TAHAR BEN JELLOUN. AN UPHILL TASK

To make tolerance people's second nature is a duty that has to be done if the rule of law is to be established and consolidated. Without tolerance there is no democracy or, to put it another way, democracy and intolerance are irreconcilable opposites. Fanaticism is the fire surreptitiously lit by intolerance in the democratic fabric, it is a fixation, a deceptively pure-seeming obsession, an error that seeks to bring life anything that moves, changes and holds surprises to a standstill.

To tolerate fanaticism would be to tolerate the intolerable. How can fanaticism be allowed to monopolize the scene and make it a setting for tragedy? How is it possible to tolerate the enemies of freedom, those who would destroy intelligence and beauty, whose goal is a totalitarian order that imposes uniformity and proclaims that might is right, the law of the jungle? Where can one find the patience, courage and composure to refute this barbarity that prefers the use of the gun to that of the spoken or written word? How can one hold fast to one's principles, remain strictly respectful of beliefs different from, and even opposed to, one's own, and coexist with those who would wipe out anything that does not fit in with their crazed way of thinking?

Intolerance is only tolerable in art

Tolerance is an uphill task. It requires courage and strength, a robust aptitude for the cut and thrust of debate, and an ability to stand up to pressure. Who can claim to possess all these attributes? The answer is a combination of soldier and poet, policeman and philosopher, magistrate and artist for all great literature and all great painting have been the expression of intolerance of the intolerable. The writer's subject is not happiness, nor is peace that of the artist. Art is a clean break, a rejection, anger, provocation even. When beauty is laid waste, intelligence done to death, childhood violated and human beings humiliated, art cannot but be intolerant. It tolerates neither the ugliness of which people are capable nor the revulsion they arouse.

Fanaticism can be countered with humour; but this is sometimes a risky undertaking, since those who are fixated upon a certain order of things detest wit, subtlety and of course laughter. What they hold sacred is dogma, rigid and immutable. It is forbidden to make fun of it, whereas life, being short and beset with pitfalls, commends laughter as the best course. Laughter is often provocative, a way of distancing oneself a little from reality; but distance is something that has been totally banished from the world of intolerant people, who are so bound up in themselves they would like the rest of humanity to be identical clones of themselves.

Tolerance is something that has to be learned, a requirement that has to be lived with every day, a difficulty to be faced every moment of every day. It is hard work, but those who are attached to principles rather than prejudices or compromises do not seek the easy way out. They may not sleep soundly, it is true, but at least they do not relinquish that which makes us human, our dignity.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, An uphill task. The Unesco Courier, April 1995

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahar_Ben_Jelloun

 

 

