Ron Dowd – Art / Psyche / Nonduality
Reflections on visual art, place, psychotherapy and nonduality
From the category archives:
it’s like this at the fish market -
standing around
when all I want is
pink glistening salmon flesh -there’s a problem with knives
and by the time I get one
you’ve offered me
your breast to cut -I go for the cheek
incising thin red
around the jaw lineand throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflictedhiding the act
from the rest of my life
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It feels time to publish this little book of poems, The Rains That Fall Around Here on Issuu. All 24 poems, written over the period 2003 to 2009, have a devotional theme.
My poetry output is fairly low, and these poems are for me a distillation of an ongoing understanding and occasional encountering of the devotional, the noumenal.
One of the poems, something in a drawer, appeared in Australia’s Blue Dog; the rest are unpublished elsewhere.
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white clouds scroll
across the sixth-floor windowdo not open window
to prevent a dewdrop
or harmful insect enteringthe book of buddha’s
at the bedside tablebe always thinking
of the transiency of your lifeleaving, turns back to the
white sheet crumpledto the cast of a body
spent the night in transit
bound for rome
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Here’s the first of four short posts on the field, a topic dear to my heart.
This post’s a personal reflection on Robert Duncan’s exquisite poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, which appeared in his 1960 book The Opening of the Field:
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall thereinthat is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going downwhose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
The phrase “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” has me thinking of David Bohm’s implicate order, unfolding in time to form the explicate order of which we are usually only aware. And “eternal pasture” is a lovely poetic form for what I usually refer to as the noumenal field, “so near to the heart”.
“Wherefrom fall all architectures I am” has the sense of that place from which the constructions of selfhood occur, the developments of self-representations, those patternings with which we then subsequently live, mistakenly taking them to be our real selves. As A.H. Almaas says:
The experience of the self is actually determined by the self-representation. The phenomenology of the self’s experience presents itself through this representation, and hence, what the self perceives and experiences as itself, in its present experience, is greatly determined by it. The self-representation actually sculpts the forms that arise as the phenomenological particulars of the self’s experience of itself. (A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, p59)
“as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos” speaks to me of that noumenal place – we can see it in Unica Zürn’s work and I mentioned it in my previous post – that place which for many of us is a creative centre – which holds the psyche against dissolution. Duncan puts it so beautifully, “a place of first permission.” And this is a “made place”, a place we make for ourselves by giving it (finally!) the importance it deserves.
This is merely a series of notes – the poem stays alive and available to me as a source of inspiration, always more rich than any attempt I might make to analyse.
(There’s a more literary reading of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.)
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Ron Dowd
Field with Horses’ Manes, 2009
Acrylic, ink and coloured pencil on paper, 66 x 50 cm
From David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (page 237):
…mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans – like all other beings – participate. One’s individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through, and around one’s particular body; hence one’s own intelligence is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land.
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In this recent Counselor Magazine article – Spirituality Around the World, Culturally Diverse Approaches to 12-Step, are thoughtful cross-denominational views of approaches to 12-Step recovery for addictions – the approaches being Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Here are gems from the Buddhist Rev. Koyo S. Kubose:
There is no sin in Buddhism, only ignorance. The greatest ignorance is ignorance of oneself; namely, thinking that one exists as an independent entity in the world and that everything revolves around oneself.
Liberation comes from loosening the grip of one’s self-centered and self-created existence.
Which evoke for me a poem I wrote in 2004:
wicca
perhaps one night they will take you
from your home
to a place out of doors
and in the darkness
on bare ground
before a pitch painted shed
begin to tell you who you are –and realise something
for which even they were not ready –that its only
that in the black shed
(its closed door hiding a mystery
terrifying even to them)
of which you are worthy
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Polanyi’s book Meaning has continued to play on my mind since recently making a little book of drawings and my recent post The Lost Power of an Explicated Metaphor. Specifically, it’s his examples of skills that require a number of levels that have stayed with me (these he presents as indicators of how the mind-body problem is resolved), particularly his example of the hierarchical levels involved in the production of an oral communication.
In this example, Polanyi describes how such a communication requires a complex hierarchy that begins, at the lowest level, with phonetics (or it could be even lower than that, with phones). Words, in turn, are constructs of these phonemes. At the next level, combining the words into sentences requires use of a grammar. The sentences are subsequently fitted into a style (the next level) that best communicates the ideas. And then, the style of presentation serves the ideas, the content, that the speaker wants to communicate. As Polanyi says:
…the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive a grammar from a vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not supply the content of an oral communication. (Polanyi’s italics)
Polanyi’s view is that any level controls the boundary conditions that are left undefined by the next lower level. “The mind relies for its working on the continued operation of physiological principles, but it controls the boundary conditions left undefined by physiology”.
