Symbol 8
Presented on: Saturday, November 25, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We're here at Art Eight and we're composing and we're composing in an ongoing creativity that has also created with it an ongoing remembering. Usually, compartmentalised causality education atrophies very quickly both in creativity and in remembering. For instance, try to think back to your favourite course in high school, whatever it was. What did you learn? What happened there? Try to think back to a favourite childhood memory. In what context does it really occur? And you can see that the compartmentalising of education inculcates a deadening of creativity and of remembering. This programme reinvigorates the creative imagination and the remembering that are part of the field of vision, part of the way in which a differential conscious field actually occurs. And when it actually occurs it interfaces with the field of nature supranaturally. Not supernatural, but supranaturally. That is to say, the two fields become a complex weave and the field against which all movement happens now has a...at least a five-dimensional quality. It has a conscious time space, five-dimensional quality. So that the possibilities of the resolution of forms now is much more precise and accurate and creative and memorable. And all of the functions, all of the processes that occur, occur with greater functional clarity. And the functions are able to ratio with each other to produce proportionate processes, processes in complex proportions. And the same thing for forms: they are now ratioable, not just rational, ratioable and that they will have creative, memorable proportions as well. So that it becomes easier and easier to remember and easier and easier to create. And this is why works of art that come out of the field of vision, that has woven the field of nature with it, that art forms are eminently creative and they're also eminently memorable. Once one has a complex, conscious time space experience, visionary experience, of a work of art, it literally is indelible and also continues to be creative, continues to be memorable, in that you will be able to bring it into play, at any time, with any processes that you want to juxtapose it with, any forms that you want to proportion it with and you begin then, after enriching your capacity, by not just an art form, or dozens of art forms, but hundreds and perhaps even thousands of art forms, you begin to get the sense that the enormous expansion in your capability literally has dwarfed what you were before. You literally become a new man, a new woman, a new person, who still has an individuality in terms of symbolic thought, still has a character in terms of mythic experience, still has the figures and figurations of your ritual comportments, but they are all available for creative, memorable expansions and new proportions, new ratioings. This is so colossally different that the time-honoured saying is that literally someone is reborn. Not born again, but rebirthed, in the sense that you have been rebirthed now back out as a spiritual person of more dimensions than you had ever had ordinarily, left only to the integral cycle of nature. And nature accepts this expansion, accepts this deepening, accepts this heightening of reality. And out of art forms will be generated a function of kaleidoscopic conscious capability of remembering and of creativeness, that we glibly call history, but as we will see when we get to the History phase, it is enormously complex, enormously challenging and when it is really engendered by the art of the spiritual person, history is indeed a kaleidoscopic consciousness, memorable indefinitely, creative in every single aspect. And out of this will come the sense of the real cosmos, that the real cosmos is indeed the most multi-faceted jewel possible and our appreciation of it will be personal and the relationship to the cosmos will be personal. It is not as if a billion galaxies negate the contact of the cosmos with the individual spiritual person, it is accentuated, it is experienceable, it is confirmable. It works in that your creativity and your remembering actually are able to expand to whatever dimensions of infinity that you would like to have duration with. This is what I call, in its largest capacity, in its deepest facility, shared presence and to achieve a personal, spirit, artistic shared presence with the actual cosmos is what salvation used to really be understood as.
We're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe and Qi Baishi, we're looking at an Eastern and a Western woman, both living almost 100 years, in the twentieth century especially. Both grounded in the nineteenth century and both now in the twenty first century, paired by us to give us a tuning and the tuning follows the initial tuning in the Art phase of Frank Lloyd Wright and Hiroshige, a Western man and an East Asia man. Two great artists whose experience with each other's civilisations, with each other's cultural realms, helped both of them become planetary in their outlook. We talked about how Japanese prints were influenced because of the Dutch prints that were carried in the late seventeenth century, the late 1600's, into that part of the Asia Pacific. And the engraving of Japanese prints in the 1700's is very much a Japanese take on Western, European engravings. If you want to look at some of the sources of this, you might look at the way in which engraving in the 1600's, in the seventeenth century, was brought to a perfect quality by Albrecht Durer, was deepened by the great genius of Rembrandt and finally went into a display of capabilities and possibilities in the lifetime of Sir Isaac Newton, where the print really had achieved high art form. And yet, Hiroshige being not only the inheritor of a Western triggered art medium, the print, the engraved print, but was able to carry it into the great East Asia art tradition that was thousands of years old. Frank Lloyd Wright of course gaining his great experience through the recognition of the Japanese print, the whole nature of a landscape which has in its ecology of spiritual completeness of cycle, has the portrait of the person in the distributed enormity of the cycle brought to a whole. So that for Frank Lloyd Wright, a house that fits organically into its site is every bit the artist who is the architect putting his portrait into that landscape. And whoever lives in that house, whoever lives in that building, whoever participates in the architecture thus made, participates in an art realm, an art form and achieves while there the extra-dimensional kinaesthetic qualities of that art and that art aesthetics involves a six-dimensional form. So that there is a definite quality that when you participate with a work of art again and again, you begin to acquire the natural capacity to see in that way, to hear in that way, to texture sense in that way, to smell in that way. All of the senses, including the sixth sense of insight, begins now to operate and once you enrich this you have a complete chance of infinite refinement.
We're looking at, especially now with Georgia O'Keeffe, that she was in a way involved with and apprenticed to one of the founders of the art of photography, Alfred Stieglitz. And Stieglitz had eventually not only the 291 gallery, but an improved, refined gallery, called An American Place. A very good friend of mine, Sidney Lanier, later on after Stieglitz passed away in 1946, a couple of decades later revivified An American Place and called it A New American Place. And a lot of my work in the late 1980's was held in very high regard for A New American Place, in fact was the centre of that whole endeavour. The first exhibition of Ansel Adams at An American Place was in 1936 and in this exhibit of his work one of the greatest photographs ever taken is called Winter Pine Forest in the Snow, Yosemite Valley. He was driving on a road in Yosemite and stopped the car, got out his equipment and set up and took this photograph of the snow covered forest. As one acclimates to the immense complexity of it, one realises that almost any individual tree here can be looked at. The gestalt of the whole can be enjoyed, the whole presentation of this now opens up a vista which is very much in keeping with the East Asia landscape tradition. This is a photograph that in 1932 is worthy of being included in the Chinese-Japanese landscape tradition. This particular photograph, there were only two prints of it that survived. There was a fire...Ansel Adams had a studio in Yosemite National Park. His wife Virginia, her father owned Best's Studio, which was a souvenir shop in Yosemite Valley and when he died they took over the shop and there was a fire in his darkroom in the Yosemite Studio and he lost 20 per cent of all of his work and these early works, the negatives, were destroyed. One of the original prints of this was taken by Ralph Lauren, the great clothing designer and was expanded to a six foot square, sepia toned photograph and then framed and was here at the Beverly Hills Ralph Lauren as part of...a couple of...three, four years ago, as part of their inner decor. And I was fortunate enough to be able to get through to the Ralph Lauren people and was able to borrow enough funds to be able to purchase that. It was too large to bring in so one of these times we'll hold ourselves together to commemorate the finale of this public presentation and we'll take a look at the original blown up to six foot square. It is an impressive portal of infinity, as nature is, so much that the painting and the poetry together have a very special relationship. And my teacher for many years, Kyushu, in this posthumous volume The Magic of the Brush, writes: 'One unique feature of Chinese paintings is the ubiquitous inscriptions found on them. Some of the inscriptions are comments on the circumstances in which the artwork was done, but more frequently they are lines of verse of some well chosen aphorisms, or poems, quoted by the author.' And an example is this Qi Baishi painting of chrysanthemums that has an inscription and the inscription translates as:
On the double ninth festival it drizzles. I plant only a few flowers and vegetables in my small courtyard. Getting old, I try to follow Poet T'ao's example, growing chrysanthemums by the fence. It's easy to grow flowers but hard to bend my back. Here are crabs bulging with fat and cups brimming with wine. If you don't drink soon, the chrysanthemums will be out of season.
