an adventure to the ability to get beyond the limitations of ritual and to get beyond the limitations of symbol, to transform what was the language of feeling toned experience into a farther Realm, a realm where there is a harmonic that takes experience out of the story lines that confined it and bring it into the field of creativity, where one could write stories without end because one has become a storyteller. And so we can say this, this kind of language art emerges in differential possibility out of the amplitude of vision, not in, quote, thinking about images, nor feeling around stuff, nor any rote ritual. Exercises for art is not an integral form. Differential forms are. Vision Matrix and thus live on their own artworks. Persons. Spirits. Consciousness. The grand cosmos all occur really, and not just existentially. That existentiality is a limitation in face of the real. Two processes. But up back to back. One of them is abstraction. The other is surreality. And in between these two is an indivisible, invisible, indivisible force field that does not allow the one to touch the other. It's a very peculiar thing, and it has its actual Reality in the way in which organic cell membranes of living organisms are pretty well throughout the universe. In any star system, you'll find this kind of a of a design, this kind of a structure. Almost all carbon based organic cells will have a membrane that has two aspects, like a yin and yang of the same quality, that one side of the membrane will respond to water and the other side will not. One side of the membrane loves water, the other side does not. So that there is a. A kind of a love indifferent interface. And because that interface face has a permeable membrane quality. The life processes can go through certain channels and yet the cell maintains its form, usually in the membrane of a cell wall. There will be atoms of calcium, or sometimes potassium, or sometimes sodium. Those atoms are ionic channels that allow for the cell to have concourse with other cells with outside of itself. And yet the cell wall by the water loving, water hating duality permeated so that it becomes, instead of a duality, a pair. And because that pair is related to a larger functioning, That pair is a complementarity, so that the very membrane of a cell wall of an organic organism, pretty much through the universe is always a defining complementarity. And art is very much like that. It is a complementarity where symbol reaches its ability to become abstract and vision reaches its new energy, where it can become surreal. And that interface of abstract and surreal was explored to the nth degree at the beginning of the 20th century and throughout the 20th century characterized, I would say, two of the artists who really characterized that on one side is Kandinsky for abstraction and for surreality. Max Ernst. There are many others that you could use, but those two give us a chance to focus and see the artist who best shows the permeability of what would be initially a polarity that stymies contact, yet through ionic channels of permeation allows a preparedness to come out of what would be a duality, and then finally a complementarity that generates an entirely new dimension of what we call life. That life is no longer existentially based, but is now reality purposed. That instead of looking back referentially To ritual confirmation for objectivity. Art looks forward in its confirmation for objectivity of the real. And this is a complete transformation. The artist who allows us to appreciate this most is Henry Moore. Henry Moore. Now Moore. It was born in 1898 and he lived until 1986, so he was 88 years. And he was born in Yorkshire in northern England, northern mid northern England. And he was born in probably the worst of the industrial wastelands of England. He looked out of one of these long brick hovels to slag heaps in the soot laden air, and more. When he was a boy, I overheard someone talk about someone named Michelangelo, who was the world's greatest sculptor and who had once knocked a couple of teeth out of a sadder figure that he had made because someone said that an old satyr like this would not have such perfect teeth. And Henry Moore remembered that all his life that there was something real about an artist who did not want to have things just existentially right, but wanted to have them real, incorporating whatever imperfections existentially there were, because the preference was to go for the real and not for the pretty. Not for the perfect. That art goes beyond perfection and goes beyond prettiness. And that deep beauty is an appreciation of the real and not tying it on and being charmed by superficialities by appearances. Moore was of such an age that he participated for a couple of years in the First World War. They called it the Great War, and when he was facing death in the trenches every day, it suddenly occurred to him that he could do what he wanted to do with his life. And he thought, if I live, if I get out of this, I'm going to go to art