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Mind and land II: Practitioners of marvelous contact Does the natural world ever have to run out of interest for smart humans? Is science the only way humans can be cognitively engaged with the natural world? In this second session of Mind and land we'll look at the mission statement for an imaginary institute and 10 instances of organic high intelligence - people who, though they are not scientists, are unusually observant of the natural world; and who, by being more highly developed as humans in relation to the natural world, rather than in the old ways 'transcending' it, are cultural shapers and innovators.
What is finally important in Walden is not Thoreau's misanthropic philosophizing, but the way in which he shows us, in his own person, how a human being can meet the evening, between the squirrels and the shadows. - An ethical life is one that is mindful, mannerly and has style. [It does not show] stinginess of spirit, an ungracious unwillingness to complete the gift-exchange transaction. - Mind wedded to physical universe producing the paradise of the common day.
1. Congeneris Foundation [an imaginary foundation] mission statement - EE I want to work for the beauty of the world and for intelligence adequate to it. That's the core of it. I want to promote skills of intelligent contact. I want to support and promote other people who work for that. I want to discover what it is in humans that makes them spoil both world and intelligence. * Premise: Preservation of a sound and beautiful natural world, and of full contact with that world, is essential to the well-being of human minds. The forming of sentient persons through contact with the world is the specifically human part of environmental value, and the core of value in cultural creation. Arguments for preservation and restoration of the natural world are often stated in terms of the intrinsic value of that world, or of the health or emotional well-being of humans, but since intelligence evolves in contact with the physical world, isn't the integrity of the natural world also fundamental to the integrity of intelligent function? When we destroy the beauty, the complexity, the manifold coherence of the natural world, we are destroying potentialities of perception and comprehension. Why doesn't everyone already know this? For some it is because the physical world is the site of an exhausting struggle to remain alive through hardship and disaster. For some, the physical environments they experience are already so degraded that minds are not much benefited by contact. For some it is because they have given up on the roots of their own intelligence in childhood feeling and are substituting mastery of imaginary, abstract or mechanical domains. For many it is also because they have been taught conceptions of mind that contrast it to physicality, so that cognitive excellence or sophistication are seen as transcending rather than completing the physical world. This conception of mind or intelligence is ancient and pervasive; in subtle forms it continues to be implicit in much of the work most valued both in the arts and in the universities. It is also being revised from many directions, most particularly through the last two decades' discoveries in neuroscience. There are artists and thinkers whose work is deeply land-based and at the same time an instance of cutting-edge cognitive excellence. At present these people are inadequately supported and their work poorly understood. I envisage an institute for land and mind that will support them financially and philosophically, and bring them into contact with each other so that the common culture they develop can carry further.
2. Gordon Smith The Vancouver Art Gallery has a painting by Gordon Smith made in 1996 when the painter was seventy-seven. It is large, 8'x 10', acrylic on canvas, predominantly cream and black with touches of green, red, and blue. The strongest impression, from twenty feet, is of a twiggy hillside black and white with snow. At other distances, given long attention, small internal images appear: a carved profile like the profile on a totem pole, a patch of sky with two winged things in a light of their own world, a sort of white flower, a cave, an extraordinary future kind of human. At the same time as they are evoking these things, the slashes of black and dabs of color are very evidently painted marks that recall the brushwork in many other paintings in the gallery's many rooms. To have been able to make this painting, the painter must know a landscape: must have been formed by a landscape. The evidence is that his formation by landscape was deep and detailed, because this twiggy slope is not simplified or made pretty. There are messy bushes, fallen branches, the ungardened disorder of a rainforest slope. At the same time, the quality of the dabs and slashes show that the painter has been formed by many paintings, and that he has taken these paintings into his wrists and shoulders as well as into his eyes. At the same time, the little figures, their barely-suggestedness, their lovely strangeness of twilight sleep, say that the painter can be all this structure loosely, in a flux. What I see in this painting is cause for pagan post-post-modern hope. It is hope of intelligence that is grounded in contact with the natural world and at the same time the very opposite of primitive. - EE excerpt from Ch 10 of Being about.
