Might a work of art simply be the refusal to make sense? The liaison between art and play is confirmed. When ripping a tree trunk, what is lost of the circumference but the width of the saw blade? But how many cuts in the horizontal slicing? The piece is then hollowed and the wood of its innards stands to the side as a fabricated long-cut 1 x 2(?) inch stack of sticks transformed into a kind of rectangular nailed-together lattice assemblage, an exposed "black box" (figuratively speaking). What's it for? However, offered no prefabricated model or theory, we're reduced to mental fiddling with less inner purpose. I found it somewhat of an extravagant experiment, but very well worth the performative effort. And besides, why should an artist be held responsible for the social cost of his private research? But in this way, defending the work's incomprehensibility approaches a kind of admission of love: that they would take it all apart in attempt to understand it! How is one to love something tragically broken?
Is art a perception founded on a premise of the mindlessness of everyday things? I don't think so. One derives from such expansive and adventurous works a vital spirit that is very much akin to what Confucius had to say with regard to "The Creative": that 'things with affinity in their inmost natures seek one another and reverberate together...as the penetrating wind (the breath of earth) romps with the tiger,' i.e. to scatter clouds and brighten emotions and render sentiments clear and serene. For the spectacle of the tenuous and vague contiguity of the inscrutable metamorphosis of meaningless things enlivens people's spirit. How sad were such beautiful play to vanish.
Korean sculptor Lee Soo Hong's unassuming work titled "Inside Outside Interside," is a gently penetrating conceptual masterpiece remarkably assessable to lay art viewers – and children too. It was the most appealing item in the Nature Borne show for me. But pardon me for not having snapped some photos (or taken my tape measure). Hurry go see!
"Inside Outside Interside," wooden sculpture in two pieces by Korean artist Lee Soo Hong. "Nature Borne" - A Singapore and Korea Joint Sculpture Exhibition, Singapore Botanic Gardens, on through 27 Dec 2009.
Additional reference: René Thom, At the Boundaries of Man's Power: Play, in SubStance, Vol. 8, No. 4, Issue 25, (1980): 11-19. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3684209
RSS
"Inside Outside Interside" by Lee Soo Hong (Nature Borne sculpture show, Singapore Botanic Gardens)
Colete Allendy
Petite and replete, she reigned in her own Hôtel de Passy where Artaud had assembled the "Cenci." She was surrounded by the "Artauds": Blin, Marthe Robert, Adamov, Mrs Jouve and Paule Thévenin. Not having any prejudice, she accepted me between Picabia and Bryen and some "Café Society Americans."
René Laubies, Portraits et Aphorismes, 2001; trans mine.
Petite et replète, elle régnait dans son hôtel de Passy où Artaud avait monté les "Cenci". Il y avait autour d'elle les " Artaud" : Blin, Marthe Robert, Adamov, madame Jouve et Paule Thévenin. N'ayant aucun préjugé elle m'accepta entre Picabia et Bryen et quelques "Café society américaines".
George Salles
Great lord, heir to the Eiffel Tower and director of the Louvre. He had taste at the time for ancient arts and modern painting, which he collected. His "Asiaticism" made him like my painting: he defended me while noticing that everything always went badly for me: "Even in a desert, you would stumble on a stone! Guard well your stature as accursed painter!"
René Laubies, Portraits et Aphorismes, 2001; trans mine.
Grand seigneur, héritier de la Tour Eiffel et directeur du Louvre. Il avait du gout à la fois pour les arts anciens et la peinture moderne qu'il collectionnait. Son "asiatisme" lui fit aimer ma peinture : il me défendit tout en remarquant que tout allait toujours mal pour moi : "Même dans un désert, vous trébucheriez sur un caillou ! Gardez bien votre statut de peintre maudit !"
Michel Tapie de Celeyran
Large nose, tip, thin, "rubbing his hands like the flies" as well, said Jeanne Facchetti. With a flair to convince the billionaires. He introduced American painting in France and located the rare interesting painters of Paris. Each time that a painter was introduced to him, he asked: "Is he rich?"
René Laubies, Portraits et Aphorismes, Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, 2001; trans mine.
Grand nez, boute, maigre, "se frottant les mains comme les mouches" ainsi que le disait Jeanne Facchetti. Avec un flair pour convaincre les milliardaires. Il a introduit la peinture américaine en France et repéré les rares peintres intéressants de Paris. Chaque fois qu'on lui présentait un peintre, il demandait : "Est-il riche ?"
For your amusement, not your edification
How do these instances of vital sensibility sustain themselves in the ambiance of memory? Why do they impel us, call attention to themselves, as if private graffiti dragged into the lanes of interfaciality and interspatiality? What can be supposed of these collectible emissions as if children who demand to be seen and heard, and who denounce curatorial arts as bollix and play at what they do until their made to be sickened by the groveling Contemporary Arts charade and its growing ranks of Tupperware hosts... What is to be drawn from these ethnographic galleries that analogue an earlier Pre-Modern era when ridiculous breeds of men changed hands on the docks of cosmopolitan boomtown ports?
Outside Korea 03
There is something inherently "minimal" (I would say) to what I tentatively call the Korean "aesthete"; not completely minimal, but deeply ingrained in the fabric and spirit of her aesthetic perception. From where did it come? From centuries of starring at her deftly crafted tea ware with understated fine glaze irregularities, or from the lines of the roofs of her noble apartments? From a fondness for the natural off-coloration and texturation of her Spartan flooring conspicuously stone and in winter time warm, and upon which she places her uncushioned bottom to continue her gaze at the unintended flaws of pigmentation of the celadon teacup cuddled in her hands abstracted and alone? From the tantalizing feel of feather-stuffed silks against her sun reddened cheeks in spring; pressed hempen gossamers of veiled summer shirting...
But this highly inconspicuous line of minamality did not run long to arrive her to her date with the post-Nuagiste devastation. Why? Because a flower of modernity bequeathed an ancient time to her; she never needed a bridge to that.
November 11, 2009
On November 11, 2009 while viewing a collection of Korean sculpture as a part of the exhibition "Nature Borne" (Singapore Botanic Gardens) my research procedure was suddenly challenged by an altered climate that expressed itself through a new set of prospects that beckoned me to test and broaden my research mandate through observing the inclusion of "interfacialilty" and the manner in which its "primmediacy of being" denoted in a spatialized socio-poetic context. Would the apparently fresh theoretical unit effect filtrations of data thereafter? Would it demonstrate results of a novel character? I set about to formulate preliminary findings...
Outside Korea 02
I visited the country five or six times in that early period (for visa reasons mainly); each trip granted me new endearments. Pusan was my port of entry and departure but I always wound up in the capital, Seoul, a tinkering city of bric-a-brac scaffolding, lanes and crossroads full of thirsty girls like cats in tea houses skirting smiles as mannequins for everyone tonified standing at ginseng street-stalls. Older folk tended to speak Japanese then. It was an autumn dawn view over wide bending river in the misty light and silent surge of a voiceless people articulate in tears amassing at the outskirts, villages eclipsed by Cold War rouble and gray zone hammering, dance clubs articulate in screams before midnight, drives through anxious Korean army checkpoints high on grass with Leonard Luerus, solders at ready with automatic rifles, Americans, saluting: 'At ease Corporal!'.... Peter Velnik married Yong Hee. Her parents gave a car. In those days if you could afford a car you could afford a driver. Newly weds with new car and driver... Bracing winter mornings Peter still enjoyed the stroll near the quaint little music shop where European classics drifted out into the icy street.... Then a train for the south. She yawned at the doorstep, covering her mouth with a friendly wave, requested permission and led me back through the empty saloon and up a flight of stairs, then went for breakfast of 100 little dishes... "You remember me," she said, "and I'll remember you." That long narrow lane down to Pusan harbour....
Italo Magliano
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On returning from the United States into 1958, I met Italo Magliano at the gallery of Le Noci. Italo had a strong personality; he could communicate his enthusiasm for painting. He animated to convince and overcome. Corso Vercelli, a freedom palace, one passed from salon to salon: Sironi, De Pisis, Morgandi, brought towards Hartung, Fautrier, Tal Coat and Manessier, then one arrived towards young people, Laubies, Benrath, Bellegarde, Yves Klein and Manzoni. There was a whole dining room for Fontana (sculptures, ceramics). Italo, true collector, had accumulated enormously the works of Italian and foreign painters. One could find at his place Twombly, Schumacher, and works of the painters still poorly known but whom he made known and recognized. The sum total of life devoted to art… Their children continue taking care of this large collection.
René Laubies, Portraits et Aphorismes, Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, 2001; trans mine.
Bauddhamata is coming to conclusion
Change and improvement is demanded of me now. The monstrous pose of homeless ascetic as deep-cover ethnographic cultural spy is utterly inappropriate to the present situation. In order to develop new interests and themes I need to come in. I'm pondering creative solutions very carefully...
New supervisory intervention and other recommendations welcome.
Ref. Abstractus, tractus, tradition, annexation http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2008/04/abstractus-tractus-tradition-annexation.html
Yves Klein
On the beach at Nice, Iris [Clert], Yves Klein and me. Iris, to unnerve Yves, doesn't cease complimenting me on my legs. After five minutes, Yves rises: "One goes; I've enough, this sea, this sky. All this blue, it is my blue! I am copied, blue, blue..."
René Laubies, Portraits et Aphorismes, Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, 2001; trans mine.
Sur la plage a Nice, Iris, Yves Klein et moi. Iris pour énerver Yves ne cesse de me complimenter sur mes jambes. Au bout de cinq minutes Yves se lève: "On s'en va, j'en ai assez, cette mer, ce ciel. Tout ce bleu, c'est mon bleu! On me copie, le bleu, le bleu..."
Laubies on Nuagiste procedure
When a Chinese painter of the ancient high period began to paint, he first burned incense, calmed and stilled his mind, collected his spirit and meditated. He let life's troubles and sordid propaganda gradually depart. With his spirit opened, he created an inner emptiness and thereby communed with the vital force that impels the universe. In harmony with Nature, it was That which directed his brush... This is how I meditate and paint myself, in India and les îles de la Sonde, in the nature that I love, tropical and dense, or in the pure luminosity of the desert.
René Laubies, Portraits et Aphorismes, Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, 2001; trans mine.
Quand un peintre chinois des Hautes-Epoques se mettait à peindre, il brûlait de l'encens, se recueillait dans le calme et le silence, concentrait son esprit et méditait. Il laissait les ennuis et le sordide quotidien s'évanouir peu à peu. Son esprit libéré, il faisait le vide en lui et communiait ainsi avec l'élan vital qui meut l'univers. Alors, en harmonie avec la Nature, c'est Elle qui guidait son pinceau… C'est ainsi que je médite et peins moi-même, dans les Indes, les îles de la Sonde, dans la nature que j'aime tropicale et dense ou dans la pure lumière du désert.
Interfaciality / An Interview
Others have spoken of your work's authentic links to West, South, Southeast and East Asian calligraphic traditions. What then might your paintings themselves have to say to us?
My paintings are the croppings of exultant wandering performed as if life were to carry on forever or, conversely, weren't. Their prefigurative affordances reside in the seductiveness of the very breaches they penetrate and in the uncharted voids they release and articulate.[1] Reading them necessitates a certain type of literacy. You might get a better answer asking them directly. As for any link to "handsome writing," this alludes more to kavya or poetry, I should think.
What is your creative process all about?
Procedural concerns are very clear-cut as they reverberate between, and thereby unify self and void as recumbent on their limitless dissolution in the mediating hues of perpetual auto-genesis, negotiated analogues to naught and nil.
What about the outcomes or "products" as you call them? How do you see them?
I see them through a kind of hyper-delicacy of exponderate Rococo elucidation; through pervading appliqués horizontally pressed between areas of muted clamor writ large on disassembled templates of wind.
Who, if any, are your inspirations? Are stylistic borrowings detectible in your work?
You allude to derivations, which signify to me an appeal for calm midst the deafening force of the 'sirens of the atmosphere,' colluding all space through its sheer cascadence, bending and blending the outcomes of nature.
In your elevated abstract mode of research, originality is relentlessly probed to the point where the notion of willful creation seems to have virtually disappeared. Any fresh comment?
It's a cross between morphing (or permutation) and the adaptation of the native's itinerancy across the savage ground over which he traipses in the course of smoothing out the symptoms of his muse.
Hmm... That's an interesting media. Are you in touch in any way with alternate or "extra" macrospheric realms?
In plaintive march with the vanishing spirits gliding through the gapes of an interfacially 'granting no centre, no homeland, no grave,'[2] I am rootless and ready, there is nothing in this world.
Notes
1. Cf. Michel Foucault on the work of Maurice Blanchot, "toward that whose absolute finespun light has never received language" in Foucault/Blanchot, 1990: 25; 22-45.
2. Cf. Foucault /Blanchot: 24.
Outside Korea 01 (redoux)
I vividly remember as a young escapee from the Gulag of America arriving by boat in the late 1970s to the port of Pusan at the extreme southern reach of the Korean Peninsula. I spent the first night in a modest hotel and then boarded a Seoul-bound train the next morning. All that day I gazed out the windows to the frugal midsummer fields and meadows in desiccated shades of yellow and gold... These made me recall van Gogh's impastos of the sun-drenched estates around the town of Arles. In fact, this was the place van Gogh should have come, I thought. Working in among these spirited people, he might have found real success in life...
More than twenty years passed. I wanted to return there, but everybody said you wouldn't recognize the place.
Where is the spirit of those frugal fields today? I wonder. How to uncover, trace and woo the shrew of Korea's post-Cloudist transformation?
untitled
salvos gong in drying mud the wind
refreshed and hammer mute
a peel of car sounds humming fans in open
sense of days removed
in spawn of filters tamped down ribbon.
mulberry shoots as vague as art
René's true family members, please stand up
Or, THE DEATH OF THE RENÉ LAUBIES ESTATE COLLECTION
It finally dawns on me how sadly disappointing and counter-productive the exécuteur testamentaire of the René Laubies Estate Collection has turned out to be.
What would be the essential aims of maintaining an artist's estate?
- To preserve and protect the original properties,
- To acquire additional relevant works and facilities,
- To make certain that the assets of the entire estate flourish
The White Peacock
One autumn – it must have been 1985 or 6 – leading up to our winter meeting in Varkala, I wrote to René from Bangkok and asked him to bring me a French novel. When he got to Varkala he handed me a novel of DH Lawrence, "The White Peacock." I was disappointed. He said French novels were never translated well into English. I didn't read it. I should read it now!
I remember in the autumn of 1989 when staying with René in his Paris flat. He complained about having to be a literary judge for a certain "young French writers competition." It was a result of his winning the Fénéon Prize in 1954 that René was more or less required to be a judge. He told me how hard it was to read all the novels, and related how the woman who chaired the award jury would phone him and insist that he read them all. But he never read them all, he told me, only parts.
I had only then recently become aware of the art-critical term "Minimalism" – mainly in reference to painting and music. "Could there be a minimalist novel?" I asked René. He considered the question and suggested, "Yes..."
When in Paris in February 2008, I spoke with gallery owner Michel Broomhead who related to me, "Of all the art critics that [Laubies] knew, René esteemed Pierre Restany above all."
This is what we call Nuagisme
To live for the moment (as if that were sufficient) and allow the given to sway ones attention to the pleasures of the wind over sweat-laced bodies on silent beaches kissed by tides; to subsist on nothing and breathe thin air as droplets filtered through evanescent cloud streams - this is what we call Nuagisme.
See Nuagisme
In Plaintive March with the Vanishing Spirits
"In Plaintive March with the Vanishing Spirits" (2006), I decoded the ancient practice of alms bowl walking as something that was far more aesthetic than ascetic - something quintessential to "ascetic art." It was a sculpting installation of poetic movement - a muted recital of grimy footfall in plaintive march with the vanishing spirits as elapsing in the crumbling facade and veneer of a celebrated Asian townscape.
See Desert Spring
the stain of sliding cloud and sea
In starting to discuss the present work, we are immediately confronted by a dearth of terms insufficient to expound a highly poetic contemporary artist born in the crevasses of cultural hybridity and nourished in the no man's lands of ascetic transmutation. How to take up this exhilarating challenge and crack the artist's liminal appeal when standard terminology so deeply disappoints us? Here's a suggestion. Assume a pre-existing Cloudist dictum and see what can be mined to explain the subject in a manner that eludes any convoluted reading of the stain of sliding cloud and sea.
the shorelines of perception
I find it curious that the deep southern reach of the Malaya Peninsula constitutes the sole amphiscian zone across the entire Eurasian super-continent. In that torrid, tropical sun-drenched tract one encounters scores of basal registries strewn as arcs in chance arrangement: scuttled boats half-buried on a riverbank, driftwood drying on curves of beach; scattered whitecaps flagging the gaze to the hazy forms of offshore islands floating like clouds on the distant horizon. And soaked in the torrid midday sun that relentlessly elutriates the baleful intimations of these proximal devices smidged together through the supplication of quiet tides; one senses the plunge of sky-blue screens as lambent veils of spatial buoyancy. And one nimbly abides there to better intervene upon, lighten and extend the emotive schema that discerns exquisite tragic text by the polished hue of its lithic dross awash in the variegated surge of enchantment splashing pure on the shorelines of perception...
"Beneath a thin flaking glaze"
What I witness may more accurately be described as a scattered but insistent urge to assert a multiplicity of latent or half-forgotten processes, sentiments or forms that are superbly free of so-called Western historiological development—an analytical modeling that needs to be abandoned, i.e., as based on the coloring or performative embellishment of an implacable array of irrelevant exdogenous operations that, despite an abiding constructural nearness, in essence neither foils nor influences the given procedurality.
Ref. J.C. van Leur. Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History. The Hague: W. Van Hoeve. 1955: 95; in a contiguous milieu.
The geniis of the margins
My paintings are rather like sacrosanct texts of aesthetic quiescence and perceptive light. They must not be hidden away by collectors. They need to appear together in numbers and in varied combinations in order to irradiate their optimal values. As a countervailing ploy, I instill these works with jinxing forces ('the geniis of the margins') that progressively nudge to allay and enrich their conscientious wards who actively promote their public exposure.
brackish sludge after evening rainstorm
I find the term Buddhism more misleading than signifying. This is fortunate. The qualified statuses of its materials and processes far out weigh subjective concerns to the point where essentially no subject remains. Through strength in cropping one proceeds unattracted by any attempt at paradigmatic theorization.
Morning fresh gutters of brackish sludge after evening rainstorm.
Batu Pahat, Malaysia.
On Maintaining the Integrity of the Laubies Estate Collection
The executeur testamentaire needs be made aware of his principle obligation: to properly maintain as an organized, integral and uncompromised whole, the René Laubies Estate Collection. It is only thereafter that the executeur testamentaire should even consider "representing" the estate—comprised of writings, art objects and miscellaneous artifacts. In this way only will the executeur testamentaire be able to accomplish the following four crucial tasks:
- fortify René Laubies's artistic legacy
- enhance the estate collection's fiscal value (sold intact to a primary museum)
- boost thereby the executeur testamentaire's own recompense
- repair and prevent the executeur testamentaire's personal legacy from becoming that of "dereliction of duty."
The executeur testamentaire needs to comprehend his foremost duty: to make transparent the collection's contents or otherwise invite accusations of fraudulence. The estate collection needs to be preserved and conserved intact so that future generations of researchers will may examine it. The executeur testamentaire needs to be made more sensitive of the immense historical importance of the René Laubies Estate Collection.
See The death of the Laubies Estate Collection
The reification of dawn's resolve
References
- Balagopal, Roberta. 2009. Building the Mosaic: in search of Southeast Asian contemporary art writing and publications. In Biblioasia, Vol 5, Issue 1, April. Singapore: National Library Board: 28-33.
- Blanchot, Maurice. 1990. "The thought from the outside." In Foucault/Blanchot, 1990.
- Dreyfus, Georges. 2006, "Is Perception Intentional? (A Preliminary Exploration of Intentionality in Indian Philosophy)." http://blog.mindandreality.org/files/GD_TE_V2.html
- Foucault, Michel. 1990. Foucault/Blanchot. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.
- Harris, Troy D. 2006. Intentionality: the karman involūtus hitch. http://karman-involutus.blogspot.com/
- _____. 2005. Grafting Plato’s Shadow Play: a spray can version of metaleptic mimesis. Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 1, 3-33, Winter/Spring. http://ashejournal.com/index.php?id=42
- Jay, Martin. 1986. Marxism and Totality: the adventures of a concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: 270.
Fautrier, Seibel, Facchetti, Le Noci, Magliano
I find it interesting (correct me if I'm wrong) that Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) did not have a solo post-mortem show until 26 years after his death (Jean Fautrier, Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1990). The reader may recall my brief discussion with art-critic/author/editor Castor SEIBEL who I met at Galerie De Meo, Paris, in March 2008 (Assembling notes around Paul Facchetti). Seibel has written for the Michael Werner Gallery (Jean Fautrier – Nudes, 2001), which holds some importance regarding the exposure of Fautrier's work. He is a penetrating analyst of Laubies, as well, and closely acquainted with Italian collectors. A Laubies retrospective needs to be organized gathering works from a range of collections. With respect to Rene's own clear indications, Italian collectors hold the most promise. In his Portraits and Aphorismes (2001), you notice that he only speaks well of Italians, who, (it ought to be mentioned) collected his work 'for more than four decades.' Here is the passage from René's brief sketch of Guido Le Noci.He discovered my painting at Facchetti's when I was in the United States. He had opened his gallery on Via Brera [Milan] with the support of Italo Magliano, Count Panza, Visconti etc… These collectors immediately bought several of my paintings and I became a friend of Magliano who supported me for more than forty years. Through me, Le Noci knew Fautrier. (trans mine)
A découvert ma peinture chez Facchetti quand j'étais aux Etats Unis. Il avait ouvert sa galerie Via Brera avec l'appui de Italo Magliano, du Comte Panza, des Visconti etc… Ces collectionneurs m'ont acheté immédiatement plusieurs tableaux et je suis devenu l'ami de Magliano qui m'a soutenu pendant plus de quarante ans. Par moi, Le Noci a connu Fautrier.These are just raw notes.
References
- Laubiès, René. 2001. "Aphorismes," in Titratti e Aforismi / Portraits et Aphorismes. [Bilingual, Italian and French], Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, [French to English trans. mine].
- Seibel, Castor. 2001. Jean Fautrier – Nudes. Gallery Werner, New York.
mutability
The stirring anonymity of unintentioned gesture stripped to the formlessness of its own infinitude
(dawn light tea at cmk restaurant, opposite mustafa's, syed alwi road)
Hermetic airports
"Airports," writes architect Rem Koolhaas, "are on the way to replacing the city ... with the added attraction of being hermetic systems from which there is no escape - except to another airport."
Moksha: an etymological note
Vedic/Sanskrit moksha (Thai mokkh) is attested as early as pre-Rgveda, from the root muc, or moc (Lubotsky) as a verb, meaning 'to release, be/become free, liberate, set free.' It holds a range of further implications, 'to shed (as leaves, feathers, hair or skin)'; 'to cast off (a bodily covering)' (cf English molting); 'to slacken, unloose, untie'; and likewise indicates something 'transformed, emancipated, liberated, given up, released.' It is likely derived from PIE base *mei-, 'to change, exchange,' 'to move, go.' Compare Sanskrit methati, 'changes, alternates, joins, meets,' and may also be a cognate of Latin mutare, 'liable to change,' and Latin meare, 'to pass'; meare is the second part of the English word permeable and appears as well in Greek amoibe, 'change,' the root of the English word amoeba, characterized by its constantly changing shape. Compare English mutable (attested c.1374).
Buddhadasa's Wikipedia entry
I have just rewritten and re-edited my formerly terse contribution to the Wikipedia entry for Buddhadasa.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhadasa
Nuagisme
Nuagisme (literally "cloudism") is a French art-critical term that was advanced in the 1950s by art critic Julien Alvard (1916-1974) to designate the painters René Laubies, Frédéric Benrath, René Duvillier, Fernando Lerin and Nasser Assar whose work was seen as broadly comprising a modern naturalist non-representational abstract movement that remained aloof to prevailing theoretical disputes by refusing to enter the oppositional framework that raged between geometrical and lyrical abstraction. Writing in 1955, Alvard described nuagisme as an "insurrection against the form" in attempt to paint the "boundless."
Related posts
Art Informel
In its 1950s French art critical context, Art Informel (alternately spelled Art informal) indicated little in the sense of "informal art," the proposition of a casual, loosened or relaxed art handling or simple diminution of formal-ness. Art Informel was actually concerned with the non-appearance of form itself, with the un-formal, the un-form-ulated. Nuanced more profoundly, its cardinal aim was the non-allowance – indeed the non-substantiation of any conception or structuration that granted validity to the Continent's fixation on the dissimulative myth of intentionality.
See The reification of dawn's resolve
Institut Huyen Vi
Institut Huyen Vi in Vitry, immediately south of Paris, is roumored to have opened. Mark this posting its premiere web presence. I love the aesthetics of the name's typography, which is stunning and noble, beautiful and auspicious. It conveys to me an appealing sense of subtle elegance restrained through its wish to affect no meaning. I wish them not to alter that, nor the elevated vision of the founding Venerable, the late Grand Master Thich Huyen Vi, and which was not to establish an exclusionary "Buddhist Studies" ghetto, but an enlightened venue for the abstract study and research of "Oriental Philosophy and Religion" with uncompromising academic vigour and valour.
Nam Mo A Di Da Phat
A Wall Street job
Measured thoughts of the Obama administration, the 'Presidency' inherently a Wall Street job, hence the very Realpolitik(al) wars in West Asia which are not of his choosing per se. A brilliant political actor, the best on the world stage today (perhaps), Obama has become the greatest number of things for the greatest number of people as he rides the tail of destiny's dragon.
On the Remote 'Ordination' Tradition
In an interview/discussion "How Buddhism invented Asia" (2 April 2009) with academic Peter Skilling, Late Night Live host Phillip Adams asked the following question.
"Was there ever a central administrative capital for Buddhism, something like Rome where edicts could be sent out, where training was centralized, where resources were sent?"
Peter Skilling: "No. There was never a Rome in Buddhism. I think it depends...its...this is because of the structure of the Buddhist monastic order. A quorum of monks, which would be ten or even five in a remoter area, can ordain new monks and set up their own monastic community. And that community is not responsible to a parent community, or to a greater community; so that as the Buddhist monastic order spread throughout Asia, it would establish its own independent centres, and they were never responsible to a Rome, a centre."
Ref. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2009/2533073.htm
to plunge the soul
I've never in my life gotten down to scuba diving. Still waiting to give it a try, I suppose. My Singapore-based research regime seems steadily giving way to an (at least) 'provisional' shift to the Malaysian mainland where recent explorations have granted more friends with compounding imageries and open invitations to peripatetic painting and other peninsular overpinnings to social schemes of calming breadth towards offshore isles with semi-ruined hutments near limpid blue waters to plunge the soul...
templates of wind
a hyper-delicacy of exponderate rococo elucidation pervades appliqués horizontally pressed between areas of muted clamour writ large on disassembled templates of wind
Staying and away
We had managed to divert our thoughts fairly purely: geographically ebbing, we neared an end and arrived there well. There was movement settled for a space in adjustment, sharing parties tangibly close. The light was dim with terminal halls branching off cool dusted pediments, later, through unknown streets and movements: shadows of engines (modulated language), soft firm doors: imagined footsteps staying and away.
bandage social skins
Somewhere midst the reading of Collins, Koolhaas, Koranic history and the Greek in us - aesthetic religiosity and its moral confrontation with the factoid perceptions of a Christian confluence inducing procedural stain and wash bewailings - distinctive moultings filiate anthems as sensitive recursions bandage social skins.
Refs.
- Collins, H.P. 1928. "Introduction." Joseph Joubert, Pensées and letters. London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd.
- Koolhaas, Rem. 2001. "Pearl River Delta." In Mutations, Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (eds.). Barcelona: Atta. 309-35.
The boats at Kotikulum (a novel)
The boats at Kotikulum (a novel), by Troy Harris (2009). Forthcoming.
Two old texts published
I have published two old texts in pdf format.
- "What Happened to the Rishi? (notes on the Khmer Contribution to Saint Guru Chod)," an academic exercise submitted to Dr. Ulrike Niklas, PhD towards the formulation of PhD thesis proposal, South Asian Studies Program, National University, Singapore, 7 October, 2004.
- Stretching the Lute Strings: A Treatise On Classical Thai Yoga-Tantra. books@apsara.co.uk. 2000.
(auto)installation
Reiterating "auto" as it aught to be, like presenting ones thesis or project in review, where (in the process) supervision is sought and given, but only on request. One needs draw near of ones own inclination through initiation (no. initiative), both to bring and to lay in a stageal process inordinate, subordinate and coordinate assemblages packed and delivered come what may.
See points of ascetic initiation.
The auto-publishing online writer
I listened with interest to the video "Blogitecture" (MIT, HTC Forum, n.d.) featuring presentations by Kazys Varnelis and Javier Arbona. Prior to the forum, Varnelis published a note on blogs, which amounted to the five cursive points that he elaborated in his MIT talk. I would take these points as brief proposals, as hypothetical or exploratory trials to come to an interesting new or (re)emerging definition that would plainly set apart both the work and the role of the traditional print-media writer from that of the writer who basically self-publishes online, or in a word "blogs."
In critical appraisal, I found each point that Varnelis drew - in attempt to chronicle the ostensible rise of the online writer - equally applicable to the digital scribe's historical precursor. Might there be any difference at all? I think there is. And to accentuate distinction, I would classify the latter as an auto-publishing online writer and work from there. The essential practice of scribbling thoughts and referencing them remains intact. Differences arise, then, not from the means of intellectual production, but their means of distribution. What is more, the essential apparatuses that handle this are hardly more than a logical extension to the mechanicalization of visual/intellectual reproduction, comparable to the advent of the camera, say, that transformed the manner in which both the ideas and the products of an "industrial art" gained distribution in particular regard to a sheer volume increase or "graphic/intellectual/digital traffic" (see Re. The Apparatus).
I find Varnelis's entire intellectual discourse delightful.
References
http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2008/08/re-apparatus.html
http://javier.est.pr/2009/04/12/%E2%80%9Chigh-quality-rolex-replica-watches%E2%80%9D/
http://varnelis.net/
http://varnelis.net/blog/a_note_on_blogs
http://varnelis.net/blog/blogitecture_at_mit_htc_forum_video
Ascetic & scientific methodological posturing
On a January evening in 2009 while reviewing some notes [in Tamil Nadu, India], I revamped a thought as concerned the adoption of a rule or code of discipline on the part of the ascetic artist in contrast to the tenets of the scientific researcher. While adopting methodologies both the ascetic and the scientific worker deliberately assumed rhetorical and procedural posturing. In primary contrast to the scientific rule, though, ascetic tradition retained recognition of its analytic agency's inexorable breach of the feigned restrictions embedded in its organizational hypothesis and clearly, if tacitly, attested thereby the excessive veneration and ultimate collapse of both its theoretical blueprint and impracticable execution. The corresponding natures of these dissimilar approaches were furthermore brought into crisp relief through the typification of their signature provisos, hypo-thesis and hyper-thesis respectively. At the very core of religious venture resided the assumption or article of faith that discipline - practice - delivered one over to a preconceived realm of transmutative good. In contrast to this, the analytic colleague was logically committed to roll with the hunch as a formerly supplanted, now superseding task to be thoroughly self-vetted for its hypothetic constancy. Inbuilt further to this technical charge was the correlate systematic obligation to formulate predictions, hypertheses if you will, and to posit notionalities conjecturally inferred exteriorly to the ordered set of freely given data. This summoned at once a modal array of "distilled-order" (tertiary) activants and accelerants exemplifying notably, discovery, invention, dispersion and birth.
Intensive pranayama courses not recommended
Someone briefly wrote me asking advice on "intensive pranayama courses." I responded (in part) as follows:I would not recommend any sort of "intensive" course format for learning any aspect of yoga. In fact, "course" itself is not at all necessary, if taken to denote an assemblage of students: for the presence of other students is beside the point. There are five requirements: student, teacher, place, time and repetition. Regarding time, as clearly detailed in my online instructions [Dutch trans here], it takes about a year to learn pranayama. By "learn," I mean, to reach a basic level of stabilization. You must never hurry or force anything. This holds for your preliminary "asana" practice too. However, unlike learning asanas, the indicators of correct pranayama performance are far more clear-cut, quantitatively objectifiable and immediately recognizable by the instructor.
In closing I cited the following relevant items:
- Anuloma Viloma Pranayama
- Learning Pranayama on the Internet
- A Warning on Pranayama
- Meditation and yoga are not separate things
Points on ascetic initiation
On the morning of February 5th, 2009—in particular regard to Bauddha upasampadA (ascetic initiation)—the notion occurred to me that in the final analysis, any parampara (ascetic lineage) disqualified itself through intransigent espousal of irrefutability. The actual compulsion towards legitimatization, however, I took as a matter for separate delineation.
A few days later, the following idea emerged. Seeking "ordination," as is often expressed, through traditionally sanctioned Bauddhaspheric sectors, the aspirant inevitably finds himself beholden to any one chauvinistic grouping or another. Dismayed by this fumbling state of affairs, I esteemed the vision of Sakamouni Bauddha who evoked the iconoclastic precedents of monks who heroically initiated themselves. In a parallel vein, the principal advantage of conventional (upa)sampradaya infiltration was securing access to ethnological content. For therein laid the task of the ascetic researcher. Legitimization remained a moot point.
Three broad avenues of education
Throughout my extended peripatetic scholar period, I have made the most of three broad avenues of education: formal lecture, independent research, and mentorship.
Do we choose to be born
Do we choose to be born? "Yes" you say, "Everybody chooses without exception. Choice is compulsory." But do you mean to say that no one chooses not to be born? Because every decision implies selection; there has got to be an option. So where's the choice?
Practice in Visala
Near my lodging was a Bodhi tree. I sat beneath it in the morning after breakfast and sipped a little kopi kosong. Adjacent to this was Sheng Chuan Eating House, a loose collective of hawker stalls. Different people sold a range of items such as curry veg rice, minced meat, fish balls, lor mee, popiah, Fuzhou oyster cakes, wanton noodle, rojak and xian xin bing. Over at the side-tables, people sat quietly, smoking cigarettes and feeding themselves with chopsticks and spoons. I convened with Buddha in the cool of the tree. He said that he had practiced in a similar way in a place he called Visala.
From "The Boats at Kotikulum"
By the morning of March 18, 2009, my highly restrained peripatetic caprice had effectively arrived to its natural conclusion. The sky was blue with big white clouds. I headed out on foot to Sultan Mosque and sat near the corner of Baghdad and Arab streets. I could see the hookah joints around Haji Lane...and I listened, enraptured by the Javanese gamelan floating serenely from a shop across the street...and I felt as if the ambiance had freed my perceptions and shifted my being to another time and space...to where my thoughts were as the waters of the ocean's depth that streamed to every corner of the universe in waves as prayers gently crashing in love lucidity strength and compassion chastening the hardened hearts of humanity including my own.
Shakib Gunn: 12th June 1934 – 17th February 2009
Shakib Gunn passed away in Singapore during my recent sojourn in India. He was a noble friend. The objective of a Muslim's time on earth was to prepare for success in the Aakhirah, and Shikib understood his personal advent as merely if essentially a means to this end — "the life hereafter." He scoffed at the popular notion of Enlightenment. Of course he had wished to gain in the virtues of wisdom, knowledge and compassion — no question. But the grandiose dimensions privileged and conferred on that modern day unicorn, particularly as pandered by the international publishing houses, was clearly, for Shakib, excessive and pointless. It was simply "not necessary to be enlightened," he told me. Life on earth had a limited scope as well as objective, and "neither thorns nor flowers should distract us from the goal." To Shakib's mind, the notion of Enlightenment amounted to an ill-starred, if not wholly devastating ideological dajjaal, a 'lying creature' lodged within the belly of contemporary spirituality.
I wish my dear friend a truly fulfilling journey.
For a lighter touch on Shakib's life, see A Tight Little Island Thwarts Kiting (Prince Sisowath Panara Sirivuth, Drachen Foundation Journal, Fall 2003).
Ref. http://www.drachen.org/journals/a12/Thwarts-Kiting.pdf / View as HTML
Tom Flint's study notes on Khmer Bauddha History
American ascetic-researcher Tom Flint (Venerable Santidev), a rare kindred soul among the Bauddha brotherhood, has published some study notes on Khmer Bauddha History.
Ref. http://www.cambodianview.com/buddhist-history.htm
Cloud stains, a post-Nuagiste critique
In Cloud stains, a post-Nuagiste critique I invited cool scrutiny of Rene Laubies's procedural affinity to tropicalism. First was his affection for 'exploiting materials accessible to the site be they old or new.' Second was seeing his visual expression as a narratology more of his staining bricolage than of any post-gestrual antecedents. Third was to disengage his burnished end-products from the structuruation of systemic unity finely controlled through the layering of error over grazed equivocations in specific regard to the dissipation of existing modes of aesthetic perception. Fourth was to rebuff all colonial messages as textual 'kitsch if only for their sheer romantic inappropriateness.'
(I note reliance on J.H. Bay, "Tropicalism," 1999, private electronic correspondence).
________
See: Harris, Nuagisme, 12.6.09; and Varnelis, Poll: unless a cultural artifact is first and foremost cool, styling it as high is now a form of kitsch, 28 April, 2009.
A twofold approach
My research by this period had adopted a twofold approach. This combined academic research and creative writing, on the one hand, with conjectural investigation and practical application of the actual methods of painting themselves, on the other hand. In accord with Laubies's painterly approach, it was therefore an imperative to find and inhabit a relatively isolated place in India that was conducive to imbuing ones aesthetic being with the natural setting's superlative qualities. It was in essence a form of aesthetic yoga where the actual work, be it textualized or painted, was effectively constructed as a temple of divinity. Through yogic concentration, purity and grace one beckoned divinity to enter the temple.
"Problematization" in Laubies's work
In "'Problematization' in Laubies's deconstructive work," problematization initially functioned as a prudent probe; but its action went beyond mere problem proposal. It marked and defaced, flattened and distorted, underrode and de-meaned ones own creative urge. It eradicated totally and left in the lurch a rude mistrust that snubbed all reliance on "technique [and] virtuosity" (Laubies, 2001, Aphorism Nine). Its importance could be gauged through indexical aids and performative provisos such as unparsed automatistic archaeology, aleatoricism and intertexturality, which were not to be read for their presumed inventiveness. It nonetheless reckoned a spatial sphere that at a very high stratum, or frequency, "had recourse to a god" (Zoetmulder). With its inbuilt resolve and resolution, Laubies's problematization was essentially left to chance.
In a related sense, participation in what had previously been described as "deconstructive practice" was tantamount to drawing on the cognitive means by which perception, as a culturally acquired and shielded edifice, was ousted by transordinate apparatuses devoted to destabilizing all known things. What on earth was left to be unearthed?Lightness over pale-blue line of horizon,
But exactly how this came about was anyone's adventure.
The untrodden beach under baking sun.
By way of conclusion
One of the last things that my research guru/mentor said to me days before he left this world was, "Bring your writing to conclusion. It's important."
That was nearly twenty years ago.
Bring to conclusion. Bring to conclusion.
Splitting lost diamonds
I am getting lots of calls of alarm and despair on the apparent disappearance of my reading and rewriting of "Diamond Splitter Discourse."
O you of little faith in the lost and the found. It was there all the time — go quickly now and read....
http://diamond-splitter-discourse.blogspot.com/
Someone who understands (somewhat)
A fellow ascetic, writer and friend caringly notes: I can understand some of your animosity toward Buddhism. But I come from a background of Catholic church intrigue, as a confidant of bishops and cardinals – and from my experience, the silliness of Buddhism is mild, gentle and childish. Buddhist monks are generally as innocuous and harmless as Heraclitus playing knuckle-bones with children at the temple gate.
Fine indeed. But I would like to return this well placed volley by exhibiting the fact that a copious, nurturing and thought-enticing anima persistently out shines the lancet of my animus. Most of my antagonistic posturing towards "Buddhism" is actually a perfomative playing with personae in attempt to resurrect an otherwise moribund collection of scripts.
I don't take it all that serious.
Re. The Apparatus
The "apparatus" is hardly more than a logical extension to the mechanicalization of visual reproduction vis-à-vis the camera, say, that transforms the manner in which both the ideas and the products of an "industrial art" can be distributed in particular regard to a sheer volume increase or "graphic traffic."
