Art 1
Presented on: Saturday, April 7, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We begin with Art 1 and we're using Frank Lloyd Wright and Hiroshige. And one of the great connections between the two of them is this volume on the Japanese print that Frank Lloyd Wright did and it is interesting for us to try to understand a tremendous implosion of circumstances and forces that produced one of the most outstanding transformations in history. It made an art form that has since dominated the architecture of the planet where had never occurred before. The place was Chicago and the circumstance in Chicago was that by 1870 Chicago had become an overgrown town of 300,000 people, all of the development of the Midwest farmlands, that had been going on for a generation or two at that time, were making a food network. That Chicago gathered all of the food stuffs and then sent it out by rail to every place on the continent and so it just simply grew over night and then on October 8th of 1871 a catastrophic fire occurred in Chicago. And just a few lines from the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 where it is still remembered in detail what occurred:
In 1871 it suffered a terrible calamity. On the 8th of October a fire broke out near the lumber district down the west side. Two thirds of the city's buildings were wood and the summer had been excessively dry while, to make conditions worse, a high and varying wind fanned the flames. The conflagration leapt the river to the south and finally to the north side, burned over an area of three and a half square miles, destroyed 17,450 buildings and property valued, in 1871, at 200 million dollars and rendered almost 100,000 people homeless.
Chicago faced a catastrophic situation where it had to rebuild as quickly as it could. With the determination of American post civil war economic industrial might and the decision was to make the larger buildings in Chicago out f steel, not out of wood. And so the steel frame sky scraper was born out of necessity in Chicago in the 1870s. It was a tremendous push because the architecture of the steel frame meant that you could build higher than ever before but that the treatment of the buildings could not then follow classical models. You can't put facades that have columns with nice little Greek lintels on a 30 storey building. You could try to stretch it and then have the top but it looked terrible to have a Greek temple top 300 feet above, a few columns.
And yet it was very difficult in terms of an aesthetic in terms of a practical engineering to solve this problem, the greatest architect solving this was Louis Sullivan who decided to rethink architecture completely and the architectural form and to build with steel. And instead of having a lot of heavy stone facade to use large glass areas for windows and to have a way to put the glass and steel together with a design that was able to take a 30 or 40 storey building and to make sure that it was rooted into the bedrock so that it would be a permanent fixture, it would literally be something that had grown out of the rock, out of the soil, out of the land and had become a steel and glass plant that man had cultivated and made.
And that in this way architecture now was rooted in the rock below the soil, not built on top of it. And able to rise and out of this, Frank Lloyd Wright who was born in 1867, who was between four and five when the Chicago fire happened, had been born in southern Wisconsin. And Chicago's influence is enormous in that part of the Midwest. And it was always the centre of cultivation as if it were another New York. And just as people in Connecticut would relate to New York City even though it was not in their state, people in Wisconsin related to Chicago in a similar way. And all through the Midwest Chicago became increasingly the draw of the power, the wealth, the forward thinking. And by the time Frank Lloyd Wright was 20 years old, having faced a peculiar family situation - which we'll talk about next presentation in more detail - he sold some of his father's books, got a ticket on a train and went to Chicago, with no money in his pocket and no possibilities except a relative in Chicago who introduced him to an architectural office where he began as a draftsman.
After a very short time he zeroed in on the fact that Louis Sullivan was the great architect of Chicago: he was making this new architecture. And in Kindergarten Chats by Louis Sullivan, he talks about, 'It seems to me that I could have gotten a clearer idea of your recent harang on function and form if you had used half as many words. Still, I think I catch your meaning, after a fashion. What do you mean by organic? I will tell you later on.' And so, instead of having a lecture of an idea of a plan of what something was, Louis Sullivan made it. He created and then would say 'Come and experience the building,' and not just the building, but the rebuilding, of one of the powerful dynamic cities in the world. We witnessed the rebuilding of Chicago, historically, when San Francisco after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, was rebuilt and became a magical place. And in our own time, the rebuilding of Shanghai has produced the same kind of effect: at one time there were 4,000 high rises in current building in Shanghai, at a given time, and the building of the new metropolitan city of Dubai on the Persian Gulf is again an exemplar that follows very closely the template of the rebuilding of Chicago in the late 19th century.
Wright would have begun his drafting when he was 20, which would have been about 1886-1887 and he stayed with Louis Sullivan for seven years. And in 1893 Wright, who had been moonlighting on the side to pay for his expensive taste in art, like Japanese prints, and expensive books, busts of Beethoven, beautiful pianos, a wonderful home - he borrowed enough money from Louis Sullivan to build the Frank Lloyd Wright Home - in the fashionable suburb of Oak Park to the west of Chicago avenue, about twelve miles from the downtown loop area, now just a suburb that is only about a fourth of the way out to the city limits of what is called now Chicagoland. Chicagoland has about seven million people and spreads along Lake Michigan and now spreads out into dozens and dozens of miles into the countryside that once was and now is just an enormous Chicagoland metropolitan area.
In Oak Park, in 1893, Sullivan found out that Wright was moonlighting and fired him but Wright had always said 'I had quit the same day because I had enough commissions of building houses because I used the house that I built for myself as a demonstration, not to tell people what it was like, what my idea was, what the plan was but to show them, by the experience of the house, what you would be living in.' And that the quality of the house began to have, more and more, a different set of aesthetic criteria, critical parameters, not the limited parameters of some kind of an integral form but the shimmering, moveable, parenthetical diameters and perimeters of a differential conscious form, an organic form that was able to grow, to mature, to be not only raised but improved. And in this sense, the home began to shift away from an emphasis on the walls protecting you, the little holes called the windows through which you could see out and the roof that would just keep everything together and just stop the rain.
That whole form which had been, almost forever, the form of the house, of the home, transformed several times over. Wright showed that the experience of a home is your living flow through the space of which its living reality is. And that, instead of just having walls with holes in it and partitions within that were walls with doors in, you would open the space, you would create more and more the sense that the windows went out into the setting of the home: the garden. Not just the yard but the setting in which the soil of the organic form of the architecture had grown out and had achieved then a living form, a conscious dimension of aesthetic life that was there for literally any kind of human being, any kind of mankind.
The curious paradox is that in 1893, after 22 years of rebuilding, Chicago was the site of the Columbian World's Fair Exposition and this Columbian Exposition had a tremendous pull from countries around the world to send people to see what the latest techniques of technology of building, of art, of engineering, of science and also of religion. A great, huge, modern version of a classical architecture city was built in Chicago. It was called the white city because all the facades were white. They were all classical revival buildings and it set the tone for architecture across the United States for about 20 years: that all the little towns would have courthouses that look exactly like classical rehash or they would have public buildings that would look very similar, libraries' facades that could have been taken from photographs from Chicago's Columbian Exposition. The greatest critics of it were Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright: that this was a bogus replay of an artificiality that had not only become tired but that had crimped and imprisoned man in a very limited and increasingly shrinking, reduced way.
Part of the Columbian exposition was the World's Congress of Religions, held in Chicago at the same time. This is the great, huge volume that came out from it. In most histories it's called the World Parliament of Religions but the title page reads, specifically, the Worlds Congress of Religions, the addresses and papers delivered before parliament and an abstract of the congresses held in the Art Institute, Chicago, under the auspices of the world's Columbian Exposition. All of the great religions of the planet were put together, for the first time, admittedly in a misbalanced but this is how the language ran - this was 1893, exactly at the time that Frank Lloyd Wright began his architectural practice on his own with a world class vision -
'This great religious gathering, never possible before in the history of the world, nor even now perhaps possible anywhere else than in the great city by the unsalted sea [Lake Michigan] was inaugurated in the Art Palace on Monday September 11th 18893 and continued 18 days.' The Art Palace is in the frontispiece of it, it is the Chicago Institute of Art. And for the first time, all of the great religious centres of the world were brought together and one got the sense, in a very peculiar way, that this was a replay of the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance. The Italian Renaissance in Florence was keyed in 1439 by the necessity of having the great branches of Christianity meet together in a conclave to try to find a unity and come back together. And the reason for that is that the Islamic forces of conquering had slowly shrunk the Eastern Orthodox Church until only the city of Constantinople, now called Istanbul, was left. And by 1453, when it fell it, was the end of the eastern empire of Christianity and the beginnings of the incursion of the Muslims, increasingly shrinking the Christian west.
The refugees from the Greek Orthodox empire fled to Italy, to Venice, to try to find some way to have an interface with the Roman Church but a young Cosimo de' Medici, in exile in Venice, stole the thunder of that conclave and had it moved to Florence where his banking family financed a great deal of it. And in 1439 the emphasis was that there needs to be a rediscovery of the classical unity out of which Christianity came and which it really should be and to reinstate it. This was the beginning of the Renaissance. So that the Chicago 1893 congress of world religions was the first attempt at an ecumenical planet: to come together and understand - at this particular juncture in this particular city, at this particular time - what was eternally possible for man to realise and to live and to build his architecture, his life, his quality of communities form the individual through the family, through the city, through the country, through the continent and through the world. And all the different levels were brought into play.
It's curious because from Asia there were ten representatives, from India, including Swami Vivekananda from Bombay. From Japan there were eight representatives, including the great Zen master Shaku Soyen, who was the Zen master tutor of D.T. Suzuki that we talked about last week in the interval. There was only one representative from china, almost an unknown figure, and only one representative from Africa, a very distinguished man from Liberia, Prince Motuku Massaquoi and he represented the insight of the interface of Christianity and the indigenous religions of Africa. So that Africa and china were only represented by one figure each but they held the stage with all the other figures from the Greek orthodox, from the Roman Catholics, from many other branches, many other religions. The American Indian representative of American Indian religions was my spirit grandfather Walking Buffalo, Tatanga Mani, who lived to be 97.
This event set the tone, especially for Wright who didn't pay all that much attention to India, paid homage to China in the sense that Lao Tzu - the Tao Tê Ching - was always a favourite quality with him. The first translation of the Tao Te Ching that was at all realistic and credible, made by D.T. Suzuki, in the Chicago area in 1898. So that all of this was current but the impress on Wright was from Japan. And it was the Japanese insight that made the trigger difference in that from Louis Sullivan, who wrote a couple of other books and I'll bring them next week, one of the about the idea of architecture, another about democracy. And Wright who had been raised on Emerson and Whitman American democracy, honed and padded together in a very powerful architectural presentation by Louis Sullivan. That particular flint was struck against the circumstance of the new steel and glass way of architecture and produced the spark of insight that is characteristic of Far East Asian civilisation.
The spark of insight is this: nature is mysterious and shows us the convolutions in the landscape which includes not only the land forms but includes the movement of the rivers of the meridianal energies of Feng shui of the sky, of the sun and the moon, of the stars. That the landscape is the total presentation that, within which, we are able to experience an interface with the mysteriousness of the Tao of nature. And that the key to this is that landscape, if seen as the venue of a journey, the sequencing of that journey, if done in a presentational way that brings the high dharma consciousness into its presentation, into its not formulation but its experiential presentation, that that journey in that landscape will yield increasingly the jewels by which all of it is not only integrated but radiated out and illuminating its source again, not just to simply bring it together in some massive centre but a centre which is prismatic which will reflect it out again.
One of the great exemplars of this was in the 20th century, the great Russian Siberian poet wrote a long poem on Bratskaya station, Bratsk's station, which was a hydroelectric plant on the Angara river north of Irkutsk where he was from. And he said the ancient model of the pyramid was that everybody worked for the Pharaoh to build his pyramid for him. This is a dead end, closed caption, one time off whereas the Bratsk's station, all of the effort to go into it made hydroelectric power then that sent electricity out to illumine and enliven the entire landscape as far as anybody could hike in months. So that the prismatic radiance of something which has a conscious dimension to it recycles so that instead of nature just being an integration to an individual oneness, something that now is established and is here and stays here, that it is an ebb and flow of radiance that goes out. And as it goes out again it refines and nourishes and energises the very landscape, the very population of people that went into making it up so that now the sources are richer, the people have more capacity than they did before, they will build ever better prisms.
And so instead of just having a hydroelectric station or instead of just having a big skyscraper out of steel and glass, that sends out a radiance, a resonance of consciousness that, as it changes the landscape of man, man with more and more capacity, will make better and ever more refined expressions. The architecture, now, will not just be something that is a forty storey skyscraper, for the first time in history, in Chicago about 1880, but by 1965, only 85 years later, you had a forty storey steel rocket that sent men to the moon. So that the capacity of man was fortified by a prismatic change in the way in which everything would occur and could occur. That possibilities increased possibilities and further increased refinement so that the centre of it was not a political integral economic structure but a prismatic aesthetic ecumenical radiant quality of consciousness.