school. I'm going to learn to be a sculptor. And when he was out of the service in 1919, he went to the Leeds School of art and began to interest himself in. How do you become a sculptor? How do you become an artist? How do you do this? He was lower than blue collar. It was like a coal miner's son, that kind of a thing. And in searching around, he ran across a book called Vision and Design by Roger fry. Roger Fry, born in the mid 1860s, and he lived, I think, up until 1934. He was around for a long time. Roger Fry became the professor, the world famous professor of fine art at Cambridge University in England. And in his time he was one of the great figures in the aesthetic appreciation of the Peculiar mysticism of art, and when more as a young X Slagheap boy an x. Trenches in World War One a soldier as a neophyte. Ran across vision and design. He turned to the last page of the book. It came out in 1920, so it was new. And being a young art student, he thought he would read The Great Professor's. New book. And the very last paragraph of Fry's vision and design reads. As to the value of the aesthetic emotion, it is clearly infinitely removed from those ethical values to which Tolstoy would have confined it. Tolstoy had when fry was a young man written a book called what is Art? And at the time, Tolstoy was going through a huge inner turmoil for himself and became disgusted with the fact that he was famous as the world's greatest novelist. And he was still a young man. He was only in his late 40s, and being Count Tolstoy, he wanted to be of service to the Russian people. So he volunteered to become the census taker in the slums of Moscow. And day after day, month after month of being the census taker in the slums of Moscow, brutalized Tolstoy's sense that he was a Count Tolstoy or that he was a great novelist. He was one of the greatest artists. It just crushed him. So he became anti-art in the sense that one must have a deeper ethic than just trying to be famous, than just trying to be socially noble, than just trying to be important all the time. And Tolstoy went through. He said in one of his notebooks, he began hiding every gun in the house so he wouldn't use it on himself. Because Tolstoy was also a professional soldier. Fry is trying to make a point not to scramble Tolstoy, but to say there is a deeper quality to aesthetics, and that ethics comes out of the deeper quality of aesthetics and does not come out of the concerns of ritual, rightness, mythical prettiness and tradition, or symbolic perfection of plants, that an ethic comes out of the personal freedom in a quintessential five dimensional continuum, where the concern is to be real. The real ethic is to be real, and not just to protect one's existence, not just to protect one's experience. Oh, it's my experience or it's our experience, those outsiders, or we have the best plan. And we know that this is good for everyone, so that they should be thankful that we're imposing it. All of this comes under the aegis of a sense of morality, of mores, not ethics. And that ethics is Concerns the activities of persons in a visionary harmonic tuning itself to the real. And so ethical behavior is a non-sequitur. There's no such thing as ethical behavior. There's no such thing as ethical judgments. Ethical decisions. There is such a thing as the range of possibilities and exploring the best that you can. And a creative ethic like that looks at a different kind of evolving. Henri Bergson called it creative evolution, and that the quality of time in creative evolution is the French word is durée. It means in English Duration. Not clock time, not plan time, not ritual time, not mythic time, but a duration wherein consciousness plays and seeks for the best possibilities to be nourished, and hopes that that discovery will continue to bring newer possibilities, newer betterness, and that one's sense of following where to go is by a harmonic of resonances rather than a plan, rather than the way the story reads as opposed to in tradition. One is reminded of the way in which the late Joseph Campbell used to encourage people to live by myths, and you will never find Yourself in a mess. What you will find is the ultimate mythic model which you can follow. And you follow at your own peril. Because if you know the story, you know how it turns out. Orpheus always goes after Eurydice. He always looks back and loses her. And always is killed for it. Yes, he comes back and he comes back to do it again and again and again. He will never get her out of hell. She will never live still. And he will always die. It can be beautiful for the first 8 million times. But there finally comes a moment when Camus was writing The Myth of Sisyphus. He made the point. This is an absurdity on a personal level, and the only question that existentially generates itself out of that absurdity is, is it okay to commit suicide and stop it? But what is a further complication of that is the sociological inflation that whereas it's absurd for an individual, it has a tone where