Art 7

We come to Art seven. And we're going to look today at Frank Lloyd Wright for a while. Wright and Henry Moore presenting together. The middle month of our art phase. Each of the phases is three months long or a quarter of a year, so that we're taking an annual circle and we're dividing it into quarters, into fours, into seasons, as it were, so that we have a cycle that has a chance to have a very interesting Ratio quality a proportion. Once you have a circle, you can do some things with a circle, but once you have four quarters, the circle has been translated into a sequence that is not only a sequence of one, two, three, four, but a sequence which is in quarters that is, fourths, one quarter is one fourth. Its position is not just itself, but it is one of four, 1 in 4. And so you have a fraction one fourth. This whole issue of translation from the whole to parts that then have a commensurability in various proportions, was a classic basis for the development of one of the most profound transformations in the human mind. The Egyptian understanding of proportion was quite primordial, but it was limited almost to the point of being crippling. The Egyptian sense of proportion was based upon a fundamental understanding of two thirds of something. The Egyptian mathematics could get two thirds of anything. And part of this is the basis that a geometric city of a perpendicular and a horizontal gives you, as we know now, 90 degrees, but that you can work very conveniently with thirds of that 90 degrees. You can work with 30 degrees and you can work with 60 degrees. If you have a triangle where the angles are 60 degrees, then you have an equilateral triangle. The sides are all equal, the angles are all equal, so that the 60 degree angle is one of equanimity of an equality, and the 60 degree angle is exactly the median in between the 30 degree angle and the 90 degree angle, so that if you work with a 30 degree angle or a 60 or a 90, you have a different sense of what is going on in angles and in Geometric City, from someone who works completely with a horizontal and a vertical, where the median of horizontal and vertical, the 90 degree angle, the median is 45 degrees. Now, if you have a 45 degree median, a 45 degree angle, it is found in terms of compositions that we grow a little bit tired of things being 45 degrees all the time. Whereas the 30 degree angle or a 60 degree angle have a different feel to them, we can look at 30 degree and 60 degree angle Compositions all the time. Why? That is, the horizontal is repose and the vertical is the highest tension of restlessness. It's difficult for us to maintain a verticality all the time. It's difficult for us to maintain a horizontal quality all the time. And so the 45 degree angle is tiring because it is exactly splitting between two unsustainable modes. You can't be vertical all the time or horizontal all the time. One you're going to get bored, the other you're going to get exhausted. And so the 45 degree angle tends to be an average between exhaustion and boredom. So Frank Lloyd Wright chose to use 30 degree and 60 degree angles all the time together to mediate between a horizontal and a vertical. Now, this is very important for an architect, because the first thing you want to make sure is that what you design is built. And the second thing that what you build is going to stand. And even the term it's going to stand, it's going to have a verticality in the sense that it will stay where you put it. So that you want to take the horizon of the earth and make something that will stand and will stay there. And so right. Use 30 degree and 60 degree angles to make sure not only that it would stay there, but it would stay interestingly there. So when you find 30 and 60 degree angles used all the time as the angles of vision, which allow for the composition of the building to be appreciated. It's not that you're being shunted into a geometry straitjacket, but that you're being given a cue that you can play within the structure as it is designed and built. That you have freedom of staying in that structure in an interesting way long enough to develop an experience within it, which is your own play. So you have people who do not understand this. You have some artists who in the past, recent past have said, well, Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. You know, they're like control freak buildings. The architect over controls how you go into a building and what you have that they're prisons somehow. And this is exactly not what he was doing. It shows an ignorance of art, and it shows an ignorance also of the way in which nature works in experience. The geometric city of the Greek mind was a development of the Egyptian, but the Egyptian, being limited to two thirds, never developed the full appreciation for the development of geometric possibilities and the development of that came to fell on the shoulders of Pythagoras, so that the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras was mature by 530. Bc very early on, his sense of understanding was that geometric unity was possible to have a sequence and a development that was not only linear in the sense of a horizontal measurement, or vertical in the sense of a vertical measurement, or a mechanical calibration of two thirds of that ultimate angle of 90 degrees, but that there was a understanding that with geometric city the geometric mind being developed, the proportionate mind being developed, that one would learn to see sequence in a different way, that you could see it arithmetically one, two, three, four, or you could see it geometrically as one, two, four, eight, that you would have the development