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Urban Research Theater Newsletter - August, 2006
1) on mysticism
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1) on mysticism
"Having traveled the world studying primitive cultures from India to the Philippines, East Africa to Haiti and South America, Grotowski was now ready to reproduce and codify ancient rituals which produced something akin to 'the trance state.' When he explained this to me, in halting-but-rapidly improving English, I repeated a comment I had once heard by Krishnamurti: 'If you say Coca-Cola a thousand times extraordinary things will happen, but it doesn't mean anything.' Grotowski laughed and shot back, 'But it does mean something.'"
- Robert Currier (http://owendaly.com/jeff/grotows6.htm)
Here is the difference between an orthodox, an atheist, and a mystic. The orthodox says: "You can repeat 'Coca-Cola' ten thousand times and strange visions will come, but it doesn't mean anything because 'Coca-Cola' is not the name of God." The atheist says: You can repeat 'Coca-Cola' ten thousand times and strange visions will come, but it doesn't mean anything because those visions are just psychological effects no matter what words you repeat." The mystic says: "...But it does mean something!"
Without mystics there are no sources, everything is flat. Mystics are doorways into the earth, because they can feel the place in themselves where they are made of mud. They can feel their own feet being of clay and being part of the earth. You look into the eyes of a mystic and it goes all the way down, into the rock and fire of the earth. Into the soil and groundwater and rivers and trees and night. But then they can also shake your hand and say hello. So they are not-quite-human, not quite what normal folks are, because they aren't carrying around that extra "self." They've accepted the contradiction of being alive and being made of dirt. It's not a contradiction for them anymore--just the way things are. That worries some people, but without it, humanity is cut off from everything else. It becomes a bunch of heads walking around on stilts talking about the way things ought to be.
It should be possible to live as a mystic. But I do not know how.
2) a Zen story
"A young man who had a bitter disappointment in life went to a remote monastery and said to the abbot: 'I am disillusioned with life and wish to attain enlightenment and to be freed from these sufferings. But I have no capacity for sticking long at anything. I could never do long years of meditation and study and austerity; I should relapse and be drawn back into the world again, painful though I know it to be. Is there any short way for people like me?' 'There is,' said the abbot, 'if you are really determined. Tell me, what have you studied, what have you concentrated on most in your life?' 'Why nothing really. We were rich, and I did not have to work. I suppose the thing I was really interested in was chess. I spent most of my time at that.'
"The abbot thought for a moment, and then said to his attendant: 'Call such-and-such a monk, and tell him to bring a chessboard and men.' The monk came with the board and the abbot set up the men. He sent for a sword and showed it to the two. 'O monk," he said, 'you have vowed obedience to me as your abbot, and now I require it of you. You will play a game of chess with this youth, and if you lose I shall cut off your head with this sword. But I promise that you will be reborn in paradise. If you win, I shall cut off the head of this man; chess is the only thing he has ever tried hard at, and if he loses he deserves to lose his head also.' They looked at the abbot's face and saw that he meant it: he would cut off the head of the loser.
"They began to play. With the opening moves the youth felt the sweat trickling down to his heels as he played for his life. The chessboard became the whole world; he was entirely concentrated on it. At first he had somewhat the worst of it, but then the other made an inferior move and he seized his chance to launch a strong attack. As his opponent's position crumbled, he looked covertly at him. He saw a face of intelligence and sincerity, worn with years of austerity and effort. He thought of his own worthless life, and a wave of compassion came over him. He deliberately made a blunder and then another blunder, ruining his position and leaving himself defenseless.
"The abbot suddenly leant forward and upset the board. The two contestants sat stupefied. 'There is no winner and no loser,' said the abbot slowly, 'there is no head to fall here. Only two things are required,' and he turned to the young man, 'complete concentration, and compassion. You have today learnt them both. You were completely concentrated on the game, but then in that concentration you could feel compassion and sacrifice your life for it. Now stay here a few months and pursue our training in this spirit and your enlightenment is sure.' He did so and got it."
One of the things in the story that is not clear to most readers--in fact it never occurs to them--is this: the man had been rich, but had never bothered to use his money to relieve the sufferings of the poor, whom he must have seen often. He spent all his time on a trivial amusement. Where did the wave of compassion come from? He had not felt it before. A time when one's own life is in danger is the least likely occasion for a sudden feeling of compassion. Even in law, if two men are drowning in the sea and there is a tiny raft which will support only one, it is not murder, or any crime at all, to push off the other and leave him to drown. It is permissible in order to save one's own life. So how is it that the hero suddenly felt compassion, and became truly heroic? It is only one of the deeper points, but a very important one.
- Trevor Leggett, _Encounters in Yoga and Zen_
3) Glenn Gould Interviews Himself About Beethoven (excerpt)
g.g.: [...] You see Mr. Gould, you're problem--and it's a much more common one that you realize, I assure you--relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of the means by which post-Renaissance art achieved its communicative power. Beethoven, as I'm sure you'll agree, was central to that achievement, if only chronologically, in that his creative life virtually bisects the three and a half centuries since the demise of your [favorite composer] Orlando Gibbons--
G.G.: True.
g.g.: --and it's precisely during that period of three and a half centuries, and specifically at the Beethovenian heart of it, that the creative idea and the communicative ideal began to grant each other mutual concessions.
G.G.: You've lost me.
g.g.: Well, look at it this way. All the works that you've enumerated on your private hate list--
G.G.: It's not that at all.
g.g.: Don't interrupt, please. All those works have in common the idea that their ideology, so to speak, can be wrapped up in one or more memorable moments.
