The thing that was most real for N during this month was, sadly, the sudden death of a friend. He was only 71. It was a shock, and N went to the memorial service, and there was an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Sadness, especially at funerals and losses, was something real. He sensed that and tried to feel that sadness, that realness, through the extremities in his body, and it brought him back into feeling the mystery of life. We try and explain it to ourselves. We philosophise about it, and put all kinds of abstractions around it, but in actual fact, there is nothing which can represent in verbal terms, the mystery of us being on this planet, and disappearing after a period of time.
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T had been thinking of the challenge when she was on a walk. She stopped at a lavender plant and squeezed the dry seeds and smelled the fragrance on her fingers. She thought of the question, 'Is it real?' There was the lavender and there was the fragrance. But what was the realness about it? She had experienced what is called something, i.e. a fragrance, but the word was a pale shadow compared to her experience. To experience something was very different from a word for it. Just as her name was a something, a word that she answered to, but was not her. She walked further and saw a tree. The tree was standing in the pavement as it did all the time, but she was experiencing it. It felt substantial and real, but was it? She then experienced her own eyelashes, looking at it. She put attention to her hands and feet. The tree was in her field of view, and they were both standing for a moment before she moved on. In that moment, the real was a lot of things coming together. Her attention to her own material substance and seeing her eyelashes, her feeling her feet on the ground, and seeing and being near the tree, and how that felt. She experienced the substance of the tree through her sight, and the faint substance of her own self in the trace of the lashes, and the sensations of the hands with her attention in them, and the feet with her attention in them and the ground pressing into them. She moved on and everything was a memory, and new sensations were in her senses.
L had made a note of a quote he had come across which he thought was relevant, from Helen Keller, and she said:
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.
L thought it was about feeling. During the month, he had experienced this issue quite a lot with nature. It might be the sun coming out and feeling its warmth on his face. Or the rain, or other aspects of nature, and that was reality. But if you took a photograph of something in nature, you could not capture it. The photograph was an artefact and very different from reality. If a composer writes direct from inspiration, the inspiration is something real out there, and the composer is transcribing it, but once he starts to change it, it becomes something different. L had been on the Heath the previous day, and there had been a terrible racket, some kind of impromptu party, and they were playing a version of Summertime from Porgy and Bess, which had been turned into rap music with a heavy beat, which ruined it, but the original song by George and Ira Gershwin was obviously the product of inspiration. But once humans get involved with inspiration, they can sometimes mangle it. He had also done the exercise with stretching on the extremities, and that was where he could feel his own realness.
T offered her condolences to N. It also resonated with Gurdjieff's warning about how all of what we valued and the beauty we sought or experienced was momentary or transitory. N said it had brought home his own mortality, in a sense, because his friend was relatively young. We were receiving machines, and we processed what we received, and that one day would come to an end, we would not be there, there would not be a receiving mechanism for the experiences that we now had, or processing mechanism there, but we were obviously more than just that as well. He thought the quote from Helen Keller was very profound. Here was someone who did not have a sense of sight or even a sense of hearing, so very much locked into her own body, but nevertheless able to enjoy the world and perceive the world and have a very profound sense of her own being.
The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.
... Among the number of the models they brought and the various being-manifestations they demonstrated were combinations of different colors, forms of various constructions and buildings, the playing on various musical instruments, the singing of every kind of melody, and also the exact representation of various experiencings foreign to them, and so on and so forth.
... Here it is interesting to notice that this definite period of the flow of time, namely, a week, has always been divided on your planet into seven days; and this division was even made by the beings of the continent Atlantis, who expressed in it that same Law of Sevenfoldness with which they were quite familiar.
... On Mondays, namely, on the ‘day-of-religious-and-civil-ceremonies,’ the learned beings of the first group demonstrated various ceremonies in which the ‘fragments-of-knowledge’ that had been previously selected for transmission, were indicated by means of inexactitudes in the Law of Sevenfoldness, chiefly in the inexactitudes of the lawful movements of the participants in the given ceremonies.
L said that Gurdjieff talked about musical instruments here, and any civilization which started to make sophisticated musical instruments would come up against what was called the Pythagorean Comma which is where a succession of octaves, and a succession of fifths almost match up, but never quite. So to make a piano which can go through all the keys, some engineering has to be done to average out the difference, and that is what Bach did. That could be a legominism because it could be forgotten and then rediscovered. He thought it was quite likely that the ancient Greeks knew about it. It was discovered a few hundred years ago, in our civilization, and had been forgotten, since the equal temperament. So when we heard mediaeval music played, it was not played exactly the same as it would have been when it was originally written. So in that sense, it could be a kind of suppression of knowledge as the technology was developed. So he wondered if Gurdjieff was referring specifically to this peculiarity about musical tuning, because there were seven notes in the diatonic scale, which was a slight inaccuracy, a slight flaw which would be discovered and rediscovered. It might be that this issue arose in other areas, too, because planetary and lunar orbits tended to become tidally locked, with ratios of orbits which were similar to ratios of musical intervals. We knew from the Antikythera mechanism that the ancient Greeks knew in minute detail about the orbits of the moon and the planets.
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