Art 3

We come to Art Three and you're looking at a print from Hiroshige, from 1830. This is called Mount Hira, Evening Snow and Mount Hira is very near Kyoto. This is the first print of a series of eight prints called Eight Views of Omi. This particular print is from my own collection and if you notice in the background here there is a wormhole that looks like some kind of mystical lightning. Japanese prints over time get characteristics which are unusual. They vary in terms of the colour registry of printers, they have precision which the engraver must follow the artist perfectly and the artist, in this case Hiroshige, this is the first time that he recognised that landscape was the context of his expression of spiritual person himself. Another print from this series is, if you can pull in a little bit, this is called Night Rain at Karasaki and the original of this as an artist's proof has everything indigo, but later the published first edition was with black, so that the night rain is characteristic. What you're looking at here is a single pine tree, so old and massive that it takes this entire small island, which has been walled in with great masonry stones and is a presentation of a sacred site. One of the eight views, famous views, of Omi Province.
When we look at a world-class artist like Hiroshige we recognise that his emergence came in staggered phases and those phases are a maturation which in ordinary social life comes to a fruition with a mentality of structure of thought that we call symbols. If one matures completely out of the nature of the world, through the ritual actions that are necessary to sustain existence and generates the horizon of experience that flows through that field of nature, that is generated by those ritual structures, those ritual forms, they are brought together, they are integralled in symbolic thought and seek then to have the sense that they are complete because they correlate back to from symbols to ritual and that the ritual is the power of existence to maintain its forms, its existentiality. In the Chinese five phase energy cycle, the first phase is Tao, Tê is the second phase, so one has a book by Lao Tzu, 2500 years ago, called the Tao Tê Ching. But the third phase is Jen, whereas nature as Tao and ritual as Tê, Jen is the mythic horizon of experience. Where language, oral language, comes into play, where feelings come into play, where images come into play and so the five phases are Tao, nature, Tê, ritual, Jen, myth and then the fourth phase, symbols, in that five phase structure the Chinese word is I, as in I Ching, The Symbols Book. The fifth phase in that traditional formulation always had a pair that were disparate. The fifth phase that we would call vision was in a Confucian sense termed Li, l-i. 'Li' means, 'Principle,' but it also means principle of the rites, of the right way to do rites. So that there is a Confucian classic, the Li Ch'i, the way that you do things right, the traditional formulations and the traditional formulations then are not a visionary, they're not a conscious development, they are rather a recursive feeding back of the I of the symbols, back to the root in ritual, in Tê. So that the symbolic integral links back recursively and hooks into the power of the forms of existence, how things come to be, how they are cinched and they are stable, how they are really there, how the practicality is founded. This is what we depend upon, this is what we have put together out of that and by linking them together we now have a cinching which gives us a basis of identity, gives us a basis of identification, gives us a way of making an order out of existence, of having a symbolic structure which organises the actions of existence into rites and rituals that will now be assuredly correct. Whereas the Taoists, unlike the Confucians, do not have the fifth phase as Li at all. The fifth phase for the Taoists was always Chi, or in the old pronunciation, Ch'i, C-h-'-i. That the Ch'i was the energy released, that the Chi was that visionary consciousness released, so that it was able then to generate...the phrase in the Tao Tê Ching in translation means 'The ten thousand things.' That is say to, 'Multiplicity,' or as we're understanding, 'Differentiality.' That the cycle did not complete, but rather shifted into, from an integral cycle to a differential ecology that began not just out of symbols as the fourth phase, but out of the whole cycle of the four brought together, because the cycle was founded in a field of mystery called nature, not in existence. So the correlation of identification, the certainty of structural referentiality of the so-called structure of thought with the ritual action existence, was an appearance within a much broader context that had really no beginning. It was Tao and it had no end because it was a Chi, it was a Ch'i that was released radiantly and could do who knows what kinds of things. And so the five phase energy cycle in the ancient Taoists was always zero, one, two, three, infinity, whereas the Confucian was one, two, three, four, releasing a fifth which curls back and one can then grasp things. So that the thumb is not out there, but in here, so that one grasps the meaning, one grasps the way one does things, one has a certainty now and one has a hold of life. And if one is trained right to utilise the integral order of the symbolic mentality, then with the exact arrangement of the rites and rituals, experience will be as we have prescribed, it will be as we have described and we will be able to predict what will come out of this. The