suicide for the individual decision becomes a question of murder. In the sociological setting, will you kill others instead of yourself? And so in Camus's writings on the absurd and in The Rebel brought existentialism to a point where one could appreciate by the early 1940s that there must be a transform out of the ritual, mythic symbolic cycle, that you can be comfortable and stay in there as long as things are working out. If they're not working out, there has to be some way to get out of that. And the traditional way to get out of that is through vision. Without vision, says Saint John, the people perish. Why do they perish? Because you can only have a string of okay, ritual, mythic symbol cycles. Only so long and eventually circumstance works against you. The house rules are that you will always lose Eventually no one gets out of life. Alive is the way somebody used to say it. There is a quality of transform, therefore, that transformations are changing the rules. By these rules. We will always end up eventually, tragically, by these rules we will always die. By these rules. Life will always ultimately be terrible. And all of this is unacceptable. All of this is not only unacceptable, but rejectable on grounds deeper than practicality, on grounds deeper than existentiality on the grounds that they can be transformed into a wider dimension Of reality, and that this is not a pie in the sky kind of transform. This is how, uh, at the last paragraph of Vision and Design by Roger fry, the young 22 year old Henry Moore reading this read, it seems to be as remote from actual life and its practical utilities as the most useless mathematical theory. One can only say to those who experience it, feel it, to have a peculiar quality of reality. Art has a peculiar quality of reality, which makes it a matter of infinite importance in our lives. Any attempt, writes fry, 1920. Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism on the edge of that gulf I stop. Whereas for Henry Moore, it was an invitation to him to go into a the mysteries of vision and the mysteries of nature and the most mysterious figure, the mysterious form that he could find for himself at 22 was the physical body of a woman that the physical, the female form, the female body was both, to him, a mystery of nature and a possibility of vision, out of which complementarity he would try to bring his art. And they've published now his, uh, complete drawings in six volumes, and the first volume of Maus drawings are over and over again. The kinds of drawings of art models that you would find in any art class, since the time when models were first sketched live. There was a time when artists didn't have live models and had to sketch from looking at other men's paintings of nudes. But all that changed in the 19th century, and in the 20th it became just normal school fare. Again and again you find after ten years, after 11 years of sketching, suddenly there begins to emerge out of these thousands and thousands and thousands of sketches, a preference for two modes of the female nude. One is the reclining nude and the other is the nude woman holding a baby. Especially holding a baby or suckling a baby. And so the mother and child and the reclining female nude. For more were like the two poles out of which his visionary quest energy began to realize that there was a harmonic working here for him. What was it about the reclining nude? She was invitational to to the man? Yes, but for what purpose? For getting together. And out of that comes the second form, the mother and child, which is also invitational. For what? For Life and more began to realize that his art concern was to bring a new form of life out of his visionary circumstance somehow in the play. The creative play of these two modes are the most mysterious form that he knew of, and it took him a long time, many, many thousands of sketches to finally realize that what he was looking for came out in 1930, in a sculpture where a woman is holding not a child, but where the child would be. There is a space, and that space penetrated through the form very soon and left a hole, left a hole exactly where the breast over the heart would be. And that one sees in the sketches about this time. For the first time, Moore is sketching a baby at the heart covered breast of a woman, where the baby's head is the same size and shape as the breast, and where the nipple of the breast would be is the eye of the baby. But instead of there being a nipple, there was a hole, a space so that the baby's head had a hole through that space exactly where its eye would be exactly aligned to where the nipple of the mother's breast would be, and goes all the way through the form. And he found that this was like one of those ionic channels where the impossibility of getting nature to be a complementarity to consciousness, and that art allows for that to happen. And it was a revelation to him. He couldn't believe it. And you see in his sketchbooks. He goes month after month after month trying not to, you know, lean