by what was known as the squares. And that if you could do this, one could learn to see in an ordinal way in addition to the cardinal way. So that number then had two distinct properties that were able to be montaged onto each other cardinality and ordinality. You could see the existentiality itself in its sequence of additive ness or subtractive ness, but you could at the same time see the powers of existentiality as it multiplied or divided, so that the ordinal, the geometric progression increases at a much faster rate than the arithmetic. The arithmetic always increases by one. The geometric always increases by squares, so that by the time you count one, two, three, four and you're up to four in a cardinal sequence, in a geometric sequence, you're one, two, four, eight. And it was noticed by Pythagoras 2500 years ago that this capacity to see geometrically Extended not only to the squares, but extended to a higher power, the next higher power being the cubes. And if you look at the cubes, the progression goes one, three, nine, 27. So that whereas the arithmetic sequence takes you to four. The cubic geometric takes you to 27. And that there is an increase of differentiation between these sequences more and more and more so that the chambered nautilus shell of a spiral that opens progressively wider and wider, that every turn is an increased power of. It became the symbol. It became the symbol of a progression of nature by increments of powers of existentiality, that man was no longer limited to what nature provided, which is existential sequences, but had the ability to have his mind go into powers of sequences, especially the squares and the cubes. And towards the great apex of the maturity of his life, Plato, who was a Pythagorean. He was a Pythagorean for many reasons, mainly because Pythagoras was the genius before him who set the tone of the consciousness. The Pythagorean vision was the vision in which the creative vision within which Plato developed. His teacher, Socrates, had a teacher and his socrates's teacher, Diotima, was a Pythagorean, So at the apex of his great career in the Timaeus, which we looked at at the end of our first year in this education in the Timaeus is a famous V. And the V sometimes can be put upside down so that it looks like the Greek letter lambda. And it was called the lambda scale in antiquity. And the lambda scale on one line coming down has the squares and the other has the cubes. And because the squares and cubes occupy related positions, the one starts both and in the square goes to two. But in the cube goes immediately to three in the square. The next sequence is from 2 to 4 in the cube from 3 to 9. So that two and three have a relationality, and four and nine have a relationality. That eight and 27 have a relationality that have to do with hidden, invisible proportions of powers. It's not a proportion of existentiality, it's a proportion of powers. It's a symbolic objectivity that is available to the mind and not a existential visibility that is available to action, to ritual, so that the mind's objectivity is of one of taking existentiality to it's powers, so that the mind has objective forms that are powers of nature. They're Their multiples and their divisions of nature. And because one understood this, it was very difficult to appreciate that the scale on which one is working goes both ways all the time. It's like the, uh, famous electromagnetic equations of James Clerk Maxwell, written down and promulgated in 1879. And it took the genius of someone like Albert Einstein to tease out, two generations later, the theory of relativity, that the electromagnetic spectrum from these very equations has capacities of generating certain powers which the mind can come to understand is very difficult, but it can understand. But it wasn't until a whole generation later that someone came along and understood that the Maxwell equations not only solve in a positive way, but solve in a negative way as well, and that the negative solutions to Maxwell's electromagnetic solutions are just as real. And the immediate understanding from that was that there is such a thing as anti-matter that it really does exist. It's not only you can have the math for it, and that because you can have the math for it, there must be in the protein capacity of reality. There must be as much antimatter as there is matter. And when that was appreciated in the 30s, an almost unknown physicist named Anderson came up with the impossible idea that there must then be a complement to every particle that we have, and therefore there must be such a thing as a positive electron. They call it the positron. And Anderson's conception of the idea of the positron in the 1930s was like a zen, acrobatic mentality that there must be, in reality, something which is impossible in terms of the mental ideal of the physical structure of atomic matter, that there must be a positive electron, and therefore there are antiparticles for everything that we know. And of course it finally came through experiment over the next generation or so. The great discovery that most of what we keep track of, positive and negative, is only one horizon of matter, and that there are several other horizons of matter so peculiar that they were given names like strange that there are like there are strange, strange matter in reality, and that it cannot exist in our universe of baryons and leptons without having instant total annihilation, and that there is even a third horizon of charmed matter and material. And so we've come to understand by the 21st century that there's an enormous array to reality, and that in the development of our Species of men