ABRAXAS

Although life is an affair of light and shadows, we never accept it as such. We are always reaching towards the light and the high peaks. From childhood, through early religious and academic training, we are given values which correspond only to an ideal world. The shadowy side of real life is ignored, and Western Christianity provides us with nothing which can be used to interpret it. Thus the young men of the West are unable to deal with the mixture of light and shadow of which life really consists; they have no way of linking the facts of existence to their preconceived notions of absolutes. The links connecting life with universal symbols are therefore broken, and disintegration sets in. In the Orient, and especially in India, the situation is very different. There, an ancient civilization based on Nature accepts a cosmos of multifaceted gods; and thus the Easterner can realize the simultaneous existence of light and shadow and of good and evil. Absolutes do not exist, and if God is thus disarmed, so is the devil. But the price of such an understanding is a direct tribute to Nature itself. Consequently, the Hindu finds himself less individualized than the Westerner; he is little more than a part of nature, one element in the collective soul. The question which the Western Christian now has to face is whether, without losing his individuality, he can accept the coexistence of light and shadow and of God and the devil. To do so, he will have to discover the God who was Christian before the personalized Christ and who can continue in a viable form after him. Such a deity would be the Christ of Atlantis, who once existed publicly, and who still continues to exist - even though submerged under the deep waters of our present civilization. Such a god would also be Abraxas, who is God and the devil at the same time. The first time I heard of Abraxas by name was in Demian, but I had really known about him from my childhood days. I had sensed his existence in the heart of the Cordillera of the Andes and in the unfathomable depths of the Pacific Ocean which beats against our coasts. This ignis fatuus, the flames of heaven and hell which exist in him, flickered even in the foam of these waves. Abraxas is a Gnostic god who existed long before Christ. He may be equated, too, with the Christ of Atlantis, and is known by other names by the Aborigines of the Americas, amongst them the Indians who inhabited my country. Hermann Hesse speaks of him in this way: Contemplate the fire, contemplate the clouds, and when omens appear and voices begin to sound in your soul, abandon yourself to them without wondering beforehand whether it seems convenient or good to do so. If you hesitate, you will spoil your own being, you will become little more than the bourgeois façade which encloses you, and you will become a fossil. Our god is named Abraxas, and he is both god and the devil at the same time. You will find in him both the world of light and of shadows. Abraxas is not opposed to any of your thoughts nor to any of your dreams, but he will abandon you if you become normal and unapproachable. He will abandon you and look for another vessel in which to cook his thoughts. The modern Christian and the Western world as a whole have now reached a point of crisis, and the choices open seem less than attractive. We neither want one of those apocalyptic catastrophes which have so disfigured our past history, nor do we want the dehumanizing path of the Orient, which would result in an irremediable lowering of our standards. Perhaps, then, the only possibility that remains is Abraxas; that is to say, a projection of our souls both outwards and inwards, both to the light and to the deep shadows of our biographical roots, in hopes of finding in the combination of the two the pure archetype. This pure archetype would be the authentic image of the god which is within ourselves and which has been sunk for so long, like Atlantis, under the waters of our consciousness. Thus Abraxas would also come to mean Total Man. 

From C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse by Miguel Serrano

BEAUTY: THREE VIEWS

Hegel:

“Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts, and fine art is frequently the key — with many nations there is no other — to the understanding of their wisdom and their religion.” [1]

Abhinavagupta:

“For Abhinavagupta, in other words, art, the spirituality path and the divine reality were clearly one and the same. In the mind of Abhinavagupta, this cosmos is God’s artistic creation, a creation within which every smallest unit of that creation itself embodies and reflects the divine Artist which is its origin. For this reason, artistic expression — be it poetry, drama, music painting or any other artistic medium — is just as capable of bringing about spiritual realization as yogic practice. For Abhinavagupta, the artist is a yogin and the yogin is an artist. The ultimate artistic expression is life itself which presents the opportunity for the attainment of spiritual realization, an event which empowers the individual to recognize his or her own identity as non-distinct from the identity of that ultimate Artist who is the source and very body of creation itself.” [2]

Herbert V. Guenther:

“Insight into life and Being ultimately springs from creative, and by implication, artistic imagination. Therefore, the fine arts not only can give us knowledge, but also, through their influence on our lives, give form to our emotive experiences. The close relationship between Tantrism and the fine arts underlines the importance of learning to see reality as a symbol of life and feeling, not as a sign that points to something other than itself. The meaning of life is in living it.” [3]

[1]   Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet, ed. and intro. Michael Inwood (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1993), p. 9.

[2]   Dr. Jeffrey S. Lidke, A Thousand Years of Abhinavagupta, Sutra Journal, January, 2016. [ONLINE HERE]

[3]   Herbert V. Guenther, The Tantric View of Life, Shambhala Publications, Boulder & London, 1976, p. 147.

IMAGE: Cover of a Shakta Manuscript with Uma-Maheshvara

FROM GORKY TO GUSTON

8^th August 2012

Frankly, having long admired the paintings of Philip Guston, I  did not know much about the evolution of his Art.  These two Documentaries are a useful start:

Philip Guston: A Life Lived (MBP, 1981) [HERE]

Philip Guston, Odd Man Out (BBC4 arts documentary, 2004) [HERE]

And attached here:

Craig Burnett, Philip Guston. The Studio, Afterall Books (One work), 2014.