The necessity that the boundary conditions limiting the operation of a set of lower-level principles must be different from these principles means that the mind can readily be understood to serve as a set of such boundary conditions for the laws of neurophysiology. Though rooted in the body, the mind is therefore free in its actions from bodily determination – exactly as our common sense knows it to be free.
Although the content of the chapter from which these quotes were taken (“Reconstruction”) is based on lectures given in 1969, the topic is for me high relevant today, as psychotherapy grapples with both neurophysiology and neuropsychology.
Let’s just not fall into the trap that there’s some causal relationship between the functions and behaviours of the lower level (neurophysiology) and those of the higher (mind) – “the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing the particulars, which form the next-lower level”.
Here’s a drawing (Hierarchical Levels of an Oral Communication after Polanyi, pen and coloured pencil on paper, 18 x 30 cm) of the levels in Polanyi’s example. I’ve tried to depict something about the mysteries that take place, moment by moment, as we articulate, particularly when this articulation is part of a conversation with another. The energies within these repeated movements between levels I see as connected, as well, to a deeper level, a noumenal field from which the dyad in conversation arises.
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Un- has been around since 2003 as a poem, posted at my old art site. Recently I wanted to explore again the potential crossover between text and the (spatial) field that I’m so interested in, and I’ve made a few (sometimes failed!) attempts at this in the past. I find it a hard thing to do, to enable a synthesis of text and the spatial, the visual. Anyway, here’s the latest attempt to put the Un-poem back into its spatial field. The poem itself is about the underlying field, the noumenal, the enabler from which all springs. This is Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund:
The mysterious teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund, about the abyss, without foundation, dark and irrational, prior to being, is an attempt to provide an answer to the basic question of all questions, the question concerning the origin of the world and of the arising of evil. The whole teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund is so interwoven with the teaching concerning freedom, that it is impossible to separate them, for this is all part and parcel of the same teaching. And I am inclined to interpret the Ungrund, as a primordial meonic freedom, indeterminate even by God.
Ron Dowd
Un-, 2008
linocut, 30 x 30 cm
(As an aside, if you go to the 2003 page, the liquid “Ungrund” you see is a photo I took of a natural mud pool in my home town of Rotorua, New Zealand. Growing up in that city I was often aware that we rested on a volcanic abyss.)
So how do we get to new business cards, seemingly a dimensional shift, from the sublime to the mercantile? Well my wife and fellow psychotherapist Amanda Gruhn (Karima) made the leap, saw the work as a potential carrier of what we do in our separate practices, and what we do when we work together with couples – there’s a kind of un-ing that occurs here before pre-existing seeds can sprout.
We next took the concept to Danielle Kojic (who as well as being a graphic designer is a subtle Gestalt psychotherapist) and she moved the work further, until we ended up with the cards below. And giving the cards to people is a lovely continuation of the energy of their gestation.
(Along with the cards goes a new web site, Therapy Duo.)
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Leonard Cohen quoted in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, on why it takes him so long to write a song:
You shatter versions of the self until you get down to a line, a word, you can defend and wrap your voice around without choking.
And Schopenhauer in The Art of Literature said this:
A good author, fertile in ideas, soon wins his reader’s confidence that, when he writes, he has really and truly something to say; and this gives the intelligent reader patience to follow him with attention. Such an author, just because he really has something to say, will never fail to express himself in the simplest and most straightforward manner; because his object is to awake the very same thought in the reader that he has in himself, and no other.
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Advance reviews have appeared for The Goose Bath, a selection of Janet Frame’s poetry that’s due out in Australia this month.
On the recent theme of outsiders, Janet Frame was yet another. Here’s her niece Pamela Gordon (in a recent Sydney Morning Herald review of the book) on Janet:
…she never called herself a poet. She always used to say “You can’t call yourself a poet, only other people can do that”.
She felt ambivalent about her poetry, she was always wanting to perfect it. And what she did write, she protected very much with a fierce artistic pride. She knew what she wanted to say, and to say it a certain way, and she stuck with that. Poetry was like breathing to her.
It’s a true mark of the determined outsider, unswayed by profit and public opinion. The attitude is encapsulated in this wonderful poem from the book:
I Do Not Want To Listen
I do not want to listen
I refuse to listen
to the geometric noises
of black and white.My big colourful mouth
has enough to eat thank you
without tasting
a plain triangle or two.Yes, I know rain-
drops are as heavy
and colourless as stones
and fall tropicallyrain-bashing what
scurries
without obvious form
and certainly without hopeto the defining
shelter of a microscope.
And I’ve heard
of stick insects and figuresand striped beds
in a sky and rows
of disembodied black
and white flowers yetpoor as rainbows are
against the pressure
and purity
of no-colourI must fight and fight
with my red and yellow head
even after I am dead, to stay
my own way, my own way
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