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

Here’s another energetic work by Kevin Meagher, from his recent show at Callan Park Gallery; a work dripping with death, time and transformation. From the Kali entry in Wikipedia:

The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself. In the Pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly seeks to confront Kali, and thereby assimilates and transforms her into a vehicle of salvation.

Kevin Meagher
Blood Kali Change

Meagher’s work is, for me, a Yantra, a refined instrument of analysis, a conception of how Blood becomes Kevin becomes Blood, how Jesus / Kali /Venus / Mars is the facilitator for a deep and necessary internal reorganisation that must take place: a matter of life and death for the artist. Or it’s something else! Something so mysterious that we’re returned finally to the work itself as carrier of archetypal content that has no other means of exposition.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I was fascinated by mirrors. My mother had a bedroom dresser with wing mirrors, and it was endlessly interesting to tilt the mirrors so that they reflected each other – creating an infinite cool-blue recursion of reflections that flipped my mind. Interspersing my head into that zone of recursion and seeing myself, a pale kid, somehow involved in, but not understanding, this mystery, was one thing; removing my head but wanting, at the same time, to know what was happening while I was absent (the recursion now presumably spotless) was quite other ache.

Mark West, at his regular Thursday night meeting in the Cross, was on fire last night. I felt for a couple of new arrivals, who (my concern only) might have been struggling with the breadth of material on offer.

Back to mirrors again, and Mark was last night demonstratiing (without mirror) Douglas Harding’s Mirror Experiment (Looking for Yourself):

I find no face here confronting the face in the mirror. I am space here for my appearance there. I am capacity for my face in the mirror.

Over there behind the glass is my human appearance; here this side of the glass is my divine reality. I am both. I have that face and I am this reality. My face there is an appearance of the One I really am – here. (One of my many appearances.)

Mark made a statement, in passing but with absolute certainty, about that head in the mirror, a statement which has stayed with me. Paraphrasing:

We’ve let that head [the one in the mirror] crawl up our arm and sit where we are, and that’s suicide!

This, to me, is a disturbing and true statement about our collective misidentification with who we are, about our construction and virtually constant maintenance of a false “I”, a sad act of continual substitution of the lie for the actually of who we are, of Awareness, of Presence.

What to do about this? As Mark said last night (in response to a great question from one of the new-comers), referring to the simple fact of awareness, to the undeniable fact of our own existence: just “Be warm towards This”. There’s something in the “warmth” that’s for me immediately curative – it’s in our myth of individuality that the warmth is lost, that we live our lives way too cool.

In May, Callan Park Gallery hosted an energetic exhibition of ceramics and works on paper by Kevin Meagher, an Outsider who’s been hospitalised for some time and who has developed his practice through the Pioneer Clubhouse in Balgowlah. He’s also taken an Artist in Residence role at Macquarie Hospital in North Ryde.

Kevin’s work is brimming with mythological and spiritual associations – and there is a real experience here of someone struggling to find where he fits into the vast staggering schemes of Norse, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Christian and Egyptian myth. And the inquiry is conducted with an urgency that conveys its importance to him, and sucks the viewer in to his worlds.

(Left, Neal Hawke, and right, Ben and Tim at War.)

For me, Kevin is involved in the classic “Who Am I?” question, with a fury and commitedness brought on by obviously distressing and bewildering personal states. I love his disregard for artistic style, and also for his daring iconoclasm – I’ll post some more of his intriguing works over the next few weeks.

(Works on paper in the top image are Shiva the Bee, Jewel Tree and Super Bella; ceramics are Ra Uranus, Iris Mary, Dianna Venus, Neptune Lir and Ganga Ocean. )

Some beautiful pieces from around about.

Not Findable but Undeniable – Randall Friend:

The subject of any and all experiences is empty – it is not locatable – it has no attributes… That subject is not a thing from which you are knowing – it is the knowing – it is like an open space or capacity. It is a mysterious, unexplainable, indescribable presence by which the world, body and mind are known… there is no light which can illuminate the subject – it cannot become objectified.

Finding Our True Home – Tracy Cochran:

…the word [nostalgia] is a learned formation of Greek compounds, consisting of “nostos,” meaning “returning home,” a Homeric word, and “algos,” “pain” or “ache.” Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Homer’s tales knows that the desire to return home is the most powerful and galvanizing of all longings. According to this great teacher [Jeanne de Salzmann], we humans wish for Being the way Odysseus yearned to see his wife and house and homeland again.

Questions and ‘Answers’ about Nonduality – Nicholas Powiull:

Thoughts cannot be identified with, they are a conditioning taught to us from a small age. Nothing really ever identifies with thought other than thought. So nobody is really thinking those thoughts. They are completely connected to what unfolds in the environment. As a way of saying it, you could say they are the environment thoughts, for without the environment no thoughts would be stimulated.

Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path – Guy Newland:

We suffer unnecessarily because we do not know ourselves. Like addicts fiercely clinging to a drug, we cannot let go of the sense that we are substantial, solid, independent, and autonomous. We lay schemes large and small to acquire and to harm—all grounded in this false apprehension of how we exist, who we are as living beings. On behalf of this exaggerated self, with fear, anger, and pride, we harm others. To nurture and to satisfy each passing whim of this exaggerated self, we build up our greed. Yet the path of greed and harm does not at all lead us toward happiness; it is samsara, the cyclic path of dissatisfaction and misery. Over and over again, moment after moment, we fall into this trap we have unwittingly built for ourselves. Like an addict’s drug, the false notion of an independently existing self is the source of great misery for ourselves and others.

* Tao Te Ching

Here’s the entry from my Outsider Art calender for June – and having enjoyed the work just about every day this month I can attest to its power and, somewhat surprisingly to me, its sense of serenity.

Paraphrasing from the calendar notes: “Eddie Arning grew up on his father’s farm in Germania, Texas. Bouts of depression and anger eventually culminated in an attack on his strict Lutheran mother. His hospitalisation for dementia praecox lasted for about 30 years. He was encouraged to draw by nursing staff. He was finally asked to leave his nursing home and went to live with his widowed sister, however, he never drew again.”

Eddie Arning
Woman with White Dog
Cray-Pas on paper, 63 x 48 cm (approx)

* Dogen, Genjo Koan

Unpacking some books from storage after our recent renovation, I chanced upon Jessie Tatlock’s Greek and Roman Mythology, a primer in the subject and a first edition from 1917. (You can find on-line, PDF and other versions of this beautiful little book here.)

The book has lots of lovely black and white photographs of statuary, friezes and vases – then (and probably still) held in a wide variety of collections. I particlarly enjoyed a small plate (Fig 42) of Cybele and her Car and was pleased to see, on a Google search, that this impresive work is still held by the Metropolitan Museum. Here she is (her “car” has now become a “cart” – makes sense in today’s language) and here is what Tatlock says of her:

Rhea, the mother of the gods,was also an earth-goddess. The people of Asia Minor knew her as Cybele or the Great Mother, and represented her crowned with a turreted crown like the wall of a city; for she was the bringer of civilization, the protectress of cities. Lions drew her chariot, and about her were the Corybantes, who acclaimed her with shouts and the clashing of cymbals, and led her worship with wild dances.

Quite a woman! And whoever the maker was, quite a sculptor! I don’t believe such a work could come into existence without that maker truly being immersed in the reality of Cybele; the Great Mother was not just a concept, rather, was a truly lived experience (that in turn energised the art-making).

So turning now to the Gulf oil spill, here’s a powerful critique of this situation by Naomi Klein:

In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.

This, for me, is what we’ve now lost: the lived, experiential reality of the Great Mother archetype, that, if collectively experienced, could be a natural restrainer to our heroic desires for exploitation of the earth. Cybele cries out for this, and the Corybantes clash their cymbals.

(Left, another depiction of Cybele, imbued with mystery, with the living energy of the golden earth – such gold to be revered where it lies, rather than being exploited mercilessly in commerce.)

Saw a nice photo sequence recently at The Guardian on The demolition of the Market Estate which had me wondering: What is the space in the room, the space we’ve inhabited, become fully habituated to (possibly for a very long time), once the demolition crews arrive? And afterwards, how has that space changed?

Said an ex-resident:

It’s just overwhelming. Everything we’ve seen and done here comes to this end. It’s very moving.

That which permeates all, which nothing transcends and which, like the universal space around us, fills everything completely from within and without, that Supreme non-dual Brahman –that thou are. (Shankara)

The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. (Nisargadatta Maharaj)

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.

Ron Dowd
Hyperthyroidic Field #5
Coloured pencil and ink on paper, 26 x 19 (approx)

Another work in the recent exhibition at Callan Park of a selection from Pearls of Arts Project Australia, a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. This one’s an energetic pastel by Leo Cussen.

Quoting from the recent Home Sweet Home exhibition blurb (National Gallery of Australia):

It is has been remarked that Cussen has a deep fascination with aspects of popular culture including the ‘Dr Who’ character from the television series of the same name and has produced a strong series of works based on this theme: ‘His work has an obsessive quality resulting from repeated use of words or phrases or in his intensive use of media. ’

I love the energetic text and the insistent working of the windows in this piece. I wanna know what’s in that tardis!

Leo Cussen
Untitled (Dr Who’s Tardis),2005
Pastel on paper, 56 x38cm

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

I live just down the hill from Mark West and for a while I’ve been attending weekly meetings at his apartment. (Mark had the good fortune to spend time with Nisargadatta in the 1970s.) Recently, Mark was quoting energetically from Psalm 23, about sitting in the presence of enemies. (How Mark quotes so much of the scriptures of various traditions from memory continues to baffle me!) Here’s the piece:

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.

“Why would I sit in the presence of my enemies?” asked Mark. Because that is what we must do, he suggests. Enemies are symbolic of thoughts here, and the Psalm is not saying we shouldn’t have them – rather that we should be able to be in their presence, and hence separate from them. How so? In Nisargadatta’s language, the work is required because we have lost the Natural State, we have the wrong relationship to thought.

In actuality we are not thought, any more than we are the body. So we sit at a table, prepared by the Lord, the Witness, pure Awareness; knowing that thoughts are the respected potential enemies of this Natural State. And in so doing we dwell in the house of the Lord forever. This is a beautiful piece of writing, a statement of pure nonduality (although usurped by a religious tradition that has lost its true meaning), a good reminder for me and possibly also for others.

To dwell in the house of the Lord forever will only be “returning to your own natural condition” (see previous post, Attempted Escapes from Fear).

A beautiful quote from Nisargadatta appears today on Charlie Hayes’ blog, and I repeat the first part here, out of my sense of conviction as to its truth:

Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realise yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition.

Once you realise that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realisation you identify yourself with the externals, like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear. It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.

You can continue reading Charlie’s post here.

Bitten by snakes? Possibly. At the very least we can say they are slithering around… Here’s Anne Grgich’s Madam Dussa, from the Callan Park show of last November. (You can download a PDF about Anne’s Archaeologies of the Extraordinary Everyday exhibition here.)

Anne Grgich
Madam Dussa, 2009

While we’re back on the snake theme, here’s another from the Callan Park Gallery show (“Snakes”) of last November, a lovely work made from recycled materials that’s been biding its time in my blog photo folder, working it’s way in…

Janine Hilder
Snake from salty lake

More work by a blog reader: here’s a couple of Eddie Wood’s clay and mixed media snakes doing damage to a wild boar. As Eddie says in his recent comment, he’s enjoying the recent snake theme around here, and has some lovely examples of his own.

I notice that Beverly Kay has a nice post on Eddie and his work. Eddie’s snake works are really energetic sculptures, as are the ones of Christ, and both speak of the transformational – about changes of consciousness by shock, biting and astute goading.

Eddie Wood
Towering serpents fight over a wild boar with tightly coiled bodies (Detail)

The old woman is completely yellow. She struggles along a city street with stern facades rising around her.

She’s growing tired, and begins to stoop, lower and lower until she’s like a lizard or something prehistoric, exhausted and bony. Yet still she’s all yellow, and struggles on.

Then she begins to dissolve. Gradually, she becomes a yellow vapour or liquid and rises gently from the pavement, up the face of a building, until she breaks free into the sky.

Rising further, she coagulates into a blinding centre, the sun, and we know this only because we’ve no choice but to avert our gaze from what she’s become, alone and triumphant in that clear empty sky, high above the city, and know that it’s only the sun that would make us avert our gaze like this.

The empty city basks in her yellow rays.

One of my blog readers, Roseanne Truman, has sent me a lovely work of hers, an appropriation of an appropriation (she says), but with a delicacy that nevertheless makes it unique. Rose says:

I like making connections with ancient art and contemporary art; the discovery just happens anyway, especially looking at my friend [x]’s work. That said, it is always though his immediate environment and life experiences which are amazingly transformed in his dreams and art. He recently painted a big star on the head of a horse – I’m sure he was influenced by his landlady’s pony (he sometimes checks on it when she goes out, as it frets a bit and he has an affinity with horses). The pony has a tiny white patch under its forelock. He also painted himself riding it (he saw himself in the dream in armour)…but it is also like a mirror image and he is facing the viewer squarely. Maybe the small things influence us more than we realise.

Rose inhabits places of soul, often hidden and under-appreciated, that give life richness, for ourselves and for others. (I also think of Bachelard’s wonderful reveries.)

Roseanne Truman
Brief Moment in Time and Space

My own take on this work is as a subtle pointer to the eternity of the present moment, given due reverence and holiness by the attendant maidens, the redeeming feminine releasing us from the strictures of ego. And the delicacy of the butterfly, gently and relentlessly attracted to the sublime sweetness of this moment! I think here of Jean-Pierre De Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment:

O, all you who thirst, learn that you have not far to go to find the fountain of living waters; it flows quite close to you in the present moment; therefore hasten to find it. Why, with the fountain so near, do you tire yourselves with running about after every little rill? These only increase your thirst by giving only a few drops, whereas the source is inexhaustible.

