Art 8

This is Art eight, which means that we're persevering with our composition. And in the second year, in the differential year, we're composing as we move along so that each time that we make a presentation. I hate to call them lectures, but each time there's a presentation in the differential year, I try and loop that whatever occurs in that lecture back into the vector as it develops, so that you get a an opening quality. In science you would call this an array. And your array is the base out of which your analysis is made. And this is quite different and quite distinct from an integral that makes a collected form. And if you try to make an analysis on the basis of a collected form, you usually fall into fundamental errors right away. To analyze a tightly integrated synthesis usually throws you back into a ritual comportment so that you falsify the object and the procedure and of course, the results. This is a very famous difficulty, And we're trying to circumvent this whole realm of difficulty. And so every lecture in the second year develops the capacity for our sense of array to give more and more possibilities. So if you're listening with the mind of trying to pull out of what I'm presenting and fit it together, you're barking up the wrong tree. The composition that's happening here is to open up possibilities. And so there's a sense of wonder that's natural to what I'm doing and not a sense of understanding. So that the wonder engenders what we would call an art, the appreciation of a work. And that means that the appreciation asks us to have a relationship. To be aware of others and to be respectful of others, and to realize that we are not individually by ourselves, but that we are relationally together. And so art always involves a sense of proportion. And because there is a proportion running all the way through, the proportion has in its array a sense of resonances that build when tuned to a harmonic, so that the most poignant kind of analysis, which consciousness does, is a harmonic analysis. And there are many volumes in advanced mathematics that deal with harmonic analysis. But even just to say, that brings into play the realization that music has a tremendous place to play in the way in which consciousness appreciates the array of possibilities in form. And Frank Lloyd Wright was one of those great architects who insisted that music and architecture were the same mind and the same process of building. And for instance, in the education here we have music, and the music selection for the art series is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And after The 12 weeks that constitute the art section. There's always a 13th week, which is not a part of any section, but is an interval. And the music for the interval after Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is Brahms Violin Concerto. And if you listen to the relationship between Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which opens up an almost infinite panorama of musical possibilities, one wonders, how would you go further in this way? Brahms went further in that way, not by writing a bigger symphony than Beethoven's Ninth, but by taking the musical compositional tack and developing that into a deeper kind of array. And his violin concerto is very fine. Ask one time whether he had any real disciples. Frank Lloyd Wright said, no, he didn't so far. But he said, you know, Brahms was really the successor to Beethoven, and I can only hope that someone will come along and be a Brahms to my work. This lecture is titled Quantum Breathing and singing has to do with the way in which our physical species articulates feeling in language. And that speaking is such a physiological, refined act that we can scarcely appreciate it. For instance, in order to speak a language like I'm doing and Enunciate words and phrases. I have to have the physiological capacity to modify my breathing more than 60 times per second. Otherwise, I could not perform the delicate pirouettes of air control in order to be able to enunciate and speak to you. One time, let them in so that they're not standing outside. One time, there was a discovery in paleontological work that the skeletal structure of our species of Homo sapiens sapiens was a definite modification of the structure of the species that came just before us, Homo, Neanderthal, And that even though we were very close as species, there was one poignant difference and it wasn't brain size. It turns out that the species Homo Neanderthal had, on the average, a larger brain case than we did, about 70 cc's larger than we did. It isn't brain size. What made our species radically different from just the species variation just before us? Homo Neanderthal, is that we can speak and they couldn't. We can speak a very complex language to the point of singing. Neanderthals could not sing. They could chant. They could utter. But they could not sing. They wouldn't be able to sing a Brahms lieder. And this was discovered by a female paleontologist. Because in detailed analysis of the skeletal structure, one of the major differences for Homo sapiens is that the metal structure of the thoracic area of our spinal column has much larger capacity for carrying nerve endings, and the only reason that the thoracic area which controls breathing would have larger areas is that we had to have breath control for speech, for language. Our species is made for singing. There is a peculiar quality then, when one says that architecture and music for us is like the primordial understanding of art, and we're trying to appreciate here that art does something which nature doesn't do, not in the sense that it doesn't do, but that nature leaves room for us to do something not yet done in nature. In one of his great essays, written in 1914, called entitled In the Cause of Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright said, nature creates creatures, but only art generates men. So