on that too heavily. And finally, you find a late in this development, the ability for him to see that there is a quality in his work which will be singled out. This quality of the reclining nude, where the entire body of the woman is available for holes and spaces that her entire body in a visionary field is permeable. It isn't just the breast, it isn't just the vagina. It isn't just the ears. It isn't. It is the entire female body is a permeability to the penetration of the deep reality of life. And when he woke up to this. He stopped doing two things. He stopped just sketching to make works of art. And he started to bring works of art out of his own visionary matrix. So deep was this that when the Second World War was upon the English, September 3rd, 1939, more stopped making sculpture for four years. He didn't make a single work of sculpture until deep into the Second World War. Late 1943, he returned to sculpture because he had a new vision. We'll come back to this as soon as we take a break. Thanks. This is an interior in the Johnson's Wax Building, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in the mid 1930s. Just to bring a visual image of how a work of art puts the visionary process into a form, and that form is the work of art. And that a work of art presents itself in the real. It does not represent something else referentially in existence, so that it takes a long education in order to understand that art doesn't concern itself with existentials. It raises existentials through an enrichment of experience into a symbolic saturation that undergoes a transformation into a visionary spectrum of possibilities, and out of that emerges the work of art. So that were it not for a great complementarity of consciousness and nature, art would exclude ritual, and ritual would exclude art as if they were polarities. And one of the great difficulties is that historically, human groups have come together in terms of ritual, existential action, And translated that ritual existential action into mythic experience, which is the very matrix out of which feeling comes, and that feelings intelligence, which is sentience, allows for the interiorization of meaning into intelligence symbolically, especially into very powerful symbols, very powerful ideas. And that that entire ecology is usually trusted as what is practical, and was called in ancient Greece by the peripatetic philosophers clustered around Aristotle. They used the Greek term practicae, and that other than that was theoria theory. So that theory and practice are two mutually exclusive and allowed to come together in one arena, and that is in the mind, and that the mind is the arbiter between theory and practice. Whereas the entire weight of millions of years of practical action do not lead you to a facility for conscious contemplation. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen at all. That contemplation, theoria, real theory, is a differential function of consciousness and does not take place in the untransformed mind. The untransformed mind will not contemplate. It can't. It can't do it. So that the traditional way to talk about that is that the mind has to wake up to what it has to wake up to its own limitations, that the mind has limitations, not because it's dumb. That's not its limitations. Mind is brilliant in thought. The mind is does what it's supposed to do. But consciousness is not a function of the clear mind. It's not a function. Contemplation doesn't happen there. And so one of the great practices is to learn to quiet the mind so that it doesn't think that it's doing something wrong, so that when it realizes that it's doing everything right and still isn't conscious, Just then something opens up that wasn't there before and that is stopping to plan for it, stopping to hope for it. Can we open the door? So that we can open the door and let something new come in? And that contemplation is a differential function. It likes to develop the range of possibility further. That's what vision does. And vision does it very well. And that when one wakes up to contemplation, one of the bad habits that's carried over by the whole alignment of ritual, myth and symbol carried over is that one expects that consciousness then, is a power, and especially men mistake consciousness for power because they carry they carry an energy line that is very much characteristic of the way in which a male operates in life, in nature. But consciousness is not a power at all. Consciousness is a permeability to possibility. And that's a completely different thing. And for Henry Moore, he discovered that the male body, the male nude, carries the line the impact of energy very well, the dynamic of energy very well. But it's the female body, the female nude, that carries the visionary mysteriousness of permeability, of possibility. And that is the complementarity between the two. That somehow is the secret of how life really happens. Life really happens that way. Fertility comes out of that. And that there is a magic to that. That is puzzling on all the levels, including vision. The first time that that comes into objective focus is in art. Art does that. The artist's vision from vision and design. Roger fry, Henry Moore reading this 80 years ago. Fry writes. The artist's main business in life, however, is carried on by means of yet a fourth kind of vision, which I will call the creative vision, is influenced by a by Bergson. He's influenced by William James, many different aspects by Cezanne. By 1920 it was already in the air. Fourth kind of vision I will call the creative vision. This, I think, is the furthest. And here uses a word which betrays his being born in the 1860s. This, I think, is the furthest perversion of the gifts of nature, of which man is guilty. It's almost embarrassing to read it. Cambridge, Don. It demands the most complete detachment from any of the meanings and implications of appearances. True enough. Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist this detached and impassioned vision as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the aesthetically chaotic and accidental conjunction of forms and colors. It begins to crystallize into a harmony. And as this harmony becomes clearer to the artist and then fry goes off from there, though he's close at many points, there's a cultural predilection to think that somehow this is like an effort still. For someone like Monet, when he learned to see color, he just. He left business. He left everything. If it's it. What's going on here? Is that the discovery that the contemplation in creative vision brings into play something as mysterious as nature? And yet it comes out of the nascent, burgeoning discovery that we are real. And so it's dynamic is not because of power, but because of realization. Realization that we are real. And to call that a power is a misnomer. It isn't powerful in that sense. It's that we now Participate in a new way, a different way in nature. Power comes because one participates with the way in which nature works, with the way in which existentials are objective, with the way in which experience is generated by actions that coordinate existentiality in such a way that triggers happen and things work. And because they work, we can do it because we're essentially participating in nature, but we're participating in nature existentially. Or is about the same time as Roger fry is writing Vision and Design in France, Lucien Lévy-bruhl is beginning to question this entire intellectual Cambridge don outlook. And in fact, about ten years before this came out, Lévy-bruhl wrote a book which is translated into English. The title in English is How Natives Think, how Primordial Men and Women Think. They don't think with the mind in its clear, abstract, objective sense of power, of aligning existentials through ritual action to get the effect that you plan for. They don't think that way at all. You don't find cause and effect diagrams with the Australian Aborigines. What do you find? You find concentric circles like mystical targets. You find the men putting white puff paint dots all over their body, and then dancing because they are dissolving their masculine power into the transformative A vision of equally distributed pointillism, so that the posturing movements of their dance participates not with the existentials of nature, but with the mystery of nature. And that when you participate with the mystery of nature, you bypass the whole existential feeding line that leads up to the sense that the mind is important because it organizes power. That the path integral of practical action leads to control and command of nature. Alpha male. And that all of that is in a way, parenthetical to something even more astounding that reality exceeds the limits of existentiality by infinite amounts. One can be real in dimensions of truth that existence is beggared by. It just doesn't hold a candle to it at all. And so the artist is not concerned with whether it is true existentially, but whether it generates life. Really. And that one participates, then, in the mystery of nature, not in the action of existence. This is a great wonderment. It's astounding. And so the artist becomes enormously personal. Every line that a Van Gogh draws is a Van Gogh line. If he chooses a cadmium yellow. He applies it in a Van Gogh way. You can't mistake him. That's not the way Gauguin would use it. So the artist becomes what to the mind thinks is an individual universe or the artist is important because he has the power of an individual universe. That is a junk idea is a terrible betrayal. It has nothing to do with what is real. That is the projection of an idea from a very powerful idea, from a symbolically habituated mind. One thinks that this is the way that things work, and therefore it should work this way. For Henry Moore, he went from the Leeds College of Art, Leeds, England, industrial city. He went to London. He went to the great Royal Academy of Art in in London. But when he was there studying sculpture. The rules of the Royal Academy of Art were that