Art and Life 1 ...

It’s increasingly difficult to write anything, I mean write coherently. It’s probably not the first sign of dementia, more likely that “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” (John Muir) That’s my new excuse for rambling hither and thither.

I wanted to write first about Why has Bodhi-dharma left for the East?, a Korean film illustrating—and profoundly embodying—Zen Buddhism. The question, for which it does not provide a direct answer, is posed as a koan: a problem to meditate upon, until the moment of enlightenment hits you like a bolt of lightning. if Zen is something you couldn’t care less about, I don’t know what you’ll think of the film. To me, Zen goes way back, almost imprinted in my soul. So like any other film, it’s one to be evaluated on its cinematographic merits; but mostly by whether it grabs you or not. Copies are rather rare. You may not find it possible to rent the DVD. I recommend ownership or nothing, for it’s not just another movie to tick off your list. It’s a place to visit and revisit. I’ve only watched it one and a half times, so far, which makes it too early to say whether it’s my favourite film of all time. Nevertheless, I would like to nominate it as one of the most successful films in the history of cinema. Let us remind ourselves what “success” means. It is to achieve your objective. It’s sloppy to use success as a synonym of popularity, or—much worse—a quality to be measured in terms of income or revenue. Sloppy is something that Bodhi-dharma never is. Its creator Bae Yong-kyun spent years making it, getting it perfect, and it shows.

Zen has been in my life as an undercurrent for more than fifty years. At 22 I was nearly ready to apply to a Zen monastery in Japan, but then ... never mind! Everything may be hitched to everything else in the Universe, but that’s where judicious editing can take out the pruning-shears, leave vast tracts on the cutting-room floor, including the story of my life. I disqualify myself from predicting whether you will like the film or not. For me, it’s a counterfactual adventure: what could have happened to me if my life had taken a different turn. You may judge for yourself, from this 9-minute trailer.

You might say that the highest art (judged subjectively) is that which goes on conveying its intention—succeeding—extratemporally. It does what it does by taking residence within us, beyond the reach of time; which sounds highfalutin, but I bet you know what I mean. Perhaps this is the very definition of the highest art: that which dwells constantly within us. I can see Bodhi-dharma achieving this status within me, through its very simplicity and purity; but mostly, as you can see from the trailer, its cinematic sensuousness that with no visible artifice places you within the scene, so that you may live it. And if you doubt the concept of Enlightenment, or believe in it fervently, you may find the film as gripping as a whodunnit, right up to the final credits.

For more information, here’s another link.

And there this piece might have ended, had I not asked myself the question “is it my favourite film of all time?” For in asking that question I challenge the status of the film I’ve previously given that honour: If.....

At this point, in order to fulfil the promise of my title “Art and Life”, I was about to expand on the merits of If.... and perhaps even contrast it with Bodhidharma, or perhaps (forgive me, dear reader) hitch my theme to anything or everything in the Universe. Perhaps fortunately at this point, the postman rang the doorbell, and delivered a book, a second-hand copy of Going Mad in Hollywood: and Life with Lindsay Anderson, a memoir in the form of a diary by David Sherwin, scriptwriter of If..... Lindsay Anderson was the film’s director.

So there will be an intermission, till my next.

PS: After drafting the above, I took a stroll in the sunshine—to the supermarket as it happens—and dictated further thoughts on Bodhi-Dharma, on If....—or any work of art, as appended below.

“I enter the film, and am totally embraced by it. Or the film enters me, diffusing into my bloodstream, as you might say. This is nothing like idolatry. For when the absorption has taken place, the essence and the sponge act on equal terms. There is Self, and there is Other, an infatuation which goes on forever. It’s devoid of idolatry: merely teamwork, symbiosis, synergy.

“Even when you pass somebody on the street, there’s a mysterious exchange of essence, an acknowledgement of two souls, even if the eyes don’t meet. It’s the same with all of Nature, all of life. Everything bleeds and touches everything else.

“John Muir [see quote above] spoke as a naturalist. Everything bleeds into everything else, like watercolour, when you apply it to wet paper.” (Acknowledgements to Susan Barry for the painting, which you can see on The Sierra Club website.)