that human beings, our humanity, not just what we are, but taking what we are and expressing it into a who we are. Our persons are generated by the process of art. That Though. Our character comes out of nature and you can see the character in Little Children, even when they're babies. A mother can tell a lot about how that baby's going to be, and you can tell from little kids how they're going to be even by 2 or 3. Their character is there, and the character is a quality that comes out of the feeling toned experience. And in our education, that was in the myth section, and we took the myth section last year that after nature comes a ritual section, 12 weeks on nature, 12 on ritual, and then 12 on myth. And to complete that integral cycle 12 on symbols, so that in that cycle of nature there is that kind of four part, that quaternary of moving from the mysteriousness of the way in which nature changes through the existential forms that are made into the feeling toned experience that the mythic level generates into the interiorization of feeling, into thinking and with symbols, thought rounds out nature, and thought is integral, there's no doubt about it. Symbols are the tightest compacting of the way in which a path integral is able to form itself. But we saw all the way through that process, even in the mystery of nature, that there was a transformative quality hidden in nature. And when it comes time for the mind to make its ultimate integral, it's coming to a self symbolization. The hidden processes of nature come back into play and we transform. We don't come to a screeching halt with some kind of ultimate dot, but the dot becomes mysteriously transparent and we go through it, and as we go through it, a whole different process unfolds. Instead of coming together, nature makes room for us in our spirit to differentiate. And so differentiation is a complementarity to integration. And it's important to understand that. And we saw last year when we first started with nature, we started by taking two examples, a pair of examples we took from the West Thoreau Henry David Thoreau and of Thoreau. We took two little essays that he wrote on walking. So Thoreau walking was our Western example. And from China, from East Asia, we took the I-Ching and we paired the I-Ching and Thoreau. And we found that in this interplay, there was something that was requiring a nuance to understand. And the nuance was this, that the Tai chi symbol, the Taoist symbol, is not a symbol of yin yang. The Chinese Taoist symbol, the Tai chi, is symbolic of Tao te, because yin and yang are a polarity, and polarities have a very special property, they hold their disjunctive ness so that the tension between them has the ability to engender an existentiality called material called stuff, and in between the positive and negative. In that electromagnetic tension, matter has a chance to congeal and to gel, and to be fixed because of polarity and without the ability to polarize, matter would not stay where it is. And so all material forms in the universe count on yin yang being polarized. But Tao Tei are in a special relationship, which is called complementarity, and the complementarity of Tao and te is that they can become each other Through a very special process called the exchange of centers. And it's through the exchange of centers that you get the reality of the whole. And so the Tai chi symbol has the circle of light in the dark, on the circle of dark and the light, because at the center of each order at the center of Dao. And where is that center? Anywhere it will be. And at the center of Tai, in any fixed existential are exchangeable possibilities. And so nature in its dao and its Tay has the ability to transform, so that fixed forms that are made by polarity can shift to A mysterious order of change and come out and reemerge, transformed as new forms where the new forms will hold because a new polarity is brought into play. And as Wright wrote in The Cause of Architecture, 1914, understanding this nature has made creatures only. Art has made men. Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, every struggle for truth in the arts and for the freedom that should go with the truth, has always had its own particular load of disciples, neophytes and quacks, because it is human nature. When we don't understand by appreciation the nuances to mistake the gross mechanical application for what is real. And so there are always very few artists, very few. And Wright says later on in the essay, just at this time, it may be well to remember that every form of artistic activity is not art. Now, this was a peculiar thing for Wright about 1914 to write very peculiar because his work as an architect up to that point, he had been practicing over 20 years at that point, and he was classified as an Arts and Crafts movement architect, someone whose architecture belonged in the craftsman type of activity, Whereas he was radically different from the craftsman activity. As someone once said to him, why do you not appreciate the Stickley furniture? And he said, because it's fake, it's phony. It is a stylized foisting of somebody's idea of simplicity on something that is showy but not really simple. And he said, my master, the artist from whom I learned about art, Louis Sullivan, would point out that sometimes the most simple forms are really very complex. They're simple in that they constitute a unity, a wholeness, so that it isn't just that they're limited to a few sticks, it's that there is no limitation to something simple, but that it constitutes a wholeness. It constitutes a unity. And in fact, the first great public building that Wright got the commission for to build the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, had an inner column of complete openness, like a 75 foot atrium. And it was an office building for the Larkin Soap Company, built in 1902. And it was the forerunner of all these grand Marriott hotels that have 25 stories of atrium in the center. He was the first to ever build something like that. And his next commission was called Unity Temple, which was criticized because it looked like a bunch of Babylonian blocks on the outside. But when you went in, you realized that the building was suspended structurally in such a way that each element was free to. Be suspended in a space which was sharable by the community and so. Unity temple was an example of the simple wholeness of. And here the Chinese word that we use is tae. Too much emphasis on Tao, not enough on Tay. Tay means the power to maintain unity, the wholeness in our reckoning. The most powerful unity is the number one. One has tae. Oneness has tae to the extent that any time it replicates or it stamps itself out its unity as transferable to another, so that we can count one, two, three, four, and that the hidden order underneath that is the power of tea. That one stays one, so that when you say two, it means one plus one, and that both those ones hold by tea, so that the cardinal sequencing of existence has the power to generate a cardinal quality where the accumulation is just as real as the one, so that if you have 20 ones arranged, 20 is just as real as one. And when you have an aggregate of things, their aggregate is as real as each individual item. And this, of course, is where written language came from in the first place, written language that came into play about 9000 years ago in the midst of the Neolithic Revolution. Written language was always an impress. At first, the impresses were made in the form of little tiny clay. Figures that stood for this little clay figure stood for a sheep. And if you have one, two, three, four, five of these, that means five sheep. So in order to do business in the ancient Mideast 9000 years ago, you would have these little collections of clay images of the goods. And in order to keep them together, you would have this little clay pouch where they were put in, and you would open this clay pouch. It was about the size of a palm. That's why cuneiform tablets are palm size because they were held in the hand. This is why written language is always said if you understand something, you grasp it. All these metaphors are because this is how it originally came out. And finally, instead of emptying these little things out of the pouch, they would make little cuneiform impressions of what was inside the pouch on the outside. And pretty soon you didn't need the little clay figures. You could just go by the written example, and it was out of this origin that written language evolves so that written language has a symbolic objectivity, whereas spoken language has a mythological process to it. So that when someone says, like, I'm speaking now, when someone says, this is in a flow of the mythic and the the sense of order of it is not based upon thought. It's based upon feeling. And feeling can be intelligent, and the intelligence of feeling is called sentience. Sentience. So that the very first recording of our ability to understand is in sentience and not in intelligence. Intelligence is a different order. It's a different integral order. It is a higher concentration. So that thought is like an essence of the sentience which we already are cognizant of. And so it's important when we're listening to something like this, which is a pure sentient oral feeling, tone flow. Not to try and dice it up by trying to impose the cookie cutters of thought onto it, but to let the flow occur because it's in the occurring of the flow that the intelligence as sentience will be there later on. You can think about it later on in the sense of interiorized that language by hearing it several times, because this is a very complex flow. This is not just the simple mythic flow of a story, but this is maybe 4 or 500 threads put together in such a way that it's a whole cable of feeling toned, understanding. That's being because I'm conveying the civilization of the entire planet every time. And so you have to have all these fiber optic wires. A feeling tone sentience because there's so much to convey. Why are we doing this? Because we need to have a new civilization, and we need this kind of power hookup because otherwise we're not going to win. And so we need all this. It's the difference between the way in which language parallels nature. Language as a process parallels nature, and it does so in a flow modulation. So that language has a deep resonance, a parallel kind of resonance with nature. Nature is a process. And because nature is a process of change, the syntax and the grammar of language is built to facilitate change, not only in the physiological Logical structure of breathing so that one can speak and talk. But the very language, syntax and grammar itself modulates itself so that change can happen. And thus the movement is never straight line. It always has a sinuous quality, which if you could abstract out the essence of it, it would look like an energy frequency. It would have the modulation of energy in a frequency. It would have the wave form of energy. And so language has a primordial energy of the truth, of the mystery of nature in its very actuality. Now, this is very, very mysterious. And. In a mythic language, the flow, the energy frequency is always to convey an integral path, which is the plot of what we're saying, the storyline literally. But in a transformed language, it's important not to mistake the story for the storyteller, because the important thing then, is the development of the array of possibilities of the storyteller, and not variations on the story, so that it's very naive. So some would be gurus saying, we have to have a new myth. No, we don't need a new myth. We are several orders of transformation beyond myth. But we do have to be able to go back and appreciate how mythic language is a part of our heritage and a part of the way in which the mystery of nature is brought