CYCLES AND THE WIDENING GYRE

yayoi kusama

 

Today, the winter solstice was a still day of light fog with about fifty yard visibility. Trees in the foreground were dark and wet, and the trees faded into the fog with distance. The foreground had a white background like a watercolor. Light breeze rang the windchimes in sequences of four and five different notes every time. A good day to be at home with no schedule and nothing pressing. A good day to stare out the window in silence with empty mind and see familiar landscape as watercolor. A good day for a long winter's nap. A good day to ride a dugout canoe through a swamp in Botswana with author Laurens van der Post in his 1958 account of searching for the Bushmen, THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI. I'd read this several years ago, probably around 40. A few weeks ago I saw the documentary film, THE JOURNEY OF MAN, tracing DNA back to the original people on earth. It went back to the Bush people of the southern part of Africa, who are living in the Kalahari desert in this time because people all around them want to kill them. They're little and they're different, so kill them, the mind we like to believe we rise above in civilization, but never do. Sometimes I feel like this is the very mind that guides civilization. However, that's serving a temptation to take something incomprehensively complex, simplify it into a word or two and pat myself on the back for saying something erudite. I returned to van der Post after learning the Bush people of the Kalahari are the original humans we all come from. They have lived in the southern part of Africa for something like 200,000 years. What we call civilization goes back less than 10,000 years.

 

yayoi kusama

 

I've recently learned a word for my view of the world. The word is, apocaloptimist, someone whose vision of the near future is waxing worse and worse, and whose vision of the distant future is that everything will work out just right. We're in a difficult time in civilization, perhaps the most difficult ever, and perhaps the greatest renascence since classical times. Making sculpture of human forms changed from standing straight up with arms straight down to sitting, lying down, standing in varieties of postures, walking, running, realistic in the classic sense. In the 20th Century, we left reproductions of existing objects and human forms for more interior representations of mind. In the Dada period, 1916, Zurich, Switzerland, a handful of draft dodging artists from Romania, Germany, France, Norway, ran the course of 20th Century art in six months. Simultaneously, in Paris, Marcel Duchamp was working in the same spirit. The cycle repeated from then to 1969 or 70. A new cycle has begun in what we call the Post Modern. First cycle happened in Zurich for half a year. Second cycle covered the globe in half a century. Third cycle may last half a millennium, 500 years. The progression I see is raising of consciousness by way of Dada during WW1, Surrealism between WW1 and WW2, and abstraction from WW2 to 1969, when the avatar of the Age left the body. The Modern period. The Post Modern period began doing Dada again. That's breaking it down in broad sweeps, the best I can do for brevity. This span of Dada all over the globe may last fifty or more years, then Surrealism and Expressionism maybe a few hundred years, then the same period of time with abstraction in all its varieties. Then time to run the cycle again, a spiral that started in one place in one time, cycles that grow bigger and bigger to take in all of humanity over a period of at least 500 years, each cycle an advancement by way of what was learned from the cycle before.

 

 

yayoi kusama

 

As we have looked back on Greece and Rome as the foundation of art through the 19th Century, the future will be looking back to the 20th Century as the foundation time when collective human consciousness took a leap without knowing it. It will take a few more centuries for that leap in consciousness to reach all the people around the globe. This does not exclude the learnings from the Classical period or the Renaissance. They will continue and feel as far away conceptually as Egyptian renderings of people with straight arms and straight legs. I was fascinated to see my first Egyptian sculpture of a life-sized human head. No lines on the face. No furrowed brow. Smooth African round face. The classical age of reason, the breakthrough of the forebrain in the time of the Christ in Jerusalem, made sculptures showing furrowed brows, deeply lined faces, the torment of thought. In a way, that period was the introduction of rational thought to collective humanity. It takes awhile for it to get around. We can see in the progression of 20th Century art leaving the physical reality of the body, or what Marcel Duchamp called "the retinal," for an art of mind reality. Perhaps this is leading to the next big cycle of the spiritual. If abstraction and readymades are art expressions of mind, I'm wondering how art of the spiritual would manifest. Perhaps what I'm calling "mind" is the spiritual, and mind came with the classical. It's getting down to defining mind and spirit, which I can't get into at this moment. I don't even know that there is a line. I'd be more inclined to say they fade into each other the way light and dark do at sunrise and sunset.