I was struck by this quote from Sailor Bob Adamson on Charlie Hayes’ blog (See New Book “Only That”) and in my struckness merely repeat it here:

Without any concepts, you are seeing and knowing. Can you say the seeing, the knowing, hearing or functioning has any beginning? Can you say it has any ending? Can you point to where you start seeing or where you end seeing, or hearing? So it’s ever-fresh, self-shining, self-knowing. You don’t need another self to try to find yourself. That would be an impossibility. We have created this false sense of self and then we go looking from that point of view to try to find out what we really are. Yet that self-knowing is constantly with us.

I think this is a hugely important statement and it thrills me in its potentiality for freedom. Take seeing alone: the visual field is seamless as we move through our lives, one scene panning into another; there’s no boundary to it (even when the eyes close and re-open). The beauty in meditating upon this, in following closely the never-ending explication of the visual…

“Explication”, above, comes from David Bohm. The explicate order (what we see in the case of the visual) unfolds from the implicate order, the holographic template, the matrix…

I’m also led back to Thomas Traherne and his illimited field:

I felt no dross nor matter in my soul,
No brims nor borders, such as in a bowl
We see, my essence was capacity.

(Traherne, from My Spirit, in The Dobell Poems.)

There seems, at present, to be a re-emerging interest in the nature and uses of psychedelics. (You know that feeling when you’re hit by the same subject from various quarters at the same time?) Well, I don’t have personal experience of this, but I was very taken by the report of a man who took part in a recent trial using psilocybin as a treatment for depression: Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again.

And here’s what that man (Clark Martin) said:

It was a whole personality shift for me. I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people.

Rather neat I thought, simple home-spun philosophy that’s hard to refute and aligns with the nondual experience. And here’s Clark Martin, showing up in a rather endearing image.

Upon returning to our apartment after its recent renovation one of the first things we did was put valued books onto new bookshelves. One such book is I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Slipping the book from the shelf a couple of days ago, I opened it to this short statement: “Life has no ambition”, a beautiful reminder that all our hopes, dreams and ambitions are mere constructions of an assumed I-centre, a thinker, a one who fears. Life itself is unfolding without the merest touch of such notions.

There is gestating, flowering, growing, withering, shining, decaying. Without an overlay that would name a future state. Such a relief, we are making up all else.

More quotes from Nisargadatta, from around the web:

The whole manifestation of this world is an expression of the same Consciousness that you are. You should not love anything other than your true nature, Consciousness. Deep desires, deep expectations: How can that be love? Your body identity is attracted to objects. It creates desires and you treat them as high priorities. Understanding yourself should be your only priority. Your body desires will lead you nowhere.

If you don’t understand the “I Am” how can you understand the rest?

To abide in consciousness is the true religion. The human brain creates religions.

How can words explain that from which words originate?

Without food there is death and the idea “I am” vanishes. Consciousness is beyond any idea.
You can only watch events happen. You can’t use Consciousness to do or undo anything.

Your body identity is like a very tight screw. Your idea of being an individual, is a screw. You must loosen it up. Let go of your personal identity and the screw will open as much as needed.

If you wish to use your intellect dwell on your nine months in the womb. What is in the womb is not different from what is happening now.

Anything that can show you what you are is actually pointing out what you are not.

Grasp the knowingness principle and move ahead in life. Like a swimmer caught in a vortex has to dive to the bottom of the river, then has to swim to the surface, outside of the vortex, and only then he is free.

We live like worms in hot sand, always needing help, but I am not a worm. I am the manifested and the unmanifested.

This set of images by Robert Kinmot has been in my queue for posting since about last September. Quite a bit’s happened since then – we’ve moved out of our apartment, had it renovated, and moved back in, a process much bigger and more disruptive than expected. There have been a total of six moves – including house sittings and two sub-lets in a difficult Sydney rental market fueled by the hot summer and high traveler numbers.

Back to the images – they’re more powerful now than when I first saw them on the SFMOMA site. I know there’s a whole conceptualist backdrop to Kinmont’s work, but looking at these images now, coming back home (literally), I’m drawn at a more emotional level to Kinmont’s own homecoming – his return to art making after a 30 year break. These are poignant images from 1969. They remind me also of dusty roads around Rotorua New Zealand (where I grew up) – riding the Raleigh Sports on unmade roads through dark bush.

Then there’s the real home, the nondual ground, the sublime emptiness; the way the photographer’s eye relaxes into the natural humility and accepting lack of these dependable dust-brushed ways. Very beautiful.

Robert Kinmot
My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969

Check out also Kinmot’s unpublished notes on the SFMOMA site, which add another level of story, an autobiographical richness, to this work.