into play in the integral not only our bodies, but our minds. But how all of that transforms and makes a spirit of a person who becomes an artist and a person is an art form. This is something that Frank Lloyd Wright learned when he was about nine years old. And he starts off his autobiography with the story of how one of his uncles, who was of this famous Welsh family, the Lloyd Jones's, was trying to teach the young boy that you have to be very firm. And he took him out into the Wisconsin landscape to walk in a fresh snow, and he made a bee line towards a point on the horizon, and little Frank Lloyd Wright, nine years old, was going around collecting all these milk pod weeds and had a whole bouquet. And when he got to the destination that his uncle was at, his uncle shamed him and said, look, my track is as straight as an arrow. That's how you go in life and look at yours. It just wanders all over. And in Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography, he said, even at nine, I knew something was wrong here, that my uncle had missed something, but I didn't know what it was. This awakening was a seed that later on nourished, exploded into a realization in Frank Lloyd Wright that the landscape is a context for variation and freedom, and that the journeying in a landscape is not a straight line, but is the exfoliation of all the possibilities of energy frequencies. And he got that when, in 1905, at the age of 34, he went to Japan and he discovered Japanese prints, and especially he discovered Japanese prints. By Hiroshige. This is a Hiroshige print. This is from the famous Tokaido series. And if you know anything about aggregating reflection. Like that. This is actually Hiroshige's great portrayal of the haiku poet Basho. Basho, who is crossing with Sora, his companion, over this bridge, and the people in the rice field are bending down to plant the rice, but they are also greeting with great respect the master of the Zen travelogue. We read in the symbol section of our course, Basho's Oku no Hosomichi, the narrow road to the deep north and part of what Basho used was prose, written prose to a certain point where he would stop the prose, and at that break in the prose he would put a haiku, and the haiku was a seed of transformation, so that you stopped reading about the journey, and you participated in the journey by making a transform, of letting the haiku evoke from you your own feelings and interiorize those along with basho's language, so that you thought creatively, artistically, along with Basho, so that the very reading of a landscape scroll in prose and poetry by Basho is one of the great essential artistic achievements of East Asian civilization. You can see, by the way here, that the sway of one kite's string is the curve. It is like the hyperbolic arc of the energy wave. And yet one kite is loose. It's free forever. It's the Zen moment where you're no longer on any one string, even your own. This landscape in the East Asia tradition presented by Hiroshige. About 1837 1838. In a series on the Tokaido. 55 stages of the journey between Old Tokyo, Edo, and Kyoto. But this journey through a landscape by stages has its origin in a Japanese artist named Sesshu, who did the first great Zen landscape scroll called Sesshu's Long Scroll. It's about 36ft long, and Sesshu was really somebody. He did it in one day. Sesshu lived in the 1400s and Sesshu went to study, like all great Japanese Achievements. We realize that they're very good at refining, but they're not particularly good at originating. And so the Japanese refinement of the landscape tradition owes its origin to China. And it's in China that you find the original appreciation of landscape and that the original writer, the original aesthetician on the Chinese landscape painting, was a GU guy, and he lived about in the three hundreds A.D., and his understanding came at a time when the dynastic structure of Han China, the Chinese, Romans, they'd been in power for about 400 years, and the whole dynastic form of Roman Han China began to dissolve and it dissolved because there was a deep movement of many of the talented people to not serve the state, to go off into communities of their own, off into the mountains, off into the wildernesses, and to try to live utopian, we would say almost socialistic kind of lives. Outlaw communities. And that period of Chinese history is sometimes referred to as the Three Kingdoms period, made famous by a novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was Mao Tse-tung's favorite reading as a boy and always thought in terms when things become too strated by categorical imposition by tyrannies, we need to head for the hills and resuscitate the natural juices and get ourselves back into the romance of the Three Kingdoms period and find the real Tao and the real Tay. And to come back with that kind of energy wave and transform the entire situation that way. In Chinese tradition, the development of that whole landscape school came back in a poignant period known as the Sung Dynasty, and in the section of it called the Southern Sung Live, some of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived, Chargois and Ma Yuan can be singled out as two of the greatest. And it's in their landscape scroll traditions that Sesshu, when he went to China in the late 1400s, studied their techniques and brought them back to Japan and it's their techniques prism through Shishio's example, that led to the refinement of Basho and finally the refinement of Hokusai and culminated in Hiroshige's great refinement. And it was this that Frank Lloyd Wright discovered in 1905. He was so taken with what had been revealed to him what he had discovered, that when he built his first great house for himself as a work of art, not as a studio in the little suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, but when he went back and built his first Taliesin, he says in his autobiography at the