The International Yoga Festival at the Parmarth Niketan Ashram on the banks of the Ganges river in Rishikesh began this morning in true Indian form, with a change of schedule. As festival participants from around the globe arrived at the ashram, the infamous television yogi, Ramdev invited Swami Chidanand Saraswati (the spritual head of the ashram) to attend a celebration of the national holiday, Holi at a leper colony in the neighboring town of Haridwar. Haridwar also happens to be the host of the current Kumbha Mela, a religious festival that occurs when the planets align once every twelve years. Full of a who’s who of Hindu saints, mystics, and sadhus, Haridwar is pregnant with pilgrims and celebration. The trifecta of the yoga festival, Holi, and Kumbha Mela brought us (an international group of yoga festival teachers accompanying Swamiji) together with Ramdev, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (another famous figure who founded the global meditation program, the Art of Living).

The Holi celebration at the leper colony was mostly for the benefit of the children of the lepers who live separated from their parents to avoid contagion. The “play” of Holi involves smearing the people around you with brightly colored powders as well as showering them with colored liquids and rose petals. The game is not limited to children however. Adults (mostly men) take to the festivities with an enthusiasm that is fueled by the accompaniment of alcohol and the perhaps the opportunity to grope women when applying color to their body.

After being publicly doused on stage in front of television cameras by the honored guests, we drove in a caravan of spacious SUVs to the kumbha tent of Sri Sri Ravi Shanker to join his Holi celebration. I remember looking out the window at the scene of camps of endless pilgrim tents when the car jolted. Sitting in the middle of the backseat row with no seatbelt available and nothing in front of me to break my thrust, I flew forward and opened my eyes to discover them two inches away from the dashboard. The hood of our car crumpled into the SUV we rear-ended. Both cars however continued to drive without even stopping to review the damage, let alone discuss the notion of fault. The only issue of concern was whether or not the car was functional enough to reach the next destination. It is said that our karma cannot be avoided. If we are meant to be in an accident, it is destined. But the circumstances of our lives, the company we keep, and our sadhana (spiritual practice), can minimize the severity of the manifestation of karma. I’ll choose to regard it as a blessing that I managed to burn some due negative karma unscathed.

We dusted ourselves off and proceeded to the stage of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar where the guests of honor were greeted like rock stars by a packed audience. The three long haired, bearded, robed holy men smeared each other with colors, embraced, sang and danced like a group of schoolboys. They gave speeches and the famous percussionist that had been in our party roused the crowd while pounds of rose petals were tossed through the air. After returning to the ashram stained in bright green, yellow, fuschia, and red, we bathed (fully clothed) in the sacred Ganges. All in my first morning in Rishikesh.

Thinking of you all with love,

Marla

On a recent foray to Michael’s – “The Arts and Crafts Store”, amidst a jungle of fake flowers and pre-assembled memories I had an “epiphany beside the wall of Easter Bunnies”. It would appear that hand made has not only lost its place in “art” but also its place in craft. It seems to have morphed into a ready-made elite pastime fashioned on figurines, stickers and plastic jewels. As we carefully decorate, glue and frame with pre-packaged stuff made in far away lands, are we not just supporting the art of mega industry? In our attempts to feel a feigned sense of loving hands of home are we not undermining the very politics of hand made?

The time honored politics of “hand made” are those of self-sufficiency; the practice of traditional craft an act of independence. Now in the face of an extinction trend, the skill and personal production of useful objects have become potent form of protest. The convention of the reactionary has produced a new kind of rebel. A post-modern protester whose work involves an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land.

Philip Leider

The Bay Area has always been a petrie dish for all movements of protest and one such notable group of rebels is chronicled by Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum (June 1962–December 1971), who upon returing from a road trip to the West Coast in 1970, published “How I Spent My Summer Vacation… Or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Fransisco and Utah.” Leider had become disillusioned with the political potential of art and looked to the pastoral craft ethos as a possible solution.* Leider argued the future of not only political radicalism, but art making itself, lies in an intimate connection to the land instead of New York art galleries. He found, in the separatist commune near Berkeley, named Canyon potential. [In Canyon] “it is worth your life to cut down a tree” as the inhabitants are determined to “effect no change in the natural ecology of the region.” Leider was particularly keen on the leader of the Canyon commune, David Lynn, a sculptor from Berkeley, who had rejected the avant-garde to become a house builder. “…it seemed pretty clear that as far as Lynn was concerned, every sculptural idea he ever had was in his building. The revolution in Lynn’s art, if there was one, was dictated by the terrain…”

Like the Bay Area innovators of Canyon, whose work involved an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land, so does current SF based artist Pam DeLuco practice her art. There is an ethos behind the work. Ethos defined as “morality, expertise and knowledge.” Her pieces are an exploration of their own provenance, investigating the origins of materials and techniques involved by the cultures where they are practiced. Years traveling and living with people in remote areas of Central and South America gave DeLuco the opportunity to study up close the Ngöbe women of western Panamá where the elaborately patterned Chácara bag is crafted and The Choco people of Panama where the fruit of the jagua tree is used to produce decorative pigments for body paint.

