The period we now live in, the 21st century, is perhaps
the only time in human history when common people have held so little knowledge
of the sky. Craig Childs
Body as spirit IV: Tenuous body, the sky
OUTLINE
- A. Intro
- 1. "The feeling of
contact with other mysterious worlds"
- 2. The question of reduction
- 3. "These slender
shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped"
- B. Precisely but complexly located
- 1. Theory and experience
- 2. Cloud physics
- 3. The firmament
- 4. "Our resplendent
realm of light"
- 5. Ineffable waves
- C. Psychology of sky
- 1. Over, around and through
something fluid and translucent that I also am
- 2. Large and great
young belonging and early love
- 3. Sky gods and archetypes
- 4. Imagine blue
- D. Meeting in marvel
- 1. "People to whom
the highest spiritual attainment was to speak the world truly"
- 2. Music the art of air
- 3. The sky book
- 4. Roden Crater
- 5. The Lightning Field
- E. "The sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully":
contact, ethics, purpose, action
- 1. The Oak Lady: contact
and commitment
- 2. The Dark Sky Initiative:
political action to preserve the possibility of contact
- 3. Suggestions
A. Intro
What does the sky have to do with embodiment, or embodiment
with sky?
Embodiment studies is an emphasis on understanding human
life as the life of a physical body.
A core assumption of embodiment studies is that the physical
universe is all one thing, and that human bodies are part of that one thing:
there is no part of human beings that arrives from or is part of an elsewhere.
If human bodies with all of their capacities for perceiving,
feeling, imagining, thinking, speaking and making have evolved within the
universe that continues to surround them, then they are necessarily and
inherently capable of being in touch with that universe.
An embodiment studies vision sees us as made by, and attuned
to, sky. The fact and characteristics of sky are built into us.
What does sky have to do with spirituality?
We talked last session about some of the feeling values
we personally attach to this little flock of S words: spirit, soul,
spirituality, the sacred.
The rest of this session will quite informally suggest
some of the ways contact with sky is a means of living these profound
felt values.
1. "The feeling of contact with other mysterious
worlds"
The Sufi teacher Hazrat Inyat
Khan wrote that
What grows lives and is alive only through the feeling
of its contact with other mysterious worlds; if that feeling grows weak
or is destroyed in you, then what has grown up in you will also die. Then
you will become indifferent to life and even grow to hate it.
By 'mysterious worlds' Khan may have meant something rather
ineffable, but the natural world that surrounds and pervades us is itself
a mysterious world.
I have a terrible need shall I say the word? of religion.
Then I go out at night and paint the stars. Vincent
Van Gogh
Devotion integrated with theoretical knowledge
When the soul does come to rest, it is usually through
devotion. Terry Tempest Williams
Even better, it is a realm in which adoration and comprehension
can be integrated with each other. Adoration can drive the search for comprehension,
and comprehension can feed adoration as we discover the always more there
is to find.
The result is a rich spirituality in which feeling, perceiving,
imagining, investigating and thinking are all included.
This workshop on sky is a little feeling-forward into
the possibility of a spiritedness in which devotion and comprehension are
alive together in, and as, integrated bodies.
The four sections of this workshop glance at sky studies
as science, sky studies as psychology, sky studies as art,
and sky studies as activism, all of them felt as realms of devotion
and comprehension.
2. The question of 'reduction'
Understanding 'spiritual' concepts as embodied is sometimes
thought to be 'reductive'. What does this mean?
In the philosophy of science 'reduction' has a technical
meaning, which is that a complex phenomenon is understood in terms of ultimate
elements, for instance atmospheric events understood in terms of molecular
or atomic behavior. In contexts like philosophy of mind the term is more
loosely used to mean understanding something as a physical process, for
instance understanding consciousness as an effect of electromagnetic patterning
in a nervous system. In these contexts 'reduction' tends to carry an emotional
weight: people feel something is being made smaller if it is understood
as a physical event.
Are our religious feelings and inklings made smaller if
we naturalize them bring them home to the natural world and our own
bodies? The answer depends on how we feel and understand the physical
whether we imagine it in too small a way.
Here is another way to understand reduction. Dualist accounts
of cosmos describe it as a mechanism created by a divine person from outside
the cosmos itself, and dualist accounts of human bodies have described
them as mechanisms with souls somehow attached to them from outside. But
in the vision I am describing:
Nature has become a living force: it is no longer reducible,
as in scholastic thought, to the 'creation' of a transcendent mind, but
nor is it yet the mechanical model of Descartes. [forgot
who]
A new Renaissance
After the era of the mechanical metaphor for bodies
(and the cosmos too), maybe we are working toward a new paganism, a new
Renaissance - a Renaissance that for the first time can include, and even
largely be sparked by, women.
