I've taken the summer off from blogging, but I have been doing some painting. Click on My Paintings on the left to see Bora Bora.
Also, Bruce Freedman has a new painting - Patterns of Growth.
Art
August 07, 2010
May 05, 2010
April 28, 2010
The Stop - T.S. Eliot
I wish I had come across this verse by Eliot before I wrote my last post on Appelbaum's The Stop, it would have made a nice ending. But here it is as a postscript:
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
At the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity.
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.
Photo credit: Jillian St. Germain of Rebecca Rice Dance by Matt Karas. www.rebeccaricedance.com.
April 07, 2010
November 14, 2009
Listening and Gurdjieff Roles
The other night on Bill Moyer's Journal he interiewed Anna Deavere Smith who currently has a one-woman show at New York's Second Stage Theater. In the 90 minutes of LET ME DOWN EASY, she becomes 20 people on stage, from a rodeo bullrider to a Buddhist monk, cyclist Lance Armstrong and the late governor of Texas, Ann Richards, each talking about life, illnesses, mortality and the human body. The project began when a doctor asked Smith to lend her talents as an interpreter of real voices and characters to the study of modern health care. The New York Times called her "the ultimate impressionist, she does people's souls."
Gurdjieff taught that people do not have a soul - we are not born with a soul, we have to make a soul. He said that what we do have is a repertoire of roles that we play. "You must realize that each man has a definite repertoire of roles which he plays in ordinary circumstances. He has a role for every kind of circumstance in which he ordinarily finds himself in life; but put him into even only slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a suitable role and for a short time he becomes himself. (In Search of the Miraculous pg 239)
Ms. Smith has developed the ability to listen to people so that she can see both the roles that they play and what is underneath those roles. She explained that in listening to people she lets them talk about whatever they want to talk about so that she can identify their particular rhythmic pattern of talking. To break them out of the roles she - in Gurdjieff's terms - shocks them awake with 3 questions:
Have you ever come close to death?
Have you ever been accused of something that you didn't do?
Do you know the circumstances of your birth?
She said that then there is a greater variety in the way they express themselves.
Here's the link if you want to watch the video or read the transcript.
November 11, 2009
Listening from The Fourth Way
From Ouspensky's The Fourth Way,
Q. About different voices, I notice that my voice changes with different emotions and different people.
A. Who has ears to hear can hear many changes of voice. Every center, every part of enter, every part of a part of enter has a different coice. But few people have ears to hear them. For those who can hear it is easy to distinguish many things. For instance, if you speak the truth it is one voice, if you lie it is another voice, if you base things on imagination, yet another. It is quite unmistakable.
Q. Do you mean the intonation?
A. Yes, and also the actual sound of the voice. If you train yourself to listen, the emotional center can hear the difference.
This is a CT scan of the curve of the ear. It was made by Radiologist Kai-hung Fung. Click the link below to see more of his images and how he makes them. The back of the nose is particularly beautiful.
November 07, 2009
October 29, 2009
Prayers & Music of G.I. Gurdjieff: Sacred Music of the Eternal Present
This CD has just gone on sale here . This is the first time the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music has been accompanied by the singing of Gurdjieff's prayers. It was recorded live at two recitals in Washington, D.C. and in Baltimore. I was fortunate enough to be at the DC recital. It was worth the cross-country flight.
The prayers are from Gurdjieff's Legominism All and Everything and are sung by my friend Nancy Caporaso to music that she composed.
Here's a short review:
"Innovative and visionary. The prayer hymns are direct, unadorned and powerful, Nancy Caporaso's voice warm and resonant. Michael Dale's assured playing conveys a heartfelt affinity with the Gurdjieff music. Deeply vital music transmitted through the musicians with a special quality of attention that calls us to listen actively." —Mary Ellen Korman, A Woman's Work
October 16, 2009
Jung and the Red Book
Well, better late than never. Any blog about self-exploration that is worth its weight in pixels should have a post on the publication of Jung's Red Book.
Although I must have read about Jung in college (actually, I think I minored in Psych) I really didn't understand what he was about. It wasn't until decades later and I read Eating the 'I' by William Patrick Patterson that I got an inkling of how art can be used as an exploration of archetypes. The inside covers are an art gallery of his paintings. He writes, "The images appeared in dreams, in meditation, or would suddenly appear on the canvas. What did they have to say? What did they mean? All I knew was I wanted to pain them as fearlessly as I could. I say 'fearlessly' because through the medium of painting I felt I had taken a deep dive into the subconscious and I didn't want to spoil the connection by 'civilizing' them. I found myself, what I took to be myself, taken up into the mystery of painting, the experiencing of 'being painted through,' rather than the 'me' who was painting. To give these inner images the freedom to surface, that which took itself as 'the painter' had to step aside, become passively active. Painting in this way consciousness transcends the physical plane and, stepping out of psychological time, 'enters' the painting. In this merger the only content in consciousness is the process of painting itself. The ensuing silence allowed subconscious images to manifest. The connection strong enough, the images spoke, not in words but in their manifesting form and presence. They were not always pretty. Self-sincerity was demanded. Otherwise, the channel might close."