and women on this particular planet. There are transformational nodes that are so profound and enormous that sometimes it takes a long time for it to register. It isn't just the old adage that it takes an idea 150 years to be born in the insight of one individual before it's part of the street language of the general population. It's that sometimes consciousness has a new dimensionality that might take a thousand years for it to register. Between Pythagoras discovering the proportions between square and cubic ratios of existentiality and thus producing The geometric mind that was capable of proportionate geometry, which becomes in its dynamic trigonometry, so that the Pythagorean mind could jump to a trigonometric, spherical sense of harmony. And the highest cosmos that a Pythagorean could think of was one where there is a harmony of the spheres. But about 1500 years after Pythagoras, in a fabulous era known as the Arabian Nights Baghdad, when Harun al-Rashid developed a Baghdad to be a different kind of intellectual center from Rome or Constantinople, his model was ancient Alexandria, mainly because the Moslem civilization that it was a part of was unable to conquer Rome or conquer Constantinople. But they had since the 600 seconds conquered Alexandria. And so he looked to see, just as Constantinople was a new Rome, he wanted Baghdad of his day to be a new Alexandria, and so he made the Baghdad of his day famous as the Arabian Nights place where all kinds of things happened, all kinds of travels and adventures. Sinbad the Sailor. But among them was the emphasis that there should be also far out science, which meant far out mathematics. We have to outdo the Greeks. We can't just take the Roman take on Greeks. We have to go back to the original, and we have to do it in our way. And the Islamic mind started from a sophisticated geometric city, which the Greek mind didn't start from the Greek mind started from a sophisticated existentiality, whereas the Arab mind of the time of Harun al-Rashid in ninth century Baghdad started from geometric. And so they developed something which the Greeks had never developed. They developed algebra. They developed the ability to go into an algebra, which yielded a startling realization that there was not only a relationship between positive and negative. In terms of existence, one can have a negative one as well as a two, but in algebra one came to understand a fundamental equanimity and reality that had been elusive for the Greeks, and that is the squares have a complement in the roots. And if you take the existentiality of a number, let's take number five. Five has a square 25, but the root of 25 is five, but there is a root of five. There's a square root of five, a square root of five. So that one can go into fractions in a rational way, which is not the same as just dividing unity in terms of its existentiality, or in terms of its geometric existentiality, its geometric powers of existentiality, that you can go into the radical nature of existentiality, and you can get to incredible proportions that the Greek mind would have considered Irrational and would never have gone there, and the Arab mind could go there. So that Islamic mysticism became a mysticism of radical rootedness, of the hidden powers of geometry. And the great classic book on the development of algebra in the time of Harun al-Rashid is The Algebra of Abu Kamal, published for the first time in English in 1966. University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. It was a fabulous year, 1966, in San Francisco, where I was was the time of Baghdad and Alexandria all over again. And it's interesting because the Arabic text of Abu Camille, written in the ninth century, had been so corrupted during the long centuries millennia that the Arab text of Abu Kamal read like a inarticulate, crabbed, stupid medieval Arab document that nobody paid any attention to. Except that there was a translation of Abu Abu Kamal's algebra from the Arabic, but the translation was into Hebrew made by a Renaissance Hebrew scholar, Mordechai Finzi, and he did it around 1200. He did it about the time that that you would have seen growing up young Saint Francis of Assisi, a young Roger bacon, A old Joaquim de Feira of about the time when people were getting used to reading about King Arthur through Geoffrey of Monmouth's fabulous history. But because Mordechai Finzi wrote his translation in Hebrew, nobody in the Christian West read it. It's a Jewish book. And especially the Moslems didn't ever read it. And because it was a translation from the Arabs, most Jews didn't read Finzi's translation of it. And so it was left to a little scholar named Martin Levy. In the 1960s America, who could read Hebrew and he could read Arabic, and he could certainly was literate in English. And he got this fabulous grant from the Rockefeller Center, and he had to come up with something flashy. And so he decided to make a translation of the Hebrew and correct the Arabic into English of the foundations of algebra. And right away one sees that at the very beginning, Abu Kamal, who was a student of al-Khwarizmi, who was a sort of a Khwarizmi al-Khwarizmi, was his Pythagoras. But Abu Kamal is the Plato, and he says right at the beginning, because of Levi's translation in 1966, we can read it in English. 