Notes: "American non-figurative painting," "post-nuagiste."
Subsuming all to the suffixed '-ism'
Any conventional explanatory-based historical approach would surely be remiss if it failed to illuminate the inherent limitations and even contradictions both of and through its very own set of working strategies. Nevertheless, such concerns of definitional and objective clarity are not in themselves insuperable. Indeed, the idea that a normative rhetorical treatment of an historical period long or short, or of any delimited event large or small could be satisfyingly accounted for by bringing into relief the actions of a few human actors would terrify most of us whose wish it is to make deep sense of things (vis-à-vis "The '-ism' problem," Brettell, 1999: 47).
What is more, one need also be on guard against a highly reductive taxonomic rhetoric through an understanding that ironclad categories have long proved very compelling in many quarters, and against predisposing avant-garde tendencies, as well, that 'deliberately stress their inherent difficulty and lack of general public appeal to give themselves an air of exclusivity, that one is a part of a very small, seemingly self-select club similar in structure to that of collectors of other rare commodities' (Brettell, 58).
Ref. Richard Brettell, Modern Art 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation, Oxford University Press.
The Bauddhamata constitutes
The Bauddhamata constitutes for me an amalgam of ascetic, research and poetic media that encompasses structures of a theoretical, methodological and productive nature occasioning random minimal subventions.
Also see
Some spit, some bow,
Feeling prissy
Post-Bauddha
Bauddha for 'religion'
Gautama's robe/Sujata's servant
Through his valuable semiotic exposures and treatments of the symbolism of the pāmśukūla or ascetic rag robe, Prof. John Strong (The Legend and Cult of Upagupta 1992, and Relics of The Buddha 2004) avails the critical narrative elements of the Pāmśukūlānisamsam and Lalitavistara Sutra texts. We concern ourselves here with the cloth that Gautama appropriates soon before the famous meeting with the girl Sujata. Citing Lalitavistara Sutra (194-95), Strong discloses a diachronic sequence immediately antecedent to Gautama acquiescing to the summons of Sujata, the village chief’s daughter, and entering her house where she feeds him. However, as to the robe that he ostensibly wears in the crucial final moments of his morbid and otherwise naked austerities, Gautama explores a charnel ground and discoveres and removes an unburnt shroud (pāmśukūla) "that had enveloped the body of a servant girl who had died in the household of the nearby village chief" (2004:216). Going on to cite a variation of this story as detailed in the late Pali text Pāmśukūlānisamsam (The Account of the Advantages of the Garbage Rag Robe), Strong unveils a thematic landscape of great hermeneutic interest. For the text reports that the girl whom the unburnt shroud had enveloped died in fact "in the advanced stages of pregnancy" and when Gautama lifts the filthy cloth a seven day long "decaying fetus and placenta fall to the ground" (2004:221) and the earth shakes accordingly (1992:72).
What a stunning exposé. Are we meant to infer through these muddled traditions of highly unconvincing Pali text redaction, through their hopelessly affected naiveté and bald insinuating contiguity stunts that Gautama had enrobed himself in the cremation shroud that he had scavenged from Sujata's dead pregnant servant girl? (cf. The Savage Buddha, note 1).
References
- Harris, Troy. 2006. The Savage Buddha: Notes on Gautama and the Kāpālika-vrata, originally published in Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 3, 304-315, Fall 2006. (pdf).
- Sāratthappakāsinī (a commentary to the Samyutta-nikāya), Pali Text Society, 1932, trans. Woodward: 199.27-200.9 [XVI.11]. There Gautama is depicted in a charnel ground picking up a vile rag 'teeming with growth' (Pali tumbamatta). Did Gautama have in mind a robe?
- Silk, Jonathan. 2001. A difficult Pali word, Archives of Indology, online post. 14 Feb. http://tinyurl.com/jqfyv
- Strong, John. 2004. Relics of The Buddha, Princeton.
- Strong, John. 1992. The Legend and Cult of Upagupta, Princeton. http://books.google.com/books?id=bKq7k2DegjcC
Preparing for death through merit
For many in Asia merit marks the most astute preparation for death. In Bauddha influenced cultures, certainly, people consider offering requisites to ascetics, particularly food, robes and bowl as highly auspicious. An ethnic Lao woman, when asked why she did this, said it was because 'When I die and go to hell, I can think of the offerings I made and be raised to heaven.'
See Leedom Lefferts 2007. "Monks' robes in rural Northeast Thailand: Relic and Memory": 160-171. In The Secrets of Southeast Asian Textiles: myth, status and the supernatural. The James HW Thompson Foundation Symposium Papers edited by Jane Puranananda, Bangkok, 2007.
Meeting Rene in Varkala
[November 1984] It was another night's journey on the train from Madras in order to reach the city of Trivandrum in southern Kerala. I reached Trivandrum Central in the morning. Stepping off the train, I immediately entered a station toilet and latched the door. Plenty of water gushed from the tap as I repeatedly filled my plastic pitcher and bathed to my hearts content. I put clean clothes on and came out shining. Leaving the station, the town was remarkably calm and peaceful. Soft Vedic chanting filled the air through loudspeakers offered for the just assassinated Indira Gandhi.
In a letter that Rene had sent to me in Bangkok, he asked me to check at the Trivandrum General Post Office. "Talk to the Post Master. He knows me," he said; and I did, and it was true, but there was nothing in the way of a letter for me there, so I left a quick note to let him know I arrived.
I headed straight for Kovalum Beach. It was my third year to go there. I was getting a bit bored of the place: not with the waves, but the numbers of tourists. The owner of my room, a Mysorean named Sergeant, told me of a seaside village called Varkala and suggested that I go and have a look. "It's a good place to practice yoga," he advised, "I think you will like it. Go and have a look. You can take the morning bus. It's easy."
There was hardly a tourist to be seen. What relief. I found a room that overlooked the sea and paid three months in advance. A few days later, I returned to Trivandrum and left an updated note for Rene. "Just take a train or bus to Varkala then go to the beach called Papanasam. You will love this place. Believe me," I wrote.
Rene arrived about two weeks later. I have written about this period both in Calls from the Shade (2008) and Saint Guru Chod (2008). Rene's very close and long-time traveller friend Alfred Winding arrived a few days later. I didn't get to know him then. He and Rene spoke Italian to each other. According to Rene, Alfred had gathered some interesting information on beaches in northern Kerala. I would experience these interesting places for myself, but not til nearly a quarter of a century later (see "The work place," "On Indian soil," The final days of Rene Laubies in India").
The following year I met Rene again in Varkala. He arrived rather late in the season this time; apparently held up by a travelling companion who only spoke French. "He doesn't speak one word of English!" Rene griped. (As I write these words, I am made to wonder if that person was not Pierre Carron). However, neither was I very talkative myself. I had fallen severely ill by this time, and after a week of acute under nourishment, I could hardly walk one-hundred metres. I was pathetically frail. "Maybe it's AIDS," I told Rene half in jest one day as we had met on the road from Janardhanan Temple to the beach. "No," said Rene, "With AIDS your eyelashes fall out and then you die." He looked at my eyes and then disappeared. I would never see him again in India.
There was no one even to bring me bananas now. Lying in my room alone one moonless night, I was very concerned that I would die in my sleep. I withdrew into the depths of an empty mind until all that remained was a tiny point of diminishing light. I placed my entire attention on that barely perceptible point of light with the solitary thought that, should it disappear I would never wake up.
I awoke in the morning feeling somewhat better. I felt that the condition had reached its nadir and was starting to subside. A German traveller visited my room with biscuits and told me that the whites of my eyes were yellow. "You had better be careful" he said, "You have a little jaundice. Watch what you eat." As fortune would have it, the Dutchman Sri Hamsa called at my door some moments later having driven from his hilltop Kanvashrama. His Italian disciple Skanda Bhakta was also there. "Come and stay with us," Hamsa kindly offered and to there I retreated. I recovered after two slow weeks of lying on my back in a rustic bungalow doing utterly nothing – not even as strenuous as reading. In 1978, while visiting Bali, I had experienced a comparable flirtation with death. But in the steamy, dreamy grips of malaria, tottering on the brink of mortal demise, I simply didn't care one way or the other. In Varkala, however, in early 1987, the illness rendered my mind translucent and I positively did not want to leave this world. There was still much more that I needed to accomplish.
Back on my feet, I proceeded to Tiruvanamalai—preposterously hot that time of year but immensely interesting all the same. A month long sojourn at Ramana Ashram and I was back in Bangkok with Saint Guru Chod — Alleluia.
my sufi tomb
I planted lots of sunflower
and papaya seeds over the sufi tomb
in the garden of Jasmine Hermitage.
There really is something beneath
the surface.
Note: a redaction of the original published 20.6.05, Torrid Zone Shade.
http://torrid-zone-shade.blogspot.com/2005/06/my-sufi-tomb.html
Wanderings
Have you ever read "Wanderings," chapter two of Malabar Jasmine?
http://malabar-wanderings.blogspot.com/
to her vessel of oblation
an obsession for beauty on an unassuming scale incited by a truly irrepressible compulsion and insatiable need to abandon oneself to the hot luxuriance of tropical littorals
or to the desiccated radiance of random oases where the mainly given element of unpredictability is key to the nearly unattended structuration theoretically bound to the full extent of a vast indissoluble
but mutual annulment of all aesthetic principles formed in the crucible of contradistinction to predictable perceptions of décor and composition
to her cyber-navigated vessel of oblation that plainly affirms that no one knows who, what, where, why, when or how [it] if anything supports this course of inquiry and research into yogic poesis
References
Thom, René and Robert Chumbley. 1983. By Way of Conclusion. SubStance, Vol. 12, No. 3, Issue 40: Determinism: 78-83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684258
Zoetmulder, P.J. 1974. Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature, Nijhoff, The Hague: 1974. See esp. "The kawi" (151-65), "The Poet and his royal patron" (165-73) and "Religio poetae" (173-86).
Creese, Helen. 2004. Women of the Kakawin World (marriage and sexuality in the Indic courts of Java and Bali). Creese works largely on the foundations set by Zoetmulder (1974) and applies with aptness the phrase "literary asceticism" (20).
A Sinic name 悉 檀 (siddham)
Some have inquired as concerns any possible Sinic rendition of Sritantra. We have found that Siddham (悉 檀) functions fairly well, although I hasten to reiterate that in actual fact Sritantra is not a name at all, but a project-function that is fully alive within its own highly transitive and polyvalent morpho-semiological infrastructure. It has previously appeared both here and here.
http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2007/02/upasampada-as-entering-stream.html
http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2008/03/adapter-catalyst-medium-bridge.html
I first met Rene on the beach at Puri (draft)
I first met Rene on the beach at Puri, in Orissa India in 1983. It was late afternoon, and he was standing on the shore wearing Bermuda shorts and a colourful shirt while casually talking to a German traveller. I was out in the water body surfing jerky, two-meter-high curlers left and right across the cooling faces of blue-green wave. But they were coming so fast that much of time was spent diving under the oncoming foam. The tide was high. He was waving his hand while standing on the shore. The sunlight shone with filmic brilliance on his well-tanned face. He kept on waving. He waved as if he knew me. There was no one else near me. He was waving at me. I was rather exhausted leaving the water. I stood there dripping on the soft brown sand. He stepped right up. "I like the way you dive through the waves," he said. "You glide very well."
We met the next morning in front of my lodge along Chakratirtha Road. René was staying a few minutes away at Hotel Bay View. Local tourist officials were looking for volunteers among the foreign tourist to take us for a two-day/one-night tour of the region of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack to practice hosting foreign tourists and get their impressions on the places we would visit. There were about eight of us chosen. René had also volunteered. We were to travel in two Ambassador Sedans. Each of the two guides would drive. It was seven o'clock. René took me aside and we chatted a bit. He told me he was an abstract painter and asked me what my interests were. "Poetry," I said. Then he asked me if I knew the American poet Robert Creeley. "He is one of my favourites," I assured him. "Oh I'm glad that you are coming on this expedition," he said. "It would be so boring with only the others." The others were mostly English. We piled into the automobiles. At first I sat in front. We drove ahead a couple of meters and stopped. The other car was not yet loaded. I asked a girl that was sitting in the back if she would like to sit up front instead. She agreed. I opened the door and immediately put my foot in a fresh green patch of cow dung. "Oh," I said. I was a little embarrassed. Some one quickly fetched a pail of water and rinsed my foot and rubber sandal clean. The tour guide told me not to worry. "It's considered auspicious to step in cow dung, especially at the outset of any venture." "That's right," said René as I climbed in the back and sat beside him, "Indians believe that. I do too." We had a lot of time to talk in the car. He told me all about his connections with the American poet Robert Creeley with whom he lived on the Spanish island of Majorca, and especially of his meeting with Ezra Pound in the 1950s at St. Elizabeth Hospital in America. Our first stopped was the little town of Pipli, famous for its artistic appliqué. We were then on our way to the town of Cuttack. René told me more of his abstract art. I mentioned to him an Indian artist from Orissa whose colourful abstract paintings I saw in a Gallery in Jimbocho, Tokyo near to the school where I used to teach. "But I never actually met the artist," I told him, "I only read the bio data at the gallery … But then one night when looking out the third-floor window of my classroom waiting for a tardy student to arrive, I noticed a solitary man walking briskly down the street with a woollen shawl draped over his shoulders. 'That must be the artist,' I though to myself, and watched him disappear in the wet and misty night." Just at this point in telling my story, while driving in the car along the winding road, another car suddenly began to overtake us, and the just mentioned Indian artist was sitting in the back along with a tall European man. "That's him!" I shouted, and immediately told the driver, "Catch that car!" He sped up quickly and honked his horn. The car pulled over. We all got out. I asked the man directly, "Are you the artist who exhibited paintings in Jimbocho Tokyo about one year ago?" "That's correct," he confirmed. Then I turned to René. "Please introduce yourselves." They spoke for some minutes and exchanged brief professional data and contact information. The Artist's name was Prafulla Mohanti.
We continued our drive to the town of Cattack and spent the night in a nice small hotel with restaurant attached. I shared a room with René. I needed a shave but forgot to bring my razor. René said to use his, "The blade is new. I haven't used it." At dinner, my eyes were bigger than my stomach. I had not eaten descent food in a while. They menu boasted an array of North India dishes. I puked 'in the bathroom sink of our room. I was fine after that. The next morning we visited the temples of Bhubaneswar and then took the longer drive to the famous ancient Buddhist archaeological sites. We passed through an incredibly impoverished area where half-naked tribal people lived hovelled in thatch. We returned to Puri by early evening.
The following morning, René and I took a walk south along the beach to the town and returned by the road. In this way, René was able to show me the general orientation of the ancient locale. René had visited Puri many times: for me it was my first.
Nearly every morning soon after breakfast, René took a long walk north along the shore past the Andhra fisher people's makeshift encampment to an isolated stretch of sand. There he could relaxingly strip to a g-string and bathe in peace and sublime seclusion. I never went with him. I preferred the waves just south of the encampment. As he briskly walked along the shore near the boats, the fisher children ran from their ramshackle hutments to greet him with jubilant hand waves and squeals. He smiled at them sweetly and waved in return. "These are my children," he nobly declared.
With the cooling light of early evening, we sometimes walked in the direction of the town. The boats there were different from the Andhra people. There were always several elderly lifeguards, too, with cone-shaped straw hats helping plump women in saris take their holy baths in the dangerous tides. But René was careful to watch the time and not be late for dinner at Hotel Bay View. He liked to have room and board together and to pay in advance on a monthly basis. "It's better for me to avoid the tourist restaurants," he explained. In Sri Lanka they have a good home stay system. I like it very much. It suits me well."
At Hotel Bay View, René always stayed on the terrace roof, in the "puja room," he called it, as it satisfied his fundamental need for seclusion and gave him plenty of space to paint.
He asked to read my poetry. I gave him the entire typewritten sheaf. He returned it two days later. "I like your poetry." (The seascapes took him.) "We should make a book," he pertly remarked. I'll do the cover art like I did with Robert Creeley. After that, his work became very popular. There is a printer in the town. I can take you there tomorrow."
I had still not asked to see his paintings. "Come to my place about five pm," he said.
I climbed the stairs to the terrace roof. The sand and sea were all in view. He had arranged about eight or nine works for me. They were lying on the ground outside his room. Only one he propped on an easel. "I don't use the easel to paint," he said. "It belongs to the hotel. I just brought it up to display one work." I scanned the lot for about 30 seconds and then broke into a steady solo applause. I kept on clapping for a minute or so as I continued to look at the paintings. Then I stopped. They were all of an approximate orange hue, chromatically analogous to the immediate backdrop. I paused a moment to collect my thoughts. "Through calm reflection you absorb the essence of the local colour. You don't try to copy but extract its essence from the breathing space, and then it's naturally abstracted."
I told him I was interested to find a yoga ashram. René only knew of the Ramakrishna Mission. He took me to meet the Swami in charge. "Do you teach yoga here?" I asked the swami. "No, this is not that kind of place," he said." "Do you know any other ashrams in Puri?" I asked him. "Puri is one big ashram," he said. That was a very good lesson.
Walking to the town one day, René showed me a room that was available for rent. I found it very dismal and too close to the town. Walking back, I disclosed to him my desire to find a guru. "I'll be you guru," he said light-heartedly.
He returned to Paris. I wound up in Bangkok. We wrote each other often. In attempt to help me publish my poetry, he introduced me to his old friend Cid Corman who was living in Kyoto at the time. After his death in 2004, our combined correspondences were archived with the large collection of Corman's papers at Indiana University (see Corman mss. III, Papers, 1943-2004. See "I. Correspondents/authors," http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/subfile/corman3ser1.html).
Two years later, I returned to Puri. It was April or May, quite late in the season and Rene had already returned to Paris. I stayed in the puja room at Hotel Bay View and began a suite of poems titled 5 pm sun.
Writing notes
Varkala two seasons.
In 1989 we met in Paris. I stayed in his sixth-floor walk up on Rue des Beaux-Arts. He was busy in Nice but came up to see me twice. Before he departed again for Nice, we arranged to meet in Venice.
He met me at Venezia Santa Lucia Station. He had already found a room somewhere. It dawned on us that Ezra Pound's grave was on an outer islands, the cemetery island of San Michele. We went there in search of his tomb. We had to ask the groundskeeper. I left a plum on the gravestone. "All the way from China," I remarked to Rene. "It will only rot," he contended. I considered the argument and reclaimed the plum, only to eat it. I ate several more and left the seeds on the tomb. "Seeds of young American poets," he would later pen (Laubies, 2001).
Untitiled
In the case of Wenlock Government Hospital having knowingly and intentionally restrained René Louise Laubiès without his consent, interfered with his liberty, and serially denied his legal right to representation; and in the case of Wenlock Government Hospital having knowingly and intentionally carried out these acts in an aggravated environment that subjected Laubiès to grievous physical injury; and in the case of Wenlock Government Hospital having knowingly and intentionally subjected Laubiès to felonious, grievous physical injury for the purpose of harvesting his bodily organs; and in the case of Wenlock Government Hospital having known that these grievous injuries inflicted in the process of removing Laubiès' organs had reduced him, the victim René Laubiès, to an awkward piece of incriminating evidence; we begin to see that René Louise Laubiès was just as in life so even in death denied his erstwhile right to Consular aid and in the final count rendered an indistinct quantity of pulverized ash interred in an unknown municipal dump site.
Desert airfield near LA
I arrived at dawn with a perfect nothing but passport and shoulder bag. The sunlight was gold through slightly muted clouds as I stepped across the rain wet tarmac to passport control. The airport was very calm and serene. I was happy to be there. There was next to no commitment. But I needed to get to Malibu quick. Then something happened with my minimal belongings. They could not be retrieved. It was very upsetting. Dawn reverted slowly to night. All I needed was to get to the house: I would not stay long there but dash right back in order to catch my onward flight. But I couldn't even leave the airport now. Time stood still. I was sitting on a bench by an unused runway far from the terminal talking with Barack Obama "Well as long as you've got your drivers license" he consoled, "I guess they'll probably let you in..." Yellow-gold hues of light reappeared over red-dust hills and a sprawling gold landscape. It was stunning.
In the Javanese Quarter
I have done my best to shape a course that calls on as many ports as possible. I furthermore try to tender goods that appeal to the broadest array of tastes. If I fail to meet your shopping needs, please do note that I call here often and each time carry a fresh consignment. So let us then convene in the Javanese Quarter, say, adjacent to the quayage.... Look for me sitting on the shaded planks of the lonely pier near the fish-net menders. They protect me.