Naturally there is a mass of critical material on Guston,  but these are a few samples. 

GORKY

Just Finished ‘My Apprenticeship’ by Maxim Gorky, which is the middle part of a Trilogy of his life. I was delighted to see that the complete Trilogy was filmed and is available on the Mosfilm site – so I will watch those soon.  Of course, in Russian, with subtitles.   The visuals are superb and the director Mark Donskoy captures an almost Caravaggio version of Russia in the 19^th century (example above).

But I like this quote, where he berates the Saturnine aspects of the human psyche, the inability to move from fixed and entrenched positions.  Love S.

“Later, after I had met many such people among the intelligentsia, as well as among simple folk, I realized that their persistence was nothing more than the passivity of people who had nowhere to go beyond the point already reached, and who, indeed, had no desire to go further, caught as they were in a tangle of obsolete words and outworn conceptions. Their will had become enervated and incapable of developing toward the future and had they been suddenly emancipated; they would have rolled mechanically downhill like a stone on a mountainside. They were kept imprisoned in a graveyard of dead ideas by the lifeless force of backward- lookings and by a morbid love of suffering and persecution. Once deprived of the opportunity to suffer, they would be drained of all substance, and vanish like clouds on a fresh, windy, day.

The faith for which they sacrificed themselves so eagerly and with such false pride, was unquestionably a firm faith, but it resembled old garments, so caked with dust and dirt as to be inaccessible to the ravages of time. Their thoughts and feelings had grown used to being tightly encased in prejudices and dogmas, and the fact that they became deformed and earth-bound did not disturb them in the least.

   This faith-by-habit is one of the most vicious and regrettable phenomena of our life. Within the bounds of such faith, as in the shadow of a stone wall, anything that is new grows slowly twisted and anaemic. Too few rays of love penetrate that dark faith, and too many of vengeance, malice, and envy, blood-brothers to hate. The light of such faith is merely the phosphorescent glow of decay.”

THE TRILOGY ONLINE HERE:

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938)

On His Own (1939)

My Universities (1939)

THE WHEEL

Philip Ellis Wheelwright

on

THE WHEEL

Ljubljana  Marshes. Wheel with axle (oldest wooden wheel yet discovered dating to Copper Age (c. 3,130 BC).  [1]

Perhaps the most philosophically mature of the great archetypal symbols is the Circle, together with its most frequent imagistic concretion the Wheel. From earliest recorded times the circle has been widely recognized as the most perfect of figures, both because of its simple formal perfection and for the reason stated in Heraclitus' aphorism, "In the circle the beginning and the end are the same.”[Note 4] When the circle is concretized as a wheel, two additional properties come in: the wheel has spokes, and it rotates. The spokes of the wheel are taken as iconically symbolic of the sun’s rays; both the spokes and the rays being symbolic of the creative influences going out to all things in the universe from a central life-giving source. In its rotation a wheel has the property that when its axis is at rest the movement of its spokes and rim is perfectly regular—a property which readily becomes symbolic of the human truth that to find the quiet centre of one's own soul is to produce a more tranquil ordering of one's experiences and activities.

Like many another archetypal symbol the Wheel is potentially ambivalent. It may have either a positive or a negative significance, and occasionally both. Negatively the Wheel can symbolize in the West the hazardous play of fortune, and in the East the persistent cycle of deaths and rebirths from which release is sought. Yoga, to the Hindu, is the patient disciplined exercise of action and non-action whereby an individual may prepare himself for such release. On the positive side, in addition to the symbolic import mentioned in the foregoing paragraph, the Wheel is in Hindu tradition connected with Dharma, or divine law. Buddhist iconography makes much of " the Wheel of the Law," and there is a widespread legend that Buddha, when he gave his first sermon after his initiatory vision under the bo tree ( the so-called Deer Park Sermon), set it revolving. In traditional Chinese Buddhist ritual a chariot wheel is often fastened to a post and turned to the right, which is supposed to reflect the sun in its orbit and to symbolize the path of universal Tao. In Tibet the idea of the perfection and sincerity of universal law can be symbolized by so simple a gesture as joining the thumb with the middle finger. The Tibetan prayer wheel had originally the same meaning, and perhaps still retains it for informed worshipers, despite the crude magical uses to which it has later been put. [Note 5]