3. "These slender shadows in which miserably and
anxiously we are enveloped"
This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse
the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard
human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth
and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which
miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have
related nothing which is beyond belief. Girolamo
Cardano
Cardano was a physician, astronomer and mathematician
(1501-1576) in a time when ecclesiastical hierarchies controlled access
to knowledge of the physical world. I have adopted his paragraph as a way
of naming contemporary ways humans shrink both their notions of the natural
and their notions of the spiritual.
By horizontal concern I mean human preoccupation
only with other human beings and our relations with them a preoccupation
that leaves us treating earth and sky as background.
Open question: why are so few human beings able to engage
themselves with anything but other humans?
(And, conversely, why are the disciplines concerned with
the non-human often so blind to the needs and nature of humans?)
B. Precisely and complexly located
The unconscious is nature, which never deceives. Jung
I wanted to tell everyone about my discoveries
no, I wanted first to understand them clearly, then tell everyone. But these
weren't things you could tell people, I was realizing. Did you know the
moon has phases? My friends would have thought I'd lost my mind. And anyway,
such a question hardly conveyed the magnitude or quality of my real discovery,
which was closer to something like this: life makes sense, or the world
has a governing body, or the power and beauty of Nature is astounding."
Sharon Butala The perfection of the morning
1. Theory and experience
This section is about ways we can feel and know the
sorts of things science tells us about feel and know them directly,
face to face as it were.
We see nothing truly until we understand it. Constable
Constable spent the summers of 1821 and 1822 on Hampstead
Heath painting clouds, which he thought of as the most challenging thing
he could paint. "I am the man of clouds." Painting clouds successfully
involved understanding how they form themselves so he said his profession
as a painter could be shown to be "scientific as well as poetic."
(The scientific study of clouds was new in his era: Luke Howard named the
cloud-categories we still use in London in 1802.)
2. Cloud physics
Cloud as visualization of air dynamics.
The appearance of any cloud is the result of basic
facts about molecular behavior plus motion of air.
H2O is a molecule of a particular kind: the bond between
hydrogen and oxygen isn't strong, and the two kinds of atoms retain slight
opposite charge (hydrogen positive, oxygen negative). Because of these
slight charges water molecules stick together to various degrees depending
on temperature, hydrogen atoms in one molecule to oxygen atoms in another.
When the molecules are relatively inactive (cold) these slight bonds are
enough to hold the molecules together stably - H2O then is ice. When they
are medium-active some of the bonds hold and some release, so that H2O
becomes water. When H2O molecules are very active molecules do not stick
together at all and H2O is a vapour.
The surface of the kind of towering dazzling cumulous
cloud one sees from the air has the shape it does because of the way it
is forming it visualizes the forces creating it. Each cauliflower
bulge on its surface marks the end of a stalk of rising air, air that has
risen because it has been heated by the ground below. (Air between clouds
is sinking rather than rising.)
The rising air contains quick-jiggling unattached molecules
of invisible water vapour. As these molecules
rise they jiggle less. (In other words, they are cooling.)
With less motion their weak charge makes them to stick
to small particles suspended in the air, and then to each other. When they
stick together they are very tiny drops of water rather than vapour (drops
one 2,500th of an inch across). When these tiny droplets are jostled together
they clump into larger droplets. Past a certain size these droplets are
large enough to reflect light. These droplets can then be seen as the
shining granularity in clouds. The sharp outlines of the cloud mark
the edge of the process of rising, cooling, and condensing water vapour.
Other kinds of cloud mark other kinds of dynamics forming
water or ice from water vapour.
A virga:
Moisture that evaporates as it falls from a cloud into
a layer of dry air it turns into vapour again as bonds release. You
can see it trailing down into thin air and simply vanishing before it hits
the ground.
Diamond dust:
Warm air hold H2O molecules invisible within it as vapor.
When there is a layer of cold air near the ground overlaid by a layer of
warm air, the suddenly cooled H2O molecules at the contact between the
two layers can suddenly clump into strongly-bonded ice. Small ice columns
and needles, diamond dust, will then be seen floating down glittering from
a cloudless sky.
3. The firmament "a coherence one has all
along desired"
beneath familiar ideas of reality there lives perhaps
an older sense of self tied to an older connection to the cosmos, a sense
of being and place that hold a coherence one has all along desired. Susan Griffin, Eros of Everyday Life
the people had tied themselves to points on the horizon
and points in the sky Craig Childs
confirming the peerless order of the world Craig Childs
firmamentum from L firmare
to make firm
Newton filled the entire space of the universe with
interlocking forces of attraction, issuing from all particles of matter
and acting on all, across the abysses of darkness.
firmly among the lines from all the suns
a gravitational frame
What are some of the ways the firm frame of outer sky
can be directly experienced?
