Art 2
Presented on: Saturday, April 14, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We return to our Art phase and this is the second presentation. Last week we set the scalar with landscape and architecture and now we're moving into Hiroshige and Frank Lloyd Wright and a complex relationality there that develops landscape and architecture into the artists. It is significant for us to recognise that if you're building, you must first of all have a site on which you're going to build and you must understand that site. And the more refined of the architecture, the more complex the relationalities of all the details of that landscape become, until they reach a threshold where it becomes kaleidoscopic and only the greatest artists were able to emerge works of art that were able to hold their own in a kaleidoscopic context. Hiroshige and Frank Lloyd Wright are two such artists, enormously capable. One of the apocryphal stories of Frank Lloyd Wright is that after having been dismissed for ten years as a has-been, an architect who was famous one time and now no longer, he got a commission to do a house in western Pennsylvania for a Pittsburgh department store owner, Edward Kaufmann, whose son, Edward Kaufmann Jr had joined the Taliesin Fellowship in the early 1930's. So they wanted him to build a country house on a stream, Bear Run, that had a waterfall, where they liked to go and sit out on the rocks and just go and enjoy the peace of their country land. And Wright got the commission to do the house and for month, after month, after month, he did nothing. And he once later said, 'You do not go to the draughting board to create, you go simply to draw up the plans.' So he did nothing until a phone call came from Milwaukee, that Kaufmann had flown into Milwaukee and was going to drive out to Spring Green, to Taliesin, where Wright was and Wright said, 'Well, EJ just come ahead, we'll be ready for you.' And in the three hours that it took Kaufmann to drive about 140 miles from Milwaukee to Spring Green, just west of Madison, about 17 miles, he drew up the entire plans and renderings for Falling Water. Every detail in beautiful colour, in elevations, in cross-sections, everything was done and as he was putting the pencil down, Kaufmann was being shown into Taliesin's draughting room. He got up and went over and shook his hand and said, 'EJ we've been waiting for you.'
There was a man named Brewster Ghiselin who did a volume for the University of California Press, called The Creative Process. And he took about 35 different world-class, planetary-class, as we would say now, artists and they all followed a very similar kind of MO. Mozart famously did not write down a single note until he heard the entire piece in his musical imagination and then sat down and he could either write it out, or he could play it extempore, from his creative imagination. That source of art is in differential consciousness; it's not in a structure of symbolic thought, it is in a larger space, a five-dimensional space that occurs where the creative imagination is now a process that is distributed freely, not throughout some kind of a form, but distributed infinitely in a field without end. So that differential consciousness is a field where creative imagination flows infinitely and freely, distributed like Tesla energy. Wherever a tapping into form occurs spontaneously, as much creative insight as is needed will flow into that. What flows with it, what is distributed in that field of differential consciousness of vision, what is distributed equally is remembering, remembering. And when you have the...not a synergy, but you have a multiplex of remembering and creative imagination, that are tapable, that are evocable, spontaneously together, the artist now becomes a prism which he includes his work with himself and while the prism, we would say in an integral thought way, is inside the artist. This is not the case. It is, rather, like a lens that is within an infinite field of creative imagination and remembering and uses as a tap source, the structure of symbolic thought, which has a structural element called the imagination, which when it is brought into the five-dimensional space of creativity, of visionary, differential consciousness, the imagination shifts into a dynamic from a form. It's no longer a cinchable, integral form, it is now opened because of a turning, a turning which is not a turning so much of 90 degrees or 180 degrees, but a turning inside out so that the polarisation becomes a complementarity. Instead of a positive and minus now, you have a distributable neutral, which can be both and positive and minus at the same time. In pairs, in sets, in complex weaves of all kinds, or take advantage of spaces of neutrality, spaces of zero, spaces of equilibrium in-between the positive and negative, which were at one time polarised in the integral cycle and now are freed to be distributed, infinitely, in complementarities, which include the ability for all zeros and all infinities to be distributed with whatever elements are in play. And 'In play' is the right word, because they are now no longer, 'In structure,' they are, 'In play.' And it is the dynamos, it is the dynamic play of vision that is the source for art and the source for the artist. And when that artist is able to give a prismatic form through his work, through his person, now we say, traditionally, that a spiritual form has been released. Not so much that it's come into being, but that it has emerged in its freedom of release. So that the spirit, the person, the works of art, are essentially jewels of freedom. What do they free us into? They free us into the cosmos, so that not only do we belong, but we have never not belonged there. And so there is something about the spiritual person and the infinite cosmos that are deeply resonant in sets without number, yet carrying always the creativity and the remembrance of a harmonic. So that works of art, or spiritual persons, or artists at play, at work, are able to tune us out of the limits of structure into the further explorations and adventures of variants without end of that structure. One of the most beautiful, poignant, planetary-class statements of this for all time, was written by the pinnacle of maturity, by Walt Whitman, called Democratic Vistas. Wrote it in 1875 and he wrote it to celebrate the centennial coming up, 1876, of the Declaration of Independence of America. And in Democratic Vistas he says right at the beginning, 'Being acquainted as I am with nature, there are two things, two qualities, that Mother Nature seems to prize above all else: freedom and variation.' And that human beings must be tuned to that openness of infinite varieties and infinite freedom and part of the New World is to recognise that this is not a right, this is not something that is a privilege, this is the true condition of our being. And art reminds us then that there is, especially in the higher, refined registries of this, our freedom, our variety, the veracity of the pairing of that is guaranteed. So that art has an enormously important aspect in reality. It weans us away from political, economic structures, the structures of political economy, to appreciation of the adventures and possibilities and varieties of an aesthetic oikoumene, not an economics, but an oikoumene. The Greek words are cognate: one means, 'The money is the source of all,' the other means, 'The family of man is the source of it all, everyone together.' The one political means a mental structure that is referenced back to a ritual limitation, that in-between tutors experience to be what it should be in terms of rituals and what it needs to aspire to in terms of mental doctrines. Whereas an aesthetic weans us away from those kinds of structures that have tenacity in the world, but are only appearances in reality, they are essentially artificial. They are time bound, they are circumstance conscribed, they are only as good as long as those rituals are practicable, as long as those doctrines are believed and as long as experience is allowed to be sandwiched in-between them. At any juncture of thought, word and deed that that combine is compromised, is exceeded, is shown to be, not only untrue, but fallacious, the entire structure now begins to collapse. What holds all of this together in the most primordial dynamic is time, time. Our species has known, seemingly forever, that time has cycles. There are cycles of the moon, there are cycles of the sun, there are cycles even of the stars in their constellations, there are cycles within cycles. That periodicity is a quality of the way in which time manifests in this world. And no matter how complex the periodicity is, it is the reckoning of a temporality that holds appearance into its shapes, its integrals, its existentials, its believability, in terms of experience of our lives. And if time changes, all of that is brought into question and one of the largest scales of periodicity that our species noted a long time ago, many thousands of years ago, was that if you go by the longest cycle that we have, which is not the moon or the sun, but the constellations of the stars, the stars in their patternings have a periodicity that takes about 26,000 years for it to go through its cycle. And when it has completed that cycle, it's like the cycle of the moon. You had a full moon, it went through its waxing, its waning, it was full and now it'll be a new moon and it'll start that cycle again. Or the sun will go through its various cycles. The moon also, not only has a monthly cycle, it has a 19 year cycle. The sun has its own kinds of cycles, the stars in their constellations have a cycle, it's actually 25,900 years. But the 26,000 year period was always broken up because the sub-cycle, the driver of that was a 1,000 year cycle, a millennium. But the secret, deeper, symbolic structure...the millennium was like a ritual driver, but the symbolic driver was a pair of millennia called an, 'Aeon,' a 2,000 year period. And that occasionally, the millennium, the two thousand year aeon and the whole motion of the constellation through 26,000 years, would fall into an alignment. This happened on this planet again in 1992. We are now 15 years into a new millennia, a new era, a new constellation and one of the great visionary works of 2,000 years ago, when this was understood in spades, as we might say, is recorded here, foreword by the Dalai Lama, The Perfection of Wisdom. One of the root, early sources of not only the Mah?y?na, but eventually became, a millennium later, the Vajray?na. 'The Buddha smiled' and it's headlined here, 'The smile of recognition.'
There was a woman who had come to that assembly of all these male monks, were listening to the Buddha. She came in and sat down. She rose from her seat, adjusted her top robe over one shoulder, knelt to the earth with her right knee, folded her hands towards the Lord Buddha and said to him, 'Lord Buddha, in this place I am not frightened. I am not terrified, not trembling, nor frightened and not terrified. I will show the teaching to all sentient beings.' Then the Lord Buddha broke into a smile, golden in colour on that occasion.