A special development of the Wheel symbolism is found in the Buddhist tendency to let the purity of the still centre be symbolized by the lotus flower. Reciprocally the wheel is often pictured as having a lotus at its axis and the lotus is often displayed with outgoing rays of light. The actual lotus flower has two characteristics that have especially struck the Oriental imagination—its simple pure beauty and its mysterious birth by water. A Buddhist teaching says t h a t as the lotus flower arises from the dark depths of the lake to reveal itself in beauty, and as the sun arises in darkness and sends forth his rays, so Buddha issues forth from " the dark womb of being " in order to chase away the darkness of illusion (maya) by revealing the truth. In India the wheel is sometimes laid on the top of a pillar, as an icon of the lotus in full bloom on its stem. In the widely revered Lotus Scripture of Mahayana Buddhism the principal teaching is at once the eternity of divine law and the multiplicity of ways of expressing and teaching it — the still centre and the many spokes or rays of the divine sun-wheel. [Note 6] 

4. Heraclitus, Fragment 70 in Bywater (followed by most English translators), 103 in Diels, and 109 in the present writer's Heraclitus (Princeton University Press, 1959), where it is translated, "In the circle the beginning and the end are common/' This is literal. But the word [. . .] besides meaning "common," carries an overtone of [. . .] "with rational intelligence." On Heraclitus' functional use of the pun, see the Princeton University Press volume, p. 120, note 8, and again p. 148, note to Fragment 81.

5. W. E. Soothill, The Three Religions of China (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1923), regards the Lamaist prayer wheel as "a grotesque form of Buddha's lofty conception of the Wheel of the Law rolling forward like the sun and enlightening the world." Charles A. S. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism (Peiping, 1931): "The turning of the wheel of the Law was probably connected with the Vedic sun-worshiping ceremonies in which a chariot wheel was fastened to a post and turned towards the right, i.e. following the path of the Universal Law which directed the sun in its orbit." Cf. E. Dale Saunders, Mudra (Bollingen Series XLVIII: Pantheon Books, 1958).

6. Sir Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism (London, 1921), esp. Vol. II, p. 52, and Vol. Ill, p. 438; Sir Hari Singh Gour, The Spirit of Buddhism (London, 1929), p. 166; H. Hackmann, Buddhism as a Religion (London, 1910), p. 194; Eugene W. Burlingame, Buddhist Parables (Yale University Press, 1922); Charles A. S. Williams, Encyclopaedia of Chinese Symbols and Art Motives (New York, Julian Press, i960), under the entries "Lotus" and "Wheel of the Law."

What is briefly called the Lotus Scripture in the text is the Saddharmapundarika, traditionally translated "Lotus of the Good Name."

From: Philip Ellis Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, Indiana University Press, 1962, pp. 125 -127.

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[1] Around 2000 BC, the Ljubljana Marshes in the immediate vicinity of Ljubljana were settled by people living in pile dwellings. Prehistoric pile dwellings and the oldest wooden wheel in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana

THE CENTRE

The Symbolism of the Center

 Paralleling the archaic belief in the celestial archetypes of cities and temples, and even more fully attested by documents, there is, we find, another series of beliefs, which refer to their being invested with the prestige of the Center. We examined this problem in an earlier work;¹⁶ here we shall merely recapitulate our conclusions. The architectonic symbolism of the Center may be formulated as follows:

1. The Sacred Mountain—where heaven and earth meet—is situated at the center of the world.

2. Every temple or palace—and, by extension, every sacred city or royal residence—is a Sacred Mountain, thus becoming a Center.

