Sunday, August 25, 2013

Anna Livia Plurabelle’s final meditation…



Anna Livia Plurabelle’s final meditation…



Are you a river running out to the ocean? 


Floating detritus of a made up life; 

attachments, seeming materialized reality, 

flowing one way... 


Once returner, never returner: 

only one way. 


Ocean Breathing: exhale and vanish.


Gone, gone, gone beyond on 

each breath.


Johnny Depp floats out to sea 

in a Northwest Coast Native American 

death barge.


One way.




                                                                     Kotatsu Roko
                                                                     25 August 2013
                                                                     Bloc 11

Pulse

Pulse: A collaboration of Robyn Ellenbogen, visual art, and John Bailes, writing.

Vimalakirti’s Silence for Chris McKenna



Vimalakirti’s Silence for Chris McKenna



The echo of the peel of the bell

sounding throughout the universe

this ear, hair follicles, skin, goose bumps,

smiles...



Miles Davis, Beethoven, the Greek chorus

all ringing the heart with one Awesome Sound

rising straight from

the Empty Aeon.



The taste of this saliva,

the vastness of this Eustachian tube,

the flesh of this cheek,

the tongue of the universe:



one entire kiss.



Kotatsu Roko

24 August 2013

Prospect Hill






The word aeon, also spelled eon, originally means "life" or "being", though it then tended to mean "age", "forever" or "for eternity". It is a Latin transliteration from the koine Greek word ὁ αἰών (ho aion), from the archaic αἰϝών (aiwon). In Homer it typically refers to life or lifespan. Its latest meaning is more or less similar to the Sanskrit word kalpa and Hebrew word olam. A cognate Latin word aevum or aeuum (cf. αἰϝών) for "age" is present in words such as longevity and mediaeval.
Although the term aeon may be used in reference to a period of a billion years (especially in geology, cosmology or astronomy), its more common usage is for any long, indefinite, period. Aeon can also refer to the four aeons on the Geologic Time Scale that make up the Earth's history, the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, and the current aeo

Monday, August 12, 2013

"Pulse" Assorted metallic wool and metal-point.water color on plike paper,2013

On Aug 10, 2013, at 4:40 PM, One Heart Zen wrote "Pulse":

Robyn Ellenbogen is a visual artist working in a broad range of media and disciplines including silver-point, egg tempera, artist’s books, photography and sculpture.  For the past few years, Robyn has been discussing her work with John Bailes, a poet and Zen priest.  These conversations have included a practice of passing words and images back and forth between them. Several of these words and images were published in the journal “Zen Monster 4.” They hope to share even more of these close encounters in an upcoming collection that will be published later this year.

The following is a portion of a conversation, while discussing “Pulse”, a recent drawing in metal point and watercolor by Robyn Ellenbogen. These conversations suggest a snapshot of what it is like to practice Zen Buddhism and attempt to assimilate it into one’s life and work.


John ​ ​  I am struck by the commitment of the pen, hand and body, to the line rather than using a ruler or a digital operative that’s going to make it exactly what we think we imagine to be a straight line.  The drawing suggests that there could actually be a straight line with some waver in it and the waver is an expression, an exposure, a display of vulnerability or fear or love and a relationship with the person who made the line.  We can feel our own wavering and own breath. We can meet a mind here.

Robyn   ​And once you put the brush or anything to the paper, this is the beginning of a commitment. This word is a powerful trigger in so many ways.  I often feel that finishing a work is a form of abandonment.

John    ​  It’s like the full commitment to the left foot standing and that commitment into that one step is what gives the next step. Similarly that first commitment of the brush gives the flow to the brush or drawing implement.  Unless we can completely give that commitment we’re distracted, we stutter, we vacillate, or we go straight forward. Whatever it is we share it. That's it. No better no worse. What is. What we are.

Robyn ​   I translate what you’re describing as having a sense of embodiment in my work.  This is how I readily shift from Zen practice to the practice of making my art.  My personal sense of phenomenology is all about how my breath interacts with what I am doing and working on and how each nuance changes what follows. I do sometimes start out with an idea, something that emerges from my mind, often a memory. I can end up a long way from the initial idea and one of the things I have noticed over time is that I am more able to accept this change and transformation.

John  ​​   When you have a certain amount of paint in your brush and a certain type of paper with a particular surface, you put the brush to the paper and you already have an idea of what to do, but the feeling of the brush on the surface and the feeling of your hand and breath, even if you draw the line to complete your preconceived notion is different. It’s changed by that feeling and that relationship. It doesn’t necessarily fulfill that preconceived notion.  What we are talking about is fully giving over to the relationship of feeling the brush, hand, arm, heart and breath in the relationship to the paper and the surface with the movement being all one and informing another.