3. Lee Bontecou Lee Bontecou's retrospective was in LA and NY and then in Boston in 2007. I walked out of the library with the catalog for this show and have thought about Bontecou quite a bit since. She is a sculptor, then about 77 or 78, who was famous with the abstract expressionist men in the 1960s and then dropped out of sight for thirty years. She was working and teaching, raising a daughter, but not showing. The catalog spans her years of work, about forty-five of them. At this moment the catalog is standing open to a piece she worked on between 1988 and 1998. It hangs from the ceiling, is 7x8x6', made of welded steel, porcelain, wire, wire mesh, and some kind of semi-transparent fabric. The bits of fabric are pale silver greys, browns, beige, russet. There are a lot of wires strung like rigging. Seen in a photo these have a quality of lines in a drawing, and the color in the fabric has a quality of watercolor wash. I'm sitting in my room staring at the page that has two views of this object. Phoenecian galley, Renaissance galleon, solar lightship, butterfly, exploding galaxy, hurricane, eye with lashes, a jellyfish, a fish, a school of fishes, something photographed through stages of a motion. A diagram. An antenna. The strength of a piece of art often depends on whether opposites are brought against each other within it. This sculpture is a transcendently beautiful thing. The word that has been coming to me is Elizabethan. I realized it's because of the fullness of being, the synthesis of opposites, there is in it. As in Shakespeare. Abstract and representational, organical and mechanical. Drawing and sculpture, science and art, male and female, history and futurity. Surrealist and naturalist. They are all there in "implacable unitary presence" (someone said), and it's because she made herself all of them. She wasn't always all of them at once, and some of the work isn't good, but she is all of them at once in this piece. Bontecou says, "as much of life as possible - no barriers - no boundaries - all freedom in every sense." She writes that when she was working on the early pieces that made her famous she used to be listening to the news on short wave radio and she'd be in a rage. When critics now place her in some modern art-historical lineage she says indignantly no, her influences are in the natural history museum. Last night I was revising pieces about my dad dying slowly of dehydration in kidney failure, my first love hanging himself at sixty after thirty years of depression, my beautiful best friend in high school thrashed into the ground a couple of years back by stroke and cancer simultaneously. There are times when I want nothing to do with people and want just to trance out with nature, but then if I let myself feel what nature has done to people I love, what I want from people and what I want to give people is splendour. Things so hard to make that it takes for instance Bontecou's entire life to be able to make them. - EE
4. Peter Manning
The electronic music concert last night was junk, and then Peter Manning's piece. We were on the stage in sofas, facing and surrounded by eighteen large speakers. I found I was in agony and sat up straight at the edge of the sofa. I really was in a black space of transparent planes. A buzzing. A so beautiful buzzing, like nothing I've heard, like something I could hear gladly on and on. I would not be able to say much about what I was, but it reminded me of the Dollar Brand concert, something happened to the space as if its grain were being polished. I was on my axe-axis, cleft solar to throat with pain, axis pain, right pain, glorious. I was saying, this is another level of art, this is opening up knowledge on another scale, where am I, aching with beauty and truth. Way beyond myself. What was it - tissues moving at depths, ethereal they said. No. Not at all ethereal. Transparent but so strong, like sheets of rock seen by a god with X-ray eyes. It was fairyland, yes, but the land of fairy warriors. And then that stretched thread of the sound of a human instrument, like brass, like a bagpipe, but an edge of a shred of the sound, drawn into a bright line, human concentration vanished to a point on the horizon. I was physically so present in that space that I was wanting to turn my face to feel its air, bolt upright at the edge of my seat, cracked from throat to navel, turning my face in an occult north I wanted never to leave. I didn't understand the movement. It was like a tribute to the quality of the place I could honor more because some human had built or found it. In great pain, was it? The other kind of pain that is a joy. - EE journal approx Feb 1995
5. Craig Childs
Already I had walked thousands of miles of canyon country in southern Utah and northern Arizona, hardly ever on an established trail. I studied geology in hopes of understanding the ground. I studied archeology to get a sense of how people moved across it, looking at their art painted on pieces of pottery. And I studied like this, with my body, my blood quick with fear and expectation. 91-2 There was fear. I could smell it off my skin and in my breath. 100 I found that two of the most accomplished route finders were mathematicians 74 A route, he told me, is much like a pathway of logic carefully proven true. The confidential language of logic is much like our negotiation of difficult terrain, the way our eyes find ways through what other people might see as dead ends. 95 My mind was consumed by the motion around me, by visions of erosion and sequences, one covering stripped after another. What is revealed is an interior landscape that will never be divulged by a map or photograph. It defines a person's vision, how one will move or pause. I know that every place has this, I have witnessed it in the heavy forests of Washington's Olympic Peninsula and across the unbroken plains of central Alberta, something not so much seen as sensed. It is something transitory, a moment when the tone of light and the shape of the horizon, perhaps the sudden sound of an animal or wind, meet at one place, revealing the indwelling landscape. 88 We had spoken with this quiet wall, finding its language, and it fanned above me, what could have been random crags and crevices, but were instead a way of living. I had to find a way of keeping track, looking behind me to consider the terrain I had just come through, ledges slick with ice skirting a small plunge above where Devin and I had retreated with our webbing, then beyond that a stone-walled avenue where juniper trees grow along the bottom. It was not an option for me to memorize all of this in order to find my way back in case this route did not go. There were too many turns and decisions. I had to instead remember by allowing myself to remain in each passageway after I had gone. I made a creaseless inquiry of the place, not asking questions as I walked, but rather presenting myself openly, taking in the environment without governing the incoming information. I did not deal in unnecessary thoughts, concerns about tonight's meal or tiredness in my legs. I walked slowly, brushing my gloved hands on walls, pausing atop high fins, my head filled with imagery and no words. 109 A term is used for these kinds of people: tethered nomads, a phrase pulling two directions at once. Often they were on the move in annual cycles, but unlike agriculturists who often migrated every several generations, these people remained in their same region for thousands of years. They had come to understand their home landscape with an acute intimacy. Walking here, we frequently found evidence of their tethers, well-worn and long-abandoned trails leading to and from places of water, or a canyon floor where jojoba nuts could be gathered, or an open plain good for jackrabbits. The country is etched with these interconnected pathways, faint troughs set barely into the ground, testament to the passage of countless feet. They turn the desert into a story of ceaseless movement. 184
6. Michael Benedikt
If we drew a line representing the history of the universe from the big bang until today, say, 100 feet long, then the first inch would represent the time it took to establish all the subatomic particles, their interactions and all the laws of physics still obtaining today ... on this same 100 foot scale, the creation of the earth occurs in the last inch ...zoom in on that inch of earth time until that final inch looks like 100 feet ... the first living organisms appear about halfway, and the first mammals in the last 5 feet ... in the last inch, precursors to [human people] ... zoom in on this last inch until it looks like 100 feet once more ... Moses walked on the earth only in the last inch-and-a-half ... in the last eighth of an inch ... printing and looms ... movies, computers. ... one cannot help but be awed at how much of what we take to be specifically modern in human feelings and problems emerge from this unimaginably long history of perception, consciousness, hunger, mobility, sexuality, desire and fear in the world... getting to these origins of meaning, understanding them, and using them to give realness and depth to their [work]. Work - like my own - is based on a search for the realness of things and for their depth. From their realness comes their call to our serious attention; from their depths comes a kind of meaningfulness that will last, as architecture lasts. The felt imperative to be deep, to seek and show realness and depth in one's work, in one's life, in one's art, is indeed religiously and ethically based. Why? Because if one believes in the beauty of the whole world and that much of that beauty, complexity, and truth is hidden, or forgotten, or lies beyond normal ken, then 'showing forth' depth is a triumph, a proof and a reproof, an act of showing or making come about. ... to break out into a place where one might glimpse a whole landscape, stretching into the distance, the Work in the making. only when s/he brings consciousness of true and tender origins ... to bear upon the experience of [her] work now, can the artist achieve the necessary counterpart of stimulation to orientations and wonder to understanding ... shows forth, ... bears witness ... reveals Order ... and brings new levels and manifestations of Order into physical being. ... a particular spirit and seriousness about the making of a [work] and an optimism about how science, creativity, and good work in all its forms can fashion one, generous, world in which the numinous and the ordinary are identical