One of the greatest architects of the 20th century, about the only figure who competed with Wright as the greatest architect of the century: Le Corbusier, in France. One of his books is called the Radiant City, that when we plan on this scale, in this way, the radiance of man will stagger the imagination. Wright called it the living city: when man lives in homes that are no longer boxes that curtail him, when he lives in cities that no longer separate him, when the planet is no longer kingdoms of different colours on maps so that wars are fought to extend the colours of this area over the colours of that area, that the planet itself will radiate radiance and glow with this iridescence that the species has matured. It is an oikumene, it's spelled o-i-k-u-m-e-n-e from which we get ecumenical but the oikumene is that all mankind belongs to a family, the family of man. And though in the old thought a family of several billion people seems a very odd thing to say but in an infinite cosmos a family of seven billion entities is a very small tight family. There are star system civilisations that have hundreds of billions of entities. So we're learning for the first time to leave the sandbox and to venture forth into wider worlds: all possible worlds.
One of the most profound volumes was called Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, published in 1886 in Boston by Edward S. Morse. Here's a reprint in the Dover paperback. Edward S. Morse was a zoologist and he went to Japan to study brachiopods - brachiopods are invertebrate marine creatures that leave fossil shells, they have a double shell and they have a kind of a ciliated proboscis, that means sensitive hairs, so that it can feed and find food and so forth - and while he was there, studying and lecturing in Tokyo, a friend of his said 'You have this uncanny ability to look at detail and record it and bring it all together into a presentation that is perfect. Why do you not do this for Japanese architecture? Because the western influence on Japan was changing it so rapidly that the traditional Japanese home will become a thing of the past.'
So Morris took the advice and applied his zoological scientific examination of every single detail and the book still is readable in the sense that one understands that every single detail of every single detail is not just a part but a resonance of a composition, that when it is done right it is a harmonic that you are able to hum its tune and the pitch pipe key for the tune is the garden within which it is set. The landscape within which it is set and that this landscape and this architecture work together as if the landscape were the stage and the architecture were the performance of the ballet and that the ballet's performance is not the building but that the building in the landscape allows you to perform your life. You are the ballet that is hosted and the architecture sustains you, gives you the props, gives you the sequence, gives you the nourishment and helps your life achieve a kind of a flow and Frank Lloyd Wright made up a word: he said it streamlines.
Instead of having things that clutter snag you and hook you and stop you, that your dynamic, now, is streamlined, it flows like a stream around and over and smoothes out everything until the stones themselves become a part of the aesthetic of the flow. And that every aspect then of an architecture, that is organic in this way, will have a streamlined flow that you, in your livingness, will increasingly become sensitized to the possibilities of refining this even further. And that once you enter into a Frank Lloyd Wright space the very first kinaesthetic quality that you experience, it's remarkable, you can do it for yourself, you feel an immense calm that is not a repose but is like a yogic focus that this is worth exploring. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to this spread by Hiroshige. This is from his great series of 55 Japanese prints called the T?kaid?, the T?kaid? being a road between old Edo, Tokyo, and Kyoto, about 300 miles. And it was the most powerful famous road in Japan, there were three other roads, the Kisokaido going further inland but the T?kaid? was the main road linking the two great centres in Japan. It took about twelve to fifteen days to traverse the T?kaid?. This is the most difficult pass, the Hakone pass, and here the T?kaid? road slices in such a narrow defile, going up past these jagged peaks that plunge down all the way to the lake of reeds as it translates, down below, and goes around the base and curves down again and then there are houses here where the T?kaid? takes an easier go. Hakone is number 11 and this is number 13. This is a little bit further on, about eight miles from where the Hakone pass portion of the T?kaid? comes down. This is called Numazu.
And you can see that Hiroshige is constantly playing: with night and day, with moonlight and sunlight, with the reflection, with water, with snow, with figures. Sometimes it's a crowded aspect of the T?kaid?, sometimes it's just a few figures. Here coming home by moonlight with a celebratory mask, the figures are coming back to their village. So the T?kaid? is like a landscape of the whole array of life, the complete registry. This has the figures and Mount Fuji in the background. The T?kaid? always has Mount Fuji on the right when you're going from Tokyo to Kyoto but only in this place, for just a peculiar perspective because the road over this marshland of rice plants, angles and curves, this one view is the only time that Fuji is on the left of the T?kaid? going north to Kyoto. And here is a milepost that would have the indications of where you were on the T?kaid?, where the next stop is and different amenities.