1500 years after Pythagoras. A thousand years ago in Baghdad. Abu Kamal, who's sort of a Sinbad, the sailor of intelligence, says first. First, it is necessary for the reader of this book to know that there are three categories. There are three types. According to Muhammad al-Khwarizmi in his book. They are roots, squares, and numbers. So that right away he's putting before you that do not think that you can think by just taking number as an existential basis for the actions of your thought and base your sense of what is real and what is possible on that limited Case. There are three different cases that go together. And of course he doesn't say immediately. The fourth case is the cubic. So if you take existence and its squares and its cubes and its roots, you get a cycle of wholeness that reads literally ones and twos and threes and square roots, that the fourth is not a fourth, but is the going into the original in a new way, so that you have an interesting ecology instead of having quarters being one, two, three, four, which is a quaternary. And all the jungians went for Quaternary, as the esoteric Hermetic tradition was never simplistic like that. That's a psychology based on laziness. To think that one understands reality because you have a quaternary psychology is really naive and has been for more than a thousand years. One. Two. Three. Infinity. The infinity is the delving into the infinite radical square rootedness of any existentiality. Someone who understood this was the famous non Jungian non psychologist George Gamow, who wrote a book on cosmology called one, two three infinity. And when you have one, two, three infinity, then your quaternary is available for a transformation out of the ritual limitations Ends of materiality, and you're ready to go exploring into the wonders of the mysteries of nature. Now, someone like Frank Lloyd Wright went into art in this kind of way. He went into an ecology of the real that went one, two, three infinity. He was able to go into not just nature, which then allows for existence to happen so that you have stuff, but to go back to the primordiality of the mystery of nature, so that the materials that come out of nature have a highlighted existentiality that goes into a highlighted feeling toned experience that goes into a highlighted Lighted symbolic capacity. That doesn't lead then to conclusions mentally, but leads into conscious vision transformationally so that Frank Lloyd Wright's Materials in the Nature of Materials is one of the great books written on Frank Lloyd Wright by Hitchcock. In The Nature of Materials doesn't mean that he's talking about wood and stone and glass as stuff. All this is specially Abu Kamil highlighted eradiated materials that have the capacity to generate a deeper infinity of possibility through transform, and it's out of that ecology one, two, three infinity that Frank Lloyd Wright developed architecture. It's not an architecture of stuff. It's an architecture of transformational mystery of nature all the way through into consciousness, and that the consciousness inhabits then an architectural space which is not an existential space, but is the whole spectrum of possibility of the existential space. What he said, space is the reality of a building. He didn't mean the space that you would find out. What's the square of this room? This room is ten by ten. It's 100ft². And you look at a building plan, it's 100ft². A Frank Lloyd Wright 100ft² is a completely different experience from 100ft² of a box. The cubic volume ten by ten by ten. One has of thousand cubic feet. Frank Lloyd Wright did not go by that kind of boxy limitation at all. In fact, he several times in his career went to great lengths to say, my architecture is out to destroy the box as a principle by which human beings have styled their homes, because if man doesn't learn to live freely in the real nature of his capacity of conscious transform, then he will not be man. He will simply be stuff. That is a content of other people's arrangements of boxes. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Let's come back. Let's come back to Art seven. Back to Frank Lloyd Wright. Back to a sense of nature, not as the basis upon which existentials occur. They do occur existentially, but we are always deluded by thinking that existence is objective because things are there in a countable way. Existence is never there in a countable way. The true understanding is that they are emergent with enough energy to maintain their vibrancy at a focus, and that to think that by pounding them, by kicking the tires, that we determine that they're real is very much a delusion which is projected upon existence. And it's a very serious problem to not do that, and that classically, the way to not do the projecting has fallen under the aegis of an even more pernicious delusion, which could be given the name retro projection. A retro rejection is just as real as projection, and even more pernicious because it is infinitely radical in its devolution. Whereas projection usually runs up against a brick wall where people consider you mad and they will put you away. But when there's a retro rejection, you are convinced that you are right. The more that you go into the details because it proves out. And so, while the world guards against madness, it does not guard against at all a retrospective, hierarchical co-opting of nature into private corrals of correctness. To use a phrase. If one then is aware of the problems on both sides, that there are problems in squares and problems in roots about existentials, then the whole strategy of coming into a realistic way of living is quite complex. In Frank Lloyd Wright's life, there were two major introductions to the transform of consciousness that obviates the way in which projections and projections together happen. One of the ways in which he discovered how to look out for both these was the discovery of Zen, in particular the Zen presented by the East Asian landscape art brought to its apex by the Japanese print, and he discovered this in 1905. And the second was about 20 years later, when he fell in love and married, eventually a woman who became his third wife and was with him in the great creative period of his life. Olgivanna was trained by Gurdjieff, who was a radical in terms of getting to the square roots of delusion in the world, but was frequently subject to a massive strategic retrospection. And this was a very complicated issue for him, and especially for those who followed him. The followers of Gurdjieff, like the followers of any one of availing themselves at the time of the particular type of cracking, the standard mentality to get to the radical root of the projection problem were co-opted in a, quote, subconscious way into a projection which they were unaware of, that they were doing so that it was a quality that was there in people not only like Gurdjieff, but also Rudolf Steiner and many of the people of that ilk and of that time, so that there is a huge area of that of so-called teachers, universal teachers, who produced in later generations a movement known as the New Age. And the New Age is a real phantasmagoria of retrospective mentalities. So one needs to be conscious in a way that a real education leads to art and not metaphysics. Leads to science and not esoteric rituals. The everydayness of rituals is a complement to the deepest science. That's why science is always particular about making sure that your experiments are as unnatural as you can make them. And it's not on the basis of an ideal called empiricism, but rather a ritual comportment, which is empirical because it doesn't cling to existence but goes constantly underneath the way in which existentials emerge in the first place. This is very complex. It's very difficult to express. Let's go back. Let's start the second part of Art seven in a different way, and approach it in a way in which would have been very familiar to someone like Frank Lloyd Wright. Here is a section of a poem written about 40 years ago, at the height of the San Francisco Renaissance, and it expresses the way in which a Zen appreciation of radicalness handles retrospective as well as projective. We don't want to even call them errors. Here's the poem. The problem, simply stated is, is how a two state, a spiritual matrix for our time space, all the coordinates are warped out of shape. And the problem simply is, is with us here in the giant forest. This giant forest has been a heaven before for ancient Indian chieftains and for medicine men and great warriors reincarnated. They believed in Sequoia gigantea for 50 centuries. Now that's nearly enough. There are rumors of dusty skulls, skeletons found tangled in fallen roots. Noble features in fire scars at night. Specters ghostly green under summer dogwood. Things that crouch there blithely black behind manzanita. This giant forest has been a haven before. For wildly utopian villages and for soul doctors and contemporary galliards re-established. We believed in a sequoia mystica for those who use a stars guide yet and counting. Yarrowstalks learning tarot. Terra. Logica. All this before and since. These giant trees have no tap roots. Their roots lace is just beneath. Not too deep at all. But inter growing so that with their mammoth growing girth. Sequoias simply stand upon themselves. That is to say, upon Diana. I wrote that in 1960. It's a part of a poem called Sequoia matrix Sutra. It is this possibility of going back to nature in a radical way, so that one goes beneath the ground of existence back to the mystery of nature, and re-emerges back through the ground as if these existentials are growing primordially for the very first time. The mind, in its integral way of thinking, has been made by nature to abstract, and the mind always abstracts and seeks then to make an interpretive shape that registers in experience in such a way that experience will fit into the shape of the understanding. And in this way, a conception is the glory of nature and the bane of going any further so that the mind becomes the arbiter of the entire cycle of nature by virtue of its functional structure. Consciousness does not occur anywhere in that quaternary, that ecology of nature, and so it is truly supernatural, supra natural, and it is a retrospective arrogance to then make consciousness the function of a metaphysics. It has nothing to do with it whatsoever is irrelevant so that there is a extremely delicate problem. How do you go back to nature in such a way that nature does not stop at existentials, but goes beneath to the composing context of nature? And in East Asian art that achieves its pinnacle in the Japanese print. In the East Asian art tradition, the landscape art was always the preferred way of delivering this. So that when Frank Lloyd Wright first went to Japan in 1905 and discovered the Japanese print, his favorite print artists were Hokusai and especially Hiroshige, who were the great landscape Printmakers. It was Hiroshige landscape prints that first gave him an indication that one was not only building a house as a form against which an architect's plans were being executed and brought out, but that the architect himself was prismatic of the mysterious function of nature, coming back through a conscious radical quality, so that the house was not just an existential thing that happened in nature. Even with an emersonian take on nature, but that there was beyond any metaphysical retrospective understanding. There was a real actuality where the house was a living resonance of the artist, of the architect himself. Now this fit in very, very beautifully with the way in which Frank Lloyd Wright had chosen to take his architecture in the first place to a professional level. He was born in 1867, and by the way, his middle name was Lincoln. He was born Frank Lincoln Wright. He was born in the American Midwest and in the American Midwest. And we have to understand that there is a quaternary shape To the American Midwest. It is Archetypally, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. To not know this is to miss the poignancy of the landscape spectrum, out of which Frank Lloyd Wright transformed and matured to the universal artist that he became. And it behooves us to understand this, that if you look at Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan together as an ecology, the central feature of that is Lake Michigan. And Lake Michigan is a peculiar lake among the Great Lakes. It has an exquisite shape, like an extended, elongated daliesque teardrop or like a long squash. And Lake Michigan has this very defined border. If you look at Lake Superior or Lake Huron, they have jagged edges and borders, and it's very difficult to get a sense that it's one coherent whole. Superior and Huron are so huge that they seem like they're just enormities of water. Whereas Lake Michigan, especially down near the tip of Lake Michigan, is a very smooth hyperbolic curve. And that's why the city that's set on the beginning of that hyperbolic curve, that beautiful geometric curve is Chicago. So that the center of the American Midwest landscape is Chicago. The city of Chicago. Looking out upon Lake Michigan. And one of the most fundamental things about Chicago is that it faces the smooth shaped, geometric city of Lake Michigan with a sense of being energized because all of the land of the American Midwest comes to a stalwart vertical pose before the horizon of Lake Michigan, so that Chicago is, as Carl Sandburg said, the city of big shoulders, and it stands powerfully erect. It is the vertical that meets Lake Michigan, which is like the great calm Inland sea, the great lake, the smoothness. It's like the holy lake of Rama underneath Mount Kailas. In India, all the great rivers of India, the Brahmaputra and the Indus and the Ganges all begin at one lake. In front of this 25,000 foot mountain, Mount Kailas. And the lake is called Manasarowar and Manasarowar. In its calm height is the yogic beginning of all the traditions in ancient India, so that yoga began at the foot of Kailash on the shore of Manasarovar, and in fact the classic epic, the Ramayana is written as the development of the radical roots and squares of human life based upon Manasa's equanimity in face of the dome of Mount Kailas, Chicago is set in this exact mode vis a vis Lake Michigan. And the curious thing about Chicago in that Midwest quaternary landscape is that the whole downtown section burned down one night in 1871, so that they had to rebuild the entire city. The entire center of Chicago had to be completely rebuilt, so that in 1871 terms, Chicago was a phoenix, and it was being rebuilt exactly at the time when a period of American history called the reconstruction after the Civil War and before the Great Corporation Robber Baron network got founded in New York, Chicago became the center of the dynamic of the United States for a period of about 20 years from 1871, and its apex was in 1893. In those 22 years, Chicago was the power of America, incarnated into the most powerful city on the planet at the time. Not the grandest city. Paris was certainly the grandest city on the planet of the time, or London, the most magnificent city on the planet at the time. But the energy of standing up in terms of man's powers of capacity. Chicago was the place and the apex of it in 1893. Was that the Great World's Fair was held in Chicago of 1893. Not only the World's Fair, which was the called because of the European understanding of the power of the founding of America was like the Columbia experience. Columbia is the gracious lady who leads us into Mother Nature in a powerful way. It was called the World's Columbian Exposition, and in adjunct to that, they had a World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. So the World's Fair and the world's Parliament of Religions met in Chicago in 1893. And the most capacious minds in America were there. Working in Chicago at the time, two great figures dominated the visionary capacity at the time. One was John Dewey and the other was Louis Sullivan, and Louis Sullivan was the mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright. Right. And it was during that time that Sullivan, great American original born and bred in Boston, is an intellectual Boston Brahmin of the first water. But when he went to Chicago, he was about 20 years old. He had spent time in the best schools MIT. He'd been to Italy and studied Michelangelo's work. So when he came to Chicago within about a year of joining an architectural firm headed by a man named Adler Dankmar Adler, Sullivan was made a partner. And what became Adler and Sullivan and Adler and Sullivan in about ten years built over 100 buildings, most of them in downtown Chicago. It was Adler and Sullivan that set the architectural tone of rebuilding the most powerful city in the world. And the emphasis was on the skyscraper that the American architecture was not. Taj Mahal's. It wasn't even Paris opera houses. It certainly wasn't Pelagio type Renaissance elegance. It was the American skyscraper. The vertical building that brought into play all the powers of the land. All the energies of the landscape were put into a vertical dynamic that registered there as if it were. An American version of an earlier American healing icon. And that early, earlier American healing icon was the way in which a medicine pole was raised in front of a complex horizontal parapet of ritual steps leading to the post that held the vertical place. That vertical culminating the entire horizontal was the median. The ancient Ojibwe great medicine ceremony of transformation. So, in a very realistic way, the Chicago of the 1880s and early 1890s was the many wound making ceremony of transforming America from a torn Civil War wreck to the most powerful industrial nation in history. One of the outcomes of this within a couple of years was the Spanish-American War, where the United States just simply ripped the Philippines off from Spain, ripped Puerto Rico off from Spain, and dared anyone to face them. This was in 1896 1897. Around that time, curiously enough, out of that Midwest America centered on Chicago, Lake Michigan, the individuals born about that time have a distinct tone. An example. The filmmaker Howard Hawks was born just outside of South Bend, Indiana, in 1896, in a little place called Goshen, Indiana. Once, when they were doing an interview with him, the interviewer showed his ignorance by saying, gosh, Gaussian or something like that, and Hawks immediately corrected him. It's like somebody interviewing a Texan saying, Houston. Houston, you know right away that they don't understand what is there to understand. Like in Hawks case, Goshen, Indiana, was founded as a Mennonite colony who were not only fleeing from Europe but were fleeing from the American East because it had become, by that time co-opted into the European retrospective ideal that they were fleeing from in the first place. In fact, the Mennonites established a college in Goshen, Indiana. I remember my first conscious view of the Sierra Nevada, from which Sequoia matrix Sutra was written in 1960. Coming in the San Joaquin Valley. The Greyhound bus stopped and he got off and it was a little place called Goshen Junction. Goshen. If you look up in the great Encyclopedia Judaica, you will not find a listing for Goshen, even though it's in the Old Testament. It doesn't have much significance for the Jewish tradition, but it has enormous significance for the for the Protestant Christian tradition, because originally the Protestant Christian tradition trying to break away from the Roman Catholic Church, went back to the Old Testament and became Hebraic Christians again. They were not Jews, but they became Hebraic Christians. And so the early radical Protestant utopian communities are all trying to be very good. Hebrews not to be Jews, but to be very good. Hebrews, which is a slightly different thing. And so you find a lot of early American pioneer things, names, practices, having a Hebrew or a Hebraic quality to it. And so Goshen Junction and the San Joaquin Valley or Goshen, Indiana, are indications that the first people to settle in these areas were Protestant Christians who were trying to go back to nature in a radical way, not just going back in a natural way, but going back in a visionary way. If you go back to nature in a visionary way, rather than in a mental way, you discover that existence is not the arbiter of the real, But that mystery is the calibrator of the possible. And when mystery is the calibrator of the possible, your forms are not interested in the ritual way to achieve existentiality, but in the artistic way to achieve personality. The artist is always concerned with personalizing the universe. It is this difference that is so enormous. It's the difference between art and ritual. And if you know this, then the ritual comportment of logical sequence is a mere cardinal, or even if sophisticated, a mere geometric way of sequencing. And that one doesn't eschew that or turn away from it so much as it's only one tool in an enormous box that doesn't just contain tools, but contains techniques and mysteries. So if there is such a thing as an initiatory way of visionary producing the magic of consciousness, instead of just doing the ritual activities that will existentially cue in certain experiences, and the mind that's based on experiences that are cued in from rituals, is a mind which is limited to an integral way of operating limited. Doesn't know, does it? Know that it doesn't know has no way. And so self-discovery does not happen other than in terms of Ritual, myth and symbol. And nature is taken to be what is countable. And so one becomes practical because one's actions and one's experience and one's ideas are well founded on practical things. All of this is a subject to a critique that is so endlessly corrosive to the limitedness of that, that the last 7 or 800 years of history are almost all encompassed by this vast critique of this. When Abu Kamal discovered the capacity of algebraic operations of number balancing roots and cubes together in an algebraic way. What came out of the Islam of the time was Sufism. The Sufi movement and the original Sufis, and trying to understand what has God done to us. We were good followers of the Quran. We're good followers of Islam, were part of the brotherhood. And now we look upon our fellow Muslims with such a penetrating critical eye that we can hardly believe that we are of the same species. And the original inn in the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, the original form of the community that came into this was called Ikhwan Al-safa, the Brotherhood of Light. And out of this came a Sufi appreciation for an artist in life who was called the man of light. And there is such a thing then as a mind of light. In fact, Sri Aurobindo once wrote a little book called The Mind of Light. That when the mind is not based upon a egg crate categorized form of hierarchy based upon countable material