acrobat

I'm feeling like the Chinese acrobats I saw this summer- the ones who spun plates on the ends of sticks and actually made it artful.  Although I fall somewhat short at the moment, in the artful part.  Yeah, I'm in a backbend, one foot straight in the air, spinning plates like mad with all 10 fingers, all 10 toes, bellybutton and  teeth but somehow, it ain't art. 

That's okay. 

My house is full of preteens this morning.  The piano is getting a workout- Heart and Soul, Chopsticks, Gilbert & Sullivan,  some freaky battle theme from Star Wars.  This is an old gutted player piano, battered and hollow but still clear.  I'm sure it hasn't been this much the life of any party since its player days.  Dogs are barking.  Some of the preteens seem to have been transformed into zombies- loud ones from the sound of things.  The piano player plays on.  I'm staying upstairs. 

I'm on an exhibit countdown this week at the museum- counting down to Friday, a big opening event.  Everything should be okay but I have to keep it moving all week- poking, tweaking, headbutting it into place.  It would be nice if the rest of my life would go away but it won't.

That's okay, too.

This week was kind of like that, though- heating up at the museum, but me not able to keep the other stuff in the background.  It's all important stuff- family, friends, the classes I teach, the art therapy work, my life.  Of course, it won't stand for being put on hold- any of it- especially for a silly exhibit. 

In fact, some of it seems to be even heating up accordingly as well.  Great conversations on all fronts, and unrelated conversations that play off of each other even.  How can I not free up brain power and presence for these opportunities?  Why do they have to happen now?

Here's just one:

I seem to have had numerous opportunities lately  to  think my life is crazy.  I keep getting to say outloud, "Please don't think I'm crazy" and to mean it.  After realizing how much I've been there lately, I found this in a book I was reading about  teaching drawing for one of my classes.  (Please bear with me for a long quote here.  I hate to do this but I keep re-reading it.  It might help to write it out, maybe hear what some other people think of it.  If you aren't into this, certainly speed read, or skip right over- your call.)  He's talking about child development at first and when kids start developing the intellect and living less fully in the imagination but then he says some interesting things about how this connects to adult life, thinking and art:

When the truth presented to our consciousness conflicts with our inclinations and cherished beliefs, we inwardly struggle against the objective truths of the outer world like fish floundering on dry sand.  The soul remains in an alien medium until it integrates the laws of the outer world with the experiences of the inner world through the organization of thought.  Thinking is a higher faculty, but it is not simply given, it must be developed.  We must do it.  A child of ten years is in the direct throes of this profound struggle between inner and  outer life.  

At this critical juncture the imaginative inner consciousness must dim so that objective thinking can develop.  The receding of the imagination is felt as a loss of artistic grace and power.  We are no longer connected to the sources of our images.  The blossoming powers of the discriminating mind become sharp and keen in the realm of anaylsis.  As a result, drawings which contain any clinging shreds of imaginative distortion are viewed in the harsh light of withering criticism.  In the doorway of this profound change, most children are apt to give up the struggle:  the imagination fades as the intellect succeeds, like the Biblical Adam, in naming all of nature's creations, and a new life of thought takes the place of the old life of imagination.  

This shift of focus and seeming death of the imagination has profound effects on later life.  The capacity to form images and the capacity to think in logical concepts are intimately related functions.  Rudolf Steiner describes them as the higher powers which enable us to develop capacities for judgment and transcendence.  

This emergence of the intellect out of the imagination is in actuality a birth, not a death.  It becomes a death only when we close the door on the imagination and choose to live soley in the intellect.  The ideal is to struggle to keep the door open between intellect and imagination so that there can be a breathing back and forth between the two worlds. 

Most adults who have a fear of the arts are usually arrested at the moment when this critical struggle between the intellect and the imagination is first felt.  Perhaps some harsh criticism by a teacher caused this door to slam shut.  The slamming of the door brings temporary release from the struggle and so the danger goes unnoticed- often for a lifetime.  The result, however, manifests in the adult as an absence of creativity and enthusiasm for problem solving.  Adult artists are those individuals who have managed to keep the door open between the two worlds.  Creative scientists have likewise learned how to keep the door open.  People who are insane also keep the door open, but have not learned the art of breathing back and forth in order to keep the soul in balance.  

Our task, then, is to learn how to keep the door open between inner and outer worlds as we breathe back and forth between them.  Keeping an open door is accomplished by training in thought.  An effective arena for this training is in the natural sciences.  All science trains the thinking, but the natural sciences can , in particular, provide models for the development of warmth-filled imaginiative thinking.  The practice of breathing back and forth is developed by artistic activity, where the images produced inwardly are grounded in techniques which enable them to become manifest in the world.  The breathing between inner image and the work of art is the essence of artistic practice.  

It's Drawing From the Book of Nature by Dennis Klocek.  He was one of my teachers this summer.  He's an intense wizard of a man.  I didn't understand much of what he said all the time I was in his classes last July- he made my head spin.  Little by little, I'm starting to understand it now- to my great delight.  
 
And now this.  All I was really looking for was insight into one class and here, a bundle of my whole life in one excerpt from a book. 

Following this, three big conversations came up that brought me back to it.  One with a client about form and formlessness in art and in thought, and the balancing of each.  Second, one of my private students, a teenager troubled, pacing back and forth, wondering about life as an artist, how it seems crazy sometimes, and how it scares some other people. And third, some observations by adult students about a person's artistic style or tendency and how one might seek to develop that while at the same time balance it- intellect, imagination. 

And all the time, when I could just be pondering these imponderables, plucking the petals off daisies, I'm buying carriage bolts, and sheets of closed cell polyethylene foam (yuck) and writing sign copy about regular polyhedrons.  All these nice shiny plates atwirl.  But my teeth are getting tired.  My bellybutton hurts.

Balance, breathing.  These are my things in this life so far- in the big breathing between imagination and intellect ways and the little sleepover mama and wrong size carriage bolt ways. 

Yeah, I can tell you from experience: it's a lot of work being a Chinese acrobat.