difficulty with it is that that grasping does not hold the air, it doesn't hold the electronic signals in the air, it doesn't hold space, it doesn't hold time. In other words, nature is deeper than its grasp, than its certainty. And when Chi, when Ch'i is released, it releases itself so it has, not the limitations of a square cycle, but it has a quality of being able to go into a whole new ecology. The time-honoured Hermetic way of speaking of it from Ancient Egypt to its culmination, not just in Greek civilisation, but Ancient Egypt was a part of ancient Mesopotamia, ancient India, they were all cognate civilisations together 5,000 years ago. And so the culmination is the five fingers of the hand together as a star and that star...the best way to call it in our time is the Hermetic star. But that star is like a quality that goes back to the handprint of Palaeolithic art. Some 30, 35,000 years ago, one can find it. And one also finds in Palaeolithic art that there are certain extract markings that a Frenchman named Andre Gourhan put together in a big tome on Palaeolithic art. He called it 'The Palaeolithic star.' That there was the realisation that the hand of man does not just grasp, but that it imprints in a pair of ways. It imprints in terms of what it is and it imprints when surrounded by the colour and you take the hand away, it also imprints by what it is not, in terms that it registers in a transcendental context of everything, as well as in an existential focus of something. And so the ancient wisdom understanding, going back some 40,000 years, comes to its peak about 2,000 years ago as that Hermetic star. One of the artists who used that star in the twentieth century, was the great poet film-maker, Jean Cocteau, great artist. And he signed all of his works with that star that is made without letting the pen or anything rise from the page and it's one flow, it's one line, that has that configuration, like the infinity sign would have. That star also is called the pentacle and one finds it in the great Middle English epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that we used in Mythology. Which was the symbol on the shield and on the livery of Sir Gawain, that goes back to ancient times and Sir Gawain was always a sun hero and in the Arthurian is the nephew of King Arthur, who is the original green knight. That pentacle, that star, that five pointed symbol, is described in great deal in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and we used J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and because Tolkien was a great scholar, as well as a great storyteller, you will find that kind of iconography, that kind of symbolism, that kind of understanding, in all of Tolkien's works, especially Lord of the Rings. Where you will find that someone who understands the Hermetic star of things, will have this quality of not only having a five quality of going from the zeroness, which is a field of nature permanently, eternally, to a field of infinity, but that five, that star, that open hand, releases an ecology that is like a pair to the cycle of four in nature, so that the fifth generates three more phases. And in our learning I have developed those three phases of Art, History and Science, so that we now have something which takes the ancient Palaeolithic understanding, East and West, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Japan, all of the Far East and brings it from just the five star to the radiance of the full eight, an octave, which gives us a calibration of eight phases, four for an integral, four for a differential and a hidden ninth phase, when those two fours are brought together. The first four, the integral four, is a square, the second four is like a diamond, like a jewel. The first is a frame of picture, a reference, the second is recut in such a way that it is a diamond, it is a jewel. And if you bring the square and the diamond together, you get the mandala of the complementarity, of the wholeness of it. And that mandala is not at all static, but is vibrantly dynamic, both consciously in its prismatic quality and stable in its pragmatic integral, both at the same time. This is a simple rule of thumb by holding up the hand. If you start with one your correlation will always be with the mind, with mentality. Whereas if you start with zero, your correlation will always be that it extends to a differential conscious radiance, to a visionary beyond, to a transcendental quality. This was brought back into play 200 years ago in the great struggle of many artists and philosophers, who tried to understand, who tried to appreciate, who tried to deepen the quality of mind, so that instead of stopping with its own mentality, was able to open up to an interface, to an interplay with other persons, other mentalities. And in that membrane interface, one of the most beautiful qualities that comes out of this is that there is a quintessential transform that occurs, a kind of like a five dimension, a fifth dimension. That visionary consciousness is like a fifth dimension and what it generates is the forms of art and that the person as a conscious, differential being is actually a six-dimensional form that emerges out of a quintessential five-dimensional vision. And that that six-dimensional, spirit person, art form, the artist, ourselves, will generate a seven-dimensional High Dharma flow, which generally is described as history, but almost completely misunderstood. Very few refined human beings have ever come to appreciate and understand history and the tradition now is several thousand years