Art 9

This is Art nine, and we're looking at the way in which reality both occurs and does not occur. Probably the most fundamental way that was ever found to express reality was about 5000 years ago in ancient China. A sage known as Fu XI who had long fingernails, long toenails, a long beard, long hair, wore a leopard skin and sat staring in the dust at a series of eight Marks. And those were the original trigrams. And that image eternal of Fouché, looking at a symbolic set of eight an octave, a set which recorded the way in which reality both occurs and does not occur, and that both modes of reality must be brought into consideration. But you cannot bring what does not occur into consideration, and so one has to take oneself further than the considering part of man in order to understand. And that's how consciousness becomes discursive in a completely new way. Consciousness uses ratios and proportions and talks about probability and possibility, whereas the mind settles for objective forms that can be specified ritually and symbolically with exactness, whereas consciousness is at home in the exact in ratio with the inexact. And so the ancient fuzzy outlook was one of thought, and not just yin yang. Because yin yang belong both to tae and do not occur, they do not register in dao at all, so that zero is not a factor in the cardinal system. You move from plus 1 to -1, and you can move to what seems to be zero. But at that point cardinality vanishes. It doesn't register. And so there are boundaries like in mathematics it's called a Neumann boundary, where the closer you come to the bound, which is actually zero, the ability to compute vanishes. And because of that, forms that occur within Neumann boundaries, vanishing boundaries are always suspended in complete openness and thus are infinitely free. The ancient Chinese phrase for the jing is heaven suspends its emblems. That in heaven, unlike on earth, Emblems do not touch, they don't unite. They don't have causality. They have suspended ness. And so in ancient China, in order to understand how to express a taut relationship that goes beyond the mind, that goes beyond yin yang structure. The development of music was based on gongs, on bronze bells, and that these bronze bells were not played by man, but were played by the wind. And so the use of bronze bell musical notes and harmonies. Thousands of years ago in China, a kind of a suspended music was the way in which an ancestor worship was ensconced within a complete natural openness. There is such a study now because of archaeology. Suspended music, chime bells, and the culture of Bronze Age China, University of California Press just a few years ago. Part of the difficulty is that the paradox of polarity, the yin yang, the positive in minus, seems to the mind to be a fundamental structure. And indeed, as long as you're working with electromagnetic energy exclusively, that polarity is fundamental. And not only the fundamental of positive and negative, but that there is a flow of tension between positive and negative. And that's how you get such a thing as an electric current, or that's how you get such a thing as a magnetic web, so that not only is there positive and negative in polarity, but there is a tension within which energy can be shaped by relational process, but it's not proportionate. It has the exactness of objective registry, so that all existential forms in nature have an objective registry in terms of a calibration of polarity and the mind being in the natural ecology, its symbols always have that fundamental basis, so that objectivity is symbolically in the mind are very affine to positive negative polarities. And as long as you're dealing with nature, as long as you're dealing with integral forms like an atom or a molecule or an idea or an existential anything, you're fine. But as soon as you move beyond that, need to move beyond that, do move beyond that, or inadvertently stumble out of the natural ecology. And there are many ways to do that. Ecstasy, terror, wisdom. There are many ways to step outside of oneself. Ex stasis means outside of where you stand. Ecstasy, terror. You're scared out of your words, that high wisdom. You go beyond the mind and all of these. Activities of transcendence or of a supranatural presencing. All of these bring into play the realization that there is a whole other polarity on the subatomic structure that comes into play as well. Not only is there positive and negative on the electromagnetic scale, but there's the strong and weak in terms of nuclear energy, and that both those pairs coming together, making a square of integral possibilities, are spun around a quintessential fifth, which is gravitation, so that the natural universe that we find ourselves in has a tremendous complexity that has a simple structure, but that the way in which the simple structure works together requires of us to calibrate, and our natural calibration is on the basis of existential actions developing into feeling toned experience and interiorized that into symbolic mental objects called thoughts, ideas, intuitions, whatever you want to call them, the whole array. And all of these take part in such a way that they are within what we could call a great cycle of nature, an ecology of integration. But that consciousness does not participate naturally in nature. Consciousness has a different function which can be woven back into nature for sure, but it is not integral. It doesn't look to things, it looks to ratios. It doesn't look to sureties and certainties. It looks to possibilities. And so art forms are especially prismatic of possibles. Art belongs to the realm of all possible things and not to the realm of existentials. And further, that art, because it comes out of vision and does not come out of ritual. Art forms have a different quality from natural experience. Art forms look to experiment with possibilities rather than to fit into existential exactness. And so art and ritual are opposed to each other in a very fundamental way, not because of some idea, but