I have some of Patterson's images in my Art Gallery (see the panel on the left). I've also added some paintings from my friend Bruce Freedman that show some of his inner journey.
The Red Book will be on exhibit at the Rubin Museum of Art until January 25.
Here's the New York Times article with the history of the book.
September 27, 2009
On Attention - Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique
I was recently reading a wonderful little book called On Attention by Christopher Fremantle. His explanation of Gurjdieff's concept of self-remembering reminded me of Michelangelo's David. He writes, "...the field of attention includes both the 'outer' sense perceptions and the 'inner' awareness of movements of thought, feeling and bodily energies..." David is inwardly silent and self-aware while actively attentive - his whole body, feeling and thought concentrated. He is awake.
Fremantle describes how we give our attention away, "My attention, this power tool for communication, in not mine. It remains almost entirely at the disposal of life's imperative needs or whaterver event comes along and forces an impression on my senses and my mind. Yet it is mine; it springs from me, from my life; it is a part of my life force which ceases to be mine in so far as it does not obey my conscious being but is constantly enslaved by the outside world."
From my Alexander Technique lessons I have become aware of how my head is constantly jutting forward. I don't look at the world with my eyes, I use my whole head. This habit of posture reflects the habit of allowing all of my attention to be grabbed by objects - none of it left for me, the subject.
Fremantle explains how inattention occurs, "When music is heard, a book read, or a conversation is in progress, the stream of impressions provokes continual associations; these tend to absorb the attention, creating gaps in the stream of conscious reception...active attention is not continuous, it consists of moments of voluntary renewal. One may say, 'now I will have an active attention resting on such and such a thing,' but at every moment it has to be renewed; and it is renewed by one's wish, or by one's will." I imagine David being in a state of will; totally committed to being in the present moment.
September 26, 2009
Gurdjieff and A Man Named Pearl
After recently watching two, very upsetting documentaries - one about the corporate profiteering from the war in Iraq and the other about Haiti - I chanced upon A Man Named Pearl. It is about a self-taught topiary artist from a small, rural South Carolina town. It was not just that he was inspiring, but that so many people were able to understand the deeper meaning behind what he is doing. The documentary is very well done in that it allows the story to unfold. After about the first 15 minutes you think "Well, that's a nice story, but what else can they say about a guy who does topiary?" But the story and its significance continues to expand and expand.
What it reminded me of was Gurdjieff's statement (can't find the exact quote - it's somewhere in In Search of the Miraculous) that he can teach a man who already knows how to do something well. If you enjoy work; if you can sustain your attention, then you have possibilities.
October 21, 2007
Ouspensky and Cubo-Futurism
After looking through The Spiritual in Art, I remembered another used-bookstore find that I had forgotten about - Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race. This is Greer's treatise on women painters and how traditional social constraints robbed them of their chance of excellence. I wanted to see if she mentioned any Russian female artists from the early 1900s when Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were influencing the Russian avant-garde. Greer says that Alexandra Exter (1882-1949) introduced French cubism to Russia. I went back to The Spiritual in Art and found a chapter on something called Cubo-Futurism. Exter was listed as a participant in this movement that evolved between 1911 and 1913. Ouspensky is described as being "widely influential" on the writers and, therefore, the painters of this movement. It is described as "the art of the transcendent, expressing the highly developed consciousness of a future species of humanity that would possess radically new organs of sight as well as a new and universal language…a revolution in human consciousness, an evolutionary psychic change that would alter the consciousness to a state similar to that achieved through the spiritual discipline of Yoga." The author of this chapter, Charlotte Douglas says, "the spiritual and mental discipline of Yoga…was a consistent and far-reaching inspiration for the Russian Theosophist P.D. Ouspensky." This, of course, was before he met Gurdjieff which changed everything for him.
October 13, 2007
The Spiritual in Art
I recently came across a wonderful book, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890 - 1985. It was published in conjunction with a exhibit by the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. The premise of the book is to demonstrate "that the genesis and development of abstract art were inextricably tied to spiritual ideas current in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." For example, geometric abstraction in Russia was an extension of "the pervasive idea of cosmic energy" which was derived from Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and the Theosophist, Madame Blavatsky.
In the chapter, Esoteric Culture and Russian Society, John E. Bowlt describes the many cultural events in Moscow and St. Petersburg to which the avant-garde artists could avail themselves. There were salons in private homes, intimate theaters, meetings of philosophical groups and cafes where the bohemia gathered. There is mention of Ouspensky frequenting the Stray Dog, of recollections of Thomas Hartmann and of Anna Butkovsky financing a series of monographs on St. Petersburg's modern artists.
In the chapter entitled Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension Linda Dalrymple Henderson discusses Ouspensky's influence on the Surrealist painters. Inspired by Ouspensky's writings on the fourth dimension, specifically Tertium Organum, the artists succeeded in "depicting a gravity-free, directionless space." Below is Matta's Inscape.
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