you could not carve. You you could study sculpture, but you don't study sculpture by carving. So he had to go secretly as an outlaw. We're giving a lecture. Somebody lock the door. You have to sometimes be an outlaw. You have to steal the opportunity to be real. Hermes initially was a thief. The hermetic tradition begins by stealing. What's the first thing? I mean, the young Hermes. What's the first thing he does? He steals the cattle of Apollo. It's a cattle rustler. Apollo, whose chariot is Helios, the sun. He steals the cattle of the sun. Well, if you look at ancient Egyptian religion, they always have the bull's horns, the cattle's horns with the big sun there. And this is like the, the, you know, the icon of the way in which the solar religion helps you to resurrect. And all of that is a deception. No one ever was resurrected by the solar religion of the sun and the horns of the bull. It's through participating in the mystery of nature and going through a permeability where death no longer is a limitation. It's not a ritual limitation. It's not a symbol limitation. It's not an experience limitation. It's a liminality, for sure, but a liminality as a threshold through which one can be initiated can be guided and that one can emerge victorious. As Shelley says at the end of Prometheus Unbound. This alone is life, joy, empire, and victory. It's not making an adjustment with bad conditions that you can't do anything about. That's not why there's joy. That's not why the stars morning stars sang together. They sing together because the cosmos is free forever. And we are of that family. We belong there, but we belong there only when we are real. And so our whole purpose is to learn the limitations of the path integral, to get us to a point to where we can accept that we've done very well and this is about it. Yet we can transform and even further the incredible discovery that transformations, forms that have transformed can be further They're distilled. You can take grape juice, which has become wine, and distill it into cognac. Those drinks are called spirits. Why? Because that's exactly what they are. And that human beings become spirits? Yeah. They wander freely in mountains and streams without end. That's what the Chinese aesthetic says. It's true. When Moore was outlawing sculpting, carving on his own, they began to notice that he was really talented. It was evoking and drawing out of him enough capacities so that they gifted him this poor boy, this poor English boy from the slag heaps they gifted him with six months in Italy. So as soon as he went to Italy, of course He was aware that you can be captured by the Renaissance. You can be captured by the Renaissance. And the Renaissance is essentially an era where the chief art was painting. Painting and sculpture was an auxiliary art, except for the fact that the earliest great painters of the Renaissance all had sculptural capacities, and their paintings are more sculptural than they are painterly. And one of the earliest Renaissance painters was a man named Masaccio. In his time he was called big Tom. He was a bruiser. And Masaccio was apprenticed to Masolino, another artist. And then Masolino got more commissions, and he said, look, Tom, you just you take over and you finish the the decor here, you finish the paintings and all that and and Masaccio, who only lived to be 27 or 8 years old when he died. They tried to find somebody who could paint like him to bring in, and they brought in Filippo Lippi to finish the paintings. And the major site is the site that Henry Moore went to. It's a church in Florence, Santa Maria del Carmen, and in Santa Maria del Carmen. The most famous part of that church is called the Brancacci Chapel. Here's a big book on the Brancacci Chapel and in the Broncos chapel, Henry Moore found an image of Masaccio in one of the frescoes that blew him out. And he realized that in this early Renaissance painterly form, there were the bones of a sculptor's comportment towards form, and Masaccio certainly has that. He has the muscular fresco of the early Italian Renaissance, very much like Giotto had, so that there is such a thing as a sculptural painter, and Masaccio is one of those. Michelangelo's muscular style of painting comes because he studied Masaccio's paintings in the Brancacci chapel. I brought in a photograph of the chapel so you can see all the paintings are on the walls, and the chapel itself is like the best gallery of early Renaissance art in Florence. And that's where Moore went in for six months. He wouldn't leave his sketching and as he was sketching, he realized that his boyhood idol Michelangelo had done this, but that Michelangelo had gone from here in Florence, that he took the feeling in his hands not to make paintings, but to make sculpture and to bring sculptural form out of his vision. Is a different process or a different mode, a different variant. You make sculpture in a slightly different way than you make paintings. You make architecture in a slightly different way from that. They're