7. Tim Robinson
... those rare places and times, the nodes at which the layers of experience touch and may be fused together such points and the energy that accomplishes such fusions storings and sortings of material for another art, the world-hungry art of words I was on a summer's beach one blinding day watching the waves unmaking each other, when I became aware of a wave, or a recurrent sequence of waves, with a denser identity and more purposeful momentum than the rest. This appearance, which passed by from east to west and then from west to east and so on, resolved itself under my stare into the fins and backs of two dolphins (or were there three?), the follower with its head close by the flank of the leader. I waded out until they were passing and repassing within a few yards of me; it was still difficult to see the smoothly arching succession of dark presences as a definite number of individuals. Yet their unity with their background was no jellyfish-like dalliance with dissolution; their mode of being was an intensification of their medium into alert, reactive self-awareness; they were wave made flesh, with minds solely to ensure the moment-by-moment reintegration of body and world. Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin's arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a human conception of this 'good step'? Our world has nurtured in us such a multiplicity of modes of awareness that it must be impossible to bring them to a common focus even for the notional duration of a step. The dolphin's world, for all that its inhabitants can sense Gulf Streams of diffuse beneficences, freshening influences of rivers and perhaps a hundred other transparent gradations, is endlessly more continuous and therefore productive of unity than ours, our craggy, boggy, overgrown and overbuilt terrain, on which every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing Rosa spinosissima of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings Can such contradictions be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground? At least one can speculate that the structure of condensation and ordering necessary to pass from such various types of knowledge to such an instant of insight would have the characteristics of a work of art, partaking of the individuality of the mind that bears it, yet with a density of content and richness of connectivity surpassing any state of that mind. So the step lies beyond a certain work of art; it would be like a reading of that work.
8. Fernando Flores
Speak with intention Tell me what you think of me: this is how you develop trust I promise I will answer you: thank you for your assessment When trust improves, everyone feels more confident One thing we need to do here is to produce despair - because despair produces reality I want you to build your sense of curiosity The compassion of the story is in waking people up to their blindness. For that, you need to be a warrior. I am tough and sweet. Know this. We aren't aware of the amount of self-deception and self-limitation that we collect in our personalities. I'm fighting for freedom, for breadth of being. I have unlimited patience. What you know you know. What you don't know, the realm of anxiety and boredom. What you don't know you don't know, another realm, whose language is truth, which gives and requires trust People with ambition don't want to listen to positive assessments. You need emotional strength to be able to hear. Negative opinion, positive followup, thank you, you're welcome. When warriors fight they end by offering each other thanks. One must feel gratitude toward the person who engages you in battle. Make promises. Make them publicly. They create solidarity. They make us responsible and give opportunities for freedom. Ask others to assess you Build identity not persona. Identity is about commitments. We need to reach a point where every moment tells us what to do in our body. The body never lies. Be practiced in making assessments so you always see through. Stop producing interpretations that have no power. Your talk does not indicate action, only desire. There is no energy in that story! If you can't put your body into it, there is not truth. Develop a big story - a story of transformed reality. Can you invent a story in which you can be competitive, world-class people? Value is not produced by hard work. Value is produced by a story. You have to be willing to risk your identity for a bigger future than the present that you are living.
