Standing Like a Tree: Revolutionary Patience

A little while back, Pete wrote a post entitled, Standing Like a Tree, which spoke of a moment of clarity he had about the emotional seasons of the Microcosmos while in the Chi Gong posture of standing still like a tree (read his post here).  His post helped mark a position in the map of my thoughts, from which I have been trailing out, making inroads to connections.  Though I sense relationships between this post I’m writing and the Microcosmos, what I am writing here is more of a self-indulgent act of utilizing this space to put together ideas I’m interested in—how they relate directly to the Microcosmos or not is yet to be seen.

There is a Taoist philosophy of active nothingness—that in not doing is doing something.   It seems in this active nothingness there is much doing, or rather, the potentiality for all doing.  In the stillness of active nothingness I have found the habits of the wind, felt the voluminous movement of a lake.  There is a fulfilling energy and grand doing found in stillness.

While at Blue Mountain Center, Pete shared with another resident and me his knowledge of Tai Chi, and each morning we practiced together, most often on a dock on the lake.  This, along with periods of solitary stillness, greatly helped me connect to the wind and water I just spoke of. 

Later, he shared with us online a video of Master Lam, his teachers’ teacher, which was entitled (in a very westernized way) Stand Still, Get Fit.  In it’s original form it is a practice called, Zhan Zhuang—to stand like a tree.   In the video they say, “we do nothing when we stand still, but we gain energy from within, just like a tree….As a tree grows its deep roots, powerful trunk, and spreading branches appear motionless but the tree is actually growing from within, slowly and silently.”  While Master Lam teaches the proper technique of Zhan Zhung, said to make one strong and heal illness, he stands in a Chinese courtyard where 4000 year old trees have been contemplated for centuries.

I recommend the whole 11 minute video, but for a nice summary of these ideas check out minute 5:00 to 6:00. 

When I watched this video and heard them talk of a tree as a human—seemingly unchanging while activity, growth, and energy happen within—I was struck by the parallel to another seed of wisdom I had recently absorbed.  A major contributor to the civil rights movement, with the insight of 82 years within him, Vincent Harding (fellow BMC resident) taught me Revolutionary Patience. 

Vincent had said, “Like plants, you cannot always see the change happening in people.”  He spoke about social movements—marches and strikes—and said that, while they have their place, and an important necessary one, they are not where real change occurs.  Real change happens inside the human being, inside the human heart.  He said, “the revolution will not be televised,” and for the first time that statement made sense to me.  You cannot put on tv, cannot see the change and perhaps the struggle for it, that happens in the human heart and mind. But that is where the real revolution, the real evolution, lies.  It calls forth one of my favorite lines of Pete’s, “We attach meaning to events, but events happen in the universe and meaning happens in the human heart.”  What happens in the world happens—it is how we translate it in our hearts that matters.  It is the inner way we respond to the world that holds the power, as the inner world creates the outer.  As Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.” Revolutionary change comes from within, not from without; from being, not from doing.  Or rather, an inner being forms and feeds an outer doing, like sap moving through branches nourish and inform a leaf.

Vincent went on to tell us the story of how Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and peace activist, was coming to give a talk in the 1960s, and arrived on the West Coast where he encountered student activists yelling, “end the war now! end the war now! out of Vietnam now!” Thich Nhat Hanh pulled the student leaders aside, and said that he was thankful for their efforts toward peace.  But that they were part of a movement that was hundreds of years old, and they needed to have patience. 

Revolutionary patience. A giant oak does not grow from an acorn to its full height overnight, or even in a season.  One must be patient.  I realized that this revolutionary patience applies not only to the evolution of the world, but to my own personal evolution.  It is a reminder that even when I feel stagnated, I am growing and changing in ways I cannot necessarily perceive, and I must be patient with myself.  And I remember that I am a tree, a plant, with a rich inner life.  And I remember that in stillness, in active nothingness, I am energized. 

Amongst all this, I sense the power of the inner world, the unseen forces, and the natural order that connects it all.

Response: Flying to Valencia

You are on to something.  I encourage you to follow this vision. 

William Byrd’s O Gloriosa Domina is exquisite.  I feel a great sense of breadth and emotion from just three voices—rather amazing.  Reminds me of a Pandora station I have been listening to lately called Serbian Chants (Byzantine Choirs, Gregorian Chants, and the like).   It is reminiscent of going to Catholic church as a kid.  I always did kinda like the ritual and the stained glass and the sound…rather otherworldly.  I’m not sure why I started listening to this lately—and it is mostly a background to my work, not the forefront of my attention—but I connect to its energy, it’s mood.  The music of voices.

My ignorance of music is vast.  However I’m enjoying learning new things through this collaboration.  I googled “turangalila” and was lead to the symphony of Olivier Messiaen, and this, per Wikipedia: 

“The title of the work, and those of its movements, were a late addition to the project. They were first
described by Messiaen in a diary entry in early 1948.^[4] He derived the title from two Sanskrit words, turanga and lîla, which roughly translate into English as "love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life, and death",^[7] and described the joy of Turangalîla as "superhuman, overflowing, dazzling and abandoned".  

The bold is mine--the parts where I find relationship to the microcosmos.  In Be Love Now Ram Dass speaks of the lila as the divine play, with the devotee as God's partner in the divine dance.  He also writes. "All planes exist within the One.  Paradoxically, the One is also a plane of consciousness.  But from within the One there's no subjective experiencer, because the One can only experience itSelf. That's the paradox, the mystery of existence that creates the play of forms, the dance, or lila.  A perfected being is no longer an actor in the play moving in and out of planes, going up or coming down.  The subjective self has disappeared in the merging of subject and object, the One."

I also looked up motet, which is most simply described as “A polyphonic composition based on a sacred text and usually sung without accompaniment.”  Which, of course meant I had to look up polyphonic (also interesting), and so on. 

This idea makes me think of how you used the voice as music and form for SpoonTree:

Sound for SpoonTree  

Please link more of Byrd’s motets, or other similarly inspiring music.

Pete Replies To Megan

Ok so firstly, I really like the points you made, they highlight things I had intuited but not considered deeply - e.g.

In a way the question of inner weather or outer weather is two sides of a coin, flipped by perspective—does the light/sound represent the inner world or the outer—It’s a choice, like heads or tails.

I like "the implicit unity" you talk about. More to the point the next paragraph, for me, is right on the money:

 Is it crazy (from a logistics standpoint) to be imaging within the Microcosmos small worlds/objects/groups of objects that have sound and light that come from within them, as well as there being sound and light that is external—in the space of the room and in the object(s).  Could the light and sound of the inner voice/weather be choreographed to make meaning and relation to the outer voice/weather? 

This leads me to visual it like this: the experience of the Microcosmos is of entering a space - the space feels limitless, it is dark and contains numerous lit objects, multiple sounds emanate from within the space. It makes it feel as though sounds and objects are not always visible - some objects are only glimpsed at certain times - some sounds emerge from the darkness. 

Almost like a conversation happening between the object and the room. The inner forces and outer forces in tandem.  Sometimes in harmony, sometimes perhaps dissonance; sometimes happening both at once, other times one alone.  

Echoing each other’s sentiments, or arguing against them.  You wrote about exploring adding sound to static images—perhaps what I’m suggesting would be like the sound of two static images expressing themselves to one another.  Or in reaction to one another.  Perhaps this is close to what you are already imagining.

It’s hard to say, all that sound/light might be too chaotic.  I also often find that more is not necessarily better, and simple can be quite powerful.  

I couldn't agree more - a frustrating chaos needs to be avoided - we're making a piece of art rather than a complex mathematical model. I feel, from a sound point of view, the Microcosmos is kind of like a symphony - but this is an orchestra of soloists (this is actually something I do with time-coded scores). In free jazz people play very much this way but the results for me are often too chaotic, though sometimes extraordinary, whereas symphonies and orchestra repertoire are very precisely defined. I feel there could be moments in the Microcosmos where we are invited to consider a single object/location/sound, where everything else fades for a moment and, let's say for argument's sake, a red light picks out 'Tree-Spoon' and a solitary cello line plays (I imagine other things drop to the background rather than halt altogether).

I like the idea that certain parts of the system are only glimpsed - maybe only seen/heard at certain times - certainly I want to use the vertical plain - I have just made a sketch actually that has an array of 22 speakers at body height with 9 overhead and 1 at floor level - this gives sound the chance to move vertically around the microcosmos and, if used sparingly, to add an extended dimension.

