Interval 6
Presented on: Saturday, June 30, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Interval 6 and the intervals are one of the most important aspects of our learning which distinguishes it from all exoteric educations that have ever been devised by man. It is a technique that is recognisable in wisdom schools around the planet. In his great Theory of Harmony, Arnold Schoenberg, right away when he is trying to introduce in this text book for future composers of music, a section on diatonic chords and spacing the chords, gives us a little bit of an insight. He says the individual tones of the scale - do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti - the individual tones of the scale may act as roots, that is each may serve as the lowest tone of a triad. Why would there be a triad? Each note is a tone but is accompanied by an overtone that can only be heard with attention and, when it does, the overtone will enrich the tone itself 'do'. It's like Segovia on a guitar who will hold the fret in such a way that he vibrates it a little bit so that each note has that crystal clarity tang to it, characteristic of a Segovia performance etcetera.
But Schoenberg points out that in addition to the tone and the overtone there is a second overtone that is not heard yet is present subconsciously. So that when he is giving the musical scale he puts three, a triad, of whole notes together for each tone. Now one of the odd things is if you look at the way music is written: it's written on a five line bar and those five lines exemplify, symbolically, the five dimension of creative art making. So that the work of art that emerges, out of that five dimensional field, will be six dimensional forms. They will not be existential forms because they are not phenomenal. Six dimensional forms are noumenal. And so a work of art, a spiritual person, is a noumenal prismatic jewel of a form and not at all limited to existentiality which means it's not limited to the integral cycle of structures of thought.
It's all the rage, now, to think that something is really advanced and new because it's integral, it's interdisciplinary. All of that has been prosaic for thousands of years, it is not the case at all. The differential resonances of what is existential, of what is integralled by the mind. And we should not even just say it's the mind because limited to the integral cycle of nature, of existentiality, of experience, of an order, a structure of thought that is phenomenally referential, is phenomenal in its objectivity itself. It is rooted in the phenomenality of the practical rituals, the actions, the snippets, the sequences, the steps that one does, how we do this. So that the mind, now, orders it and says 'These things, these actions, this experience that comes out of it and this mental structure that orders it and integrals it, all of that is phenomenal.'
Consciousness is not phenomenal; it is the first excursion in a fifth dimension. In alchemy it's called quintessential, fifth business, fifth essential. It's not limited to time, it's not limited to space. It has a flexible expansion especially into possibility, it isn't' just wider or higher or deeper, it has more possibilities and so it's called differential not integral. So, conscious vision is a quintessential dimension that is always transformative when it comes into play and the field of consciousness, as a differential field, when it comes into play, against the field of nature, nature and consciousness accept each other in a very, very special way: they begin creating now a complexity that exceeds the previous limitations. So now the things that come into existence, it used to be called, thousands of years ago, they are not just things now, they are magical things. They are transcendent in their existence not because something has been added to them but because they have emerged out of a complex field of consciousness and nature together and so their very emergence is into magical existentiality and to transcendental activity.
And, where before you were limited by the karma of the actions, you were limited by the boundaries, by the limitations, by the outlines, by the shape, by the form, now the resonances are a part of that shape, now the possibilities of sets of resonances, like a musical scale, can introduce something that is really artistic: that the visionary of resonances can be made into a scalar of a harmonic. Thus a theory of harmony is a visionary consciousness of art forms and it applies not only to music, it applies to all art, it applies to the art of person making. And that's why we call someone spiritual, because their resonances are extended, in such a way, that one can come to appreciate the set of their resonances in their harmony, for that person. Now we say, of that person, 'They're a spiritual person'. They're not limited by time, they're not limited by space.
Of all the people who lived in the late 1500s, the early 1600s, one of the most real people, who didn't have an existential life of that time, Don Quixote, is spiritually a person who is real forever, as real as Shakespeare who did live at the time, as real as Cervantes who wrote don Quixote, who lived at that time. And so indelible is the quintessential stain of realisation that, in Spain one of the greatest existentialist philosophers around the turn of the 20th century, Don Miguel de Unamuno, the great Spanish existential philosopher - who was also a writer, who also wrote some quixotesque material - and in one of his exemplary novels - because Cervantes wrote exemplary novels, short little novelettes as well as Don Quixote.