G.G.: You mean motives.
g.g.: I mean tunes. I mean, quite simply, that you, as a professional musician, have clearly developed a resentment pattern in relation to those tunes--forgive me--which represent and which characterize the spirit of their respective compositions.
G.G.: Well, there's nothing very special about the tunes, if you want to call them that, in the "Emperor" Concerto, since you're challenging me on that ground in particular.
g.g.: There's nothing special at all. There is, however, something readily identifiable about them which, by definition, threatens to undermine your interpretive prerogative, don't you see? You resent the fact that, in a work like the "Emperor" Concerto, the elaborate extenuations relevant to those motives have indeed been left in your hands, literally and figuratively, but the raison d'etre of those extenuations inevitably devolved upon the kind of motivic fragment that automatically came equipped with certain built-in interpretive biases by virtue of which they can be sung, whistled, or toe-tapped by anyone-any layman.
G.G.: That's nonsense. Mendelssohn's tunes are every bit as good as, and far more continuous than, Beethoven's, and I have no objection to Mendelsohn whatever.
g.g.: Ah, precisely. Mendelsohn's are far more continuous because they relate to a motivic substance which is at once more extended, more complex, and--don't get me wrong, now--more professional.
G.G.: You think so too, then?
g.g.: Everyone does, my dear fellow. It's precisely that impossible mixture of naivete and sophistication that makes Beethoven the imponderable he is, and it's precisely that dimension of his music--the mixture of the professional's developmental skills and the amateur's motivic bluntness--that is at the heart of your problem.
G.G.: Do you think so?
g.g.: There's no doubt of it. And it's not at all a bad thing, really--a bit anarchistic, perhaps, but, in a way, it's even rather creative--because when you reject Beethoven--
G.G.: But I'm not rejecting him!
g.g.: Please! When you reject Beethoven, as I say, you're rejecting the logical conclusion of the Western musical tradition.
G.G.: But he isn't the conclusion of it.
g.g.: Well, of course, chronologically he isn't. As I've said, he's really the center of it in that sense, and it's precisely those works which are in the center of his own chronology that disturb you the most. It's precisely those works in which an elaborate expose with which only a professional can cope is related to material with which anyone can identify.
G.G.: Hmm...
g.g.: And that disturbs you, Mr. Gould, because it represents, first of all, a comment upon the role playing, the stratified professionalism, of the Western musical tradition that you, and not without reason, question. No, it's no accident that you prefer those works in which Beethoven was less emphatically his logical-extremist self--the works written on the way to, or in retreat from, that position--the works in which the predictability quotient is lower, the works in which the composer is less concerned with making the mystery of his art explicit.
G.G.: But on the way to, or in retreat from, that position, as you put it, you encounter a much more professional kind of art--Wagner's professionalism, or Bach's, depending on which way you go--and you have to move a long way back, or forward, as the case may be, to encounter a purely amateur tradition.
g.g.: Precisely. On either side of Beethoven, there's a much more thorough-going professionalism, and that's precisely why those composers appeal to you.
G.G.: Hmm. Well, do you mean, then, that if I do reject Beethoven, I'm on my way to being an environmentalist or something like that? I mean, I think John Cage has said that if *he's* right, Beethoven must be wrong, or something of the sort. Do you think I'm harboring a sort of suicide wish on behalf of the profession of music?
g.g.: My dear fellow, I don't think you should be concerned about it, really. Besides, you're quite a moderate, you know--you didn't choose Op. 132, after all, just 81a and 95. You're vacillating. You're not quite sure whether in making that mystery explicit, in exploiting the dichotomy between layman and professional, we do our fellow man a service or a disservice. You're not quite sure whether in opting for an environmental course, which, after all, puts an end to professionalism as we know it, we're getting at some truth about ourselves more immediate than any professional can achieve, or whether, in doing that, we're simply reining in our own development as human beings. And you shouldn't be embarrassed, because Beethoven himself wasn't sure. After all, he didn't write many "Emperor" Concertos, did he? He vacillated, to a degree at least, and I don't see why you can't. It's just that in celebrating Beethoven, you're acknowledging one terminal point which makes your vacillation practicable, and now you have to find another one. [...]
- The Glenn Gould Reader (ed. Tim Page), pp. 48-50.
I don't pretend to understand all of that, but I do read in it a strange foreign glimpse of a question that is very close to my heart: In artistic terms, it is the question of craft and spontaneity.
It's here: "You're not quite sure whether in opting for an environmental course, which, after all, puts an end to professionalism as we know it, we're getting at some truth about ourselves more immediate than any professional can achieve, or whether, in doing that, we're simply reining in our own development as human beings."
Surely the most controversial concept in human works is that of verticality. It is both the greatest goal and the greatest danger; utopia and fascism; truth and violence.
This paradox cannot be resolved through analysis, because there is nothing to resolve. Having a "great goal" is the danger; pushing for utopia is fascism; insisting on a single truth is violence.
The thing that is good can't be named; likewise the thing that is bad. It is no longer vertical if you can see it. We can call it "constant searching" only as long as we don't know what that means.
You can know that you are ugly, but you cannot know that you are beautiful. So the only alternative to ugliness is to dwell in the unknown.
4) The work is the teacher
"He [Grotowski] was always clear. 'Don't identify with the teacher, the work is the teacher.' He meant that it is through practical knowledge that a tradition can move forward in a living way." - Thomas Richards, The New York Times, 8/20/2000
Don't identify with the teacher, the work is the teacher.
Ben Spatz
2) a Zen story
3) Glenn Gould Interviews Himself About Beethoven (excerpt)
4) The work is the teacher
New York City