center of Taliesin, he put a limestone layered vault, and he didn't keep his money in private papers in the vault. He kept his Japanese prints because they were the key to how he understood that transformation happens in art, and he had become, instead of a very idiosyncratic architect, with the transformation that Japanese prints brought into his Ken. He became aware that you do not build an architecture simply on a site. He had thought that this was organic architecture because you have the house fit the site. After he came back from that first trip to Japan, it more and more occurred to him that he was practicing a pseudo architecture, even to the extent that he thought that he was being as sophisticated as he could. Because the house is not situated on a site, but situated in the complementarity of taught, And he saw that the possibilities of an architecture of reality were right before him. He had every facility to do it, but he couldn't do it as long as he stayed in his office. And so in 1909, he scrapped everything. He left his wife and six kids a lucrative architectural practice. He was building for ten years. A house a month in Chicago. That's a very good practice. He was spending more than that, though, on trying to get more Chinese and Japanese things because he was opening up and awakening up. And when he left, he left to find. How can you make an architecture that comes from thought rather than just from the sight? And it took him about ten years to be able to find out How you do that, because you cannot go back into any kind of ritual techniques and expect to find that scale of art there. You have to go back to the mystery of nature, and the only way to go back to that is you have to take your mental comportment of yourself and dissolve it back in nature completely. And this kind of dissolution is very close to what the mind perceives as a death. So that the recoil of the mind against such a radical transformation is where the ego builds all of its defenses, saying, this is madness. And of course, it's only out of the visionary madness of the great magicians that art is really emerging because art forms are never existential clones. They're always original creations in and of themselves. They have the energy of the beginning of the universe because they emerge out of taught in the first place. Let's take a break. Let's come back to our not an issue and not a theme. Yes, we're talking about art and we're talking about Frank Lloyd Wright. We're talking about landscape. We're talking about China. We're talking about the United States. We're talking about many aspects that are in a modulated flow, but they're only modulated because of our arena. And that arena we call here the square of attention. The square is an ancient shape and the square has a peculiar property. Its stability as a square is directly translatable into the next order, which is a cube, so that in architecture there was such a thing as a cubic room, and it was 20ft by 20ft by 20ft. And this was the modulor for an architect named Pelagio. And Pelagio was one of the greatest Renaissance architects and one of the greatest architects of all time. And when Pelagio wanted to make a really spectacular room for someone in a villa up in the Venezia, he would make a double cube room 20 by 20 by 40. And these double cube rooms were like the the outrageous thing of the day. And a lot of architects tried to go one better than the big double cube of Palladio and keeping his orders. And one of the most successful architects at this was Christopher Wren. But the greatest architect at this was Thomas Jefferson. And when Jefferson made Monticello, made his own home, he went beyond the double cube because Monticello culminates in a dome. And the peculiar thing about Monticello's dome is that it was always painted on the inside, a kind of a sky blue, and it was always kept empty, so that when Jefferson wanted to go to the architecture of the infinite mind, He walked up into the top floor of Monticello and was there, conspicuously alone, under the sky dome of his home. And there is a quality in this which is mitigated only by circular apertures, windows that look out upon the landscape. And it's the landscape of those hills fading into the larger landscape of the Blue Ridge, Appalachia mountains. Beyond that, you find that mystery of nature coming into the prism of Jefferson's art personality, and you find always at Monticello in its structure, the ability to walk out within the resonances of the building into the beginnings of the landscape and still be in the building, and yet already transformationally into the landscape. And these walkways, these walkways that underneath house the store rooms and the fruit cellars and the root cellars and the kitchens, these walkways that go out the very last edition that Frank Lloyd Wright made to Taliesin in Wisconsin due to his wife Ivana, was a walkway that just came out so that they could look at the Wisconsin landscape and still be within Taliesin, and yet out onto the transformational edges of it. And he made that very close to the end of his life. I think, within just a couple of years of his 90th birthday. It's important to understand that Frank Lloyd Wright occurs in his architecture because of a pioneer family orientation to the primordial landscape of the United States. His memories go back. He was born in 1869, and so his parental generation went to that part of Wisconsin when it was still, as he said, there were still real Indians who were still living in parts of the landscape at the time. The great writer for that whole transformational realm of the American experience is James Fenimore Cooper, and James Fenimore Cooper wrote a series of five novels that together are called the Leatherstocking Saga, and the very last in the chronology of the Leatherstocking saga is called The Prairie, and Frank Lloyd Wright's early houses are called prairie houses. And it's interesting