on structural basis. Existentials which are ritual action, are objective because the ritual actions are objective in the sense that they happen trigger like Conclusively because of the gelling, the integrating, the firming up by polarities and by the other pair of nuclear processes, and by the quintessential spinning of gravity, so that when existentials occur out of the process of nature, they occur objectively with great exactness and great certainty. One can measure now down to the photon. What kind of lumens a light source will have. You can measure even to subatomic particles, the exactness of muon decay. The whole quality of exactness and existence does not apply in art forms that kind of existential criteria is no longer the basis upon which one understands and one appreciates art. In fact, art, because of its differential form, reaches all the way back through the process out of which it came, and the process out of which art comes is vision. Vision. And we took a great deal of care for a long time to present that vision is that process of consciousness that exceeds the forms of both existence on a ritual level and symbol on a mental level. And so when vision as a process goes back carried by an art form. It actually recalibrates the way in which ritual action is objectified, so that art really is a very peculiar form. Art recalibrates the objectivity of ritual, so that ritual no longer is simply or purely a natural integral happening, but gains an additional quality, a different order. And so activities or actions that have an influence of art with its visionary process, there is always a change in the way in which things happen. Stravinsky and his Poetics of Music at Harvard, said, I take cognizance of the existence of elemental, natural sounds, the raw materials of music which, pleasing in themselves, may caress the ear and give us a pleasure that may be quite complete. And behind this kind of initial phrasing, you have to understand that when Stravinsky was a boy, when he was a little boy, when he was born, and he was a baby and just a small child, he grew up in Saint Petersburg. What used to be called Leningrad under the Soviet Empire. And Saint Petersburg is far enough north that the Neva River that it's on a very large river, freezes over every winter. And if you've ever lived in a northern enough climate to have all the water sources in nature freeze over. I lived for about five years in Calgary, Alberta, and the bow River used to freeze solid. But when spring comes, the first sounds of spring are not birds, but ice breaking. The river current begins to break up the ice, and it has the most unearthly, low frequency rumbling, grinding sound that in if you have never heard it before. The first time that you would hear it, you would be terrified. It sounds like doom. Whereas to someone who's used to that, it sounds like the beginning of spring. In northern China. The first shoots, the first power of vegetation coming up through the ice and snow. Are the peonies. The peony flower is famous throughout northern China for being the harbinger in the way in which ice breaking is the harbinger of spring. There, while everything else is still frozen, come these green sprouts poking up through the snow and through the ice. And one is astounded at this that this could actually happen, that nature does not wait for everything to melt and be all nice and warm. And then things grow. Things grow immediately that there is a flip flop in the polarity. As soon as it stops being colder and colder, it starts to be warmer and warmer so that polarities can exchange their polls. It's one of the fundamental facts of nature. For instance, our planet Terra has had its magnetic poles switch. Many, many thousands of times in its history. The North magnetic pole has been the South Magnetic Pole thousands of times. The entire magnetic field of the planet flip flops every tens of thousands of years. And it doesn't destroy life. It's like the Neva River breaking up. That is simply the way in which nature moves itself both ways. In a electromagnetic calibration. It can go both ways. And it goes both ways by shifting in a transformation. And that the transform is at the equanimity of the polarity. And so, man, our species learned a long time ago that if you bring the positive and negative polarities into equilibrium, and that that equilibrium saturates the entire field, that there will come a transform by virtue of the structure of reality. You don't have to earn it, other than maintaining the equanimity and making sure that that equanimity saturates the entire field of whatever is being brought into equanimity. In India, it's called yoga. And China in ancient times. This is the way in which Tao Emerges as Tay, and that Tay contains the yin yang together within itself. So here's Stravinsky saying, yes, there are elemental, natural sounds. These are the raw materials of music. They may be pleasing. You may hear the grinding of the Neva River. You may hear the wind coming through trees. But over and beyond this passive enjoyment, we shall discover music. Music is over. As in like a ratio, and beyond. As in like a transform. Over and beyond this we shall discover music. Music that will make us participate actively in the working of a mind that orders, gives life and creates. Here he's talking about because Stravinsky was always Russian Orthodox. He's talking about God. Stravinsky is a long time 50 year relationship with his wife, Vera. Vera would always say, I'm sure God is bored by the same old prayers. She doesn't like to hear the same thing twice. So they were an odd pair. She very tall. He very small. He doggedly, very basically religious and really was so far beyond the constraints of Russian Orthodox understanding of divinity that it was almost embarrassing and she completely beyond, and yet was always more traditional than anyone else. So that there is this kind of peculiar quality when we come to look at Stravinsky and in order to appreciate how Stravinsky Brings art into form. We pair him with the