Also, if we’re not careful this whole thing will be saccharine sweet, 

Actually, I'm not worried about this. It will be a space that embodies our own creative responses to the subject - neither of us are much into saccharine sweet - it's always good to flag the question, of course, just to make sure it doesn't end up that way but I think we're both looking towards a deeper exploration of elements here.

So, my question: what do you feel about objects that are not always seen? For example, I mentioned previously some of the 'uterus' imagery you used - I don't specifically mean using those, but I'm interested in the idea of imagery that is only revealed at certain times - perhaps it's at the walls or above us or on the floor (?) We've touched on chakras in conversation - they, of course, have associated colours, do you feel that plays a part in this. Also; how do you see the 'prosaic' objects? Do they have a specific reason for being there? i.e. is a cup, spoon etc symbolic, metaphoric? It feels like dream imagery to me, but I don't know what the dream is telling me - which is not at all a bad thing - I think the idea I've suggested here of having things that only reveal at certain times is in part my own wish to say that the Microcosmos is mysterious, it doesn't lay out all the answers, it also lays out unanswered riddles, perhaps. 

Flying To Valencia

I'm itching to write a reply to Megan's last post - I'll hope to do it tomorrow, Before I do I just wanted to post up my thoughts as I arrived here in Valencia yesterday - half asleep at the end of the flight.

I started imagining the final ten or so minutes - I imagined, arising from all sorts of disparate sound-worlds, spread across the space, a unified sound, what I jotted down as a turangalilla - a joyous, painful, dance of life - the only sound that I think would do that would be the human voice - I have no idea whether a text or something wordless, a feeling that, as we've journeyed through the internal weathers of the microcosmos we've finally arrived at something that somehow transcends it.

Of course, it's just an idea, but I think it would be interesting to investigate - as a vague pointer, here's some early music: William Byrd - Byrd's motets are some of my most treasured sounds to listen to - in this recording there are only 3 voices - I love the fact that 3 people, simply standing side by side, can make this sound. I'm not imagining the final sounds of the microcosmos being this exactly, but something of it's nature is very appealing to me:

https://soundcloud.com/cantumbarbum/william-byrd-o-gloriosa-domina

Letter to Pete: Seasonal Layers of the Microcosmos

Hey!  You sent me this:

My Microcosmos question at the moment is - we have 'invisible seasons' or 'internal weather' - do we have external weather? It feels like we do but maybe it's invisible somehow - light or sound... I feel the Tao is going to be a rich area for us - I got out the Tao Te Ching but nothing quite fell into place....

And it got me thinking and looking back at some of the other things you insightfully wrote about this topic:

As our ideas about 'emotional weather' develop so it becomes easier to find ideas that work. Currently I think that there is a map for the entire microcosmos - the map covers both time and space - it maps the trajectories of the weather throughout the time period - so it will show how the 'weather' passes around the microcosmos, defining migrations of that weather. Perhaps certain sounds will be associated with certain emotions or perhaps specific musical ideas will have that function*

[*I want to go into this last sentence more, in a separate post, and am putting this note here to remind myself to do so and include my ideas on material and mood/meaning]

You also wrote:

I could see this tree soaking up the weather, nourished by the weather, shaped by the weather, beaten by the weather - but then I remembered something I had written and used many times: "we attach meaning to events, but events happen in the universe and meaning happens in the human heart" - suddenly the image of these individual static microcosms, their visual content unchanging but their sonic and light colouration changing - rang true - I suddenly felt the microcosmos was like looking at 100 people, or a million people - the physical appearance unchanging with each one, but the inner, unseen landscapes nourished and battered by 'invisible seasons'.

In a way the question of inner weather or outer weather is two sides of a coin, flipped by perspective—does the light/sound represent the inner world or the outer—It’s a choice, like heads or tails.

As I mull all this over, I feel the paradox of what you may be reaching for in your question—how does one make experiential an inner state and outer state simultaneously.  Are we expressing an inner weather or an external weather?  In a way it is both, depending on how the visitor perceives it (or is guided to perceive it)—is the sound/light representative of an inner voice of the object(s) or an outer force that the object(s) exists in.   Inner emotional weather, or outer worldly weather.  I see where you reached for the Tao, in that it speaks so much of that space in between that is not either thing and both things at once.  Not so unlike our own paradoxical puzzle….I think we are trying to speak of something that is two separate things, internal and external, while also pointing out the connecting sameness between both things; the implicit unity.