old, because the understanding of history is a very high, kaleidoscopic consciousness and what it generates are like vision as a five-dimensional field, will allow for the generation of works of art, the seven-dimensional flow of history allows for the generation of science. So that whenever you found a sense of an historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness, out of that you find the evidence of sciences beginning to emerge and come through. One of the very first indications of that is in the realm of architecture. It's one thing to go into caves that exist in the earth as a secret place, to mature from the deeper nature underneath existence, underneath the ritual level, to go to the mysterious qualities of the inner qualities of nature. It's a whole different transform to be able to take that cave underneath out of nature and bring it up into above the surface and to make some kind of structure wherein the secrets can be furthered like a pyramid. Like an arrangement like the Taj Mahal, like an arrangement like Borobudur, arrangements like this are found all over the world and one of the most amazing things is that even the so-called Palaeolithic American Indians on the Mississippi River, just across the Mississippi River to the east from where St. Louis is, was the ancient American Indian city of Cahokia, that more than 1500 years ago had 50,000 people in it and had enormous architectural pyramids and other structures that were set up. Or that one could look into the Wiltshire Plain of southern England and find the beginnings of a place like Stonehenge 5,000 years ago. Or go across the Irish Sea to County Meath in Ireland and to find a structure that is like a rounded dome, called New Grange, which has an entrance into the so-called interior that is lit once a year at the midwinter sun, where the shaft of the midwinter sun will penetrate all the way through the structure to its centre and illuminate a symbolic swirl, like a spiralling curl, to show that its radiance is real, one can predict it and you find the beginnings at New Grange, at Stonehenge, at Cahokia, the pyramids of Egypt, all over the world, one finds that Homo sapiens sapiens have understood that an architecture is something that is an art that is raised, not in competition to nature, but as a furthering of the resonances of nature, into a harmonic. An integral will be a completeness, but a harmonic is extendable indefinitely. And by having an octave one now has a resonant set by which a harmonic can be extended. You don't have to end with just eight: mi...do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. You can arrange a number of resonant sets of those octaves and get a piano. Now you have something that is truly transcendent to the limitations of ritual sound, of symbolic, ordered structure of sound. One now has the art of music. And the same thing can be applied to language. Now one has not just the mythic horizon of an oral language, or even the refinement and the integral of a written, symbolic language, but with a visionary capacity of transforming the written, the oral language, one now has an art of language which is a poetic, which includes mathematics. One can be given the visionary theoria by which one can weave a mathematical series of expressions and envision a meaning that is greater than what would be delimited by existence, or by mentality. One can explore now wider realms.
We're looking at the way in which art is emerged out of the Chi, out of the Ch'i and has that Chi that is already woven into the zeroness of nature. Not that nature is empty, but that its zeroness is also completely fullness and one sees this in advanced physics today. One is able to, in very powerful experiments, like the Tevatron at the Fermilab, just on the outskirts of Chicagoland, or soon the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, coming online at the end of this year. That at high enough energies, the particality of existentials becoming more and more heavy, the more that energy is cinched into particality, where does it originally emerge? It emerges from a dynamic which is not calibratable and therefore is both zero and infinite at the same time. it is both empty and full at the same time and particality emerges instantly, spontaneously and not just once, but iteratively, vibrationally, all the time, such that one can have a calibration of the periodicity, a calibration of the way in which actual reality occurs out of its zero fullness, into its particality of almost any extent and its extent is always in pairability. Not only is there symmetry in the natural integral, but there is a super-symmetry in the complementarity of the ecology of consciousness and the cycle of integrals. For instance, a super-symmetrical particality to the photon, is the photino and many other aspects, so that one begins to get a sense by this time of the twenty first century, that we're dealing here again with the need to tutor ourselves in a new way. To not go so much for a revolution, or a reformation, or even a renaissance, but to look for a recalibration. The recalibration here in this learning is to patiently mature us through all of the phases that went before and then carry us all the way through the furthering phases that once were the province of just very distinguished men and women, of very exceptional men and women. And now is the heritage of anyone who would persevere and do this, it is a shareable feast. This quality especially emerges in the art projects that we have. The original art projects were in the Symbols course for this