That previous print over the marshland was Yoshiwara, this one is Kanagawa and here is one of the most famous prints from Asian art. This figure is Basho whose Narrow Road to the Deep North we used earlier in our education, the Zen travel log, Oku no Hosomichi and Sora, his travelling companion, and the arc of the bridge here is vectored with the arc of the kite so that you get this opening up, this blast of presence that's being broadcast so that the kite that is freed is like a Zen freedom, you are no longer tethered to this world. You are free, not just to go, but to be, in whatever way there is. Here, the arc of the bridge has the other travellers bowing, both to get up through the crust and also to honour Basho, the rice field pickers are all bowing. And it's that Basho presents, here, the pivot of release which is worthy of deep regard.
And the fifth, the last for this presentation, this one is the 29th Mitsuke. Many rivers have to be crossed and some of them can be waded, others need boats to ferry one across. You can see the Hiroshige landscape that is gently fading into the mist, into the background and the sky with just a touch of colour at the top and a deeper touch of colour at the bottom give us the parenthetical of the deep blue of not just sky and water but that deepest blue, verging almost on an indigo, of being the highest ultraviolet energy that one could see by. In this, the angle of the prows of the boats and the patience of the ferrymen, who have just worked and are resting for a moment and then will return back to work, and the passengers who have left here are loading on to go further across.
The quality of landscape in the East Asian civilisation came into its deep own at the end of the T'ang Dynasty and the beginning of the Song Dynasty. There had been a number of interesting artists in the T'ang and all of a sudden in the Song. Chinese landscape painting developed into one of the finest arts that the planet has ever seen. Three of the greatest figures of that time, one was named Ma Yuan and because he bunched almost everything into one corner of the landscape scroll, he was called One Corner Ma. Another, Xia Gui who did these incredible, brilliant strokes that made it seem as if the rocks had just been chipped out of the rocky mantle of the earth and that was in contrast to the vast spaces of mist. And so the Ma-Shah school [44.31] of Southern Song painting came into being and the third Mu Qi whose beautiful presentations of the tiger and the dragon illustrate the notes, the presentation notes, from Vision, the last two pages of Interval 5 and you will find them in the presentation notes, the last page there was a dragon.
If you will look at Mu Qi's dragon in your presentation notes of Vision and then compare Hokusai and Hiroshige - this is the Hiroshige dragon from about 500 years after Mu Qi, this is in the Art 1 presentation notes - has a very similar harmonic. And if one to looks to see the Zen of Mu Qi who was a priest in the 13th century, the 1200s, that 500 years later one finds it as just a part of the deep sensitivity and developed, nourished refinement of Hiroshige who was not a Zen priest at all but was a fireman in Tokyo. In fact it was a family position inherited. Hiroshige's family was originally Tanaka but the father who became a adopted into another family Ando then passed that name on so Hiroshige was known as Ando Hiroshige and he worked not ... they didn't called them firemen but they called them fire police in Japanese. The fire police would occupy these tall wooden towers that would look out over the cities to make sure that any fire was spotted right away - because when you build out of wood and shoji panelling, rice paper, fire has to be put out right away.
From the top of the tower one has a view of life, of looking down, and many of the prints of Hiroshige have an elevated view. He is showing us what life looks like when you are observing it carefully from an elevated perspective, looking, not this time for fire, but for the fire of insight, for the composition that will deliver to you the spark, that Promethean spark of insight, to understand that this is in a journey through a landscape, like you are journeying through your landscape, and here is a jewel lens by which you can refine what your journeying is in your life by these lenses that are presented together. In the case of Hiroshige's T?kaid? series, 55 arranged in a row. The Japanese in particular loved sequences. One of the great comparisons, and I'll bring next week two volumes in a single box - Hiroshige's 55 stages to the T?kaid? and Hokusai his 36 views of Mount Fuji.