existentially, and goes through a deep transform of consciousness, it's like the mind is opened to light. And this mind of light especially looks at nature in a new way. Does not look at nature then as just an assumed, de facto ignorable background. But that nature Always then presents itself as the amphitheater of the landscape, and out of this landscape come images that are not just images, but have an indelible quality because they continue to resonate even when they are not there. It is, in fact, the actual basis of memory of how memory works and develops. Here is a little book called Cooper's Landscapes. James Fenimore Cooper, children's writer. Right? Aha. Yes. Most of the United States has been exiled to children's libraries that are not read anymore. Amazing. Cooper's landscapes. Subtitle an essay on the Picturesque Vision. Picturesque. It's a whole development of appreciation of landscape in a new way. That happened during the enlightenment, when the enlightenment was transforming into what was called the romantic revolution, the way in which the mind of light in the enlightenment became the heroic consciousness of a new kind of person, the romantic hero, right at that cusp, right at that threshold of transformation. A couple of individuals who are familiar who helped in that transformation were William Blake and Percy Shelley. But the really interesting pair to watch at that time, at that change are William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it's Wordsworth and Coleridge who record. Closest, almost like scientists of the real, the way in which their own work shifted from the enlightenment to the romantic in the way in which their poetry changed. They called the volume of poetry which they did together Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical ballads, ballads are long songs that are sung to the community of people in order to convey poetically in song the history instead of the mythology. Um. Here's the preface to Cooper's Landscapes, published by University of California Press, just not too long ago. Um. Published in Quantum Editions, 1976. The preface says, Francis Parkman once wrote of Cooper's pictures, do you know who Francis Parkman was? Francis Parkman was the great American historian who was, as a young man at Harvard. He was he was enamored of Homer, Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odyssey, and he was also enamored of the United States of his time. And he wanted to write an epic of the United States in a Homeric way. And so he wrote a history in 12 great books at the end. The last book in Francis Parkman's Homeric History of America is called the Oregon Trail. The American history ends not by an ending, but by a trail going off to the Pacific And beyond. What's beyond the next landform of any size beyond Oregon? California is Japan. China. So the whole development of the Parkman epic is an appreciation that the history of the United States ends up in an opening going even further, and that the movement of the steps or stages in this kind of open matrix that is called the moving frontier, and the idea of it is called the frontier in American history. And it was the great thesis of a midwest historian named Frederick Jackson Turner. Once, when people were literate, it was the core of American studies. The Turner thesis concerning the role of the frontier in American history. In 1960 this would have been read by anybody doing any kind of basic American history course anywhere in the world. When I first went to teach a new kind of conscious education in 1970, in Canada, even in a place like Canada, American history was taken as a basic that everyone took. Five years later, there were six people enrolled in American history. It became irrelevant. 1975 was already irrelevant. Francis Parkman once wrote of Cooper's pictures, their virtue consists in their fidelity, in the strength with which they impress themselves on the mind and the strange tenacity with which they cling to the memory for our own part. The writer now says, for my part, it was many years since that I had turned the pages of Cooper, but still haunted by the images which his spell evoked, known as the magic language. My own interest in Cooper's landscapes began with the realization that they persisted vividly in my memory, as indeed they must in every readers, long after the makeshift romantic plots and most of the characters had faded. One of the curious things about James Fenimore Cooper is that his novels convey a landscape which remains real, even after the romantic plots and rather melodramatic figures fade. Here's a study of James Fenimore Cooper's landscapes, published in Finland not too long ago. The whole emphasis here, um, is, as I hope in my study, that I have demonstrated, James Fenimore Cooper is a writer in a continuous, more intimate, most intimate relationship with nature. The continuity of the relationality with the mystery of nature was Frank Lloyd Wright's take on how his architecture transformed. From the time that he entered into Adler and Sullivan's office, he was 20 years old and Louis Sullivan. Louis Sullivan's book on kindergarten chats was only published in 1947. Um Sullivan died in 1924. Nobody wanted to publish it. Originally it appeared in an Ohio architect's news bulletin. One of the things that Sullivan says in kindergarten chats, and we'll come to it next week again, he said, right behind every building you see is someone you don't see. The architect that the building is a harmonic with the architect, so that in order to design real buildings, you yourself must become real. And one of Gurdjieff's great works is life is real then only when I am. More next week.