Back state side, she uses the deep crimson dye, carmine, extracted from the female cochineal larvae and indigos collected from the Indigofera tinctoria, a member of the pea family. Cochineal is one of the few water-soluble colorants that resist degradation with time while her Indigo is processed using the preindustrial method of reduction (chemical alteration), dissolving the indigo in stale urine. Not an easy system to put into routine practice.

Behind the innocent facade of a crocheted pillow cover lies a patient connection to the hand-spun, 6-strand, Tussah silk, cable yarn and end medallions from her hand-reared Bombyx mori silkworms. Over a period of 60 days she carefully charts the progress of the eggs as they hatch, eat their way through tasty Mulberry leaves, become fat juicy worms who then cocoon producing the silky fuzz that is spun into thread. Allowing the cycle to complete the moths emerge, mate, reproduce and the new eggs are stored until the following spring when the process will repeat.

When the fur of an animal required, DeLuco is unflappable in her sympathetic acquisition of raw materials. The hand-knit sweaters require only the hand-spun Angora from her house pet rabbit, Jambo. The braided horsehair tassels, belts, hatband, and stampede strings are procured from the horses under her care. When hand-spun Qiviut down is required for knitted gloves, Pam is there at the San Francisco Zoo collecting the precious material off the fence.

As newcomer to the Bay Area, where artists and craftsmen like DeLuco have migrated in order to be with like-minded thinkers and rebels, I, like Philip Leider and others before me, am humbled. These practitioners are our seed banks, protagonists in the technique of know-how and self-reliance. More than a self-conscious authenticity, or token tribute to ennoble the vernacular, DeLuco is prepared, indeed steeped in the politics of hand-made; not a backwards looking nostalgia, nor revivalist idealism, but a proactive pursuit to find equanimity within our time.

The White Ribbon, the award-winning new film from Michael Haneke, is sub-titled A Children’s Story. The children of a small village in Northern Germany are at the heart of this film. Haneke contemplates the process of evil’s origination in the raising of these children, a process that requires the repression of all joy and openness and the nurturance of fear and loathing. The titular white ribbon is tied onto Klara and Martin, two young teens, by their father, the town Pastor, who explains that the ribbon serves to bind them to innocence and purity. Of course that is a lie, just as the quiescence and purity of the village is an illusion that conceals horrors. The cruelty shown the children is normative behavior in the village’s rigidly patriarchal, feudal environment. The placid town slumbers, its resentment and fear festering, as we know full well that its reawakening will be in the Third Reich: the village children are the generation that will form the backbone of Nazi Germany. From one languorous and bleak scene to the next, the psychopathology of fascism unfolds, with methodical precision. The breaks of sweetness, a romance between the town schoolteacher and the nanny of the town’s manor house, only serve to heighten the contrasting gloom and cruelty. Haneke drops into this setting several unsolved and seemingly random crimes and fatal accidents, from which a mysterious horror hangs in the air like a tasteless and odorless poison.

A group of village children march in step on what they claim is a kind-hearted mission to see Anna, a girl whose father (the town doctor) has been injured in a riding accident. On its face the spectacle of the girls walking in unison is a bit somber, but innocent enough–still there is an unsettlingly sadistic shading to their mission. Anna’s father had fallen victim to a deliberately strung wire that tripped his horse. Are the children really on a visit of good will, or are they returning to the scene of a crime? Later, the same children are seen being severely reprimanded at dinner for being out too late. Their father, the town’s pastor, announces he will beat them all on the very next day, a form of sadism which I only hope is rare these days (my Italian mother used to tell me with great disdain that only cold-blooded Germans allotted time between the sentencing and the execution of punishment, and boasted that Italians believed in beating their children only in the heat of anger!!) The horrific anticipation drives one of the young victims to a suicide attempt. Some time after the pastor canes his children, the child of the town patriarch is found half dead and half naked, having been served up an uncannily similar beating. More incidents follow, all of them seeming to make a certain sense, but blame is never fixed, and despite the lumpen attempts of an outside police force to solve the crimes, no single culprit ever emerges. The townspeople are frozen in silence.

In an extraordinary scene, the town’s schoolteacher, an innocent man who is an “outsider” from a neighboring village, and therefore out of reach of the psychic oppression that rules these folks, confides certain suspicions to the Pastor, bits of evidence that imply the Pastor’s own children may have something to do with the crimes. Of course, the Pastor becomes enraged and threatens the schoolteacher with ruin. But nothing ever happens. The final sealing over of the mystery occurs when the housekeeper of the doctor claims that she knows who is responsible for the crimes. She rides off on a bicycle to tell the police, and we never hear from her again.

This unwillingness to investigate, to purge, to accuse, to “bring to justice” represents a collusion of the oppressor and the oppressed–and here is the real mystery that Haneke presents to us: why this silence? The core thesis of The White Ribbon, and the reason for Haneke leaving unsolved the crimes of his allegorical village, is all about the human desire to remain sleeping, to resist the psychic rupture that truth threatens, to resist change even when the habits and practices that bind us produce illness and misery for ourselves, our loved ones and our children. The people of Haneke’s village will slumber on, through dreams, through nightmares, through self delusion (the Pastor really believes he loves his children). The political, economic and social repression so imbue the personal realm that individuals are immobilized in a sleep-like passivity, that is, until “the reawakening”, that age-old tragedy of Oedipus, finding the remains of crimes scattered about in so many open graves. The themes that Haneke opens up in The White Ribbon may apply pointedly to the process of fascism, but are deeply resonant wherever a culture of concealment and repression buries the hope of significant social or personal change in falsehoods, trivialities and distractions.

[Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film & Cinematography--Christian Berger]

Many things went through my mind walking away from REDCAT after seeing the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, but one of them was surely hats off to the company’s artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte. First created by LeCompte and company in 1982, North Atlantic holds up remarkably well. The writer, James Strahs, pulled from texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein, and the company, anchored by Francis McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, hit their marks with style and precision. Set on an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Holland, the piece juxtaposes tough-talking military exchanges with kinky sexual banter, presenting life during the Cold War as a fever dream full of violence and desire. Devoid of the multi-layered video projections that play a major role in later Wooster Group productions, North Atlantic features the fast noir rhythms and the Grotowski-esque physicality that define the company’s approach to performance. Evidently LeCompte remains as sharp as a tack.

North Atlantic was created shortly after LeCompte took the reins from founder Richard Schechner and changed the company’s name from the Performance Group to the Wooster Group. Schechner had been one of America’s earliest and most energetic proponents of the visionary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s laboratory aesthetic. This past summer I saw Schechner at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where the elite of the global avant-garde gathered to pay tribute to the legendary Pole. Schechner spoke to our group about Grotowski’s impact on American theater, the rigor and seriousness he demanded from performers in every aspect of their craft. The Wooster Group’s highly physicalized performance style and their intensive working methods are among the most visible examples in America of Grotowski’s belief in theater as transformative ritual grounded in fully embodied presence in action. Beyond any rigid doctrine, the stamp of Grotowski is the absolute conviction that theater is linked in crucial ways to our collective sanity and, as such, merits the highest level of commitment.

At the same time I got the sense that Schectner’s earthiness and urbanity helped to limit the transcendent aspirations of Grotowski, pushing things in the direction of a kind of neo-Brechtian irony and spectacle. Or perhaps LeCompte is the source of those qualities in the Wooster Group’s basic affect. Either way, part of the reason the Group has found favor with the American art world is that they don’t mess all that much with depth. If American theater is a vast inland sea, wide and shallow, the Wooster Group is one of the bigger crocs, sunning themselves on their mossy log just North of Canal. Their productions are best thought of as comedies that don’t really have time for a sense of humor. It’s interesting to compare with the Polish company Theater Zar, which is Grotowski-inspired work at its most achingly transcendent. Unlike Zar, the Wooster Group does not traffic in reverence; leave the tragic dimension to the Eastern Europeans and pass the smutty jokes.

Rigor without transcendence manifests as kinetic energy, which is LeCompte’s forte as a director. Energy is where the agenda of art links up most easily with the American mindset, and this helps to explain why a counter-cultural enterprise like the Wooster Group has managed to slip past the informal censors that guard American sensibilities from challenge. One searches in vain, in a Wooster Group production, for the subversive silence in which self-recognition can bubble up. And yet one reason North Atlantic holds up so well is that America has matched the shallowness the piece is intent on satirizing. North Atlantic feels much darker now than it would have in the early 1980s. The addition of a Moslem call to prayer way in the background and some references to water boarding are all LeCompte needs to remind us of Abu Graib and Blackwater – of how far we have fallen. North Atlantic does not lack edge, it just aims its edge at tissue where the nerve endings long ago died.

For me the most successful Wooster Group piece was Hamlet, which came to REDCAT in 2007. The piece showed LeCompte’s command of a full high-tech barrage working to support her performers, and the brilliance of her meta-theatrical staging. And yet despite all the distancing and irony, the grandeur of Shakespeare’s mythic text came through loud and clear. To me, and as a playwright I am fully biased here, theater remains at root a literary activity. It’s when rigor in performance meets an original text with true depth that the full transformative display of the art form arises. This is why the highest points in the history of world theater tend to center around a significant playwright rather than a director. Think of fifth century Athens, Elizabethan England, the European era of Ibsen, or to a lesser degree the post War Europe defined by Brecht and Beckett; the playwright-centered convergence seems to occur when a culture begins to run a kind of maximum energy, an energy that translates into a willingness to collectively engage with the radical freedom of the present moment. We do not seem to be currently living in such a time, but perhaps the best way to move in the right direction is to pretend that we are.

[View with PicLens]

That said, it’s impossible to overstate the challenge of maintaining an American new work theater company over the last thirty years the way LeCompte has done, much less a company that has consistently produced such excellent and original work. Theater is pre-eminently an emergent art form, each performance resting on a huge web of complex social and artistic interactions. From the banality of board meetings to the Shakespearean treachery of inter-company politics to the ecstatic energy of performance, an artistic director like LeCompte has to engage with the full spectrum of human experience and remain operative. We are lucky to have artists as strong as LeCompte and her Woosters, and we should treasure every performance.

That Oscar gold will shower down this year on James Cameron’s Avatar, with its connective planetary goddess, says a great deal about how deep a ditch we have dug for ourselves. The central idea of the film, after all, is that while the ruination of our own ecosphere is a done deal there exists, somewhere far far away, a planet where human greed and aggression will finally meet their match. If hope is your cup of tea you might want to look a little closer to home. For that purpose another recent Oscar winner comes to mind – No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers, based on the noir thriller by Cormac McCarthy. The hope it contains may be on the dark side, but so are the forces that have pushed our world so dangerously out of balance.

In my last post, Theory of Miracles, I wrote about emergence, a concept central to many intriguing developments in the physical sciences. It’s a concept expressed in deity figures like the benevolent life force in Avatar. A good candidate for the opposite of emergence, in my view, would be reification. Reification is a fancy word for a kind of collapse we all encounter at various levels of experience throughout the day, and it is central to the culture of materialism. To reify is to reduce a complex process to a static thing, separate and apart, unique unto itself.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber

If you made a deity figure out of reification (as opposed to emergence) that deity would look very much like the Protestant God of Capitalism. This deity is all about breaking connective bonds (social, psychological, chemical, molecular, atomic, etc…) in order to exploit the energy they contain. And along with the boundless dynamism and creativity that have given us automobiles, moon walks and the small pox vaccine, this God of Thingification has also bequeathed us species extinction, nuclear weapons, and a badly damaged ecosystem. He is the Christian God shorn of the Virgin Mary, who represents that balancing, feminine instinct for staying in touch with Being.

Karl Marx wrote a lot about reification and so, in his own way, did William Shakespeare. Read Shakespeare’s great tragedies and you will find the theme everywhere. King Lear’s root error, for example, is to turn love itself into a thing that a father can demand from his children. And in Macbeth we see the concept of a king get plucked out of the complex web of relationships that supply its meaning and become centered in a thing, a crown, that can be seized by an act of violence.

The process of reification turns every man into a would-be usurper pursuing the tokens of material success. And sure enough, a short time after Shakespeare wrote The Tragedie of Macbeth the king-killer Oliver Cromwell appears on the scene, launching the modern era with his New Model Army. The various Protestant sects born in the fire of that Civil War left England to settle America, which has become a land of little Macbeths sharpening hidden knives. This kind of thumb-nail history is always tricky, but the fact that we still inhabit the world Shakespeare foreshadowed in his plays explains why Hamlet and Lear remain mainstays of global drama, and why Shakespearean writers such as Cormac McCarthy feel so relevant to our lives. In novels such as Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road, McCarthy has been tracking the trends that so worried Shakespeare.

One paradox McCarthy loves to illuminate is how desperately the god of reification strives to avoid being reified himself. No god wants to be reduced to just another thing, and especially the “jealous god.” And so he hides, receding into the woodwork of the universe where he masquerades as Natural Law. He is the one-God of Adam Smith and Isaac Newton, the deity of materialism who is difficult to free oneself from because he hides from view where his authority cannot be questioned. And this is where No Country for Old Men, becomes especially interesting.

Buried under the plot of No Country lies a complex meditation about fate, Ananke, karma American style. The hero, Llewelyn Moss commits a series of cosmic indiscretions and the hit man Anton Chigurh is dispatched by our implacable, impersonal deity to make a corpse-thing out of Moss. Moss’ first “error” is failing to kill the antelope he shoots at in the beginning of the film. Some little hesitation, perhaps, ruins his aim and the antelope runs off, wounded. Next comes Moss’ biggest error – he returns to the scene of a massacre to give a dying man water. Through these errors Moss identifies himself as an apostate in the temple of materialism. His heart is not true – he worships at some other altar. In the domain of the one jealous god this is not okay and Chigurh is sent to “thingify” Moss.

In numerous scenes Chigurh presents himself as an agent of “necessity.” In his vanity he refuses to acknowledge that he works in service of a god. And, again, this is fitting because Chigurh serves the god who conceals himself because he wants to be the only god. Hulking around with his pneumatic cow-killing machine, Chiguhr is a demon of the hidden monotheism that underlies the material view of the world.

After Moss is dead, Chigurh pursues Moss’ innocent wife, Carla Jean. Before taking her life, Chigurh tells Carla Jean he is only enacting a fate Moss himself set in motion for her. Carla Jean scoffs – Chigurh has come to kill her because he likes to kill, plain and simple. No impersonal law is being served. This insight doesn’t gain Carla Jean anything – Chigurh kills her anyway – but driving away he is grievously wounded by a speeding car that appears out of nowhere. What is the meaning of this odd bit of seemingly random violence? The tables have been turned on Chigurh. Either the car slamming into him had no meaning at all – in which case his own acts of violence are equally devoid of cosmic significance – or the car slamming into him represents the intervention of some rival force or energy…in which case the “impersonal law” he claims allegiance to is the expression of one deity among many. Either way, Chigurh is revealed as a creature of delusion. As he hobbles away on his broken bones, we sense that he has been reduced in his own eyes.

