crone

wraps the shawl around her
in a way of saying

i’m enough –

sits in front of our block
her old bones chilled –

warming now, us seeing her

knowing we want her,
the wise crone in our lives

bird

i read that the body is a depression
and wanted you more.

and walking to the car
weary from the waiting

thinking of the day to come

a single bird
voiced what i’d yearned to grasp

wanted to have
translated into form.

Scything Device (detail)

the scything

there were high meadows
and a wooded pass

there was a clearing
where people gathered

there was a bright device
tall as a building

animated, moired
with conflicting lines –

captivating verticals
of orange, red and violet –

and a moment when the
machine shuddered

halted its vibrant lathes for a time

shifted to other gears,
another purpose

became the weapon,
prepared for the scything

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 line

and throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflicted

hiding the act
from the rest of my life

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One of the poems, something in a drawer, appeared in Australia’s Blue Dog; the rest are unpublished elsewhere.

white clouds scroll
across the sixth-floor window

do not open window
to prevent a dewdrop
or harmful insect entering

the book of buddha’s
at the bedside table

be always thinking
of the transiency of your life

leaving, turns back to the
white sheet crumpled

to the cast of a body

spent the night in transit
bound for rome

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 therein

that 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 down

whose 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.)

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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 tropically

rain-bashing what
scurries
without obvious form
and certainly without hope

to the defining
shelter of a microscope.
And I’ve heard
of stick insects and figures

and striped beds
in a sky and rows
of disembodied black
and white flowers yet

poor as rainbows are
against the pressure
and purity
of no-colour

I must fight and fight
with my red and yellow head
even after I am dead, to stay
my own way, my own way

I’m pleased to say that a poem of mine, something in a drawer, has been published in the latest edition of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. Here is the poem:

something in a drawer

like something i’ve put in the small drawer
of a dresser
(slid the drawer in
while i was unawares) –

and now cannot find
nor know what it was –

like something that a tribe
buried in the land

and then the farming folk
(generations later)
made plots and grazed sheep
changing it all –

something i want to get back to
like last summer
when sulphur crested cockatoos
screeched garrulously
at the window in full flight –

or years before when lorikeets
flocked cacophonous
to a dead tree at dusk –

until they cut it down
for fear it would fall –

or like eros making a flying intervention
dramatic but needed –

something about dark sleep in that drawer
a sadness each day that i can’t get to

Here’s a great review by Ron Silliman of Joseph Lease’s recent poetic work Broken World. And from an interview with Joseph Lease:

We all know—in a sort of abstract way—that being born is meaningful and dying is meaningful—but the meanings get lost in our worst moments—and they are reborn in poems.

Lease is a fan of poetry as incantation, of poetry as spell. This is where power lies, as it potentially does in the voiced language of psychotherapy. And in psychotherapy, meanings too can become reborn.

This morning I walked and photographed from before dawn in Centennial Park, a haven in the middle of Sydney’s busy Eastern Suburbs.

I’m reminded now of Robert MacFarlane’s statement in his wonderful recent book The Wild Places:

I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing natural existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.

It’s good to be reminded that we can experience wildness in the heart of our city, and not think of this as less than the wildness that is “out there” in the Australian bush.

Some images from this morning:



MacFarlane goes on to say:

I had come to see wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency.

There’s a sign in the park that reminds visitors that the ponds drain large volumes of rainfall from suburbs such as Bondi Junction through the Botany Aquifer to Botany Bay, via a complex system of streams, drains, and groundwater flows. And there’s good evidence that in the Northern parts of the Aquifer at least, the sandstone filtration produces water quality better than that coming out of our taps. It’s encouraging that a wild system system can maintain its health in one of the most densely populated areas of Australia.

And finally, a poem relating to Centennial Park that I wrote last year:

the way we walked

we could feel it in our bodies,
had already slipped into our mythology –

the gravel path, the darkening sky
the swamphen strutting on the lilies –

how the green leaves gorged the lagoon
how rain fell upon them, drumming

how we attended to the beats
saw flashes in the west

saw the swamphen, purple
moving over the extent

Australia’s ACT (the Australian Capital Territory) strikes me as a powerfully symbolic territory (of a different sort to Winton’s territory occupied by the ratepayer) and one that has a place in our collective psychic life.

This fact has not been lost, of course, on the original inhabitants of this land, who for 36 years have resiliently maintained the Aboriginal Tent Embassy near old Parliament House, and right on the Griffin land axis.

The Griffins delineated a land axis, aligned with the summits of four local mountains. It went from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong. Crossing this at right angles was a water axis along the river, which in the plan became a chain of ornamental basins. By integrating the site’s topography with their design, the Griffins presented the site itself as a symbol ‘of a democratic national identity’ (Vernon, 2002). (The Ideal City)

I found the Griffins’ land and water axes to be palpably powerful, on a beating hot New Year’s Eve walk that we took last year, past some of the war memorials of Anzac Parade.

Hot letters on the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial:

A shimmering Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, also hot to the touch:

There seem to be many rich layers of land and water “markings” at play in these axes, several cruciform incisions at the heart of our democratic system, overlayed with the complexities of histories and current-day relationships between indigenous and “imported” cultures.

