Great art galleries can give such a sense of life bursting with codes and hidden meanings.
On Saturday I was going to see the end of term show at The Place - home of the London Contemporary Dance School. There was a wonderful Japanese dancer, deeply centred and able to draw the whole audience's gaze to her because of that. I wondered if she knows all about the oriental, esoteric teachings on the 'hara', which I touch upon in my book?
The last dance, which started with a slide saying 'In the beginning' and embraced the whole history of the cosmos, was choreographed by a guy who's worked on Skins. I'm hoping to publish some Skins books, as I'm interested in anything that's at the growing point of consciousness.
Waiting for the show to start I visited the Courtauld galleries. Not been for years.
Gauguin's The Dream shows a child sleeping in the foreground with a little demon lurking nearby. In the middle-ground are two large figures, an older woman looking to one side and a beautiful, younger woman looking straight out of the picture. The room in which they sit has murals which include a woman with a demon lover and animals rutting. In the distance you can see a male figure retreating on a horse, which reminds me a bit of the distant knight in Leighton's Lady of Shallot. Of course in Tennyson's poem it is the fact that the lady has looked directly at the phallic knight rather than at his reflection in her mirror that causes her downfall. Is the retreating figure in Gauguin's painting the father of the sleeping child? Was there something demonic about his love?
Gauguin means us to ask Whose dream is this? The child's? The mother's? The distant male figure's? The painter's?
Gauguin was a Theosophist, interested in the flux of interpenetrating dimensions. A drawing by him in the same gallery confirms that he believed that in dreams - as in death - we enter the spirit worlds. In
The Dream he means us to understand that ALL these different dreams meet in a dreamworld that has its own ontological status.
There's also a drawing by Picasso. The Minotaur is seducing a beautiful woman. They are both magnificent. He looks at you, holding up a glass of champagne in celebration.
The initiate who is behind much of the thinking in my book once said to me 'Of course people don't realize who Picasso really IS'. Well, who was he? It's clear to me that although he inhabited a human physical body, his was no ordinary human spirit. He changed the world effortlessly, never putting a brushstroke wrong. He was amazed at his own powers: I never seek, he said, I find. The heroes of the Greeks were spirits of higher orders than the human - angels - inhabiting human bodies. My intuition is that Picasso is trying to tell us in this picture that he had been Theseus. When Theseus fought the Minotaur, he was - on one level - fighting the beast within himself. Picasso's mission was to help lead humankind towards a new accommodation of the animal parts of its nature, as foretold in esoteric history.
A bookseller in Ireland has reported that she's never seen anything like the crowds coming to an event of Lorna's last week. Bigger than Harry Potter mania, she says. It begins...
When Paris was occupied by the Germans, Picasso was such a strong spirit that the most Hitler could do was label him a "degenerate." Between aiding allies and denouncing Nazi's and not getting killed in the process is a clear reflection of the strength of spirit this man contained.
Is Lorna coming to the US by any chance?
Posted by: Al | June 30, 2008 at 03:57 PM
Hi Al
Yes, she will be, but dates not set yet. Sorry, i haven't forgotten your request - or my promise. Our offices have been completely re-organized and it's all been pretty middle-management hell-ish here.
Posted by: jonathanblack | July 04, 2008 at 03:33 PM