Friedrich Schiller. Y Friedrich Schiller. Schiller is the author of the greatest aesthetic treatise in Western thought, Western philosophy. And we're using it. It's a series of letters on the aesthetic education of man. And there are several translations of it. What's important to us is that Schiller was a quintessential German poet who understood art exceedingly well. His correspondence with Goethe. He is famous, collected in a couple of volumes, and you find Goethe and Schiller talking with each other for years on end on the highest level. Somebody once said, If Goethe had an IQ of 200. Schiller was at least 198. And here are two supergiant intellectual men who looked upon art as the way to transform civilization out of a stuck box canyon, which it had gotten into and had mistaken for enlightenment, and that the enlightenment had come to an impasse because of a very peculiar thinker named Immanuel Kant. And Kant had come out with a way to express beautifully in philosophic language that there was such a thing as pure reason, transcendental to what you thought were nice baroque parlor ideas of reason, and out of this crack in the enlightenment. Came the jagged lightning of the romantic revolution. The whole romantic era. And Schiller is the great poet of the romantic age. It is Schiller's ode to freedom. They usually translate his the title of the poem as his ode to Joy. It was the text that Beethoven used for the Ninth Symphony. But in the German it's not ode to freedom, it's not ode to joy, but ode to freedom. The romantic hero seeks transcendentally beyond all the forms of nature, a freedom of an openness where his spirit can sing to the cosmos. Because in the romantic heroes nature His field is heaven and not limited to earth. That earth is one example of thousands of worlds yet to be explored. And of course, the romantic hero must become a super man in order to explore this new realm. And as soon as Schiller's poetry began to be read consistently in the Europe of his day, one very brilliant young woman whose husband was the greatest poet in English of the time, Mary Shelley. Wrote about the negative aspect of the Superman and called it Frankenstein. There is a lurking Frankenstein in the Superman lunge of the romantic hero, and so hidden within Schiller's Ode to Joy. Ode to Freedom, one has to understand that the mistranslation is not by not knowing German, but by expecting a certain romantic quality, because there is a kind of mental expectation that a superman will have more power and therefore more joy than ordinary men. And this is a bit of cheese that brings all the rats in history out. One of the most beautifully conscientious scholars of the first third of the 20th century was a woman. She was originally at Newnham College, Cambridge in England, and then went to the University of Manchester. For many years her name was Elizabeth Butler. She wrote with initials E.M. Butler. And here's five of her books here. Just to give you an idea of the way in which she looked at the Superman romantic hero Schiller Goethean Frankenstein, all this gestalt of possibilities, she did a book called Ritual Magic and Ritual Magic was published by the University of Cambridge Press, and in the paperback version they give you a nice demonic cover. The University of Cambridge Press gave you a Classic Renaissance magic cover. But it's interesting because on the very first page, before the title page, she has a quotation from the Buddha. It is because I see this peril in the marvel of psychic power that I am distressed by it, that I abhor it, and that I loathe it. Ritual magic. A whole history of ritual magic. And to back it up, she wrote another volume called The Myth of the Magus, tracing the figure of the Magus throughout history and to focus it. She then wrote a volume called The Fortunes of Faust, The Fortunes of Faust, about the development of a special kind of magus, the man who wants to make a pact with the devil so that he can have all power of wisdom, because once he has that, he can figure out a way to control. And all of this she found was based, and she wrote a book called The Tyranny of Greece over Germany and followed it up with a study of Rilke. So that Ian Butler was really quite a gal. And when they reprinted her Tyranny of Greece over Germany, one saw that she dedicated to Pallas Athena. Pallas Athena is the mythological figure in the Homeric mythology. In the Olympic pantheon of Homer, Pallas Athena has a very special Quality. Not that she is the warrior woman she is, that she always carries a spear. And she always has on the breastplate. Wear one. If you're fighting with swords and shields, the usual way is not to hack at the arms or the legs, because one is trained for that, but to thrust at the breast. And so there was always a protective breastplate in hand-to-hand fighting in ancient times. And on Athena's breastplate is the head of the Gorgon, that if you look at her, you will turn to stone, a kind of a face like that, with the tongue out and the eyes crossed. And it means that if you look to stab Pallas Athena, you yourself in that moment will have turned to stone. But these are not the qualities of Athena. The symbol of Athena was always the owl, and the major thing of owls are the eyes. And it's the eyes of Athena that are the most important. Just like for Aphrodite, it's not her hips or her breasts. It's her smile. And as Aphrodite's smile is the key to the calibration of her symbolic range of integral, the key to the symbolic range of integral for Athena are her eyes. The pair of eyes that, like owl eyes, see all. They not only see outwardly, but they see within. In the Odyssey, the first time that Odysseus in the Odyssey meets Athena face to face, he's been dropped off at home on Ithaca. He's laying in the sand. The mariners who have brought him have piled up treasures so that the returning king will have money to run his kingdom. And Odysseus, who has been lying all through the epic, wakes up and he sees this woman standing, and she's watching him, and he begins already