Grasshopper Mind

Grasshopper Mind is related to what artists do:
Five goals of artists and art, particularly Land Art, in the health of a technological society: 
Creating a Sense of Place
Linking to our hunter/gatherer history,
Witnessing to Other,
Building the capacity for ambiguity,
Testifying to the Organic.

Grasshopper Mind is quite related to the mind of the Hunter Gatherer.  I've just read Hugh Brody's book, The Other Side of Eden.   a few quotes:

 There are eruptions of the hunter-gatherer in the [modern] urban setting… arenas in which a rival mind seeks expression and longs for its particular forms of freedom […] The hunter-gatherers in the heartland of the exiles… are opponents of the dominant order. They oppose hierarchy and challenge the need to control other people and the land itself. Consciously or not, they are radicals in their lives.
At the least, they experience the tension in themselves that comes from a longing not to plan and not to acquiesce in plans; at most they use a mixture of knowledge and dreams to express their vision. It is artists, speculative scientists and those whose journeys in life depend on not quite knowing their destination who are close to hunter-gatherers; who rely upon the hunter gatherer-mind.

The distinction between respect and control is of immense importance to an understanding of how agriculturalists approach hunter-gatherers. The skills of farmers are centred not on their inner relationship to the world but their ability to change it. Technical and intellectual systems are developed to achieve and maintain this as completely as possible. Farmers carry with them systems of control as well as crucial seeds and livestock. These systems constitute ways of thinking as well as bodies of information. .. the achievement of abstraction and the project of control are related.

Grasshopper Mind is related to Metaxy  in-between-ness

IMAGES ONLY nature and culture

References, Links, Bibliography

Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky
A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly  
Iron John by Robert Bly
Queen Maeve and Her Lovers: A Celtic Archetype of Ecstacy, Addiction, and Healing by Sylvia Brinton Perera

Working from the margins, the edges

Archetypal Time waits on the edges

and irrupts, leaks, sneaks, seeps, gurgles, burbles into historical time

via Shadow holes and cracks : sorrow, trauma, surprise, coincidence, shock, ferality,

carnality, pornography… It’s the destination of the surrealists; mystics, runners, The Zone

It’s remembered and honored on irreligious altars: the backs and bottoms of drawers


2. Archetypal Time and ther Bitten Finger.

3. The wonder of the world;
    the beauty and power; the shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades;
    These I saw;   Look ye also while life lasts                         Gravestone epitaph

4. Stevie Nicks getting ready, 1981

5. Animals, insects and birds are Guides to and from Archetypal time.Working from the margins allows Others their moments Center stage, their Solos... their chance to sparkle, discover, feel  and be essential to the meandering, unexpected  organic growth of the group.

This has something to do with my favorite shape: the Sensitive Chaos... where there a many little epicenters.  At out Seligmann Committee meeting today there were often three or four conversations going on at once.    Quite Tribal!  How Beautiful!

MORE Black and White

Iwas in a 5th grade class, with some dirt and some white paper. A girl did this in a few seconds!

Altars

Altars

We humans make everywhere --near our desks, in our cars, in our living rooms.  Theese are just a form of an outdoor altar, where we make a statement and invitation to powers unseen.  I was in an exhibit on this a couple of years ago and wrote more about altars:

Altars have a extra meaning for me. My workbench is an altar; my desk is an altar. The shelf above my desk is an altar.There are many more. And yes, they are about the Dead, but they are mostly about weaving Memory and Longing into the present. Much of my artworks are altars. Oh, they just look like chairs, tables, shelves and carvings, but really they function as doorways to and from Elsewhere, to the thin places of imagination and memory. And like all doorways, things can pass both ways.
I put them out there a fragile hopeful declarations of a brief existence and then I wait and learn from my objects and the people who use them. At a funeral, as we grieve the dead, aren’t the tears also for our own mortality, so bluntly confronting us?
Budda is quoted as saying:  Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise.
Altars are the places where this exquisite ambiguity takes place:  Things are dead, and alive

Old Patterns

I'm re-reading Sylvia Perera's Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction: an archetypal perspective. Such a wealth of insight, information, history! I told her a few years ago how much I really liked it and she said: "Oh, are you addicted? Addicts really seem to like that book." Well, that's not my point--right now.

On p. 241, she's talking about the celtic triple spiral as a reflection of lingering patterns in our lives:

We may find that our own rhythms manifest a triple pattern that repeats at each new stage oe venture through our lives. Sometimes we can see that the pattern initially tends to repeat the very processes of our birth... The way we were born often remains as the underlying mode of coalescing and pushing forth towards resolution through all of life's later discomforts and fears."

So, how were you born?

I was breech, rear end first with the umbilical cord around my neck.
My 24-year old father was told, "Mr Mack, sorry to say you'll probably either lose your wife or your baby."

We all survived. Though I do still seem to make things a bit harder than they might have to be.

Arts and Institutions

I was at a meeting yesterday discussing that the best way to get Arts Grants is to have very measurable results from ongoing arts acrivities: how many people came? how many MORE people came the next time. "Pilot projects are OK... but a measurable record of arts projects is really much better."
Oh my! ... and arts organizations wonder why it's so hard to get and keep members!

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
Glenn Gould

"Art’s essence is its ability to engage us fully in body, emotions, mind and spirit,
to create beauty and meaning, to cultivate imaginative empathy, to disturb the peace,
to enable grief in the face of loss and hope in the face of grief.
Arts advocates have been trying to pour the vast personal and social importance of this
essential human experience into containers—into language, slogans, arguments, strategies
—far too small to hold it. Trying to explain or demonstrate this with numbers is like trying to describe a rainbow without mentioning color. It is ineffective, discouraging, and unworthy of who we really are to keep trying the same failed approach. And now it is plainer than ever that the failure is total and abject."
Arlene Goldbard

more on arts

Arts advocates have been trying to pour the vast personal and social importance of this essential human experience into containers—into language, slogans, arguments, strategies—far too small to hold it. Art’s essence is its ability to engage us fully in body, emotions, mind and spirit, to create beauty and meaning, to cultivate imaginative empathy, to disturb the peace, to enable grief in the face of loss and hope in the face of grief. Trying to explain or demonstrate this with numbers is like trying to describe a rainbow without mentioning color. It is ineffective, discouraging, and unworthy of who we really are to keep trying the same failed approach. And now it is plainer than ever that the failure is total and abject.arlenegoldbard.com.

Seen and heard #133

Overheard -- from a slightly allergic woman to a beloved cat:

"Go away. Just looking at you makes my eyes itch!"

Oh, those generational moments!

I was working in a 5th grade class yesterday with a small group of students. The opening comment to me was this:
"You look like the old man in UP"
It started a buzz with the others, some defending me: "No,he was mean!"
My response was "What's 'UP'"? In my old man mind, I was just a big fifth grader.
I remembered that quote from Gertrude Stein, Inside we are always the same age
Oh, are there more s'elves lurking about the Pixar has yet to discover?: