Ron Dowd – Art / Psyche / Nonduality
Reflections on visual art, place, psychotherapy and nonduality
Posts tagged as:
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
{ 2 comments }
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One of the poems, something in a drawer, appeared in Australia’s Blue Dog; the rest are unpublished elsewhere.
{ 0 comments }
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
{ 0 comments }
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.)
{ 1 comment }
Here’s an article, A Tailor In The Cyclops’ Cave?, by Steve Silverton, that I’ve just enjoyed reading. It’s a good reminder of what really works in psychotherapy, and a reality-check on notions that mechanical approaches can in some way address the poetic, relational worlds that we create, as they contemporaneously creates us.
… we humans tend to make ourselves up as we go along, not only our present but our past and our future as well. We are always re-writing ourselves and whatever the current story or pre-occupation is tends to change our sense of our past, present and future selves. The figure creates the ground and the ground creates the figure.
Steve Silverton’s writing comes with the clear mark of personal experience. His reflection on the question “How do you work?” (posed to the therapist by a potential client) moves not only into the nature of the relational venture of client and therapist, but raises the subject of how we potentially are limited by the words at our disposal (the words in that question), by collective sub-texts behind our endeavours and inquiries; how these endeavours can be limited by that sub-text.
{ 0 comments }
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
{ 0 comments }
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.)
{ 0 comments }
Ron Silliman’s recent post on the current James Castle exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art alerted me to the work of this fascinating artist. It’s tantalising – I obviously can’t get to the show from Sydney, and I know so little about him, but Silliman’s comment certainly made me look at his work around the web:
Apparently deaf from birth and unable to read or even speak, James Castle turned out to be one of the great American artists of the 20th century. His galleries and those of the Gee’s Bend quilt makers are what’s currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the same spaces that will be gorged with viewers of Cezanne come late February. Frankly, they should be there now.
And in a statement that really made me take notice:
I think every visual poet in the world would want to consider the vision of this man for whom language seems to have been essentially visual, as distinct from semantic.
That’s significant, coming from Silliman, a poet so deeply concerned with the place of language in psyche and life. And I hear it as a call for me to take my attempts in this area (visual language) further. I’ve found it challenging to make satisfying visual/text works, having experimented with it (in linocuts) from time to time. A project for next year, to look again at the difficult crossover between the visual and the semantic!
So coming back to the man in question, and a lovely work from the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition site:
James Castle
Man in red between two giant chickens (date unknown)
The medium for this work is poetically listed as “Blue, red, and green washes with soot-and-spit stick-applied lines on thin cardboard faced with off-white paper with selectively roughened surface (from commercially printed food carton [BECK'S MORNING FRESH BAKERIES / Morning FRESH DONUTS])”.
Looking around on the web, I came across this little work in soot and spit, one that offers me a haunting intimate reflection on the quotidian:
James Castle
Untitled (0479.40), Not dated
found paper, soot
6 1/4” x 8”
(Gallery Paule Anglim has this and other wonderful images of works by Castle.)
Finally, a nice point in a well-considered post on James Castle by Tyrus Clutter:
I suggest that in Castle’s case we should be considered the outsiders. We exist outside of his closed system. We are deciphering his messages, his language, that we cannot wholly comprehend. This makes for work that is not static. It compels us to come back again and again.
Addendum: Lots more on James Castle (including images and a Village Voice article) at Greg Kucera Gallery.
{ 0 comments }
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
{ 0 comments }
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 landand 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
{ 0 comments }