Birth of Venus, 1879, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As powerful as he is, all it takes to undo the god of materialism is the whisper that he is not, in fact, alone. In McCarthy’s understated, hyper-masculine way what No Country announces is the rebirth of the connective deity that reigns over the planet of Avatar. She is the great emergent rival of the reductive Protestant god, the presence the poet Ted Hughes identified as the “the Goddess of Complete Being” in his remarkable book about Shakespeare. In the four centuries since she departed from the scene the world has been transformed. In flight from the mystery of Being we have pulled nature apart to analyze matter and energy down to their smallest components. And there we have discovered…mystery. Particle-wave duality…action at a distance…non-locality…the materialistic exploration of the world has unearthed, not the longed-for certainties, but the most mind-confounding paradoxes ever contemplated. Every time we use a computer, a cell phone, or a microwave oven we are reaching down into a miraculous quantum realm where matter and energy are interconnected in ways we can scarcely comprehend. And now, having reached the bottom of the world, the scientists raise their eyes…and there she is, clothed in the very real hard science of complex systems and emergent form, like Venus rising up out of the waters…

It is awards season here in Los Angeles and along with the traffic we seem to be stuck in a glamour glut. Is it the handlers, stylists or just me: it’s so boring out there! The constant parade of Elie Saab, Marchesa, L’Wren Scott and J. Mendel blurs from one podium to the next. The two exceptions, off the top of my head, would be Sandra Bullock’s SAG Awards knockout Alexander McQueen and the ever fashionista Chloe Sevigny at the Golden Globes in Valentino…que bella!

So I did some scouting about and came up with a few alternatives. To keep focused on getting fancy was actually tiring, giving me new found respect for Rachel Zoe, whose taste drives me sideways, but who can really anticipate what the viewing public wants from their celebrities (see the spread in C Magazine September 2009 with Jennifer Garner). And just as I was becoming totally discouraged I fell in head over heels in with love the Givenchy Riccardo Tisci’s Spring 2010 collection. While I understand that full length gowns are the expected I want you to consider the impact of these lush, polished short frocks and pant alternatives.

These first set of six are all Riccardo Tisci. 1-3 are from the Spring 2010 Ready to Wear Collection, while 3-6 are from Spring 2010 Haute Couture. To really appreciate the Haute Couture you must visit the Givenchy site and see these garments from the rear. Spectacular.

RED. Enough said. From the team of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli at Valentino.

Rick Owens other worldly designs take on a softer note here. So much more to say about our local Angeleno gone stellar, but for now suffice it to say that the chic of these pieces would be a welcome site on any red carpet.

From Jil Sander’s Raf Simon. Pretty slinky for a guy who started in industrial design.

And finally I would love to see these three from Nina Ricci’s Peter Copping. Fresh, Fem and wouldn’t you love to see a splash of fur on the shoes as well.

]]> http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/02/05/fancy-stuff/feed/ 0 http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/01/29/razors-edge/ http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/01/29/razors-edge/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:01:32 +0000 Nancy Cantwell http://www.timesquotidian.com/?p=7097 The Katha Upanishad
by Nancy Cantwell

Recitation by Christopher Isherwood

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard. —Katha-Upanishad, 3.14

So begins Somerset Maugham’s bestselling twentieth century novel The Razor’s Edge (1944),  whose main character gives up a life of privilege in search of spiritual Enlightenment. Maugham himself visited Ramana ashram where he had a direct interaction with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India in 1938. But, it is said that Maugham received his inspiration and direct translation for this epigraph from Christopher Isherwood, with whom he had become acquainted through The Vedanta Society’s Hollywood Hills center. This reading by Isherwood of the Katha Upanishad is of special note. It is translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester. From the CD liner notes: “We used to listen to Chris read this scripture in the early morning in the temple of the Vedanta Society on Vivekananda’s birthday. Needless to say, this translation is our favorite.”

The Katha Upanishad and Yoga.
The Upanishads represent a shift from the early Vedic texts, whose thinkers focused on rituals formulas, prayer and song, sacrifice and ceremony and those connections to the cosmic spheres. By placing its emphasis on the physiological make up of man, esoteric knowledge, and ontological inquiries into cosmic realities, the Upanishads and in particular the Katha Upanishad set the stage for the self-transformative alchemy that becomes the practice of Yoga.

The Katha Upanishad (commonly assigned to the forth or fifth century B.C.E.) is the first instance when we see a recognizable tradition of Yoga emerge. Within this poetic text there lies the first descriptions of the fundamentals of a yoga practice; the preparation of the body and the cultivation of stability in the mind that steel the aspirant for the discoveries of consciousness. The story unfolds as a conversation between a young, but spiritually endowed Naciketas and Yama the God of Death. Seeking the knowledge of the mysteries of life after death, Naciketas is initiated by the God Yama onto the path of emancipation. He is instructed in the practice of involution, the climbing of consciousness to ever higher levels of being, the transcendental self and the psychospiritual work that prepares the yogi for the event of grace. Reminiscent of the Baghavada Gita’s (500-200 B.C.E.) classic dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that occurs in a chariot, so the poetic metaphor of the charioteer is used by Yama to instruct Naciketas of man’s relationship to the Higher Self.

Chapter 3, 3-9
Know the self a rider in a chariot,
an the body, as simply the chariot.
Know the intellect (buddhi) as the charioteer,
and the mind (manas), as simply the reins.

The senses, they say, are the horses,
and the sense objects are their pastures;
He who is linked to the body (atman), senses, and mind,
the wise proclaim as the one who enjoys (bhoktri).

When a man lacks understanding,
and his mind is never controlled;
His senses do not obey him,
as bad horses, a charioteer.

But when a man has understanding,
and his mind is ever controlled;
His senses do obey him,
as good horses, a charioteer.