The Tree of Life

“If I can prevent just one person from watching this, it’ll have been worth suffering through it.” Thus begins a review of The Tree of Life by Kevin A Ranson, alias Grim D Reaper; unfortunately one which I didn’t read in time. I can’t blame Paula, from whose House of Toast I heard about the film. She describes it “as impressively beautiful as many have said, but ultimately annoying”. You need more from a film than impressive beauty. You need it to deliver the catharsis adequate to the emotional anguish it’s put you through for more than two hours. The more pretentious the work of art, the progressively less willing is one’s suspension of unbelief. The portentous music and images constantly create expectation of a poignant tragedy of universal significance. By the time it suddenly finished, I think in a field of sunflowers, or perhaps Sean Penn in a suit and tie, wandering an Arizona desert, I was merely being polite to the film and all who sailed in it, praying for no more than merciful release.

As a kind of irrelevant leitmotif, we get bucketfuls of nature-fractal imagery—raging seas, hot lava, writhing clouds—which I take to represent the seven days of Creation, with highly-strung choirs to match. Any moment now, I thought, we’ll reach Satan’s rebellion from God. That’s possibly because I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to read Paradise Lost, after a visit on March 1st to Milton’s Cottage, when I allowed myself to be seduced into the idea by Eddie the Curator, a man of superlative charm, erudition and marketing skills. The Americans love Milton far more than we (English) do, he said. They come over in droves. I think the English are right. Let us honour Milton, but stay short of reading Paradise Lost, just as we may acknowledge the critical acclaim given to director Terrence Malick, short of actually spending time watching his film.

“Ultimately annoying,” says Paula. Let me clarify and say it was annoying all the way through, but most of all it was retrospectively annoying. What was all that pain for? I had planned to write a post entitled “Why Paradise Lost?” but ended up saying to myself “Why write a post about it?” So I bury those plans in this one, and cover the two overblown visions in one review.

As other critics have noted there isn’t a narrative, exactly. It’s more of a tableau in its creator’s head, made into celluloid. There is a father, a mother and three boys. The eldest is Jack, the most beloved of the three angels in heaven, and the one who will rebel against the boss of a suffocatingly-close nuclear family in the nineteen-fifties: Brad Pitt as the All-Father. In his emphasis on high achievement, I couldn’t help but think of the Kennedys. To me, his character had a look of the late President and like him had been in the Navy during the war, not to mention the good old Irish name—O’Brien. (Well, begorrah! It’s St Patrick’s Day as I write.) But never mind that. As soon as I saw the way he treated his sons, especially the eldest, I said to myself “A righteous man—they’re the worst.” He had a wonderful look of smug religiosity, which as the film went on made me wish that Jack would shoot him in the head. I wasn’t far off there. In one scene, Father’s lying under his car doing some repairs, while it’s precariously supported by a jack attached to the rear bumper. The boy Jack saw the possibilities two seconds after I did, saw how easily the support could be kicked away. Both of us, sadly, had been too high-mindedly brought up to give it more serious consideration.

What interested me in the first place was probably the same thing which interested Paula: an alleged dichotomy between Nature and Grace, as in the following voice-overs from the mother:

“The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”

“The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.”

“Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.”

“Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

Like all the other voice-overs, like most of the scenes, they are inconsequential pieces of confetti tossed in the air as generalised religious sentiment: a tossed grenade of indiscriminate guilt-laying. I shall resist the temptation to discuss Nature and Grace here & merely endorse Paula’s own words on the topic. The film doesn’t cover it anyway, being engrossed in an all-embracing emotional blackmail which only violence could stem. Jack wants to kill his father—psychoanalytically one supposes—but can’t. So the boy grows up and turns into Sean Penn, a bewildered neurotic given to wandering in metaphorical deserts—or perhaps real ones, who knows.