It has been a reoccurring thread emerging in my life lately that I am a microcosm for the world around me, and the world outside me is a macrocosm of my inner landscape.  I was describing it today as skiing.  Riding two parallel tracks—one my inner world, one the outer world—simultaneously, yet sometimes leaning onto one more than the other depending on my directional need, depending on where I’m trying to go or what I’m trying to understand.  Either way, they work in tandem.  I often find when I learn something about the nature of my inner world, it can be applied to the nature of the outer world, and vice versa. 

Circling back to the Microcosmos….Inner weather and outer weather, working in tandem.  Is it crazy (from a logistics standpoint) to be imaging within the Microcosmos small worlds/objects/groups of objects that have sound and light that come from within them, as well as there being sound and light that is external—in the space of the room and in the object(s).  Could the light and sound of the inner voice/weather be choreographed to make meaning and relation to the outer voice/weather? Almost like a conversation happening between the object and the room. The inner forces and outer forces in tandem.  Sometimes in harmony, sometimes perhaps dissonance; sometimes happening both at once, other times one alone.  Echoing each other’s sentiments, or arguing against them.  You wrote about exploring adding sound to static images—perhaps what I’m suggesting would be like the sound of two static images expressing themselves to one another.  Or in reaction to one another.  Perhaps this is close to what you are already imagining.

It’s hard to say, all that sound/light might be too chaotic.  I also often find that more is not necessarily better, and simple can be quite powerful.  Also, if we’re not careful this whole thing will be saccharine sweet, and we’ll have a cute one-liner about seasons.  Kinda like a Hallmark card (do you know what I mean when I say that?)  I’m made to think of this decoration my mother would put up every Christmas: little painted ceramic buildings make up a town around a ceramic pond with a mirror on top for ice; little people skate around the pond (by magnets) while a Christmas tune plays; the little houses are lit up from within by Christmas lights.   It’s all very quaint and kinda beautiful and mesmerized me as a kid.  But it had no depth.  No layers of meaning.  It was a one-liner, and a kitsch one at that.  I think we have the potential to make the Microcosmos multi-layered and meaningful, both intellectually and experientially.  Also think sometimes seeing what you don’t want to be like helps form what you do want to be like. 

So, in summary: Do we have internal weather/seasons—yes, I think that’s part of what is going to make this meaningful, to us as explorers and to visitors as experiencers.  The question is how do we represent this internal world (visuals, sound, light, suggestion). Do we have external weather—yes, I think so.  By default of creating landscapes (my sculptures) we will have either weather or geography (ie. a snowy tundra in the arctic may not look too different than the plains of the Midwest on a winters day).  So maybe part of the question is do we utilize sound/light in representing an external force, an internal force, or both? I see two scenarios—there is light and sound in the space and it represents inner or outer forces, depending on how we choose to perceive it and encourage others to perceive it (two sides same coin); or there is light and sound coming from the objects and from the space itself, each force—inner and outer—getting its own voice and light representation.

We Are What We Think

We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts, we make our world

Buddha

Utowana

I posted this piece on a different blog - but I wanted to put it up here because it came out of my experiences of Blue Mountain - it also talks a little about the place itself:

Here’s a suggestion if you’re reading this blog – as it centres on a piece of music, you may want to hit play now and then read the story behind it as it plays. (It will sound best on headphones or on full range speakers, rather than the speakers of a computer. If you just want to read about the piece of music just scroll down to where it says ‘About the piece’).

Utowana

Lake Utowana

The Adirondacks, as I recently discovered, are a 6,000,000 acre wilderness in upstate New York about 5 hours north of New York City. For September of this year I was offered a residency at the Blue Mountain Centre to work on an opera and, while I had been told it would be beautiful, my friends in New York City had sternly warned me: “it’ll be cold!”  their voices had sounded concerned, “have you got thermal underwear?” they asked.

So I headed off on the train from Penn Station, journeying north with the expectation of spending the next month hunkered down in a studio peering out through icicles at a bare, prematurely wintered woodland.