I await to see a fiercer opponent to this "thing" you people so speciously call "Buddhism."
References
http://nyaya.darsana.org/topic92.html
http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2006/07/curt-retort-to-candrakirti.html
Post-Bauddha
The basis of my non-elite but "custom" education is as follows. I left my native land as an underage boy and hung around various foreign schools where female faculty found me adorable and took me home with them.
Regarding my use of the term Post-Bauddha; well let's take Bauddha first. It generally denotes anything pertaining to or emergent from the cultural products ascribed to "Buddha"—yet with careful understanding of the need to discern between Buddha as a) 'awakened, conscious, intelligent, expanded (blown away), learnt, aletheial,' etc., b) a non-specific person that evinces the just mentioned largely mental properties, and/or c) as specifically avers to the quasi- mytho-Historical 6th Century BCE Gautama—"The Buddha"—and/or his (their) students.
In the realm of disruptive patternization
In search of a method, how does one proceed though the realm of disruptive patternization? By first going with, and then against the breath as a consequential practice that may under no circumstances ever condescend to the quirks of leisure time? How much less to the lure of public pandering? Or by the transubstantiation of aesthetic quandary as owning to a genus of poetical-yoga where for all intents and purposes the prima materia undergoes initial sieving procedures through native apparati and never by those arriving on ships. For the compulsive exdigenous localization process is marked by its clinical and readied designs for rapid deployment at the crucial fork where the pot-holed road of the census taker turns well paved thoroughfare of accredited scholarship that dominates the region through its operant blueprints and philanthropic bids to vouchsafe endangered heritage sites whose hitherto yield is typically placed on public exhibition in the reconverted palaces of the metropoles; and each with its own rhetorically implicit treaty of the subjugation of whatever compels it. A plea for her protectorate: (the underage girl) as a draft resolution of formal strictures for the preservation and trusteeship of her own undervalued and misapprehend good, giving ample demonstration to superior skills in long-term storage and restoration, exploration, extraction and refinement procedures, in the aptness to amass, reformulate and stabilize pictorial systems that camouflage intention through ardent concern over hyperthetic vocables, commissioned perfomative pamphleteering, internal security, human rights issues, and so forth and so on. To square their little play pens and bring them round to the charts and the charters of authorial displacement by dispatching savvy envoys and toady intermediaries with clear-cut mandates to bring all parties to the negotiation table with believable schemes for co-opting rebel and unaligned contingents through incentive-building pledges of technical transfer.
References
Blechman, Hardy. 2004.DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage: Nature, Military, Culture; Two-volume edition. [Call no.: RART English q701.08 BLE.]
Williams, Glanville L. 1973. Learning the Law (9th ed.). [Call no.: 371.426 WIL.]
Skins of thought
If words are transporters of communicative impulse, wardrobes of mentality, skins of thought, then what microbial probe might we lay to inveigle these stripped down grains of shadow, refracted, pearly, rinsed and stinging?
Facial gracilation
Long bumpy journeys: windows down left bruised in the local coloration of tongues in panelled relief and sequenced stress of scum-wrench formulae dust and sun in the eye-squint search of a day of contour, hunger, thirst, tabulation and loss through the facial gracilation of patterned stain let jarred on trashy sweat-laced breezes scudding athwart the Lesser Sundas
Incessantly motionless
Sunday morning breather on second-floor veranda, stranger in a strange town cursively bordered by forested hills, a rippling sea and swishing sounds from nearby traffic as the maid mops the patio and drive across the lane. House next door, they pile into a vehicle, maid to the back beside the spare tyre silently, the automatic gate rolls closed. Earth-tile roofing to forested hills under pale blue skies with incessantly motionless dull white clouds.
Ingratiating kites: a poetic inquiry
Looming dark cloud made me grab an umbrella as I stepped out to the porch of Jasmine Hermitage and slapped the grilling closed behind me. Then I passed through the gate and locked it. Walked to the bottom of Lorong 31 and crossed to the south side of Geylang Avenue where I waited for any of three numbered buses that would drop me at Lavender Street International Bus Terminal.
The Malaysia-bound bus departed on time in the cool of the pouring rain.
This morning marked the fist occasion ever to get my thumbs printed - digitally or otherwise - away from my native land. No, not upon arrival across the causeway, but while leaving Singapore at Woodlands checkpoint. They were doing it to everyone and making us repeat our dates of birth. In striking contrast, streamline Malaysia has consigned the immigration card to history.
I am spending the night in the eastern coast of Johor state, in the town of Mersing, Embassy Hotel, room B6. Very near by on Jalan Dato Moh'd-Ali, directly across from Mersing Hotel, there is a Tamil run place called Al-Hamid Restoran Cendol. It serves dosai, roti, cooked animals, chai etc, and boasts a 24hr Wi-Fi connection.
Tomorrow around noon, I plan to bus north to Kuantan.
An inquiry: How to imagine a course of reading that could explicate the history of Malayu kites in a way that simultaneously ingratiates both the subject and the academic protocol it sees to engender?
Assembling notes around Paul Facchetti
I would like to assemble some scattered notes in homage to Paul Facchetti (b. 1912). The spur of this account is very recent news that this exceedingly rare photographer and artist continues to flourish in Paris. I first came to learn of Paul Facchetti in the initial phase of my bio- art-historical investigation of nonfigurative painter René Laubiès (1922-2006). In the process of establishing an early working contextual framework, I configured some notes titled "Pound, Laubiès, Alvard & Facchetti" (bauddhamata, Sep. 2007). Even then, in the very inchoate stages of my research I had publicly appealed for clues on how to get in touch with Paul Facchetti. It was fortunate for me that someone responded, and the heartfelt concern and information provided soon led me to embark on a strenuous month-long fieldwork project in and around Palakkunu village, that southern Indian seaside community where René Laubiès spent the final five extended winters of his life. It was late October 2006 when René arrived on his final call there. That visit however proved tragically short. After only nine days, on Nov 2, he entered Wenlock Government Hospital in the nearby city of Mangalore. Eleven days later on Nov 13, René expired.
During my month-long research in India I spoke with three broad sets of informants: 1) local villagers who were privy to Laubiès' various pastimes, 2) western travellers who knew René in that roughly six-year period of winters, and 3) administrators, doctors and other health care workers associated with the elderly patient during his eleven-day residence at Wenlock Government Hospital, Mangalore.
In the later part of February 2008, I received an endowment in the form of an air ticket, Singapore–Paris–Singapore, for the sake of expanding my research. I visited Paris from Feb 24 to Mar 24, 2008. A major objective in going to Paris was obviously to meet Paul Facchetti. I tried my best but failed to meet him, and I place the blame squarely on my own ill resolve and lack of French. Yet not unsurprisingly, numerous people when learning of my project consistently asked if I had met with Paul Facchetti. "I'm trying to!" I replied. Yet nobody offered to arrange a first meeting. All the same, after speaking to various friends and colleagues, I became more aware of Paul Facchetti's immense historical significance, not merely through his long association with Laubiès, but by his own individual achievements far more.
It was ultimately Mr. Castor SEIBEL, art critic and collector who more then anyone else in Paris beseeched me to go and meet Paul Facchetti. "Before it is too late!" he dramatically implored. "Do you know if he's still alive?" he asked. "Yes" I replied, "A person I know just talked to him on the phone. He lives in the States but flew to Paris when he knew that I was here. We're supposed to meet tomorrow for lunch."
* * *
Let me halfway sum up here. It was only from the point of meeting Castor Seibel at Galerie Di Meo, rue des Beaux-Arts that I began to fathom the immense importance of meeting and speaking with Paul Facchetti. My deepening research on the life and work of René Laubiès discloses all the more that Facchetti represents a living spring of crucial art-historical data. Paul Facchetti was among Laubiès' earliest supporters in the 50s in Paris, and his Galerie Facchetti was the first to exhibit a selection of Laubiès' work. In his Portraits et Aphorismes (2001), René gives expression to the admiration that he held for his long-time friend and colleague. The pithy accolade is especially marked when weighed against the general balance of the text as contained in the limited Italian edition wherein otherwise René does nothing but expose of his famous blend of comic wit and venomous tongue. I quote René's brief portrait in full:
The flair is unexplained, if not for that it would be too easy, and everyone would have some! Facchetti when seeing a painting for the first time, senses what is new in it, what is personal, while the others all look at what can sell, at what it resembles. In the film that was recently dedicated to him, one sees Facchetti walking in his gallery. It's his garden: Sima, Pollock, Hundertwasser, Michaux, Dubuffet and Laubiès. He never listened, that's his taste, he persisted and did not cede. Few galleries can therefore pride themselves in so many discoveries that mark their era. Just as he knew to find the young painters, he exposed through his photographs the personality of Breton, Ossorio, Gracq, Michaux, Fautrier, Sima, Wols...See also Fautrier, Seibel, Facchetti, Le Noci, Magliano.
Le flair ne s'explique pas, sans quoi cela serait trop facile, tout le monde en aurait ! Facchetti voyant un tableau pour la première fois sentait ce qu'il y avait de nouveau, de personnel, alors que tous les autres cherchent ce qu'on peut vendre, a quoi cela ressemble. Dans le film qui vient de lui être consacré, on voit Facchetti se promener dans sa galerie. C'est son jardin : Sima, Pollock, Hundertwasser, Michaux, Dubuffet et Laubiès. Il n'a jamais écouté que son goût, s'entête et ne cède pas. Peu de galeries peuvent s'enorgueillir de tant de découvertes qui ont marquee leur époque. De même qu'il a su trouver les jeunes peintres, il a montré dans ses photos la personnalité de Breton, Ossorio, Gracq, Michaux, Fautrier, Sima, Wols...
(René Laubiès, "Paul Facchetti," in Titratti e Aforismi / Portraits et Aphorismes, 2001; trans mine.)
for robert creeley
...if "form is no
more than the ex-
tension of con
tent" (as they
said), then 'torRid
zone shade' [<=click it]
don't fill
in applications.
Originally published in torrid zone shade, 12.5.05.
Very less
In proto-Laubiesan turn of phrase one creates a vacuum of the emptiness; emptiness is that which coextends with the wholeness. Form and either/or its absents or wanting is an irrelevancy. There is always much waiting in theorematic recourse as privileged over science and philosophy, say, where inexactitude, aphesis, chance and mistelling prove clever re-evaluating prompts to exemption. Whatever one expresses has very less to do with oneself.
The Laubies final days in India archive
I have (re)launched The Laubies final days in India Archive. It is a relatively open source archive dedicated solely to the thorough and accurate amassing, recording and protection of historical, cultural and evidentiary data, entailing personal correspondence, official reports (their petitioning, textual and visual reproduction), supplementary notes, explanations, worksheets, etc.; and to the trenchant analysis and testing of the data as pertains to our ongoing research project, The final days of Rene LAUBIES in India.
Reference: http://laubiesdocuments.blogspot.com/
Is historiography a valid discipline?
Every academic branch of inquiry takes as read its personal style of writing and thinking in particular regard to points of methodology and product presentation. From a reading of Hayden White's "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact" (1978), I would extrapolate this, that to a large degree the historian's practice consists in measured manipulation of the meanings of events by stressing particular elements and aspects that are set within naïve chronologies traditionally contrived and maintained. I abstract this statement as a tactical enticement towards putting forward the following challenge. What might comprise the applicable aspects to a valid historiological discipline, that is, in displacement of presumptuous distractions penned midst the bureaucentric gridlock of traditional territorialising scholastic discourse?
History has been picked on, no doubt about it. But the object aims of these communal critiques ought to now be turned in upon themselves and to each its shooter the trigger squeezed.
References
Bleeker, C.J. 1971. Comparing the Religio-Historical and the Theological Method, Numen, Vol. 18, Fasc. 1 (April): 9-29.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3269755
Mink, Louis O. 1968. Collingwood's Dialectic of History, in History and Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1: 3-37.
________. 1968. Change and Causality in the History of Ideas, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, Special Issue: Literary and Artistic Change in the Eighteenth Century, (Autumn): 7-25.
White, Hayden. 1978. The Historical Text as Literary Artifact, in Tropics of Discourse: 92-94; cited in Hardy, Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to modern Western theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-Ma Ch'ien, in History and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 1, Feb, 20-38, 1994: 32, note 33.
Laubies, Aphorism No. 6
The conservators in France are like all the French, they detest the painting and the painters that live. Deaths reassure them, but be on guard because the "second death" of official artists may prove definitive and these conservators will in the final analysis pass for idiots, which is in fact their secret terror. The zeal of these petty functionaries of art makes me laugh. They are as quickly dismissed as promoted. They take themselves for Louis XIV and end up like Louis XVI.
Les conservateurs en France sont comme tous les français, ils détestent la peinture et les peintres vivants. Les morts les rassurent, mais il faut prendre garde car la "seconde mort" des artistes officiels peut être définitive et ces conservateurs passeront en fin de compte pour des idiots, ce qui est en fait leur terreur secrète. Le zèle des petits fonctionnaires de l'art me fait rire. Ils sont aussi vite limogés que promus. Ils se prennent pour Louis XIV et finissent comme Louis XVI.
René Laubiès. 2001. "Aphorismes," in Titratti e Aforismi / Portraits et Aphorismes. [Bilingual, Italian and French], Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, [French to English trans. mine].
samsara baptismo
samsara
sara is sarasvati
the gracious upper riverine reaches of oceanic knowledge
divinity and bliss
sam
only means
you're
immersed
in it
wholly
baptismo
Guo Xi as cultural toponym
Guo Xi (c. 1020–90), the distant eleventh-century cultural figure, wafts as a buoyant toponmy on the mirage-like horizon of Laubiesian Studies. How disposed should we be to this ominous placement: this transferring of securities to a small group of investors?
Spelt also typically "Kuo Hsi," "Khuo-Chi" et cetera, Guo Xi (郭熙 / Jap. Gakuki), as legend has it, was a court professional landscape painter and aesthetician of the Northern Song dynasty. As a highly lettered or literati painter, Guo Xi developed an amply personal and detailed system of idiomatic brush strokes that proved influential for later painters. He is typically attributed to have produced a treatise on landscape painting. In his best known painting titled "Early Spring," dated 1072, Guo Xi demonstrates his innovative methods for producing an amalgam of perspectives, and which he called "the angle of totality."
Subsequent researchers should not be confused by the varied spellings of the painter's name. Aside from the two most common appearing – "Go Xi" and "Kuo Hsi" – and which alone in the eyes and the ears of uninitiated seem in themselves to be hugely divergent, the following variants are also attested: "Khuo-Chi" (Harambourg 1998), "Kouo-Hi" (Abadie 2003), "Kuo-Shi" (Cloutier c. 2006-7), and lastly, the eminently proper "Guō Xī" with finalizing Hanyu Pinyin tonal marks. Reasons for the appearance of these wildly diverse orthographic outcomes are due in large to the historical presence of not less than nine different, often competing, and perceptively dissimilar Romanization systems of Mandarin transcription that arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The two most universally recognised conventions are clearly Wade-Giles and Hanyu Pinyin. However, deeper confusion arises from the fact that in our current attempt to place Guo Xi within a formal Laubiesian Studies framework we are invariably reliant on textual materials that are generally the product of Francophone discourse. Puzzlement therefore is bound to arise from the way in which earlier generations of French scholars had presented Chinese words in the dress of their own distinctive Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient transcription scheme that was instituted in the 19th century – a system, moreover, that even the French found difficult to pronounce without first knowing its intricacies (Ware 160, n. 5). In recent times, however, Hanyu Pinyin has nearly replaced all other Sinic Romanization schemes, and is increasingly seen in parts of the world where the Latin alphabet is the norm.
References
Abadie, Daniel. 2003. Texte écrit à l'occasion de la publication du catalogue René Laubiès édité par la galerie Alain Margaron (Août).
http://www.estampes-alainmargaron.com/boutique/page_actus_page.cfm?num_actus=16&code_lg=lg_fr
Cloutier, Guy. N.d. [c. Winter 2006-7]. Untitled document.
http://guycloutier.org/Laubies.htm
Harambourg, Lydia. 1998. L’Ecole de Paris, 1945-1965: Dictionnaire des peintres.
http://www.bj-fineart.fr/documentation/laubies/peintres.php
Ware, James R. 1932. Transliteration of the Names of Chinese Buddhist Monks Author(s), Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 52, No. 2, (Jun.): 159-162.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/593169
The Savage Buddha (my most popular article)
1. Gautama's Early Protégés
From viewing a number of my online articles, certain readers have formed the impression that I strongly identify with a remote class of Asiatic asceticism. They furthermore presume my "tradition" (yes, it is hard to get beyond this decadent term) to be essentially shamanic, but with a particular penchant for secreted oases. Finding this not too far off the mark, I should like to suffix some orienting surfaces...
Read full article>>
Originally published in Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 3, 304-315, Fall 2006; portable document file (PDF) available at http://ashejournal.com/fourteen/sritantra.pdf.
http://ashejournal.com/index.php?id=89
http://ashejournal.com/fourteen/sritantra.pdf
With Senora in Rome
I dreamt I was with Senora in Rome. She saw me painting. I was standing near a table peeling small-flattened globs of paint off sandpaper when she offered me a nearby house or flat. "I can show you them tomorrow" she affirmed. "Are you serious?" I asked. "Of course" she said and cast her eyes downward and away. I was pleased with the prospects, but later while driving a motorcycle that belonged to a friend in America, I worried over how to return it to him, because I did not want to leave Italy. I turned down a side lane and very soon saw that it was actually the entrance to an old abandoned factory. Someone near the gate waved his arms in the air and I made a quick u-turn. I was happy with the thought of spending the remainder of my life in Italy. Were I able to choose a single country in which to exhibit my art, it is Italy.
Red packets, furnish and curl
I believe it is important that we occasionally draw attention to certain troubled fields midst the greater academic grazing ground, and with the highest degree of refinement possible, proclaim unmitigated bullox. I advance this remark as relates in particular to matters deficient of the slightest trace of agreed-upon, nor even volunteered procedures of verification. In the queue, we have as follows. The surplus view in which human beings imagine themselves to be quadruply possessed by and privy to, sucked in and relentlessly mixed-up with the comprehensive pull and poetic sweep of nature's unbridled extensionality, i.e. in a casual, relational and contributive manner implicitly.
References
Koerner, Lisbet. 1994. Linnaeus' Floral Transplants, in Representations, No. 47, Special Issue: National Cultures before Nationalism, (Summer): 144-169, see p. 154.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928789
"Properties of paper," in Pulp & Paper resources & Information Site.
http://www.paperonweb.com/paperpro.htm, and http://www.paperonweb.com/index.htm
Zoetmulder, P.J. 1974. Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature, Nijhoff, The Hague: 101-185
What happened to Supañño?
From his progressively stable hang out base on Phangan Island in the South China Sea (c 1992-94), the New Zealand-born, Australian-national and former monk Supañño began to explore cross-Isthmian trade links to Phuket, Phi Phi, Khao Lak, and back, in order to provide the up-market tourist scene along that lovely Andaman Coast with X, LSD, hash, little dhamma talks and smack. It was eventually the white stuff that did him in. According to reports, he became terribly lax and found himself languishing in Surat Thani's psychiatric detention centre and looking at some pretty serious time behind bars. A Spaniard, who was living off the same west coast of the Isthmus of Kra as Supañño at the time, related how the ex-cleric's father was nearly destroyed upon learning of his son's incarceration. And though never having visited the Kingdom himself, he possessed the prudence and wisdom required to gather information and travel up to Thailand unaccompanied. He tactfully met with local authorities and (demurring speculation on a monetary figure) discretely secured his son's repatriation. It was apparently the fact that Supañño had practiced seven-years as a Bauddha monk in Thailand that ultimately swayed the judicial board and saved his silly masochistic ass. Where is Supañño now?
The State of identity
Had I not escaped to Asia in 1977, I would probably have gone to Europe first. The principle motivating force for departing was after all simply getting out of the United States. I was attracted at that time to both radicalism and mysticism. I figured that Libraries would only get better but mysticism worse, and so I opted for the East before it got too late, with the thought of resuming academic training later. I had always viewed the two as ineluctably linked, two sides of a single coin.
