Strokes and Folks

Reflections on the Challenge

When you spot something around you that seems not exactly right, consider what the reason might be, observing your emotions as you do so. Then stroke your arm.

• Experiences

  N had been to the Rosetti exhibition at the Tate. He looked round the pictures, and read the poetry. thought it was all very nice, but a bit false. It was medeivalism carried to the extreme. The colours weren't real. He would much rather look at Renaissance paintings than look at these which were almost like the kind of illustrations you see in children's books, which are overly colourful, but you would not see colours like that in the real world. Some of the poetry was the same, and he left the exhibition feeling a little bit disappointed.

  T had booked accommodation for a trip in the summer, and she had recently received a message that it was no longer available due to a family crisis. She had felt very disappointed - it was like a line of falling dominoes, with the actions of one individual setting off a chain reaction. It felt small on one level, but it was only after writing it down, which helped her process the experience, that she remembered to stroke her arm, and she realised that the gesture was comforting.

  With L it was usually noticing things happening in the worldL Firstly, a tourist boat had capsized in Kerala, India. It didn't seem right to him that such a thing should happen, and he had to consider what the reasons might be. He thought the reason was human action. The boat was carrying twice the permitted number of passengers, which L attributed to greed, and possibly a lack of courage to enforce the rules due to competition. His emotional reaction was sadness. Another incident was a bus accident in South America, where a bus went off the road, crashed into beehives, and the survivors were attacked by bees. Most casualties were from bee stings. L again attributed human actions to this, such as careless driving and irresponsible bee breeding practices.

• Responses

  Responding to L, T said the signiifcance of human error was often overlooked. She suggested it was a matter of 'criminal carelessness', quoting the phrase from Beelzebub's Tales. She mentioned the Buddhist concept of 'Right Action and Wrong Action', indicating the fundamental importance of making correct decisions to prevent such unfortunate events.

  She also said that Cezanne had written about sensory inaccuracies in painting, and drew parallels with N's experience at the Rosetti exhibition. She thought that the perceived inexactitude in art, such as the overly idealized portrayal by the Pre-Raphaelites or the work of Cezanne and Morandi, might be a deliberate attempt to awaken the viewer.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 30 cont.

With acknowledgements to Harold Good

• Passage

  Every kind of conscious production of the beings of the Babylonian period was gradually destroyed, partly owing to decay from time and partly owing to the processes of ‘reciprocal destruction,’ that is to say, to that degree of that psychosis of theirs called the ‘destruction-of-everything-existing-within-the-sphere-of-the-perception-of-visibility.’

  Thanks chiefly to these two causes, almost all the consciously actualized results of the learned beings of the Babylonian epoch gradually disappeared from the surface of that ill-fated planet and at such a tempo that after three of their centuries scarcely any of them were left...

• Discussion

  What stood out for L wa that the destruction was only of things that could be seen, whereas things that were not visible might be overlooked. When T first read it, she was thinking of the first or second world war where everything was destroyed, and the same was happening now in Ukraine. Considering visual modern art, the term was coined about a hundred years ago, and we revered those people, but now it had gone too far from its roots and there was no longer anything being communicated.

• Passage

  This branch which reached beings of contemporary times is called there ‘sacred dances.’

  And thanks to this branch alone, which survived from the period of the Babylonian learned beings, a very limited number of three-brained beings there now have the possibility, by means of certain conscious labors, to decipher and learn the information hidden in it and useful for their own Being.

  And the second mentioned branch which recently ceased to exist was that branch of the knowledge of the Babylonian learned beings which they called the ‘combination-of-different-tonalities-of-color’ and which the contemporary beings now call ‘painting.’...

• Discussion

  L said the discussion was specifically about the "sacred dances." N added that Gurdjieff, having studied dancers from around the world, understood dance as a language; these dances were akin to an alphabet. L said that when a modern choreographer created a dance with a narrative, possibly ideological, it could miss the essence of dance from Gurdjieff's perspective, which focused on transmission and fostering conscious change in the performers. T said modern dance seemed to have lost its connection to the grassroots traditions of folk and tribal dances.

• Passage

  It must also be noticed that in spite of all this, not a few of the still surviving productions of the Babylonian times reached the beings of the contemporary civilization, chiefly the beings breeding on the continent Europe. But these productions which reached the beings of this contemporary civilization—and not originals but only half-decayed copies made by their recent ancestors who had not become entirely what are called ‘plagiarists’—they simply, without suspecting the ‘well-of-wisdom’ concealed in them and without taking corresponding practicable measures, stuffed into what are called ‘museums’ where these old copies are gradually either totally destroyed or partially mutilated by frequent copyings from them, made by means of various eroding and oxidizing compositions as, for instance, ‘alabaster,’ ‘fish glue’ and so on, only so that the copyists might swagger before their friends or cheat their teachers, or achieve some other Hasnamussian aim.

• Discussion

  L commented on the point in the passage about items being stuffed into museums. He said there was a movement to return such items to their countries of origin, comparing this to disputes over the relics of saints. T added that these items, once removed from their cultural and community context, merely decay in the museum. L wondered whether this was perhaps the natural course of things, given the passage of time. T said the act of moving such items to museums was also a way of honouring them, even as it disconnected them from their original context. N agreed that the motive was preservation. N talked about his personal experience visiting Palmyra before it was destroyed and noted the cultural destruction that could happen under extremist regimes. T pointed out the primal, tribal instinct to destroy anything that is perceived as a threat to one's own identity or existence.