In the Taoist tradition chrysanthemums are an anti-spring, they bloom in November. And because they bloom in November, a Taoist garden will always have peonies for the spring, chrysanthemums for the fall. The peonies herald, with their brilliant red and their powerful green, the coming of the summer solstice. The chrysanthemums, with their fluffy, lacy petals, sometimes muted colours, herald the winter solstice. The poet T'ao is actually...his name was T'ao Yuan-ming and the great two volume study done on him, published by Cambridge University Press, by A.R. Davis from the University of Sydney, in Australia. He was given the honorific name of T'ao Ch'ien and here is a translation done by a very great translator, James Robert Hightower, published...The Poetry of T'ao Ch'ien, published by Oxford University Press and the poem about chrysanthemums:
The fall chrysanthemums have lovely colours. I pluck the petals that are wet with dew and float them in this care dispelling thing to strengthen my resolve to leave the world, to retreat. I drink my solitary cup of wine alone and when it's empty, pour myself another. The sun goes down and all of nature rests. Hummingbirds fly chirping toward the grove for the evening.
T'ao Yuan-ming is the beginning in the Chinese poetry tradition of gentleman scholars who abstract themselves from the court dominated world, from the Confucian dominated culture and go back to a kind of a Trung Thu, Lao-tzu solitariness, that is either solitary by themselves, or welcomes fellow solitaries who come in and when fellow solitaries come in, it is the poetry that they share, it is the paintings that they share, it is the conviviality of the philosophia which they share. Out of this came the great landscape traditions of China, furthered also and largely imitated originally by Japan, but the Chinese tradition was always that the poems and the paintings and the conviviality of the philosophia go together, the three are together. But the root of the poetry and the painting and the philosophia, is the writing, is the calligraphy. The brush and the ink and the ink always made from a solid block, always made with the very special gradations, from a deep black to a very light wash. And the brushes always kept in a brush holder; originally they were slices of timber bamboo, later on they were ceramics and very ornate, enormously expensive. The brush that is able to write the symbolic language is the root of the art. The symbolic forms are the root, but it is the transparency to vision that allows one to read the characters and know the poem, to extend the calligraphic stroke of the brush to mountains and streams without end, to bring a sense of conviviality of the writer and the reader together. And so a symbolic form, like a written language, to be appreciated must be transparent to vision. And without that visionary capacity the art of the poetry is not there, the art of the painting is not there, the art of the interpersonal spirit is not there. All three, like a three in one, like a trinity in an actuality, you can phrase it in a number of ways, a Thrice Greatest Hermes in a single moment of realisation, that taproot is that symbols must be made transparent to the art form expansion and art forms are always of a personal spirit. Louis Sullivan once said to the young, 19 year old Frank Lloyd Wright, he said, 'Wright, behind every building you see is an architect that you don't see, but he is there, everywhere and when you can experience that you will be an architect and you will build that way.' Which he did.
There's a beautiful little...modern China is not as illiterate as some people would say. This little volume of T'ao Ch'ien, T'ao Yuan-ming, is made for a pocket. And whether you're in the fields plucking vegetables or fruits, whether you're in the factory and you don't have very much in the world, you can buy this for four plus four point five yuan, which is very, very cheap. And there are in it little woodcuts, little blocks and translations of T'ao Yuan-ming, T'ao Ch'ien's poems. This illustration, which I'll leave a marker in here, shows him reaching from his bed down to his spilled wine cup and it reads in translation:
The sage came long ago, has gone away and in the world the men of worth are few. The old man laboured on with might and main and lost integrity tried to renew. Although the phoenix came no more to earth, yet once revived the rites and music old, but then the echo of the streams was lost and these adrift before the tyrant rolled. What wrong have poets and historians done that in one day their work should turn to dust? To these succeeded the old scholars next, who diligently laboured at their trust. How is it that within the world today are none acquainted with the ancient books? But for the way of old, nobody looks unless I drink till I am satisfied.
This was written 1700 years ago. It's always been this way. The renewal of the human spirit always begins with a handful who are reminded to explore their creativity and to enlarge their remembering. It is through the constant exposure iteration of our enriched context over a two year cycle, that we begin to nurture and fructify all of these capacities.