Golden hair means intense sunlight, not intense so that it becomes white, but intense so that it retains its saffron golden radiance. Why? Because that saffron golden radiance is the key light, is the photonic registry of our star. Our star's name is Sol, s-o-l. Sol has a saffron golden registry of its photonic spectrum. Every star will have its own individual spectrum. The brightest star in terms of luminosity in our heavens is in the constellation of Orion. The blue-white giant Rigel, which is the lower part of Orion, is about 800 light years away. It is several million times as bright as our star. If it were where Alpha Centauri was, it would be brighter than the full moon as a star. The star opposite it in a kitty-corner diagonal at the top of that centre of Orion is Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is one of the most massive yellow stars in the sky; it's about some six, 700 light years away. And if Betelgeuse is where our sun is, its surface would be out of the orbit or Mars. Every star has its tone. Our star has the tone of this golden light.
And so the Lord Buddha broke into a smile, golden in colour on that occasion. By its lustre it beamed through endless and boundless world systems, rising up as far as Brahma's world. Then after it returned, it circled around the Lord Buddha three times and then finally faded from his face. Immediately they witnessed the Lord Buddha had broken into that smile, the woman seized some golden flowers, strewing and scattering the golden flowers over the Lord Buddha, but those golden flowers, unsupported, were suspended in the air.
Anti-gravity, suspended, so that he is outlined in a sphericality of more than three dimensions, by golden flowers. It's a very ancient way of showing a transition from an old life to a new life.
The venerable Ananda rose from his seat, adjusted his top robe over one shoulder, knelt to the earth with his right knee, folded his hands toward the Lord Buddha and said to him, 'What prompted that Lord Buddha? What was the reason you broke into a smile? Truly, perfectly enlightened Tath?gatas and Arhats do not break into a smile without good cause, or good reason.' So then the Lord Buddha replied to the venerable Ananda, who is his cousin, 'Ananda, this is our sister, the Goddess of the Ganges. In a future time she will be the Tath?gata.' The Buddha, the future Buddha. 'Named Golden Flower. She will arise as an Arhat, purely perfected, enlightened, accomplished in knowledge and good conduct. A Sugata, streetwise and supreme, a tamer of wild men, a teacher of both gods and men, a Buddha, the Lord Buddha. She will completely enlighten, in supreme, truly perfect enlightenment, in the stellar aeon.'
We are in the stellar aeon, right at the beginning. The new civilisation will be a stellar civilisation, the new species will be Homo sapiens stellaris. We're already 15 years into moving into that. This learning is a new way of weaning ourselves from old cycles that are gone forever, into new ecologies of complementarity that will be here fruitfully for the next couple of thousand years. But it takes a special thing of being able to wean at the same time as allowing what concurrently occurs with that and the emergence of something that is fresh. And because it is fresh, because it is spontaneous, because it has a tone of empty zeroness, as well as staggering infinity, the old emotional connotations are at first so unfamiliar with that degree of freedom and variety, that the experience is one of numbness. One of blankness, or of being overwhelmed, of a dread that it's just all too much and so in-between dread and nothingness, for a little bit of time of adjustment it occurs to someone that this is unbearable, it is worse than death. One of the reasons why there is so much refusal to learn in our time, very much refusal planetwide, 'We don't want to know that, we don't want to hear that,' it has already occurred. The prescience for this came 100 years before in 1893, which we talked about last week, of the world parliament of religions, the Columbia World Exposition, placed in Chicago, the new Chicago, rebuilt just 20 years before, after the great Chicago Fire had levelled the entire city. And it was exactly at that time that Frank Lloyd Wright struck out on his own and for the first time built a house that was an extraordinary expression. And the house is called the Winslow House and is one of the world famous structures. This is a Japanese Global Architecture Series and it features the Winslow House on the cover in Oak Park, Illinois. And one of the interesting things about Oak Park, Illinois at the time was that Frank Lloyd Wright had put his house and studio there, on Chicago Avenue and Forest Avenue. A couple of blocks away from him lived another Oak Park man, who was eight years older than Frank Lloyd Wright. His name was Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan novels, the author of the John Carter of Mars, all the great science fiction works. One of the young students that went to school with Frank Lloyd Wright's sons was Ernest Hemingway, who lived a couple of blocks away in Oak Park. And so that 1890's Oak Park, Chicago, was like a focus of an intense penetration through the old into new stuff, completely new adventures into it. And the Winslow House is interesting because Winslow and his partner had a plant that they were specialising in a kind of a glass brick architectural element, Luminex, that would be able to be a new kind of building block, that would let light through, a prismatic brick. And so it was quite interesting that Wright was the first one to design the prismatic shapes of these prism blocks. And not only did he build for Winslow, but he built many other structures and that led finally to his building of the first larger building than houses, the Larkin Building, in 1902. That whole impulse from 1893, began to register more and more in the planet in occurrences, for instance, a couple of years later, 1895, H.G. Wells wrote his first great science fiction work The Time Machine. The next year, 1896, he wrote The Island of Doctor Moreau. The next year he wrote The War of the Worlds. And by that time the electron was discovered, showing that the atom was not the smallest thing and that there are all kinds of subatomic particles. And X-rays were discovered, that there are all kinds of energies that we had never even registered before and all of that came to a culmination by the early, mid-1920's. The Rutherford-Bohr quantum mechanic atom, by 1926, '27, was understood. The most poignant way of calibrating it is to realise that the founder of a new kind of astronomy, called astrophysics, was George Ellery Hale, from Chicago. He lived in his father's house that the backyard backed up to the University of Chicago. On the other side of the fence was the astronomy observatory, the little observatory of the University of Chicago of the 1890's. The University of Chicago had just been founded with the new Chicago and it was founded to be one of the world's great universities from the get-go, which it was. But George Ellery Hale was the one who transitioned from astronomy, astrology, stars in their constellations, to looking at the photonic energy of light and being able to tease out from astrophysics a whole new science that in the 100 years since has given us a completely new cosmos. He wrote a book that was published in 1923, because not only did he become the head of the Department of the University of Chicago, of Astronomy, he got them to front money to build one of the most beautiful, astronomical observatories, big enough for a community, on Lake Geneva in southern Wisconsin. The Yerkes Observatory, which was so successful he got even more money. One of the donors was Henry Huntington, here in Pasadena, to put up some of the money to build the Mount Wilson Observatory. For the first time you had a 100 inch telescope, the first in the world, that was capable of not looking through visible light only, but looking through the astrophysics of the fractionating of light into all of its components and a complete new universe opened up, because Edwin Hubble and Hale and many others there discovered that there are such things as galaxies. Not just all these stars and these constellations and their 26,000 year period, but out of the 2,000,000,000,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy, there are galaxies, millions of them, hundreds of millions of them. What kind of cycles are there in God's realm? In 1923 Hale published a book called The New Heavens, The New Heavens. And he followed it up in 1924 by a book called The Depths of the Universe and finally in 1926 he published a volume called Beyond the Milky Way, right at the same year that the Rutherford-Bohr atom was seen and towards the end of his career, after he had already died, his legacy came through, because his attempt for some 15 years to establish the 200 inch telescope at Mount Palomar...this is the June 3rd 1948 souvenir book from the establishment of the Big Eye at Mount Palomar. We not only have 200 inch, we have ten metre telescopes. We not only have telescopes here on the earth, but the Hubble and the James Webb space telescope coming up, that will be several thousand times as powerful as the Hubble, due in our lifetime. All of this is that this speeded up is a recalibration, it's not an improvement of the old, it's not just a transformation of the old, it is a prismatic new array into zeros and infinities, along with all of the varieties and the possibilities. It takes a different quality of humanness to play in that. If you choose to live in the old forms, they will ossify and you will be able to deal relatively with them as long as they're able to hold a little bit of current, but the trouble with fossils is that they don't have any life in them and they become opaque and finally they just become like concrete. So if you wanna stay in those tombs, do nothing, it's already in process. You can vaporise into creative spirit with a little bit of application and be free on scale of forever. Let's take a little break.
Let's come back and let's come back to the visionary field out of which the forms of the kind of architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright had emerged and emerged prismatically so that they were able to convey through their prismatic form a tuning of the infinite field of vision, of differential consciousness. So that when it played out through the jewels of the art, the jewels of the person, the jewels of the spirit, it would play out in a kaleidoscopic, multi-rainbow way. 1,000 years ago, when Europe was waking up from what used to be called the Dark Ages, the most poignant thinker, teacher, of the time was named Robert Grosseteste. 'Grosseteste' means, 'Large head, large mind.' He was the Bishop of Lincoln in England and he was also the great scientist philosopher of the day at Oxford. And his prized student was the greatest scientist and philosopher of the 1200's, Roger Bacon, who invented microscopes so that in his secret written notebooks...he had spermazoas and human ovum, eggs, because he was the first by many centuries to have a microscope, to have many other instruments. But because he was always put into prison by the Church authorities, he spent almost a third of his life in prison and wrote his secret script upside down and backwards so that no one could read it and the only person to really figure it out was Leonardo Da Vinci, who wrote his notebooks in that same esoteric, upside down, backwards script, so that no one could read it and persecute. Robert Grosseteste, in maturing Roger Bacon, took him outside one time to view a rainbow and he said, 'When you look at that rainbow, every drop of water in that rainbow is a rainbow.' It isn't that these drops there are red and those there are yellow, those there are blue, every drop in the rainbow is a rainbow, is a prism. So that instead of there being a form which contains all the different levels, every atomic, structural aspect of the form was a microcosm of the entirety. But when you look at a rainbow deep enough...and one of our planetary ancestors of 4,000 years ago, Abraham, when he was given a Covenant with the Divine, the seal of that Covenant was the rainbow, because it had been the seal there for Noah as well. 'I will set my bow in the sky.' And when you have a visionary amplification one is able to see that rainbows do not just occur, they occur in pairs and they're inverses of each other. The most visible rainbow will have its red to its ultraviolet blue, but the complement to it, much fainter, nevertheless there, will have its red at the top and its blue at the bottom. An even deeper, mystical penetration is for those rare beings, mature in their visionary capacity, who see that rainbows do not only occur after a rainstorm during the daytime, there are night-time rainbows as well, called moonbows. And one of the most famous photographs of a double moonbow in Yosemite National Park is in the latest issue of Sky & Telescope. And that these moonbows are special because they give from the waterfall the night-time penetration that the universe is more magnificent than anyone would have been able to think it before. As someone said of Shakespeare's Collected Works, Ben Jonson, he said, 'You will find herein more wit than you might have brain to grind it upon.' Not only is nature unbelievably magnificent, but the dimensions that are added to four-dimensional nature through the ecology of consciousness, add to it, expanded, so that one gets infinities with infinities and one of the difficulties of mathematical astrophysics and quantum nuclear physics, was that when you did the high-powered computations, you kept coming up with infinities everywhere. And so in the late 1940's, about 1948, when Palomar was first established, was the first time that a couple of Americans and a Japanese got together and made quantum electrodynamics, which involved a way of filtering out the infinities, because on that high level, infinities operate the same as zeros, so that you get a kind of, what they call, the, 'Renormalization.' The math, the differential art of understanding the science of it, is that exactly and precisely there are infinities everywhere, distributed all the time. And one can filter them out and in a renormalization you can get computations that are numerically testable in world laboratories, in world applications and they work. But you cannot go to other star systems in terms of this world, you have to wean yourself away from the need to filter infinities and to have a renormalization back to world appearances, in order for you to deal with it. It will deal that way, in appearance, unlimited worlds. It will be like a worse than phantom deception in terms of the cosmos, where only infinities and zeros distributed permanently, all the time, work. So that it is a quality of the deepest learning to not just factor in for ourselves, but to expand and as we expanded during the Vision presentation phase...because we can't move by subjects, subjects are limited appearance, worldly phenomena that are deceptive. As long as we are here in a deceptive world that's all we need. But as we wean ourselves to other worlds, to the multiplicity of worlds, to all possible worlds, as we talked about in the Vision presentations towards the end, it is apparent now, by the early twenty first century that if we deal with reality in terms of a mental limitation, we will get caught into games and we will mistake information theory and game theory for a filtered workability to success in this world. And indeed for a little while you can play that game, you can deal with information in that way. It will not ever be real and does not work off-world. And it's like the percentage of reality that is this world doesn't even appear after enough zeros to fill telephone books after the decimal point. The earth is a beautiful blue star once you get out past Mars and from then on it's a fading blue star. And out past Neptune it's still a very sweet robin's egg blue, but it's a very, very small star. And the earth as a star winks out by the time you get out into the outer regions of our star system, not the Kuiper Belt, but the Oort cloud, where comets originate, about 50,000 astronomical units out. Jupiter is five astronomical units. Our expansion of consciousness now is 13,000,000,000 light years and deepening.
One of the biggest changes that came, came in the United States and came at a time where in the middle of the nineteenth century two things happened. The original vision was forgotten and resulted in not just a Civil War, but in a catastrophic quality of nightmare of having forgotten what all this was about. The refocusing of that vision, the reprisming of that vision, was done largely on the basis of just a handful, not of individuals, but of spiritual persons, artistic, prismatic persons. And the most conspicuous historically has been Abraham Lincoln, who was important because of being able to reprism the original vision that the United States was an experiment in freedom and variety and not at all a place of contention for different factions to have empires. Not to replay the old, worn out imperiums that proved catastrophic to human beings in every single case. The quality by the time of Frank Lloyd Wright's emergence towards the end of his young manhood and coming into responsibility as a man, as an architect, his mentor was Louis Sullivan and Sullivan published in 1922...this is a reprint by the press of the American Institute of Architects a couple of years later, The Autobiography of an Idea. And in The Autobiography of an Idea the foreword by a French mystic, Claude Bragdon, said he was:
I mentally couple him with Walt Whitman and Lincoln. However little he belongs in their category, or they in his, he was like them at least in the untainted quality of his Americanism, having Lincoln's listening ear for the spiritual overtones amid the din of our democracy and Whitman's lusty faith in the ultimate emergence into brotherhood and beauty of the people of these States.