with his spiel, I'm a merchant, and I was shipwrecked, and I'm coming from Crete and all this. And she says, good fellow, do not lie to me. Look at me. And he looks. And when he looks, he sees Athena's gray eyes evenly balanced. Homer says as if it were aligned on the horizon of the gray sea, under a clear sky, so that the gaze of Athena is like the ocean horizon of the planet. It is the equanimity of the entire world brought into play, so that the equanimity of Athena, distributed throughout the entirety of whatever constitutes your world, is the transform of Pallas Athena's wisdom. When one understands this, you do not build according to nature. You build according to the intelligence of consciousness, holding proportions and ratios in a balance where the entirety of the form is integrally and differentially presented as a reality. And the great building that presents Athena Athena's distributed gaze is the Parthenon. In Athens. And the columns of the Parthenon are not straight up and down. That would be an integral mistake. They're slightly bowed so that the entire structure is built like a great ship, where the inverted hull of the ship is the Parthenon in its majestic presentation, that the proportions that are operative here are a distributed stress of the entire structure, so that nothing stands on anything else. But all of it stands together so that a differential form, like a work of art, is built for presentation, not representation. It doesn't represent anything it presents itself. And when we look later on next week in following at works of art like Stravinsky's compositions or Schiller's of poetry or his dramas, we'll see that these art forms are markedly different from natural forms. Natural forms can be said to have their reference. You can trace the objective mental idea of something back to its ritual reference, and have those go back into a natural cycle, and you can understand that way. But in consciousness. Consciousness is like a fifth dimension added to time and space. The four dimensions of nature, the integral which holds all the way through any cyclic path you run in, comes to include what in show business is called a fifth business. It's an unknown. It's like the movable thumb. It's a quality of transform so that art forms have conscious transforms as a part of their structure. And that's why they're jewel like. They're prismatic. They don't just reflect, they also diffract. So that one gets a sparkle as well as a mirror. And it's this quality of an art form that is an indicative reminder to man that we are not just animals, and we're not just intellectual animals, that indeed we have spirits that go into realms where only the resonance of wind blown gongs would carry us, that our Ancestors are not just there in the ground, but that a great part of their spirit is free in the winds that blow and the atmospheres and even among the stars. So the tyranny of Greece over Germany has dedication to Pallas Athena. And she says of this book, and it's germane to what we're talking about. Schiller and Stravinsky. Schiller died in 1805. Stravinsky, born in 1882 and lived to be almost 90. But the central fact is that Schiller was German and Stravinsky was Russian, who did most of his work in France, so that Stravinsky is like a parenthesis of Russia and France. And in the middle, almost untouched is Germany, and Schiller is a quintessential romantic German, so that Stravinsky is like a parenthetical scale of understanding that is, looking beyond and around and through something that is so glaringly there, which is the German Romantic culture of which Schiller is even more than Goethe, the ultimate example. But to understand Stravinsky, we have to understand that that entire diagonal Russia, Germany and France at the time of Stravinsky and just a generation before was thoroughly permeated by a discovery of East Asian culture. East Asian art and East Asian ways of philosophically considering everything. One great example was the. As we talked in the past month, the way in which the Japanese print the landscapes of Hiroshige and Hokusai transformed the way in which Monet saw and painted the way in which Van Gogh saw and painted the way in which Frank Lloyd Wright saw and built. There's a famous photograph of Stravinsky, a young Stravinsky with a more mature Debussy. And on the wall are some Japanese prints. One of them is Hokusai's The Great Wave. When you look at a 1905 Russian fairy tale illustrator Bilibin, and here a Russian fairy tales, it's tales reprinted. This is the way it was printed. You find Hokusai's Great Wave already in 1905, in the midst of the fairy tale, as if it were a part of the folk culture of Russia. And this is very strange, because Russia in 1905 suffered a military defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. Belbin's illustrations for Russian fairy tales included The Firebird, and it's this scheme of fairy tale that Stravinsky used for his first great ballet, The Firebird. He went back not to Russian mythology, but he went to Russian fairy tales, because fairy tales are an expression of a quintessential five dimensional continuum. Fairy tales are all about magic language. They're not about mythic language. Of experience coming out of ritual. Fairy tales are about possibilities coming out of vision. And Stravinsky showed he's not reaching back into mythology for his themes. He's reaching deeper than that. He's reaching back into the mystery of nature with a visionary tone to bring something out, to make a work of art like The Firebird, which came out in 1909. We're going to take a little break and then we'll come back to this. Let's come back. We had an image of the thawing of the ice on the Neva River and its grinding. Let's come back to an image of the world, and in which the pressure of the 20th century had reached a frozen quality. And that was in the 1950s. And for people who do not remember consciously, the 1950s, it was a decade of nuclear terror. The Cold War had frozen everything into suspicion. And here's a poem from that era. Its