In Ansel Adams, who was one of the most literate artists to come along, one of his prized little volumes that was put out, selection of his photos of 40 years of Yosemite, just called Yosemite Valley. This was put out in Redwood City, California, south of San Francisco, a suburb. And he had a company there called Five Associates, five photographers and they published this in 1967. I remember when it originally came out. He writes in here exposure recommendations on the very last paragraph of the text, before there's a list of the photos and the titles and the pertinences of the photos. This is the last paragraph in the book, about six lines:
The recommendations given below are for the simplest and most conventional aspects of the Yosemite seen under late spring and summer conditions. Whenever possible, make a preliminary tour of the picture taking locations so that you may more precisely define the proper time of day for your particular photographs. Actual exposure times depend upon the character and speed of the film used.
We're taking in our programme, over two years, a long reconnoitre of the entire heritage of man on this planet. We're taking a look in the very short duration of eight quarters...four and four is a pair of years, to take ourselves on a preliminary tour of the picture taking locations of the image making, feeling toned, image making of the way in which languaged, feeling toned images are what our experience actually is. So we're taking a preliminary tour through the entirety of our experience on this planet, going back as far as we can possibly go, not to early Homo sapiens 160,000 years ago and we don't stop there, we don't even stop at the primates coming in, the major primates like ourselves, some 70,000,000 years ago. We go back to the beginnings of the DNA of the earliest life forms and before. And so our learning is literally the entire history of the reality of this star system and its context in many star systems that make a galaxy and into galaxies that number now into hundreds of billions. There was a Harvard University observer, Harlow Shapley. He is the first one to write about the metagalaxy, about the place in which the galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy, occupies in a whole sequence of galaxies. And in the beginnings of his assessment of the metagalaxy, from the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory directorship, in the late 1920's, we were able through powerful telescopes, like the Mount Wilson 100 inch Hooker, to look out some 100,000,000 light years into the universe. At that time it was decided that Harvard was to put together a map of all of the galaxies of the universe of which we could see. And one of the things that Shapley notices, that it's not evenly distributed, that there are huge streams of galactic structures, there are huge shapes. And it wasn't until the 1970's, some 50 years later, by which time our capacity for telescopic penetration went into the billions of light years, that it was realised that there are great voids in the universe, where there are just a few galaxies and then there are great, huge, bubble like membranes, where there are hundreds of millions of galaxies arranged on the membranes of these huge voids. And that this kind of a structure seems to be characteristic that the universe is not some kind of mechanically mixed, random dispersion, but has a foam like shape to it, it has a structure, which means that it has an iterative quality of being not only a thing, a universe, but of having a transformative, infinite quality of morphing structure, so that it is a cosmos.
One of the interesting things that Ansel writes on the page just before 'Some suggestions about your camera' and he says this and this is apropos of how we learn and what we are doing here:
The camera does not quote 'see' as the eye and if we understand this and think about the way the camera interprets the scenes before us, we will achieve more satisfactory results. The eye sees the world much as we want to see it. It can scan a wild, wide field of view, or concentrate upon a distant object at will. A distant mountain may appear majestic to the eye, but with a normal lens may turn out distressingly small and weak in the photograph. The eye can see, quote 'see' a tree in the forest standing clearly among its fellows, but in a photograph it may be disappointingly confused with its background.
Our learning helps discipline us, this is why it's called a yoga of civilisation; it is a true, new Raja yoga. To be able to hold the camera recording of sight, the aural recording of sound, the natural capacity of the other senses and to be able to creatively explore all of the different ordinals that are possible in spectrums that extend to the almost impossibly real on all ends. And to be able to remember what we did, how we did it, that we can do it again if we wish, or mix it up and have a completely new quality of apperception, or bring all of the senses into play at the same time, including intuition. This quality rebirths us from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens stellaris, to star wisdom people. We will not only belong at home in our entire star system, our home will be in the landscape of the interstellar and intergalactic ranges of reality for the very first time. Let's take a break.