But as it turned out I rarely needed a coat at Blue Mountain, most of the days in September required no more than a T-shirt. I rowed on Eagle Lake by moonlight, listened to the mysterious dreamlike calls of the loons in the night, participated in a moose-calling competition at the local fair, played far too many games of bananagrams with great people and ate and drank like a rogue hog on vacation.

Eagle Lake from near the composer studio.

The only problem I had was that sitting in my studio during the day writing a heavyweight opera turned out to be difficult when outside a glittering Eagle Lake gently lapped the shore, especially as I’d occasionally glimpse one or two of the other residents whisking past in a canoe, looking fabulously happy in the sunshine.

It’s no great surprise: I didn’t complete the opera as planned on the trip. Even though I felt that was the important thing to be doing, the interaction with the other artists and activists, the days of canoeing, kayaking and hiking – even with the distinction of being the only person to overturn his kayak – brought me such a wealth of new experience and joy that in the end I concluded that my time there was spent in the best, most productive way possible.

Does that sound like an excuse? Do you require proof?

It was hard for me to describe in words the previously unknown world of adirondack lakes, but I’m a composer, so I took to music. The work for orchestra that plays at the start of this page is a little of what I'm talking about, it wouldn’t exist but for those excursions, the imprint they made on me and which I carry with me, influences and informs new pieces and approaches.

Lake Utowana, Eagle Lake, Blue Mountain Lake

Utowana is a lake that connects to Eagle Lake, where I was staying, which in turn connects to the much larger Blue Mountain Lake. It can be reached by a footpath through the woods or by rowing through the narrow strip that connects the two lakes. 

I went there many times; it was extraordinarily peaceful, I was often the only person there so far as I could tell and it felt downright greedy to have so much beauty to myself.

About The Piece:

The idea of 'Utowana' the piece of music is that it represents a year in the life of the lake: Literally, the piece has a periodicity of 3.33' seconds per day (this happens to work out as a bar length at 72 beats per minute). I didn’t want this to feel like ‘accelerated time’, the kind of thing we’re used to with time-lapse photography. I wanted it to feel as though this was a natural sense of time, that what might feel like a year to a person might feel the equivalent of 20 minutes in the existence of the lake. I felt music offered a way to explore and experience this idea.

It was therefore my hope to make a piece that was not so much ‘my perspective on Utowana’ (though that’s inevitable) as ‘Utowana’s perspective’.

In the deep midwinter, where this piece begins and ends, I imagine there’s little sign of change on the lake but what I was interested in, which is represented by the slow moving strings at the start and end of the piece, was the idea of ‘energies’ or potentials, perhaps deep in the ground or in the movement of water beneath the ice.

I was interested in the way one thing arises in relationship to another in nature – this interdependence suggested to me a natural ‘harmony’, though one that also embraces the ‘dissonance’ of competition; the survival of the fittest. In the music, as in the lake, each major structure contains numerous minor structures: as musical motives evolve, emerge, interact and disappear, each instrument or group of instruments acts independently but they also respond to other sounds and instruments, much as the ecosystem of the lake is both complex and subtle, containing numerous independencies in a complex entangled web of interactions.

I also wanted to factor in the unsteady curve of development during a year – warm weather, snow storms and the like that can suddenly create growing spurts or put populations under strain, sudden changes across the entire system. So I contrived a few things over my fictitious year that would influence the music – to give a few examples:

• At 5.40’ I imagine sudden warm weather causing a thaw and more rapid growth.
• At 6.40’ a cold snap that inhibits or threatens development
• At 7.10 warmth returns
• At 8.00’ a dense snow storm blankets everything

And so on.

At 10.00’ I have changed the descriptive process a little – in the first half I have tried to evoke a picture of the lake in its entirety, but in the second half, where we’ve hit full summer and everything is going full tilt (its equivalent soundworld just felt too frenetic), I have created the equivalent of a moving camera that focusses on individual elements – so here it perhaps comes closest to a score for a wildlife documentary.

Ultimately, I’m just another artist seeking to reflect nature – I know I can’t hope to do justice to it, but perhaps with this piece I can convey a sense of not just standing there taking in the extraordinary peace of the place but a sense of the hidden, the life of the lake itself, the broader palettes of nature that, being human, we cannot fully take in with our eyes.