- Seeing outward
I had little idea how deeply the mystery of distance
would affect me Guy Murchie
Lying on one's back at night, glued securely to the earth
through the length of the body. Looking outward rather than up.
Seeing backward into time light arriving from stars
many light-years away light years ago - seeing many times
at once.
and nothing has intercepted, in all that time, in all
that space as long as I look it is saying I'm
here, I'm really here I show you, if you can want to know the space
the space the space you have to move in
- Seeing the Milky Way as the galactic equator. Our sun is near one edge. In one 24-hour period we rotate to
face the whole of the rim.
A discus-shaped mass of 200 billion stars spinning
in a turbulent whirl of gas and dust
The rim revolving once every 230 million years around
a hub 80,000 light years away.
mesh fixed and free, so we can be in vastest space
and never fall
- The constantly changing now and here within a framework
of space and time
Sun position, rising times and angles
Can you point to the angle of the midday sun here
at Plainfield yesterday?
Can you point to the angle of the midday sun at the summer
solstice wherever you usually live?
The furthest north (closest to Polaris) the sun gets is
on June 21, when it is overhead on the Tropic of Cancer, 23.5 degrees north
of the Equator. (Approximately at the southern tip of Mexico's Baja Penninsula,
several degrees north of Mexico City.)
One's home latitude determines how high the midday sun
appears at any time of year, how far north and south it rises and sets,
and how long in a day it appears above the horizon.
Plainfield is approximately 44 degrees north latitude.
If the sun were directly overhead it would be at 90 degrees from the southern
horizon; at Plainfield, at midsummer, it is never more than (90 44
+ 23.5) 69.5 degrees up from the southern horizon.
At Plainfield at midwinter mid-day it is never lower than
(90 44 23.5) 22.5 degrees up from the southern horizon.
At spring and fall equinoxes, when the midday sun is directly
overhead at the Equator, it will be (90 44) 46 degrees above the
horizon at midday.
At San Diego (on the Mexican border), at 33 degrees north
latitude, it will stand considerably higher at midsummer midday (80.5 degrees)
and also considerably higher at midwinter midday (33.5 degrees).
Moon position, rising times and angles
How high does the full moon ride at midnight? Is it always
the same?
Can you point to what is the highest angle reached by
the full moon in midsummer at your latitude? The highest angle of full
moon at midwinter? Is it the same as the angle of the sun at that time
of year?
No it is in fact opposite. The full moon of midwinter,
also called cold moon, wolf moon, moon of the long nights, rises to approximately
the height of the midsummer midday sun. At midsummer it rises approximately
to the height of the midwinter midday sun. If you want to know where the
midnight moon will be in six months' time, ask where the midday sun is
now.)
Why is this? The full moon is on an imaginary line from
the sun through the center of the earth to the moon it is full because
we are seeing the sun shining full onto it.
As it wanes, it rides always lower in the sky, until at
the dark of the moon it is where the sun is it is invisible because
it is overhead at midday.
The moon will rise earlier and set later in midwinter
because it is following a longer arc when it is rising higher.
At equinox, where day and night are the same length, exactly
12 hours each, full moon will rise when the sun is setting and vice versa.
4. "Our resplendent realm of light:" the
optics of light and color in the open air
"Resplendent realm" is from one of the Hymns
to Aphrodite
Minnaert and optical phenomena. Minnaert's book full of
examples.
supernova in AD 1054 as bright as the full moon for
almost a month, visible in the middle of the day. At night it bathed the
earth in a ghostly ruby-colored light. It was positioned off Orion's shoulder
. Over the next six years this light slowly faded
5. Ineffable waves
The orderedness of invisible pattern and its relevance
to perceiving: for example sound.
When we hear something somewhere we can hear the
intervening air.
The atmosphere can mediate acoustical contact because
it is elastic: it takes and propagates structural alteration. A vibrating
object broadcasts every tremor. When one blade of grass is blown against
another, every detail of the temporal structure of that tiny event travels
away from it in all directions. Anything happening on a scale that starts
a pressure wave train patterns the air.
Near its source, a wave train is precisely correlated
with object, event and location: its component periodicities, their relative
energies and timing, are exact consequences of what happened and what or
who it happened to. Because pressure wave trains travel outward like expanding
concentric spheres, they also are exact consequences of where it happened.
A complication is that all these crossed and interwoven
wave trains reflect, or are absorbed, or partly reflect, or partly are
absorbed, wherever they meet an obstacle or change of medium. The perceiving
creature, standing in the atmospheric sea, will intercept many wavetrain
versions of the same event, or will intercept a wave train when its energy
is unevenly attenuated.
But order lost can here be seen as order gained. Wave
trains converging on the perceiving creature are changed in ways precisely
correlated also with where they have been - through miles of desert air,
back and forth inside a canyon, under a door. Pressure wave trains by the
time they reach the perceiver also are exact consequences of atmospheric
conditions and the reflective and absorptive environment. In consequence,
many things about the surrounding world are specified at any point in an
acoustic field; particular objects or events or directions or atmospheric
facts will be specified by different covariances present in the array.
Creatures who hear at all hear successfully, so we know auditory systems
are able to do this very complex thing - comb out the different covariances
that specify object, location and environment.
We do not hear with our ears. We hear with the help
of our ears, but properly speaking we hear by means of the entire auditory
system - all the streams, loops, matrices and multiplexing through-nets
of the auditory nervous system, and all the motor states by which we search
for acoustic pattern. Senses are not end organs: they are systems that
reach all the way up into the brain (where they intersect and interpenetrate
other senses) and then down again into muscles that turn the head or twitch
in the pinna.
Hearing is knowing by means of the auditory body. Auditory
knowledge is the spatiotemporal structuredness by which the listener is
managing to hear, and which is occurring so that the listener's auditory
system can pick out one set of higher-order patterns rather than another.
Auditory competence is the listener's pre-structure,
the auditory system's inherent and experienced order. The listening moment
is that pre-structure selectively, responsively active, picking out, 'resonating
to', higher-order pattern in the ambient array. It is a listener physically
configured in a way that is specific to something about the world, to what
is being heard.
A listener comes to be so configured by being in contact
with the world. Pressure wave trains are patterns of impact. The world
never stops touching us. It can touch the inside as well as the outside
of our bodies: when a helicopter rises over our heads, we feel ourselves
touched in all our tissues. Some voices are felt as very pleasant touches
in the solar plexus. Other kinds of acoustic touch are so fast and sharp
we don't feel them as touches, and yet we hear by means of them because
and only because they are touches. They literally
communicate with us: they communicate energy and pattern. The tympanum
is the window by which the smaller-scale patterns can get into us: a bottleneck.
From that point on it is the wider nervous system that finds the patterns
in the patterns.
We are temporally entrained by what we are hearing:
when we hear a truck shift down at the lights, we hear it not quite when
it happens, but in the order that it happens. And we are spatially reorganized
in hearing it, though in very minute ways. Temporal entrainment and responsive
spatial reorganization are what Gibson means by resonance. What Gibson's
approach gives is a way of understanding the acoustic and neural processes
of perception not as signal processing but as comprehensive contact.
Generally speaking we hear the sorts of things we have
evolved to hear - the sorts of things that are relevant to the kind of
creature we are. We hear what we can attend to. We don't hear the fluttering
passage of a raised dot on a moth's wing, although a bat does. We do hear
our friend's pleasure or the wetness of the street.
Hearing a seagull fly over the roof we are also hearing
the open air that allows its passage. In the particular balance of the
seagull's cry with traffic noise we hear that it is early morning. When
we hear a train at the crossing seven blocks away we are also hearing the
presence of that reach of space around us.
- EE from Being about
C. Psychology of sky
Sky and the aspect of 'spirit' that have to do with transparency,
ineffability, lightness, pervasion, openness.
This section about psychology of sky is in several ways
about sky as psychic value or archetype it is about imagining
sky as well as about perceiving subtle aspects of sky.
1. Over, amid and through something fluid and
translucent that I also am
Immersed in invisibles
In brief, conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit
. Thomas Browne Religio Medici
Nothing exists or happens in the visible sky that is
not sensed in some hidden manner by the faculties of earth and nature.
The natural soul of man is not larger in size than
a single point, and on this point the form and structure of the entire
sky is potentially engraved. [Keppler]
From Peter Redgrove's The black goddess and the unseen
real:
Protoplasm is a semi-fluid electrical crystal which,
like its mineral counterparts in rocks, radio transistors and light meters,
possesses properties which include semi-conductivity (which directs and
rectifies currents), photo conductivity (which generates and switches currents
when light shines on the crystal) and piezoelectricity (which generates
currents when pressure is applied, or causes a crystal to move when an
electric current is applied).
In such crystals of which we are made there
would be electron flow within the lattices, interactions between its electronic
structure and variations in the external electromagnetic field, and an
organized pattern of electrical potentials, responding to the equally complex
pattern of electromagnetic changes constantly altering around us.
I know, as we two walk the cliff path underneath, that
the clouds are charged with that life force we call electricity and, as
they scud over, their fields press on our own, which press back. The sun
beams down on them, and its power charges up the water vapour and ice crystals
of which they are composed, and in which are dissolved the essences of
living things, drawn up from the land: the distillations of trees, flowers,
animals and people which begin to re-radiate and add the tone of their
lives to the light which excites these molecules . I know that just as
every cloud has a light-shadow, it has an electrical shadow too, which
I feel by my sense of touch, by my whole skin, for the ionization of the
ground alters as each cloud passes over, and my lungs breathe this charged
air. But within the clouds too, those complex organic molecules and assemblages
of water are charged also by the sunlight beating upon them. It is said
that their electrons move up to a higher-energy shell, and then the merest
touch of the correct frequency will cause them to drop a shell. As they
do so they emit in-phase electromagnetic frequencies, which may bounce
around inside the cloud until their energy bursts them free, emitting infra-visible
flashes like a laser, producing invisible collision-rainbows or interference
patterns as they intermesh with their source in the sunshine. 112
I know that inside the clouds the audio pulses of the
wind echo too, like vast resonant chambers which are floating electrostatic
machines and transducers of radiant energy also, masers tuned by the whole
balance of things to emit as that balance will.
As the rock reads in its crystal all the pressures
that surround it, so we read the scene from the impulses induced in the
electrical lattice of our whole body, with its piezoelectrical hair and
skeleton rebroadcasting to one another among the world's broadcasts, throughout
a continuously changing, continually held field of resonance, like a choir
of visibles and invisibles.
2. Large and great young belonging and early
love
To evoke the greatness of life
Roots of aspects of our feeling for sky. Early imprints:
- Amnion as proto-sky
We begin immersed in amnion like a proto-sky containing
and holding us. In our first world we float tethered like astronauts. We
grow to fill all of this early sky.
And then the shock of birth and the burning of atmosphere
in our new wet lungs and new wet skins. A sudden enlargement often catastrophically
felt. Outer space: outer outer space.
- Looking up
When we are little, beginning to walk, we look up at towering
sky deities who are our only hope of safety and consolation.
3. Sky gods and archetypes
- Robert Desoille
1890-1966, French psychotherapist, built on the work of
Jung and others - rêve éveillé dirigé
waking dream therapy developed in the 1930s. 'Archetypal situations.'
- Bachelard and elemental archetypes
By archetypes I understand something like highly
energized innate experiential templates.
Bachelard talked about an ascensional psychology of air
images in poetry:
a psychology of wonder
If movement is ascensional, images increasingly ethereal
and luminous
L'air et les songes translated
as Air and dreams: an essay on the imagination of movement 1988
Dallas Institute
This book has chapters on poetic values of sky and clouds,
and passages that implicitly draw on prebirth associations:
Oneiric continuity which unites dreams of swimming
with dreams of flight. L'air et les songes
The sky becomes an aerial water. The sky is then, for
the water, the call to a communion in the verticality of being. The water
which reflects the sky is a depth of the sky.
Quoting Audiberti:
Intoxicated with so many skies eaten like seeds, seeds
of the blue medicine which makes one fly, she walks, she is still walking,
but already she is sprouting wings, black wings of night, cut out by the
spiny ridge of the mountains. No! The mountains themselves are part of
the substance of those wings, the mountains with their mountain pastures,
their little houses, their spruce trees. She permits these wings to live,
to beat. They are going to beat. They do beat. She walks, she is flying.
She stops walking. She flies. She is everywhere that which flies.
(Bachelard also wrote The poetics of space and
The poetics of reverie.)
Sky gods
- Buddhist sunyata
This concept is central in Buddhism but there is no
good English equivalent. 'Emptiness' has been most frequently used, but
is unfortunate in that it sounds nihilistic. A better way of thinking of
it is 'spaciousness'
a spacious and bountiful spirit of letting everything
be
'Transparency' is another translation.
the transparency of all things and their interrelationships
- Skydancers
In Bon and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, "meditational
deities or members of their retinues"
Tibetan: khan-dro-ma - a powerful female figure:
she who walks in space. Skygoer, skydancer. Sanskrit dakini.
An advanced spiritual being, she moves in a fundamental
freedom so spacious in its emptiness that it is like the sky, or like space.
The specific wisdom that defines dakinis is the nondualistic
and vibrant knowing of a reality...described as "beginningless purity"
or "primordial freedom." Anne Carolyn
Klein
- Visionary experience
I stood in a tremendous place of light and wind. Under
my feet was only light and wind. I fell. I was like a feather. There was
no need to fear.
As I began to feel this and understand it, I began
to know the greatness of the wind, the brightness of the light, and joy.
That all my senses could perceive was themselves, that
they were making the world by casting shadows on the bright void of the
wind.
We live in this house that makes itself and keeps itself.
- from Flicker's story in Ursula Le Guin Always coming
home
4. Imagine blue
We encounter the deep electric blue of creative space
deep blue light has a demonstrable healing effect on
those who use it in visualization practices
Meditation based on one in Tarthang Tulku Time, Space
and Knowledge p.94-:
Find a location on the top of a mountain or very high
hill. The location should be such that, from a sitting position, the blue
sky encompasses almost your entire field of vision. It should be intensely
blue, but not too bright. Make yourself comfortable in a sitting position,
with your back straight, your mouth slightly open, and your breathing smooth.
Your eyes should be open but very relaxed.
For a few days, just attend to the presence of the
sky. Let your gaze and visual concentration relax completely. As you gaze
at the sky, breathe in the blue space before you. That is, draw in deep
but relaxed breaths through both your nose and mouth, considering that
it is actually the blue sky itself which is entering you. Gently draw this
space into your body so that it pervades every level of structure, from
the smallest to the largest. When you exhale, consider that your breath
is merging with the sky.
Let the space which is entering you pervade your thoughts,
feelings, perceptions, judgments, and memories, as well as every cell of
your body. All defining partitions to be permeable to this rich and vital
space.
See whether - in conjunction with your breathing
the blue sky above, before, behind, and to each side of you can enter every
part of your body and thoughts. When you exhale, allow this space to return
to the outer space through every pore of your body. There is a complete
commingling.
This exercise introduces us to some of the unlimited
energy that is here. Such energy is real, palpable, and usable.
If this exercise is performed concertedly for five
hours a day over a period of three weeks, you will find that space is literally
a food that you are eating or grazing on. The senses function more harmoniously
and feel more fulfilled. There is unlimited nourishment and fulfillment
available here if you can open to more of the presence of Great Space.
The deep blue sky may serve as a doorway to such contact.
Further step: Continue to practice the commingling
described above. Let the pervasion by space be so complete that it includes
your locatedness, your subtle sense of position in regard to both the surrounding
sky and to your locating past and anticipated future. Surrender all positions
the here that you occupy, as well as the surrounding spatio-temporal
environment that contains you and your aspirations. This is not a matter
of negating anything. Simply heed these subtle structuring factors and
allow the liberating quality of space to grace them with its touch.
We can open to a dimension which is not a doing, an
achieving, an experiencing, an occurring, or even a locatable particular.
D. Meeting in marvel
suddenly conscious of the sea crystalline and enduring,
of the bright as it were molten glass that envelopes us, full of light
1. "People to whom the highest spiritual attainment
was to speak the world truly"
In The telling science fiction novelist Ursula
Le Guin describes an oppressive culture in which there is a subversive
secret society of people who tell. This is a description of the
narrator's encounter with someone explaining these "people to whom
the highest spiritual attainment was to speak the world truly."
She had come to understand their descriptions of natural
phenomena, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies
of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity,
the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of
being.
"We're not outside the world, Yoz. You know? We
are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see?"
"Nobody made the world, ruled the world, told
the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made it be
a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened
in it?"
"We're here, and we have to learn how to be here,
how to do things, how to keep things going the way they need to go ...
all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk,
how to tell. If we don't tell the world, we don't know the world. We are
lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly. Eh? Take
care and tell it truly."
Some sky words
- Proto-Indo-European (10,000 years ago) roots for night,
star, sun, moon, snow
- sky from the Old Norwegian
for cloud
- buttermilk sky, mackerel sky
-
- cloud streets, a banner
-
- Sky words in Persian:
- zenith Arabic samt
(ar-ras) the path (over the head)
- nadir, nazir (as-samt)
opposite the zenith
- azimuth, azimut as-sumut
the ways angle on the horizontal plane from true north measured clockwise
-
- Star names in Arabic:
- Arabic: Algol, Thuban, Markab, Algenib, Algorab, Arneb,
Mizar, Alioth,
- Suhail, alabtrab, Zarijan, Nijad, Salid, Mebsuta, Mibwala,
Zaban, Unuk, Ghurab, Ruchbar, Sabik, Sagma, Ajmal, Theemin, Phegda, Huzmat,
Merach, almach, Megrez, Furud, Urkab, Iclil, Jahfalah, Zavijava, Zubenesch,
Mabsutah, Difda, Murzim, Chenib
- Greek: Arcturos, Sirius, Procyon, Canopos, Pleiades,
Hyades
- Other: Formalhaut, Nunki, Rho Ophiuchi,
2. The art of air
Music. For example Kiri Te Kanewa singing Richard Strauss'
Beim Schlafengehen and Im Abendrod from Four last songs,
approx. 1948 (Strauss b.1864 d.1949). These orchestral songs, like any
music in performance, are built in air; they also seem to me, at moments,
particularly to evoke the experience of sky. In one of the songs the soprano's
words describe a lark spiraling up and up while the music carries her voice
in that spiral and the Wagnerian sweep of the orchestra holds space darkening
transparently around us all.
For those of you who read German, here are the words:
- Und die Seele unbewacht,
- will in frien Flügen schweben,
- um im Zauberkreis der Nacht
- tief und tausendfach zu leben.
-
- Wir sind durch Not und Freude
- gegangen Hand in Hand;
- vom Wandern ruhen wir
- nun uberm stillen Land.
-
- Rings sich die Taler neigen,
- es dunkelt schon die Luft,
- zwei Lerchen nur noch steigen
- nach traumend in den Duft.
-
- Tritt her und lass sie schwirren,
- bald is es Schlafenzeit,
- dass wir uns nicht verirren
- in dieser Einsamkeit.
-
- O weiter, stiller Friede!
- So tief im Abendrot,
- wie sind wir wandermude
- ist dies etwa der Tod?
3. The sky book
What color is the sky? White, green, yellow, orange, pink
and often very grainy.
Richard Mizrach's record of desert skies published in
2000.
4. Roden Crater
Roden Crater is a 380,000 year old extinct volcano on
the western edge of the Painted Desert, near Flagstaff in Northern Arizona.
James Turrell found Roden Crater in 1974 and bought it in 1977. Over 30
years he has been designing and constructing sightlines to the sun, moon,
stars, and planets from within the mound of the crater. Like Stonehenge
and other ancient earthworks, Roden Crater is now a naked-eye observatory
for celestial events. Art foundations and private donors have been funding
the project, which will have cost something like 20 million dollars by
the time it is completed.
Turrell was born in 1943, grew up a Quaker in Los Angeles,
learned to fly when he was 16, and came to art from his experience in the
air and a degree in perceptual psychology. All of his work is concerned
with bringing people to meetings with light and sky.
He says 'Rather than being a journal of my seeing,
it is about your seeing I would just like to take you and put you in front
of this mountain in a way you couldn't miss it. It's all that I can hope
for and that way there is a possibility that the same kind of delight of
seeing that happens to me, could happen to you.'
Of the crater project he says:
... it's always something to work with light in the
outdoors. That's something that I wanted to do, wanted to shape space,
to use the light that was here naturally. Also, I wanted to use the very
fine qualities of light. First of all, moonlight. Also, there's a space
where you can see your shadow from the light of Venus alone - things like
this. And also wanted to gather starlight that was from outside, light
that's not only from outside the planetary system which would be from the
sun or reflected off of the moon or a planet, but also to emanate light
from the galactic planes where you've got this older light that's away
from the light even of our galaxy. So that is light that would be at least
three and a half billion years old. So you're gathering light that's older
than our solar system. And it's possible to gather that light, it takes
a good bit of stars to do that, and a good look into older skies, away
from the Milky Way. You can gather that light and physically have that
in place so that it's physically present to feel this old light. Now that's
a blended light, of course, but it's also red-shifted, so it's a different
tone of light than we're normally used to. But that's something that you
can do here in a place like this, where you have good, dark skies. So to
have this sort of old blended light and to have this sort of new, eight
and a half minute old light from the sun - it's like having the Beaujolais
and then having a finer, older mature blend [of wine] as well. And I wanted
to look at light that way, because to feel it physically, almost as we
taste things, was a quality I wanted. And this is where you can work with
light like that.
Roden has also elsewhere constructed many small viewing
chambers he calls sky spaces, which open to the sky. One of these is in
a Quaker meeting house, of which he says:
... it's a very traditional form, except it's convertible.
The top opens, and it makes a sky space where sky is really brought down
to you; your awareness of it is made quite different.
...This Meeting had to do with the meeting of the space
that you're in with the meeting of the space of the sky. So the sky's no
longer out there any more, but it seems to be brought close in touch with
you and space where you sit.
Turrell describes seeing colored light as spiritually
significant because:
We think of color as a thing that we're receiving.
And if you go into one of the sky spaces, you can see that it's possible
to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don't change the color
of the sky, but I changed the context of vision. This is very similar to
simultaneous contrast, where you see a yellow dot on a blue field, versus
the yellow dot on a red field. Same yellow dot will be seen as two different
colors. The same frequencies come into your eyes through a difference of
context of vision, and are perceived differently. We actually create this
color. Color is this response to what we are perceiving.
So there isn't something out there that we perceive,
we are actually creating this vision, and that we are responsible for it
is something we're rather unaware of. So I actually like to do that, and
I look at my art as being somewhere between the limits of perception of
the creature that we are, that is - what we can actually perceive and not
perceive, like the limits of hearing or seeing - and that of learned perception,
or we could call prejudice perception. That's a situation where we have
learned to perceive a certain way, but we're unaware of the fact that we
learned it. So this can actually work against you sometimes. Working between
those limits and kind of pointing them out is something I enjoy doing because
it's not just the fact that you are bringing the cosmos down into the space
where you live, but that your perception helps create that as well. So
that you really are this co-creator of what
you're seeing.
People talk about the spiritual in art, and I think
that's been the territory of artists all along. You know, if you go into
the great cathedrals made by architects and through the light of artisans,
you have created a sense of awe that often is greater than what people
feel when they read, or any sort of rhetoric by the priesthood. This is
something that can be very powerful in a visual sense. And so the artists
have always been involved in this; this is not something new. And I think
that sometimes it's easier for people to approach that portion of the spiritual
through the visual than through organized religion, and perhaps that's
true today.
5. The Lightning Field
The Lightning Field (1971-1977) created by Walter de Maria
is a grid of 400 polished stainless steel poles placed in a rectangle 1
mile long by 1 kilometer wide in a flat area of desert in New Mexico. It
can only be visited by reserving an overnight stay; visitors are met in
Quemado, a little town three hours from Albuquerque, and are driven for
45 minutes on a dirt road to a cabin at the edge of the field. Next morning,
someone comes to pick them up.
The poles are 220 feet apart, are two inches in diameter
and about 20 feet tall. Their tips define a level plane above the irregularities
of the ground.
A visitor writes this description:
It would not be enough to drive up to a parking lot
on the edge of the work, snap a few pictures, get back in the car, and
leave. The work unfolds in time and space. By forcing viewers to spend
a day with the work and by giving them the freedom to wander around and
through it, De Maria has made sure that people who see the work will feel
it as well.
Actually spending time with The
Lightning Field provides an experience that cannot be captured through
photographs or descriptions. As the quality of light changes over the day,
the work's character changes. While the sun is high in the sky from mid-day
into late afternoon, the poles almost disappear. They don't throw a shadow,
and the harshness of the light washes out poles more than three or four
away from where you stand.
But as the sun drops in the sky when evening approaches,
the field becomes different. A shadow grows from the base of each pole,
giving it additional definition. The more veiled, angled light of evening
begins to reflect off the poles, bringing into view the whole mile-long
by kilometer-wide field. Watching this happen, it's as if your vision suddenly
sharpens. The field emerges from the landscape in its totality. If you
happen to be there on a night that is not overcast and you get a brilliant
orange sunset, the effect is stunning. The poles reflect that light, flashing
orange, setting the field ablaze with color.
Part of the benefit of visiting The
Lightning Field is getting a sense for the size of the work. In its
conception, the work is a marvel of precision.
Until you actually walk the 3.2 mile perimeter of the
work and spend even more time wandering through its middle, you have no
sense of the immensity of this construction. Because the terrain is rough
you can't walk fast. Todd Gibson from Search
From the Floor, a blog
Sculptor Walter de Maria was born in 1935 and has
created other earthworks mostly in or around New York.
E. "The sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully":
contact, ethics, purpose, action
the sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully Ursula Le Guin The telling
1. The Oak Lady: contact
and commitment
For months before the comet arrived, people were predicting
it would bring about the end of the Earth, and in her eight-year-old girl's
mind Ryan found the predictions entirely plausible. The night the comet
finally came was unforgettable: she tossed and turned in her bed, waiting
for the moon to turn blood red and Satan to begin pounding on his loathsome
anvil, as the seers had promised. In the middle of the night her father
woke her and led her and the other children downstairs and onto the back
porch. With a feeling of overwhelming relief, Ryan discovered that the
infamous death star was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. "It
lit up the entire eastern part of the sky, and you could see stars shining
through it."
- from The Oak Lady republished from the San
Diego Reader Feb 27 1986 woman born in 1901 in Escondido describing
Halley's comet in 1910.
The eight year old who saw Halley's comet in 1910 was
inspired by this meeting with the reality of nature and grew up to become
the Oak Lady, a woman who gave her long life to propagating an endangered
variety of California oak throughout her county.
2. The Dark Sky Initiative: political action to the
possibility of contact
The International Dark Sky Association defines light pollution
as "Any adverse effect of artificial light including sky glow, glare,
light trespass, light clutter, decreased visibility at night, and energy
waste," and works to preserve the possibility of true experience of
the night sky.
3. Suggestions
Daily sky photos, daily sky writing
More?
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