I had concluded early that the state was the site wherein collective hysteria was engendered and maintained in an indexical or shelving manner; where colossal identity fabrications got empowered, and sanctified forms of mass murder creamed over. The state-in-itself was according to my view a conceptual apparatus for the comprehension of elite group struggle for power and play as enclosed in a kind of ritual theatre of moral deception vis-à-vis politics and public affairs. But the configurations of the politicized state were analogous to conceptions of the personalized ego; their very sense of being seemed to contravene logic. Neither existed beyond the sphere of myth.
References
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/29/europe/france.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30france.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Sufi-Tao Insurgency
On my recent trip to Paris, and upon arrival to Charles De Gaulle Airport, there was virtually no immigration process. The officer glanced at my US passport and immediately handed it back to me. I received no stamp at all. What does this suggest or signify? Well for the time being at least, for US citizens, the European Union is more hassle-free than the United States themselves. I find this reassuring, particularly now as America Inc., and especially New York as its dominant cultural/financial motor, enters its backyard-abyss of denial. Europe with increasingly attractive currency, measures the migrant clouds of time; she continues to rely on traditional discretion and appropriately holds her articulate tongue. It is after all to her own advantage as the natural pole of the globe now progressively shifts to the Central Asian Steppes with an inevitable emergence of Islam-lite and a semi-house trained post-Marxist mélange of the finest blends of Sufi-Tao insurgency. People won't care what you call it in the future when acumen and discernment advance to the point where dogma and finagling labels, even in their most insidious forms, are immediately detected and roundly reviled as the worst of indiscretions. Archaic speculation will also cease when the basis of value is intrinsic quality and primmediate function.
Albert Hofmann dies aged 102
Albert Hofmann, who died on Tuesday, 29 April, aged 102, synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 and became the first person in the world to experience a full-blown acid trip.
The day, April 19 1943, became known among aficionados as "Bicycle Day" as it was while cycling home from his laboratory that he experienced the most intense symptoms.
Hofmann was working as a research chemist in the laboratory of the Sandoz Company (now Novartis) in Basel, Switzerland, where he was involved in studying the medicinal properties of plants. This eventually led to the study of the alkaloid compounds of ergot, a fungus which forms on rye. Read full story...>>
See also Infinity of Inbetweens and The Albert Hofmann Foundation.
Laubies, Aphorism No. 9
A painter who claims to paint what he wants deceives himself. The painting is imposed on us, changes its course, goes left and right, then suddenly stops. Knowing to stop is necessary. Getting old, painters just lay it on more and more. Heavy toil does not restore grace. Chinese painters of the classical period knew when to stop. They accentuated accidents detected in nature. A poetic and musical work of art owes everything to inspiration. One needs to forget technique and virtuosity. One cannot paint the void without painting the fullness!
Un peintre qui prétend faire le tableau qu'il veut se trompe. Le tableau s'impose à nous, dévie sa course, prend à gauche et à droite, puis soudain s'arrête. Il faut savoir s'arrêter. Le peintre en vieillissant charge et surcharge. Le lourd labeur ne remplace pas la grâce. Les Chinois de l'époque classique eux savaient s'arrêter. Ils pouvaient voir dans la nature un accident qu'ils accentuaient. Le tableau poétique et musical doit tout à l'inspiration. Pour eux il faut oublier la technique, la virtuosité. On ne peut peindre le vide sans peindre le plein !
René Laubiès. 2001. "Aphorismes," in Titratti e Aforismi / Portraits et Aphorismes. [Bilingual, Italian and French], Morgana Edizioni, Firenze, [French to English translation mine].
Abstractus, tractus, tradition, annexation
Lineage, tradition and their annexations
stealthily hedge narratological occlusion
while a quasi-house trained post-Marxist analysis
checks impudent urge to stave things off
and reframes the day in utopic late-capitalist
strategic tableaux where life as movement passes
irretrievably and time continues is the fundamental myth
that penetrates every waking moment of the dream....
Genealogy, heritage, transmission as traction,
proprietary tracks of legitimisation,
Tradition as the self-dissemination of a myth
re-distilling itself into tonic tinctures,
congenial streams of collective receptivity seeping
through the crevices of rock over source-spot,
islet-jewels set in mountain lakes...
imperceivable disbursement at the upper reaches,
...stream-swift tracing through deltaic rushes...
immersion in the sediment of what remains.
This median fluidity of tidal drift in
the inflow/ outflow, inherent of solutions
with fey suggestion of causal linkage
and endlessly aired propagandist sentiments
averring irrefutable similitude and fondness
for a castaway, a cultural spy
in the orbitus light of cloudist dictum
combing the pristine stretches of coast
for a secret cove of hermeneutic vantage
gathering the sponges of gentle ideation
callously blurred as events or things
and re-imbuing them with values of persuasive
mutability, fortuitous misreading and primmediacy.
Tradition as nostalgic gazing back to the scuffed littorals
of corroded tractors tilting, bungled, stripped and strewn,
how clever we were to have slipped through the
cordon, how lucky to have reached the beach.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1975. The Mirror of Production: 17.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language: 21; cited in Nelson, 1998: 117.
Hardy, Grant. 1994. Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to modern Western theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-Ma Ch'ien, in History and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 1, Feb, 20-38.
Harris, Troy. 2006. On Laubies's Work, in Calls from the Shade.
Legge, James D. 1992. The Writing of Southeast Asian History, in (ed.) Tarling, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia: 1992. "The very notion of tradition implies a judgment made now about past patterns of belief and behaviour [...] It tends to imply, further, if not a static past, at least a stable and slow changing past. The idea of 'inertia' of tradition is an integral part of the notion. There are enormous conceptual problems here. What is to be regarded 'the tradition' and what is to be seen as change must depend in part on where observers take their stand" (Legge, 40).
Koerner, Lisbet. 1994. Linnaeus' Floral Transplants, in Representations, No. 47, Special Issue: National Cultures before Nationalism, (Summer): 144-169.
Mair, Victor H. 1991. Tracks of the Tao, Semantics of Zen, in Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 23, April.
Mink , Louis 0. 1978. Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument, in (eds.) Nelson, R.S. and Kozicki, H., The Writing of History: 129-149.
Nelson, Robert S. 1998. Appropriation, in Critical Terms for art History: 117-120.
Nicholls, Peter. 1995. An Experiment with Time: Ezra Pound and the Example of Japanese Noh, in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, (Jan.): 1-13.
A hypertextual Ulysses by James Joyce
Robert Craven's hypertextual, self-referential edition of Ulysses by James Joyce is now being linked to/from Concord, an online library of concordances, using texts publically available from online repositories such as Project Gutenberg.
References
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/
http://wwwhomes.doc.ic.ac.uk/%7Erac101/concord/texts/ulysses/ulysses.cgi?word=Ulysses
This operatic drive
This operatic drive to contextural inscription adequates treatment of tactile solutions, oiled pigmentations, erasure and scuff in relaxed analytical facial advance on the modifications of a patterned inappropriateness: two joined spheres in gradient ply of contiguity, frequency, pace and mark—dissipation, bleeding, buff and rebuff—in compliance to perceptions of these somersaulting samples, audacious cross-smears and continuating scores...
Laubiès on Pound
René Laubiès wrote:
I do not remember having any difficulties returning to visit Pound at the Asylum of St. Elisabeth's. I asked him whether the surroundings obstructed him: "Not at all, they are the only acceptable Americans."
When I told him that I was born in Saigon: "Ah, that's why! Only Europeans with a master key to the Suez Canal are worth something...."
He died quiet as always in Venice, on his tomb a [laurel] shrub inclines itself toward the offerings, flowers and seeds of young American poets.
(From Portraits and Aphorisms, translation mine)
Reference: Laubiès, René 2001. "Ezra Pound," in Titratti e Aforismi / Portraits et Aphorismes [bilingual, Italian and French], avec cinq planches en couleur hors-texte et une oeuvre original de l'artiste. Morgana Edizioni, Firenze.
My special thanks to Broomhead Junker & Cie.
What is spatiality?
I am just reminiscing on earlier discussions of an interesting ontological hue that dealt with expressions such as interiority, intersubjectivity and intentionality, and with the stunning question "what is perception."
An important subject that was missed, however, or that perhaps just made itself invisible to us, was the question of the fundamental character of space. We had failed to discern the faint dispositions of our own highly personalized operational ontologies; we had failed to consider how "perceptive filters" both formulate and populate the spatial dimension.
It is only since reading James Elkins (2007, 2004) that I begin to trace a plausible route for advancing such a formal if elusive discussion. It is thus my intention to plot a new course for the burgeoning realm of global art history and explore its sub-region of aesthetics as well. But I am not there yet. No, the berth is still unconfirmed.
In the mean time, could anyone suggest an alternative site where the mapping of human spatial perceptions and their possible freeing may occur? For we have not even started to offer an account or endeavoured to elucidate the probative range of implied and/or inferred spatial archetypes. This becomes, however, not a simple problem of cataloguing variant ontological theories but a question of chronicling the veiled dispositions of our subtle if incessantly operatic grasping after inwardly transmogrifying spatial methodologies.
To whom or what, then, might we appeal in attempt to reserve a foundational suite of polyordinating referents willing and able to mark our conceptual probe? What subspecies of philosophical taxonomy best stands equipped to structure this inquiry?
References
- Elkins, James. 2007. Ed, Is Art History Global?
- ________. 2004. Review Essay, "David Summers's Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, 2003."
- Harris, Troy. 2006-8. Six items: 1) Infinity of Inbetweens. 2) Catalogue entry and parallel study notes, 3) Let's move forward 4) Receiving the Arc 5) Messy Dharma (dharmadravaya) 6) Intentionality: the karman involutus hitch.
untitled
Cold black sun
in white blossom silhouette
shadows low the palace lawn
from the night and deep blue silent steps
over stone
climbed surfaces,
new wet shade
white blossoms silhouette
naked limbs
blue skies and cold black sun
yellow light
untitled (blue-grey text on ephemeral surface)
White birds fly in across terrain
veneered and above, again
feet up
the sun
in the face of a charmed
to be
again
and then and then in the freeze of sun
and rouge-cloud cheeks
in shade of sun clouds,
frost and grey-blue cottony
blue with red as
white birds land on sandstone statuary
plinths, and late winter rails
first and finest feelings of contexturous
ply of shade and sound revived
in the brightness of the lost one
éperdu in Paris – summer-fall 2006
in the face of a final flight to Bombay
(I like only Indians)
And washed their hands of the ground remains
of incinerated bits in mortar and pestle
in scattered chance, the municipal dump
this matéria prima of infernal son
who gathered dust and the fetid relics,
that brick to keep the door propped open
on terrace roof of EM Lodge came
plywood board of exhaustive rubbings
to gratify plumbed and polished burial,
stone flat compressions (hoped it was enough)
as scramble ensued midst the injured allusions
in appraisal of a scandal
(Rene would have loved it) over cooled
conclusions and consciousness.
It's gone
but knows reciprocity in faces of serenity
and messy paint-fat globed on razors,
the peaceful edges of colour stained rags
the drum-tight canvas thinned back to nothing,
skin of discomfiture in musty room of colour and
light or again to the roof just to be in the
air and the sun and the hues refracted on papers
oily, sticky, rubbed and sanded surfaces
wiped with sea washed rags; abrasively buffed
after vast inclusions of marked appeasement
and sunset mood in the chilling air returning
early spring and takes a little hike down to Rue
Danville where Jean Claude Scribe is to mount
them on canvas, not too coarse.
then shivering again,
in the afternoon wind of the garden
sky and people stroll by in bundled attire...
his contemplation: the summer months ahead
where, Malaysia, Cambodia, Korea, Taiwan
perhaps Vietnam, the Lesser Sundas, who knows?
these cold drops of rain
Paris 2008
Catalogue entry and parallel study notes
Untitled (docked at Troy: Agamemnon's loot), oil and charcoal on paper, 76.7 x 64.5 cm.
Study notes:
1. Study, examine and reexamine the data; data unifies the source of the data.
2. "Multiculturalism itself would have a new meaning if scholars took not only their subject matter but their interpretive methodologies from the cultures they study" (James Elkins, "On David Summers' Real Spaces," in Elkins, (ed), Is Art History Global?, 2007: 62).
3. David Summers's Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London: Phaidon. 2003. 707 pp., 343 b/w ills., a Review essay by James Elkins, Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004.
4. "Ma" (kan) / 間: Japanese word or concept indicating an interval of time and space, an opening [a measure word]; Chinese jiàn. Additional senses: gap, place; the space between; the time between; free time; among; interstice; separate; a crevice, a room; intermission; during, in; (verb) to divide, interfere, intervene.
5. Consider Japanese conceptual phrase mukan / 無間 (Chinese wu jiàn), literally "no space, gap," viz. primmediate / primmediacy; cf. Sanskrit anantara, 'having no interior' (note 7 below).
6. Compare allied Japanese phrase mugan do 無間道 (Chinese wújiān dào), literally "path of no interruption," (Bauddha, 'the instantaneous path; path of no obstruction, without obstacles; unimpeded (Sanskrit nirantara)' [source S.Hodge]).
7. Indic allusions to mugan do /無間道
- One of the four paths 四道 taught in the Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya (加行道, 無間道, Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (log in with the userID "guest")].
- One of the nine yogas 九瑜伽 in the Yogâcārabhūmi-śāstra [瑜伽論 T 1579.30.346c26]. Cf. Sanskrit anantara, 'having no interior, interstice or interval or pause, uninterrupted, unbroken'; ānantarya, 'non-interruption' (fr. an-antara), immediate sequence or succession; proximity, absence of interval; hence ānantarya-marga (Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary).
Tipped into sheer prefiguration
On learning of the passing of Rene Laubies, the figurative infix died all around me. It had taken the death of my friend and teacher to tip me into sheer prefiguration. I had never been able to go there before — in spite of my arrival to the crucial point of valuing non-figuration solely. I had never been able to bring an end to the image/figure referencing impulse. So I simply quit painting and stuck to writing. Yet the drive to go total—to go without—adhered to me through years of intention-bearing écriture: a quiet metamorphosis advancing formulation of a cumulative method that explains the nearness of its automatist implements to those of the illiterate calligraphist – having doffed both semantic and semiotic grids. However fields of marked extension continue as concatenations of anointive release through sustained veneration of the ontic ploy.
Nam Mo A Di Da Phat
One would have to search hard to discover a contemporary Bauddha monastic custom more gracious than that of the Vietnamese immigrants to France today. One finds among them a renewing, transmorphing yet enduring affinity with an "inclusively exclusive" mélange of refinements that evolved in the name of French Indochine, whilst rooted deeper still to a set of highly civilizing cultural markers known formerly as Cambodge, Annam, Tongkin and Cochin China.
l'Orangerie
He would arrive back to Paris sometime in March shivering and if the sun was out, walk to Jardin du Luxembourg and warm himself in a chair against the southern l'Orangerie wall.
Adapter, catalyst, medium, bridge (悉 檀)
Names, as words, typically occupy or populate various semantic fields and semiotic networks simultaneously. They do this naturally without intentionality. Words as communicators comprise both seeds and signs. Seeds imply developmental inimitability in relationary scope of morphemic constriction, while signs, on the other hand, are rather something more like polyordinating signals of attentive performance — catalytic blueprints or conduits to partnering, bridging otherwise incommensurate zones.
*
Reference: Where is the adapter?
Laubiès & Twombly on rue des Beaux-Arts
It was rather accidentally to Signora Luisa Tatiana Franchetti in the summer of 1991 in Rome that I first wrote something about my weeks spent in Paris in the fall of 1989, and my stay in René Laubiès' sixth-floor walk up at no. 3, rue des Beaux-Arts. This was also the first time I ever saw the work of the artist Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Junior, at Galerie Di Meo, just two doors down in rue des Beaux-Arts. It was additionally to the gracious Signora Franchetti that I tried to explain how discovering the American painter's work had blown me away and utterly revised my aesthetic perceptions, and how day after day I returned to the gallery to gaze at his works in a proliferating state of psychic disrupture.
René had already gone down to Nice because he truly hated Paris and only stayed there long enough to attend the openings of his exhibitions and collect late payments from his "stingy art dealers" who seemed to think artists were "supposed to starve." René's estimation of gallery owners was vicious and renowned indeed.
One evening, however, when he phoned me from Nice, I spoke in glowing terms of the ecstatic experiences I was having while viewing the works of an artist by the name of "Cy Twombly. Do you know him?" I asked René.
"Twombly?—Of course!" René replied, "I'm surprised you didn't know him. He's one of the best artists. Oh, I'm glad you like him..."
(Adapted in part from Calabrian Journal, Jasmine Hermitage, Singapore 2006)
With Guru Chod in Paris
In a dream I was travelling in a bus towards Paya Labar station as if in Singapore, but it wasn't. I fumbled with the coins, which were different types. I finally paid. It was the terminus stop. I asked for final directions to the train. Then I saw Guru Chod in a Paris apartment lounging in a chair with a footrest and covered with a blanket and a few university students chatting on the carpeted floor. One of them was the Brazilian Edson Roig Maciel who I met the night before at Shakespeare & Co after the reading. I was also sitting on the floor near Chod. I began to do paschimotana asasa. I looked again and the guru was not there. I was thinking how to tell the students that we would have to wind the meeting up. Chod or my father-in-law George Whitman was in another part of the house or apartment doing something, maybe cooking. It was all quite contingent but basically right.
Eurasian artist René Laubiès (a draft note)
In many ways, the product of South-South trade and culture exchange, of African-Asian capital flows, of a peripheral form of hybridizaiton (Verges 2003) at a time when steam ships ruled the sea. "I'm Colonial French," he carefully explained – "I'm not French."
Yet René Laubiès was also not "white," but Eurasian, clearly. The product of an overseas Frenchman jurist and a "Creole" mother (whatever that was supposed to communicate), René only "became" French, so to speak, before he left Asia sometime in his teens and when a passport or other kind of travel documentation had to be issued—his "master key to the Suez Canal" (Ezra Pound). He was leaving to study in France at the time, though he turned up in Africa, North Africa, Morocco, to be more precise, another hot country. He was apparently forced to fib about his age in the process of getting his identity papers. This begins to account for discrepancies in his later professional bio blurbs, where his date of birth is variously stated as 1922 and 1924. The date of birth in his final passport is February 27, 1922. I have a photo copy.
René was born in a state called Cochin China, a dethroned kingdom bundled together with a diverse group of neighbouring monarchic realms that included Cambodia, Laos, Tonkin and Annam, plus a scrape of land that was leased from China. This was French Indochina, L'Indochine française, a monumental exercise by the colonial French project in "geographical construction" (Fletcher 2003: 4:3). Cochin China was the economic and administrative centre of this noosed together peripheral sphere of "greater" (Oriental) France. Today this former political entity has virtually dissolved in the modern construction of Vietnam.
Even into old age, René always carried a picture of his mother. He showed it to me when I visited his rooftop room at Bay View Hotel in Puri, India in 1983. "She was beautiful," he said. He handed me the photo. I looked at the small, rather aged monochrome print. "She looks very nice," I concurred. I asked him was she Vietnamese. He paused. "In part" he said, and said no more. It was as if he had rarely ever thought in those terms. And after all, my question was to some degree senseless, given that the modern state of Vietnam did not exist at the time of his youth, nor even the ethnonym "Vietnamese." In fact, the term Vietnam is a very late arrival that only came into widespread usage from 1948 when it officially replaced Annam. This occurred at the end the century-long French colonial period. As a modern expression, then, "Vietnamese" is best understood as a historically constructed ethnonym for the majority Viet inhabitants of the land (Proschan 2002: 614, n. 12).
"We didn't call them Vietnamese," René later told me, "but Annamite, Indochinese, or Cochinchinoise. There were Malabar people there too," he noted "—the same as these people." We were staying in the southern Indian state of Kerala at the time. That must have been December 1986.
References
Fletcher, Simpson. 2003. Review of, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-44. By Eric T. Jennings. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4:3.
Proschan, Frank. 2002. "Syphilis, Opiomania, and Pederasty": Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases. Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. (Oct.): 610-636.