work about 37 years ago. When I first designed it, working it on for several years in San Francisco and then in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, in 1970 put together the Myth course and the Symbols course and also a Parallel Lives course at the time, which I didn't understand yet - this was 37 years ago - that this opens up into History and Art and a visionary quality. The Symbols course had as projects...and the course numbered anywhere from 90 to 300 people for the five years, 1970 through 1975 that I designed it and offered it. The first project was to make a painting, the second project was to make a sculpture and the third project was to make a poem. After several thousand students, in an architectural school that was a college without walls, it was a 15 acre building on what at the time was the edge of Calgary. Calgary then had about 350,000 people, now it has 1,000,000 people and has spread out so that it's actually very...the suburbs are ten miles out from where they were at that time 40 years ago. The painting evolved finally into a pair of paintings. One of the paintings would be a portrait, a self-portrait, the other would be a landscape. And that those together would form a symmetry in a super-symmetrical way. One's self-portrait requires not just looking at oneself in terms of an identity, or an identification, but in terms of possibility and expressiveness of openness and furtherance. So that the portrait is not at all simply a record of what you actually, existentially, look like, or what you symbolically complete as your sense of identity. A portrait is not an identity card, it is a possibility array. It is not simply an image of how you look, but a scintillation of all the ways in which you could look and do look. The second project was a sculpture and that has evolved so that the sculpture now goes through two reorderings. The first reordering is when you finish your sculpture, that you pass it on to someone else who's in the learning community and one of their qualities is they pass on their sculpture to someone else and then the second phase is to redo the sculpture that was given you, in your way. And then in order to salve over and so that one is not insulted that 'My beautiful sculpture was ruined, they redid it,' that that redoing is passed onto a third person and they redo that yet again. The first redoing is a fermenting transform of what was a work of art, but was presented as an integral object, 'It's mine.' Once it goes through the process of somebody else's mind, redoing it and transforming it, it has the quality of a fermentation, it's no longer water, now it's wine. The second transform is a distillation, where what was wine is now turned to Cognac. Or if you like to have something a little bit different, there are other ways to express this. The whole process shows that art forms do not fit into the frames of an integral whose frame is directed by mentality and a correlation with ritual. That those are important phases to have as a base, but that those phases as a base transform. For instance, it's true that in order to have a co-ordinate that registers, that is graftable, one needs a kind of a frame, a frame of reference. And on this world, in this limitation, it's very difficult to understand why one could not just use that all the time. But in trajectories that go, say, from the earth to the moon, you cannot get to the moon by using frames of reference without extending a continuous algorithm of transform, that the frames shift constantly as the trajectory goes on. And going to other planets, like Mars, one has to have a very complex, shifting frame of reference. Or to send a mission of an exploration robot vehicle to rendezvous with a comet, takes an immensely complex series of algorithmic shifts, differentially conscious, so that the framing is constantly shifting so that it no longer looks like frames, but it looks like a very complex flow, that has not only an integral which will hold its frame, but has a differential flow, which will allow you to play in a very complex reality. We're learning here how to transcend ourselves out of the limitations that were grafted upon the society, upon the culture and upon the arrangement of existence in certain set ways, not to destroy them, but to utilise them as a true base out of which one now can introduce variations, can introduce freedoms.
The choice of Frank Lloyd Wright as an architect and Hiroshige as an artist, is the relationship that came out of the interpenetration of East and West that the nineteenth century exemplified. The quality of Japanese prints is that they were not limited to the East Asia artistic, ritual, symbolic tradition, but were heavily influenced by western art, especially prints of Dutch work, Dutch paintings and so forth. Those changed the way in which the Far East artistic array of capabilities were presentable and Hiroshige is one of the masters of this, so much so, that when his work was presented back again to the West, the West, which had developed a great differential transform of that same great Dutch art, engraving tradition, by taking something as sophisticated as a Rembrandt and now turning it into a Monet, or a Renoir, they discovered that Hiroshige was a source for them that they could resonate to. And one found a Vincent Van Gogh making two paintings...Van Gogh paintings of two of Hiroshige's prints, because he felt in tune with Hiroshige to the extent that he could express himself in that way. We're gonna take a little break and then come back exactly to this part of the journey.