because prairie is not an English word. It's a French word, and it is the French trappers who went into that wilderness not to colonize, but simply to be with the natives, because the French do not go characteristically into some place to do it up in English fashion. They go in as Frenchmen to be there with whoever is there. And so the American wilderness, when it was first visited in the northern reaches, by the French explorers, by the French trappers pretty well remained Indian. But as soon as the English colonists. Came, they extended the eastern seaboard mirror of the English. Experience. And as you went farther and farther west, there was less and less of a demand to carry this ritual. And when you get across the Mississippi River, you find that the French attitude begins to predominate over the English attitude, even in the settlers. So that in Wisconsin, which is on the edge of the Mississippi River, it's the last place that you can go before crossing over. Um, that area of the American Midwest has a peculiar quality. It's as if the ties that bind you to a European model of something are so loose that with very little effort, you can shrug them off. And if you go a little bit farther west, if you cross the big water, the big river, if you cross the Mississippi, what occurs to you is that you are on a moving edge of something unexplored. And this was in the American experience, an energy renaissance, a resonance of a Renaissance characteristic. And in the American experience it was always called the frontier, the frontier, and that the moving frontier was like the ripple of a vision. And following surfing the ripples of this vision was the basic westward movement of the United States. And in those ripples, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this about the prairie. This is from a the Prairie, the last of the Leatherstocking saga. The second description of these natural meadows lies west of the Mississippi, at a distance of a few hundred miles from that river, and is called the Great Prairies. They resemble the steppes of Tartary. They resemble Central Asia in the sense of an unending expanse, a flat expanse occasionally rolling, almost unrelieved by anything very high or very large. They resemble the steppes of Tartary more than any other known portion of the world, being in fact a vast country incapable of sustaining a dense population in the absence of two great necessities already named rivers abound, it is true. But this region is nearly destitute of brooks and the smaller watercourses, which tend much to comfort and fertility. The origin and date of the great American prairies form one of nature's most majestic mysteries. And then he goes on to talk about, in a Cooper, sort of a way that this is a mystical landscape, in that it seems that the great prairies at one time was were the bottoms of a great ocean. And so that one is literally underwater, but in a different historical time, so that there isn't the ocean there. And yet it has that kind of equality. That one is moving in such a way that you're in a surreal landscape where geologic ages surround one in the sense of a vast present. And the prairie houses came out of those. And Frank Lloyd Wright's quality of understanding is very much like Cooper's quality of understanding that as one moves through this kind of milieu, this kind of landscape, there is an alchemical change that happens within the person, not in the mind so much, but in the body that the body learns to comport itself with a patience for indefinite horizontal. And that you do not expect to always climb up so that you lose the physiological habituation towards hierarchical structures, and you begin to enjoy the indefinite repose, so that one of the kinesthetic qualities of a Frank Lloyd Wright building, no matter what it is and when you step into it, you feel the repose. And when you go into a major Frank Lloyd Wright building, you feel immediately the tremendous calm of a quality of sheltered safety which can be explored at your leisure. We're fortunate to have two really great Frank Lloyd Wright houses. One of them is open to the public generally. The other is open by appointment. The one open to the public generally is the HollyHock House, called Barnsdall Park, Uh, where Vermont and Hollywood Boulevard and sunset all come together. It once was called. That whole hill top was called Olive Hill, and it was owned by a woman, Eileen Barnsdale, who had some of the Standard Oil fortune. And HollyHock House was built in 1920, and it is one of Wright's greatest structures. And when you go into the HollyHock House, when you come on to the grounds, even though it's now surrounded by shopping centers and dense, uh, uh, construction, as soon as you go into the entrance of the house, you realize that the entrance is constricted to a deep covered cubical tunnel, and that the front door forces you into this kind of an aperture. And it's like going into an alchemical retort where the neck of the retort focuses to the point of intensity, so that when you enter into the building, the building immediately opens out to you with a kind of an explosion of explorable space, but in deep repose. And what's important about this is that one cannot have a transformation without energy being raised to an almost ultimate level. Alchemy requires an intensity of passion, and that without the intensity of passion, there is no transformative quality that's available. And the second aspect of a transformation is that whatever is being transformed has to have that energy distributed equally through the entire structure. If there isn't this kind of equanimity in the distribution of the pressure, or if it's a quality of the saturation of the content so that the content and the form become one, become a unity in terms of saturation of intensity. If both those are not brought together at the same time, there's no transform. Now, the Greek experience of