Hokusai who lived before Hiroshige but lived longer, Hokusai once wrote, 'I am now 90 and I have at last learned how to draw a line that lives.' Hiroshige died in 1858 of cholera, just about the time that Admiral Dewey of the American navy forced Japan to open its doors to the West, almost at the very same time. Just like Frank Lloyd Wright, beginning in 1893 his architectural practice of almost 70 years, exactly at the time of the World Congress of Religions at the Art Institute of Chicago where Wright was to lecture on Japanese prints, on architecture, many times over the next couple of decades. It is peculiar that these two figures, because Hiroshige is almost the end of the line of the high dharma East Asian landscape tradition which was made so that the architecture was the jewel and the artist spirit person was the scintillating sunlight refracting the jewel and making it shine.
One of the few great Japanese print landscape geniuses to come later was a man who revived the traditional Japanese print, his name was Hiroshi Yoshida and I'll bring a couple of his prints next week, originals, so that you can see. What is interesting is that Hiroshi Yoshida, in the 1920s, used French impressionist art to refine the Japanese print. Where the Japanese print of Hiroshige were the source of refinement for the French impressionists and that the Hokusai-Hiroshige refinement of their landscape prints came because Dutch prints were introduced into Japan when they were just youngsters. So that you get this constant criss-cross cross-fertilisation of East and West constantly being condense within a period of only about 150 years. Someone once observed that the life of an idea, in an organic sense of its lifetime, that when it first appears in the mind of an individual, after 150 years it will be public knowledge everywhere and everyone will consider it just a part of the way in which things are.
The landscape in architecture is the beginning tuning for our Art presentation. One of the refinements for us is that when art opens its sourcing, its field is the differential field of visionary differential consciousness that has absorbed the four dimensions that spring out of the field of nature. But nature as a field in its Tao, has zero dimensions when it comes into ritual existential form, when it comes into karmic action sequenced doing that sticks, that polarises, that forms itself into an integral form for the first time, something existential, something that is really there, that stays there, is there, something for whom the actions of doing amount to a sequence that gets something done. The pragmatic forms of ritual have the dimensions, they emerge out of the zero dimensional field of nature.
So that when the zero insight dimension of consciousness, as a fifth dimension, vision as a fifth dimension is able to absorb the zero of Tao, of nature's field and so they work together in such a way that the origins of the four dimensions from zero have already an alchemical affinity with the quintessential fifth dimension of consciousness. So that the field of zero has both a zero and a five dimensional creative imagining, remembering dynamic inherent in its sourcing. So that an art form that comes out of that is actually a six dimensional form that does not rely on polarity for its stability but that it engenders complementarity for its stability.
What are the art forms? They are works of art but they are also the maturation of human persons. Beyond the figure that they are in their ritual doings, beyond the character that is in play in their experience, and beyond the individuality in their symbolic structure of thought, the idea of who they are, they become opened up to a rainbow spectrum. And a rainbow spectrum that is not just limited to the visible rainbow but goes into the invisible realms of the infrared and the ultraviolet as well, so that the entire electromagnet spectrum, now, is available. There are invisible energies much beyond the range of visible light. And so a kinaesthetic quality of a verdant experience happens in visionary conscious field, that imbues the works of art, persons, art and also spirit forms, with a quality, a quintessential quality that they can not only transform things in the world, four dimensional things, the structure of the integral of the four dimensional things is the mind, but things of existence and the thing of the mind can both be transformed by works of art by spiritual persons.
So in the Japanese print by Frank Lloyd Wright, an appreciation of his great collection, at one time he had more than 5,000 prints, Japanese prints, and he bought and sold. On the world market at the time, Frank Lloyd right was the person to get into contact with if you wanted a beautiful collection of Japanese prints and the Art Institute of Chicago had one of the greatest collections of superior Japanese prints in the world. I will bring next week a little book on Sharaku, a Japanese print maker who was a member of a travelling Kabuki group. And Sharaku worked only ten months in his whole life and all 146 prints of his were made within a ten month period in 1794, out of the 146 prints over 40 of them, in the originals, are in the Art Institute of Chicago because of people like Frank Lloyd Wright. He writes,
If then there is a culture we might acquire whereby the beautiful may be apprehended as such; that is, not looked at but looked into', [not prehended, to grab it, but apprehended to appreciate it]. 'Be apprehended as such and help restore to us the fine, instinctive perception of and worship for the beautiful which should be our universal birthright instead of the distorted ideas, the materialistic perversions of which we are victims. We assuredly want to know what it is and just how it may be had. Nothing at this moment can be of greater importance to us educationally, for the laws of the beautiful are immutable as those of elementary physics. No work sifted by them and found wanting can be a work of art. The laws of the beautiful are, like the laws of physics, not derived from external authority, [like a politics or an economics] nor have they any regard to ulterior utility. They pre-exist any perception of them [the Tao of nature as a field], in here latent and effective in man's nature and his world.