One of Unamuno's short exemplary novels ends and then there's a coda where the characters come in and demand of Unamuno, the writer, that he write more: he has created them, he is responsible for their life, their noumenous life deserves to have more creativity and extensions so they will not just be limited to that one story. And Unamuno puts in the dialogue that he has with his own creations, arguing, 'He has the right not to write. No you don't, you created us now we are a part of reality as if we were existential, as if we already had our own minds and you would be committing murder by not writing further adventures for us.'
It was about this time that one of the most famous Englishmen of all time did not live and yet was there: Sherlock Holmes. There are more biographies and discussions of Sherlock Holmes than almost anybody in Edwardian London. Was he existential? No. Was he noumenal? Yes. And so the spiritual person can be a creative imaginative being as well. And by introducing the creative imaginative remembering quintessential aspect of ourselves, we too now become noumenal. We are born phenomenal we are rebirthed noumenal. So that the rebirthing is not, 'Oh well, I'm born again, another existential, I have a second chance at existentiality.' That is a reductive misunderstanding and it is a sign of a dead end mind, of an ego dominated experience and of a ritual comported dead endedness existentially. And to settle for that is actually a form of suicide. Not to accept that is not an example of revolt but a step towards freedom.
Now, one of the very interesting things: Schoenberg was an extremely close friend of Wassily Kandinsky and we're taking for our interval, as we always do, the spiritual classic - sometimes the Tao Te Ching, sometimes the Bhagavad Ghita etcetera - now we're taking Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. A little booklet in this translation; it hardly goes to page 57. Came out in 1912 but has all the earmarks of one of the great friendships of art. Schoenberg and Kandinsky's letters to each other are preserved and translated here and the first letter from Kandinsky to Schoenberg is 18th of January 1911. In other words, exactly at this poignancy, in January 1911, you begin to get a special churning because when two spiritual person come together, because they are both prismatic, because they are both lenses - six dimensional lenses - they comport and relate to each other in a very surprising, astonishing way.
Each one by themselves would be a prism, would be a lens, but when the two are together now you have two lenses, you have the ability to have a telescope or you have the ability to have a microscope. Now the range is open because one can be microscopic more and more and more, one can be telescopic more and more and more, now two spiritual persons together, two artists together, begin forming a diffractive multidimensional spectrum that the word for it in English is kaleidoscopic. So, what emerges out of the theory, the vision, the differential conscious field, is the spiritual person, is the work of art. What emerges out of two or more, gathered together - 'In my name, I will be there' - is a kaleidoscopic consciousness and that is what history is. It is a seven dimensional kaleidoscopic conscious flow that dwarfs the four dimensional flow of experience, which is mythic. It's all about stories with images, with feeling tones and that is myth.
And so history doesn't just negate myth but it matures myth by pulling the mythic flow through a square of attention that has four sides, it has four phases and that square of attention, now, has as its base the symbolic structure of thought: symbols. For its second side it has the phase of vision, differential consciousness, the realm where the field of theoria, contemplation, theory. Theory does not take place in the mind, theory takes place in a space of consciousness in the field of vision. It's only the egotistical closed mind that thinks that it thinks of theories; it doesn't think of theories ever. It thinks of the best order that it can come to, integrally, but a theory is not an integral phenomenon, it's an experimental noumenal take on possibilities. So, now, one is not limited to experience, one can introduce an indefinite array of experiment that enriches experience beyond its original capacities, which were already huge, now, they're infinite, not just huger, infinite.
So that our learning is something that is provocative, it is challenging, it dwarfs revolutions, it dwarfs renaissances and reformations and best, initially, is called a recalibration, a recalibration of everything. One of the deepest qualities that's there in Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art is section 7 about theory. Here's a few words in translation, 'Because of the very nature of modern structure there has never been a time when it was more difficult than it is today to formulate a complete theory or to construct a pictorial foundation.' He's talking about a theory of art but he's also talking about a theory of the artist, the person making the art, the art of the person who now can make a work of art because a work of art cannot emerge out of the individuality of an integral limited order structure of symbolic thought, it's impossible, it cannot emerge. It doesn't have enough dimensions, it doesn't matter how powerful that individual is it's only an individual, there's only four dimensions.