Let's come back. This is one of the most famous of all the prints by Hiroshige. This is the New Ohashi Bridge in the rain, in a cloudburst and it is one of two Hiroshige prints that Vincent Van Gogh made his own paintings of. This is in a series called One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, but there are 118 prints, three of which are actually by his son, who took the name Shigenobu and finally he was called Hiroshige II. This print is not as good as this original that is in my collection and you can see here the massive...'Shin-Ohashi,' means, 'New bridge.' The large Ryogoku Bridge further on the River Sumida was one of the largest wood structures built in the world in the 1600's and this built in 1693, was even larger. It has a quality that we've been talking about here. A work of art will have a special quality of circulation which is an ecology of a spiral. The classic High Dharma portraiture of the First Century AD was always a very esoteric putting points in an array, so that they constellated a movement of the eye that would spiral. Rather than look at something, you looked with its vibrant flow and its vibrant flow was not just the pattern by which the eye moved by salience, but the arrangement of the pattern in which the eye flowed again and again, in an ecology where the work itself would literally come into the field of vision. Not perception, not conception, but vision, because the visionary field is where art emerges from. Art in its emergence from differential conscious vision then is transcendent to the natural integral and in fact is not an integral form at all, but a differential form. It is based, as we said, on sets of resonance that will have a harmonic that is extendable indefinitely and will have the ability to come back and change in an integral form, the indexing by symbolic thought's structure is transformed to a tuning, to a resonance. The cross-checking that referentiality has between symbol and ritual is transformed so that the arrays now are constellations of possibility. The ritualistic basis of the images, so that one could talk about an image base, is now transformed and becomes artistic, rather than ritualistic. And an image is no longer a base in art, but is a matrix. So one moves from an image base to an image matrix and in the integral, experience will always have a tribal quality of forming itself on the basis of what rites are done, r-i-t-e-s. That the ritual basis makes the imagery, makes the feelings, makes the talk, the oral language experience, formal, in that it can be integrated by the structure of the mind, of mentality. Instead of this, art is always personal, is always spiritual, as one would say. It has a completely different tone. The quality that emerges most importantly in art is that appearance is a natural part of necessary locality. Images are illusory until they're fixed by the repetition of pattern, which is a natural integral of the iterative actuality of existentials. Illusion is natural, needing an indexing cross-check, which ritual provides and every tribe knows this. However, art emerging is iterative out of the complex field of vision and being differentially conscious, tunes arrays into an artistic personal that opens that particular world into a cosmos. A work of art has this quality of being able to jump orders beyond its base, its frame, its limitations and this is why it's called the diamond of insight, rather than the square of attention. The square of attention will always be an integral, but the diamond of insight will be always be a prismatic jewel of facets of possibility. And as we said this morning, when you put the diamond of insight on the square of attention, one gets the eight part mandala of encompassing. And that encompassing, if one can bring them together in such a way that they literally come into a tuned pair, not quite touching, but paired, that resonance, that slight space, will have an infinite and a creativity to it. The ancient mudra and the Mahāyāna of the hand held up with the middle finger slightly advanced, is the teaching mode. The hand held with the fingers even like that is the fearless receptive mode, just the slight difference. And two hands together, teaching, brings the mudra into its differential energy.
We're looking at Hiroshige and Frank Lloyd Wright and one of the reasons for this is that Frank Lloyd Wright was completely changed by discovering the Japanese print from the 1893 Columbia World's Exposition, World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. And by 1906 he went on his first collecting trip to Japan. In his book The Japanese Print, published in 1912, he wrote this: 'During the years at the Oak Park workshop'...Oak Park, the suburb of Chicago, of Chicago Avenue, of a number of miles. At the time, very much on the outskirts of Chicago, now so close to the loop that one considers it not suburban at all, but part of almost downtown Chicago. Chicagoland today has more than 7,000,000 people.
During the years at the Oak Park workshop Japanese prints intrigued me and taught me much. The elimination of the insignificant, a process of simplification in art, in which I was engaged, beginning with my 23rd year, found collateral evidence in the print. Ever since I discovered the print, Japan has appealed to me as the most romantic, artistic country on earth. Japanese art I found really did have organic character, was nearer to the earth and a more indigenous product of native conditions of life and work, therefore more nearly modern, as I saw it, than any European civilisation, alive or dead. I'd realised this during a first visit in pursuit of the Japanese print, made in 1906. The print is more autobiographical than you many imagine. If Japanese prints were to be deducted from my education, I don't know what direction the whole might have taken.
The adventure of searching out for the prints, to try to find them, to get the funds to purchase them, to bring them together, to not just have them, but to appreciate them, to arrange them, to sit before them, all of this taught a recalibration to Wright, a recalibration that had already occurred once in his life. When he became an architect, he recalibrated himself through a fermentation process that we talked about this morning, which is a transform, but the Japanese print introduced the distillation of that fermentation. And one of the qualities that is there, in East Asian art especially, is the meditative, contemplative incorporation of oneself and the work together in a shared presence, in a process of rediscovery, almost like the...what we talked about this morning, of the shifting, rapid shifting, of frames of reference, to be able to algorithmically make a trajectory in celestial mechanics, so that one could send a rocket crew to the moon, or one could send a robot rocket to a comet. You can't just go there, there's no direct way, there are motions everywhere all the time and one must figure out how to do the ballet choreography, in order to meet, not to get somewhere, but to meet, in a mutual encounter...because that time space is not there, it is only a passing occurrence and to recognise that, one has to wean oneself away that there is a point in time space which is stable. That its thereness is there, wherein actuality, in reality, the thereness is in pairs that only occurs in passing. And so to meet something, the East Asian tradition of landscape was that the journey, the journey through life, the journey through this world, that kind of a journeying was embodied in the landscape. And that the early Chinese landscape scrolls that began to come out in the Tang Dynasty...one of the earliest of the great landscapers was Wang Wei, who was a great Tang poet and painter. The quality that one addresses in these landscape scrolls is that you arrange yourself and maybe with a special friend and you have a special liquoring tea and you have just the right occurrence of atmosphere and the scroll is unrolled and yourself, or together, or a group, addresses themselves to participate in the journeying of that scroll. And as time went on, as centuries went on and the sophistication of this reached an apex in the 1500's, all of a sudden you found a genius, like in China, Wang Yangming, who brought Taoism and Buddhism and Confucianism together in a spiral swirl, sometimes referred to in textbooks as Neo-Confucianism, but was a radical improvement and deepening. Wang Yangming lived about the time of Leonardo Da Vinci and was very much that kind of figure in China. The figure in Japan at that time was one of the greatest artists of all time, his name was Sesshu. And I bought at one time his great, long scroll in a replication. This is a small version of it and it was yards and yards and yards long and Sesshu painted the entire thing in one day. The power of the orders of an artist radiantly envisioning, makes it possible for a hyper fast way, especially in a great Zen painter...'Sesshu' means 'Snowboat,' it means that this is the vehicle that flows through the field of the blizzard, of the snowstorm, of the soft snowfall, is able to make one's way in an infinite array of instantaneity, though to the world, in its stuck frames of reference, it's very difficult, especially if one is looking at a world that is completely white, where is it? Somebody who is a vehicle in the snow, like Sesshu, was able to take the long scroll of a Zen journey and this was the immediate way in which one had a whole new way of addressing...not only would you sit with a companion in a two or three and address a landscape scroll, but now you had this long scroll that had different parts, different aspects that could be emphasised in such a way that they all flowed together. And out of this, as we explored in Ritual phase, the haiku poem came as the kernel, as the starting seed of 17 syllables, of renga, of linked verse, where one poet would start it with a haiku and the next poet would add to that a set number of lines, 16 syllable paired lines. So that now you had a 31 syllable renga and that these could be linked together in such a way that one could go on with alternating haiku and renga couplings and make a whole chain of poetry, or have it circle, spiral, with five or six poets together and plenty of plum wine, or wonderful tea and an evening with a full moon and one would then generate that this was a harmonic of that journey which we are taking together through the landscape of our life, of our inner life. The great transform of Sesshu came from the ukiyo-e, the 'Floating world, the visionary world,' not the world of the expensive artist painting for palaces through traditions, but the transform distillation of the East Asia landscape, the East Asia landscape scroll, the East Asia poetic journey together into the kind of presentations that Hiroshige's Tokaido series would present. 55 prints that flow together in a constellation, a matrix, that emerges out of a five-dimensional visionary field and because that visionary field is able to meld transformably with nature and interpenetrate exchangeably with symbols, you get a different quality of mind. You get a mind that is able to entertain its origins in zero, Tao and carry it all the way through to an infinite field of possibility. And having that Tao zero and that great Mahāyāna infinity together in the calibration, now the landscape series by Hiroshige, that is called Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido...the Tokaido being the eastern coast highway between Tokyo, old Edo and Kyoto, instead of it just being 53 stages, the beginning and the distillation, the zero and the infinite, are included in the harmonic set, but not counted. So there are 55 prints for 53 stages. The zero of the beginning absorbs perfectly into the infinity of the end and cycles back around. In the Taoist five phase energy cycle we talked about earlier before the break, the Tao, Tê, Jen, I, in the Confucian, the Li, the principle, the rites, but in the Taoist, the Chi, the Ch'i, which is an energy, now doesn't fold recursively back as a grasp, an integral action, but now is a radiance where Chi, the Ch'i, is able to recirculate in such a way that as it recycles back again and again through it, it generates a higher power, a higher order comes out of this, so that a quintessential star, radiant, is able to generate higher orders indefinitely. And one of the higher orders is able to accept is an extension into an octave, into an eight, resonant set in itself because of its characteristic able to extend to an infinite number of sets. An octave is the choice scalar for music in the West, the pentad is the choice musical scalar for the Chinese. Question: how many scales of music are possible? Answer: an infinite number, there are musics without end. One of the first really great books to develop this, Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg - still in print, University of California Press paperbacks - where he made the 12 note scale, showing you can have a music very easily from this. There are sliding scales, there are all kinds of presentations in Indian raga music. One has an enormous variety of possibilities.