But not the States as a political aspect, but the best visionary line written at that time, contemporaneous with Lincoln, was by Whitman. He said, 'If you want to open your life, hitch your wagon to a star, open it out.' And it was that Emersonian revisioning happening at the same time as Whitman that delivered a more refined, tunable pair. Lincoln delivered a Whitman and Emerson delivered a Thoreau. For most persons someone like Lincoln is just a history book text. I remember at 12 sitting in the screened-in porch of my great, great aunt Mina, who lived to be 104, who had known Lincoln as a girl and castigated my father for not having taken me to meet all my relatives, who were all doctors in central Illinois towns and not taken me to see Lincoln's home in Springfield. And she said, within direct eye contact with my father, 'You have to let him know that we are all still Lincoln people.' The licence plates in Illinois read, 'The Land of Lincoln.' Because it was a quality of someone who had emerged from the landscape, was not a political figure, but was a prismatic artist in the revisioning of life with its spiritual dimension, without making a big metaphysical deal of it. Of doing it, of making it available, not to dominate and not necessarily to lead, but to make available the dimensions of opportunity that anyone can help themselves to, like the Pisan dining of the old Italian style. The bowl is in the middle of the table: 'Take what you need to eat, let's eat together. Let's work together to furnish this, let's have this meal shared.' That quality of Lincoln was passed onto Whitman in a very peculiar way. Whitman was a newspaper man, reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, eventually in New York City was interested in doing what we would call war reportage. He went to Civil War battlefields, but his big speciality was to go to the hospitals where the thousands and thousands of wounded, North and South Americans, were suffering. And Whitman went like a Florence Nightingale constantly, holding their hands, East and West, North and South alike, taking down letters to their loved ones, to their parents, changing...and after several years of this, as if to give a synergy to it, he was appointed a minor post in Lincoln's Government. He was appointed to the new Bureau of American Indian Affairs, as one of the Sub-Deputies. And the man who was supposed to head the Bureau was never around and so Whitman was the one in the office in Washington DC when all the tribes of the United States were invited to send their want lists, their emissaries, their communications, so that after the Civil War, the renourishing of the original Americans and the landscape could be done. And it was Whitman who received this and after Lincoln was murdered, was assassinated, he was the only person in the world who carried this around with him and that's where Democratic Vistas came out of. It was his expression: 'This is what I have heard, thus have I heard.' And that the deepest landscape is Mother Nature, who loves our variety, who treasures our freedom and who champions all of us who will emerge this in our lives, in our persons, in our spirits and in our art.
Louis Sullivan not only wrote The Autobiography of an Idea, that had this kind of Whitman-Lincolnesque quality, he wrote a book called Democracy: A Man-search. Hardly ever read, reprinted here by Wayne State University Press in Detroit. It is an interesting because so much of Democracy: A Man-search has parallels, though they're not parallels of influence, but parallels of emergence, to two other writers who are Americans, about the same time, William James and John Dewey. James, raised in a force-fed atmosphere, his father, Henry James Sr, wanted geniuses and he forced his two prized sons, along with a couple of other sons and a daughter, to learn Greek and Latin and French and German and English and Spanish and everything, before they were five years old. Constantly taken to Europe, to be made international and they were force-fed to become geniuses. The daughter, Alice, ended up in a psychiatric care home. Two of the sons died and two of the sons that lived, Henry James the great novelist and William James, the great philosopher psychologist. Dewey, born in Burlington, Vermont, became, as a young genius, associated with the University of Chicago and it was there in the 1890's eventually he would go on and become the great professor at Columbia, New York City. The greatest American philosopher of all time, just as James is the greatest psychologist. They together formulated, on the basis of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose father was one of the few people who understood Newton's mathematics and at Harvard, Benjamin Peirce wrote books on Newton's universe and his son, Charles Sanders Peirce, became interested in the pragmatic foundations of philosophy, rather than the metaphysics of it. And James and Dewey brought that seed into play as pragmatism. And that part of the pragmatic quality was that there is a completely different understanding of experience from what had been traditional since the metaphysics of philosophy was first codified by someone named Aristotle, at that time, 2300 years before. That all of that was fallacious in a very profound way and that when it held sway over the world in medieval European times, it produced a Dark Age. It produced a numbness of accepting limitations and killing other people, torturing other people, because they did not accept those limitations, that authority, those divisions of categories, those hierarchies of authority. And the two things that were most feared in that medieval ethos were nothingness and infinity, the zeros and the infinites were feared. And one will shy away from that at all costs, including killing anyone, including killing yourself, not to have to let those into the world. 