Verges, Francoise. 2003. "Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean," in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique - Volume 11, Number 1, (Spring): 241-257
With René Laubiès in Varkala
I remember Rene's habit of often making preposterous but trivial sorts of absolute statements, very illogical and easily refutable. He was very insistent and refused to listen to reason. It was usually quite funny. In the winter of 1984-5, in Varkala, south India he wore a piece of purple cloth or dhoti as a lower garment. Once we were taking a morning sea bath near the southerly freshwater spring that trickled from the cliff. We had stripped to our loincloths and were sunning our bodies lying on the sand. He was actually lying on his purple dhoti. "It is getting very dirty," he pointed to the cloth. "Why don't you wash it?" I suggested. "I can't find anyone to do it," he said. "Wash it yourself," I said, "Why depend on dhobis [washer women]? It's easy! Give it to me and I'll show you." "No," he said, "the dirt will never come out." "Yes it will," I insisted, "give it to me." He laughed. "No," he said, "the dirt will stay in there." Then I grabbed my satchel and pulled out a bar of bath soap. "Look," I said, "you can even wash it with this — I'll show you." Then I playfully pushed him off the cloth. He kept on laughing. "I'm going for a swim," he said. I took his dhoti and my bar of soap and stepped to the nearby spring. Just to spite him, I decided to wash only half of the dhoti. It hardly took a minute. I spread the wet and half-laundered dhoti on the sand in the sun and then joined him for a swim in the smooth Arabian sea waves. After our swim, we walked back to our sunning spot. And there was the purple two-tone dhoti already dried. "Wow!" I exclaimed, "Look at that! … Light and bright over dark and murky. It looks like one of your paintings — what do you think?" He picked it up and wrapped it around his waist. "It looks ridiculous," he said, "How can I wear this now?"
Semantic portioning: why i write
Correct. We need not to speak here of religiosity, nor certainly religion as an ideological cordoning, with regard, that is, to the subject's prevalent concerns and/or legacy. Indeed, such discussion would at once be tactless and uncool, and anything but helpful. But to ascertain the subject's metaphysical deductions or to elaborate its basal ontology; to plot, disinter, re-evoke and fulfill its semanto-filial obligations of piety "in discursive drift between the living and the dead," such facial encodements to our study we find simultaneously appealing, compelling and compulsory.
Reference: Calligraphic fragments
Rene's "final" work: towards a global art analysis (draft2)
Broadly speaking, calligraphy holds dissimilar social status in Eastern and Western art historical cultures. However, in traditional Asiatic critical art practice, particularly in the Far Eastern literati tradition, there is neither a compelling nor a valid distinction drawn between painting and calligraphy, as such, between image and reflection, idea and word, for that matter, between presentation and representation.
What is more, in our present globalizing academic sense at least, painting isn't necessarily even considered "painting" but more an extension of writing (écriture), which covers simultaneously images and letters, and thereby makes such terms as "letter" and "image" remarkably 'irrelevant in stricto senso' (Inaga, 2007: 266).
Calligraphy, then, as a facet of writing, and which thereby expects to communicate something, harbours resounding rhetorical implications. And one ponders therefore as to what extent the peripheries of Asia had touched upon the thalassocratic quayage of Imperial Venice (ca. 13-15th cen). However, even in the far earlier sixth-century period, Gregory the Great (d. 604) had already in essence classified the art of painting as an aspect of 'Rhetoric' and thereby subsumed it under 'Word' (Arteni, 2001). Now if the inverse proposal also holds true, then what shall be made of an artist's letters or even incoherently scribbled notes? Would not these items form a part of the artist's corpus of "paintings"?
Full-bodied questions start to emerge in regard to our subject's final composition.
Question 1: Where from Laubies, East or West?
If East wins out, then the following comes to surface.
Question 2: What constitutes Rene Laubies's true "final" work?
I shall return to these questions as soon as possible.
References
Arteni, Stefan. 2001. Painting, Image, Likeness.
Inaga, Shigemi. 2007 "Is Art History Globalizable? A critical commentary from a far Eastern Point of view," in Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global?, 2007: 249-279).[In the Far East traditions,] "calligraphy" and "painting" (shûhua/shoga) is a single classification category in the conservation of cultural properties. When the European academic definitions of fine arts was introduced in Japan in the 1880s, it provoked harsh controversy. The question of whether calligraphy whould be included or excluded from the category of fine arts was the point at issue…. The opposition continues today. (Inaga: 266)
For Inaga's personally corrected Homepage version, see http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/~aurora/pdf/2IsArtHistoryGlobalizable(revisedonJune20)pdf_put.pdf
Where is the adapter?
Two dragons go halves through sky in stare down of unremitting dual and darting play configured as standoff, loom, abandonment of code through disruptive pattern, camouflage, stealth, immobilia, neglect in propinquity of parities' unapparent stammer and sticks
The adapter as an unproblematic third item conjoining otherwise incommensurate zones.
Lydia Harambourg (a beginning)
I find Lydia Harambourg's writing on Rene Laubies to be extremely attentive. Her writing shows that she has deeply observed and admired his work. In a 2006 photograph (here) we see Lydia Harambourg standing next to Rene Laubies at Galerie Alain Margaron, Paris, a few days before Rene departed for India (Julius Baltazar is the tall person standing on the left). Lydia is a very honored academic in France.
Let's move forward
I would like to return to an earlier mooted point in regard to the scientific method. We seemed to imply 1) a fundamental incongruity between technique and methodology, and 2) that by conforming to methodology you side step issues or accusations of gesturality and intentionality.
Let's move forward. According to my view, an individual or innate knowledge, that is, a particular knowing how to do, if you will, comprises or implies a skillful expressive act or flourishment: that is what I call technique.
Methodology, on the other hand, is the re-induction or reapplication of procedural precedence. Methodology is conformity to the materials themselves, or in other words, "the data," instead of their manoeuvring and manipulation as votive objects, connived into effigies, masks and the like with intended "causal or indexical relation[s] to what they reproduce" (Summers, Real Spaces, 2003: 248). Methodology is furthermore scientific in its deferral both of purposeful objectivity (busyness, pursuit), subjective intention (motive, plan) and professional notions of intentionality, as well as any sense or facilitation of data's perceptive dislocation (Tantidharo, "Is Perception Intentional?" 2007). For that reason, perception is not intentional, it involves no act of choice. In fact, there is no human choice (Choice, Datum, 2005.)
artist's statement (a rough draft)
Prefiguration
The prefigurative encases, takes on, includes non-figuration – but more. It is non-mimetic, it does not seek to copy nature but is an expression or facet of nature's essential abstraction.
The primmediation (無間) of composed compilation
It is composition, and composure includes aesthetic (perception) per-/receptivity and perception.
It is not necessarily creative, i.e. conceptive or conceptual.
Its actions are not glimpses into special realms, neither indicative of fortune or doom. But that seeing is in itself a pre-figurative mood, a primmediate receptivity, indeed, primmediation.
Primal
The primitive articulation of pre-figuration, then, is akin to an noninclusive originality unrequitive of personal agency, expression or personality.
Nature or creative force does not work through the painter but dons material, i.e. data in a semi-organized fashion. A composition thus comprises a stageal hermeneutic of granted data, agreed or commissioned and pressed into form and formulation as ephemera.
Ascetic arts
The presence of these surfaces, resurfacing treatments, abrasions, veilings, revealings, unveilings as ephemeral vanishments, dons to recoverature primmediate (無間) incipience, viz. percipience.
Hence the artist as actor, as active choosing agent engaged in a non-représentationnel, non-mimétique, non-figurative recital.
One must therefore not connote either yogic enstatcy, shamanic ecstatic command, or animist or chanelist possession of spirit, neither any such notion of the abduction of responsiveness, nor can ones appraisals lock on assumptions of artistic creator, choiceful agent(cy), intentionality — neither on readings of an aggregative qualia-esque sense of persuasiveness.
Uniqueness is the given. The unsettled question(s) are WHO GIVES, what, where, when, how and why?
A list of points
- The given as data (mined in the field)
- The data as the field
- The artist as researcher
- The artist as scientist, i.e. passive receptor of freely donned data
- The artist as ascetic = sheared of cultural accretions, occlusions, screens and filters.
There is no intention, no choice. There is neither perception nor primmediacy of art.
Etymological note on "art": c.1225, "skill as a result of learning or practice," from O.Fr. art, from L. artem, (nom. ars) "art, skill, craft," from PIE *ar-ti- (cf. Skt. rtih "manner, mode;" Gk. arti "just," artios "complete;" Armenian arnam "make," Ger. art "manner, mode"), from base *ar- "fit together, join" (see arm (1) (Online Etymology Dictionary).
Rene in Calabria
Excerpt from Calabrian Journal (chapter eight), Malabar Jasmine.
The mood of the place was especially quiet. It reminded me of an off-season hot springs town. There were poor people standing in a straggly queue waiting for an out of town bus to arrive. Then I noticed a peculiar looking man standing next to a dusty parked car. He acted as if he were waiting for me. I felt a little strange. A tout? He seemed familiar. It was nearly as if we had met before.
I stepped to approach him. He grinned to receive me. His physique was lithe; his face a little sleepy. He patted his pocket. "Hillside herbs," he said, "an excellent hobby." He nodded calmly. He turned his gaze up the road.
We walked side by side along the residential lane and then came to what was formerly the town's main street. "Before the new road was built," he explained. The shops were all vacant, no car was seen.
"So what is your interest in Calabria?" he asked. "You can ask me anything. I will cooperate fully."
We walked on further and then turned down an alleyway. It soon fizzled out and we were standing in the dirt. We exchanged but a few more casual words and then he directed my attention to the dry summer hillsides "carelessly resting fallow," he described them. "Sketch these," he advised, and then he cryptically added, "Avoid human dealings and just sketch these."
He left without speaking and walked beneath a spruce tree, across a weedy yard to the porch of a small plain house. Skirmishing sparrows high in the tree and the penetrating rheees of unseen cicadas stopped with the rusty squeak and clack of a screen door slamming shut.
Chuang Tzu and UG Krishnamurti
As far as I know, Chuang Tzu is the best-humoured philosopher in history.
UG Krishnamurti is at the cutting edge, a radical demolitionist who nonetheless maintains a pretty well humoured mental constitution too. Yet UG could also be as vicious as a viper when attacking stupidity. We always see him centre stage, holding court and dominating the conversation. But he tends to leave behind a desolate feeling, having torn to shreds all contested truths. He seemed however not the least suicidal in nature, or may otherwise have tested those very waters. And was buoyed, as it were, by a joy for life, despite its complete if ostensible meaninglessness. UG possessed an extreme ascetic nature.
However, all sages tend to smuggle new charts that thoroughly reroute our working approaches. But their reconstructive styles will naturally differ—as witnessed by the fabulous Chuang Tzu and the plucky UG. This is due in large to their distinct personalities, cultural backgrounds and time periods.
Rene's last walk to the beach
And passed through the palm groves, tall golden grasses bent by the breeze bordered everything bathed in diaphanous sunbeams, morning mists and smoke from the cottages...
Troy Harris, Untitled, Palakkunnu, 2007, 120x108 cm, detail, gouache, crayon, watercolour, pencil, coloured pencil and graphite on paper. Private collection.
Plamen Gradinarov Elucidating Zen
As a follow up to something I posted earlier (here), I would like to offer a brief summing up. For my examination of the E-sangha forum is by now both extensive and deep. Based on this research, I conclude forthrightly that E-sangha forum IS Dark Zen. I furthermore consider E-sangha forum the most hideous example imaginable to date of a rampant Buddhist Fundamentalism that at the same time purveys an essentially fascist political outlook.
Not that I would drop it like a vile rag and run, but E-sangha fourm is definitely something that warrants cautious observation and study in a disciplined ethnological sense, i.e. as a clear demonstration of what I tend to depict as Contemporary Neo-Buddhism.
However tenebrific, though, approached in such a manner, E-sangha forum may very well promote ones broad elucidation, as it throws rich light on the reasons why this thing we traditionally refer to as "Buddhism" may in fact represent the most insidious intellectual current of our time.
Even so, E-sangha forum is not without its precious contrubutors — and heads above the rest is the compassionate professor Dr. Plamen Gradinarov, a damn brilliant teacher who senses hunger and feeds it abundantly. Just search the user name Imago, read, think and learn. Notice that you will no longer find my copious contributions under the username "tantidharo".
See also
Towards an e-sangha review
E-Sangha Buddhist Philosophy forum
Notes of a dream
On a flight to Cochin I dreamt a dream.
As we boarded the plane, I noticed two small girls travelling alone. There was no adult in charge of them. They possessed a natural joyfulness that bordered on frivolity. Flight attendants took them to their seats. When the aircraft reached its cruising altitude and the 'fasten your seat belt' lights went out, it suddenly became known that the two little girls had mistakenly boarded the wrong plane. "How could that be?" I was dubious. The children appeared not the least upset; but the flight crew were, as they spoke with the captain who superciliously scratched his head in the aisle. To their credit, however, it must be said that they handled the error extremely well. Proper channels were immediately gone through, mistakes acknowledged and clear-cut rectifying measures undertaken.
Afterwards I found myself in charge of the girls who only seemed elated by the accidental detour. I had the address of their uncle on paper. The extended family were expecting them. The house was small but very cosy. A bearded, bald and portly man, presumably the uncle, greeted the girls with pats on the head as they ran through the door to be hugged and squeezed by a jubilant array of cousins. Standing on the footpath in front of the house, I witnessed the light of flickering candles placed all about the lavishly spread dinner table. The smiling uncle then stepped outside with a warm extended hand. He thanked me dearly and immediately drew my attention to the pale blue moon in the clear night sky.
I continued on my way. I felt extremely desolate. I couldn't understand why I'd come to that town. There was no place to stay there. I didn't even know the name of the town.
Sleep was relief. I awoke with a clear revitalized feeling, but the desolation soon recurred when I began to ponder where on earth I was. I had not slept horizontally either, but tiling back in a large reclining seat. "Had I travelled all night on a bus?" I was doubtful.
Slowly, strangely as dawn's dim light infused the mood with sublimity, constancy and perseverance, I perceived the stillness of a gray-green sky. In fact, the vision reminded me of one of my paintings. I was vaguely flattered, but soon felt mocked and longed for something more purely abstracted. It presently appeared.
It then became clear I was not in a bus. I was quietly resting in a large reclining chair on a patio beneath a flat slopping roof, on a low-lying hill overlooking an expansive dry grassy plain. From the silence of afar, a two-lane highway scored a horizontal line below. There were other chairs on the patio, too, of similar design but they were empty.
To the side of the patio was a short-cropped lawn and a few steps further a flat roofed house. I stood in the muffled morning light and walked in front of the quiet house. It was smaller than the house from the night before, and it had a flat slopping roof as well. I walked to the yard at the other side of the house and came to a garden surrounded by a low fence. Beyond the garden were two little dogs. They had longish white coats and looked immanently friendly, but I still stepped back, careful not to prompt their cheerful barking. I turned and reversed my steps toward the patio but paused to admire the pale green landscape.
I relished the relief of the ample nights sleep but was also wary of being too impulsive. "How was I to handle the recursive need?" I wondered. "How was I going to survive in general?" I thought, "By approaching houses and offering to perform minor chores in exchange for morsels of food and provisional lodging?" I subjected this scheme to immediate testing. "Why not!" I thought. I felt some inner ease. "I could probably scratch out a living on that."
A slight built woman stepped from the house. She was dressed in faded jeans, a light grey pullover and a flat straw hat as deep as a pie pan tuned upside down. In fact, the hat was so flat it made her look deformed to the point of having nothing above her jaw, but which in any case the hat completely covered over. She turned with a swivel and moved in the direction of the patio. She threw a hand up in the air and swiveled back, then stopped. She tipped her hat and faintly smiled. I noticed a sketchy, penciled in face.
"Would you like a glass of beer?" she asked.
"Fine," I said, and she handed me one.
"But you're an ordained monk!" she immediately censured and pointed to the glass of beer in my hand.
"What's it to you jew?"
Thank you Sensei!
I only just heard two days ago that Venerable Jean-François LEPEZ recently passed away near Paris.
Jeff's last email to me was posted on Oct 18, 2007; subject: "(pas de sujet)"; it was also without text, just this link to a Le Figaro photo of a woman smoking a reefer. The final text that Jeff ever sent was on Sep 13, 2007; subject: "Fw: Emailing: Parrot_Flower-1.jpg." He touchingly wrote: I often think of You. Love. Doen
The message was accompanied by this photo link.
Further worth noting, earlier on July 23, 2007, Venerable Doen generously posted twenty-four photo attachments of himself with friends. I would be happy to share these with anyone who cared.
The photos were also accompanied by some writing, not Jeff's, but someone named Mickaël, an obvious admirer of Jean François. I posted a partial rendering of Mickaël's text that same day (here).
If not too imprudent, I will offer Mickaël's original text in full.Mon cher Jean François,
Je te remercie pour ton 'café-camarade' vendredi et tes invitations, auxquelles je ne sais pas toujours répondre avec la ponctualité ou la patience qu'il faudrait. Je suis parfois irritable, mécontent, insatisfait... Je culpabilise un peu d'y laisser entrevoir des souffrances égoïstes universelles... Mais pour répondre à ton texto de vendredi, toi aussi tu m'aides à vivre; c'est un échange, et je partage avec l'aîné, le maître, des moments de grâce teintés de forte humanité. Je t'aime fort pour le dehors que tu communiques, et pour le dedans de ce corps où bat le coeur œcuménique d'un mage, d'un conteur, d'un témoin, d'un messager, d'un prophète, dont les vibrations imprègnent ma conscience et marquent ta présence; solidarité, humanité, résistance, combat, mémoire, amour... amitié.
Je suis avec toi.
Mickaël
References
Elder Lepez (Doen 道圓)
To Venerable Lepez
Tracing the non-figurative: two clear objectives
The celebrated French "hidden" abstract painter Rene LAUBIES, died in India in November 2006. A year later, I travelled to India and spent one month in the very same places where Rene spent his final days on earth. I had two clear objectives in going there. Firstly, I went to experience for myself the environment in which Rene had passed five sublime late winter seasons of life. I also made the journey to establish with disciplined precision the genuine events of Rene's final days, his death, and the occurrences immediately thereafter. My data raises more questions than it answers.
black like me
...and like i said,
Siem Reap, Angkor Vat, mainly just to meet a very old friend from far long ago in Tokyo who happens to be in the neighbourhood. So I make the effort. He's the age of my father; and since I can't relate to my father, which is very sad because he's gotten so old I could hardly relate less, I will in some way offer fitting respect to another entirely different sort of bloke who ran with the likes of Erich Löcherbach through sleazy little Asian cities being bad, and at a ripe old age is... Well, let's see.
Just a few words mate(s).
life goes on...
Man hangs himself in Wenlock Hospital
Often the facts just speak for themselves. The following is a report of "unnatural death" at Wenlock Government Hospital on 23 October 2006, about ten days before Rene was confined there.
The crime was registered in Mangalore South Police Station and reported by the online spdk, a daily log of reported crimes by Superintendent of Police, Dakshina Kannada, Mangalore.'Appolian Brox, age 53, was admitted to Wenlock Hospital, Mangalore for [unspecified] treatment. He committed suicide by hanging himself at the hospital at 1600 hrs' (spdk, Daily Crime Incidents for Daily Crime Incidents for October 24, 2006).
Hanged himself at the hospital in broad daylight. "Appolian Brox," sounds like a foreigner.
Ref. http://spdk.blogspot.com/2006/10/daily-crime-incidents-for-october-24.html
See also the death of Mr. Gopalakrishna, age 55, who went missing from Wenlock Government Hospital, Mangalore, after he was admitted for treatment of kidney failure (spdk, Daily Crime Incidents for July 19, 2006).
Ref. http://spdk.blogspot.com/2006/07/daily-crime-incidents-for-july-19-2006.html
The work place
I took the room where Rene always stayed on his winter retreats in Northern Kerala.
Though my motives were mixed, my aims were specific. I had come on a formal fact-finding tour to track the impressions and traces of data with regard to the tenuous details surrounding the demise of René Laubies on 13 November 2006 at Wenlock Hospital, Mangalore; and what is more, to hermeneutically decipher the seaside villages of Kotikulam and Palakkunu and sumptuous Kappil Beach. I would furthermore explore a train-hour north around the seaside communities of Manjeshwar, Kanwatirtha and Bangra.
The work place: room 323, Eeyem Lodge, Palakkunu Market, Kasargod District, Kerala.
The final days of Rene Laubies in India
According to my data, Rene Laubies entered Wenlock Government Hospital, Mangalore, India on the evening of November 2, 2006. He passed eleven days there refusing food, and on November 13, 2006 around 7:20 AM died.
The death bed. Bed 12, ward 12, Wenlock Government Hospital, Mangalore.