Robyn​ This is exactly so and this gets into the extraordinary/ordinary sensory awareness that can go through you while you’re making a work.  It is as if something is being transmitted, from where, to whom?  This is everything that is not taught nor can it be taught in a formal setting such as school.  I am often asked questions regarding formal training and how it plays out in my work.  Even initially, I was less interested in skill and more interested in something else.  This something else is infrequently addressed in a skill-determined culture.

John ​​ If we look at a Chinese calligraphy apprenticeship situation, somebody will draw with that brush and ink on a blank piece of paper a straight line a million times.  Then they know brush, ink, paper, straight line and all of the idiosyncrasies and variations of straight line and the possibilities. Then  there’s a freedom. They are free of their concept of a straight line.

Robyn​  This is where the true sensibility emerges from it is rooted in the body’s sense. When I was an art student, I worked for Louise Bourgeois and I am often asked, “What did she teach you or what did she tell you to do? I have to laugh because she was, in a way, my first Zen teacher and her most often repeated direction was, “Stand up straight!”  This amounts to the gift of nothing.

John ​​ There are countless stories in Zen history about this gift of nothing and that’s the biggest gift. It relates to what we were talking about before, the importance of difference.  As your relationship grows with art or with your teacher, the clarity of difference and the uniqueness of each of you come to the fore . You cannot be your teacher and you cannot be Zazen, some idea. You can learn from Zazen, applying yourself to this idea. But when you do Zazen it is so much bigger than your idea.  You do Robyn and Robyn is so much bigger than Robyn. We feel like we fall short of Zazen our idea but we cannot fall short of Zazen. You can't fall short of Robyn. In being totally confident in our self as we are 100 percent without being right or wrong, short or tall, the best or the worst, we are complete.  That is communicated throughout history and it’s identified in Zen art.  That’s what we are meeting in Zen art; that is what is exposed, displayed, opened, our heart, our vulnerability, our true strength.

Robyn​  Yes, we are meeting somebody’s world. This term Zen art is not limited to just eastern art because I am thinking of how there are many western artists that come to mind, that seemed to capture a totality of some world, Blake, Klee, Giacometti, Morandi. 

John​​  And their total presence in that world complete with neurosis, shortcomings loving and enmity.

Robyn​  And one of my favorite topics failure.

John​​  Failure is incredibly important.  Until we totally and completely realize that everything is a mistake, nothing fulfills a platonic idea or an objective.

Robyn ​ Most of the objectives are so culturally ingrained and forced on us from the moment we start school and are acculturated into society.  It is painful to think about  this …and the myriad ways it manifests throughout our systems

John​​  And this is remarkable because on a certain level, these are socially, culturally, ingrained, transmitted and habituated  objectivity; and we like to think the objective has no subjective or weighted quality that is intended to benefit ourselves or someone else, that it’s an objective measurement. That very objectivity is a political and social statement.  And what is a political and social statement but an extension of our own fear and protection?

What is considered objectivity?  The remarkable thing is to be totally comfortable in our subjectivity, to recognize to what degree each of us is entirely subjective. Entirely exposed our subjective projection no longer gets in the way. Fully broken open our vulnerability reaches hearts And we can dance with whatever is.



Pulse: A response to Robyn Ellenbogen’s Painting

If I were a cloud or a section of skin, lung, follicle or an ocean or a dream or a planet or a star or universe expanding and breaking apart, a worm hole or a black hole, the black of black so bright and luminous yielding all of what we imagine to be color, apart not separate, an entirety of expansion contraction of being a breath riding a dragon, unsui.  A  fire or ice deep blue red yellow orange the density of this space omnivorous devouring peacock transforming all poisons: Raquel Welch on a Fantastic Voyage...what we imagine can't even touch it let alone what we say.

Kotatsu Roko
06:VIII:13
Prospect Hill



Saturday, February 23, 2013

Speak, Memory



Speak, Memory

“There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or re-experienced whenever they are recollected. (The neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman often speaks of perceiving as “creating,” and remembering as “recreating” or “recategorizing.”) Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recatorgorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.

We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with irrelevant information.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all out knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusive ours. Memory is dialogic and arises from intercourse of minds.”[1]


[1] Oliver Sacks, “Speak, Memory”, The New York review of Books, 2.21.2013, Vol. LX, #3. 

Cafe life...






Coolness no longer

          even a memory,

I stand

          naked and free;


not even a Jaybird.


Roko
Friday, 22 February 2013
Prospect Hill

coffee, tea and cakes...









Bloc 11


The pleasure of
               coffee, tea and cakes;

together after school
               father and two young sisters.


Kotatsu Roko
Friday, 22 February 2013
Union Square, Somerville