all family relations, but you're following Uncle Fred's way instead of Aunt Jane's way. Where did Michelangelo go? He went to the coast. He went to the marble quarries at Carrara, not far inland from the coast. A big mountain of marble where they've been carving marble out now for 500 years, and all of Michelangelo's sculptures came from there. So more went to Carrara and he went to Carrara in a visionary way. He went to get the feel in his hands from the mystery of nature. And so he would sit on these great huge blocks of marble that the Italian workmen are patiently cutting out of this great huge marble quarry in this mountain side. 500 years worth. And he would put his hands and feel the veins of minerals in the marble so he could calibrate himself and sensitize himself. And he realized that what he was trying to carve in London as a, as a student in a, in a boyish sort of way, he was trying to carve wood and to stay with the grain of the wood, but the grain of marble is quite different. The grain of marble has the way in which mineral lightning goes through the igneous rock. The fire formed rock of the marble, and it's like the minerals are like, not dead, but they're like Pre-life. Teilhard de Chardin, once in Outer Mongolia, where he was exiled by the church. Teilhard de Chardin in the First World War was asked by two dying Frenchmen to give a mass in their trench foxhole, and he didn't have anything to offer for the mass. So he offered the whole world. And when they learned of it, the church said, get rid of him. So he was sent off to Outer Mongolia for 40 years. And de Chardin used to say that rocks are not dead, they're just pre-life because he had that vision of the real, and the way in which rocks begin their journey into life is they become minerals. That minerals are the first step towards organic self formation into organisms. Before there are bacteria, there are minerals. So that this quality of the life veins of the marble as being pre-life for more. It was like a vision that he could bring the life realities out of the stone. That's the true meaning of the sword in the stone. It's not the sword of power. King Arthur can't pull a sword out of stone with sheer power. He does it by the finesse of being able to work with the real, and so more learned that he had this ability. He could stay in his vision, and as long as he stayed in his vision, he could bring the sculptural forms to life and what sculptural forms he wanted to bring the feminine, the female nude body reclining and with child, especially out of marble. And he realized, like in Masaccio's beautiful woman with her child, that there was in this relationality no kind of sentiment, but a sobered ratio of realism. And this is how Frye writes of this. This is in the essay Art and life. On the other hand, the artist of the new movement. This is 1920s talking about Kandinsky and Picasso and the new movement. On the other hand, the artist of the new movement is moving into a sphere more and more remote from that of the ordinary man. In proportion as art becomes purer, the number of people to whom it appeals gets less. It cuts out all the romantic overtones of life, which are the usual bait by which men are induced to accept a work of art. It appeals, then, only to the aesthetic sensibility, and that in most men is comparatively weak, so that Henry Moore throughout the 1920s, after that, for ten years until the early 1930s, was searching. He was interested. He was trying to find out of his hands. Not in the ritual action of just sketching, but in the artistic generating of an ongoing duration, a durée of his conscious vision, keeping it not stoked in power, but keeping it resonant in real. And out of that came a discovery. Which surprised him, and you can find in more. By 1935, he had married a woman named Irina, and Irina more had been a model for him. In 1935 was the last time that he sketched his wife in the nude. And after that, you find that more goes into a realm which cursory public calls surreality, surreal images, odd shapes having holes in them, or having lines drawn around them, having nothing to do with natural forms set in an ambience of gray, or of just cream paper, or somehow cross-hatching that just creates an indifferent space. And out of this, unbidden, came the sense of an arch and people writing these kinds of catalogs say, well, maybe more was thinking of the niche in which such and such a sculpture would go. But Henry Moore never made sculpture for niches. He didn't do it. He made sculpture initially to fit into landscapes. His great sense were sculptures that could be put out into the moors, into the landscapes. But at this time, in the 1930s, 35, 36, for the first time, you find Henry Moore discovering in his sketches that you could put a sculpture in an interior architectural space and this interior architectural space. By 1936, it's a sketch buried away on page 173 of volume two of Henry Moore's complete drawings and it doesn't show up from this distance, but there are four standing figures, two of them together on one side and then two slightly separated on the other side. And they are like in a cavern, but not a cavern. It is so curved that you can see that it's more like a tunnel, and it's like you would recognize in ancient times that this was from the mystery religions. These are hooded berobed figures undergoing the Eleusinian Mysteries in that kind of a tunnel effect of the architectural cave. And this was in 1936. There's no follow up to this for about three years. And when war was declared between England and Germany. And the Germans took it upon themselves to convince the English by bombing them. And bombing them incessantly to make them understand that they better behave. And London was in the Blitz and the population to get away from the Blitz. Bombings had to go into the subway systems of London and stay there sometimes all night. Wrapped and swathed in robes and blankets. And they looked exactly like this sketch. That Henry Moore had done in a prophetic image just a few years before. And so he spent all of the Second World War. He got special permission to sketch the sleeping population of London in the tunnel. Bomb shelters during the whole of the Second World War. And so he sketched and sketched and sketched and in fact, the first monograph on him, 1943, The Penguin Modern Painters, people had forgotten he was a sculptor. He was a painter. And of course, the next year the great. Literary. Literary art critic Herbert Read brought out one of the first great monograph on Henry Moore. Not about painting at all. It's called Sculpture and Drawings. It's a sculpture. And he says in the beginning that we're still conditioned by the Renaissance thinking that painting is the mother art. And so we try to understand all the other arts in terms of painting, and that this does a disservice to us. Sculpture has its own way. Architecture has its own way. Music has its own way. While he was undergoing this enormous transformation. At the same time as you find the Eleusinian Mysteries initiation sketch of Moore, he begins sketching his surreal permutations of sculptural form in rows and aligning those rows so that you get a composition. You get a page of maybe 25 sketches, five on five lines or six arranged three, three. And there's a photograph somewhere of an early exhibit of Moore's sculpture. And on the wall are framed drawings of these sculptural forms arranged in sets. And when you look at them over and over again, from there on, you realize that these sets of arranged sketches are an alphabet. There are secret alphabet. There are language that he's learning to speak, not from the voice, but from his hands. He's learning to speak a secret magical language from his hands so that when he comes back after the Second World War, he goes back to Carrara right away to get the feel of the material, because he knows how to speak a language with those hands, the language of sculpture to bring the mineral veined fire forms of marble into living reality as works of art. Towards the end of his life, one of the grandest moments of Henry Moore. They had a retrospective exhibit in Florence, and there's a famous photograph from the roof of one of the palaces of the Great Duomo with a Henry Moore huge sculpture on the roof. And it fits right in. And there is more just happy and beaming, because he has emerged realistically into the company of Michelangelo, into the company of Donatello. He's at home with them in their city, on their terms. And he knows that. And this vocabulary, this alphabet of sculptural permutations, shows itself later, not in the arranged rows of 1937, 1938, 1939. But when he's sketching the underground shelters that are known as the shelter drawings of Henry Moore. You see that he puts all the permutations in the same drawing instead of different little drawings. He puts them as separate figures arranged together in a composition of one drawing. So he puts all the alphabet. Together, so that a single drawing in hundreds of people contains now the visual poem that he had before just arranged like an eye chart. Now he's seeing deeper and deeper into the penetration. From then on, Henry Moore's sculptural work begins to take on kaleidoscopic facets, as if it were like a jewel. Because every angle of vision is a new letter in the alphabet of the condensed poem of that sculpture. And you can see 2 or 3000 sculptures in a single Henry Moore work. Because every angle of approach has its own composition, its own artistic presentation. One can never run out of it. You can walk around a Henry Moore or late Henry Moore sculpture, and at first it seems just a that you've exhausted it because you've seen it. Well, have you seen it? Well, yeah. You ritually looked at it, you symbolically noted it and mythically your experiences catalogued it. And but if you have the vision and you have that participation with the mystery of nature, you can be with that sculpture through to eternity and never exhausted. This is the nature of the real. This is what we are made of. More next week.