3. Being an axis mundi, the sacred city or temple is regarded as the meeting point of heaven, earth, and hell.

A few examples will illustrate each of these symbols:

1. According to Indian beliefs, Mount Meru rises at the center of the world, and above it shines the polestar. The Ural-Altaic peoples also know of a central mountain, Sumeru, to whose summit the polestar is fixed. Iranian beliefs hold that the sacred mountain Haraberezaiti (Elburz) is situated at the center of the earth and is linked with heaven. The Buddhist population of Laos, north of Siam, know of Mount Zinnalo, at the center of the world. In the Edda, Himinbjorg, as its name indicates, is a "celestial mountain"; it is here that the rainbow (Bifrost) reaches the dome of the sky. Similar beliefs are found among the Finns, the Japanese, and other peoples. We are reminded that for the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula an immense rock, Batu-Ribn, rises at the center of the world; above it is hell. In past times, a tree trunk on Batu-Ribn rose into the sky.Hell, the center of the earth, and the "gate" of the sky are, then, situated on the same axis, and it is along this axis that passage from one cosmic region to another was effected. We should hesitate to credit the authenticity of this cosmological theory among the Semang pygmies if we did not have evidence that the same theory already existed in outline during the prehistoric period.According to Mesopotamian beliefs, a central mountain joins heaven and earth; it is the Mount of the Lands, the connection between territories. Properly speaking, the ziggurat was a cosmic mountain, i.e., a symbolic image of the cosmos, the seven stories representing the seven planetary heavens (as at Borsippa) or having the colors of the world (as at Ur).

Mount Tabor, in Palestine, could mean ṭabbūr, i.e., navel, omphalos. Mount Gerizim, in the center of Palestine, was undoubtedly invested with the prestige of the Center, for it is called "navel of the earth" (ṭabbūr ereṣ; cf. Judges 9 : 37: "… See there come people down by the middle [Heb., navel] of the land …"). A tradition preserved by Peter Comestor relates that at the summer solstice the sun casts no shadow on the "Fountain of Jacob" (near Gerizim). And indeed, Peter continues, "sunt qui dicunt locum ilium esse umbilicum terrae nostrae habitabilis." 

Palestine, being the highest country—because it was near to the summit of the cosmic mountain—was not covered by the Deluge. A rabbinic text says: "The land of Israel was not submerged by the deluge." For Christians, Golgotha was situated at the center of the world, since it was the summit of the cosmic mountain and at the same time the place where Adam had been created and buried. Thus the blood of the Saviour falls upon Adam's skull, buried precisely at the foot of the Cross, and redeems him. The belief that Golgotha is situated at the center of the world is preserved in the folklore of the Eastern Christians.

2. The names of the Babylonian temples and sacred towers themselves testify to their assimilation to the cosmic mountain: "Mount of the House," "House of the Mount of All Lands," "Mount of Tempests," "Link Between Heaven and Earth." A cylinder from the period of King Gudea says that "The bed-chamber [of the god] which he built was [like] the cosmic mountain …" Every Oriental city was situated at the center of the world. Babylon was a Bāb-ilāni, a "gate of the gods," for it was there that the gods descended to earth. In the capital of the Chinese sovereign, the gnomon must cast no shadow at noon on the day of the summer solstice. Such a capital is, in effect, at the center of the universe, close to the miraculous tree (kien-mu), at the meeting place of the three cosmic zones: heaven, earth, and hell. The Javanese temple of Borobudur is itself an image of the cosmos, and is built like an artificial mountain (as were the ziggurats). Ascending it, the pilgrim approaches the center of the world, and, on the highest terrace, breaks from one plane to another, transcending profane, heterogeneous space and entering a "pure region." Cities and sacred places are assimilated to the summits of cosmic mountains. This is why Jerusalem and Zion were not submerged by the Deluge. According to Islamic tradition, the highest point on earth is the Kaaba, because "the polestar proves that … it lies over against the center of heaven." 