What we're looking at here in our learning is to wean ourselves away from the limitations that distort, because we have to believe, ritually and symbolically, that what we are looking at is stable and statically there when it is not. We have to delude ourselves into the ukiyo-e, the fleeting world of appearance, not to see it as appearance, but to see it as objective, as if it were there that we can count on and we must then calibrate ourselves to that countability and we must index ourselves to the accountability of having done that right. All of this is not only an ossifying type of methodology, but it leads to death, it leads to dead ends and in our time, in this twenty first century, we must live spirally out of the zero field of nature and the infinite field of consciousness, into a cosmos without any necessary boundary, without any necessary end and yet has a deeper, kaleidoscopic registry of analytic and of theoretical possibility of appreciation. So that the arts and sciences, the vision and the history, the field of the vision, the flow of the history, the critiqueability of art as differential jewels, the analytic of science as cosmic jewel fields, is able to be appreciated, able to be played in. And while art is a play in the field of vision, science is a very deep occurrence in the theatre of history and when we get to History we'll find that history is generated by art. Art forms, artistic persons, spirit person art, generates and what it's generating is a flow, which is actually history, which is actually the process, the High Dharma process, of civilisation. So that a civilisation is literally, prismatically, generated by art. The artist has a more crucial role than the politician in the generation of human life beyond the tribe. A politics is only as good as the symbolic structure is ordered in referentiality, to a limited, ritual base, corralling experience within those two parts of a frame of referentiality, whereas art generates the beginnings of the forms which are prismatic, which also are able to work with the square of natural attention, the integral of its four squareness, but able to generate it further behind. Wright also wrote:
The pursuit of the Japanese print became my constant recreation while in Tokyo, a never failing avocation in fact. The adventures and excursions would take place at night, or sometimes call for a journey by day to distant places in search of them, endless the fascination of the quest, some said obsession. This, the place, this democratic art of the people, of Japan, took in my life at this time could be compared to nothing else in my life, unless to music.
And if one looks at some footages or photography of Wright at this time in his Oak Park home and studio, next to his draughting table is a piano and on the piano is a bust of Beethoven and on the wall behind it is a Hiroshige print. It is this quality of transform that led Wright increasingly, not only to move into a grandeur of the house being stretched in an array of a possibility of a flow, so that instead of having rooms, you had a continuous space, that in its spiral radiance was something that could be walked through again and again and as one did this there was an entire order jump between each time and it becomes a kinaesthetic indelibility. Like having learned certain dance steps, one now can do those dance steps without having to force oneself to remember them. But to walk through a work of architecture, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house or building, one gets the recalibration kinaesthetically, that that flow is an enormous, iterative, memorable tone, which is not a tone for just a limited set, but for an indefinite array of possibilities. The journey now, walking through the house each time, is an iteration of that flow. One of the most extraordinary examples of this, in Dallas, Texas, Wright built a playhouse, a theatre, the Kalita Humphreys Theater. And when you first go through the Kalita Humphreys Theater playhouse, it's odd because the angles are everywhere, everything is cut at a certain angle, certain facet, until you begin to calibrate that each angle here is 30 degrees and that this 30 degrees is a 12 wedge of a circle, a half dozen, a six wedge of a D-shaped semi-circle. And when one calibrates one's movements to 30 degree trajectory angles, tunes oneself to it, not index, but tunes oneself to it, all of a sudden the theatre opens up that it is a playhouse which is theatrical in itself. It not only is a venue to present plays on that stage, but the stage is within a theatre that opens up to the play of you being alive in that structure. One of the last great large structures built and completed after Wright had died, passed on, is the Marin County Civic Center, enormous stretch of buildings and parking and grounds and when one realises that the composition of the flow of artistic, kinaesthetic experience in that entire building is based on the pace of walking about two miles an hour, when you do that, the experience of the building suddenly gets kinaesthetic wings and begins to glide. And the experience of moving through the Marin County Civic Center now becomes a gliding flow of an aesthetic that is not a ritual pacing, but is instead a resonant harmonic that is being engendered as you do it. One of the great exemplars of that kind of architectural art is here in Pasadena, in southern California. The Gamble House, built by Greene and Greene about 1902. And the entire house is not indexed by, but is tuned by, the Japanese symbol for 'Cloud,' which is a line that curves around and then continues and its curve is like a little bit of a scrunched cumulus cloud and everywhere one finds that motif repeated in different sizes, different orders. The back of a chair will have it in a kind of a silver, over the fireplace the tiling will have that again. When you go to the top of