We're looking at an original Ansel Adams photograph, this is signed by him. This is on the California coast, Refugio Beach, which is near the Carmel area. And you can see the layers of the wash of water at the bottom of photo that's inside the beachfront and then there's a little bit of rocky terrain, then there's the real beach of the Pacific, then is the play of the Pacific Ocean with the light on it. Then there's a little bit of darkness and a small line of the setting sun as a striation through the evening night-time clouds coming in. The layers of this are enormously sophisticated and what's of interest is that he has done this in black and white, which is like the East Asia landscape tradition of originally and classically using only black ink in its different washes and its different complements with light. And that the prismatic effect is not for colours of the light, but for the light and dark in their play, to indicate a spectrum of imaginativeness that exceeds the world, that goes out into an infinite quality, into the blackness between all things and the light that is emergent iteratively from all things. This is a Westerner, an American, who is able to work within the East Asia tradition and panning over, here's a print by the greatest of the twentieth century Japanese print artists, Hiroshi Yoshida and this of El Capitan in Yosemite, Ansel Adams' favourite place. And here in the Japanese print in the classic great art style of the East Asia landscape tradition, is a typical Ansel Adams quality of Half Dome, of El Capitan here. And if one looks at the Yoshida, this was done in 1925, it's interesting because this is the first time that Yoshida took his talents as a painter and as a watercolourist - he was almost 50 years old - and made a classic great Japanese landscape print out of an American subject. Now come back over here to the desk, pan right in. And Yoshida was born in 1876 and he lived until 1950, but he stopped making Japanese prints during the Second World War in a kind of withdrawal, like the classic East Asia artist hermit and though he would go on certain assignments to make portraits of workers and of students and just donate them, he stopped making great art. And the last print that he made was in 1946, right at the beginnings of post-World War Two Japan. His last print is called Farmhouse, of the classic traditional interior of a Japanese farmhouse, with just a little, tiny rectangle of looking through the doorway out into the colourful, natural garden and it's almost as if the doorway is a picture on the wall of the traditional inside, at the dark browns and umbers, of the Japanese farmhouse. That the tradition had exceeded its ability to be both natural and conscious to the extent that several generations of military Japanese Empire building had shrunk the natural realm to just a little picture that one could put on the wall and was no longer able to be there and especially that the interior of the traditional Japanese farmhouse, which was the root of the feminine qualities of life, of preparing the food, of arranging for the fabrics and the utensils and the human relationalities of daily life. That this then was a picture of something that had vanished, with the picture of nature which had vanished and this presented in post-atomic Japan. He was from a district not very far from Nagasaki.
We're trying to appreciate and understand on a planetary scale the heritage which we have received, which is rich beyond belief, which has a facility for almost infinite creativity, but we must be able to play within it and with it completely, to avail ourselves of the full spectrum. And we must encourage through a discipline and an application to learn the ABC's of it, to learn the fundamentals of it, not to just be inculcated then, but to be freed from having to learn the ABC's, to be able to use the language, to be able to speak it, to be able to write it, to be able to read it on level of great poetry, on level of kaleidoscopic histories, on level of the indefinite refinement and precisions of the sciences, all within a free, envisioning, differential conscious field. This is the realm of the person; the individual left in a mentality cannot get there. The character of our experience in the mythic horizon, without this ability to raise ourselves into vision and to emerge spirit person art forms out of that, becomes then sabotaged by the limitations of a false individuality. And instead of the character that we have, we get the compressed distortions of versions of that character in pathological processes. And worst of all, the very rituals of comportment, of sequences of action that are necessary for existence, become co-opted and encouraged to make a false realm, not just an artificial or superficial realm, but one characteristically...the way in which it was phrased 2,000 years ago, in such a consummate writer as St. John, he said, 'This is the work of Belial, the liar, who takes great pride in leading man into lying.' The origins of that is from Zarathustra, some 2,000 years before St. John. It is the deceiver. The bad spirit is a spirit of deception loving deception, encouraging the inculcation of artificiality and superficiality in preference to reality, in deference to falsification, of enjoying this kaleidoscopically inverted realm. To not know this is to suffer from illusion, to believe in it though is a delusion and to actively encourage it is demonic. This is exactly how human beings have understood this as Homo sapiens sapiens for 160,000 years that our species has been available. And that other species before us, like Homo Neanderthals, understood a half million years ago and other Homo species, like Homo erectus, 2,000,000 years ago already understood. No one can really exist in nature without emerging in that natural way that the Tê comes out of the Tao. No one can be human, humane, without being able to add, not just an idea, a mental abstraction of an observer, but to be alert and aware that here is not an observer so much as a conscious witness to the entire event. That the event now has the dimension of having been witnessed to.
