Art 4
Presented on: Saturday, April 28, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Art Four and we're recalibrating ourselves. And one of the compositional ways of seeing is through a kind of visioning which allows for the person to emerge. And one of the flaws that gets in the way is the mental, habitual idea that there is an inner person, that the person is inside. And you always hear the cliche and frankly it's a yellow caution light, if not a red stop light, that they don't know what they're talking about. 2500 years ago already the historical Buddha showed that with the most exacting yoga applied, there is no one there, there is no individual there. There is an appearance, but that appearance, that sense of identity, can be gone into in a yoga atomic way, so that you lose the atomic structure of appearance and when you lose it, it vanishes. So when someone talks about an inner space, or an inner person, you right away know that they do not have any experience themselves, nor do they know. And largely because of that, because of the ego and because of the hubris involved, they are uneducable. It's not only that they do not learn, they cannot learn. And so one of the classic tacks that is taken in wisdom teaching is to cause you to trip up on that assumption, to alert you that you must unlearn what you assume, or that the presuppositions that found what you say and how you say it and who thinks they're saying it to whom they think they're saying it, that all of this is something to be initially considered. And this kind of briar patch, this kind of labyrinth, this kind of maze, was always a characteristic of deeper wisdom understanding. The natural way is not to have these kinds of little, strategic, tactical traps, but to instead have a smooth transform that happens out of the clarity, the clearing, of the structure of symbolic thought. And we use the phrase here, 'Transparent symbols.' That when the frame of reference that has the pictures of the frames of reference by which we think we're going by, when that clears out so that there is no content, for just one split moment in that frame of reference, the framer of it occurs in such in a way that not only is it empty, but it is open. It takes enormous sophistication of spiritual discipline and yoga traditionally to do this, you can go a whole lifetime. But our learning takes advantage of a great deal of accumulated resonance of sophisticated harmonics and presents it in such a way that you have a chance all the time to clear out the presuppositions and to open up the empty frame and to emerge through. The protocol for this is the yoga every week. There is the presentation and most of you will be following this by DVD and those of you for the next generation who will be following it by holograph, it is a technique that is based on the seven day cycle, on a weekly cycle, because you can make a quaternary out of four week cycles and get a month's cycle, which then you can put into a triple quaternary, a 12 part cycle and you get a year, annual year and if you pair the years you get a very interesting kind of time where a calendric quality emerges, quite naturally and quite consciously, that you can really perceive. The protocol is this: two days after the presentation to listen to an audio version of it exclusively, not just to turn the picture off of a computer, not to just to turn the sound on and not just watch the screen, but some kind of audio mode, because the audio, the hearing of the ear, the listening, has a different imaginative quality to it. In a mythic horizon, hearing is what takes precedence over seeing. In symbols, it's seeing that takes precedence over hearing. But in ritual, before the seeing, before the hearing, it is the tactility of texture, it is the smell of fragrance, or odours, it is the kinaesthetic quality of one's existential awareness, the body, that takes precedence. So that the hearing is the beginning of the flow within a textured, olfactory, kinaesthetic awareness and that flow of experience is where now, as you hear, images will come up. They are not images initially seeable, but they're images hearable. One of the peculiar qualities of a baby, a really small baby, is a really small baby will respond to the mother by their kinaesthetic sense of relationality, by that texture, by that odour. And a few months later will respond to the voice of the mother and a month or so later, when the eyes are able to come into play, respond to the sight. It happens in that kind of a sequence. Ritual precedes myth and myth precedes symbols. And nature is the source, the context out of which it comes and so our first four cycles are a reiteration of the way in which things are, which they come to be. They come to be deeper, they come to finally have their integral. But that entire cycle, that entire integral, has the ability to open itself out, not from an inside, but from an insight into the oldness of the outside. So that for someone who is visionary, they will have a sense of themselves, not of themselves in here and you of yourself in there, but rather, there is a field that emerges both and iteratively whenever it really occurs and happens. One of the nicest ways, simplest ways, to say this was done about 80 years ago by Martin Buber in his book I and Thou. That the 'I it' relationship is to subjectify yourself and objectify the other, 'I am I and you're it.' Whereas the 'I' now is that there is no subjective me different from you, that you're objective to my subjectivity and that I have to watch out that you're objectivising me in your subjectivity, but rather the dialogue now is mutual in its exchange and that the 'Thou' is an eternal field, not just of awareness and not just of a quality of understanding, but a field which is divine. So that there is always a thouness to our regard, not for ourselves, but for our participation in this field. And for 'Thou' likewise that we participate together and thus a dialogue at any moment is a possibility of realising this. That we are talking to each other in such a way that the talking with each other, mutually, sparks us together. The origin of that is in a developed Pythagoreanism in Plato that influenced deeply Hellenistic Judaism and surfaced again and again throughout rabbinic Judaism, as a way of encouraging, not just a negotiation between two or more, but the participation in all in this dialogue, this exchange. The caution light goes on when somebody talks about an inscape, as being in here and the landscape is out there. The landscape includes our frames with whatever content that there is and whatever emptiness that we can achieve through simplicity, or through realisation and then the openness which we share together. This was always the way in which art emerged out of a mythic sense of the hearing of the way in which experience, with hearing images and with heard feeling tones, conveys an integral that is capable of transparency.
One of the earliest recorded Chinese poems about painting is from about 100 BC. The poet Wang Yanshou is not very well known and this little excerpt appears in a book published by Stanford University Press, by the great Michael Sullivan, Symbols of Eternity: the Art of Landscape Painting in China. And Sullivan, the author of half a dozen really great books on Chinese art, especially landscape painting and as we'll see, landscape and portrait go together like bacon and eggs. Here's the translation by Arthur Waley of Wang Yanshou's...just a few lines. This was a part of a long prose poem called in Chinese literature, 'A Fu,' f-u. 'Here is one fragment of these Fu describing a fresco cycle in an ancient palace that was already half ruined when the Han poet, Wang Yanshou stumbled upon it.'
Upon the great walls, flickering in dim semblance, glint and hovered the spirits of the dead. And here all heaven and earth was painted, all living things after their tribe and all marryings of sort with sort, strange spirits of the sea, gods of the hills. To all their 1,000 guises had the painted formed his reds and blues and all the wonders of life had he shaped truthfully and coloured after their kind.
This hearing delivers for us an imagery, which when we hear it, because we are inculcated with an integral, symbolic structure of thought, we immediately flash the heard images into pictures, into visual images. And those visual images, as soon as they come into play...and where are they in play? They're in play in our experience, but when they come into our symbolic structure, they're no longer in play, they are ordered, they become ordered. That swirl that is there in a mythic experience now is portioned out into a structure and that structure is extremely important and very viable, but it overdoes itself without any trying, it just always does. So the quality is to make sure that the swirl of the mythic experience extends partially through into vision, because the swirl of experience is more naturally tuned to participate with the field of nature than with the structure of the mind. And if we can sensitize ourselves, if we can develop the taste and the balance for the way in which the flow of experience can also flow in the field of visionary consciousness, just as well as it can in the field of nature, it will make it a lot easier for us then to have a mind which is ambidextrous. It can have a frame of reference with the structures of thought that it needs to do its integralling. But it will also handle them...an athlete will call it, 'Soft hands,' 'Handle it with soft hands,' so that you don't grasp it, you work with it. And if you work with it, with those soft hands, the structure, instead of gripping it, will work with it, but also have a light choreography that allows for it occasionally to bounce into the open. And once one gets that way, the flow of experience in the field of differential consciousness, has a five-dimensional quality, not just four dimensions, but five dimensions. It is no longer an inner, but that one participates in an indefinite, not an outer, but an indefiniteness, which is realisable. And so the realisation of it is extremely important.
One of the great developments in China, as soon as landscape painting became apparent that it was not just a visual journey of the mind, but was capable of being a visual transparency of a journey which extends experience into consciousness, that the flow of experience now can flow in the field of visionary, differential consciousness, as well as the integral field of nature. Now both those fields were able to coalesce and come together and in that quintessential dimensioned, double field, what emerged out of that was no longer just four-dimensional existentials, but six-dimensional spirit forms. And the recognition was that this had been done for over 3,000 years and partially recognised, but now was fully recognisable. In terms of China, the six-dimensional form is very much like the hexagrams of the I Ching. They are hexagrams in the sense that they are pairs of trigrams that are brought together. And they are brought together in such a way that they can go through the entire array of the proportions, of the ratios. So that in a sense, the trigrams which have an eightfold structure, now generate a hexagram that has eight times eight, but has a 64 matrix. Like in our learning you will find that we have eight phases, but when you use those eight phases together, not only with integrals, but differentiating consciousness, you will find that there are 64 possibilities in that matrix. And in fact that matrix is very much the same as the triple codons of the DNA, with its double helical qualities, where they do not parallel but they go in opposite directions, so that there's a complementarity. So that one has the ability to have a complementarity not of inner and outer, of left and right, of north and south, but a special kind of transcendent chirality, where both together form a fertile balance.
One of the earliest qualities that's there in China is that you will get a series of eight paintings, eight views of something and that these eight views eventually come into...what we've been using with Hiroshige is Eight Views of Omi, done in 1830. This is about six or 700 years after the eight views that Mu Qi had used successfully in China long before, in the thirteenth century. And that this quality is extremely important for us because we're not only having Hiroshige, but we're with him pairing Frank Lloyd Wright. And when we hold up this little book on Fallingwater, we see Frank Lloyd Wright photographed as he was designing Fallingwater and right behind him is a portfolio of Hiroshige's prints. The print that's open right behind him is from the Tokaido series. It's later on in the series, Crossing the River. I'll bring a copy of this print next week so that you can see that. Fallingwater itself is like a Japanese print and has the ability to generate a quality where the flow of experience that goes through the transparency of all the symbols, flowing in the field of the visionary consciousness, emerges in the form of the architecture. That the architecture itself is like a being, is a spirit, the spirit of place. And it is this spirit of place quality that gives it the distinctive tone of art, different from the time-honoured Palaeolithic reverence of certain natural sites, certain rocks, certain trees, certain caves, certain minerals, certain metals. These are natural spirits of place. But a work of art...in this case we're talking about architecture as the major art, the work of art has the spirit of the person as well as the quintessential, five-dimensional conscious time space. So that one gets a sense of knowing, knowing someone in their deep spiritual person. Fallingwater...this is the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy booklet on Fallingwater and you can see from the beginnings of it, how the architecture sits in the Western Pennsylvania landscape. But the house is a portrait, a portrait not only of Frank Lloyd Wright as an artistic person, but a portrait of anyone who comes to recognise themselves there in this structure. It is not only the family, the Kaufmanns, who built it and lived there, or the architect, but anyone who comes through it. The bags from Fallingwater have just a simple, symbolic design, but it's very much almost like a sense of an ancient calligraphic script, that is very similar to the 'Om' of Sanskrit. When a model of Fallingwater was being built by the Museum of Modern Art, it took two years for it to be built. And the man who built it for the museum had such a moving experience, that having built the model of it, he began to have this prismatic sense that not only going through the architecture of it, but had sensitized him to all architecture, to all art, to the spiritual quality of a person. The Italian study on it uses the Italian phrase, not Fallingwater, but 'La Casa de la Cascada.' The illustrations are always emphasising aspects of it. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: The House and Its History by Hoffmann, emphasises the house. The emphasis in this little monograph, published by Phaidon, emphasises the stepped quality, the...not the zigzag, but the way in which the terracing arranges sets of resonance into a harmonic. And finally the really large volume by Kaufmann Jr on Fallingwater gives us again the structure. This house is the portrait of whoever spiritually can be there, so that all who do this live there. Fallingwater, the only house that is related in any kind of architectural fame and way to this, is Jefferson's Monticello. And the walking through of Monticello has a culmination, that after the grounds, the gardens...and you have to understand that a garden, like the one there are Monticello, is a work of art in itself. Not just art in terms of its arrangement and choreography, but an art because of all of the medicinal herbs, all of the imported fruits and vegetables...Jefferson spent a whole lifetime composing a garden book as well as the garden itself and so it is the fruit of the entire earth that is brought together in one place and that the house rises out of this and that in the house, as one goes through it, the top, the dome of Monticello, is a very special place, because it is a domed, upper room that is always empty, there is nothing in there. And the inside of the dome in Jefferson's day was painted sky blue. That when he would rise to the dome of the art and architecture of where he lived, it would be a dome like a planetarium into the open sky. It was observed in Ancient Greece that one of the qualities of Homer was that he is best declaimed orally in open spaces. That Homer did not write for closed temples, but he wrote for the open spaces, for the groves. Instead of there being some Temple of Zeus, there was the Olympian grove, where the rustle of the sacred oaks was the way in which one heard the auguring of the mystical prophecies given by Zeus. Not visual at all, but on the level of being able to hear. And the rustle of a small, sacred forest patch, the sound that would be available to you and Fallingwater has that as well. Wright wrote and meant it, that, 'Everything is positioned in Fallingwater so that you can hear the waterfall in different echoes.' And that the relationship of all the spaces and volumes is such that you will hear, at various places in the structure, the waterfall in different modes of the same white sound. And it is not of the white sound of the waterfall accumulated from all of its different resonant notes and modes, timbres and pitches, that finally becomes the visionary field out of which one's sense of experience will begin to flow freely. It is with the hearing of the ear in this infinite, open way that is the time-honoured way for our kind, our sentient kind, to open up. This is why in the Chandogya Upanishad, 2800 years ago, man is not declined from animals, but from plants, man is the essence of plants. And speech is the essence of man and 'Om' is the essence of speech. And that 'Om,' when it is pronounced 'Om,' 'Ommm,' 'Ommm,' it has a quality of resonantly emerging into something that in the ancient Upanishads was always put there. The initial 'Om' is followed by the Upanishad, but the final 'Om' is followed by a triple of the Sanskrit word 'Shanti,' 'Shanti, shanti, shanti,' 'Peace, peace, peace.' It is a triple extension of peace in the symbolic structure of the mind, of peace in the art of the spirit person in their multi-dimensional being and the peace of that mind, in that person, in the cosmos. Real, fermented, distilled, resonantly together, this is a harmonic. We're gonna come back after the break and we're gonna take a little bit of a look at the great Wen Fu tradition of East Asia, because not only Hiroshige and now Frank Lloyd Wright, but next week we begin with the greatest Chinese painter for the last 500 years, Ch'i Pai-Shih. And one of the greatest painters of all time, Georgia O'Keeffe. The translation of a special version of this is called The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. And it takes its cue from a Chinese genius, Lu Chi, who died about 300 AD. And this is how he wrote 1700 years ago about getting set to make a work of art. Just a few lines:
Taking his stand at the hub of the universe so that he might objectify his outlook, feeding his purpose with sacred writings of the past, he followed through the four seasons with a sigh at their passing, he surveyed all creation and mused on its tangled skein. He mourned the fall of leaves, in strong-handed autumn he rejoiced over the tender buds of fragrant spring, his heart was [36:15] with the thought of the frost, his mind caught away above the clouds of summer. He recited the mettlesome virtues of the writers of his day, hymned clean, literary fragrance of men before him. He roamed though the crowded treasure house of letters, admired the matching of matter and manners in his exquisitely terraced works. Impulsively he pushed the books away, grasped the brush, summoned to it to the work of his composition.
Two lines from Mai-mai Sze's The Way of Chinese Painting. She was about five feet high and a Taoist master. 'The brush is held in a vertical position and no part of the hand touches the paper or silk. Controlled flexibility of the wrist is therefore of great importance and can be attained only after constant and attentive practice. Experience in handling the brush usually comes in the course of learning to write and its daily use.' So that the kinaesthetics of writing what you hear and what you say, is the magic portal into transparent symbols. If you can write for real, you can teach. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to the Japanese print that we showed at the beginning of the second half. This is Hiroshige's greatest prints. In English translation it's Monkey Bridge. And here, riding over the top of this bridge that's shaped like a drum, which usually the drum bridge is in a classic Japanese garden, here the landscape has become the garden and the two figures are very much like Basho and Sora. And we used in our Ritual phase The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Basho, the great Zen travelogue. Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the narrowing funnel of exactness of freedom, into the compass north, where one has the ordination, the ordinal of all directions. Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, finished in the 1690's, is a Japanese expansion and deepening and refinement of the Ancient Chinese Fu, which is the poetic use of oral language, which then written with a special calligraphy, is the precursor to the way in which painting is always taught and in Chinese tradition one master's poetry with calligraphy and painting and that those three together constitute an education. The translation of the Chinese word usually is, 'That of a gentleman,' but it's not so much of a gentleman, it is that of someone who is free from the social realm's constrictions, to flow their experience into the wider ranges of reality. In 300 AD...we were talking about Lu Chi's Wen Fu and there's a short, little excerpt of it, The Art of Writing, translated here by Sam Hamill and here the seventh of the selection that is presented to us of 16 selections on revision. Reads in translation:
Looking back, one finds the disharmonious image. Anticipating what will come, one seeks the smooth transition. Even with right reason the words will sometimes clang. Sometimes the language flows, though the ideas tend to be trivial. Knowing one from the other, the writing is made clear, confuse the two and everything will suffer. The general inspects his soldiers for every minutest detail, down to a single hair. When corrections are precise, the building stands square and plumb.
The easy presentation of poetry and painting and architecture and the thread of the calligraphic language of the poet, who will speak his poetry to his close friends and that the sharing of that friendship will add an energy to the frequency of that spoken language and the calligraphy then in a scroll will be that added amperage. And generally as a scroll of calligraphy, or of painting, especially a landscape painting, as it is finished a poem will be written, usually in one corner of that scroll, one corner of that work of art. And the seal, the chop, of the artist, will be put on that scroll and everyone who owns that scroll throughout the ages will put their chop, or put their seal on it, so that a very venerable work will have quite an array, almost like medals of valour that have been won in the appreciation that survives the general atrophying of interest over time and over changing styles, over changing generations.
The very first aesthetic treatise in China, translated from the manuscript of 490 AD by Lin Yutang in his book The Chinese Theory of Art, six qualities of art were listed and it's generally the first of the six that carries everything with it, it's the seed. In Chinese, the character is pronounced, 'Chiyung shang-u-kung.' The translations are, 'Resonance of the spirit life movement,' 'Rhythmic vitality,' 'Spirit element,' Life's motion,' 'Spirit tone,' 'Life movement,' 'Rhythmic vitality,' 'Spirit rhythm.' It is a quality where this pair of pairs of Chinese characters constitute the transparent frame by which one retrospectively understands the spirit, but the vitality of the life is instant spontaneously in nature. It is the spirit resonance that is insightfully, retrospectively, sealed into it. In Greek antiquity this sacred motion is called an 'Epiclesis.' You prepare the forms of integral life in such a way that they can receive the spirit. So that one doesn't in the completion of the form close it off from spiritual energy, but leaves it formed in such a way that it can receive. And when it receives, when the spirit is laid in, it is a fruitfulness, the fructification then, of the natural form of existence and of the symbolic thought structure, to receive the vitality of the retrospection of the sprit returning and of its larger harmonious resonance of the cosmos being real. The beautiful quality about this in Fallingwater was revealed in 2001, November 23rd. They had finished the $11,000,000 renovation of Fallingwater and the article carried from the Associated Press had this:
Work began last week to pull up the sandstone floors in the living room to provide access to the concrete beams and base that make up the structure's main cantilever. 'This is a once in a lifetime chance to see the house like this,' said Linda Wagner, Fallingwater's director. 'I certainly hope I don't see it like this again in my lifetime.' Steel cables will be attached along one side of the beams and pulled taut with hundreds of tons of pressure to counteract the forces trying to make them bend. It's like holding several books between your hands by pressing the volumes at each end. The pressure won't bring Fallingwater back to horizontal, doing that would crack all the wood and glass that has settled with the slope of the building, but it should arrest the growing tilt.
One of the qualities that architecture deals with is that the landscape, being a natural phenomenon, will have its own shifting and its ability to maintain an existential accepting form. And that the laid in compositional energy would be distorted if there were not a special pair of exchanges that have occurred. The first pair that occurs is that remembering as the functional quality of the field of differential consciousness goes into the structure of symbolic thought as the memory. The remembering function becomes the memory as a structure. So that the mind's structure of remembering is a gift from vision. In exchange - because it's a reciprocity involved here - in exchange the mind gives up a symbolic structure called the imagination, the ordered arrangement of imageries into a written composition, as it were and gives up that structure to vision, so that consciousness now acquires a creative imagining which it did not have were it not for this exchange. So that consciousness as a quintessential dimension exchanges with the integral of the four dimensions, remembering as memory and the imagination as creative imagining. So that now consciousness and symbolic thought together constitute the mind. The mind is not thought, is not the structure of thought, is not a form exclusively, it is the complementarity, the co-operation between consciousness and symbols. The interface that is most difficult is for the symbols to be transparent enough to receive remembering and keep memory then capable of its interchange retrospective with imagination and this is a very difficult thing to do. This is why in our protocol, two days after the presentation and the DVD, on a holograph for those of you who are able to watch this several centuries from now. You will be able to have a special kind of a holography that you will be able to go into the holograph and reconstruct the context from which it occurred. But the important thing is that two days later, on the third day, one hears the presentation for a second time, for a repeat and that two days after that, on the fifth day, that you go into reviewing the presentation notes from the previous phase that are cognate. If you're listening to Art Four you would then on the fifth day read the presentation notes of Vision Four. The reading of the presentation notes is a Pythagorean retrospection. It's a going back and reading through, making sure that the hearing in-between the presentation and the reading of the presentation notes from the phase before, that the hearing now is the base that becomes encourage to flow through the transparent, written language presentation notes. So that on the sixth day there would be a flow of experience that flows freely into differential conscious visioning, which is supported because in the protocol your weekly distributed reading in the yearlong text, your journey text, whether it's the Odyssey in the first year, or it's The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki and whatever you choose, that reading journey then on the sixth day helps you to distribute, patiently, throughout an annual cycle, the three part parfait of the presentation. The hearing of it fresh, the retrospective reading comparison of it and then by the sixth day of having a chance to distribute that each week in a yoga and then the presentation on the seventh day would start that protocol, that weekly cycle, again. This is a meditation yoga that is very high; it exceeds the classic [55:22 Dhyana] yoga by at least three orders of efficacy. Once practised and utilised so that it becomes literally, not just second nature, but like a third nature...having once learned how to ride a bike, having once learned to type, having once learned to do the steps of some technique, it is now with soft hands of every kind, that it becomes spontaneously you. Not you as a figure, not you as a character, not you as an individual, though all those are resonances that are available each in their own kind. Your figuration of what you do will carry the transform tone of it, your character of the configuring of experience, however you do, will be a part of that. The structure of your own symbolic thought will be a part of that and the openness of your differential consciousness will be shareable. So that one now has a new tone that instead of there being individuals who are under constrictions of doctrines, or laws for a political form of community, are free to have an aesthetic form of prismatic community, a new scale. This scale has appeared many times on the planet before, but usually in very small populations of human beings. Occasionally in great ages they were expanded to include several hundreds of thousands of people for a very short time. The time limit usually was about three generations before there was an atrophying. Sometimes it was extended to a fourth generation. Alexander the Great was a fourth generation resonance from Socrates, who lived it from Diotima, who learned it from Pythagoras and so in that case one could actually go through the lineages of Pythagoras, to Diotima, to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great and one could come to a sixth generation presentation of this, capped by a seventh generation of the Second Ptolemy, Ptolemy Philadelphus, who's the one who completed the great library in Alexandria, who completed the great Musaeum, the Temple of the Muses. Not temples to gods, but temples to nine women who were differential conscious arrays of the capacities of consciousness: poetry, history, music, astronomy, dance, so forth, those nine muses arrayed and made into a set by Apollo, not Apollo as a mythic god, but Apollo as the carrier of art. And so art is able to make this kind of set, whether with the Apollonian it's a ten quality, not ten elements, but nine muses cupped together and that the tenth is actually the wholeness of the form. One finds this Pythagorean tradition revisited in Plotinus. All of Plotinus' works are arranged in Enneads, in sets of nine, but the sets of nine also have a deep, Asian element. Plotinus, when he was about 40 and his teacher Ammonius Saccas, advised him to go to India to study the gymnosophists, the Buddhists, the High Dharma Buddhists of his day, of about 240 AD. But one of the real high points in the Mah?y?na...was unable to go there, but one still finds that while the Enneads, sets of nine, from the Pythagorean tradition, there are six Enneads, making the hexagram, making the six part quality that one finds very quickly runs all the way through Asian wisdom traditions. This shows in the way in which an artist refining, a spirit person refining, learns that their lensable expression is shareable. And not just shareable to those that they would talk to in an immediate present, but that there is an extended differential conscious present, called presence. And that that presence includes a community across time and not only across the planet, global, but across as far as the civilisation extent reaches and has its outrigours of adventure into frontiers beyond that shape. For us, we're entering into the stellar aeon and for the next 2,000 years, especially the next 500, our species will expand to a star system civilisation living freely on an interstellar frontier. This quality of that frontier is not just the octave of the eight phases, but the eight phases brought together in their ninth complementarity. The tenth, which would be the harmonic sealing of it in the Pythagorean way, is a gifting from the cosmos to us. Not something that we make, no matter how we arrange and rearrange, but is the seal, the epiclesis, the grace, as it were, that is conferred, 'All this is real.'
The importance for calligraphy was drawn out by an American familiar with Japanese and Chinese art. He wrote a big, two volume history of Chinese and Japanese art, Ernest Fenollosa. And this is the City Lights reprinting of Ezra Pound's Fenollosa: Chinese Written Characters, A Medium for Poetry. That the Chinese characters, as they are written, have not only the designation of a word, but the style of the calligraphy of the writer will enable each character ever written by any completely different person to have a special tone to it. So that the prize would be to have calligraphy from some great artist in the past and to have that available in the present. Not just the present moment, but in the presence, the presencing, of a very large community. The quality of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture is very much in this tradition of both East and West, of both the Pythagorean structure that is able to come down through the Western core and the Taoist, Buddhist core that is able to come down through the Asian traditions. One of the qualities that one almost never sees of Fallingwater...everyone is familiar with this shot of Fallingwater by now. One of the most poignant shots of Fallingwater is underneath the house where it touches the river, before it goes into the waterfall. It is the house stepping down in its resonant way to just above the water, not touching it. And it's the quiet pool and shimmer of light reflected on the underside of the entire structure that one hears the sound of the waterfall carrying all the way through the house and into the stillness of this moment. And one of Wright's most beautiful writings is that, 'It is the silence of the waterfall when you hear it all the time,' that allows for it to be not just a white sound that goes into the background, but it becomes an indication of experience flowing through the transparent symbols, into a conscious dimension of mind that finds it exstentiality in the art. This was especially true for Wright about the structure. The cantilevered structure of the entire building is built in such a way that its point of contact with the stream and of the waterfall, is like the brush that actually writes onto the page, but the other hand should not touch the page, should not touch the silk or the paper. It is only the composing brushstrokes that then carry, not the water in the waterfall, but carry the rock base. The beautiful western Pennsylvania rock that is handled in such a way that it is cut out to make the piers of the three, four stories of the structure of Fallingwater that hold the cantilevered terraces. So precarious did it look to construction builders, that a false wall was built to support, supposedly, the lowest, largest cantilevered structure.
The most westerly extension of the house is an open terrace, cantilevered far into space. It is supported by a large, reinforced concrete beam on its long axis and by several transverse ones that the main beam is anchored in the great chimney mast, the lesser ones in a natural boulder nearby. Under the main beam, well back out of sight, a stone supporting wall ran for a number of feet. Here the Pittsburgh engineers were certain of their ground. This was a structure they knew how to calculate, for it was practically independent of the complicated structures of the main house. They knew that as it was, the terrace must fall. They knew that just four more feet of that inconspicuous base wall would avoid the disaster. My father called Wright's young apprentice and ordered the four feet built.
The apprentices, Taliesin Fellows, that worked on the site, were Edgar Tafel and Byron Mosher.
Wright himself came around in due course of inspection and said nothing. Another month passed and Wright came again, went over the work with Father and no word of the wall. At the day's end, over a comfortable drink in the half finished shell of the house, Father confessed to Wright and said, 'If you've not noticed in these last two tours of inspection, there can't be anything very bad about it architectural.' 'EJ,' said Wright, 'Come with me.' They went out to the spot in question and behold, the top four inches of the additional wall were gone. 'When I was here last month,' Wright continued, 'I ordered the top layers of stone removed. Now the terrace has shown no sign of falling, shall we take down the extra four feet of rock?'
It is this quality, not of arrogance, or just of integral certainty, but of working with the living site. That there are conditions that change, for instance, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo survived the 1923 earthquake which destroyed tens of thousands of people and thousands of structures. My friend Manly Hall happened to sail into Yokohama Harbour the day after the great earthquake and he said that, 'The entire bay was filled with dead bodies floating everywhere, thousands of people.' Hiroshige's own diaries of the journey which Monkey Bridge shows here, perished in the great fire after the earthquake, as did many works of art in other buildings.
The quality that we're looking towards understanding here is that art a spirit person form. It uses a prismatic energy from consciousness to make a composition that is able to be refined almost indefinitely. So that one can cut and recut and refine the facetedness in such a way that one comes out with a jewel. It is the lensing of the symbolic structure of thought into a clear lens, that is the transparent symbols that allow for the flow of experience to come through into the field of consciousness. It's extremely important because the spirit person, like a work of art, has the ability to distil that flow of experience into a higher energy flow of experience. So that instead of having a mythic horizon of experience one then on a higher energy will have an historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness. And in this way myth is transformed into history by the jewel of works of art of spirit persons. Civilisation is a process of kaleidoscopic historical consciousness and not a form. But the kaleidoscopic consciousness of civilisation is a double transform of the mythic horizon of cultural experience. Not only does the tribe get transformed into consciousness, but it gets distilled and transformed a second time into the kaleidoscope of history. We live in a time where the confusion of culture with civilisation is as rampant as the assumption of an inner person being definitely there at the centre of one's individuality, that that 'I' then is an identity. All of this on every level is fallacious. The fallacy of it is workable as long as it is held with soft hands as appearance, but as soon as it is gripped and grasped, that artificiality grounds the living energy so that it is no longer there. So that what happens then is that experience is muffled, it's imprisoned, it is artificialized and what creeps in is a projection of the 'Iness' of individuality into that by now pressure processed false experience and that is where the character of the ego now occurs, like a shadow become real. As soon as the transparency of symbols in the mind allows for experience to flow through into differential consciousness, that ego evaporates without a trace and the certainty of the individual at the centre of the mind, is distributed into the symbolic structure itself, which can be simplified of content enough that one can comes to literally understand we are more real in cosmic possibility than at any pressure point presentation of limited power. It is aesthetic forms that are the future of our species, as community and not political forms. Their aeon is over, it will never work again. We have a learning here to help wean ourselves away from not only the bad habits, but the dead traditions.
One of the most poignant documents to survive from the First Century AD is by Plutarch and it's entitled Why the Old Oracle Centres No Longer Work. They had worked for thousands of years. All of a sudden in his lifetime, about 80, 90 AD they stopped working. None of the ancient oracular sites worked anymore, the Oracle of Delphi was silent. Plutarch records a philosophic sailor who'd been asked one last time to yell out when he passed the Cape of Brundisium in southern Italy's heel, where an ancient Pythagorean community had once been, to yell to the forested shore that the old gods were dead. And when he did, it was reported that there was a great sigh in the landscape and no one ever again heard of any kind of spiritual spirit of the place in that region of Italy. Once the old has gone it does not come back, except in rehashing, increasingly forced scenarios to try and make it stick. It is a stamp not only with the glue gone, but tattered and pretty soon it's a disgrace to even try to work with it again. The old is shredded, the new is not yet visible because it's being looked for as something inside. It is not inside, it is in our shared presence as we have our concourse ever more refined in the real. As time goes on this will become apparent.
Next week we move to Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih. Now, the big, beautiful book on Ch'i Pai-Shih was done by my mentor Kai-yu Hsu about 40 years ago. It is very difficult to find and so I will utilise my prerogative and make copies of a number of pages for you so that you will be provided with a text and I'll put those in the presentation notes. He was an extraordinary companion as well as a mentor. His great work, which he did not live to complete, is going to be a big three volume set called From Dragon to Man, where he would take an ancient myth, a medieval myth and a modern story and show them in their tripartite resonance over a three, 4,000 year period, to give the sense that the dragon of the Milky Way had emerged in its great spiral spirit to confer on man the right to live on a dragon scale as a man. This first dragon man was Fu Xi, who was always paired with Nu Gua and so the beginnings of a dragon man is actually a shared presence pair. This pairedness is tunable now in the early twenty first century on any scale of possibility. More next week.