'What will happen to us?' The deep quality that we talked about last week, of John Dewey, when he went to China for a year to lecture under invitation...and Dewey's pragmatism became the most famous and popular philosophy in China until the end of the Second World War. When Mao Tse-tung and Chu Ming-li had asked the old China hands, the sons of missionaries who'd grown up in China and read Chinese and dreamt in Chinese and asked them to make an appointment to go see Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the end of the Second World War, so that they could bring the American pragmatic quality into play in China, all those requests were put into the labyrinthine back pockets of individuals who wanted the Cold War, they didn't want a democratic China and drove them into the reluctant synergy with communist Russia, Soviet Union. All of this is documented and the literature on it is rather unread in our time, but it can be provided to you, it's well known.
The quality that we're looking at here is that the limitations of the old are positively demonic by now, they're radioactive by now. It is an active sabotaging not to let something new out, not to let it occur. To undertow it as if, 'Well, this is just somebody's opinion and it really doesn't hold. Where are the millions who would be hearkening to it?' And 'Why aren't you rich?' Etc., etc. It's always been pointed out in that way. One of the qualities that came out for Frank Lloyd Wright was that he found that his success...because by 1908, his success was astronomical. His practice of building homes...he'd built almost 150 fancy homes in Chicago in just a period of about 15 years. Always spending money, but making enormous amounts of it and also being a pillar of the community. He left that entire world, that entire success. He closed his office, he left his wife and six children and he went off to Europe with a woman that he had fallen in love with, named Mamah. And they spent a year touring all of the architectural sites in Europe and when they came back, decided to build a home together, not the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio in Chicago, but to build Taliesin, on the brow of a hill on the Wisconsin River, where Wright as a boy, all of his family, his mother's family, the Joneses, lived up and down on all of the farms on this valley. And one of his first architectural buildings was called the Hillside School, mainly for girls and it was run by two aunts of his, two sisters younger than his mother Anna, Jane and the other sister was always named Nell. And the Hillside School was within sight of the new Taliesin home and also a tower, Romeo and Juliet tower, that he had built for his ancestral family, was visible. And surrounded by verdant farmland so that one could grow food, one could grow crops. And it was here that his entire life had come to a transform, to a visionary exfoliation and just as it was assured that it was going to happen, for three years, from 1911 to 1914, they built Taliesin, he and Mamah lived beautifully, although castigated by the social order that they were living in sin. A servant set fire to the house and killed Mamah and her two children and four other persons with an axe and Wright was finishing up a project in Chicago at the Midway Gardens and was only told over the phone that Taliesin had burnt. And on his way back from Chicago to Spring Green...it's a ride at that time of about five, six hours, he learned that his life was over. In his autobiography is one of the most poignant ways of expressing, not just what sometimes is called the dark night of the soul, but this complete numbness of the loss of the presence of spirit, for someone who had learned to translate his individuality into a spiritual prism and now it showed nothing, didn't register. 'A long distance call from Spring Green, Taliesin destroyed by fire, but no word came of the ghastly tragedy itself. I learned of that little by little on my way home on the train that evening. The newspaper headlines glared with it.' And you have to understand that exactly at this time World War One broke out. The story was so devastating that it was competing with headlines of World War One.
I had left Taliesin, leaving all living friendly and happy and now the blow had fallen like a lightning stroke in less time than it takes to write it. A man from Barbados, well recommended as an ideal servant, turned madman and took the lives of seven and set the house in flames in 30 minutes. The house and all in it were burnt, to the stonework, to the ground, the living half of Taliesin violently swept down and away, in a madman's nightmare of flame and murder.