Here's what Ansel Adams wrote to a great photographer, Paul Strand, in 1933. September 12th, from San Francisco, to Strand who was in New York City. Strand's one of the world's greatest photographers, a good friend of Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. 'Dear Paul Strand, you remember me? And you may not. I had a few days with you and your wife and O'Keeffe at Mabel's in Taos, Dallas, 1930.' Mabel Dodge Luhan was a very wealthy Eastern American woman who developed a ranch in Taos and a home in Santa Fe and eventually ended up marrying a Navajo man. And she brought many figures, like D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, to live at the ranch and to participate. And one of Georgia O'Keeffe's great paintings is The Lawrence Tree, which shows from the base looking up into the starry night, this enormous, complex, strengthened pine that characterises northern New Mexico. Ansel Adams goes on to Strand: 'We motored down to Santa Fe together and shot at tin cans with a revolver on the way. If the last mentioned event has slipped your mind, perhaps you will recall that we had a wonderful morning with Marin.' John Marin, another great artist, watercolourist. 'At Dallas. Seeing his things remain for me my most immense experience in art. I have been working hard with a camera since that time.' Then later on he writes to a friend of his, Dave, David McAlpin, from Yosemite and he says, 'September 4th is not so far off. I can't help shouting for joy that you will be here. Whoopee!' Then in small print, 'Whoopee' and in parentheses, 'An echo.'
I shall be terribly disappointed if Godfrey and the missus - I don't know her directly, so maybe I shouldn't call her Helen until I meet her - do not show up. I guarantee them the trip of their lives. I really think the Sierra will be a revelation for you and of course if O'Keeffe comes the party will be extraordinary. Never was there such a collection of personalities in the Sierra all at once. Please don't think that I mean that the party would be only extraordinary if O'Keeffe were along, but there is something about the lady that is dynamic to say the least. You can assure O'Keeffe that we will take her to the most beautiful parts of the mountains, that we will do everything we can to make things fluent for her. I will meet you at San Francisco and of course give together all the special equipment and take special care that O'Keeffe will have all of her art supplies, her easels, her paints, her brushes, everything that she needs. At the instant that she creatively wants to reach for them, they'll be there.
Ansel Adams, though he made a very complex list for Strand, being an urban man, the first thing on the list is, 'Get a good pair of shoes.' When you're out in the wilderness, the most important thing is to be able to walk out and you need good shoes for that. The classic shoes we used to use in 1960, '61, '62, when in the Sierras, were called Red Wing boots and Red Wing was a blue-collar American shoemaker that made sure that those shoes are gonna be dependable for you. And they used to have a little red wing on them and I used to see them as like a little, American Hermetic, winged boots, that you could go out and you could guide yourself and others through any extent of the wilderness. The farthest I ever was able to hike in one day was 50 miles and was so exhausted that the other two fellows and I, when we got back to the car in Kings Canyon at the end of the road, we just lay down and fell asleep on the gravel, it was about it. But we wanted to go up through a big ambit and see the John Muir Trail, which was some 25 miles inland and then of course we had to get back, we had to get back to work the next morning. We overdid it.
One of the interesting things about Adams is that he was able to make images, especially of the American West and O'Keeffe, with her images, not only of New York City, but of the American West, is extraordinary. And there is a quality to...this is Glacier National Park, this is McDonald Lake, by Ansel Adams. If you don't know, a glacier is partly in Canada, partly in Montana, this is in Montana. And just to give you a little vignette, Glacier National Park is one of the most wild areas of the Rocky Mountains and there is a road that goes up to one of the highest passes in North America and it's called the Road-to-the-Sun, because as you're driving up it seems like you're climbing Jacob's ladder. And what's interesting is that the best view of it is on a little road that runs along the edge of the Blackfoot reserve in Montana, west of Browning, where the American segment of the Blackfeet have their centre, west of there about 30 miles. The only difficulty is that that road is only two lanes, very narrow lanes, 'cause almost no one will use it because the drop-off there is about 4,000 feet down to the river. And across you can see the mountains with the Road-to-the-Sun, about 30 miles away. I remember driving it one time and I had two Blackfoot men hitchhiking I picked up and as we drove along they kept scooting closer and closer to where I was driving and finally I said to them, 'Why don't you guys take a nap and just close your eyes?' And the further one over said, 'That's not gonna help.'