When a man lacks understanding,
is unmindful (amanaska) and always impure;
He does not reach that final step,
but gets on the round of rebirth.

But when a man has understanding,
is mindful and always pure;
He does reach that final step,
from which he is not reborn again.

When a man’s mind is his reins,
intellect, his charioteer;
He reaches the end of the road,
that highest step of Vsihnu.

And here exactly we find the first instance of the word Yoga used in context with its definition. A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment.

Chapter 6.10-11,
When the five perceptions are stilled,
Together with the mind.
And not even reason bestirs itself;
they call it the highest state.

When the senses are firmly reined in (dharana),
that is Yoga, so people think.
From distractions a man is then free (apramatta),
for Yoga is the coming-into-being,
as well as the ceasing-to-be.

Robert Kato’s photography is about finding beauty in the most unlikely anythings and anywheres. The images from his San Francisco Bay series “Man Forgets the Earth Remembers” are neither Kodak moments nor hero shots, but tributes to the grandeur of common places and the singularity of the ordinary. These bayside landscapes speak to the most quotidian of scenarios that under the watchful eye of Kato become opulent photographic renderings.

[View with PicLens]

Kato pursues his images with both controlled precision and serendipitous intent. He purposes only to be present, a certain place at a chosen hour, trusting that the images will come. Then, from the moment the vision alights on his lens it will go through a rigorous process of selection, calculated tweaking, and imbuing of the RAW file into a technical tour de force. Deliberate shutter speeds expose new colors, surprising details, sharpening the atmosphere while slurring movement, the camera’s giant owl eye casting a preternatural light on these seemingly mundane cultural landscapes.

[View with PicLens]

Robert became digital after looking up some old friends who were now “doing it” commercially. “They showed me their new digital darkroom” he says. “They had a Radius monitor, a power PC and Photoshop 2.5. Things you couldn’t do with photography, they were doing with Photoshop. All of my earlier aspirations of wanting to be a painter came flooding back.” His first first digital camera was given to him by his friend, Son Do, co-founder and CTO of Rods and Cones. It was a first generation, Sony DSC-T1 (I admit, I’ve never heard of it) and he cut his printer’s teeth on an IRIS 3024 back when people were doing inkjet printing using iris technology before color profiles or screen calibration… before…a lot of stuff. As the technology continued to advance, he continued to be an early adopter.

Today his studio sports 44? and 24? Epson wide format printers, both on loan from Do, as well as smaller models. He uses them not only for his own work but for the business he has started with fellow photographer, Larry Stueck, that specializes in post production consulting workshops for fine art and commercial photographers.

That is how I met RK, when he helped me turn some sow’s ears into Ilford Gold Silk. And although sometimes he looks at me so searchingly that it makes me nervous about just what he might be seeing… I just try to scuttle quickly around behind him so as to see what he is looking at instead…

Take the spontaneous canine dance of Three Dog Vortex. Like ancient guardians these three hounds swirl round a puddle amid a landscape that appears to have been in wait since the beginning of creation. An ordinary pool of water becomes a portal to another world, not unlike like the mirror Alice stepped through on that fateful day.

[View with PicLens]

Following Her Path offers another enigmatic view into parallel universes. It first strikes me as the simplest compositions: white above, black below. An empty morning sky, too weak still, to chase away the night, then gives way to the earth and a jungle of dried fennel stems rooted below. Dead center, there’s a path, and this passageway appears to head both towards the sunrise and deeper into the darkness at the same time. Think of a strange loop turning the perceived world inside out; the ant on the mobius strip coming and going at the same time. Much like Alice’s extraordinary journey brings her safely back to where she begins so The Path begs us to explore the fine line that divides the darkness from the light, the arrival from the departure.

[View with PicLens]

“There is a shift from one level of abstraction to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.”- Douglas Hofstadter – I am a Strange Loop

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that the author of Zap and Mr. Natural, Robert Crumb, has undertaken the Greatest Illustration Project Ever Drawn–the Book of Genesis. Any narrative with all those “begats” would have to exert a certain charm for Crumb. The generally naughty R. shows himself to be extraordinarily obedient to this text, and demurs from any interpretive flourish in his cartoons–a wise decision, as the plain act of Crumb undertaking this work is its own statement which promises plenty of fun. His cast of characters includes a scowling, hirsute God, thunder-thighed Crumb-girls, and swarthy hangdog males, all tormented by the kind of terrible behavior that makes it obvious why God needed to give these people the The Ten Commandments.

R. Crumb’s drawings possess sweaty rigor and sturdy line. It makes the live ink on display in his Genesis cartoons glisten in a sensual and oily way. You can feel the fleshiness of his human figures; you can almost smell their dank perfumes. Slightly simian, utterly approachable, like soft homunculae you could take in your hand, the actors Crumb has drawn to populate the often horrifying saga of Genesis are as profane as Mr. Natural and Devil Girl. The irreverence is the point: there is no mystery to Crumb’s cartooning, only dogged workmanship, and a passion for drawing, indeed his project seems to reinforce a literal, mundane and pragmatic view of the “sacred” literature he is illustrating.