Dispossession is the shadow side of this occupation of territory in such a grand way – I was drawn to this in my poem on the land axis.

on the land axis

dispossession strikes a chord with me –

you want to make this place
eucalyptic

have set your gunyas
here on the levelled lawns

let in long summer evenings
the smokes of your dreamings
mingle with the scents of roses –

me, going from door to door
looking for what’s been lacking –

returning, in the end
to the little timbers
the jetty, watching the meteorite

that falls and boils its way
into the churning sea

There are also some thoughts on Canberra in canberra, new year’s eve.

canberra, new year’s eve

the big lamps hover
in ceremonial attendance
over the wide empty way

the avenue, the monuments, the dry leaf-strewn earth
vent the day’s heavy heat

at the nurses’ memorial
they touch cast letters –
A for australia’s like a small body
exuding body heat

at the air force shrine
bright steel’s hot to touch,
bronze searing

over at vietnam
a quiet thermal outpouring’s going on
while three pink and greys
haggle noisily

korea’s faired best –
granite and stones having reflected
much of the day’s onslaught –

three bright-metal conscripts
standing fresh and prepared
like sentinels for an evacuated city

the inhabitants having made
other plans for the evening

Energies can potentially be evoked by such national symbols on this grand scale – something I was attempting to consider in some recent linocuts (especially meteors over a field and meteor falling on a slope) – perhaps there can be a redemption for Winton’s youths suffering the occupation of the ratepayer; a potentially more inclusive and energised life for them, rather than one of social and cultural marginalisation.

And I had in mind in my figure on a land/water axis linocut (at recent linocuts) a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or “knowledge-based” markings in the land and/or water.

Reflecting on Tim Winton’s understanding of how children can find themselves living in “occupied territory”, and what they must do to survive…

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald (“It’s a risky business”, 24 April 2008):

So what is it about risk? Winton reckons it’s so prevalent among the young because Western culture has such safety and domesticity. “You can understand a residual appetite for wildness,” he says. “But I think there’s also a physical, psychological and erotic correlative to all that.”

He knows all about it. He had that hunger for wildness that he gives the boys. When he was still quite young he moved from the Perth suburbs to Albany with his parents. “Growing up in a small country town, there was this palpable compulsion towards risk and that had to do with somehow defeating the empire of boredom and the empire of domesticity and the empire of the occupation … youth often feel they’re living under occupation; the occupation of the old and the occupation of the ratepayer.

“From that occupied territory, we’d go out on these pointlessly insurgent actions of risk-taking which simply involved fast cars, drugs, sexual misadventure and, where we were, firearms. And, for my tiny coterie of fellow travellers, water sports.”

(The SMH article is in relation to Tim Winton’s new novel, Breath.)

On the recent theme of openings, here are two wonderful poems. To me, both speak of the possibilities of opening ourselves to deeper, richer parts of ourselves, through encounters with the natural world.

The first is by Judith Wright:

Breath

I turned to the dark window;
outside were stars and frost.
My breath went out to the night,
shaped like a cloud or a mist.
Small and soulless ghost,
what was it my heart meant
that, watching the way you went,
it moved so under my breast?

And here is Denise Levertov’s A Reward. This is a beautiful poem that was originally in her collection Evening Train.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

A Reward can now be found in Denise Levertov’s New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Robert Lee was recently in Sydney and it was a pleasure to meet up with him again at the GANZ Professional Development Evening. And it was an opportunity to buy from this gentle man his new book The Secret Language of Intimacy (The GestaltPress, 2008), which continues his investigation into the dynamics of couple relationships.

As well as Robert’s work and his description of how he runs his intimacy workshops, I was very taken by Frank M Staemmler’s paper, in this book, on joint constructions and gender-specific misunderstandings. I’d like sometime to try to animate some of his constructions on this blog.

Descending Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) on the New South Wales far south coast. This was on our February trip to Mystery Bay and around.

Short article on Gulaga.

From my poem blue boat on a stormy sea:

feeling the chill, descended
encountering things of a black shiny nature –

wriggling leaches
that we knocked from our shoes
and a snake that turned its back
slipped away into cover

In February we spent ten days at Mystery Bay on the New South Wales far south coast. It’s a beautiful area and I found writing there very pleasurable. Here’s an evening image taken from the cottage we stayed in.

A poem that resulted:

the little ones

a flock of tight knots -
brown gerygones
drubbing on lathes of the decking
like rubber bullets ricocheting

little fists of children

each vector of forces
arriving and then leaving
the verandah empty

not as it was
before they came
but changed, a stage

whereon the piece took place
and the little ones
moved on

And I find the image below a very hopeful one – approaching a rise on an open track, a soulful lifting and sense of space. The black cockatoos love this area, swaying in the banksias and strafing in flocks. Near the headland north of Mystery Bay, on the way to Corunna Lake.

In this article I related some art works I’d made to the Gestalt contact cycle and the modifications or disturbances of contact spoken about in Gestalt.

I described how these art works led me to wonder about various ideas of self in the Gestalt literature. I inquired about Gestalt field theory, and if and how it relates to the idea of a noumenal field, as I intuitively experienced this in relation to my art making practice.

I suggested how Gestalt phenomenological fields and the noumenal field may relate to each other, and that the idea of a noumenal field is a natural extension of Gestalt’s phenomenological field.

The article appeared in the Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand Vol 2 No 2 May 2006.

Download:

The article is available in Acrobat format.
Download the article (RonDowdGJArticle2006.pdf, 25 pages, 360Kb).