It's like the saying, classically, in the new testament, Jesus says 'Of all the men that have been born on this planet John the Baptist is the best but the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he' because the kingdom of heaven has more dimensions than space time. And even a baby, with five dimensions, has already transcended not just this world not just this social realm and not just the individuality of mentality and not just the existentially practical steps in this world, but already he is on the way to emerging as a spiritual person. And that that spiritual person emerges out of a visionary conscious field that has not only creative imagination but it has the function of remembering. And remembering is extremely potent because it means, now, that you're not based on a cognition of existentiality, ordered by an integral structure of thought, rather than cognition you have recognition.
And the recognition will always be in a quintessential five dimensional field and will always find a way to register not in the integral ordered mentality of symbolic thought will register in the six dimensional prismatic form who, now, is a person who has a mind, now it's a mind. Before, it was a brain, before it was a cognition network, very complex, no doubt, but it was not a mind because a mind has more dimensions, is able to look back upon its own structure and recognise it. And experiment with it. How else are you going to have a neurobiology? You have to be able to reflect back upon oneself. This introduces the need for the six dimensional art of the spirit person to be active, in a new flow of kaleidoscopic consciousness, not limited just to natural experience, so that the possibilities can be investigated of the theories.
And so historical consciousness expands the theoretical, expands the visionary and out of that will come the forms of science. Now what has occurred are forms that have an indefinite analytic that is possible with them. One can understand, analytically, to any degree that you would like to understand, including the disappearing into nothing and the disappearing into infinity. So that, in a logical mental order of a four dimensional integral structure, you can introduce a zero and an infinity and they will operate as the very same logical possibility within that particular logic. There'll be no way to distinguish between zero and infinity. So that, when you have something that is transcendentally a universal language, like higher mathematics, like a calculus, it is an infinitesimal calculus said sir Isaac Newton. It is an infinite calculus said Gottfried Leibniz, the two creators of calculus but both used a slightly different notation. We use Newton's original vision over Leibniz's but we use Leibniz's terminology.
Newton's original calculus is based on a transform of mathematics, largely English and German and French at the time but Leibniz's is a development out of the very first translation of the I Ching into European language. And Leibniz, when he was 20, visiting one of the most spectacularly individual and odd philosophers of all time, Spinoza, in the Netherlands, Spinoza - though Jewish was exiled from the Jewish community and fro the Christian community and because he was a philosophic mystic - but he had access to Dutch traders that were trading in Indonesia, trading in Japan, trading on the edges of china. And some Jesuits translated the I Ching in the 1630s into Latin and a copy of that ended up in the Amsterdam of Spinoza when young Leibniz was visiting him. And Leibniz developed, out of the yin yang, out of the structure of the I Ching he developed his calculus.
Newton called them fluxions because there are any number of changes that are there but Leibniz, because the changes was the beginning of it, he called it infinitesimal calculus because between zero and one there are an infinity of midpoints. Why? Because the infinity of the midpoints are a harmonic set of resonances of the zero. Tao is so resonant that it has an infinite set of resonances so that its harmonic and its set, though infinite, are precisely and exactly zero, eternally. Now, this is mysterious unless one just lets the flow follow it but the flow of experience cannot follow this, its concern is to get to the mind and have a dharma, a truth, but with more than five dimensions what you have is, traditionally, called the high dharma. Now you have infinite possibilities including not the existentiality but the noumenality of emptiness. Hence the Zen koan 'Emptiness is form, form is emptiness.' And that form, for emptiness, is the cosmos itself which is an infinite eternality.
So that one has a very interesting kind of a play, here, at a crucial time in world history: by about 1909, a series of events and persons had matured themselves to the point to where a kaleidoscopic historical consciousness was glowing incandescently and by the time of about 1912 it had already achieved a penetration, a poking through the limited fabric of what was there before. And, by poking through it, it let out the steam of the previous limited form and, because the world was not ready for it, by 1914 it entered into World War I, savagely, because it couldn't cope with the punctured reality that was now shattered of what they had believed before.
All of this comes to play in the book that Kandinsky wrote, Point and Line to Plane, to be a companion to Concerning the Spiritual in Art. And the reason why these two books are extremely important is that they were written, the first, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, was written for Kandinsky's own school in Munich Germany. He was originally Russian, born in Moscow but raised in Odessa, became a law professor and a Juris Doctor, a JD. And ,one day, when he was almost 30 years old, he went to an art exhibit of impressionists and he was struck by a painting by Monet called Haystacks because Haystacks is actually a series of paintings of the same haystack at different time of the day, by one of the greatest visionary artists of all time, Claude Monet, who was generating, in his series of Haystacks, the kaleidoscopic conscious historical flow, now, that we're dealing, here, with something major: 'I will provide you with my lens and, if you will bring your lens to play with mine, together we can make a telescope and a microscope.'
Now the work of art stands in lieu of the other person and, so, a work of art can function as if it were a real person, like a Don Quixote, for as long as that work of art not exists but continues to be noumenally in its prismatic presence. And so as we mature and we bring ourselves into play with more and more works of art more and more kaleidoscopic facets of our own possibilities developed and come into play. And, after several thousand new telescopic and microscopic lensing experiences, a human being, now, becomes, royally, a kaleidoscope of rainbows, not just a rainbow or a double rainbow but a play of rainbows. So that one begins, now, to have the kinds of paintings and forms that you begin to see in Kandinsky but it also goes back, in recognition, as deep as when Homo sapiens, like ourselves, first were able to achieve a spiritual presence of art.
In 1912, in addition to Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he wrote a series of illustrations and poems called Klänge, and it's translated here, Yale University press by Elizabeth Napier, sounds. The first, the Yale edition is just black and white, this is a Norwegian edition that has all the colour and you can see the first illustration, here, actually is very similar in colour tone to a Hiroshige print that was copied by van Gogh. But what is astounding is that the second colour is of this, almost the ultimate speed of a running horse, a black horse. And someone who is faceted so that the entire heritage of the planet is alive in them is able to tell you this black stallion was the symbol of the artist who painted Lascaux 20,000 years ago.
Now, when you come into Lascaux, on the left, the very first key to the tonic of the scale of all the Palaeolithic art drawings and paintings of Lascaux is a black horses head, a black stallion's head. And right at the end of the long first corridor there is a stalactite hanging down, like a tooth, and that black horse, that black stallion, is painted there again because that's the turning point where at Lascaux. You've gone down this main route, paying attention to the left side, now, you do a metanoia, you do a turning within yourself and you come back and on the other side, on the right side, you begin to get a fantastic kaleidoscopic differentiation. And one of the panels in Lascaux, there, they're called the Chinese horses: an overlay play, a whole herd of horses of different colours that are literally playing and showing the mobility and the power of what a horse is like wild in nature. And this leads you back then to the second avenue of Lascaux.
Here's Kandinsky, by 1911, able to get back in recognition in painting, back to the Palaeolithic greatness of 20,000 BC. All of this came because he was trying to have an art school and by ten years later, by 1922, he joined forces with one of the most powerful art schools that has ever appeared on the planet: the Bauhaus. And part of the Bauhaus was to have new kinds of texts books and Point and Line to Plane was a text book for the Bauhaus. There were 14 books and the number two book in the series of books on the Bauhaus is by Kandinsky's good friend Paul Klee and it's called Pedagogical Sketchbook and right away, first thing on the first page of the second Bauhaus book ... one point one 'An active line on a walk, moving freely without goal, a walk for a walk's sake, the mobility agent is a point shifting its position forward.'
And if you remember that Nature 1, that begins our learning, the very first project that we had was to take a random walk from wherever you live, out and around about, in any way that you want, and come back home and then to repeat that every week. So that at the end of three weeks you will have had three random walks that now are stackable because the second random walk was indexed by a natural element - fire, water, earth, air, aether, whatever - and the third walk was indexed by a pair, by two, so that now you have a random walk that is stackable with a random walk of one element, determined as a thread through it, and the second a random walk by a pair of threads through it. Now, there's a very huge mathematical operation behind this.
The one difference is called a Gaussian transform, named for gauss who developed this. If you keep track of just one more increment for a pattern one now has the ability to have a very interesting analytic eventually come out of that. If you can keep track of a pairedness, now, you have the ability to keep track of not just one more element but of a tuned element, a resonance recorder. And ,with that, our learning progressed so that, by the time you were in nature 4, you realised that the pair of books we were using, Thoreau and the I Ching, were the tuneable pair for the first month of the first phase of the first year of our learning. All of this has been worked out for over 40 years so that it's as refined as a set of symphonies. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to our presentation which bears the designation of Interval 6 which indicates that we have gone through six phases, now, and each of those phases is a season of about three months, of twelve presentations, that occur with a very special kind of geometry. We have three sets of four, to make the twelve, and in the four we have a pair of pairs that are operating so that we have a pair of pairs that is presented in three different resonances to make a phase. That particular geometry is the most easy geometric to be able to be transformed into a trigonometric. In a trigonometric it is the ratioing relationing functions that count and not just the geometry of the lines and the angles. And once one has achieved a phenomenal form of geometricity in the integralling of the symbolic mind, and coupled with that the trigonometric relational functioning, the phenomenal world has reached its fullness, its completeness and is ready, is ripe for a transform out of phenomenality into noumenality.
And the first indication that there is a sense of the impending discovery of the noumenal is that there begins to be, in the phenomenal geometricity, a sense of peculiarness and, in the sense of the trigonometric functioning relation, a sense of irony. When philosophic genius Søren Kierkegaard was a young man in university his university degree book was called The Sense of Irony in Socrates. It's the beginnings of not just an existential wisdom but of an ability to go beyond the existential integral, into realms that now involve an aesthetic space and not just a phenomenal space, that involve a visionary relationality of possibility and not just a functional relationship. Now, visionary consciousness becomes, as we have been presenting, a field of differentiality which is a complement to the field of nature but where the field of nature has a zero designation, it's a Tao, but is able to emerge anything and everything as onenesses so that what distinguishes existentiality is the emergence into existence and it comes into existence as a one, a oneness, always.
So that every single thing is a single thing and when they come together those single things add up to single things and so the quality of a binary to express phenomenality is zero and one. And you can write very complex computer programs with zero and one and they are phenomenally and functionally accurate and complete: they do not transcend, they do not have a sense of irony and they cannot deepen irony into paradox. So that to tell the most sophisticated computer in the world a Zen koan you will get no response because, in the field of visionary differential consciousness, the binary that you're working with is no longer zero and one, it's zero and infinity. And to the logical mind that is strictly phenomenal, is strictly logical in terms of the integral, there is no way for them to distinguish between zero and infinity and so the structure of symbolic thought perceives it as empty, all of it, or perceives it as full, all of it.
And so one gets the University of Chicago 'Is a glass half full of water, is it half empty or is it half full?' It becomes a true Zen koan because it is differentially empty and infinite in its possibilities, all the time. Artists emerge out of that quintessential five dimensional field of visionary consciousness and what they generate, out of their six dimensional prismatic noumenal form, is a kaleidoscopic seven dimensional flow that deepens experience with experiment into possibilities and worlds without end. And this is what history is. Where experience is a stream of four dimensional - language and feeling and images flowing through the field of nature, or it can flow through the field of consciousness and begin to have a sense of otherness, a sense of recognition and not just cognition - now, when visionary consciousness, as a field, has the flow of kaleidoscopic conscious history through it, now, all of a sudden there is a direct relationality between the noumenal spiritual person and the noumenal form of the cosmos in its infinitude.
Now, eternity occurs, immediately, spontaneously, everywhere. In our Interval 6 we step aside from using pairs, all through, like tuning forks that, every four presentations every month we take a new pair of interesting people, a new pair of books, but in the intervals we take them one at a time so that the four intervals of an annual cycle will make up a very interesting relationality, not a square of attention, like a frame of reference, but will make a diamond of insight. And, by having a two year, four and four, eight phase double cycle, a rainbow infinity sign occurs because both of those prismatic qualities are able to come together and you get the paired lenses of the telescopic and the microscopic. And, now, the entire range exceeds all geometries, all trigonometries, all scalars, like al musical scale. And it was about the time we're looking at here, the period from 1909 roughly until the early 1930s, in that 20-22 year period, the whole phenomenal confidence of limitation was not only penetrated but, literally, evaporated away.