Genesis is probably more widely read by the general public than any of the other literature in my library, even though the ornate and downright strange prose can be daunting. Crumb’s graphic treatment brings you through the semantic jungles into the real juicy narratives whence all of our western values emerged: stories of Jacob, whose shrewd practices of animal husbandry and entrepreneurship out-maneuvered his crafty, deceitful father-in-law; or Joseph, the best of Jacob’s sons, who became the equivalent of Chief Executive Officer in Pharoah’s organization, and foresaw advantage in laying away grain for years of drought and famine. (Once the drought arrived, he finagled a way to swindle the starving farmers of Egypt into selling their land to Pharaoh in exchange for the grain he had been prescient enough to store.) Although there are stories here that are shocking in their seeming brutality (Noah’s Ark, Abraham and Isaac) Crumb’s sensual, expressive pictures, with their unsparingly frank visual style, seem to enhance the pathos in the narratives. Perhaps because Bible stories are a staple of kid’s literature, it seems natural to see the Word of God in cartoon form, and Crumb has performed a magnanimous coup with this new work, proving himself again as a consummate illustrator and, surprise, a Bible scholar. [Be sure to read the Commentary to the book, where Crumb writes about some fascinating research by a feminist Biblical historian that explains some curious anomalies in several of the stories.]

Charles Burchfield, like Crumb, was an artist who became a great commercial success, but he was never as sanguine and straightforward about it. As a designer and illustrator, Burchfield defined a certain look in the 20’s& 30′a both in his floral motif wallpapers (I grew up with floral wallpaper derived from his designs) and stolid magazine illustrations which were both comforting and promising. He was set to work during his military service designing camouflage patterns. In the late 20’s he quit his day job to become a very successful watercolorist who made images that captured the zeitgeist of depression era Americana.

The recently closed Hammer show was a comprehensive retrospective that covered his entire body of work, including occasionally unsettling quotations from the artist:

“What is man composed of anyway? I shudder when I think of the bestial impulses that so often flood my imagination. I am considered a decent citizen because I manage to keep these mental debaucheries from becoming antisocial actions; but as far as I, a lone individual, am concerned, I am that depraved being. And perhaps these orgies of imagination are all the worse because they are never relieved by actions. Yet may God confine them always to the mind (if they must exist anywhere and it seems they must.)” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, April 10, 1938

This quote appeared in a gallery full of somewhat creepy–though vigorously beautiful– paintings of snake like trees and burnt looking houses, ashen skies and the occasional insect-like floral motif. This soulful, strange and eccentric work gives pause to wonder what sort of “mental debaucheries” he was talking about, and one suspects they are something on an entirely different level than ravishing the odd wood nymph. The fascination with Burchfield’s work must be entirely connected with his psychological and spiritual journeying, for these paintings are more than pastorals, they are diagrams of nature overlayed upon a human personality and consciousness: an excruciatingly personal language and alphabet. Although his career trajectory coincided with the great cultural shifts of Modernism, Surrealism, and later, Expressionism; and despite his fame and populist themes, there is an outsider quality to much of his work.

Counterposed to Burchfield the accomplished designer/painter and placid family man, there was Burchfield the brooding transcendentalist who rejected the religion in which he was raised, but passionately sought the sacred imprints of spirit in the forms of nature. Early in his life he had a special affinity for nature, carefully digging up favorite plants he found in the forest and transplanting them to his garden. Late in life, after twenty years of success, he rejected the work that had brought him renown and refocussed on a series of glyph-like drawings he had produced during what he called, his “golden year”, 1917. These curious drawings, made with graphite and china marker, are simple biomorphic forms with unsettling titles: Fear, Morbidness (Evil), Insanity, Hypnotic Intensity. They are collected in a folio; its cover an age-stained sheet of manila paper with the following title drawn in pencil in a very controlled, but rather puerile hand: “Conventions For Abstract Thoughts”. This was the first in what became dozens of these sketch journals. In his maturity Burchfield underwent an epiphany in revisiting the work of his youth, realizing that he had ignored its mysterious power and so reconnecting with what he saw as its seminal virtues. In the late work of Burchfield, motifs and obsessions coalesce; he builds out with paper from core imagery often created in his early career, and so the drawings grow in an almost vegetal way. Plunging himself into the sacred character of the landscape which he came (again) to see as an objective correlative to his inner life, Burchfield seizes upon the demonic within but never with the notion of exorcising, only guiding and bending it into form.

Autumnal Fantasy 1916-1944

“All at once I felt that I was the most lonely person on earth, and it seemed to me that I could not endure the solitude; and yet it was so overpowering I could not leave it. I was, as it were, a prisoner who loved and hated his isolation.” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, November 6, 1947

Tibet Fractels

A central idea in new arenas of scientific inquiry with daunting names like “complexity theory” and “integrative levels”  emergence is tricky to capture in words, much less experience directly. The Wikipedia definition reads: “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Hurricanes, the world wide web and the architecture of termite colonies in the Kalahari desert are commonly cited examples of complex emergent systems. But your ability to read this sentence (and my ability to compose it) could also be viewed as an “emergent” property of the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms that, arranged in a very specific way, make up our bodies. That the material world has the capacity to generate surprising new forms in this fashion makes emergence something close to a theory of miracles, reconciling the material and the mysterious.