Here I return to the reviewer Kevin A Ranson, whose advice (“don’t watch it”) I had not received in time. He concludes that it is not the worst film of all time but his least recommended, a view which he explains thus: “. . .this film was made by one person specifically for one person and can only be the product of much soul-searching and intense introspection. It should be viewed by that one person and only by that person, sitting alone in the middle of an empty theater like a widower watching old home movies and reminiscing of days gone by.” I conclude that it’s a cinematic autobiography of which the author/director should be justly proud, so long as he doesn’t foist it on us. For the emotional blackmail foisted on Jack by his father (and more subtly by the mother) is now foisted on the viewer, suggesting that the father’s dream has come true: he has sowed a seed of righteousness in his son the film director, who has brought forth an hundredfold, to preach to us from an Hollywood mountaintop.

“Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!” said Wordsworth. Indeed. The author of Paradise Lost and the author of The Tree of Life could meet, like Joseph when he went up to meet Israel his father: “and he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while”; for they have a lot in common.

Straight off, no plan

It’s been a long time since I just wrote a post straight off, but when you have guests sometimes you have little time to yourself.

I’m wondering if I am like other people. They often seem to plan their lives, both long-term and for a day at a time. I’m not the planning type. The only thing I would like to plan is plenty of empty space in my life: space; time; eternity in the crack between space and time. I realise that this is my desire in the moment that it is given to me, with no planning on my part.

But then I reflect that I’m a child of Nature, which, if I understand the theory of evolution aright, does not make plans. Except one, of course—survival. Staying alive has rarely been my number one concern in this life—except when I’ve been in a very tight spot. One counts one’s blessings—this is surely one of the biggest. To be honest with you, my three-score years and ten has been mostly spent in choiceless carrying on, wherever I found myself, along the path of least resistance. Along with a billion others. I’ve had some big choices to face but was seldom well-enough informed to choose wisely. Much of the time I’ve not been confronted with freedom, or perhaps I was but found it too confronting. So I’ve happily worked to other people’s plans, finding a kind of freedom in choicelessness. Sometimes the words of the Book of Common Prayer echo in my brain: “O God ... whose service is perfect freedom ...” and it never occurs to me to think that servitude to God would be unfreedom. To be in harmony with divine power would be to go with the current, covered in blessings and grace. If I were a Christian I might think that there is sacrifice and renunciation involved. But I’m not and I don’t.

I found a gem in the Oxfam shop: a beautiful edition of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. At the age of 22 he was selected to go along with Captain Fitz Roy of the Royal Navy and took voluminous notes. It was a surveying expedition, took several years, covering South America, the Galapagos Islands and I know not what else—not till I take that journey myself, nearly two hundred years later propped up on pillows, through the blessing of literature. And apart from the intrinsic interest of his curiosity and observations recorded on everything he saw, there is the glimpse into what guided him to speculate on the origin of species, disturbing orthodox views ever since. Needless to say, I have found nothing of atheism in him, and everything to love in Miss T, a fervent Pentecostalist.

K, Vincent & Aunt Theodosia (Miss T)

Miss T at Waterperry Gardens. The other side of the obelisk is inscribed in Sanskrit. I assume that this side is an English translation. As you see, it’s a prayer in stone.

Let Spring be my muse

Things are happening in hedgerow and pasture; a spate of fresh worm-casts; larks twittering; occasional sardonic comments by crows. A suddenly-surprised cock pheasant flaps away from me, going airborne in its panic, plumage bejewelled and voice like a rusty klaxon. Last year’s sunflower-heads, haggard and desiccated, stand witness to the kindness of supplying winter provender for hungry young pheasants, so they can be shot by businessmen in September. That’s farming, part of the harmony in all that grows.

If I were a farmer I’d be wandering these meadows and arable fields, taking a keen interest in the renaissance of everything at this end-of-winter moment. But I’m merely an observer, with no vested interest, no trained eye, ear or nose. I see how the birds, thorn bushes, young nettles & all wildflowers in their turn awaken, look to expand their territory; sniffing the wind, temperature and humidity; noting the lengthening days & the brighter sky. Intelligence, in the whole being, not just the brain, determines when to continue in hibernal mode, when to let the sap or blood quicken for growth or mating. Tramping by, in mud-caked boots, I sense all this; using reason merely to unravel what I have sensed, and put it into coherent prose.