On Indian soil
"Setting right what the father has spoiled" (I Ching, 18, nine in the third).
Just after meals in front of Hotel Sri Sastha (near Kotikulam Railway Station) Palakkunu Market, Kasargod District, Dec 2007
Works: November 2007 / Mangalore
no. 1. Untitled. 8 Nov. Oil, ink and mixed media on paper, 75x122 cm.
no. 2. Composition. 10 Nov. Oil and ink on paper, 32x38 cm.
no. 3. Untitled. 16 Nov. Oil and ink on paper, 36x41 cm.
no. 4. Untitled. 16 Nov. Oil and ink on paper, 39.5x39 cm.
no. 5. Breakers on the Ramparts at Troy. 16 Nov. Oil on paper, 121.5x75 cm.
no. 6. Composition. 17 Nov. Oil and ink on paper, 46.5x78 cm.
Yemené, Yemenī
You swish the tall red curtains closed
and screen from sight the dancing girls —
but not their timbre...
Bursting into peals of trill ululation
as the well-beloved melodies
and other fetching figures
limberly pierce the breach in veil....
Seascape
Hard wooden stools and benches.
Shifts. Nets and lines strung
along the sea-beach to dry;
hempen colors, yellows, lighten
in tone as moisture leaves them.
Pulled on in with the first glints
of dawn's light. Odd bits: like
driftwood, bone-white, tied to the
mesh-work for floats: rim them
spread now drying in the sun.
Axe-hewn crafts rest proud near
the shallows: beached. Twixt
coiled ropes and further blue.
Dead fishes heads; ropes still
lying coiled tonight.
More locals about now late in the
season. Their beach back, curried
favour...
(from Kovalum Suite, 1982)
Seven Works : October 2007 / Mangalore
no. 1. Composition. 9 Oct 2007. Ink, gesso and emulsion on paper, 79x65 cm.
no. 2. Composition. 10 Oct 2007. Ink, gesso, chalk, crayon, tempera and emulsion on paper, 110x97 cm.
no. 3. Composition. 9-10 Oct 2007. Oil, ink, gesso, chalk, tempera and emulsion on paper, 110x97 cm.
no. 4. Untitled. 13 Oct 2007. Gesso, ink, acrylic, chalk, emulsion, gouache and graphite on paper, 92.5x141 cm.
no. 5. Untitled. 14 Aug - 18 Oct 2007. Aluminum paint, gesso, chalk, semen, ash, colour pencil, pencil, graphite and acrylic on paper, 110x110 cm.
no. 6. Untitled. 25 Oct. Oil on paper, 150x121.7 cm.
no. 7. Composition. 27 Oct. Oil, ink, graphite, permanent marker, gesso and latex mat on paper, 122x75 cm.
On Laubies's work
The "naturalist pre-figurative" abstract impressions of René Laubiès, the spiritual tête of "nuagisme," that vague appellation engendered by his critics that ignored too much his exteriorized plasmas, his wind-blown ash over arid terrains, his anonymous transparencies of loosened stain from the torrid earthen wall. They are the light of quiescent color (his tableaux): shade without tension, toneless shade; texturous shade of warmth rubbed patchy under fine-scratch brushings and sun-blanched mauve.
"Just chase away the thoughts from your mind," he said at Puri, with his subtle modulations of gait and laugh. He is the culminating issuance of Modernist trends since the ancient Chinese Tang.
These odorous strains of fecund terseness disarming in their paucity, stoic, sheer; and with each new tablet out-flanking its precursor: pure abstraction retaining no interpreters, inwardly comporting yet devoid of gnostic footnotes, ramps unsolicitous precipitating ends...
Wintering in Kotikulum, Palakkunu village, he is stunning, amazing, salubrious, calm. Cessative tinctures of diluted jissom let dried and peeled in the morning-fresh sun... Then Spring exhibitions in Milan and Paris then back through the Greater and the Lesser Sundas, through the hunger, thirst, tabulation and loss, through the patterned stains of sweat-laced breezes, hiking off alone when the turpentine is finished, transparently alive in the pan-Islamic silence...
Troy Dean Harris, "On Laubies's Work," 1990. Initially published in René Laubiès, Octobre-Novembre 1990. Gallery Michel Broomhead. Paris; Achevé d'imprimer sur les presses de Mira Impression à Libourne, Conception: Canovas Belchi.
Also see Nuagisme http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2009/06/nuagisme.html
Rene Laubies: an abstract monologue
I am currently composing an abstract monograph, not on or about but very near to the life and work of Rene Laubies, accounting for his legacy by calling into play a radical Euro-decentering effusion of cultural hybridity essential to the patterning of his own looming art.
Methodological pose: a hermeneutics of 'wayfaring,' flâneur and dap.
Reference: Stefan Arteni 2001. "Painting, Image, Likeness."
Extended bibliographic data
(*Astriked items are newly added; listed in ascending publishing date order)
*Thomson, John. 1875. The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China, or, Ten years' travels, adventures, and residence abroad, illustrated with upward of sixty wood engravings by J.D. Cooper, from the author's own sketches and photographs. New York: Harper and Bros.
*Knox, Thomas Wallace. 1880. The boy travellers in the Far East: part second, adventures of two youths in a journey to Siam and Java, with descriptions of Cochin-China, Cambodia, Sumatra and the Malay Archipelago. New York: Harper.
*Scott, James George, Sir. 1885. France and Tongking: a narrative of the campaign of 1884 and the occupation of Further India. London: T.F. Unwin.
*Anonymous. Gallica - Le Tour du monde. 1860 [1893]. (66/2e semestre). Paris.
*Smith, D. Warres. 1900. European settlements in the Far East; China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Netherlands, India, Borneo, the Philippines, etc. London: S. Low, Marston and company.
*Anonymous. 1920. An official guide to eastern Asia v.5. Japan. Tetsudōshō. Tokyo, Japan: Department of Railways.
*Powell, E. Alexander. 1921. (Sulu, Borneo, Celebes, Bali, Java, Sumatra, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Cambodia, Annam, Cochin-China), with illustrations and map. New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons.
[Microfilm copy shelved at: NL11209]
*Norden, Hermann. 1931. A wanderer in Indo-China: the chronicle of a journey through Annam, Tong-King, Laos, and Cambodia, with some account of their people. London: H.F. & G. Witherby.
[Call no.: RCLOS 959.7 NOR - Microfilm copy shelved at: NL7464]
*Russier, Henri Élie Éduard, editor. 1931. L'Indochine française avec la collaboration de Henri Gourdon et Edouard Russier. Hanoi: Imprimerie d' Extrême-Orient.
[Call no.: RDTYS q959.703 RUS]
Thompson, Virginia McLean. 1937. French Indo-China. New York: Macmillan.
[Call no.: RCLOS 959.7 THO (RFL)].
A general survey of the history and the soci-economic aspects of French Indochina.
Anonymous. 1939. Malaya, Siam, Indo-China, Netherlands Indies. Singapore: American Express.
[Microfilm copy shelved at: NL11209]
Descriptions of French Indochina, including a few brief mentions of Saigon.
*Kratoska, Paul H. (ed.). 2001. South East Asia: (Colonial History), Volume II, Empire-building during the Nineteenth Century. London; New York: Routledge. [Call no.: RSING English 959 SOU]
*Thomas E. Ennis. 2001. The development of French Administration in Indochina: French Administrative Accomplishments. In Kratoska, Paul H. (ed.), South East Asia: Colonial History, Volume II, Empire-building during the Nineteenth Century.
[Call no.: RSING English 959 SOU ]
*Proschan, Frank. 2002. "Eunch, Mandarins, Soldats, Mazelles, Effeminate Boys, and Graceless Women: French Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese Genders." A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Duke University Press. [Available by Project Muse]
*Proschan, Frank. 2002. "Syphilis, Opiomania, and Pederasty": Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese (and French) Social Diseases. Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (Oct.): 610-636. [Available by Project Muse]
*Vergès, Françoise. 2003. Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean. Positions 11:1 (Spring), Duke University Press: 241-257. [Available by Project Muse]
*Trocki, Carl A. 2005. A Drug on the Market: Opium and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, 1750–1880. Journal of Chinese Overseas - Volume 1, Number 2, (November): 147-168. [Available online at: http://192.38.121.218/issco5/documents/Trockipaper.doc]
Reference Point: Laubies's childhood environment
1. I speak in praise of Reference Point, the evolving research assistance service provided by Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, Singapore.
2. My general research subject is the Indo-Oceano-Eurasio-Chinese(?) French Colonial artist Rene Laubies (1924-2006). A subsequent task to the greater study (an abstract monologue) is to locate pertinent historical materials from which I may contextualize and draw an impression of the subject's birthplace and childhood environment in Cochin-China.
3. When I approached Reference Point via email (ref@nlb.gov.sg), they provided me with a list of very useful materials. This data in turn exposed me to a lot of additional relevant information. See my hyperlinked Extended bibliographic data.
4. I can now more confidently specify Rene Laubies's place of birth as "Cholon-ville" [Cantonese, Cholon (堤岸), literally "embankment]. Today Cholon is completely merged and incorporated into Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), and constitutes the city's Chinatown. However, at the time of Laubies's birth Cholon was not even yet a suburb, some 11 kilometres distance away, but linked by a light rail steam powered tramline. Regarding Cochin-China as a political entity, it was at the time of Laubies's birth a distinct and separate state, though under direct French Colonial rule. Geographically, Cochin-China comprised the southern deltaic region of present day Vietnam.
5. I am currently in the process of formulating the second phase of my reach project: an examination of early Chinese landscape painting. I will surely consult with Reference Point again.
6. A plea. All of my research would greatly benefit from the academic class of online materials provided by Project Muse and JSTOR, which I see are included in the library's e-Databases. Having been aware of these scholarly services for more than five years now, let me just say that it remains my ardent wish to use them. Which is mainly to announce that my personal library membership does not permit me to access to these items. "Non-resident" researchers are apparently barred.
7. Finally, I would like to draw attention to the very useful Southeast Asia Visions: a collection of historic travel narratives (Cornell University). It publishes full-text versions of its items, some of which have already entered my developing bibliography.
Untitled
Malarticulating anchorage positing seeds of impulsive probes in pretensive consignments bound to ensemble The flotilla. its sinuous, oft erratic course dispersing/coalescing through soft insertions of ready-made tissue, elaborate implotment gliding through streams of sodium air breathes easily in quality rule as adjudged for duration, suppleness, fecundity For sealing the stone over artificial artefacts, tribal-ancestral hostage exchanges, evil simulacra and other indiscriminating models of euphori — for smashing the seal on resurrection's sepulchre
Pearl hermeneutic near Emin's "Live (and pissed)" (remix)
Many are familiar with the life and work of London-based artist Tracey Emin who seems to have become a rather brash and upsetting public figure, at least in Europe. Personally, however, I had only vaguely heard of her mainly though accounts of My Bed when it was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999. And so my first real peek of her only came recently, after viewing the "very short" film Live (and pissed) (2007, 1:05), and where she initially impressed me as a pitiable lush.
But I take it all back.
After simple hermeneutic and repeated viewing, it occurs to me now that the woman was on to something cracking and pensive. I furthermore propose that she had actually plotted her appearance as a loosely crafted media intervention—as a working conceptual art presentation. I specifically allude to her recursive stress that the purported "live broadcast" was in actual fact a twenty five-minute taped delay.
"Are there really real people watching this program in England now?" She poses to her fellow circle of participants.
"They're probably as real as you are, Tracey..." a gentleman retorts.
Now, if the data thus far presented holds firm, we would then need to know at what precise point into the taping of the show Tracey bid her dramatically early adieu. For I submit that it was Emin's original intention to be out of the studio in time enough to watch her own live performance on the telly with her friends. And while she was at it, to capture the extensive overspill on film
Through her own demonstrated brand of exemplar methodologies, artist Tracey Emin's conceptual opi have fused and confused a vivid private life with additionally vital commercial clout.
Hear also Wanted (Tracey Emin), with Boy George.
April 2007
Staring out 4th floor dim morning windows
filmic, dusty petrol-laced sky.
religious propaganda blaring from a television.
Smiling young women pass through the office
made insidiously livable by Japanese air cons,
exhibiting profiles, asses, tits.
everyone phoning across the city.
people getting on in spite of the war.
drivers on standby staring at computer screens,
hand phones, watches, who will it be?
Lunch is over. the driver is ready
we speak a little Mandarin - enter the lift.
a heavily armed guard escorts me to the car
opens the door. I thank him.
The road to the airport
Calls from the Shade
...because it's made of ourselves, ourI have just republished a slightly emended edition of Calls from the Shade (collected poems).
emotions, our angers, our love for the
sumptuous...and our asceticisms.
René Laubiès
Pale-pink gradient grayscale morning
Woke this mourning well before sunrise. Listened to the BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones interview the Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic. Stepped on the street as light entered sky with clutches of girls in pale-pink skirts on their way to madrasa. Turned down an alley then halted looking back: a massive rain cloud swarming in the sky. Crossed Geylang Avenue just before the bridge and gazed again at ink-drenched sky. Then crossed the canal to Geylang Serai and bought fresh kaya buns from a baker. Returned immediately by a different set of alleys and arrived as rain started hitting the roof. Brewed Oolong tea.
See Geylang, Geylang Serai.
Pound, Laubies, Alvard, Facchetti
1. Someone has written me inquiring about the Colonial French nonfigurative painter Rene Laubies who presumably passed away sometime at the end of 2006 on the Malabar Coast of southern India. The question concerns Rene's translation of the The Cantos by Ezra Pound.
Yes, Rene Laubies is also esteemed as the first translator of the work of Ezra Pound into French. In 1983, in Puri (Orissa), Rene related the events to me personally. It was after consulting with Pound himself that Rene decided to translate a "selection" of Cantos. This was back in the early 1950s during that scandalous twelve-year period from 1946 to 1958 when Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washinton D.C., a Federal mental institution. In the 1950s, Rene was also living in the United States in close association with Black Mountain Collage, a place that attracted many the 20th century's most influential artists. He also taught a stint at the University Alabama, 1956-57. Rene was thus able to repeatedly meet and consult with Pound who closely mentored the project throughout. But I have actually never seen the volume myself, cataloged in French as Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound; traduction de Rene Laubies, Paris: P.J. Oswald, 1958. 77 p.
2. Of immense importance to Rene's career is Julien Alvard (d. 1974) who initially launched a modern art movement that he baptized "nuagism," as based on the paintings of Rene Laubies, Frédéric Benrath, René Duvillier, Fernando Lerin, et al. This important young emerging body of work had first been shown at the Paris gallery of Paul Facchetti, who was remarkably also the first to have exposed Jackson Pollock in France. Some important 50s period details have recently been published by Guy Cloutier (2007). These relate to the Cochin-china-born Laubies's natural affinity to ancient Chinese landscape painting and the assimilation into his practice of its discursive relation between the void and the full, its frontal perspective, non-theatricality, and pervading atmospheric evocation of an ontological allusiveness. Interrogé par Gérard Xuriguera (Les Années 50, éditions Arted), Laubiès dit lui avoir fait découvrir la peinture chinoise ancienne, "le vide et le plein, la frontalité, l'absence complète de l'expression et du théâtre, l'atmosphère, le suggéré, l'allusif". Des termes qui s'appliquent aussi à son propre travail. Sur ces bases, Alvard lance un mouvement baptisé "nuagisme", d'abord recueilli par la galerie de Paul Facchetti, le premier à avoir exposé Pollock en France (Cloutier).
In a 1954 Paris group photo (here) we see Paul Facchetti and Rene Laubies stainding second and third from the left, respectively. The now retired Facchetti was himself an established painter and photographer of some importantc and figures in the following set of images.
Question: Does anyone have any clear idea on how to contact Paul Facchetti? (Though the fact that the man was born in 1912 might be a hint.)
3. I find it quite inexplicable that after nearly six month I have not been able to gain direct communication with a single person who knew Rene Laubies—especially those who were with Laubies in Paris just prior to his final departure for India, presumably late October 2006.
See also
Fautrier, Seibel, Facchetti, Le Noci, Magliano
Nuagisme
Assembling notes around Paul Facchetti
Leda and the Flamingo
A tumult in the birdbath.See working paper, Leda and the Flamingo (notes for the architects of a future liminology)
Lancing pecks and a flurry of wing flap.(Sommières, 2003)
Suggested reading
K.R. Melson. "grafucked," kris.likes.to.draw, Monday, June 04, 2007.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KsHyoGVt7Us/RmMA8ErZGVI/AAAAAAAAAMY/uVmeVFibsIs/s1600-h/graf_3-copy.jpg
Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory, Australian Humanities Review, 1996.
The discursive proliferation of queer has been enabled in part by the knowledge that identities are fictitious--that is, produced by and productive of material effects but nevertheless arbitrary, contingent and ideologically motivated [...] Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics and having no stake in its own hegemony, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity [...] Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally. (Jagose)
Bonsai pagodas on Tono Beach
The huge white moon was rising from the hills as we made our way out to Via Provinciale. We stood by the triptych and waited for a ride. The first passing car pulled over and stopped...
The moon was high in the clear night sky as we stepped on the sands of Tono Beach... The light was enchanting at the phosphorescent shore and the sea was as quiet as milk in a saucer. Except for the licks of stealthy kittens. [Then we] took a little naked dip [in the Tyrrhenian Sea] and pranced about the sand like guileless savages.
Next we erected twenty small megaliths assembled from the plethora of smooth round stones half-buried in the brown grainy sand. As a fluency of chiaroscuro light shown down, the piled-high stones lent ethereal tone to our makeshift silent movie set.
With the first faint glimmer of rosy dawn-light, the bonsai pagodas proudly greeted me. I sat cross-legged as they stood all around me like alien sensors for the absorption of prana. With each long alternating breath I drew, I gained in the serenity of bliss beyond elation.
I suddenly remembered the Eskimo Shaman:
My body is all eyes.(from Calabrian Journal)
Look at it!
Don't be afraid!
I can see in all directions!
Flying clouds
Troy Harris, Untitled, detail, 2007.
Gouache & latex on paper, 100x88 cm.
Methodological reiteration: It all becomes apparent via self-reflexive plumbing of the baton-twirling carnivalization process in accordance with the discipline of a sumptuous asceticism (René Laubiès), a principled quasi-archaeological practice that seeks to appeal to the formative influences of Cloudist narratology appropriate to isolating seminal procedures as pertain to otherwise vague schemata.
Monsoon Season
My roof leaks.
I return from
alms round
to find small
puddles over
clean white tiles.
I keep to myself.
Thematic notes
Current research theme(s)
A prefigurative, non-narrative hermeneutics of aesthetic quandary (as mark of serenity).
Questions:
1. What is "figuration" vis-à-vis visual language, preliterate and/or aesthetic?
2. What exactly means "non-narrative text"? (3) Is it found where 'relationships between the parts (of a work or text) are at once alogical and non-sequential, and where order, as it were, follows the impressions of felt experiences'? (S. Delehanty, 1975). (4) Does "non-narrative" inevitably imply a fragmentary, partially contextualized or simply misunderstood text? (5) To what extent can gibberish be textual? (6) What are the hermeneutic ramifications of this, if any?
Suggested reading: Silverman, H. J. What is textuality?, Phenomenology + Pedagogy, Vol.4, No.2 (1986).
Indolent tropicália
We detect here an architectonic accretion that primmediates want in being involūtus and soundly routs inner ear in appeal; an indolent tropicália that pivots all sense on the compound patchwork of her cannibalisma—her fortunate figure as intangible thread interlacing comprehension with the aptness of blush.
Calligraphic fragments
Upholding her prerogative to falsification in discursive drift between the living and the dead who can always be counted on, kept up to date and persuaded through continued rounds of renegotiations unsubjected to the mythos of enlightenment.
A culture that opens to ingratiating secrecy and throngs of children in haptic feint through baton-twirling streets of undelivered futures and totemistic pasts...
A cool nonlinear effusion of sanskriti to continuate aesthetic activation in vivo...