By 1932, based on the purely visionary mathematics of P. A. M. Dirac, Carl Anderson, here at Caltech, was able to detect the negative electron: the positron, which was predicted. That there is not only an electron, that knows carries the negative pole of the electricity, of the electro energy, but that it relates, in some functional way, to the photon which is the carrier of electromagnetic energy, both for the proton and for the electron and that there is such a thing as a negative electron. Therefore there's an antiproton, there's matter just as real that is completely antithetical to the matter that we know: contraterrene matter. And not only that but can be raised three times to a third level: the electron becomes more powerful in its energy wakingness and becomes a muon and then becomes super heavy, super energetic and powerful and weighty and becomes a Tao particle.
Now, if the positron deepens and becomes a negative muon, becomes a negative Tao and then all of a sudden you have a six fold scalar that is brought together and one understands that this is only the array, the spectrum, of a single particle. And that all the particles have a similar series of arrays and that when they are stacked together one gets a playful cosmos: it creates spontaneously, all the time, even outside of time, even before time, even after time. So that when Kandinsky is publishing his 1911 book of poems and his illustrations at the same time, putting poetry and illustrations together, this is a sample of one of his transcendental poems called adventure,
Once I visited a summer colony where no none lived. All the houses were neat and white and had green shutters that were tightly shut. In the middle of this summer colony was a green square overgrown with grass. In the middle of this square stood a very old church with a tall belfry with a pointed roof. The big clock ran but didn't strike. At the foot of this belfry stood a red cow with a very fat belly. It stood there without moving and chewed sleepily. Every time the minute hand of the clock pointed to a quarter, a half or a full hour, the cow roared 'Oh don't be so alarmed!' Then it went back to chewing again.
Klänge. Sounds. The translation published by Yale university here in 1981 was the first time it was ever translated into English. Sometimes it takes 70 years for someone to get it. As we showed, one of the most potent illustrations in Klänge is this wind rushing black stallion and, if you consult the first half of the presentation today on the DVD or the audio, you will remember that the black stallion is the great artist 20,000 years ago who painted Lascaux. And three places in Lascaux put his portrait of the black stallion's head: on the left at the beginning, on the very end of the stalactite that ends the concourse of the grand hall and brings you back and then into the side hall where there is a test of death. So that Kandinsky was able to go back, recognition-wise, 20,000 years into the very heights of Palaeolithic art because he was going back to the spontaneous emergent origins, not back in time but back into a seven dimensional historical remembrance.
And, another illustration which, immediately, does not evoke something to you but, because your presenter has a planetary culture, infinitely deep, you will find this colour scheme and this presentation on the cave art in the middle of the Gobi desert at Dunhuang. That a thousand years ago the art that had developed from Ajanta caves in India had moved, with the Mahayana, into central Asia and in the Dunhuang oasis, where all of the Gobi desert silk road routes, jade routes - the silk road runs on the northern part of the Gobi, what I call the jade road was the southern, and they met - all of these met at Dunhuang, after which one went through Lanzhou and you were at the beginnings of classical China; Lanzhou is only a short couple of days from Chang'an. There, in the cave art of Dunhuang - and I will bring some next week to show you - you will find the same ultimate [speed?58.50] of suspended colours and forms and if you take a look at Matisse's work you'll find the same thing, about the same time.
We're not limited by space and time or by gravity, we are permeated and we are penetrable into mysteries of infinity and emptiness, spontaneously, whenever we are mature enough to be real. This quality of Klänge, of Sounds, was matched by Concerning the Spiritual in Art coming out in 1912. And right at this time and trying to bring together a quality of a school, that would mature people into art so that they would find their own spirit person released and their own creative imaginative capacities able to field themselves with remembering, because the process of creative imagining and the process of remembering are both functions of the visionary field of consciousness. He brought out, also, an anthology called The Blue Rider and all of the friends of Kandinsky and his people - the German edition of The Blue Rider which is reprinted here has become even in a recent, this is [1:00:39 Presto Verlag] out of Munchen 1982, already several hundreds of dollars. The English translation of Der Blau Rider is available and Presto also has done that so one could find more inexpensively The Blue Rider.