title is Subterranean Elegy. It's the Samuel Beckett opposite of Schiller's Ode to Freedom. Wintry street blew. Cold. Fluorescent Boulevard lights. Orange. Electric I. Boulevards. Concrete. Low. Glaring. Orange. Electric I. Blue. Snowy. Concrete. Orange. Guiding lantern. Early spaces. Occasional. Traffic. Surreal. Loneliness. Grand. Modern. Space age. Low slung. Subterranean I. Indifferent. Non-feeling. Boulevard and I. Built for mechanical things. And aesthetically cool. We sit and we wait. We ever watch that orange eye? We wait for it to blink. I wrote that in Chicago in 1958. There's a quality of inevitableness, as it used to be called sometimes, or a quality of mystic ness or elusiveness. The first time that Schiller met Goethe in a concerted way, he wrote in his diary, to be often in Goethe's company would make me unhappy, even toward his closest friends. He displays not a moment of intimacy. There is nothing by which to grasp him. And then Schiller chalks it up. He says, I believe he must be an egotist to an incredible degree. The fact is, is that the mature Goethe was not there as some kind of cut out figure that was graspable as a thing. He was a prismatic personal raise to a very high order, almost a cosmic level. When it came time for the more mature Schiller used to these realms and stretches of vast mysteriousness. In his first letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man, he writes, I have then, your gracious permission to submit the results of my enquiry concerning Art and beauty in the form of a series of letters, and then to jump down to the third paragraph, he says, truly I shall not attempt to hide from you that it is for the most part, Kantian principles on which the following theses will be based. And then, towards the end of this first letter, he writes, I too, therefore would crave some measure of forbearance if the following investigations in trying to bring the subject of inquiry closer to the understanding, were to transport it beyond the reach of the senses. What was asserted above of moral experience must hold even more of the phenomenon we call beauty. For its whole magic resides in its mystery and in dissolving the essential amalgam of its elements, we find we have dissolved its very being. It's like a Neumann boundary and a mathematical analysis that the proof that you did the analysis right by this method is that all the boundaries vanish, and one is left with no further steps to go, because the analysis has been carried out in the right way, that instead of just looking to boundaries as is drawing lines around something, or even kinetically in looking to boundaries that establish established themselves by tangential approaches to them which have derivatives of relationality which can be brought out mathematically. A new analysis shows that the zeros emerge. There is a quality in Schiller's letters and the Aesthetic Education of Man, where he approaches the quality of that kind of mathematical analysis, where you come to the mystery beyond which a different kind of language has to come into play. He is of that generation. Taking a cue again from Kant, that one approaches a threshold where the Finality of certainty, for man gives way to the mysterious possibility of infinity for other realms of worlds, and that the word for those other realms was, in English, the sublime. That there is a quality beyond nature where form that holds here passes into a threshold where, and it's a chemical term, it sublimes. It vanishes from here and reappears in a different form. The river was ice and now it's breaking up. It's going to be liquid. But that liquid can by evening time turn into vapor. I've seen the bow River in western Canada under 50 below zero weather, where if it warmed up just a little bit, the ice would steam as if it were boiling and you would look at steaming ice in the night. You talk about mystical insights. There is a quality where? And Schiller, in the first letter on the aesthetic education of man, is using alchemical terms on purpose. There is a quality of transform that aesthetics brings into play, and therefore or not so much. Therefore, thereby the whole process of aesthetic appreciation is one involving a Visionary quality of process and not a mythic quality of experience. And this is very difficult because in nature, the flow of experience seems to parallel the way in which nature happens. So that nature happening and experience happening seem to be parallel, so that one's language, the whole phenomena of language, would seem to have a correlate with nature, that natural things are real reference for real words, because the processes are parallel. But this is very flawed and it's precarious. And consciousness can tell the difference, but the mind cannot. The mind cannot tell the difference between a language flow and its referent from a natural mysteriousness and its non-referential harmonic. The mind has to be very conscious in order to understand. Don't do that. One of the best examples is in the early lectures by Niels Bohr on quantum physics, of saying that if you continue to have images in your mind of what we're talking about, you're missing what we're saying. There are no images in this realm whatsoever. And it reminds one of the old prohibition in ancient times not to have false gods, that if you have an image of God, that's for sure a sign that your mind is profane. Because we're not talking in terms of where an image base would be operative, it wouldn't have any traction, and it certainly doesn't have any referentiality, so that the mysteriousness of nature is not the parallel at all of the way in which language flows on the mythic horizon of feeling toned experience. What is the parallel? The parallel is in the ritual action. It's not in nature, it's in the ritual action, so that the referent to experience is action, but not action as a process, action as an objectivity, it's important to understand that ritual is objective. It is not a process and ritual action, ritual comportment that involves a doing. It's a doing