At the Edendale Sara Bayles and I were surrounded by practitioners of yoga, which is all about balancing body and mind, material and mystery. The party was a send off for a mutual friend named Tara Judelle, a teacher of asana practice who happens to be particularly focused on these issues. And so, at the Edendale, the idea of emergence reminded me of the embodied process of learning yoga, and how that process is not linear at all. Your body initially fights a pose… you make a series of micro adjustments…and then one day the pose simply reveals itself and you shift into a more refined alignment. It’s this sudden leaping into a new level of order that connects this experience to the concept of emergence. And there’s a correlate in meditation practice too – breath by breath you rest your awareness on a challenging thought or emotional pattern and after an eternity has come and gone you are surprised to experience an abrupt shift. A transformative insight emerges; you are drawn back more fully toward a non-dual experience of the present moment.

In recent months, Tara has been giving special focus to the organ body – being aware, for example, of how your kidneys align during trikonasana, or how your liver curves against your back ribs during a seated twist. Unlike muscle and bone, the organs are formidably complex entities. It can be unsettling but also enlightening to contemplate how these astonishing tissue-matrixes we lug around evolved over eons to do what they now do for us, which is to support the awareness that allows us to reflect on our experiences, question the meaning of our lives and engage with each other in a chaotic world. In a standing pose one day I had a visceral (literally) sense of the furious busy-ness of evolution, the constant, bubbling creative activity – trying this, shifting to that, juggling this, abandoning that to move over here and try this – that has animated our long evolution, and along with that recognition came the sense that darker energies must also be a part of this tapestry; that this creative activity needs some destructive capacity too or things would get too locked in and static, and while there may be no way for that destructive aspect to be pleasant or positive in-and-of-itself it remains still a part of this larger creative unfolding. And so on balance we human beings should feel honored to be the vehicles (one of them at any rate) through which the material universe can turn and look at itself, contemplate and praise itself, and that many of our emotional and psychological challenges stem from the sort of jury-rigged, boot-strapped, emergent nature of the operation, where this creative principle managed to arrange the carbon molecules in such a way that they formed into complex nucleic acids that then lined up in the astonishingly complex arrays of RNA and DNA  and then somehow, down the line, these strands of DNA gave rise to things called synapses and neurons which then gathered into brains and the whole rickety contraption continued to build on up through the different life forms until finally, with a certain species of mammals called primates, the brains reached a size where the skulls that contained them could barely squeeze out through the hip opening of the female, giving birth to an awareness that, still in the process of forming, was sensitive enough to be deeply scarred by the trauma of birth, and then again by the trauma of its extended dependency on unreliable adults, and then yet again from all the other traumas that follow birth such that human beings tend to experience themselves as separate, apart and terminally embattled, threatened and insecure and defined by a sense of lack such that collective life tended to ignite frequently into the most bloody conflicts imaginable and history became a sequence of wars, and of incessant conquest and domination, a cycle of violence building in ferocity until finally, in the name of survival, the species learned how to sublimate the violence into economic systems such as Capitalism that generated the technologies of convenience that have left vortexes of plastic swirling in the middle of the gorgeous deep blue oceans.

And yet something new is emerging in the human realm and many of us sense it. The material sciences are everywhere bumping up against phenomenon that undermine the top down nature of their own inquiries. One of the scientists most engaged in unpacking this aspect of emergence is the biologist Stuart Kaufman. Kaufman views emergence as a challenge to the reductionism that has defined the scientific view since Galileo. To explain reductionism, Kaufman quotes Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg: “the ‘explanatory arrows always point downward’, from society to small groups to individuals to organs to cells to chemistry to physics…” With emergence scientists have started looking back in the opposite direction, working outward from the smallest particles to the complex structures that arise out of them in unpredictable ways.

Galileo Before the Inquisition. 1847

In a move that is sure to tweak a few goatees in the citadels of science, Kaufman, an atheist, proposes appropriating the word “God” and applying it “not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself.” “I want God,” Kaufman writes, “to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours.” While I’m not sure we need to befog ourselves all over again with a lot of symbolic baggage (and I would argue that this creative force should be embodied as a female rather than a male deity), I do appreciate Kaufman’s sense of urgency. As Sara Bayles underscored for me, smiling, at the Edendale, there is no quick fix for problem such as the swirling vortexes of plastic. Despite my new year’s resolution to forgo plastic bottles, the vortexes will continue to grow for years and probably decades to come.

To survive the patch of environmental “bumpiness” that is surely coming we will need something to pray to and we will need all the miracles the universe can provide. We certainly can no longer afford to view ourselves as disembodied minds separate from experience and the exclusive authors of our own actions. The emergent view underscores that even our ignorance is an inseparable part of a larger story defined at every turn by surprise. It might be that a new capacity for non-dualistic experience will emerge in time for us to respond to the mess we are making of the world. The reductionist view of Western science has managed to give us an array of potent technologies and knowledge, and perhaps now, under the gun, we will locate the wisdom to use these tools effectively.  While optimism and pessimism are equally beside the point, why not embrace the idea that we are about to emerge as a wiser species? We’ve already broken the eggs, we might as well cook up the omelette.

Below are organizations that bring awareness to the problem of plastic vortexes in our oceans:

5Gyres
Blue Ocean Institute
Plastic Pollution Coalition
Green Peace-The Trash Vortex
National Geographic