Missing the point of the many masks
With your kind permission, then, we thoroughly break faith with the millennia-long tradition of fairytale weaving. But please, boys and girls, we do not wish to cause misunderstanding, nor give conniptions to the closeted believers. Nor would we dare attempt to dismiss the feasibility that Bodhidharma (or The Buddha for that matter) actually ever existed. Yet at this point we really do need to keep it real and sincerely inquire as to what archaeological, textual or archival material we have in support of any "existence," not alleged existence. Our chief concern is to focus therefore on 'the methodological attitudes with particular respect to the kinds of evidence permissible in the process of reconstructing ancient biographies' (Farmer 2000). Christgau, Robert. 2001. "Missing the Point of the Many Masks," LA Times article, February 18. Harris, Troy. 2007. The Proprietary Myth of Spiritual Legitimacy, http://bauddhamata.blogspot.com/2007/01/proprietary-myth-of-spiritual.html. _______. 2001. Missing the Point of the Many Masks [was: dvija varNa], Indology Archives, Tue, 20 Feb 2001 04:36:12 -0800, http://tinyurl.com/yua7d9. Yampolsky, Philip. 1967. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, the text of the Tun-Huang Manuscript with Translation, Introduction and Note, Columbia University Press.
Soteriological movements, then, are serially retrofitted through the natural processes of shifting perception and retrospection. It is, in other words, the boat that creates the wake and not vice versa. Such movements furthermore thrive in environments of multi-level marketing where intangible products assume the form of exalted states such as paradise, nirvana, enlightenment and the rest. Religionists, however, have always been chary to probe the basis of the ploy itself and instead have impulsively devoted their time to polemically deriding the authority, virtue and goals of their opponents. What is more, in its conspicuous aversion to carefully focus on the salient inconsistencies of certain remotely prehistoric religious figures, academia has traded in these same market shares. For, to deal with this seriously would mean a precarious shift in tack away from a discourse on the impact of various historical players—philosophers, religious leaders, their antagonists, etc.—to a history of the concrete pathogenesis of the fraud-impulse itself.I have recently observed this syndrome of denial in a scholarly discussion pertaining to the history of the Dhyana-yoga School of Buddhism, otherwise known as Ch'an or Zen. Heinrich Dumoulin (1988) performs a highly commendable job in substantially burying the Bodhidharma myth. However, Philip Yampolsky (1967) is far more radical and thoroughgoing in discrediting, for instance, the pseudo historicity of the hallowed Zen-figure Hui Nung and the sutra attributed to him. Yampolsky's translation is ostensibly based on the Dunhuang text, the earliest extant version of the Platform Sutra unearthed at the Silk Road oasis town of Duhuang (Tun-Huang). All the same, the scholarly data and thesis put forward in his long Introduction greatly out shine his work of translation. Of further concern, if not suspicion, is the fact that Dumoulin hardly makes reference to Yampolsky's work, which was published more than twenty years prior. One infers that there may have been much at risk, as the meat of Dumoulin's livelihood was explicitly linked to the perpetuation of Zen's traditional proprietary myth of spiritual legitimacy. This may furthermore exemplify how the study of culti in terms of each its specialized argot, functions to condone, if not to wholly sanction each particular cult in itself, and which obviously precludes any meaningful study.Frankly speaking, contemporary Buddhism is a highly cultic and sentimental mess where in the name of tradition even top-notch scholars persist in notorious rationalization and kid themselves into crediting purely human aspirations to a factitious paranormal human being. Of first importance is to clean the mess up, because if we don't the enchanted myth will only get conferred on another generation.
Adapted from a previously published essay, Missing the Point of the Many Masks [was: dvija varNa], Indology Archives 2001.
References
"Composition" (after Laubies)
"Composition" 2007 Mangalore, oil on paper.
This is one of a series of fifty compositions dedicated to my teacher and beloved friend René Laubiès who passed away on November 13, 2006, in Mangalore, India.
See also On Rene Laubies.
Towards a hermeneutics of the Tocharian Ballet
The Cyrillic allusion is lithely drawn from its intersemotic correspondence to the tambourine as mobile apex of the cosmic axis, let us say, and typified by a certain branch of horse riding nomadic pastoralists in tentative reference to the Tocharian culture and 'the theory that the earliest Bronze Age settlers of the Tarim and Turpan basins hailed from the steppelands and highlands immediately north of Eastern Central Asia' (Mallory and Mair, The Tarim Mummies, 2000), and which indeed is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Twits aside, what I find most alluring is that this literate tribe of ethereal roamers were 'related to the Afanasievo culture that enjoyed open steppeland and highland environments that furthermore formed the eastern linguistic fringe of the Indo-European medley of tongues, as its centre of expansion lay much further west, say, north of the Black and Caspian seas. These tessellated speakers were likely ancestral to the historical Tocharian languages' (Mallory and Mair).
Now, as to Tocharian creative writing, fine, it boasts the Sanskrit Maitreyasamtri-nātaka (MN), which continues to top the Central Asian Buddhist charts. It was extensively remixed among diverse communities spread along the drifting oases towns of the
In several of MN's adaptations, we find these same three improvisationalists (Tumburu, Pañcaśikha and Citrasena) thinly veiled as audio technicians, but they are actually the principal poststructural tacticians of the Lokapāla Dhrtarāstra, one of the Four "World-Guardians" or lokapāla, specifically governing the Eastern Pole. Yet elsewhere Tumburu appears all alone, if not in the middle of nowhere then in the garb of a yaksha, or more specifically the brother (or architect) of the fabled girl group "The Four Kumārīs" (named after the celebrated Mahāyaksinya, or four "girl" deities), but sometimes rudely dubbed "The Four Bhaginīs."
Nevertheless, with the dip in lucrative Silk Route trade from around the beginning of the 7th century, and with the natural emergence of an alternate southern 'maritime' Silk Route, we witness The Four Kumārīs riding the crest of their wild and wet celebrity, coyly reconcocting their sure-fire glam and launching an ambitious Grand Southern Tour with fresh new staging and delicious choreography. Their names are on the lips of every child—Jaya, Vijaya, Ajita, Aparājita. Even Bodhidharma is tapping his toes when the four are invited to perform at the Court...
Then poised on strapping Pallavan ships they sail for the entrepôts of Java and beyond... But guess what else. Their brother (or producer) is also on board, only going by the name Kumara now (though never Kārtikeya). But in fact his real name is still "Tumburu" — and his sisters beseech him, "Play your tambourine!"* * *
Underpinnings of Zen philosophy
Some Notes:
1. Academically speaking, the historicity of Bodhidharma can hardly be more than the history of the retrofittings of the legend—largely, apparently, for the sake of legitimating a lineage. The tendency to fabricate prestigious genealogies is rife throughout the history of historical documentation.
2. The earliest extant "contemporary account" of Bodhidharma is Xuànzhī (547), who identifies his subject as a Hu, 胡人, vis-à-vis Iranian (I am being a bit rhetorical here).
3. Geoff Wade explains that the early use of "hu" was a non-specific "generic (slightly disparaging) reference to those from the west/Central Asia and beyond."
4. Re. The Kingdom of Tun-sun. In line with the southern 'maritime' Silk Route, easily as early as the 3rd century in what is to day southern Thailand, i.e. somewhere on the eastern littoral of the Isthmus of Kra, there was an independent polity, state or kingdom called in Chinese Tun-sun (we don't have any Sanskrit etc name) where according to the 5th century Chinese Funan-chi Annals, '500 families of hu lived.' According to Wolters, "These hu probably represented Persians, Sogdians, and people from Western Turkestan" (1967 note, 314).
5. Wheatley (The Golden Khersonese, p. 17) cites the 3rd cen. primary source of T'ai-p'ing Yu Lan???. This description shows very strong Iranian elements, particularly in the Zoroastian/Parsi-like "bird burial" aspects of their funerary rites. In addition, a community of Brahmins is explicitly present who apparently find the country conducive to their high-caste practices. See online "Description of the Malay Peninsula". There may even have been a division of labour there between the priestly Brahmins and the Sannyasi Bhikkhus.
6. We can therefore at least begin to imagine that—not just isolated Indian ascetics, not merely enterprising flotillas of trading ships, but entire polities, kingdoms or states had come into existence on the tropical littorals directly facing the South China Sea perhaps as early as the first century.
7. In summing up, given the mytho- or literary nature of the quasi-historical Bodhidharma figure, or perhaps approached better as a 'data-cache' time bomb, i) he may have been born in the kingdom of Tun-sun, ii) he may have been fluent in a Chinese dialect, iii) he may have only gone to Kanchipuram for his higher studies, iv) there is really no end to the possible retrofittings.
References
Bodhidharma as encoded cache
Monsoon Winds to the "Land of Gold," Primary Source Accounts, "Description of the Malay Peninsula"
http://ias.berkeley.edu/orias/spice/textobjects/primary_sources.htm
Aryaniazation in the Bauddhamata
"Aryan" replaces "Hindu"The following dozen didactic points aim to (i) ponder the notion of "Hinduization" and (ii) raise the key question—"Buddhism: within or without the Aryianization process?"1. I will square a few notes here and risk once again appearing controversial, though only for the sake of our shared cultivation and edification — and with any luck jiggle into sharper relief the historical underpinnings of Buddhist thought. Harris, Troy. 2007. Buddhism and Yoga, http://sritantra.co.uk/by/by.htm
ReferencesBriggs, Lawrence Palmer. 1948. "The Hinduized States of Southeast Asia: A Review," in The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 4, 376-393. Aug. In, Enduring Scholarship, Selected From The Far Eastern Quarterly — The Journal of Asian Studies, 1941-1971, ed. by John A. Harrison, thirtieth Anniversary Commemorative Series, vol. 3: 179-196.Coedès, George. 1947. "Histoire ancienne des e'tats hindouisés d'Extrême-Orient," Paris. Published in English translation as The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1975.
On Rene Laubies
Explored the
Jasmine
littorals
for decades
aloft & adrift,
but abreast
'midst the
turmoil
Scored a
series of
informal
genealogies
each
hermeneutic
its mercurial
outlay.
_________
See also
Rene Laubies: tracing the non-figurative
"Composition" (after Laubies)
Elder Lepez ( Doen 道圓 )
Master of moments and grace – strong humanity; magus, raconteur, witness and messenger. Prophet of camaraderie, struggle, resistance, reminiscence, love and friendship, we salute you.
Reference: Venerable Lepez
Bodhidharma as encoded cache
(these 'data-cache' time bombs)As a means of deciphering the fragmentary coding of Bodhidharma (not to mention the Buddha) the reader may find it a useful tool if, whenever she detects a cultural term that is based on the Avestan root airya (noble, honorable), she simply, as a substitute, think Iran, the two words being essentially the same.
So what do Iranians have on us? Consider this. The ethnonym Śakya is also Iranian. Herodotus, however, employing the term Scythian (VII 64), nonetheless remarked that the ancient Persians/Iranians referred to all Scyths as "Saca." Recent scholarship supports this view. Through an etymological examination of Scyth, Oswald Szemerényi (1980) established that Saka is an Old Iranian ethnic name. The "Śakya," then, are the "Indo-Scythians" who over many centuries entered South-Asia.
Now based on such data, we are justified to ponder that the historical Buddha, Śakyamuni, may himself have descended from this Old Iranian tribe.
Shamasastry (1922) first discerned the Iranic nature, not only of the Early Vedic religions, but of the origin of Gautama's ethnonym as well. More recently, Harvard Professor Michael Witzel mooted the scenario of an "Iranian Buddha." Drawing our attention to the "suspicious" presence in the Ganges Valley of a "cluster of East Iranian names" [vis-à-vis Mauryas, Licchavis, Magadhans, et al], Witzel notes that these are also typical of later waves of Iranian immigration 'that brought among others the Śakyan tribe into northern Bihar, in company with the Puraṇic Maga Brahmins' (Witzel 2000: 27, n. 62). Indeed,
the tribal name of the Buddha, Sakya (Skt. Śakya), attested only in post-Vedic times in the Pali canon (ca. 250 BCE), can not be separated from the self-designation of the northern Iranians (Saka), who otherwise entered India only after 140 BC., via Sistan.What is more, The Buddha's main stamping ground, the kingdom of Magādha, is clearly derived from an Avestan or Old E. Iranian word. In fact, according to Avestan scholar George Thompson,
The term maga [="Magus, sun-priest"]...is not attested in Vedic. That it is a borrowing from Iranian into Sanskrit seems clear, especially in light of the variant form magu [cf. Avest. moGu, Old Persian magu].Or simply think "magi."To close for the moment, I find the suggestion extremely compelling that to some extent at least the code-word "Buddha" (not to mention Bodhidharma) may very well represent a remotely undecipherable cache or compendium of Old Iranian asceto-shamano-philosophical lore.
References
Mallory, J. P. and Victor H. Mair. 2000. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Shamasastry, R. 1922. "India Under the Iranians," in Journal of the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, ed. J..J.Modi, No.1: 75-84, http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Culture/impact/shamasastry_India_under_iranians.htm
Szemerényi, Oswald 1980. "Four old Iranian ethnic names: Scythian - Skudra - Sogdian – Saka" (Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 371), in Scripta minora, vol. 4: 2051-2093, http://www.azargoshnasp.net/history/Scythians/fouroldiranianethnicnames.pdf
Thompson, George. 1998. "Re. Iranians in Ancient India," Indology Archives, Wed, 27 May. Online post http://tinyurl.com/2rvn34
Witzel, Michael. 2002. "Re. Buddhism as Iranian heresy?" Indology Archives, Tue, 5 Nov. Online post, http://tinyurl.com/2kkk6m
_______. 2000. "The Home of the Aryans," in Anusantatyai. Festschrift für Johanna Narten zum 70 Geburtstag, ed. A. Hintze & E. Tichy (Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, Beihefte NF 19) Dettelbach: J.H. Roell: 283-338, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/AryanHome.pdf
Bodhidharma Myth
Indexed properly under "East Asian Mythology," the Britannica entry for "Bodhidharma" seems sufficiently scholarly as well as exhaustive. Note that every detail is qualified as "legendary." In this sense, the history of Bodhidharma can hardly be more, academically speaking, than the history of the retrofittings of the legend.
The earliest extant "contemporary account" is Yáng Xuànzhī (Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang, compiled 547). Interestingly, Yáng identifies Bodhidharma as a Hu, 胡人, (vis-à-vis Iranian). I note here however that, according to Chinese History Professor Geoff Wade (personal correspondence), the early use of "hu" was a non-specific "generic (slightly disparaging) reference to those from the west/Central Asia and beyond."
Tánlín (曇林; 506–574) is noted as the second contemporary writer on Bodhidharma. His brief biography forms the preface to Two Entrances and Four Acts, "a text traditionally attributed to Bodhidharma." Tánlín's account of Bodhidharma is the first to describe him as "Southern Indian"—a geographic detail, I however note, that neither presumes nor precludes the subject's ethno-linguistic heritage (vis-à-vis Iranian). Tánlín furthermore embellishes his subject with royal blood and makes him out as "probably" (Zvelebil 125–126) a Pallavan prince.
I loosely abstract my contention as follows. Marked by (i) suspended disbelief (in the name of faith), (ii) a clutching after singular pregnant moments and (iii) construing series of historical constructions, the neo-Buddhist project of 'arresting temporal flow for the sake of achieving spatial stasis,' purposefully and serially strives to retrofit its proprietary myths of spiritual legitimacy.
Reference: "Bodhidharma," Britannica entry, http://www.answers.com/main/ntq-dsid-2222-dekey-Bodhidharma.
Rene Laubies: tracing the non-figurative
I came across Pan Da'an's (潘大安) valuable essay "Tracing the traceless antelope: Toward an interartistic semiotics of the Chinese sister arts" (College Literature, Feb 1996) while researching the theoretical underpinnings of the colonial French non-figurative painter Rene Laubies. This project requires an historical grasp of the Dhyana/Chan/Taoist contribution as stems from ancient Chinese players, with particular attention to Guo Xi (郭熙, ca. 1020-1090). I have tentatively applied Professor Pan's art-historical analysis of the fabled Chinese Chan/Zen narrative in a way that would hopefully bring into relief and support my own developing take on the "underpinnings of Zen philosophy" as largely retrofittings constrained by the neo-Buddhist fondness for the fabulous. I would also like to lay bare the following point: to effectively decode the neo-Buddhist Zen-myth one needs simultaneously to perceive the persona of Bodhidharma as essentially a Hindu theatrical device and to infer the heritage of Chan itself as of basically healthy Taoist stock.
See these items too
- The final days of Rene Laubies in India
- Rene's last walk to the beach
- Rene in Calabria
- Lydia Harambourg (a beginning)
- Rene's "final" work: towards a global art analysis (draft2)
- With René Laubiès in Varkala
- Eurasian artist René Laubiès (a draft note)
- Laubiès & Twombly on rue des Beaux-Arts
- l'Orangerie
- Tipped into sheer prefiguration
- untitled
- (blue-grey text on ephemeral surface)
- Laubiès on Pound
- Laubies, Aphorism No. 9
- Guo Xi as cultural toponym
- Laubies, Aphorism No. 6
- The Laubies final days in India archive
- Very less
- Assembling notes around Paul Facchetti
- Untitiled
Chan: a little Buddhist, more Taoist
1. Legend holds that in the 6th century Indian ascetic named Bodhidharma conveyed a variety of Dhyana yoga to certain spiritual communities in southern China. Yet consider that this enterprising Kanchipuram Brahmin may have never even deemed himself a "Buddhist" per se. In those days, Brahmins would not have regarded their requisite act of renunciation so much in terms of sectarian Bauddha as in the more remotely traditional sense of sannyasa ashrama. I say this in view of the political fact that Bauddha prevailed in the kingdom of the Pallavas, thriving over Jaina, Vaishnava and Shaiva factions. As sannyasin culture is essentially marked by the total and complete repudiation of all sectarian and communal identifications, I strongly suggest that the yogi Bodhidharma would never have become a Buddhist as such. In fact, one wonders if it wasn't precisely Buddh-ism that drove him out to sea.
2. This statement may in fact assert no more than, the Pallavas were sponsors of Bauddha culture along with Jaina and Brahminical faiths. The names of their kings were typically Vedic and suffixed with -varman (lit. "coat of mail"), implying 'protector' or 'protégé' – a practice mirrored by the ancient Khmer. It is also worth noting that Mahendravarman I, the son of the Pallavan ruler Simhavishnu (mid-6th cen.), was a Jaina who opposed all the Shaiva practices before being converted to Shaivism, and further, that Simhavishnus' mother may have been a Christian (Encycolopedia Britannica).
3. Chan Buddhism during its development in China absorbed much of the quintessence of Taoist philosophy. A key methodology is expounded in the doctrine of "forgetting words after getting meaning," a dictum that establishes the paradox and semiotics of language, a poetics of "amnesia," so to speak. It is also associated with the poetics of "resonance beyond tone" and "emotion-scene fusion."
4. By bringing into play an art-historical analysis of the traditional Chinese Chan/Zen narrative, Professor Pan's study "Tracing the traceless antelope: Toward an interartistic semiotics of the Chinese sister arts" (1996) discloses much as applies to, for one thing, the neo-Buddhist paradigm. In the terms of traditional Western painting, the cardinal objective of the neo-Buddhist mindset is clearly mimesis—i.e. 'imitation' at best and 'mimicry' at worst. This less-than-philosophical neo-Buddhist outlook endeavours as such to latch upon a basic set of ideological specificities that (i) allege reproduction of a "single pregnant moment" and (ii) turn "temporal flow into spatial stasis." Yet by uplifting contrast, in the Ancient Chinese "sister arts tradition" that exists between poetry and particularly literati landscape painting (shan-shui, 山水, 'mountains and water'), this so to speak Indo-European predilection for fixing on single pregnant moments is viewed as incongruous to the subtle valuations that effuse the Chinese notions of object, attainment, virtue and sense. For in the Further East arrangements, merit rests efficiently in forgetting words after gaining meaning. Such striking inference from language, however, is not just paradoxical, nor merely antinomian. Rather, words are intuited as semiotic agents, as semaphores alerting, then diverting one thither, transposing the attentive through aesthetic quandary to the "mindscape" beyond the figurative field. Accordingly, through sublime and liberating disregard of any stripe of centralized, narrow, rigid view, the elegance of Chan is precisely its transparency, its fluid perception inviting the select to plumb the depths through its Taoist procedure of abstracting nature.
5. In Laubiesan procedure, though, the painter doesn't need to actively abstract nature. "I paint from nature, and nature is abstract..." (Rene Laubies, 2007: 1).
References
Pan Da'an. 1996. "Tracing the traceless antelope: Toward an interartistic semiotics of the Chinese sister arts," in College Literature, Feb.Rene Laubies at Alain Margaron, Art in America, April 2007.