Among Shadows and Ruins

In my last post I showed some of my recent paintings done on paper. These were in watercolor and pastel. At the moment, I really enjoy working on paper – just something about that natural texture and light weight of paper. However, I have become a bit impatient to let the watercolor dry before I go over it in pastel.

So…I dusted off my old bottles of Acrylic paints and started playing around with it. Not expecting anything to come out of these play sessions, I was amazed at how much I enjoyed the combination of Acrylic and paper.

The images in this post are some abstract works (size about 50 x 33 cm) that have come out of these play sessions – some of these have been getting quite a lot of pins when I posted them on Pinterest, so I guess I am not the only one liking them!

I have also posted some of these on my formal website, and in doing this I found that putting a border around the image gives a much better indication of what the work would look like when it is framed with a mat behind glass. In the case of abstract work, I have always found that the border makes up an intrinsic part of the composition, so it is quite important to see it with a proper border.

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A good break over the new year, together with increasing exposure to sunlight, nourishing but sparse food and lots of exercise has enabled me to put some distance between my demons and my angels. At the moment I am living with my angels mostly, but in the end I realize – they are all mine. All part of this particular life as a sentient being on a ball twirling in a corner of the vast eternal universe.

When consciousness can relax into the simplicity of bare presence, something opens up. We are in harmony with a greater intelligence, or more accurately, the illusion that we are separate from this falls away.

Tollifson, Joan. Nothing to Grasp (pp. 103-104). New Harbinger Publications. 

With a more energized viewpoint, I noted that my need to go into the studio has ever so slightly diminished – like everything else this will change – but for now I am keeping a curious eye on it. I have learned not to overthink these changes in my internal seasons too much. Besides, thinking is quite overrated. To quote Tollifson again:

Some of our thinking is useful and functional, but we can notice that much of our thinking, maybe most of it, does nothing but generate suffering and confusion. With awareness, we can begin to feel when thought ceases to be useful, when it slides over into obsessive rumination. The more we pay attention with awareness to any thought process, the more we can become sensitive to where it ceases to be functional. Ultimately, the clearest and most truly creative decisions, discoveries and breakthroughs come from a place totally beyond the thinking mind.

What I have learned to my surprise (again!) over the past few weeks is that a healthy, nourished body exposed to a lot of sunlight really does tend to host a more positive, healthy mind. The old “healthy body, healthy mind” cliche, a bit more personally experienced.

But there is something of benefit in all internal seasons. What beauty is there not also in the spirit in repose, slightly reflective and objective. I can only imagine the mood of Pessoa when he wrote:

The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I’m convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities. And in this contemplation (which has occurred to all thinking souls at one time or another), the colourful parade of customs and fashions, the complex path of civilizations and progress, the grandiose commotion of empires and cultures – all of this strikes me as a myth and a fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins. But I’m not sure whether the supreme resolution of all these dead intentions – dead even when achieved – lies in the ecstatic resignation of the Buddha, who, once he understood the emptiness of things, stood up from his ecstasy saying, ‘Now I know everything’, or in the jaded indifference of the emperor Severus: ‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit – I have been everything, nothing is worth anything.’

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

 

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O252-4: Wait Without Hope

One of the larger landscapes I have done. This one is about 70 x 70 cm (Oil and Cold Wax on Panel). The images below show a close-up as well as another painting done in the same week.

O254: Oil and Cold Wax on Panel (approx. 70 x 70 cm)

It is difficult for my iPhone camera to capture the nuance of light and color correctly. In the photo above, the painting appears to be almost uniform in tone and color in the fore and middle ground. But as the closeup below shows – there is a bit more color and variation than the camera captures:

 

The painting below is one of my favorites, but sadly it does not seem to appeal that much to others (going by my Instagram feed). That’s OK with me.

O252: Lost Landscape (Oil and Cold Wax on Panel, approx 60 x 45 cm)

My numbering of paintings got mixed up – there is no O253, but I do not have the energy to re-number all the ones afterwards, so this will have to do!

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In a sleepy, seaside second-hand bookstore, I came across two books on TS Eliot (one of my favorite poets). The one is The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, by Hugh Kenner. My morning coffee has new life all of a sudden. Kenner densely but steadily persists to show how Eliot found his way through the no-mans land of artificiality in his art, partly through his study of the philosopher Bradley:

It freed him from the Laforguian posture of the ironist with his back to a wall, by affirming the artificiality of all personality including the one we intimately suppose to be our true one; not only the faces we prepare but the “we” that prepares; and it released him from any notion that the art his temperament bade him practice was an eccentric art, evading for personal and temporary reasons a more orderly, more “normal” unfolding from statement to statement. A view of the past, a view of himself and other persons, a view of the nature of what we call statement and communication; these delivered Eliot from what might have been, after a brilliant beginning, a cul-de-sac and silence.

