Art 10

This is Art 10 and we'll come back and revise a revision. In Art 9, when I was giving, in the presentation, an example of Henry Moore's great sculpture, the thirty foot long reclining figure, I said it was in Lincoln Center. And during the break one of the New Yorker students who takes great pride in being a New Yorker said, 'Well it must be in Rockefeller Center.' So, to accommodate him, I made an emendation that perhaps it's in Rockefeller Center but on checking, as I have checked for 45 years, it's still in Lincoln Center and is one of the really, it's the largest Henry Moore that's been made to date and it's extraordinary.
He always complained that the sculpture which was set in a big pool of water, that the water level was always wrong, that it had to be exactly right so that the reflection of the piece gave you the complete sculpture. It's in two major parts and one of the parts is like the exaggerated knees of the reclining woman but in such a configuration that, when you get the reflection in the water, it looks almost like a Palaeolithic tomahawk coming into play. With the rest of the figure, which does not have a head but has the characteristic twist of the neck form and then truncated and cut off - and this is a famous signature volume in Moore's work - and then the massive body coming to meet it. The two parts of that, in a very interesting way, are like two parts of a woman which, one sculptural presentation of it, would be a mother and child. Not just a Madonna type, holding the child, which Moore has done - and when he was first beginning in sculpture did - and then eventually got to where he would leave the cradled child out and put a space there and then have that space penetrate through the materia of the form - wood or stone, granite, sometimes even very rare materials. That hole, that space, was something that the viewer, in seeing the form with the space, their intuition, your seeing it, appreciating it, complements the sculpture and lays into the sculpture so that the sculpture now includes you seeing it.
So that it has prepared a dimensional presentation larger than four dimensions, beyond four dimensions. Not only a fifth dimension of intuition, of creative imagination of vision - visioning is dimension - but a sixth dimension which is the art form. The emergence of the form out of the five dimensional field, just as a form in nature will be out of a four dimensional field, not with time as the fourth dimension but time as the first dimension, space blossoms out of the first dimension of time. Time is a dynamic which blooms. It is a movement not from a place to a place but a continuity so that the periodicity of time, the units of time are delegated and they are delegated by the symbolic mind so that the symbolic mind, in making time signatures, is entering into a composing order so that time can be integral and integrated into the spatiality that has blossomed out of it.
And one of the easiest ways to say this, so that you can appreciate it: the occurrence of anything is a continual iterative emerging out of a field which is nature. Nature is a field, it is a Tao, and that Tao field has zero dimensions. And the first dimension is that there is a movement, there is a change. And that change is actually continuous when it comes out of nature and is only periodic, is only cyclic, after the symbolic mind enters into indexing that movement by its periodicity. There are periodicities so refined that the symbolic mind, initially in the natural cycle of integrals, cannot distinguish them, do not know that they are there. But later on, when the symbolic mind is completely transformed by science, now scientific instrumentation can make a periodicity, an iteration, so refined that one can now talk about time signatures like in femtochemistry.
Ahmed Zewail, the great Arabic American scientist at Caltech pioneered femtochemistry and found techniques to make films of chemical reactions, of molecular reactions, on a femtosecond scale. And that has been refined now to the attosecond scale. The femtosecond scale is a nano scale to nano; the atto is an even smaller, deeper, faster iteration and it's on the atomic level. And with attochemistry one can see the atomic dynamic movements of material. And there is a subatomic scale which is not been attained so far. Whatever exists as particality or as waves continuously re-emerges, nothing is statically simply there.
And so a learning, like we have, is to help us recalibrate to what is actually happening. A hundred years ago was the first time that it became apparent to a handful of human beings that the traditional time space was vanishing, that our capacity for a conscious understanding, a critical, a critiquable differential form of things and a historical kaleidoscopic scientific cosmic form of things. And one of the earliest phrasings of this was by a Frenchman named Henri Bergson. He was born the same year as John Dewey, 1859, and by 1884 he had come to understand. This is from the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he was Jewish and towards the end of his life became interested in Roman Catholicism among other things but was of Jewish heritage. Most of his works deal with the conception and explication of the notions of duration and movement. Duree is the continuity, the continuousness, and movement occurs in that duration, not as static concepts defined by the mind because the mind, in its definitions, in its identifications, in its referentiality, will always take like a snapshot, it will always make a frame, it will always have a picture, it will have a model, it will have a conception. Not as static concepts defined by the mind but as experience conceived by the intuition when it is freed from the limitations which the intellectual consciousness imposes upon the conceiver and the conceived.
So from the mid 1880s on, Bergson was teasing out that, while the standard picture of time and space seemed to be decomposing, vanishing, the space, the spaces, in between the periodicities, where the continuity is continued, were becoming more and more available to consciousness, not as a conception but as a creative intuition. And so, by the early 20th century, one of the great philosophical books of the 20th century was, in English translation, called Creative Evolution. That this is really and actually what occurs all the time. According to Bergson, the dynamic element of the duration, the flowing time, is the sole penetrator of real existence. Time abolishes the static world of the conscious mind and the concept of duration may be defined as the continual change which takes place in time. This change is not transcendentally motivated but results from an inner energy: the vital impulse, the elan vital, which derives from an unlimited source.
We know now that every particality, however subatomically small, emerges whole as itself. Its occurrence is an emergence whole, it has that unity and because all of the elements carry unity in themselves - the Chinese term for that is Te - they have the power to come together and make more complex unities. And that this is true on every order and every scale so that the universe as a whole is unified and that this is apparent to consciousness when the universe has been completely taken out of its integral and put into a complementarity with its differential. Now the cosmos is not only a whole but it is an infinite variety of wholensses. This is now a cosmos.
And this was emerging about this time, contemporaneous with The Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson was the discovery of x-rays, the discovery of the electron. I once did a whole series of 24 - 26 lectures about the 19th century and how at the beginning everything was very solid and at the end everything was electromagnetic, mysteriously going into x-rays, subatomic particles and who knew what. The fading away of the confidence of the certainty of the static thereness of the world was being replaced. This becomes extremely important when we come to someone like Max Ernst and Henry Moore, as we're doing now. In 1920 the pioneer French writer on surrealism, Andre Breton, wrote this,
The belief in an absolute time and space seems to be vanishing. Dada does not pretend to be modern, it regards submission to the laws of any given perspective as useless. Its nature preserves it from attaching itself, even in the slightest degree, to matter, or from letting itself be intoxicated by words [no spiels, no addictive magnetism to stuff has been the arbiter of what is real]. It is the marvelous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of our experience, of bringing them together and drawing a spark from their contact, of gathering within reach of our senses, abstract figures endowed with the same intensity, the same relief, as other figures and of disorienting us in our own memory by depriving us of a frame of reference - It is this faculty which for the present sustains Dada.
Ernst said that there are two themes in his work. One of them is the aggressive critique exemplified by Dada; the other is exemplified by surrealistic art. And that is that there is an exaltation of what he called, in the early 1920s, irrationality. That there is an aggressive critique of rationality, there is an exaltation, artistically, of irrationality. Now that was 90 years ago; we're understanding here, in our learning, that it isn't irrational. They were using a vocabulary that was conditioned by the several thousand years of the previous civilization, actually, by about 2,400 years. It was a language expressive mode that was preconditioned so permanently, so long, that very few people had any way of speaking other than that whereas what you're being given, what the presentations here are, is the results of over 50 years, half a century, of working with a new poetic. I was able to write originally in this way in the late 1950s. In fact, my volume of poems, San Francisco 60s Poetic, which will come out next year with an introduction by the great American poet David St. John, will show half a century of refining and using this new poetic, this new language.
It's interesting because the irrationality issue as opposed to the rationality confidence came into play, into focus, with the classical Greeks of the 400sBC, the fifth century BC. And the all-time classic book on it is by E.R. Dodds - Dodds, very interesting character - it's called The Greeks and the Irrational. And in this - this was published by University of California Press in Berkeley, the Sather Classical Lectures, one of the great classical lecture series in the world - about half way through, chapter six, Rationalism and Reaction in the Classical Age, has a quote from one of the greatest of all the philosophers of the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead, who with Bertrand Russell, right at the time that Bergson was bringing out his Creative Evolution in French, they were bringing out in English Principia Mathematica which shifted the foundations of logic and mathematics by showing that logic and mathematics are two different ways of looking at the same procedural order, the same serialization of the calibration of a structure - in fact all symbolic structures of order - that initially have types, that style, the way in which the unity will be maintained in a balance and that rationality is to be able to understand this.
The quote from Whitehead that Dodds uses for chapter six, 'The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.' It is not simply that they are revolutionary, or that there is a paradigm shift, those are concepts that are projected onto the phenomena of the event. The actual numinous field of the event horizon is that what we're dealing with here is a differential infinity that has come into creative play and comes into play not only with an initial quintessential fifth dimension of transformation but that that quintessential fifth dimension opens up its self into a complementarity of four dimensions that transformably complement the four dimensions of space time that are now designated as time space. And that when those two, the cycle of the four dimensions of the integral are complemented by the ecology of the four dimensions of the differential, that eight together come together in such a way that they open up and they release a hidden quintessentiality that was only intuited for the first time by a seer who saw it in their vision, now the cosmos opens up a quintessential ninth and tenth dimension.
And when all of that comes into play you get an eleven dimensional quality which string theory addresses in our generation, quite accurately. The loops, the minute iterative loops of string theory are not strings in loops but the occurrence of returnability, of returnabilty in an iteration that is open. They are not circles, they're not ellipses, they're loops which are all always open and it is the openness of that loop space that allows for freedom to be real in the cosmos. The great term for that, of course, that opening, epiclesis, is that what can laid into that completes the structure, completes its unity, and what is laid into it is not another thing but an energy that is pure in allowing for the return to cycle itself consciously through all the dimensions as well as to cycle itself through the natural integral. So that what is done is really done and it is always open to variants that will be as real as what is done.
This is wisdom and our presentations are a presentation of wisdom learning. At the beginning it's always just a few gathered around the campfire in the forest at night. And one of the great themes in Max Ernst's work is the theme of the city as the great type, almost an archetype, of civilisation and the forest, the enchanted, the mysterious forest which is almost an archetype, the primeval primordial forest of nature. And one of the most incredible descriptions of this was when he learned to write really well, James Fenimore Cooper, at the very beginning of the third of the five Leatherstocking novels, The Pathfinder. He has Hawkeye climb way up into a huge tree in upper New York State and from there he can look out and see that there's an unbroken forest as far as one can see and that the primordial America was an unbroken forest, only tapering off thousands of miles away into the great prairies and that this has a tremendous influence on Ernst.
I'm going to show you a couple of paintings. This one is done in 1928 by Max Ernst and is called After Me Silence (The Eye of Silence?). By 1928 it was apparent, especially to someone like a Max Ernst, who by now was 37 years old, speaking not only German as his native language, speaking French extremely well, also speaking English, that he understood that in just the year or so before, a finger of insight of mathematical genius had poked all the way through into the mysterious spaces out of which all iteration occurs. The finger of insight that occurred, occurred in 1926 by Erwin Schrodinger who published a book on what became wave theory that was one of the founding theories of quantum mechanics. Two people immediately appreciated what had been done. In Copenhagen, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. And two other people, like a pair of pairs, four people at the beginning immediately saw it, Bohr and Heisenberg because they were working closely with Schrodinger.
One of the other geniuses was the young J. Robert Oppenheimer, studying at Gottingen in Germany, and he went immediately to Zurich where Wolfgang Pauli was. And Oppenheimer and Pauli understood in a slightly different way as a pair, what Bohr and Heisenberg had understood. For Heisenberg it was an uncertainty principle: that the observer is a dimension so real that it obviates space and time from being calibrated together. And this splits apart then space and time from Einstein's theory of space time relativity. Wolfgang Pauli, deeper than Heisenberg, a better mathematician than Heisenberg, came up with what is called the Pauli Exclusion Principle: that it isn't that there are separated, that you can only measure one or the other. It's that our whole concept of measurement has an exclusion quality to it so that when we focus on space we focus on what has blossomed out of it; when we focus on time we focus on the continuum of it and that no particular pair of objects of emergence, those things that have emerged out of time, can be in the same place in that continuum of time so that the observer, or what is observed, either of those must be attended to.
Now, in physics it was emphasised that 'Alright, that means then that Heisenberg was right, the uncertainty principle, you can't have a measurement of the special dimensions object in time.' But the Pauli Exclusion Principle - more refined - indicated that there is a mysterious, almost mystical, possibility of focusing not on the thing observed but on the observer in that time. And what is excluded is that the object being observed cannot occupy that place that the observer occupies temporarily unless time itself, as a periodicity signature, is also transformed. It was artists like Ernst and Henry Moore and poets like Roca and Yeats who understood that if you transform time what comes out of it then is the field out of the infinite field out of which time itself has emerged.
This harkens back then to the very first book that Bergson wrote when he was 30 years old, 1889, in English translation it's called Time and Free Will: as long as we are in time there is a structuring limitation that is simply there all the time, literally all the time, but when time itself, as an emergent, is transformed not into a continuum that is dynamic but a field which is infinite, now you can have not only an observer and the thing observed in the same place but whatever has emerge together will always be synergised together. A pair of particles, that have emerged any time in the past 14 billion years, anywhere in the universe, if something happens to one of them the other one will reverberate, no matter where it is in the universe. If there is an electron, whose positron, somehow, is in intergalactic space, eight billion light years away, and we ionise something here, and that electron has its change in operation, its pair will reverberate to that. It's called entanglement.
So that what we're learning is how to learn to recalibrate not only everything but the way in which everything is operative and the way in which our participation is possible. What comes out of this is that we have such an enormous scale of real freedom that to the mind which is used to its identity and its shape, its limitations which protect it, now are not only permeable but they are evaporateable, they're penetrable all the time, everywhere, which means then that the private ego individuality is threatened by the very circumstances of freedom, by the very circumstances of transformation. And you get popular sayings, now as you did 2,400 years ago in Greece, 'A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of learning may erase you.' This is a problem and for Ernst, he symbolised himself as a spirit bird Called Loplop. And here it is, Loplop in a painting of Loplop, presenting himself presenting a painting of himself, Loplop. And this is not an infinite regression; it is that there is a reverberation of infinite variability but that the closest reverberation to it will have a harmonic tuneable occurrence with what we come in with, with what would be original. So that you get this kind of a strange language.
This is from a book called Beyond Painting by Max Ernst and his friends and this is a Hans Arp, a great German sculptor- artist from the 20s on through World War 2, introduction to Max Ernst's Natural History. And the Natural History is reproduced, it was made in Paris in 1926, Histoire Naturelle, and the introduction by Hans Arp, one of his great friends. Listen to the surrealist flow of the language seeking a poetic which is constantly creative and will not stay in a conceptual place,
This introduction contains the pseudo-introduction, the original, the variants of the original, the pseudo-original as well as the variants of the pseudo-original, the apocrypha, and the incorporation of all these texts in an original apocryphum with apocopated whiskers as well as 50 calcinated medals and 50 suns of 50 years because the medal rises, the medal of light rises 50 suns and 50 medals rise, the wheels turn, the wheels turn, 50 suns and 50 medals rise while the pseudo sun after 50 years of service retires into the calcinated wheels of light, the wheels turn no more, the wheels turn no more.
Let's take a break.

This is a painting by Max Ernst called The Inner Vision done in 1929 and I want to show you a painting done in 1934 and you can see how quickly he was maturing and changing. This second painting bears the title Blind Swimmer, (The Effect of a Touch). Touch, not just for texture, but for existentiality, for form. Someone congenitally blind can see with their fingers. It's very discursive. In really esoteric India Yoga, touch is the primordiality out of which, later, language and logic are able to come. The certainty is not from sight nor from sound but from touch. If you get interested in following that up the Sanskrit word for it is sphota and the great Surendranath Dasgupta, in his five volume History of Indian Philosophy, published by Cambridge University Press, well in the first volume, in the index, give you some introduction to that.
Dasgupta was the yogic mentor for Mircea Eliade until he, Eliade, helped himself to kisses of Dasguspta's daughter and was sent to the Himalayas to learn yogic manners where, in Rishikesh, they dismembered him atomically and he reassembled himself. And I believe at one time I showed two portraits of Mircea Eliade as a handsome young Romanian writer, existential radical, at 20 going to India, and Mircea Eliade at age 21 coming back from that with a full Himalayan beard, dark hair and eyes set deep into looking penetratively at what is going on around him. He was so energised by an ancient yogic, shamanic, form that his two books, one on shamanism, Archaic techniques of ecstasy, and the other, Yoga, The Theory of Integration, go together. Shamanism and Yoga go together. One is the Palaeolithic; the other is the origins of civilization. One week before he died Mircea Eliade's office at the University of Chicago caught fire and burnt all of his papers and all of his books and he was dead within a week of that. There are deep mysterious ways.
Ernst constantly is putting a self-symbol circle with a dotted overlay of a bird, a spirit bird, and that these are above the forest, the primeval, primordial forest that we talked about before the break, the unbroken forest. And another theme is the city. This is from the early 1930s and it is about the petrified city. It's about the incursion increasingly of the Nazis, the National Socialist Party taking over Germany and very, very quickly threatening and taking over Europe, The Petrified City. And in the next year, 1935, the entire city, with the jungle, the forest now become a jungle, and the city. And the occurrence by the mid 1930s of the actuality that the most advanced civilized form and the most primordial Palaeolithic forms were in the same composition. They had come so that instead of being disparate, instead of being almost antithetical, as they were for the classical Greeks, for instance, they were now - in the mid 1930s of the 20th century - brought together in such a way that they were not going to be separated again as long as one kept the old calibration. Man's civilization, in the old calibration, now is more vicious than the age of dinosaurs in nature so we must emerge, recalibrated, and not go back to that.
We were, before the break, looking at The Greeks and the Irrational, by the great E. R. Dodds. Dodds' autobiography is entitled Missing Persons. We read the quotation at the beginning of chapter 6 from Alfred North Whitehead, 'The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.' In chapter 7, Plato, the Irrational Soul and the Inherited Conglomerate has a quotation from al Ghazzali, one of the great Arab alchemical wizards, 'There is no hope in returning to a traditional faith after it has once been abandoned since the essential condition in the holder of a traditional faith is that he should not know he is a traditionalist.' Once a cultural ethos is expanded, it cannot be lived in. The experience flow in the field of nature has overflowed its banks and has flooded the area where the stream would have had its continuity in time and would have had its liminality in space. It is a flooding that now produces a swamp and not a stream of experience. One cannot go back without encountering a pestilential quality to the dynamic of life. That mythos now is disease prone and cannot be returned to.
The most difficult of all the qualities that the classical Greeks came up against was that as they began to tighten and tighten their mental structures of order, culminating in Aristotle and his lyceum Theophrastus, and it became literally the unparalleled snapshot static confidence builder that was time, and time again, used and utilised to found civilized orders of mentality that were unchangeable. Medieval scholasticism culminating in Saint-Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica is a case in point. Dodds says,
The last chapter described the decay of the inherited fabric of the beliefs which set in during the fifth century and some of its earlier results. I propose, here, to consider Plato's reaction to the situation thus created. The subject is important not only because of Plato's position in the history of European thought but because Plato perceived more clearly than anyone else the dangers inherent in the decay of an inherited conglomerate.
In the previous chapter he talked about how it was considered an inherited conglomerate by the great classicist Gilbert Murray. It isn't just a mythic tradition, it isn't just the cultural ethos but it is packed together in a conglomerate so that, now, the mind, in its symbolic structure, has completely encased the flow of experience into its correct ritual based, law abiding, code determining dictates and that this is now what takes place against the field of nature. But because existentials, because existence itself emerges iteratively billions of times per time unit, unbenounced to that frozen petrified order, the ritual qualities of action in life are like sand getting in the gears. Not just the gears but, now, beginning to cloud up the relationality of how reality really brings its unity out of the Tao field of nature. And increasingly what we get is a decayed spottiness and artificiality, especially when we do things exactly according to law, exactly according to code; the letter of the law kills. In our time the letter of the law is radioactive and kills, half-life of millions of years. It isn't just that we will die; the possibility of life will die for geologic time. This will not be.
Sages like al Ghazzali, philosophic geniuses like Alfred North Whitehead, the presentation by people like E. R. Dodds, encourage artists like Max Ernst and Henry Moore, like Ch'i Pai-Shih and Georgia O'Keeffe, like Hiroshige and Frank Lloyd Wright, like our interval exemplar Kandinsky, encourages great artists to do two things at the same time. And Ernst is extraordinary: he said the two things that go together is a critique, he called it the critique of rationality. It's a critique of petrified mentality at the same time as an exaltation not of irrationality, as it was called then, but an exaltation of the differential freedom of creativeness and that whatever forms come out are not just simply existentials, they are creatively imagined memorable aesthetic forms. They are prismatic, all art forms are prismatic, all persons are prismatic.
So that you can have not an alignment of a spectator for a work of art but that the prism of the art work and the prism of the person appreciator, together, make a pair of prisms that, now, can look microscopically or look telescopically at the complete range, not only the complete range of things but the complete range and array of the possibilities of all things. Whether they are particle, waves or invisible spaces between things or waves of frequency and energy, will have a liminality of the high calibration of where the energy wave goes and the base where it dips. And in those not limitations but liminals they're membranes out of which one can work with in very advanced kaleidoscopic ways. This is where science comes from.
As we were talking before the break, by the end the 1930s it was apparent almost everywhere that men and women were alive to what was actually happening: that some enormous sea change had taken place in human beings. And like al Ghazzali centuries ago made clear: once an alchemy has happened you can't go back to the untransformed, you must now work with the transformed. But it became apparent, and this is 60 years ago, 70 almost, it became apparent that the transformation was one of a continuous transform. It wasn't just that something had been transformed once and there it was, it's that our appreciation and understanding, now, was that the transform is a continuous transform which means that our participation, also, is in a continuous differentiation.
It isn't just that you had the freedom to have a moment of insight, it's now that insight has insight. The silence within the silence has an immediate effect of turning mental forms inside out. That's when it happens. In advanced yoga you can demonstrate this for this for yourself. It means that the inner space of the mind which would be where one centres the integral meaning, like of reading symbols, that has turned inside out so the membrane surface, the bubble surface of the inner, now become the membrane of the inner outer is where one would read the symbols, one would read the language. And because that bubble, that inner membrane, is expandable infinitely, the quality of reality becomes infinite freedom.
For someone like a Max Ernst, the discovery of this was exactly at the time that his European world fell apart. And we talked last week about the peculiarity when most of Europe was being put into German concentration camps, he was a German put into French concentration camps. Then he was sprung by a personal letter to the premier of France so that he could go down to the south of France and continue to build his house and live with Leonara Carrington and make works of art. And then they nabbed him again and brought him into another concentration camp and was just miraculously able to be sprung and put into one of these great creative intellectual halfway camps of people trying to get west. He said everyone wanted to go west, not just to Portugal but to America, to New York, to get to New York, that the gateway of freedom in the world was getting into New York harbour, getting into the city which, surprisingly and miraculously, he did. And as soon as he got to Elis Island in New York harbour he was arrested and put into a camp.
The photograph, the classic photograph of Ernst at the time is this stunned look on his face that everywhere that you expected that you were out you were back in it deeper. Until he discovered the American Southwest and driving in this beautiful car with his son Jimmy and with his erstwhile wife Peggy Guggenheim they drove in the American Southwest into an Arizona souvenir shop where he found Hopi Kachina dolls. And Max Ernst, with Hopi Kachina dolls, finally got a penetration, an insight into what he had been looking for all of his life. Ernst changed and he began to live in Sedona, Arizona like an Indian; building his own house and carrying with him all of the Kachina dolls that he had arrayed on Peggy Guggenheim's balcony in New York City and hundreds of them with a white hide fur piece and his white hair allowed to grow shaggy, he looked like the shamanic yogi that he was becoming. And in Arizona one found that Max Ernst now was transforming. The cry of the gull and a map of the new Europe of the amazing new person that had emerged.
This is from our book that we are using, the centennial, the 1991. Here is a painting from 1973 - he was born in 1891 so he was 82 years old - Some animals, one of which is illiterate [Some animals are illiterate]. He began to do works which are extraordinary and he made a calligraphy, calligraphic series of figures, that were like a new alphabet. They were postures of possibility. They are not just stick figures but they are energy figures. They are just pure artistic Matisse lines made into energy squiggles and they are at the very same time that Richard Feynman was making his Feynman Diagrams that have the same kind of squiggles in for energy processes, not just of transform, but of the way in which energy emerges originally from the undifferentiated field of visionary nature. Now instead of there being just a histoire naturelle there is a histoire mystique. And it is this quality that Henry Moore, as well, exemplifies for us.
We are going to look next week at Max Ernst's great little volume called Beyond Painting. It was published in 1948 in New-York City. Robert Motherwell did a whole series of publications for the Museum of Modern Art, Documents of Modern Art, and you can see on the frontispiece the yogic shaman Max Ernst whose eyes have looked beyond the tragedies of the 20th century and is beginning to look penetratively through to a new wildness. Wild in the sense that it is not tamed, it is untameable. It is infinitely, permanently free. What gets in the way is the fear of all mental structures, that they are going to be dissolved, they are going to have to be abandoned. And so eventually all the isms that there are will unite against this fruitlessly. Fruitlessly and also unnecessarily because the originality of limitation, of limit is not that it is a line limit, a defining identity line, a referential certainty line, but it's a liminality in a transition between all the possibilities of forms so that liminality is an indefinite variable space. And we know enough about processes, we can handle any amount of variabilities and work with it.
Our learning is recalibrating of the very foundations of what we have inherited that is now radioactive and impossible. One of the follow up volumes that Dodds did which was the lectures at Queens University in Belfast, Ireland and it is called Pagan and Christian in an age of anxiety and shows the way in which some aspects of religious experience, from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, from roughly 180 to roughly 320 AD, the origins when Christianity was not yet defined, when being a Christian meant being in dozens, if not scores, if not hundreds of different variants and sects and groups. Most of which were groups that were not really distinguishable from cultivated pagan sects, from traditional ancient pagan sects because in the liminality of common human experience they experienced each other as human. What began to knife-edge and make those divisions, lines drawn in codes and laws, were the mental structures that were imposed and stamped onto both the pagan cycle and the Christian cycle.
And the pagan cycle itself had so many variants and the Christian so man variants that you can't even talk about them. It's like saying the sport was baseball and you insist the Red Socks are a totally different team, a totally different game, from the Yankees. Not at all. What happened is, as the lines were drawn and incised and enforced by laws and codes and doctrines, the more that that happened, the more that the certainty of the identity safe within that, of the referentiality of being certain within that, the more that that occurred, the level of anxiety rose to an overwhelming quality in the ancient world, literally. The civilization drowned. By 300 AD it was impossible to go back, it was impossible to go forward so they tried to make the best of all possible worlds by taking the structure and forms of the old ethos, the old civilization, and putting the Christian content in. And so you get a Roman Empire whose official religion is Christianity. And in order to make sure that this was now the new phonebook, the new law code, the new internet for everyone, a great council , the first of many, was held at Nicaea, across the golden horn from Istanbul/Constantinople and, there, the beginnings of ironing everything out. And it was difficult because the Christian range was so wide.
In Rome there were many groups that would not admit The Gospel of Saint John or The Book or Revelation of Saint John, or The Epistle to the Hebrews into the Bible. And many things, like one of the texts of Peter that is now considered very much a later production and on the side, was included; the book of Enoch and all of its complications excluded from the Bible. Many other documents, the Shepherd of Hermas was originally in the Bible but now the lines were being drawn and redrawn and each time redrawn, incised more and more and it was punishable by death to go across those lines. And increasingly, as that shape took hold, the anxiety went from generation to generation and produced what the French call ennui, a malaise that eventually, like a suffocating mud, drained and covered and stopped the creative energy of the Western world. Then you had incursion increasingly of those outside of it - the northern Celts, the Huns, the southern tribes - anyone could come in [??1.10.43]. A barbarian named Alaric sacked the whole city of Rome because there was no spirit to defend something that had been drowned and then covered with mud and grew no new creative memorable life at all.
There is a famous photograph of the face of Marcus Aurelius, the most intellectual of all Roman emperors. When you get a detail and you look into the eyes of Marcus Aurelius they are like wooden sockets that just stare out and the deepest wisdom is to be dead, even unmoving, within the structure that one controls. This is an enormous challenge and in our time it is now not just a European Mediterranean empire but the ethos of the entire planet. Every single culture on the entire planet is radioactive. Not that it has to be jettisoned but that that the transform is one of a visionary field that revivifies all of the cultures again in terms of their participation in a tapestry of humanity. And of that visionary planetary culture will come the beginnings of new civilization, a new civilization whose personal prisms are aesthetic rather than political. An aesthetic space, an ecology of interpersonal resonance and not just a toleration at getting along of different kinds, different types, different individuals but that one can have one's resonance as a part of interesting creative sets of many different kinds of people and one gets a greater variety.
And, eventually, that gets prismatic so that it becomes kaleidoscopic. By the 2030s, a hundred year after what we have been concentrating on today, it's only a generation from now, the beautiful possibilities of human groups exemplifying conscious freedom will be gorgeous. It's at that time that one will be, and a hundred years after the event, one will begin to look at works like Max Ernst's in a new light, works like Henry Moore. One of the most interesting of Ernst's works was done in 1935, it was a sculpture, it's called Lunar Asparagus, we'll be growing a new kind of asparagus on the moon. Who knows? We're the parent generation to that generation but before we can teach that in such a way that they can grow up in it, we have to learn it from scratch. And that's what so difficult now: it's difficult to learn from scratch. I've been doing this for almost 50 years and I can tell you it is much farther along than you might suppose.
More next week.