The only thing that was saved was the working part of Taliesin. 'The great stone chimney stood black and tall on the hillside, the fireplaces now gaping holes.' It is a haunted scene. There is a place in the United States that still has that haunted quality. If you ever go up to Napa Valley, in Glen Allen, there is Jack London's house, ruins, with half dozen or so four storey chimneys are still standing in the black, charcoaled, gutted house, that was burnt to the ground to the ground the night he was going to take his new bride into the new wolf house. The money he made from writing and it is one of the few haunted places for real in the United States and you can still feel it. Wright buried her by himself, with a couple of his sons and his workmen, in a field without a marker. And he said, 'No monument yet marks the spot where she is buried.' And he, by the way, when he died in 1959, he was buried exactly in the same way that he had buried Mamah in 1914. He died in 1959. They took a buckboard and two old family horses, that had been raised in foal in the valley, Darby and Joan and filled the buckboard with flowers and handmade the coffin themselves and would not let anyone perform the service except their own spirit outpouring and Wright himself asked everyone else to leave and he filled in the grave himself and stayed there in vigil, a vigil for several nights.
In the little back room of the undestroyed studio workshop, I remained in what was left of Taliesin. No one seemed near to me, not even she who had been struck down. The gaping black hole left by the fire and the beautiful hillside was empty, a charred and ugly scar upon my own life. The tragedy resulting in the destruction of Taliesin left me in a strange plight. From the moment of my return to that scene of devastating horror, I had wanted to see no one and I would see no one but the workmen. Work was the only thing that made it bearable. And for the week following there was no one on the hill at night but me and the watchman who sat on the steps with a gun across his knees, in case he came back. The whole countryside was terrified by the tragedy, not knowing what more to expect. Before the murderer was discovered, groups of neighbours had searched the cornfields and woods. Those nights in the little back room were black, filled with strange, unreasoning terrors. No moon seemed to shine, no stars in the sky, no familiar frog sound coming from the pond below. It was a strange, unnatural silence, while drifts of smoke still rose from the ruin. Unable to sleep, numb, I would get up, take a cold bath to bring myself alive and go out on the hills in the night, not really knowing where. But I would come back safely again only with a sense of black night and strange fear, no beauty visible anymore, grope how I might, no help from that source and I would find my way back to bed and something strange happened to me. Instead of feeling that she whose life had joined mine there at Taliesin was a spirit near, she was utterly gone.
This experience of blankness is a peculiarity familiar to everyone who has had an enlightenment experience. The classic Japanese art presentation of it was by a great Zen master artist, Hakuin, who illustrated in ten panels called The Ten Bulls, because the first panel the man is searching for the wild bull that he must confront, the power of the world in its most authoritative, fearful form. And in this, all the way through, one comes to a ninth panel which is blank, there is nothing on the page, the rice paper has no mark of any kind. It is not only when the candle goes out, it's when light does not work any longer. Why would it not work any longer? Because one's artistic dimension has exceeded the five dimensions of visionary consciousness and entered you into a six-dimensional differential, prismatic, jewel form, where you have two times more dimensions than the realm in which light can occur in space. And so your visionary field reveals, absolutely precisely, exactly nada, nothing. And it reveals it because it is that zeroness that is the source field distribution and the only thing that is sustaining that nothingness is that the dimension, the original first dimension dynamic of time, is still habitually occurring until it runs down, until time itself stops. And when that first dimension stops, the zeroness of the darkness of the non-light, winks out because it was an epic occurrence of time fundamentally. And when time winks out, what comes into play then instead of zeroness is infinity and one has a revelation. And any particular movement in a four-dimensional time space continuum acts as a wake-up trigger and one wakes up, not to the four-dimensional realm, but one wakes up to a multi-dimensional possibility and it takes a while to get used to that. Because now you're able to play in even more than six dimensions and immediately the challenge is to grow up again in realms that very few people said anything about because they didn't know, they had no idea. And so it takes a while to get reacclimated to a kaleidoscopic infinity. This generation is heading for its zero and will have its moment of coming back to a bouquet of gorgeousness beyond comprehension, all within the next decade. It is not imperative, but it's an invitation that is realistic to go through this recalibration. The original presentation of Wright's work was done in Holland in 1925 and next week we'll come back to this and read a couple of the beautiful little phrases that Wright wrote in the 1925 edition of this. If you get interested, there is a reprint of this great edition. It's called the Wendingen Edition because of the Dutch magazine where its sections first appeared and there is a Dover paperback version of it available for less than $10, but we'll read from the original next week. Wright had by this time understood a three level expansion. There is such a thing as a natural house, there is such a thing as a living city and there is such a thing as a future of architecture, that expands beyond the past and present into a gorgeousness that previously was unimaginable and now will be buildable, because those who could live there are already alive and ready for it. More next week.