When it is visionary man's world now is transcendent to the limits of mental structures and has great affinity with the field, the Tao zero, of nature. So that you get a complexity of two fields that are not polarised, they are not opposites but rather interpenetrate like an infinity sign, like the Tao Tê Ching symbol. They interpenetrate so that the cycle now also has an ecology and that the ecology is able to accept any cycle into the ecological recycling of it. So that a cycle, instead of it just being completed and that's it, statically, or keep repeating its completion in a rut, now all cycles have a recyclable, ecological possibility of coming into play with refinement, with extension. Not only is there life after life and life after death, there is eternally refineable life, a living.
This quality in Wright's work is enormously interesting to us and our learning here is better understood as a recalibration, bringing us out of the ruts of the cycles of a dead past which was never alive, simply dominated, and bringing it back into life in a very recognisable way. When the book we are using as a text, one of our pairs, Hiroshige's Woodblock Prints, by Edward F. Strange, A Guide. This was reprinted by Dover in 1983. The reprint is valuable because the original edition of it was only 250 copies so that copies were soaked up by the great libraries of the world like the British Museum or the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and only a few copies of this were ever released into private hands. This is one of 250 copies of it. The Dover reprint gives us a chance to take a look at this. What I am presenting, and for the next three presentations with this as well, is that the linking between Hiroshige and Frank Lloyd Wright is an extraordinary tuning fork that allows us to tap into an enormous tapestry of complex interrelationalities that are working for us now t the beginning of the 21st century.
One of the difficulties with the publication of the colour prints of Hiroshige when it came out in 1925 was at a time where there was a watershed where a great many people were beginning to curl back from the avant-garde and go back into a regressive mode, which has only deepened in time so that there are more people in 2007 who are regressive than there were in 1925, many more. But those who went forward went forward with a greater dynamic, a greater kinaesthetic quality so that we have a great opportunity now to alert almost everyone else to the fact that it isn't cut and dried at all. In 1925 this volume was published outside of Chicago in Illinois, it's called Experience and Nature by John Dewey, one of the great pragmatic philosophers, one of the great American democratic philosophers, one of the great aesthetic philosophers of all time. Experience and Nature was the first of the Paul Carus lectures. Paul Carus is the man who put D.T. Suzuki to Chicago to translate the Tao Tê Ching in 1898 and translate two more volumes so that Lao Tzu from the 5th century 500BC was matched up with Ashvaghosha in about 100 AD who is the first great Zen master of the Mahayana. They usually make Bodidharma the first Zen master but Ashvaghosha is before Bodidharma, about 400 years before.
The third book that D.T. Suzuki translated for Paul Carus' open court publishing was the Zen sermons of his own master Shaku Soyen, who was at the World's Congress of Religions in 1893. And in 1907 D.T. Suzuki translated and published for the first time so that one could see an early 20th century Zen master following an early first millennium Mahayana master following a sixth century BC Taoist master so that you got 2,500 years, in a three part development translated for the first time into English in Chicago, by a Japanese who understood to the nth degree the complexities of the tradition and the quintessential vision to spark all the way along so that his presentations have become, since, classical. Now, Dewey, in writing Experience and Nature wrote this in 1924, after he spent a year lecturing in China. He was invited to China and he was following a previous philosophic genius who lectured in China for a year before him, Bertrand Russell. And when John and Evelyn Dewey got to China the first thing they did is they realised that Bertrand Russell was ill, he was sick, and they nursed him for many long weeks to save his life and bring him back to health.
