Dear learners,
'The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness. Only when there is
stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear which pervades
heaven and earth.' The Tao.
'We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by regions of space
in which the field is extremely intense --there is no place in this new
kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only
reality.' Albert Einstein.
The room in which I spend my time writing and often just reflecting is quite
small; four or five paces in each direction and the door to the room is about
six feet high, whereas I am six feet four.
This is a vast improvement on our previous lodgings, where the roofs upstairs
were five feet six inches high with sloping ceilings so that only one third
of the room was usable for perambulating, but each of those two room's
groundplan was even smaller than these, so for me stooping became a 'fine
art'. The doors in the old house upstairs were four feet eight inches! The
roofs were held up by spars from an old river boat that carried goods up and
down the River Thames and it was filled in with 'wattle and daub', that is a
form of mud and horse's tail hairs, some of which were then both tangible and
visible to me from occasional knocks as I lay in bed. It was like living
inside something living that was also living, the sleeping quarters were like
the inside of a great fish or whale with the spars as ribs.
I must also tell you about the entrance to that ancient cottage. A rear door
accessed it and the floor tiles leading in were about three inches deep and
set straight into the earth floor, the house being over 400 years old. Over
the generations of habitation a gentle and meandering groove had been worn
into the tiles, so directing you into the warm heart of the house, the
kitchen. The house was very organic and it filled one with a sense of
peacefulness that I cannot describe in words. Somehow the very 'fabric' was
imbued with the hundreds of lives from the birthings to the expirations that
had 'happened' there. It was truly a 'living place/space'.
When I was a young boy at school I used to 'stoop' when in morning assembly.
I did not like being tall. It was a fact that people thought one did, but it
was 'my fact' that I did not. I wanted to be completely average.
The room I now work in is like the previous one was unheated for most of the
day which means that in winter mornings at dawn and before when I sit to
collect my email and thoughts and sometimes write on this and that I have to
generate a reasonable amount of passion ;-) for learning, otherwise it is an
easy option to return under the blankets like 'bucket' and 'daisy'.
Surrounding me on the walls I have a fluid but relatively constant mix of
pictures and writings that are important to me. Above my desk is a 'blank'
canvas, primed and ready for someone to paint on -- there is a print of a
brush drawing of my personal emblem, a bluebird that is both a 'bird' and
'cloud', something and nothing, something in nothing that is enfolded in pure
blue silk, my implicate made explicate -- when one turns the image in
rotation so as to invert it there is another image that strikes the mind, it
is a very perfect image of a dog, or to say a 'chien' in French that I
prefer, and the dog image looks for all the world like 'daisy' my jack
russell terrier. I believe there are other images still and implicate within
the enfoldment but they will not yet reveal themselves to me for reasons
quite beyond me, now.
Perfection is a funny concept or term. I prefer imperfection much more.
You may recall that once used a quotation about the world being full of just
the right amount of suffering, maybe my memory fails me and I put it into
some other place, but certainly it is a notion hanging round the corners of
my mind these days. The origination is Zen I believe, but mediated to me
through Nicholas Cage the American avant garde composer and artist. I often
write to music, I used to teach a girl who sang to me when I was with her, it
was so very beautiful that I cannot explain. Thank you Lou'. Beside the blank
canvas is another larger one, it is one of the few larger canvases I still
have around. Most I gave away or destroyed before I stopped painting for some
years. But this is that 'one', the one that carries you through years of
wandering. It has rocks, rivers, dark chords and bright chords, asymmetries
and symbolic contents and effective form. It has many enfolded meanings, like
a dream it is very condensed, overdetermined and rich. Very much a rich
picture for me, I cannot say for another. But it is austere beyond belief.
Not a minimalist image that is austere for austerity's sake, but austere
because that was the form the content chooses. Or, the content that the form
chooses. Never sure which is which. The image is always hung vertically in
one particular way, but once, by accident I placed it against a wall upside
down and right there was the most amazing image, revealing itself as
distinctly and asymmetrically as a 'dog' that would be a 'bird'. Now I am not
going to say what that image revealed to me but it took new life when it did
so. It was in Zen terms 'the finger pointing at the moon', that once I had
seen the moon I no longer need 'see' the finger, nor had need of it. Well,
--- not for pointing to the moon with anyway!
I often have the deepest doubts about the purposeness of writing to a list
that proposes to 'form and content' the philosophy of a LO. So what was the
attractor? At's 'deep creativity' postings? Other's postings? The hope of
meeting a nice young lady? No, none of these. It was quite by accident that I
was 'surfing' for almost the first time when I came upon the 'domain' and saw
it's principles clearly set out; so like a flame up on a hill. A community of
people developing for, with and among each other, a 'living learning
organisation'. It reminded me of an institution we have had in the UK for
over thirty years now, the Open University. I think that the OU is a fine
model or 'exemplar' for many to 'study' and yet I have never once seen it
mentioned in LO dialogue even though for over three decades it has used the
resources of the BBC to enable otherwise unqualified people from every walk
of life to become formal learners and develop themselves as fully formally as
they can and wish. It is a jewel in our community crown IMHO.
For some years before I went back into a rejuvenated 'formal education' and
while doing so I experienced many facets of learning. My parents house in
Oxford was often a home to numerous University students, I still recall names
forty years on, Gordon, and Joyce stick out, Gordon for his beautiful
collection of electric guitars that stood like pristine modern sculptures on
stands in his room and Joyce, because she was from India exotic and had a
river of black hair. Then later when older contact with another aspect, the
aloofness of sharing apartments (flats) with Oxbridge students, bordering
sometimes on arrogance contrasted later with the complete humility of world
class scholars for whom a lifetime was too short to write a single book. I
have been involved in the production of books that passed through the hands
of three generations of scholars, from a master in 1930's to pupil and
through his protégé to the hands of the Oxford University Press that has
itself existed as an institution for five hundred years, predating somewhat
easily the Declaration of American Independence. But only one third the age
of one of At's mid life succulents!!!
I
Learning is deep and rich when it is open to time and it's diversity.
That is anyway part of my life's experience for what it is worth.
When I came upon the Rick Karash LO it reminded me of all that was best in my
life about learning and little about what was worst.
I was flabbergasted when I read Maturana, Capra and de Lange's respect and
tacit if not explicit realisations of the role of poets and artists to the
new demands of the unfolding age. They and numerous private mails make me
think that even if only for now there is important work to be done by reading
and writing here. So what if I get something wrong, or appear foolish, or
write 'off key' or 'off topic' the risks are miniscule compared to the
benefits of the learning I may take from what I may give. My intuition tells
me to keep going and I think that my guts can take it, I hope so! I was
befriended once by a dying girl, she was saved by a modern miracle of
transplant technology. She and her family taught me all about 'guts', in her
case 'heart and lungs'.
OK, I know I have wandered on this one again, but I will come back to my
rooms, that have often seemed like prisons to me. Both houses are old, which
means small windows. That means they are for more than half the year dark.
They are not so dark when inside as they appear from the outside, but I must
confess, by averages they are certainly small and dark rooms. Speaking once
with someone who in mixed and crowded company I had thought a friend
remarked, 'Andrew, no wonder you are always talking enthusiastically about
living in a big old farmhouse in the south west of France living in that
pokey dark little house all year as you do!' I can tell you, I was hurt, my
partner was with me and we both felt slightly ashamed. As one does. A few
weeks later I came upon a photograph taken in midwinter, it is of two living
beings 'deeply' in each others 'company', almost incandescent both being and
becoming and both suffused in streaming light and love, complete and absolute
unconditional positive regard, captured therein as a moment though I tacitly
know to be right now living a continuum. I do not know about the physics
either of light or love, but I can 'sense' them a mile off and in that
'company' no 'hole of the mole' is so dark that I cannot see that fitting
beauty. Light like learning sits deep inside people, waiting. Patiently.
At de Lange believes, and so also I happen to believe, that anyone can
overcome the 'subject dread' of mathematics. It has been my dread all my
life. But I can now see 'why' and seeing 'why' I see 'how' and seeing 'how'
helps me see 'what' and 'when' and seeing this I see 'who' and in the 'who' I
find myself and in myself I find the meaning of 'x' and that it changes again
and again.
But At, if I am wrong -- you will tell me.
I happen to believe that every single one of you is an artist. Every single
one of you is deeply creative, even if so deeply set inside yourself that you
couldn't believe it yourself. I know that feeling.
I KNOW that FEELING.
If ever any one of you wants, ever to find that out for themselves I will
certainly 'care' about that. And maybe you will find a new more 'royal' road
to the deepest mystery that is 'selfhood'.
Self - learning - self.
The first reasonable gesture of all 'plastic arts' is usually to move the
hand and arm outward, as emblem and sign it is in my lexicon anyway to both
ask and receive, both give and take in the self same moment.
Somehow a kind of perfect circle is broken and in that asymmetry a river
starts to flow both inward and outward and it is taking you places you have
never been, where others cannot precisely go since you are every moment
henceforth self made, self learning, self sending both past, present and
future.
Listen then to an artist who confesses to a real lack of 'skilful means'
while even so being a 'modern master' speak about becoming being in the act
of painting. Let your imagination meander to a sea of ideas and sense, feel
how very easy, even natural it might be to become and artist, -- 'When as in
Opus 13 the black streams downward, the ribbons seem to take the form of
blood dripping. The effect all the stronger when you compare this streaming
image with that of [the series] In Plato's Cave. which is like an immense
eye weeping, paler into darker, white into black. Here black into white.
Opposite poles, yet unforgettable, precisely because so rare, are the drips
to be cradled [by the artist]. -But the drips have another message, that, I
think, of death, its cyclical other, the cradling gesture of the painter who
must arrest the paint by holding the paper or the canvas horizontal once the
drip has taken its place.
The artist remarks, 'You see, here I cradled the image. See, here.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I see'.
Plenteous.
Of these images another saw a mere photograph of them and remarked, 'The
work, it is so strong that the picture of it takes your breath away.'
Just so.
That is, I think, what happens when you see.
Strange that we do not see, until we see.
Fitting that we have to let go of the one vision to acquire the vision of the
next?
A creative collapse par excellence that signals a return to wholeness via a
new track.
Finding and losing in your own way.
Walking on the ground of feeling.
Your 'cradling' is a good one Rick Karash, your 'pictures' are rich and deep
At de Lange, your 'streams' still flow in the dark Leo Minnigh;-) and your
'bird' waits a 'tumbled turning' Winfried Dressler, visions upon visions upon
visions.
We will not last -- they will.
That is a reality too.
Finally for the soul that may still be searching the 'voice' and the 'song'
at the bridge of the 'void' this, '-emptiness is not to be taken as
nothingness, -- ' 'Brahman is life. Brahman is joy. Brahman is the Void
---Joy, verily, that is the same as the Void. The Void, verily, that is the
same as joy.' Upanishads
Best wishes,
Andrew Campbell
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