The Darling Buds of May

Reflections on the Challenge

When you encounter a blossom or bud, take a moment to appreciate its beauty, then turn your body and focus on something ordinary nearby. Allow yourself to become absorbed in its unique qualities, experiencing the wonder and appreciation it has to offer. After spending some time with the object, reflect on your experience and optionally express it in words.

• Experiences

  In terms of looking for new buds, L found that got to be a little harder as the month drew on because the trees had come more into flower. Earlier in the month, on one occasion he saw some lovely red blossom on a tree and then turned, and in the other direction there was a tub with some black soil, and then he waited, and because he waited he could see the contrasting colours, the orange of the pot and the lush soil, and then a bird started singing. This experience only happened because he waited. On another occasion, as he walked there were tree branches with small buds on that were very beautiful, and he turned and there was an old beaten-up post office van. He waited and it didn't grow on him. It had the negative connotation of an old, great industry in decline, recently on strike and subsidised, unreliable. He only enjoyed looking at cars if there was an intentional beautiful design, which there wasn't here. Later at home, he similarly saw through the window, branches with new buds swaying. He turned round, and there was a chair against the wall, and a sweeping brush, but there was beauty there because of the design of that chair and brush.

  There was a lovely plum tree outside in N's square, and it suddenly blossomed. Every year he waited for this blossom to occur, it was just so beautiful. The previous year, he had taken a photograph where the cars had virtually disappeared, but this year, unfortunately the cars were still there. So he saw this tree once again, and wrote some words:

  Hello, cherry plum tree,
  It's good to see your spring dressing again.
  How lovely you look, old friend,
  And to see your renewed finery.
  How this reminds me of my own ephemerality,
  But it's perfect in its way.

  After that he went abroad and saw a lot of trees with beautiful purple blossoms, like jacarandas and bougainvilleas, which were always very inspiring to see, particularly against white backgrounds. He did not always remember to turn around to compare the beauty with something else.

  T recalled standing in a railway station. admiring the contrast between an absolutely beautiful blue sky and a green tree. Then she remembered the challenge and turned around, and there was a railing, brilliantly reflecting the sunlight. Under normal circumstances she would not have looked at it, but this time she noticed its design, and reflected upon it being man-made, and that it was an attempt at beautiful design, and was functional. Another time it was the beauty of some buds, and she was transported, not wanting to turn around, but she did turn around, and it was a black door, over across the street. She questioned how she could see beauty in that? Again it was because it was man-made. There was the knob on the door, it was functional, but it was also intruiging that it was painted black. Nature was colourful by default, butbecause it's what it is. Unlike nature, which was colorful by default, man-made objects like art, chairs or this door, were intentionally designed and decorated.

• Responses

  Responding to T, N said he understood her comments about doors. He had seen some lovely old ones with studs in Spain, redolent of the country's history. The blackness of the doors was almost like an absence of colour which was rare in Nature. It was very much a man-made functional colour rather than natural and of the senses

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 30 cont.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good

• Passage

  Why you must be so careful towards just them, and in order that you may in general better represent to yourself and understand from every aspect these terrestrial contemporarily arisen types, I must without fail mention two further facts which became quite clear there.

  The first is that, owing as always to the same conditions of ordinary being-existence abnormally established there, and also to the existing ‘illusorily inflated’ maleficent idea of their famous art, these representatives of art gradually become crowned, as I have already said, with an imaginary halo in the preconceived picturings and notions of other three-brained beings there, and thereby automatically acquire an undeserved authority, in consequence of which all the rest of your favorites always and in everything assume that any opinion they express is authoritative and beyond dispute.

  ...That is just why I advise you to be very, very careful not to make enemies among them, so as not to make a lot of trouble for yourself in the actualizing of your affairs.

  Well then, dear Hassein, the very ‘Tzimus’ of my advice to you is that if you should indeed have to exist among the beings of that planet Earth and have dealings with these representatives of contemporary art, then you must first of all know that you must never tell the truth to their face...

• Discussion

  N said that in his opinion there were certain artists who were massively overrated today, and who stood in positions of authority, with huge amounts of money paid for their work, which was very mediocre, in some cases. People listened to their opinions as though they were wise gurus, and yet you had to be very careful, as Ahoon says, not to cross these people, because they can make life very difficult for you. So there was some advice there which was most probably quite sound. You had to accept the world as being as mad as it was, and then deal with that madness, and keep quiet about what you really thought. Such people could be very good at self promotion, and came across, as a result, incredibly authoritative, but N did not think they were necessarily great artists. N also remarked on the use of the word "Tzimus" which he thought was Yiddish, meaning essence...

• Passage

  Any kind of truth makes them extremely indignant, and their animosity towards others almost always begins from such indignation.

  To such terrestrial types you must always say to their face only such things as may ‘tickle’ those consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer unfailingly crystallized in them and which I have already enumerated, namely, ‘envy,’ ‘pride,’ ‘self-love,’ ‘vanity,’ ‘lying,’ and so on...

  Although you have to behave in this manner toward all the beings in general of that planet, it is particularly necessary to do so toward the representatives of all the branches of contemporary art...

• Discussion

  N said Gurdjieff was so aware of the vanities and stupidities of people that he saw how you had to deal with them, although these kind of complements were well over the top. N had watched people doing exactly this in his professional life and could see how they got up the ladder, but he himself was never one to do that.

  L cited his own experience from meetings with other composers, where it was hard to diplomatically appraise music in which there were no discernible tunes.

• Passage

  Thanks to their chief particularity, namely, to the ‘periodic-process-of-reciprocal-destruction,’ there almost wholly disappeared from amongst the ordinary beings there, soon after the period of the ‘Babylonian-magnificence,’ not only the Legominism concerning the keys to the lawful inexactitudes in the Law of Sevenfoldness contained in each of the branches of the ‘being-Afalkalna’ and ‘Soldjinoha,’ but, as I have already told you, there gradually also disappeared even the very notion of the Universal Law of the holy Heptaparaparshinokh, which in Babylon they then called the Law of Sevenfoldness.

• Discussion

  L said this passage emphasized the concept of the Heptaparaparshinokh, a law of nature once known but subsequently lost. He said that the mathematical laws behind musical harmony were separate from the emotional content of the music, and that there might be such laws which permeated the entirety of existence, from the microscopic to the stars, but it would be beneath the dignity of modern science to contemplate this possibility. Gödel's Theorem showed there might be true laws of nature which, though they could be described, could never be proven.