by rote steps, by discrete designate patternings. And it's the flow of language that then has a reference to the ritual sequencing. And that ritual sequencing is built upon a spinal column so subtle as to escape mental analysis. And what is that? Sequencing. The sequencing is time. That ritual action is invisibly made coherent and kept discrete and sequenced, right because of its time base. And that if you haven't factored in by a conscious analysis to filter out a time base, then you're still working within a very closed realm, and nothing sublime is going to happen there at all. Everything will become more and more like a blue, snowy concrete boulevard with unblinking lights that are just there to mark time. This quality of time is most important in music because music is conscious. It's a conscious art of bringing that time base into play in fundamental ways, which in ritual are not considered. But in music, it's the entire situation. One of the difficulties is that the last 400 years in Western music have been so prolific in development that it wasn't until the early 20th century that there were individuals who were able to bring a conscious recalibration of ritual sequencing temporality into play, so that music theory became, at last, clearer and clearer. And the first great example of it is Arnold Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony, 1911. And in his theory of Harmony, this is from the third edition of 1922. Chapter 13 entitled rhythm and Harmony. We have worked out the exercises up to now without considering metre and one of Stravinsky's most poignant themes, the young Stravinsky, was that metre and rhythm are different, though related, and that one has to work consciously with them. One of the great examples of someone who should know the difference and appreciate the difference, and couldn't hear the nuance until it was explained, was his cousin, Diaghilev. Diaghilev, who invited Stravinsky to come and do The Firebird. And it was so successful they invited him to do another, and he did a Russian puppet mythology, Petrushka. And then he was working on a third called The Rite of Spring, and he had Diaghilev and Nijinsky in his little room in Switzerland on the lake, and he played for them on the piano 59 bars, over and over and over again. Diaghilev, trying to maintain his elegant ness, as Stravinsky says, ask him one gentlemanly question how long will this last? And Stravinsky grinned. Even at 85, when he was telling, he said, oh, my dear, till the end that the entire composition has a structure which has a distributed, subtle nuance through the entire rhythm, though it stays the same. The meter is delicately nuanced everywhere. The way in which you make sets of notes with emphasis can slightly change. And he said they couldn't hear that each time. It was just slightly different because he was reaching back. Stravinsky was never primitive. He was reaching back to Paleolithic qualities of experience that undercut the entire history of Western music, that Western music, not just 400 years old, or even going back to the Greeks of being 2500 years old, or going back to the Egyptians and being 5000 years old, but going back to Paleolithic ritual of spring, the way in which spring broke in a grinding way of the ice breaking in man's mind that he can not expect the mysteries of nature to be revealed in any kind of prosaic, integral way, but will be some kind of transcendental vapor released, and he has to be ready for what he cannot expect. So instead of being ready for something, he has to be open and not ready. But available for that primordial quality that Paleolithic men and women had. They were not saddled with a classical education, or a Renaissance background, or Baroque sensibility, or an enlightenment prejudice. What did they have? They had, as Lucien Lévy-bruhl used to call it, they had a participation mystique. They had the ability to participate in the mystery of nature so that it was instantly, spontaneously what was happening, not Ritual action, but natural, mysterious emergence. And so Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is a great example of reaching not only back to the fairy tale past of a people, but reaching back to the Paleolithic soup out of which the original forms of civilization came in the first place. That civilization is something that does not coexist with the tyrannical order of an imposed mentality, no matter how initially enticing it might be. The persons so-called who enjoy those orders are egos, because the egos love to have things made perfectly clear, and they parade their ability in just this way. E.m. Butler wrote The Tyranny of Greece over Germany. She says this book was begun in 1933, the year in which Hitler came to power, and it was placed on the Nazi index shortly after it appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1935. The whole point in her study is that there's something incredibly worth looking at in the way in which they idea of Greek order entered into the German sensibility in such a Basically invisible way is to be almost not discernible. She writes my apprehensiveness on the subject of the danger looming in Germany is evident in the introduction, especially in the epilogue. In the first and last paragraphs. I should write them more factually now. This is the preface to the paperback edition that came out in the 1950s, about the time I wrote that poem and was reading this for the first time. Yet I cannot help smiling at a note in my diary of the time to the effect that I intended the work partly as a warning. When have books such as this have ever had a practical effect? Because the trace element of people who would read this, even in its heyday, was a very small. What she was pointing out was something very peculiar that the Enlightenment in Germany had come to appreciate Greek order and the principles of Greek order. And yet, she writes, it was not only the lost beauty of Greek art which Winckelmann rediscovered for the modern world. A German art critic and aesthetician of the day, it