In The Blue Rider one has a very interesting thing: it's not only the black stallion iconographic ancient Palaeolithic symbol remembered in a planetary scale but there was a famous Rembrandt painting called the polish rider. A noble man, not a knight in armour but a knight like man in his nobility, riding and for many artists at the time this was an invitation, a sign to re-emerge in the nobility of reality, not in the nobility of a social pecking order, not in the nobility of the power of the sword and the might of the kingdom and the overwhelming intensity of the empire but the prismatic release so that the noble rider now is able to ride in the landscape of vision and the landscape of a mysterious nature and to find himself always at home in the cosmos.
This is a completely different realm and you find in Kandinsky, about this time, the development of what became - in art history it's called abstract art, not objective art - the ability to, as he says, this is the 1947 translation, a little bit different from the Dover, this edition published in New York Documents of Modern Art, has a beautiful introduction by Nina, Madame Kandinsky, who was still alive at that time. Let's come back to what he says about theory, 'Because of the very nature of modern structure,' which means the projection of an integral mental symbolic thought structure which is limited, it is only phenomenal, it is not noumenal, it is only capable of a geometry and a trigonometry, it is not capable yet of a calculus which takes a visionary transform, it takes an art of mathematic .And you cannot have that, no matter how sophisticated your arithmetic is, you cannot count your way when there is an infinitesimal infinitude between zero and one. Now, probability and possibility and wonder is a concomitant of what you're dealing with,
Because of the very nature of modern structure there never has been a time when it has been more difficult than it is today to formulate a complete theory or to construct a pictorial formalism. All attempts to do so have had the same result. Painting today is in a different position. The emancipation from dependence on nature is only just beginning, until now colour and form were used as inner agents.
The mentality will give you the outline for your colouring book and the palette that's available, that you can purchase, you will colour it in or colour outside the lines. And if you begin to colour outside the lines you may not need the lines and it may be that commercial colours are not enough: you may mix your own. And who knows, now, the infinitude of possibilities released, it's like an explosion of creativity.
The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea. Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul so that he can weigh colours in his own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation.
Ten years later, when Kandinsky was at the Bauhaus, not only did he have a prismatic relationship with his good friend Paul Klee who was there. And I brought several of Klee's volumes of note books here - the first volume is The Thinking Eye, volume two is The Nature of Nature - and a book, here, on Klee at the Bauhaus as well as a book on Kandinsky at the Bauhaus. It was interesting because it wasn't just Klee and Kandinsky, but there was a whole spectrum: there were about 13 or 14 creative geniuses from all different places, all different arts; all brought together. And the maestro who was organising this was named Walter Gropius, one of the great architects of the 20th century. One of his most recognisable buildings, now, caused a big sensation when it was built in New York, was the Pan Am building.
But Gropius, who was of a noble family, had been an officer in World War I. The same German army that, in the trench warfare Max Ernst who we took for four presentations, was there and died and said, when he came back, 'Max Ernst had to re-emerge again into life again.' The same thing happened with Gropius except that Gropius was conscientious that one is not just going to be in a Dada movement, one is not just going to be with a group of surrealists, he wanted to find some way that the shredding carnage of World War I would never happen again. And so he wanted to take the power of human society out of the hands of political forms and put them into aesthetic forms. And, in the Bauhaus, he was very clear: in 1919 when he was first beginning to make sure that everyone understood just what this was going to amount to, he purposefully began - because inflation in Germany was taking away the value of money - he began selling family precious objects, a bust of napoleon brought quite a lot of money at the time.
And he put it together and formed the Bauhaus and what he thought, as a cultivated German, would be the artistic cultural capital of this kind of Germany: in Weimar, because of Goethe being there at the beginning of the 19th century, exactly 100 years before him, he thought there would still be this heritage there. But, without a Goethe, Weimar reverted back to a very selfish little village like community that resented some kind of a school who knows what they're going to be doing, 'Look at these people, they're unorthodox. In fact they're letting almost anyone in; they're letting in just ordinary people, raggedy soldiers from the German trenches of World War I, coming to study sculpture, to study music, to study architecture. And there are hundreds of them and we don't know what they're up to.'