Dewey, then, lectured all over China but especially in the intellectual centres and introduced the pragmatic quality of American democratic transpersonal communities of form, based on actual working together,r and for quite a long time, China, in its most poignant 20th century realisation, were John Deweyites, up until 1949, from the early 1920s until 1949. Mao Tsetung and Joanne Li had wanted to go to visit Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Washington at the end of the Second World War. In China it was called the war with Japan and lasted from Japan taking over Manchuria in1933 until 1945. It lasted the twelve years that FDR was president of the United States. They trusted that they would be heard, would be received, they were ready to come. Reactionaries in the state department said, 'We can't trust them, they have read Communist literature. We don't know why they are coming over.' And so they were driven into a box canyon of being called Marxist Communists when they were really Chinese trying to recover themselves, not only out of a long war, humiliating war with Japan, millions of Chinese were killed.
My mentor Kayu Shu had his mentor, the great poet Wen I Tu machine-gunned in front of the students by the Japanese because they wanted to show 'We are your teachers now and what you need to learn is to obey us,' It's interesting, because of the criss-cross of things. When Dewey came back and delivered Experience and Nature, it's very much as if the Tao had entered into the pragmatic of American democracy and within ten years he produced an aesthetic masterpiece called Art As Experience - Nature and experience, art and experience. Towards the end of his life, Dewey lived to be 92 - everyone who seems to work with this lives into their 90s - he at one of his last great lecture series is called Experience in Education, published in 1948. He published it in 1948 because he was expecting Truman to win the 1948 election and Dewey, by that time, even though he was nearly 90, was the central philosophic figure that was going to come into play at last through an American presidency that really would have brought the cream of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's experience and a wider American democracy into play but of course Truman lost the election, this was not ever really brought into play.
Instead of Dewey, Nature and Experience, Art As Experience, Experience and Education, you got the McCarthy era of witchcraft hunting communists and the cold war. We are taking a look at such a vast complexity that it takes a series of resonant presentations to acquaint you, to sensitise you, to expand you in such a way that, increasingly, what occurs is that these are facets, each presentation is a facet, and the yoga of the jewel realisation is being cut now, not by me, but by you in whatever ways you participate. There is a protocol; there is an eightfold, a noble eightfold path protocol. If you will follow this protocol the facets will be cut in such a way that the jewel will emerge better, truer, faster.
The first is the DVDs, once a week, or the presentations live, if you are able to be here. Step one, the presentation, live or on DVD. Step two is the audio tape or CD played two days later so that you get a follow up on the third day, two days after. Then two days, that's two, then the third is the presentation notes from the previous series two days after that. So that you get a presentation, you get the oral audio take on it, two days later you get the Pythagorean retrospective of how it resonates to where this phase now is to the emergent sourcing phase just before it. The fourth is to read in your yearlong selection two days later. So if you heard the presentation on a Saturday and you did your audios on a Monday and you did your presentation note reconnaissance on a Wednesday, you would do your weekly reading in the yearlong presentations on a Friday.
For instance, if you're chossing for the differential, let's say you want to have Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West, about the moving of this fairytale group of people, very Tolkienesque, trying to get across the vast Gobi Desert spaces to get to India to get the true dharma books and come back with them. Or Scheherazade's Arabian Nights, the wisdom of this thousand and one night journey through three years of trying to save her life by telling stories that are so captivating that her royal husband lover will not kill her in the morning for someone else, he'll want to hear how the story keeps unfolding and how after 1001 nights he realises there is no end to the stories she can tell, that her scintillation is one of an eternal jewel of person and the marriage.
If you do your yearlong readings on a Friday the next four phases are distributed through that week, it's like the pattern of a week with the presentation on a Sabbath, not a Sunday but a Saturday morning, play time. Read in the paired books current throughout the week, each then on the sixth view of film - every month there are four films for each phase - take one each month and then for the interval take the fourth film. Then listen to the music selection occasionally, randomly, throughout the phase. The music selection for art is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Eight: do the projects and share communication with others involved.
The first four are the sequence of what to do in a week the second four are distributed, like spice, throughout the reoccurrence of the four, not only each week but they accumulate, they build and with this protocol, this octave, of four integrals and four differentials, you'll be able, eventually, to have the kinaesthetic quality that you once learned when you learned how to ride a bicycle. Once you have that balance, once you feel that, you will never again fall off a bike. Once you have this kinaesthetic quality of how to learn in this way you'll be able to utilise it forever in whatever way is familiar to you, personal to you. It'll become just like when you learned how to type you now type what you want to say. This is a learning to give you an alphabet and a scale by which you can not only sing but you can write your songs out for others to sing as well. More next week.