Art 6

Let's come to Art 6. And we're moving in a complex set of resonances. We're doing a presentation which is classic in the way in which a wisdom teaching would be delivered and given. Both Jesus and the historical Buddha taught very much in this kind of a way and has been traditional for at least 3,000 years. The presentation is not to appeal to a mentality; a presentation evokes the entire resonances of a set in terms of a chord that sets their harmonic so that you are able, then, by repeat, by iteration of this to settle into a presentation as a form of meditation, as a form of contemplation. Following it, three days later by simply an audio recording of the presentation, gives a deeper emphasis, then, to the hearing of the ear and the stimulation of your creative imagination. Children raised on radio had fantastic creative imaginations in contrast to children raised on television. 30s children were enormously adventurous and creative, 50s children tended to want to have to see something before, and see it move around, before they would really respond to it. There's a great deal of difference.
After the presentation, after three days of the oral reiteration of it, then on the sixth day to read the notes that are cognate with the previous phase. So for Art 6, next Friday you'll be reading the notes to Vision 6. And that reading of the notes is an ancient Pythagorean innovation, it gives you a symbolic retrospective and the symbolic retrospective, again, is not something that is of a mentality but it's using symbols, that is written language, in a visionary way. So that when you're reading symbols, visionarily, you're reading through the symbols, you're reading with penetration of insight. And as you get used to reading with insight you do not follow the symbols in an integral way but you allow their integrality to be transparent and you're able to follow it in a creative flow: creative imagination.
By arranging the presentation in poetic, followed by an oral creative listening, followed by an insightful penetrative reading, if you put that triumpherant [04.33] into an intellectual form, the idea is to have something which is of a very deep nature that occurs, something that is of a very flowing experience that occurs within that and then something of a visionary consciousness, which is a field like nature is a field. And so you have nature, myth and vision, all three together. And when you have three of them working together they do a very interesting thing. Nature and myth will always have a way of braiding themselves so that the flow in the field is a natural participation of experience. When you have vision added to it, because it's a differential field, it weaves with nature, it doesn't flow with nature but weaves with it and it gives a very interesting quality to it.
There's a French weave called Jacquard where you can see the weave in two distinct, ways depending on the light incident. And vision and nature as fields weave in just this way. And when experience is able to flow both through a natural field, participating with it, and to flow upstream, as it were, in the field of vision, experience now gains an extra couple of dimensions that it did not have in the four dimensions of nature because it gains the dimension of consciousness, but a differential dimension. It is able then to source the form of person, the form of person as a work of art, a living work of art. That form is, now, a six dimensional form and because it has a six dimensional form, when it generates a flow, the experience flow will be a seven dimensional flow which is truly kaleidoscopic consciousness. We call that phase, here, history because that history, that historia, when it was first recognised in terms of its distilling power, the first person to really give it that name was Pythagoras. And Pythagoras' ancient phrase was 'Geometry is History.'
The geometric form of the structure of thought, when put into a seven dimensional kaleidoscopic flow, now, you have something where the geometry has been turned, twice, into a higher form. The first form is that geometry becomes spherical and is able to also deal with cones of light, with sections called conic sections. And so one has the ability to have the entire field of light, the entire sphere of the three dimensions and geometry transforms into trigonometry. But the trigonometry, in its deeper quality, has a time dynamic so that you're able to put a trigonometric function into play which has a characteristic of being able to be understood in terms of its entire occurrence and all of its permutations, all of it sinuous turns. And one can understand, trigonometrically, that functions of four dimensional space time to such an extent that one more transform of that, which is a distillation, gives you the ability to have Calculus, to have both an integral calculus and a differential calculus. To be able to understand that between zero and one is an infinitude of possible proportions, ratios, elements, parts and, yet, you can go either way: you go from zero to one or from one back to zero. So that it is an infinite calculus that is available in two different distinct modes.
By having that, one has now taken that geometry, which was a mental structure, which was a symbolic form, purely integral, given it a twist so that it was half symbolically integral and it was half a differential form that was in possession of a more dynamic dimensioned person. And then to have that go through a second transform, a third phase, and that third phase as history delivers the ability to have an infinite analytic applied to actuality at any juncture, any point. Not only any point in space, or any point in time or any point in time space, but to follow that one does not have to settle on a point, moving, in order to understand that the very beginning of Euclid's geometry, 2,300 years ago is that a point is a locus of no dimension, is a zero dimension. A zero dimension locus that when that moves the zero dimension locus, moving, is able to generate a precursor of what would become a line if you put ends to it.
If you put two points and that this movement connected those two points, then you would have a line but the deeper understanding of it, the Pythagorean mathematiki understanding of it, is that that geometry of those lines and those angles and those shapes is all a provisional mentality, a provisional structure of symbolic thought and does not exhaust the actuality that is there. This is very much the case in China, with Lao Tzu, about the same time as Pythagoras, so that when you come to a strictly classical Chinese aesthetic, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, translated her by Vincent Yu-chung Shih, the very beginning is on Tao the source, Yuan Dao. And it doesn't begin with Tao, it begins with the Chinese word wen, wen or pattern. So it begins with pattern
Wen, or pattern, is a very great virtue indeed. It is born together with heaven and earth. Why do we say this? Because all colour patterns are mixed of black and yellow, and all shape-patterns are differentiated by round and square. The sun and moon like two pieces of jade manifest the pattern of heaven; mountains and rivers in their beauty display the pattern of earth. These are, in fact, the wen of Tao itself.
Now that pattern of the rivers on the earth is the flow of experience and that flow of experience has a certain Tê, it has a certain power to it. Experience has the power to bridge over the existentiality of things to the structures of thought and that flow that links them together can, by virtue of the structure of symbolic thought, become lines that then make connections and then one can build on that. But if you build in this way, and take that for exhausting reality, you fall into a dead end, you fall into a trap where you have believed the case of thought structure to be the total actuality of what is real. So that always there is, both in the Pythagorean and thus the hermetic tradition - Pythagoras learned from 22 years the Heliopolin wisdom of ancient Egypt so that he is in the great hermetic tradition that takes itself back to the origins of Egyptian wisdom about 3,000 BC. The Taoist tradition is exemplified by Lao Tzu in a similar way because the Tao Te Ching, written about the time that Pythagoras was teaching and would have in fact written three very rare books, very large books, they were so expensive in antiquity and they were so rare they only made a few copies, and the only person that we know who received a set was Plato, after he was 40 years of age.
Lao Tzu and Pythagoras are similar in that Pythagoras goes back 2,500 years to the origins of Egyptian wisdom and carries them forward in a periodicity that was known as the cycle of the phoenix. In China the Taoist tradition comes to a focus with Lao Tzu about the same time and he goes back to FuHsi and NuGua about 3000 BC, about the time of the origins of the Egyptian hermetic wisdom as well, so they're cognate. About 500 years after Pythagoras you find a cycle of the phoenix has occurred and the year in which that occurred was 36 AD, it was the year that Jesus was crucified and resurrected. The death of Pythagoras is almost 500 years, exactly, before that, so between the death of Pythagoras and the resurrection of Jesus is 500 years, it's the cycle of the phoenix. The phoenix also occurs in China so that the Taoists and the hermetic traditions are linked together in a very, very deep and interesting way. The link between the two is not India but ancient Central Asian Zarathustra, it is the Zarathustran connection between ancient China and ancient Egypt that gives this tremendous linking together. So that you find for instance in Zarathustra the operative six dimensions that characterise a spiritual person in visionary space time are the six holy spirits, the Amesha Spentas, and those six appear later as the six Paramitas of the Mahayana. But they come into play because of a transform that occurred between the time of Jesus and his resurrection and the time of John and his passing into - the old saying was that he didn't die but he entered sleep, the sleep of the ages from which one would be awakened, which was about 100AD.
The development in this time was always to have the radiance of the spirit-person form, understand that they were not controlled by their mentality, they were not controlled by the integral of the structure of thought. And in order to emphasise this it was the pattern not of reiteration but of iteration following a cycle that is capable of a transform. And a cycle that is capable of a transform is actually then an ecology. So that the periodicity of the cycle of four dimensional nature, when consciousness as a fifth dimension comes into play, the cycle begins, now, to have, instead of a circularity of itself, it begins to have a contour that is very much like an infinity sign. And the Egyptian way of expressing this, in the earliest pyramids one finds on the back wall, where the sarcophagus would be, the king cobras are looped in such a way that it is an infinity sign that keeps reiterating itself over and over again so that you get this accordion of infinite time that occurs in the field of eternity.
When we're looking at a pair like Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih, we're looking at a Western woman and an Eastern man, great artists who lived on into our own time who carried with them an extraordinary yin and yang quality. The yin yang is not a quality of Tao, it's not a quality of the locus of no dimension, it's not a quality of the emptiness or fullness. The yin yang, the light dark, the male female, the pairedness, is a structure that polarises in terms of Tê and transforms, shifts gears, out of form, out of structure, out of an information data into an operational dynamic. And the earliest understanding of this was through heat and comes all the way up into the development, in science, of thermodynamics. It is the dynamics of heat that allows for this movement to occur and out of that movement of heat dissipating, finally, a space will be created in which light will then be the carrier. So that light follows the heat; the heat is first. And in the deepest teachings of yoga it is the sense of touch that is the most primordial and not the sense of sight nor the sense of hearing; touch is the deepest.
The texture of a work of art is extremely important and shows itself, did show itself, about 100 years ago in the development of the art of photography. And the person who really pioneered the art of photography, in terms of delivering the texture, the touch, through the photograph, that then allowed for light to follow the sense of the textured touch and to disclose, then, an artistic possibility of form, not just a camera recording mechanically what is there but a camera in the hands of an artist is giving us the penetration through, the insight into, based first of all on texture second of all on light and third on our ability to have a generation of deeper and deeper appreciation. Stieglitz was the person who really pioneered this and we need to talk about Alfred Stieglitz for just a moment.
He was born January 1st 1864 so he was born during the American civil war. So we're talking about somebody who lived from the civil war and he died in 1946 so he lived into the atomic bomb era. Stieglitz also, while he was a New Yorker - he was born across the river in Hoboken but largely he grew up in fairly wealthy family circumstances in New York City. So he was a New Yorker but his parents were both German and so when he got to be 17 they sent him off to Germany to get his education in German. And it took a year or so before he could pass the exam that allows you to go into university and he went to the technical school in Berlin. And then discovered one of the new cameras, in Berlin, in a shop window and bought the equipment and taught himself and just happened to know that one of the great pioneers of photochemical developing - a man named Vogel - was teaching at the university in Berlin and he began studying with him.
And Stieglitz spent about nine years as a European but those nine years were like the maturation from a 17 year old precocious New York boy into a very sophisticated - by the time he was 26 Stieglitz was extraordinarily well travelled, well read. He travelled all over Europe but he travelled with the sense of wanting to understand the heritage. On top like a parfait of the tremendous energy of New Yorkers at the time - the New York that he grew up in is the New York of the 1870s, tremendous developments and the traction of big business, of railroads, of larger and larger buildings of New York really becoming, even Chicago at the time, but New York more than other city of the world of being the power of engineering and industrial might. On top of that he gained the German sense of the meticulousness that goes into really good engineering and from his European soirees he developed the aesthetic and the sense that there is such a thing as a fine art. Why cannot photography be a fine art? And he, more than anyone else, was the original developer of the art of photography. But he was cultivated in the sense that when he came back to New York in the year of 1890 he was distressed because New York had changed so much in just that decade.
It had grown so much and so fast that the land was transformed into the corridors of industrial might. One of his most famous photographs he took coming into New York City on the train and he set up his camera on the last platform of the last car of the train. And he took a shot and all that one saw was the earth divided up into dozens of shiny railroad tracks, telephone poles carrying all kinds of wires - telegraphs and everything else - the smoke from factory chimneys, the smoke from the locomotives and the complete desolation of the land, that the landscape had been overlaid with a mechanical, industrial [30.10] quality and the suburbs of New York City at that time were just miles and miles of slums. And this bothered Stieglitz to the sense he wanted to find is there not some way to go into this desecrated landscape and bring back out of it some of the hidden beauty and grandeur of a deeper reality.
And one of the first photographs that he was able to take was in 1893 after a huge snow storm, a blizzard, in New York City. He happened to be standing with his camera and his wondering 'What can I do to pull out, of this industrial New York, something of the hidden reality?' He was at the end of the horse drawn tram line, where they turned the tram around and then they unhitched the horses and pitch up a new team. He was watching the care of the man with the horses and the excellence of the engineers who were tending the tram car and everything and he took a famous photograph and he called it The Terminal. And it's one of the first art photographs in the world. And the horses in the chill air have their breath foggy in front of them and he got the insight that there are certain conditions in which New York becomes magical again, becomes artistic. And a couple of years later he took a very famous photograph of New York completely inundated with a snow storm and down fifth avenue one found this quality of a magic wonderland again because man's desecration had been temporarily overcome by the weather, by nature. And that the field of nature, now with the conscious field of the artist working together with it, was able to pull out of the mechanical existential arrangement that dominated experience and to bring in a visionary quality that would bring a work of art out.
This particular photograph became one of the most sought after photographs in the art scene in the early part of the 20th century. Largely due to the success of this he began looking for instances and qualities and events where he could do this. He had just gotten over a bout with pneumonia, was forbidden to go outside by his wife and by his doctor, by his friends and there was a particularly magical deep frost evening in New York city and he couldn't stand not being out there. And so he said he'd put on four or five pairs of socks, doubled up the underwear, put all kinds of sweaters on and got his camera and his equipment and snuck out of the house quietly. And there, at about two in the morning he took one of the most fabulous photographs of New York ever taken. It's called Icy Night, New York. There's a reproduction of it that I'll put in the notes. He said,
I stole out of the house, I succeeded in getting as far as Fifth Avenue and Sixty Third Street. The trees on the park side of the avenue were coated with ice, the gale blew from the north-west .Pointing the camera south, sheltering it from the wind I focused. There was a tree, ice covered, glistening and the snow covered sidewalk. Nothing comparable had ever been photographed before under such conditions. My moustache was frozen stiff, my hands bitter cold in spite of heavy gloves. The frosty air stung my chin and nose and ears.
And he got the shot. And what was even more important was that when he got back to his studio, by this time he had developed all these techniques in the darkroom and was able to take a fantastic photograph already a work of art, and refine it through his developing so that it became one of the greatest classic photographs in the world. Icy Night, New York, I'll leave a book open that has a copy of it, here, so that you can see. It has the mysterious quality that in the midst of the most powerful industrialised, over engineered city in the world once consciousness and nature flow together, the experience that comes out of it is able to be teased through the structures of thought into the radiance of a spiritual work of art. And that this work of art, now, this photograph in this case, is like a beckoning beacon for anyone else to come out of their shell, to come out of the social shell, to come out of the artificial experience, to transcend the mentalities that are holding that social world of artificial experiences and to get the real Tao, that it does now occur. And it occurs for us in such a way that that work of art presents the pristine moment of your art experience of evoking your spirit person.
And, in this way, art saves what is largely ruined by political forms, what is largely covered up by economic concerns. It teases the spirit person back into a present multidimensional actuality and frees them that time, there, and gives them the insight and the foresight that they can do this. And if you have done this once you can do it again. And if you have done it once, with something like a photograph or a painting or a work of architecture or a work of music, a dance performance, now you can begin to refine yourself and extend yourself so that all of the arts now come into play. And when they do the old Pythagorean understanding is that it isn't the Olympian gods, their old mythic stuff, it's the nine muses. This is the spectrum of the ecology of the arts and sciences. And once the nine muses are all alive in your capacity, the flow of your sense of reality has many dimensions beyond the limitations of mentality as space time had, originally. You gain not only four more dimensions but you gain the complementary of all of them together: you gain a ninth muse.
And when the nine muses are together, as a harmonic set - four from the integral, four from the differential and one for the unity of all of them - there's then a transform of an old Olympian god Apollo, out of the Olympian pantheon, into now the new set of the harmonic of art. And so Apollo becomes the figure who was mythic at one time and, now, is artistic in the sense that your complete spectrum is guaranteed a fasrseeingness. Apollo in Homer is the far-darter, he's the carrier of light, the light rays. The chariot of Apollo is the sun, he is the one who is able now to pull out of the mythic experience that was limited in mentality and to flow through the structure of thought into a new dimension of mind. And that out of mind, out of a quintessential five dimensional mind of vision creative imagination, now, and remembering, making works of art will also make works of science. We'll come back but it's interesting because Apollo is not only, now, the carrier of art but is the carrier of prophecy and the carrier of medicine as well. Healing and prophecy and art as spirit forms are all cognate together, or we should say recognisably recognate. Let's take a little break.

Let's come back. We were discussing Alfred Stieglitz, the development of photography, the emergence of a fine art out of something that was originally mechanical and just took an artistic genius to be able to tease out qualities. But his artistic genius was combined: the New Yorker energy and the European sophistication. And when he brought them into play, not only did he develop photography - Photography Club an amateur photography club, a little publication on camera notes and then finally it evolved and became the association of American photographers. And one of the instances where the deep tone of the resonance of art carried over because, as we'll see, Georgia O'Keeffe became enamoured of Stieglitz in a very deep interesting way. And later one of her greatest buddies was Ansel Adams who took the art of photography where people like Stieglitz and Edward Steichen raised it to a very, very high level, Ansel Adams distilled it to perhaps an almost Rembrandt level in his great landscapes, especially of not just Yosemite but one of his night scenes in New Mexico under moonlight is considered the greatest photograph perhaps ever taken.
Stieglitz was born January 1st 1864, Georgia O'Keeffe was born November 15th 1887 - and we talked last week - she was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, not far from Richland Center, Wisconsin where Frank Lloyd Wright was born. And one of the aspects of hers that the family moved to the east coast and eventually she moved with the family, they ended up in Charlotte, Virginia where the University of Virginia was, Monticello, Jefferson's home and Jefferson's design architecture of the university. And in keeping with that quality she took classes from someone who had learned about the depths of Asian art at Columbia Teachers College in New York and had carried these courses to the University of Virginia. And the man at Columbia Teachers College was named Arthur Dow, not Tao but Dow but pronounced Tao. And Arthur Dow had learned in the late 19th century from Japan and from China, from the East Asia art tradition, the East Asia civilisation artistic poetic, he had learned to understand a great deal.
And at this time there were a handful of Americans who were in the 1880s, 1890s who were beginning not only to understand East Asian art but to become even more adept at East Asian art than the East Asians themselves. In addition to Dow, Henry P. Bowie was one of these individuals and influenced greatly the way in which Dow at Columbia Teachers College was able to teach art, teach the esoteric understanding. And this is called On the Laws of Japanese Painting, published in San Francisco, published by Paul Elder's bookstore - which was on Sutter in San Francisco up until the 1960s - published in 1911 and his motto at the beginning of it, Ken wan choku hitsu, a firm arm and a perpendicular brush.
There is a yoga but the yoga does not dominate, the yoga gives a facility to amplify your expression, to take what was a seed of insight and develop it into an extended duration of insight that, as it learns its extension, a hidden dimension of it comes into play that was initially not controllable. And that initial non controllability of it is what is the prophetic visionary capacity. And prophets, classically, are told, visionarily, 'Write down what you have seen, in a book, put it into a symbolic written structure form.' But the more that the capacity of not just insight but foresight, the more that foresight is able to come into conscious play, not so much a control but a conscious play, instead of writing it down in a symbolic structure, one makes a work of art. One makes the artist who can make these works of art. And so the spiritual person is a higher order than the symbolic sacred text; the scripture is an integral form, as useful as integral forms are, but the spiritual person, the artist of their life, is a differential form that has infinite possibilities.
In the Enlightenment in the 18th century, in the 1700s, the concern was with the individual, the enlightened individual not part of the masses but someone who is really like an enlightened person. And in the 19th century, the 1800s, the whole concern was with the rights, the political rights of the individual, the political economic rights of an individual. In the 21st century our concern is with the possibility of persons, not with the rights of individuals. Not that there are not rights of individuals but they're a historical fossil, they do not have a living place in our new civilisation. Aesthetic concerns are with proportions, with resonances, with ratios, with harmonics and these concerns have all the ordering that one would ever need, including the extension of the orderings into the ecology of further dimensions, whereas a code of rights is limited to an era in which they were drawn up and limited to the mentality capabilities of that time. And you can keep scotch-taping and making a pastiche onto old codes but eventually it becomes like the book of codes and laws now: so extensive no one can master it.
Who could master all the details of all the codes, of all the laws? Yes, a computer can and so one faces the dilemma of a master computer being the only way to keep track of a thought structure, this is the inhumanity that a machine, extension of artificiality, looms and has loomed for a long time. The earliest science fiction presentation of the absurdity of that situation was done by a Czech writer, Karel Čapek and his play was called R. U. R., Rossum's Universal Robots. And he published it in 1924 where the robots become so sophisticated that they learn to make themselves and learn to make themselves better than men can make themselves. And so they decide that man is extraneous, he is getting in our way of making ever better robots ourselves so he's not going to be allowed in the factory and increasingly he's just not going to be allowed. That was 85 years ago.
Out of this comes someone like a Stieglitz who wanted to not get caught in the limitations of a 17th century or the limitations of an 18th century of a 19th century, he wanted to get into the new possibilities, at the time of the 20th century which was new. And so he began having, in addition to his photography work, a gallery that eventually became 291, Fifth Avenue in New York, fourth storey of one of those Brown Stones. And it was there that Georgia O'Keeffe, as a young art student, first saw Stieglitz, not to see him but to see an exhibition at his gallery. And he was showing - because he was the first to exhibit in the united states, artists like Cezanne or Picasso or Brach - he was exhibiting, for the first time, an artist that almost no one had heard of at the time: August Rodin. Now it seems impossible to us for someone not to know that Rodin was one of the greatest artists of all time. In sculpture there's Phidias of the Greeks, there's Michel Angelo, there's Rodin and then there's Henry Moore.
But no one really knew about Rodin although he was born in 1840. He was 60 years old the first time that there was an exhibition of enough of his works that one could see it. This is at the 1900 Paris world Exhibition. This is the first time that people woke up to the fact that there's a Rodin. And of course Rodin, being an old centaur kind of an artist; he liked women, lots of women and he loved his wife rose but rose was always sort of like the matronly house-frau and Rodin liked nude ladies, younger, nuder ladies. And so the erotic water colours that he did, which were banned and no one would show them, Stieglitz demonstrated that by putting them all up on his gallery walls and this is what Georgia O'Keeffe walked into as a young art student. They get rather graphic; you can look at them later. The whole entourage of these is to show the sensual sexual graphicness of women as the landscape of the whole interplay of the way in which touch and sight generate the nudity of the interphase of the landscape of the body with the portraiture of the person. The nude is a membrane interphase between the portrait and the landscape.
And so Georgia O'Keeffe, when she finally got used to the idea of going back and staying with Stieglitz and finally marrying him, Stieglitz took about 500 photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe in every conceivable aspect, including some of the first great erotic torsos, very much in keeping with the Rodin. But, as one goes through, one finds, more and more, the emphasis for Stieglitz a motif is her face and her hands. There are photo after photo, hundreds of photos of her hands because the hand of Georgia O'Keeffe was to him one of the great artistic portraiture insights possible. And one of his most famous photographs is against this shiny V8 hub cap of a very powerful car and her hand touching the wheel of this powerful machine in an artistic way. And one of the qualities of Georgia O'Keeffe was that she was able to be a penetrating artist amidst of this machine engineering power New York City.
And one of the most incredible arrays of her early genius is not of the characteristic flowers which everyone recognises from her and has beautiful instances. This portrait of the high rises in New York City with the moon is very much a kind of Georgia O'Keeffe Hiroshige. She had learned from people like Dow, who were associated with people like Henry Bowie, and here is Impressions of Ukiyo-e, a little book published by Paul Elder in San Francisco in 1905. And even the in papers have a Zen quality to them and the saddle stitching and the frontispiece of the Impressions of Ukiyo-e by Dora Amsden is a Hiroshige from the Tōkaidō. And we talked, during the first four presentations of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Japanese print.
And the quality of all of this began to seep in so that from about 1870 to about 1910, in that 40 year time period, there was an enormous exchange between east and west in terms of art, an immense amount of insight was churned. And it's as if the year 1910 is like one of the great watershed years of human history. That it had no vehicle of being transmitted to a large enough population to transform not only the planet but the species was one of the failures of the old civilisation. It was sophisticated almost beyond belief but was limited to such a trace population of people that, while it produced genius after genius who appreciated each other, the general public knew nothing about them whatsoever and were ensconced in being sucked up and absorbed into the notorious successful industrial military complex world. One of the qualities that someone like a Georgia O'Keeffe finally exhibits is the incredible ability to have artistic insight that goes back to unbelievable levels. This is a sunrise with a New Mexico cross but for somebody who has a planetary background of wisdom, including esoteric, this painting exists in one rare original presentation: it is on the only copy ever made of a book that was inscribed in ink - that has turned brown with the centuries - it was the extended little volume of about 60-70 pages with illustrations and this was the cover illustration, the title page illustration.
It was the diploma written out by Salomon Trismosin and Johannes Trithemeus to Paracelsus giving him their imprimatur that he was not only the great alchemist that was expected, almost messianically, but he was the great new doctor of a new kind of medicine called the [aeaptrochemical medicine 1.02.53]. Not at all medieval but the beginnings of chemical, biochemical scientific medicine, not just a pharmacology, a herbology, but an understanding of the structure of health and application and medicine and the use of alchemy not only to change forms but to distil the changed forms into art which was then able to be further refined into science. This painting, hopefully the volume still exists, it was in the collection of manly hall at one time and I made some copies of many of the pages for a book that I wrote on the origins of hermetic America, about 1982-83. I hope the book still exists, if it does it's in the Getty collection of alchemical books that they got from the Philosophic Research Society. Hopefully it's there.
How does an artist do this? Because an artist at this level of refinement finds in their insight and foresight that it extends further than their experience in this life. The experience in this life was the experience of the flow, based on what you do and what you did, based on the ritual foundation of it and indexed, integralled, by your symbolic thought structures and to the extent that you could index or integral, to the extent that you could have existential base for your experience. All that is rather limited, it's in fact hardly a trace line in a very large infinite sphere called the cosmos and yet, that thread, that trace line, has, in higher dimensiality, the ability to generate the entire complexity of an infinite cosmos in all of its dimensiality. So that the artist, in their works of art, are the gateway that opens form into the ability to have a harmonic with reality; a political structure will always seek to limit that because it cuts the basis of their authority, because it transforms ritual into art. It frees experience to include experiment and to develop new possibilities, new proportions, new ratios, new adventures, new kinds of people that have never been seen before, new kinds of relationalities that have never been seen before.
As Witmants remarked at the beginning of that era in 1875, 'Nature loves freedom and variety,' she likes her family to be adventurous. And art comes out of this in such a way that you find something new begins to occur, something that was proscribed before. And let's use an example from China, form traditional China: here are the three sages that traditional China will hold up and make little sets of. Here's Lao Tzu, here's Confucius and this third figure is holding a baby. Now, men don't hold babies in terms of archetypal iconography; women hold babies. But this is a Confucian model and so it is a man but the true figure that is there is Guanyin. Ch'i Pai-Shih's Guanyin is an enormously interesting, Guanyin. And you can see from the detail the limpid quality of his artistic tone and presentation seems almost childlike in its immediate easy getting into and all of a sudden, as you get experience of looking at it as your eye follows it, as your sense of kinaesthetic appreciation begins to increase, Ch'i Pai-Shih begins to reveal more and more that this is the gateway that is now open to understand anything one would, starting from the simplest things.
Let's look at this original Ch'i Pai-Shih for a moment. There's nothing more important in the cyclicity of traditional China than New Year's and New Year's is the time of firecrackers. And here are all the firecrackers, all ready to go in a big burst and here are a pair of firecrackers. And they're arranged almost the pair of ribbons coming down from this lantern that looks like a pink pumpkin that has the ability to be hung in this space and that below it the burst of the firecrackers is actually a peony, a peony flower. And so the symbol of the peony in the time of the new year - and if you don't know, peonies begin to sprout in the earliest spring while the ground is still frozen, the first shoots of green that come up are the stalks of the peony just beginning to burst and they look like dark chartreuse fingers of vegetation that poke through the frozen earth. The seed that's so fragile, how can it have the strength? That's the penetration of the peonies and the first thing that blossoms is the peony with its brilliant colouring.
This peony is not the red of the peony but in keeping with the light, the firecrackers, the flower, the row of firecrackers and suddenly we see the tea pot with the pair of cups, of tea cups. This is a very famous clay and these tea pots are made for thousand years out on the [Xi'an 1.1046] area of China. So what one has here is the companionability, the sharing, of two in pairs of very interesting circumstances so that now it is not just a new year but any time you bring yourself to this work of art is the moment of the new year: shareable, with all the fireworks, a flower that's stronger than a frozen earth. This kind of painting is made in one of the darkest periods in Chinese history, in the 1940s, the war against Japan. It is the power of an artist to be able to present, in their works of art, aspects which, hitherto, were not expressed adequately and one of the most interesting paintings in here is this pair. The one on the right is the founder of Zen in China, Bodhidharma, the one on the left is Huineng who completely made a synergy between the ancient Chinese Tao and the Mahayana of India, he's the Sixth Patriarch. Bodhidharma, the first Patriarch, Huineng the Sixth Patriarch in that, in that set from one to six, the transform was done so magnificently in terms of this infinite extensibility that the seventh patriarch is anyone ever who can tune in to that set.
That harmonic will include you instantly: you are know the seventh patriarch, you are the seventh completing that whole structure so that whole star system of planets, sun and moon, that all of this is now a collage of the actual which is shareable. And one of the great self-portraits of Ch'i Pai-Shih, of him as a traditional mad Chan Buddhist Taoist sage. And he will give us not only this but he will present himself so that he is, at the very same time, in a traditional Chinese landscape scroll in the little house, in the window - and here's a detail of it - is another facet of Ch'i Pai-Shih: not the street walking Toshiro Mifune sage but the very quiet scholar poet-painter in his studio. And he is able to present now in such a way that he is at the same time one of the great eagles of the world because of the detail from it. The magisterial quality of artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Ch'i Pai-Shih have demonstrated - during more than 90 years, during the 20th century which was one of the most nightmarish, ruinous centuries on human record - the capacity for art to penetrate through, for artists to continue to bring forth the ability to have a harmonic with the cosmos, to have an artistic aesthetic way of being not only human but of extending the humanity to the plants and animals as well, to everywhere, not only plants and animals on this planet but wherever they occur.
The way in which the codification of art - this is an excerpt from The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. It was commissioned by the Bollingen foundation and published in 1956. Mai-Mai Sze was about five feet high, she was Chinese and lived in New York. Here's a way in which one has to be cautious that aesthetics does not become reductively a mentality. The instructions are, 'Establishing the outline and interlocking brush strokes, in human beings before the hundred bones of the body are formed, the nose begins to take shape. In the drawing of mountains, the first brush strokes outline the central peak, the hawk's beak form on the face of the mountain' and goes on and talks about the different kinds of brush strokes. And increasingly one finds a sense of the manual of Chinese painting includes mastering the vocabulary of the brush strokes which tends to become reductive. And it's interesting because it's called The Magic of the Brush and it was published in Taipei in Taiwan but it was co-authored by Catherine Woo. But it says here that it was published some time after Kai-Yu Hsu, the other author, died, and he died in 1975, and this, like the book on Ch'i Pai-Shih, co-opt Kai-Yu Hsu's writings by Taiwanese Chinese many, many years after he had passed away. This in fact is a 1982 and this one 1979.
Having studied with Kai-Yu, having learned the East Asia aesthetic first hand, enough to get a degree, a Taoist degree, from his own hand, the co-opting of his artistic insight and foresight into a mental structure of presentation so that they can become like resource manuals or some kind of a resource catalogue. This is a catalogue of Ch'i Pai-Shih's work; this is a source book of how to do it. None of these are truthful. What is truthful is the artists actually occur as artists and the aesthetic poetic of being able to appreciate them is deliverable, presentational, which we're doing here. One of the Americans who was there, along with Henry Bowie and Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Dow, was - one of the earliest - was Ernest Fenellosa. And I'll bring next week his two big volumes of the art of East Asia, just magisterial. And one of the ways in which he was trying to convey to the west his mastery of the east is by taking the Chinese written language, the Chinese written character, and showing - this is by Ezra Pound - the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. And he excerpted this out in 1920 in a book called Investigations.
If you look at the form of the Chinese characters, it's easily discernable that you have five characters in a line, they're actually written so that they would be written down but they're presented in this way. The five characters in a line is the Taoist energy cycle; Tao, Tê, Jin, I, Qi. And then you pair them so that you have two lines and then you pair the pairs so that you have four lines; you have a quatrain. And by the time of the T'ang dynasty you paired this so that you had eight lines of five characters in a line so that you had a 40 character poem. The 40 character poem of Tufu, especially of all the great T'ang poets, is a particular artistic geometric architectural structure. It surfaced at the coronation of the original Queen Elizabeth in the 1500s in London. Thomas Tallis wrote a 40 part motet, it is not possible to hear with the structure of the brain a motet but you can with a juicing up of the dimensions of a spiritual person you can resonate to a 40 part motet and that one, for her coronation, was called In Spem Alles [Spem in alium (?) 1.21.51] , it means the greatest grandeur, it means the glory of a person raised artistically to the resonance where the harmonic of the cosmos is now within hearing. And she is called, because of that, Gloriana, in those days. That's what she was called, not just 'the queen', Gloriana.
The architectural is that if you take a cube of 20 feet by 20 feet by 20 feet, you get a certain king of an acoustic but if you double that so that you have now a double cube, 20 by 20 by 40 feet, now the harmonic is extendible indefinitely. And so the 20 by 20 by 40 music room of the Renaissance is an architectural expression of these kinds of forms where geometry is transformed into a trigonometric sphericality function and then transformed, through a distillation, into an art of presentation. There is a music room in Los Angeles that has this: if you go to the Huntington library and gardens and go to the second floor of the Huntington - which was Henry Huntington's house - you will find a renaissance music room And as soon as you walk into it you can kinaesthetically notice there is a different timbre to space and to sound as soon as you enter into a room like that. It has the quality of gently lyricising whatever sound there is and the sense of kinaesthetic spatiality that contexts it is not only the sound but the special silence within which that sound is made musical that now is one of the highest art forms that there is. One can do that with hearing, with a poetic language that does not register in the brain, by the ear, but that goes through the entire body, with you spinal column as a condenser, so that the whole psycho-physical-neural being that you are, the body itself becomes a body of light and is able to hear infinites instantly, even while you say a single syllable: Ah or Om. More next week.