The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, P48

For me, Eliot’s poems are landscapes of the inner landscapes of people who may or may not be Eliot himself. It exposes, but does not focus on, the petty decisions (“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”), to larger ones, including: “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

But always the question “Who Am I?” seems to hover around Eliot’s poetry.  Kenner quotes a segment from Eliot’s play “The Cocktail Party”:

Who are you now? You don't now any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait.

This may seem fatalistic or nihilistic; but Eliot I think was pointing at a more humble form of waiting, as hinted at in “East Coker” (one of his the “Four Quartets”):

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

 

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#O168: No Outside Council

High city hills! Great marvels of architecture that the steep slopes secure and make even greater, motley chaos of heaped up buildings that the daylight dapples with bright spots and shadows – you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what you won’t be tomorrow, and I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there’s a mysterious longing and regret in their passing.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

In my life, weekly waves of doubt and anxiety follow others of confidence and certainty. Contentment and whispers of joy lie in the acceptance of this cycle, and at times I have one certainty only: no one knows anything for certain; no one, nothing on the outside can help – one must feel patiently, silently toward the inside.

This inward questioning applies to clearly delineated questions such as “is my art ‘good enough’?” but also to those other ones which lie dormant when we are confident and energetic. There is the one at the very bottom of existence: “Who am I?”.

Rilke wrote of this in the context of art:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

When my eldest son was about four, as he went to bed one night he asked me “Who am I?”. I said you are [name]. He said: “I know my name, but who AM I?”. I was dumbstruck by his insight.

Nisargadatta wrote:

Knowledge is most useful in dealing with things. But it does not tell you how to deal with people and yourself, how to life a life. We are not talking of driving a car, earning money. For this you need experience. But for being a light onto yourself material knowledge will not help you. You need something more intimate and deeper than mediate knowledge, to be your self in the true sense of the word. Your outer life is unimportant – you can become a night-watchman and live happily. It is what you are inwardly that matters. [I am That (66)]

I already quoted the following poem in an earlier post, but cannot resist doing it again today:

Behind Closed Doors
After teaching and preaching
running about for so many years,
Now I've shut my door and retired to the 
hidden forest spring.
Having kicked open heaven and earth
I can now rest my feet.
Alone I sit before the winter window,
the shimmering moon full.

translated by Beata Grant, in
Daughters of Emptiness

 

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#O163-7: This Steeply Sloping Hour

For me, my landscape above is a time machine back to a Sunday afternoon road to a beach where sadness and joy took turns to sweep the shoreline with the tides.

I envy – or again, perhaps do not envy – those painters that work with assured clockwork precision to an outcome almost known. For me it is a doubtful, anxious search for a felt but not known emotion in paint. It sometimes takes several attempts before it shows itself:

Pessoa wrote:

Amiel said that a landscape is a state of feeling, but the phrase is a flawed gem of a feeble dreamer. As soon as the landscape is a landscape, it ceases to be a state of emotion. To objectify is to create, and no one would say that a finished poem is a state of thinking about writing one.

Time and time again, a hurried pace, ambition and lack of self awareness takes me to the place of humble-making. There I find myself. Gold is found where I stumble and fall without hope. I am not that steeply sloping hour that Rilke wrote of:

My life is not this steeply sloping hour
in which you see me hurrying.
...
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death's note wants to climb over -
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
       And the song goes on, beautiful.

Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly in
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

I sense that autumn approaches – a favorite season. Longer walks, steady meditations, eating little and falling into hesitant footsteps with awareness. Clearly seeing and rinsing off those expectations that approach from an angle like soft rain to fill my life with semi-contractual “shoulds” that tighten like barbed wire across the chest at 2 am.

Nisargadatta said:

Pain and pleasure are in the mind. Change your scale of values and all will change. Only contentment can make you happy – desires fulfilled breeds more desires. Contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state – a precondition to the state of fullness. Believe me, it is the satisfaction of desires that breeds misery. Freedom from desires is bliss. [I am That (3)].

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#O151-4: A Love not Known

I am amazed at how hard abstract painting is for me. It requires a balance of control and abandon as well as a balance of self-confidence and self-criticism that is very taxing on my nerves at this stage of the journey.