9. Antonin Artaud
Dear friend, I am enormous. I cannot help it, I am a high place where the tallest masts acquire breasts instead of sails, while the women feel their sexual organs become hard as pebbles. For my part, I cannot prevent myself from feeling all these eggs rolling and pitching under the dresses as the hour and the spirit moves them. Life comes and goes and grows small across the pavement of the breasts. From one minute to the next the face of the world has changed. Wound around the fingers are the souls with their cracks of mica, and into the mica Abelard passes In short, a strictly vegetal and rustling life in which the legs move with their mechanical step and the thoughts like tall boats with their sails reefed. The passage of bodies. The mummified mind breaks loose Will the bird burst through the gate of tongues, will the breasts branch out and the small mouth resume its place? Will the seed tree break through the obdurate granite of the hand? Oh, oh, oh! how light my thought is. My mind is slender as a hand. But the fact is that Heloise also has legs. The best part is that she has legs. She also has that thing shaped like a sailor's sextant, around which all magic revolves and grazes, that thing like a sheathed sword. But above all, Heloise has a heart. a beautiful heart erect and full of branches, straining, firm, full of grain She has hands that surround books with their cartilage of honey. She has breasts of uncooked meat, so small, whose pressure drives one mad; her breasts are network of fibers. She has a thought that belongs to me, a thought that is insidious and twisted, that unwinds as from a cocoon. She has a soul. In her thought I am the flashing needle and it is her soul that accepts the needle and lets her in, and I am better with my needle than all the others in their beds, for in my bed I roll the thought and the needle in the sinuosities of her sleeping cocoon. For it is always to her that I find my way back along the thread of this love that is scattered to the world. and in my hands grow craters, grow networks of breasts, grow explosive loves which my life wins over from my sleep. But by way of what trances, what sudden starts, what gradual glidings has he arrived at this idea of the enjoyment of his mind? For the fact is that at this moment Abelard is enjoying his mind. He is enjoying it fully. He no longer thinks of himself either to the right or to the left. He is here. Everything that is happening in him belongs to him. And in him at this moment things are happening. Things that make it unnecessary for him to look for himself. This is the important point. He no longer has to stabilize his atoms. They combine of themselves, they arrange themselves into a point. His whole mind is reduced to a series of ascents and descents, but the descent is always to the center. He has things. His thoughts are beautiful leaves, level surfaces, successions of centers, clusters of contacts among which his intelligence glides without effort: it goes. For this is what intelligence is: to walk around oneself. The question no longer arises whether to be shrewd or slight and to come back to oneself from a distance, to embrace, to reject, to separate. He glides from one state to the next. He lives. And things inside him shift like grain in a sieve. He is really there. He is there like a living medallion As for Heloise, she is wearing a dress, she is beautiful outside and inside.
10. Sharon Olds
11. Jorie Graham - 2 poems
Discussion sheet Organic high intelligence and defending lovers by being one Other practitioners? Romantic poets - Wordsworth The prelude, Coleridge journals Classical artists - Ovid, Virgil, Hellenic painters from Pompei and Heraculum There are nights when the upper air is windless and the stars in heaven stand out in their full splendor round the bright moon; when every mountaintop and headland and ravine starts into sight, as the infinite depths of the sky are torn open to the very firmament; when every star is seen, and the shepherd rejoices. Such and so many were the Trojan's fires. Iliad As a flickering light from water, flung back by the sun or the moon's glittering form, flits far and wide o'er all things, and now mounts high and smites the fretted ceiling of the roof aloft. Virgil Constable, Turner, DH Lawrence, Willa Cather Buddhist mindfulness traditions, Zen artists, Basho Georgia O'Keefe Q. What do these mind/land being-practitioners suggest about how to be marvelously in contact? - they're very present - they're felt bodies - they are attending to both the outside and themselves in relation to it - they're don't back off from sex and death - they're willing to feel pain - they don't segregate fantasy from observation but they know which is which - their fantasy play is as if generated by structure that is deeply formed in contact - it's not thin or weak or false fantasy - they're culturally formed but they're not limited to one culture - they have cosmological education, they aren't scared of science * Notes on core and processing
Suggested reading for Mind and land II - non-fiction writers including autobiography:
- fiction writers:
- other kinds of art
- film
- architecture
- physics and biology
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