And so a kind of a hippy like movement was attached to the Bauhaus and slowly it occurred to people that they were even worse: that they were not raggedy edged people that they were engendering a very superior outlook and relating to each other in a creative aesthetic way that had nothing to do with social pecking orders. It was a whole community of several hundreds of these people and not only that, more and more great artists were coming to join them in this development. And so, Weimar voted, by 1924, 'Let's get them out, we don't want them. They're even worse. We can complain about people who are inferior but we're afraid of people who are perhaps superior.' And so they had to move the Bauhaus to Dessau and after a while the same thing happened there, they had to move the Bauhaus finally to Berlin and that lasted just a few months because the Nazis said, 'We're the superior people on the basis of political might and military force and you're going to have to leave.'
And the person who carried the major part of the Bauhaus with him to America was Mies van der Rohe. And Mies, who spoke very little English - in fact for years he had to give talks with a translator, interpreter - but Mies was a very, very sophisticated and thus private individual, not interchanging with the normal society pecking order. He had this very elegant quality of remaining in his hotel room, where he would rent a beautiful room in one of the finest hotels that you could have and he would have his boxes of cigars and his martini mixing, his fastidious drawing board and architectural practice. And when he went into making architecture it was the cleanest simplest Zen-like purity and the only architect he wanted to meet was Frank Lloyd Wright. When they let Frank Lloyd Wright know that Mies van der Rohe was now in Chicago he wanted to come up and see him in Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Wright's reply was, 'I should think so.'
And when he was asked to introduce Mies van der Rohe to what was, in Chicago at the time, called the Armour Institute - Armour's big meat packing, Chicago's railroad stockyard centre of the world. My family moved to Illinois when it was a territory, in the revolutionary war, and always, for our generations, the city is not New York, it's Chicago, that's where you go, the city of the big shoulders. The only thing beyond Chicago is just the gateway to the west, St Louis and it's just a gateway but Chicago's the place, midway between the Atlantic and Europe and the pacific and there on out. And so Chicago had this very interesting thing. The Armour Institute joined with the Louis Institute and became the Illinois institute of Technology and it was Mies van der Rohe who designed the new campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in South Side.
But in order to be introduced to the Armour Institute initially Mies called upon Frank Lloyd Wright to do the introduction and Wright, who was disliked immensely by all these inferior architects, jealous - in a film one time Philip Johnson said, 'Well of course all of us hated him. He could do the impossible over and over again. Of course we hated him, we're jealous.' He said this about Wright's Johnson Wax building, he said, 'As soon as you enter into that building,' he said, 'you realise that you've been a construction person, this is an architect. Some grandest space imaginable and it's just for people to work in.' He almost wept - so Wright introduced Mies van der Rohe to the Chicago cognoscenti who had, over decades, dismissed Wright over and over again. And Wright said, 'Mies is like myself, he's not one of you but you're lucky to have him.' And they say when he left the stage he muttered 'God knows you will need it.'
And Mies, of course, raised the Illinois Institute of Technology and its architecture to one of the grand sites of a transformational. When I was a boy, even though living in Michigan, Chicago was always our city and I would be taken there and, especially as a child, you were taken to the museums and the Shedd Aquarium along Lake Shore Drive. And immediately noticeable were 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive, the twin apartment towers that Mies van der Rohe made that were just unmistakeable, not just that they were geometrically pure but they were architecturally resonant: you really got it, these buildings have a charisma, they stand out, you can't miss them, these are distinctive buildings. And even into 21st century Chicago, those Lake Shore towers still maintain that kind of a pristine presencing.
As Louis Sullivan reminded Frank Lloyd Wright, he said, 'Behind every building you see that is architecture is an architect you don't see until you experience the building.' And when you put your aesthetic experience into that building the building now receives it like an epiclesis and comes alive for you and your liveliness has that resonance of the creativity that went into making that architecture, into making that work. One of the grandest experiences is for someone to go to the Marin County Civic Centre, one of the last works that Wright designed. And he designed it to be experienced at the pace of walking, around two miles an hour. You can look at photographs of it and 'Ooh' and 'Ah' but, as soon as you begin walking through it, the architecture lifts itself out of geometry, out of trigonometry, RECORDING ENDS AT 1.17.30