People think of “dumb animals”, but the perception is false. In the universe of all living things there is knowledge and wisdom, equally wondrous in every creature. It is contained in i) instinct, ii) acquired skill and iii) reason. There is good reason for extolling reason: it’s one of the defining attributes of the human ape, a gift which matures in each of us with a healthy brain. But it’s no more wondrous than the other two.

Instinct is knowledge and wisdom in its stored form, already present in the seed or ovum. No scientific insight can dim its glory. In us, instinctual nature has not been superseded. What the autonomous systems do in our bodies cannot be replicated by reason. These systems keep us alive in almost every varied circumstance, till things become too hostile for our continued singular existence; then we unravel and merge back to the All. Intellect is not the master of all it surveys. We (our conscious intellectual selves) are wholly dependent on hidden bodily mechanisms. We can’t control them and we cannot replace them with thought.

We acquire many skills in life. The baby takes its first steps, speaks its first words. These are observable milestones, but the skills go on becoming more complex. The underlying mechanisms might be understood and documented in books; but they cannot be learned from books, for their execution is beyond analysis. I refer you to the “Centipede’s Dilemma”:

A centipede was happy—quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.

As for reason, we’re fully aware of it, “we” meaning I writing and you reading. We won’t get far without it. I shall merely say that it differs from the other forms of intelligence (instinct and learned skills) in one characteristic only: its spontaneous inventiveness. For example in language communication, without the faculty of reason we could not make up new sentences to suit the occasion; or understand them. We’d be reduced to the formulaic, and learn a phrase-book. At any rate, reason is too big a topic for me to think of at this irreplaceable moment. I’ll just focus on our capacity for improvisation, whether in jazz, speech or dance; a kind of reasoning whose steps we cannot see, possibly the best kind; the mathematics of the ear that flowed from the pens of Bach and Mozart like a constant spring.

Some of the signs of human industry are a mystery in these rolling meadows; archaeological remains of the very recent past. I saw at the edge of a field, in the shade of an ancient hedgerow, some huge paving stones which seemed to hide something beneath, like the entrance to a cave or sewer, with a neat pile of about 50 bricks on one corner, as if to prevent the stone being lifted. I could not make sense of it.

There was a time when most phenomena could be ascribed to God because no other explanation was available, and this ascription had the advantage of uniting everything known or unknown. You could talk of Divine Providence, as I still do, without any prescribed worship. It’s true that today, there are more explanations, but they don’t diminish Providence: they fill out the rough outlines with more detail, a kind of fractal recursiveness. I’m confident that mysteries will always outrun explanations.

What I see in these fields, cultivated for two thousand years at least, is effort, by man and his near and distant relations. Impulse precedes effort. For the miracle of life there has to be potential energy. Most of it comes from the sun. Then there has to be purpose, at any rate, that’s what I lightly believe. If you say it was randomness I will not burn your books. Potential energy is there but purpose-driven impulse, I think, is what lets off the brakes so that potential energy turns into kinetic. Or to put it another way, Nature doesn’t fool around in mindless interaction for its own sake. Ask James Lovelock*; he’s spent his life gathering evidence. Not that nature is perfect. It makes mistakes. We have only to look at ourselves, or (to see them more obviously), at one another.

I seem to gain a kind of direct knowledge, tramping these fields: a peripatetic† philosophy open even to the illiterate, like a ploughman who walked these fields a few centuries ago, whose entire spoken eloquence derived from the Bible cadences he had heard.

I see that human separateness—from one another and from the rest of Nature—is an illusion; a necessary one, whose potential is built-in and whose actuality is gradually learned in early childhood. I call it the primary illusion, from which others derive along with philosophies and religions. I have no authority to say it’s an illusion, other than personal certainty derived from intuition whilst passing through landscapes, and confirmation from others§ who have travelled the same paths, viewed the same reality.

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* For example by reading any of his Gaia books.

† Peripatetic: from classical Latin peripatēticus of or belonging to the peripatetic (Aristotelian) school of philosophy, philosopher of this school; from Hellenistic Greek περιπατητικός given to walking about, especially while teaching or disputing, especially with reference to Aristotle and his followers; from ancient Greek περιπατεῖν to walk about, to walk up and down while teaching ... (Oxford English Dictionary)

§ See for example The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and reality in a more-than-human world, by David Abram.