 

yayoi kusama

 

This brings to mind the next book from the past I want to reread. Not all books from the past do I want to reread, very few. This one I just now picked off the shelf. AN ART OF OUR OWN: The Spiritual In Twentieth Century Art, by Roger Lipsey, 1988. Looking at the table of contents makes me salivate mentally. He walks from Cezanne through the Modern period, chapters on Kandinsky, Brancusi, Matisse, Noguchi. Lipsey previously wrote a biography of Ananda Coomeraswamy, a philosopher of Indian art. Lipsey's vision of art is through a western eye that has learned to see through the eastern eye. He is a scholar whose eyes see both ways. I am comfortable with his approach to the spiritual through the eastern vision. Eastern spiritual engages experience. I remember enjoying Lipsey's prose and insights. I didn't always feel like his interpretations accorded with my understanding of the subject, but that means nothing. He was teaching me. I wasn't teaching him. It's mine to take what I learn from him and weave with my own understanding. Lipsey pulled the whole of 20th Century art together as the dismantling of form, color, name, design, all the way to conception, 1969. I remember reading the 500 page book with the same fascination as a Patrick White novel, another one I'd like to dip into again. I could happily spend what time I have left in this body rereading books I have loved along the way. Another favorite is a biography of artist Giacometti by James Lord. One I must read the first time is the text with a big book of Brancusi's work, written by his closest friends, other Romanian artists living in Paris. And Stanley Weintraub's biography of Whistler. Now I get a logjam in my head and have to do like a dog, shake my head, flop my ears, throw pointless thinking off like water off my hair. Back to the Kalahari of Southern Africa for now. This is what I love about reading, that it takes me to places, times, people, understandings far beyond my own, whatever my own may be. I feel like I'm creeping up on a time to dive back into Lipsey's beautiful book and illustrate it with google images. A review of the Modern to look forward to with the same anticipation as for a cup of Ethiopian coffee.

 

yayoi kusama

 

 

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THE PEOPLE OF THE FIRST DAY

bushmen art

Looking backwards into the deeply forgotten past the last couple days, looking for where my fascination with the most primitive people around the earth began. National Geographics magazines, found everywhere, showed me sometimes people who danced around fires wearing masks and covered with body paint. People who carry bows, a few arrows and spears, people who from our point of view look like the most poor, but from their point of view were the most rich. Wherever they are, they live in a garden. Want a monkey for dinner? Easy done. One perfect shot. And you get your arrow back. They know how to make fire and their musical instruments when they need them. I've an idea the fundamentalist church of childhood fed my interest somewhat. Tuesday night was Missionary Meeting. Every week. No getting out of it. Missionaries passing through would stop by, give a slide show, talk about the work they're doing in the fields of the Lord, and ask for money. I liked the slide shows of mostly Africans. It was like Africa was real missionary work. Schweitzer and Livingston. A continent of colored heathens ripe for the picking, where they boil missionaries in big crock pots. My heart was actually with the coloreds. I couldn't stand it that the missionaries were so proud of putting the people in American thrift store rejects. That's the way they were supposed to dress after they get saved. It doesn't show their private parts and it's the way of civilization. It's what the Lord wants for them. I didn't have anything to base it on, maybe intuition, but I did not believe the Africans were devil-worshipping heathens, still don't, and have learned enough about it that I never will. I feel sad for black American Baptists who believe their African heritage is devil-worshippers. Now we're getting into colonialism. Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

 

 

 

I do not have the heart of an adventurer. I'm not one to go off into the unknown to see if I can survive it. The unknown is happening all the time, anyway. I have a great admiration for people who climb Everest, K-2 and the other killer mountains. I enjoy reading accounts by adventurers, one of my favorite being John Long's Gorilla Monsoon, a collection of his accounts of Xtreme experiences you have to be ready to die to jump into. I'd rather read about it. I think John Long thought up the plot for the Sylvester Stallone movie, Cliffhanger. It would have been better with actors we'd never seen before, but they would not have been a box office draw. So we had Rocky's ugly face wrecking an otherwise good movie. I like other people to have the adventures and tell me about them in person, by book or movie. I don't want to be hanging by a rope on the side of an ice cliff that goes half a mile straight down into a chasm there's no return from. That's for them that want it. Sometimes I believe Milly Richardson and I are from the same planet yonder in space. We both feel like we are here to observe. It's like we both live by a maxim of don't get attached, just observe. Observing is great. It's an ongoing round-the-clock movie. It's like seeing everything behind you in a window. I admire people like Jane Goodall sitting in dense African forest among the chimpanzees. She made one of the most beautiful films of my memory, The Wild Dogs of Africa, with her then-husband who did the filming. I saw it almost 40 years ago on PBS tv and have never seen nor heard reference to it since.

 

 

 

The documentary JOURNEY OF MAN has taken me to looking at the Kalahari region of southern Africa in a picture book I have of landscapes in Namibia. Odd to have such a thing, but I do. Africa fascinates me to read about. Ryan Milan's MY TRAITOR'S HEART comes to mind first. He wrote of South African apartheid in the time of Botha, from the inside. Athol Fugard comes to mind. I passed him on a sidewalk, once, going in opposite directions. What's happening in that part of South Africa is capitalist strife. I'm more interested in the people of the Kalahari region, the people who live the original way we humans began. I look at pictures of them on google images. I've read about them in the past, but it has been a long time. So long that they are no more than familiar. Went to the shelf and picked up Laurens van der Post's THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI. I gave away the copy I read a long time ago. The copy in the house was found at an Alleghany County Library book sale, a discarded library copy. Probably paid a quarter for it. It's in rough shape indicating it may have been read a number of times. It's one of those books you don't forget. I sat down with it for awhile and let myself be pulled into the good writing that inspires thoughts that I'd love to be able to write like van der Post. I picked up the book and held it just now, opened it, read a chance paragraph and felt awe. Van der Post grew up on a farm pioneered by his grandfather on the edge of the Kalahari territory. He grew up hearing his dad and granddad talking about them, about their ways, their skill with arrows, hunting, the clicking sound in their language, enough to grow him up curious about the people of the bush.

 

 

 

I've read a little bit along the way about the Aborigines in Australia, their culture, their relationship with the spirit that was direct, so direct as to be participants in the Dream. The Aborigines say they have been here 50,000 years, which I thought incredible, though wondered how well mythology translates to history. Confirmed by DNA that they do indeed know their own history renewed interest in them. Now, to see from the Journey Of Man that the people of the Kalahari are the first people that all the rest of us descended from in a Persian carpet tree of life that covered the earth eventually. All the time their descendants were covering the earth, the original people stayed at home in the southern tip of Africa. I'm wondering how many thousands of years the bush people lived there before the band of explorers set out on their way to the floating continent. They were not lonely because they were the only people. They did not set out looking for other people. They walked over the virgin earth, their footprints the first human footsteps. They were one with the spirit world and the animal world. They didn't leave a swath of devastation behind them like humans do now. This was before money was an issue. They were one with the ground they walked on and the rivers they crossed, wherever they were. The vision or whatever it was that guided them had to be powerfully convincing. They didn't have machetes, either. I'm wanting to dive into Laurens van der Post's good writing again and read about the Bushmen of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, this time seeing them the original humans, where we came from, what we came in with.    

 

 

 

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