was also the ethical standard which he associated with it greatness, nobility, simplicity and serenity of soul. Nothing could be further removed from the tenets of Nazi ideology and the gods of Greece, whom he revered in their marble perfection were miles removed from the bloodthirsty Nordic mythological divinities resuscitated by the Nazis. It is not difficult to imagine how Winckelmann would have recoiled from them. And then she goes on to say, all of the great German Enlightenment masters like Lessing and Herder would have recalled, especially Friedrich Nietzsche, who had come to write in his early days as a young philosophy professor, one of the great documents on the origins of tragedy. We brought out the two types of approach the Apollonian, Apollonian and Dionysian. The Apollonian type who loves order things clear, collected, the Dionysian likes, everything differential and open, she writes. Here the figure of Dionysus, the god of orgies and ecstasies. This was the god that took the heart of Nietzsche by storm, and his was an excessive nature. But it was because of something excessive and tyrannical in the ideal proclaimed by Winckelmann that the Nietzschean rebellion took such a violent form, prophesying a race of demonic supermen to bear the banner of the future. Nietzsche's Dionysian anti classicism generated that vision, although he was as far from foreseeing as from desiring that his countrymen would cast themselves for the part of future rulers of mankind. And he goes on in this way she goes on. The figure that loomed in music, though, was not Nietzsche, but was Richard Wagner. And it was Wagner who was such a great friend to the young Nietzsche, who developed one of the most powerful art forms of all time, the Wagnerian opera that not only presents itself in a magnificent art form, but links four great operas together into the cycle of the ring, the ring of the Nibelung. It impressed Stravinsky because when he was a young man in Saint Petersburg, his house was on the same street as the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, on the same street as the Mariinsky Theatre, where all the great Ballets were being performed, and his father was a very famous opera singer, and the home was filled with the intellectual cognoscenti of the time. His mother played beautiful piano, and one of the earliest heroes for Stravinsky was Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who, when he became more mature as a as a teenager he became friends with Rimsky-Korsakov's son Alexei, and he noted that Rimsky-Korsakov had left off writing the kind of music for which he was famous twice in his life, once when he was alive and the music was new in the late 1880s. Music like Scheherazade or the Russian Easter Oratorio or Capriccio Espagnol. Fabulous. Orchestral near symphonic pieces. Rimsky-korsakov, after 1889, stopped writing that kind of music. Sheherazade was 1888, and for the last 20 years of his life he wrote operas because he had seen a presentation of Wagner's Ring cycle in Saint Petersburg, and had become almost garroted by the possibilities of an operatic art. Later on, Stravinsky always held opera at a distance because it was seductive in a massive, subtle way. And he said, I do not write operas, I write choreographic dramas which are distinctly different, and that if you don't know the difference, it means that you haven't come to participate in the art forms as I am making them. And he once emphasized the difference that rhythm is not a syncopation of doo doo doo doot doo doo, but is a clear sequence of dunt, dunt dunt dunt dunt that there is a unitary unit with intervals. And this is what makes a sequence. And that that sequence then when it flows, does not flow in a blur or a trill, but occurs with an exactness. And of course, it's the kind of exactness that Schoenberg later on in rhythm and Harmony writes. And we'll come back to this now we have worked out the exercises up to now without considering meter. Actually, I should prefer to continue working the same way, for we have very few directions, even in the older harmonic theory that pertain to rhythm. Even these no longer have much application in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. They were, at least for the most part, already outdated. But in the music of Beethoven, not to mention that of Schumann or Brahms, we find just the contrary of what their rules required. Obviously, it cannot all be the task of a present day harmony course to lay down new laws. One could at most only attempt to organize, according to general features the numerous, the countless ways in which harmony and rhythm relate to each other. For numerous and countless. One can read boundless, boundless ways. So what is the way in which the relationality is carried on without a path? Integral based on the old understanding of rhythm. Out of Schoenberg came the principle of developing variation used best by Brahms. That we would say today is like an algorithm that holds by folding back in whatever occurs as the way in which the structure progresses, resonantly in a differential way, and not in some kind of holding on to the string integral is a completely different kind of understanding of music. And Schoenberg towards the end of this great paragraph writes. I have no doubt been somewhat pedantic and conserving any old laws that have had the slightest influence on our present day music. But these the old laws of rhythm, have largely disappeared from actual use, or have been transformed into their opposites. So away with them. This is about the time that Stravinsky was beginning his musical career. He did Firebird in 1909. He did Petrushka about 1910. He started writing The Rite of Spring 1912, and it was produced in 13. He was just beginning. He was beginning at a cusp of where the old forms had dissolved, to the point to where they were actually in tatters. One of the peculiar things is that when you look at the music of that time, you find a very interesting parallel with the way in which the ancient East Asian understanding