After such struggle, how freeing it is for me to suddenly switch back to the old familiar childhood landscapes that lie dormant in my mind:

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In the Book of Disquiet, full of strangely haunting prose images, Fernando Pesoa writes:

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others.

At times the old familiar life, waiting by the roadside inn, gives way to the the most simple yet profound beauty and happiness. The walk with the wheelbarrow back to the compost heap, the 18 steps from my desk to the printer. What stupendous reality flows into these senses! What is this I?

I keep realizing – for now – that the spiritual life is a losing game. You win by giving up; and by watching your self hide those things – down there in the subconscious – the things you feel you cannot give up. Beyond ownership lies what?

Nisargadatta said:

Just look away from all that happens in your mind and bring to it the feeling “I am”. This “I am” is not a direction, it is the negation of all direction. Ultimately, even the “I am” has to go. But bringing the mind to the feeling “I am” merely helps to turn the mind away from everything else.

Questioner: “Where does it all lead me?”

 Answer: When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and love you have never known; and yet you recognize at once that this is your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience you will never be the same again.

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#O150: It sees Me

It feels like I am still finding my feet again after a break in painting. Some strange combination of urgency and anxiety about my paintings seems to have left me – I don’t know for how long and if it is to the benefit of my art or not.

This version was painted over my earlier painting Another Road (Oil Version). The images below shows the progression to the current version. Although the two photos were not taken in the same light situation, you can see what an amazing effect the sky has on the landscape – showing yet again that our perception of color is very relative to what we put next to it.

 

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This morning I wrote a letter to my son who is away on an 18 week Venture School experience. At the school they spend most of the time outdoors and have almost no access to technology except during school lessons which mostly happen on weekends.

Knowing how much my son likes technology, I expect that the experience will be challenging to him. As I was closing off my letter, I thought long and hard what advice I could give him. I know he is resourceful and intelligent – any Pollyanna-like words would be met with an eye-roll. I ended my letter as follows:

… always keep practicing and strengthening your self-awareness. Watch and observe your moods, your thoughts and emotions and learn that you are more than those things. As your self-awareness grows, so will your happiness, compassion for others and your ability to meaningfully influence others. Keep asking how you can be the best version of yourself, then leave the rest up to the Creator.

Nisargadatta said:

You can do nothing to bring [Self-realization] about, but you can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there.

I am That (42)

I found that some poetry can act as pointers to the silence, the source that Nisargada alludes to. Some may not agree with me. But read the following poem intently while observing the mind. See if the mind goes – perhaps just for a split second – to silent emptiness at the end of the last line.

Street Crossing
Cold wind hits my eyes, and two or three suns
dance in the kaleidoscope of tears, as I cross
this street I know so well,
where the Greenland summer shines from snowpools.

The street's massive life swirls around me;
it remembers nothing and desires nothing.
Far under the traffic, deep in earth,
the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.

It seems to me that the street can see me.
Its eyesight is so poor the sun itself
is a gray ball of yarn in black space.
But for a second I am lit. It sees me.

Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robert Bly in:
The Half Finished Heaven

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O149: I came to Myself

First day painting in weeks. A landscape that turned into a seascape along the way this afternoon. Beautiful day. So glad to be alive.

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Dante wrote:

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.

from Dante’s Divine Comedy, this copy from Poetry in Translation

Ecclesiastes 1.9 and TS Eliot said it better than I ever could, but here goes for today: How life turns and returns to the same familiar scenes! Always dressed in the fashion of the day, but “in the middle of the journey” I realize more and more that I have seen it all before. The same dramas at home and work, the same actors at meetings – regardless of the country in which you do business.

It becomes clear: I can end up pushing plates and condiments around on the table until I die, or at some point one can get up and walk into the sun. And you do this despite the fact that you are still conversing at the table. Always when this happens (yes, this realization also comes and goes), I go to the same old old simplicity. Each time the spiral moves up a notch.

What is MY simplicity? I return to my little black book with the distilled pearls from Nisargadatta’s I am That. For the past few days now, I have been returning as often as I can to my self – not the the one apart from others – but the perceiving center, the sense “I am”. Will I persevere? Let us see…

In one of those quirky synchronicity happenings – right after the first morning I returned to my book of notes from I am That, I saw that Open Window, a blog that focuses largely on the writings of Nisargadatta, was so kind to follow my blog. Everything points.

Moving an inch closer to your real self is not at all complex. It can happen in inches, and when you do, the Universe trembles slightly. Nisargadatta gave this supremely difficult, supremely simple formula:

Stop making use of your mind and see what happens. Do this one thing thoroughly. That is all.

I am That (43)

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