” Absolve thyself in the great sea of the waters of Life. Dive deep in it, until thou has lost thyself. And having lost thyself, thou shalt find thyself again and be one with Me. Then shall the glory of Myself, which is thy true self, be mirrored in thee.”
Source unknown
Post-script to the title composition I wrote for 6 performers in 1992
” Beauty manifests itself as an equilibrium in which there is a harmony of stability and movement, identity and variety, the massive and the light, the low and the high, the equal and the unequal, the one and the many.”
Boethius, 6th century
Doorways…. a fascinating symbol of transition and transformation – a passageway, like a pass in the mountains. Standing in the doorway…. perhaps we look back on what lies behind us….. it’s the moment where we have to decide, have to commit to that leap of faith into the new, into the unknown.
Art for me is intricately related to what happens when we step into the doorway. Because art is all about life, and life to me is all about what happens on our journey to the next doorway.
[This Doorway page right here will soon become a portal to another website in progress that is specifically relegated to matters of a more esoteric and mystical nature. If you feel so called upon, or are just curious, step into this Doorway for a little preview. Unlike many doorways in life, this one you can stroll through casually, back and forth as you please!]
I have noticed that some of my favorite artists have a fascination with doorways. De Kooning is one who employed ‘random’ images of doorways shimmering between layers of paint. For some it invokes the idea of ‘having a way out’. For some it would be more like a way ‘in’.
Just before I wrote about stepping into “the doorway”. Maybe “a doorway” is more appropriate. Maybe there are many doorways. Maybe each moment holds fur us an infinite amount of doorways, an infinite amount of directions – just as an infinite amount of lines radiate out from a single point. Mathematics and Geometry have a way of zooming in and out of sacred space.
Dervish – the spinning wise men of the amazing Sufi tradition … the mystical arm of the Islam that hosts legendary people like the great poet Rumi and other illuminates…
It’s been said the word ‘der’ means ‘door’….. spinning in the doorway to the beyond…
(to be continued)
to sit back
and just take it in
life
art
whatever
Approaching the familiar through the unfamiliar.
It always stuck with me how a saxophone player described gaining a whole new perspective on saxophone playing by doing an in-depth study of trumpet players.
By stepping into the unfamiliar, and necessarily translating back into the ‘familiar’, we are required to invent a new language of our own – new words, new colors, new imagery, new tools.
Nothing more instructive than dwelling in a foreign country for a while.
Or camping out in the wilderness.
Because of this, I love to explore that unfamiliar terrain in the arts. Stepping out….One of such explorations takes place when we ‘step out’ from one art form into another. Creating music perhaps, but thinking of creating a poem. The language of poetry becomes the overriding principle, and all music ‘rules’ and history have to cede to that. In effect, all music rules have been suspended and replaced only by concerns of poetic language. New music ‘rules’ might have to be invented, or adapted.
There are endless excursions we can make like that, mixing up two or more art forms:
Listen to a free improvisation, structured – or freely composed -, partly as a poem, partly as a painting, partly as an architectural sculpture.
We might see a still… a moment in black and white, light evoking silence.
…Hear a poem, thrusts of meaning singing off the page, slowly filling the empty space between our beacons of known meaning.
(to be continued)
The Path of Love (not Fear)
or the under-appreciated practice of dying a little bit every day