3. Finally, because of its situation at the center of the cosmos, the temple or the sacred city is always the meeting point of the three cosmic regions: heaven, earth, and hell. Dur-an-ki, "Bond of Heaven and Earth," was the name given to the sanctuaries of Nippur and Larsa, and doubtless to that of Sippara. Babylon had many names, among them "House of the Base of Heaven and Earth," "Bond of Heaven and Earth." But it is always Babylon that is the scene of the connection between the earth and the lower regions, for the city had been built upon bāb apsī,the "Gate of the Apsu" —apsu designating the waters of chaos before the Creation. We find the same tradition among the Hebrews. The rock of Jerusalem reached deep into the subterranean waters (tehōm). The Mishnah says that the Temple is situated exactly above the tehōm (Hebrew equivalent of apsu). And just as in Babylon there was the "gate of the apsu" the rock of the Temple in Jerusalem contained the "mouth of the tehōm." We find similar conceptions in the Indo-European world. Among the Romans, for example, the mundus—that is, the trench dug around the place where a city was to be founded—constitutes the point where the lower regions and the terrestrial world meet. "When the mundus is open it is as if the gates of the gloomy infernal gods were open," says Varro (cited by Macrobius, Saturnalia, I, 16, 18). The Italic temple was the zone where the upper (divine), terrestrial, and subterranean worlds intersected.

The summit of the cosmic mountain is not only the highest point of the earth; it is also the earth's navel, the point at which the Creation began. There are even instances in which cosmological traditions explain the symbolism of the Center in terms which might well have been borrowed from embryology. "The Holy One created the world like an embryo. As the embryo proceeds from the navel onwards, so God began to create the world from its navel onwards and from there it was spread out in different directions." The γoma affirms: "The world has been created beginning from Zion." In the Ṛg-Veda (for example X, 149), the universe is conceived as spreading from a central point.The creation of man, which answers to the cosmogony, likewise took place at a central point, at the center of the world. According to Mesopotamian tradition, man was formed at the "navel of the earth" in uzu (flesh), sar (bond), ki (place, earth), where Dur-an-ki,the "Bond of Heaven and Earth," is also situated. Ormazd creates the primordial ox Evagdāth, and the primordial man, Gajōmard, at the center of the earth.Paradise, where Adam was created from clay, is, of course, situated at the center of the cosmos. Paradise was the navel of the Earth and, according to a Syrian tradition, was established on a mountain higher than all others. According to the Syrian Book of the Cave of Treasures, Adam was created at the center of the earth, at the same spot where the Cross of Christ was later to be set up. The same traditions have been preserved by Judaism. The Jewish apocalypse and a midrash state that Adam was formed in Jerusalem. Adam being buried at the very spot where he was created, i.e., at the center of the world, on Golgotha, the blood of the Saviour—as we have seen—will redeem him too.

The symbolism of the Center is considerably more complex, but the few aspects to which we have referred will suffice for our purpose. We may add that the same symbolism survived in the Western world down to the threshold of modern times. The very ancient conception of the temple as the imago mundi, the idea that the sanctuary reproduces the universe in its essence, passed into the religious architecture of Christian Europe: the basilica of the first centuries of our era, like the medieval cathedral, symbolically reproduces the Celestial Jerusalem. As to the symbolism of the mountain, of the Ascension, and of the "Quest for the Center," they are clearly attested in medieval literature, and appear, though only by allusion, in certain literary works of recent centuries.

Eliade, Mircea,  The Myth of the Eternal Return. Cosmos and History. Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask with a new introduction by Jonathan Z. Smith, Bollingen Series 46, Princeton University Press, 2005.