of music underwent a transformation in times so old that they seem to be almost pre-dynastic. Here is a volume. It's entitled Foundations of Chinese Musical Art, published in Beijing in 1936. Rather difficult to find. And one of the curious things is on page 17. Music of the Chinese Language, where they're talking about the tonal basis of Chinese language and the way in which music in Chinese experience follows the lead of the tones, the level tones, the rising tones, the falling tones. Um. He gives an example of how the same Chinese word, uh, spoken in a even way, means to know, spoken with a rising tone, means happiness, and with a falling tone means wisdom. Or my, my, my. With a rising tone. By and with a falling tone cell. So the term for business. My mind. It's a quality that in ancient Chinese Times was brought together in the human hand so that you could get the arrangement of the tones into some kind of mnemonic order using the human hand. And we see that this is very similar to the way in which the ancient Egyptian architectural proportion was the Eye of Horus, with all of its various parts being assigned numbers which represented in the relationality to each other, proportions which could be used to style, structure, structure that would not just be a mental plan, but would reach into the actual way in which existence emerges out of nature in the first place, so that the constructs of Chinese sound and the constructs of Egyptian visionary masonry or papyrus books. All of these structures are not artifacts of a ritual process, but that they are art forms that emerge out of vision and carry with them a primordiality. They are not documents about something else, and therefore secondary their original creations, so that works of art like this emerge originally out of the mystery of nature, but not in an integral way, in a differential way. And the deep understanding of that is that conscious vision is able to exchange places with nature so that instead of having rituals emerge out of nature in an existential way. You have art recalibrated actions that emerge out of vision in a differential way, so that the entire process is one of transformation. All the forms of art are transformative all the time. They never are just there. There was a sardonic poem by E.E. Cummings one time, and one of the lines in his poem he says, he wrote, and it comes out like a ribbon and lies flat on the brush. Art forms are not a cultural toothpaste. They have a vivacity of reality because of their very structure and the way in which they emerge, so that the artist is not only creative but participates in the mystery of the creator. Originally. When Stravinsky recognized this possibility, he was overcome by the realization that he could go back and bring something out of originality, and that this was not an exercise in trying to imitate anybody else, but to present initially from one's own deep reaching into the mystery of nature. One of his earliest compositions, I think, 1907, the only one that Rimsky-Korsakov Korsakov saw shares of fantastique. Rimsky-korsakov noted that this had possibilities, and in talking with them, Stravinsky got the idea of writing another little tiny work for the birthday of Stravinsky's daughter for the birthday of Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter, and Stravinsky worked on this piece. It's only less than four minutes. It's called fireworks. And he sent it to Rimsky-Korsakov, who by that time was ailing, and he was in the sanitarium south of Saint Petersburg, and it arrived too late. He had died a couple of days before, but fireworks was the work that was heard by his cousin Diaghilev. And that's how he came to invite Stravinsky to come to Paris and begin writing fairy tale ballets. Because the fairy tale ballet that had most impressed the Parisian audiences of 1908, 1907, 1908 was the ballet that resuscitated Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and the staging with fantastic costumes by Benoit and by Bakst by choreography Fokine, by dancers like Tamara Karsavina and Nijinsky. All of a sudden, one had this explosion of the essential, transformed genius of the Russian music of Saint Petersburg, which had been outlawed in the person of Diaghilev because of his homosexuality. People whispered in Saint Petersburg. And so Diaghilev left. He went to Paris and he put on his productions there, in Paris and there in Paris, he brought the cream of what was the Saint Petersburg vision of gorgeous art in ballet, in costumes, in music. And Stravinsky came and joined at the moment of its flashing onto the world's scene. It was this way that Stravinsky felt that he had been given the most extraordinary coincidence of opportunity for any artist, and when he got to Paris, he found that there was a Spaniard there who felt exactly the same way, and his name was Picasso. And they got together with a Frenchman who said, I've been here all the time, and I feel exactly the same way. And his name was Cocteau. And one finds the three of them with their arms around various young ladies in Paris at the same time, and with Cocteau and Picasso and Stravinsky, you find something that goes deeper than even the Ballet Russe, deeper than the way in which these gorgeous Saint Petersburg ballets were put on. It was the way in which modern art in the 20th century did what the nuclear nuclear physics did. It went subatomic. It went into the way in which particles occur with half lives so short that it takes almost a superior mathematical ability to even prepare for them. We're now, 100 years later, just getting to the point to where we're able to detect the tau neutrino, which has so little mass that it makes zero seem like a lot. And we're in a position now of understanding that we cannot grab anything, especially energy and its forms. We have to participate with the way in which it both integrates and differentiates, woven together all the time. We're either going to be real or we're going to be tyrannized. Let's come back next week and I hope that our machinery works.