the house, the third level, in the attic, one sees that the great central beams that hold the house together, there are no nails in the house at all, it's enormous. They're hooked in such a way that it's like the interpenetrating cloud motif. Once, spending about seven hours in the house filming, decades ago, I came out and as I was walking to my car down the driveway, I felt, kinaesthetically, like I was scuffing clouds with my feet. The architecture had imbued the calibration. Another example, a Hiroshige example. There was a time in Berkeley I lived on College Avenue, near Dwight Way and across the street was a Unitarian church, built in Bernard Maybeck style, but was positioned in such a way that it had a lot of Japanese architectural motifs and the front lawn, instead of being green, was left to be sort of like a seasonal, fallow, yellow chaff and so the building from time to time would float in this yellow chaff, these beautiful Japanese type beams, and behind it the blue sky, pale, with the white full moon rising over the Berkeley Hills, it looked exactly like a Hiroshige print. And one can look, experientially, into a Hiroshige print, or a series of prints, long enough to get the registry and the harmonic of how to look with Hiroshige eyes and look out into the world and at any time see it composed in this way. In his Daybooks the great American photographer Edward Weston said, 'Composition is the strongest way of seeing.' One looks, not to perceive, nor to conceive, but looks to play with the creativity of the moment, which is memorable, not in the mind, but memorable in the conscious dimension that now quintessentially transforms time space. Out of this will come a six-dimensional jewel of a person, scintillating and when two such persons meet together, it's more than synergy, it's a complex harmonic that develops. And love is the extension of that complex harmonic into lives then that are able to generate that High Dharma flow of a shared history together. So that an aesthetic based human community will generate a kaleidoscopic, historical conscious flow that they share in that with civilisation and that flow will be the source of the analytic, which gives a cosmic science.
The deep quality of these prints in such that in 1988, in London, at Sotheby's, this print from The Tokaido by Hiroshige, Kambara, sold for £15,000. This large triptych, Whirlpools at Naruto, sold for more than £9,000, 20 years ago. Next week I will bring two great Hiroshige prints: one, the great double oban of The Bow-Moon, which has a Basho-like figure riding on a horse, being led by his friend [1:22:29 Sara], over a deep chasm, over which there is a beautiful river underneath this drum bridge. And the other is a great triptych that goes with the Whirlpools at Naruto...are the flowers, the whirlpools are the flowers. There is a print with three...about The Moon over Kanagawa. Moon, flowers and the third great theme was always snow and the print I will bring is from the Kisokaido, the great 69 Stages of the Kisokaido, that inland, high mountain road. And one thing that will be outstanding for you, my print is not a series of three prints arranged together in what is called a triptych, but is a single sheet printing of it, the most rare version of the greatest masterpiece of Hiroshige, that I bought almost half a century ago from an old printmaker in the San Francisco area, that we all just knew as Nikkō, because that's where he came from, Nikkō, Japan. And he said it was in his family at the time for many decades, several generations and that it had took three printers working together in perfect choreography, plus a colourist, to make sure that the print was an accurate presentation of Hiroshige and only the choreography of those kinds of human beings who are tuned perfectly together, are able to carry this through. A great printer will be able to do a 15 by ten inch original print, but to do a print of the size three times that and have everything register exactly in all the mellowness, is really an extraordinary high art. It's like a great quartet, being played by a great quartet of musicians. Next week we're also going to be looking forward to the second pair of artists that we're going to be working with. One of them will be Georgia O'Keeffe and the other will be the greatest Chinese artist of the twentieth century, Ch'i Pai-shih, who lived to be almost 97. Georgia O'Keeffe lived to be about 99. So we're going to shift to two nonagenarians, who understood art for longer than most people ever hope to live. But next week we finish with Hiroshige and Frank Lloyd Wright. To bring the presentation to a wholeness, one of the best ways to realise it, if one reads - this is called Shank's Mare - reads a humorous journey of the Tokaido, along with a series of Japanese prints of Hiroshige's Tokaido, one gets increasingly a quality where the presentation begins to have a journey which is so resonant it exceeds the possibilities of being indexed and brings the tuning into an almost infinite array. This is why your year long, graduated reading of a classic journey is so important. And the four journeys for the differential are extremely important. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales; The Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, from China; The Arabian Nights, Shahrazad and the Ramayana by Valmiki, from India. Four great, differential conscious journeys, portioned out in such a way that a little bit of reading every week will carry you, distributed, through an annual cycle, an annual year. It is a very patient way of ensuring that the recalibration of both the square of attention and the diamond of insight begin to occur to you naturally and consciously, without your needing to consult anything else. A real learning, like the stellar civilisation, is indelibly free and not even limited to a planet. More next week.