Skip to main content

Painterly approaches to truth

Evening Primrose


Bird singing in the Moonlight

The paintings are in inverse order, chronologically and spiritually. Morris Grave, the painter,  is an exemplar of a pilgrimage we might all hope to take from a reality that is symbolized to one that is actual.

The bird that sings in the moonlight is a beautiful expression both of itself but primarily as a symbol (or interlocking set of symbols) that with diligence and awareness can be read out of the picture - song, bird, moonlight.

The Evening Primrose is simply utterly itself: imaging reality in its own uniqueness - transcendence is immanent in the particularities of a flower seen its its 'suchness'.

Graves is quoted as saying that he had surrendered 'religion' as so much 'blah' - not because, I think, it is inauthentic but because it is inadequate: a set of signs pointing to the way that is not the moon. The primrose is simply a primrose at evening itself yet transparent to all things. Seeing a primrose as it is means seeing all as it is: that everything that lives is holy.

Graves was a serious student of both Japanese aesthetics and, more importantly, Vedanta, and in that latter study, rightly realized that 'maya' - the divine play that weaves the world in consciousness - is not (as it is often translated) 'illusory' but, if seen aright, illuminating. God dances into form and 'you' can dance into seeing/participating in its revealing beauty. It remains 'illusory' only to those (all of us most of the time) who sit on the stiff back chairs around the dance floor, worrying about our steps, our style, our partners (bound in that separating self-consciousness that can be heightened, rather than dissolved, by the 'blah' of religion).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev