High Theatre

L had done the Challenge several times. Being a composer, he thought quite a lot about going from the fourth degree of the scale, whether back down or further up. It required extra effort going upward, as the distance was two semitones, whereas going down, it was only one, or half the effort. When he didn't follow through an intended action, he would remember to sing do-re-mi-fa and then fall back to mi, and that sometimes spurred him on to carry out his intention after all. He had noticed that music he heard while out and about, blaring from cars or from within houses, often did not get much beyond the do and the re, it was very repetitive. He had wondered if the influence of that music on the people who were absorbed in it might be not to do effort, not to try to do things. If the music was purely rhythmic, it was just do do do.

Once a day, observe when you consider doing something, but meet with resistance. At the moment of choice, if you don't put in the effort to do it, sing the first four notes of the scale, and then drop back to the third, do-re-mi-fa-mi. If you do put in the effort and accomplish the task, sing the first five notes of the scale, do-re-mi-fa-sol, going the whole hog, including the extra semitones. Either way, consider how the shape of the music affects you emotionally, and whether you might sing the shape before deciding, and whether that might influence the outcome.

What had been happening to T over the month was a third project, which had a deadline of two months, and she had realised that it was the one thing that she was using the do-re-mi for. It was usually at the end of the day, and she would do do-re-mi-fa-mi. She kept falling back, because she said to herself, I just can't do it today. I'll do it tomorrow. I haven't got the energy today. She realised that she had left it to the wire, and it was only two factors - the deadline and support from a couple of other people - which pushed her to go do-re-mi-fa-so. She observed that she did do-re-me-fa-me a lot.

During the period allocated to responses, nothing was said about specific instances of doing the challenge.

The reading then continued from Chapter 30 of Beelzebub's Tales.

Initiating you now into the impressions, hidden from strangers and which became fixed in my common presence, and which were the result of my conscious perceptions during my last stay there in person on the surface of your planet concerning this contemporary art of theirs, my ‘I’ with an arisen and profound being-impulse of regret must now emphatically state that of all the fragments of knowledge already attained by the beings of the Babylonian civilization—which fragments, it must be allowed, also contained a great deal—absolutely nothing has reached the beings of contemporary civilization for the benefit of their ordinary being-existence, apart from a few ‘empty words’ without any inner content.

T said that at the time this book was written, about 50 years ago, artists were being taught, now that the camera had been invented, that they did not  have to do the work anymore, to observe and make make detailed drawings and paintings of what they saw, which, presumably, was objective art. She had been taught that the contemporary art was a release and a freedom from that. Gurdjieff's words were almost like a prophecy. He thought it was bad then, but what about now? How much worse could it get?

        

With acknowledgements to Harold Good
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And as regards this word art itself . . . this said word for some reason or other happening to please just this kind of three-brained being there, they began using it for their egoistic aims, and gradually made from it that very something which, although it continues to consist of, as it is said, ‘complete vacuity,’ yet has gradually collected about itself a fairylike exterior, which now ‘blinds’ every one of these favorites of yours who keeps his attention on it only a little longer than usual.

T said that current art had somehow got corrupted through egoistic aims and self aggrandisement. A word she heard again and again, when there were exhibitions, was showcasing, which was a ghastly word, and it was bigging it up. It was all about show rather than somebody coming along and meditating on a painting for an hour. N said that in his opinion there had clearly been quite a disintegration even from the period of the Renaissance to the later periods in art.

. . . A certain amount of information concerning the activity of the group of the mysterists, the learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism, also reached, as I have just told you, the beings of the contemporary epoch, who, wishing to imitate them also in this, began building for this purpose special halls which they also called ‘theaters.’

The three-brained beings of the contemporary civilization quite frequently assemble in considerable numbers in these theaters of theirs in order to observe and presumably to study the various prepared manifestations of their ‘actors,’ as they have quite recently begun to call them, just as the other learned members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism studied then in Babylon the reproductions of the learned beings of the group of the mysterists.

N said Gurdjieff was saying there was something going on now which represented something similar to what happened in Babylonian times. So he was not saying that all current artists were without any credibility. There was something that had still managed to come through.