transformation was precisely on the point of those two being brought together. And the Greek word for it in ancient times was sophrosyne, and that meant great passion under perfect control. And the great passion under perfect control was always the square that took the chariot and the team of horses within its combine, so that that square of chariot and team of horses. In ancient times it was always four horses, and then it became just a pair of horses. So that in Plato, in his dialogues, when you find one of the great expressions of how a philosophic excursion through language, building in intensity under perfect control of not dialectic, but the Greek word for was a diaresis. It means division. It doesn't mean the ping pong game of dialectic, it means the increasing of the array by division, by dieresis, so that the interplay in a platonic dialogue between the speakers is not a dialectic, but is a energizing of the passion under perfect control so that a transform can happen. And if done right, the realization is there. The realization because one has just now transformed, been given exactly the right mix. And if Frank Lloyd Wright building is a transform architecture, it's made for you to come in and increase not just the intensity of a feeling toned energy, but the intensity of a geometric proportional recognition because it is the recognition of proportional, the ratios of the real spread into an almost indefinite, almost infinite array that one comes closest to having a visionary experience of sudden consciousness so that Frank Lloyd Wright buildings increasingly are architecture made to awaken someone to themselves in the building and the last great work of his. The Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael is made to be experienced exactly in the movement pace of someone walking. The human walking will average about two miles an hour. The building complex does not unfold by you standing still, and it unfolds to complex if you run through it. But if you walk through it at the pace of the people using it. Office workers and public coming to a civic center just to do their business. The building complex is made to awaken the entire array of proportions at two miles an hour. And if you do consciously go in with that, the building complex works. And of course, being an American revolutionary, Frank Lloyd Wright put at the farthest reaches of this building a great circular domed enclosure like the Monticello dome, only this one, instead of being sky blue, is sun amber bright. And underneath it is the public library for the people of Marin County, especially for the children, that this is where one gets to in the saturation of the awakening of the senses of proportion of man and architecture. You come to the place where you learn that you can learn to learn. And that's what a library is for in that context. So there's a tremendous quality when one folds this understanding into the frontier as moving ripples of a great harmonic, and that this great harmonic is the unfolding of the future as it is being originally developed, so that it gets to a certain saturation point where the form is completely filled, and where is that point where the American frontier fills the geographic continental form of its whole on the Pacific coast, and it takes off at the Pacific coast and goes straight up and out. And for Wright, it was interesting that exactly when he came to understand that aspect of the whole thing, he discovered East Asia, that on the other side of this is China and Japan on the other side of the Pacific. 40 years ago, I wrote this kind of a poem. This is a part of we read one section of Sequoia matrix Sutra last week. This is about the dawning of the Space age and the Pacific Rim in 1960. It carries exactly this kind of visionary resonance into a discovery of the trajectory that leads out, through an energy being raised to a saturated passion with perfect control so that it changes in the days of the day with a swinging, driving rhythm, the forest shimmering in the lemony smelling heat, intoxicating cedars and piney sap from El Greco groves. A sweeping, driving, compelling ascent in Sequoia prelude for the ascent to Luna, going up so soon after. The Mercury forerunners and the Gemini Dozen probes and God named boosters driving with a diamond rhythm, blistering, launching pads, thawing frozen ideas, archetypes against the sky whose limits are lost. So far, far that distance is in the dizzying heat. And after the Psalms of kings and prophets after proverbs from elders at the well, with deep walnut tones of strength, flushing the subterranean east, fueling the dynamic west, fueling the radical, forceful jubilation that blows clean the stigma, gathering terrifying fragments, fashioning figments, making a synchronistic fiction that becomes a versatile psyche, driving, swinging rhythm. Moving on out. And we said, yeah, moving into deeper space, drawing on the enormous energy from a radical consciousness, an arrow like slung, making a newer dimension. In the days of that day, the torrid eloquence hovered low over the white rocks and hushed itself in the heat and focused on the horizontal haze, looking for the first stars and already hearing the big fire wind a mile long behind, driving, pulsing up and out. Yeah. So this kind of equality that there is such a thing as an American vision that outstrips its continental form. Right? Discovered this and about the time of the First World War, he was given almost as if he had earned it, the most incredible commission he could imagine. He was commissioned to build the great Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. What could he say? So he went, and he spent about six years in Japan, and they told him, we want a hotel that is characteristically in the great Asian tradition, but looking forward to the future that has the American dynamic in it. We want to fuse east and west together here in Tokyo, and we want a place that's going to say that to the world. We want the Imperial Hotel to be the landmark of a whole new era of Japanese attainment. And so for six years, right, sought to take the kind of Japanese architecture that was traditional. How was it traditional? Not just that it was built on the modular of the map, the three by six. Matt. So that a space might be ten mats or a space might be 20 mats, or the shoji panels that are based on modulars of that. But he took the architecture of East Asia that originates in China. In the China of the great era, in the tongue where the buildings collected the energy like condensers, collecting the energy of the landscape so that the buildings focused like a prism. The entire range of possibility. And of course, the great landscape paintings of the Southern Song. When you look at let's take Ma Yuan Ma Yuan's great buildings set in these Daoist landscapes, you look closer and you see that the post beams do not quite touch the lentils that the elements of the building are held in a suspension of space, and they do not touch that. The building is there as like a phantom gestalt, because it renews its presence by drawing on mystical nature and spiritual energy, and that in the crosshairs of those double windows forming a different kind of relationship, not a polarity to make physical things, but a complementarity to make real things. The Chinese temples and Ma Yuan's great paintings are real buildings. They do not exist out there. They exist in that landscape. Scroll. Now that that scroll is an original nature, not a reprint. It's not a reproduction of anything else. It's a presentation just now, as you are seeing it, which is why these scrolls were not meant to just be hung, but they were meant in great intimate moments of the spirit to be unfurled with the right wine or the right tea, with deep friendship to appreciate the emerging opportunity. Again, this launch window for a new journey into the real. Because the world is so phony. It's not real. This landscape is real. And so art creates what nature is ruined by the false world, the cacophony of pseudo cultures, of pseudo mythologies, of political tyrannies, you name it. The list is very long. This quality of a landscape being able to collect and do that. Where an architecture is able to do that is immediately apparent. When one looks at Sasha's long scroll and you look at the buildings, you look at the architecture set into, not the landscape of the vertical scroll. The Japanese transform was to make it a horizontal scroll, where all the great landscape scrolls of China have this vertical grandeur, unbelievable vastness, and the impress of an original landscape scroll will bring one next week is indelible. Once you look to see it to be real, instead of looking at it as a picture to look, to see one's looking at it, generating a real launch window for exploring proportionate resonances of a new harmony. Yours in this landscape. Those Sessue. Buildings like those Ma yuan buildings before them collect and bring together not only the building, but transforms the landscape into a garden. Not the kind of garden where things are in rows, but a Daoist garden. A garden where the unique wildness of everything is pristine for the first time. That the architecture establishes a transformational node where the land itself changes and becomes real beyond what even it was in its natural state, it becomes a new reality. And at this point, man understands that to create is truly a divine gift and not just a technical exercise. We're going to come back next week and take a look at two more. We move from Henry Moore and Frank Lloyd Wright to two other artists. We're going to take Igor Stravinsky, especially his poetics of music, and we're going to take a classic from Friedrich Schiller, a friend of Goethe's. A series of letters written to express the title is On the Aesthetic Education of Man, that an aesthetic is not a subcategory of mental ideals, but an aesthetic is a much more differentially conscious and powerful than the regressive form known as politics. Towards the end of his life, James Fenimore Cooper wrote The American Democrat in order to express dismay at the kind of stupidity that was creeping into the American scene, even at the point where so many people were discovering the freedom of their personalities in the resonant frontiers, moving west. And he had this to say in his conclusion. 1838 the inferences to be drawn from the foregoing reasons and facts, admitting both to be just, may be briefly summarized as follows. No expedience can equalize the temporal lots of men. For without civilization and government the strong would oppress the weak. And with them an inducement to exertion must be left by bestowing rewards on talents, industry and success. All that the best institutions then can achieve is to remove useless obstacles and to permit merit, to be the artisan of its own fortune, without always degrading demerit to the place it ought naturally to fill. Every human excellence is merely comparative, there being no good without alloy. It is idle, therefore, to expect a system that shall exhibit faultlessness or perfection. The terms liberty, equality, right and justice are used in a political sense, are merely terms of convention and of comparative excellence, there being no such thing in practice as either of these qualities, being carried out purely according to the abstract notions of theories. A decade After that, you find this language seeping into the American vision so that that period is known as the American Renaissance. And within a five year period, you have about a dozen of all the American classics, the greatest ones being written at the same time, 1850 to 1855. Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Melville's Moby Dick, all of them exploding at that moment. Cooper died in 1851 and was buried in his family home, Cooperstown, New York, where the Baseball Hall of Fame is.