The Peace Corps

Village in Benin

I attended a Peace Corps recruitment gathering here in Tucson - really inspired me, although it also gave me much to think on before I submit my application. I would say that about 1/4 of the people at the meeting were over 50. First, let me say what I'm inwardly asking myself........here I am, about to take a grueling ESL teachers course before I leave for D.C. in August, and I'm beginning the almost as grueling application process for the P.C.

Am I out of my mind? Probably. You've heard of the "Mid-Life Crisis"? What would one call this?

I've been able to educate myself somewhat by a few fantastic blogs - one, Arabiandrum.org is a network for PC blogs throughout the world, and is excellent if you want to read the thoughts, struggles, and meanderings of volunteers. I've enjoyed reading many of them, although I have yet to find a blog by a volunteer over 30, which bothers me. Where are the grandmothers who look like Jane Goodall I saw tromping through the tundra in the recruitment video show? I await their (hopefully encouraging) words of insight.......

Here's another excellent source of information - a blog for the writings of present and past PC volunteers (Peace Corps Writers).

I confess, I have some real regrets that I did not take advantage of the opportunity to join the Peace Corps when I was younger. What I am concerned about is not so much whether they can use me, or whether I would find the experience rewarding, but whether it's something too strenuous for me. Living in an isolated village in Benin is out of the question. However, living in Roumania and teaching at the University (as some PC are), or having a small apartment in Morocco with electric and hopefully running water......would probably seem luxurious enough to me.

PC in Roumania

I'll be exploring this further. It seems very strange, to be opening this possibility, this door, after a lifetime in the arts, mysticism, mythology. And it is also a kind of circle, as I remember being a teenager in Kabul (where my father worked for U.S. A.I.D.) My first job, at the age of 16, was sorting mail for Peace Corps volunteers at their office in Kabul.

Am I nuts? At an age when so many people I meet are taking up golfing (and boring me to death with their stories about grandchildren and endless physical ailments)........I want to teach English in Mold0va? Work with children in Zambia?

Our Lady of the Saguaros

There are unexpected poetics along the trail, Sanctuary for the asking, and sometimes the Goddess appears at unexpected moments.

I felt like sharing this Shrine, with its Madonna standing at a trail head (or, at the end of the trail, depending on your perspective) near A Mountain in Tucson. A Mountain (which might be more appropriately called "A Hill") is an extinct cinder cone that features a large "A" on it's pointy side. The "A" came to special prominence in 2003, when patriots painted it red, white and blue as George Bush prepared to invade Iraq, and anti-war protesters painted it green in the middle of the night. For about 6 months, you never knew what color the "A" would be, but eventually the patriots won and it remains a garish red, white and blue.

At any rate, there is a wonderful trail nearby that people like myself take early in the morning. It rises gradually among a grove of saguaros, and affords a wide view of Tucson, and the sunrise among the Catalina Mountains.


I don't actually know what the shrine is called, but I call it "Our Lady of the Saguaros". Because, as you walk up the hill, you pass chapparell, medicine plant, sage, and impressive Saguaros. Native people called them the "fingers of God", and indeed, they often do seem to be making Mudras, telling slow stories about time, heat and the desert, if one can only find the means to read the sign language they speak.


Right now, having bloomed white flowers in April and May, their tops are crowned with pear shaped fruits, which the birds are tearing open to eat. It's quite wonderful to see those red tops, and masses of finches and doves gathered on the tops of the desert trees, happily feasting.

Here's another little poetic.

A Barbed Heart I discovered taking refuge among the Palos Verdes, the "green trees" of the desert.



May all Barbed Hearts find refuge among green groves.

May we all find "Our Lady" (by whatever name) waiting for us at the end, or beginning, of the Trail.

Lithographs from the '80's

"A House of Doors" (1986)

I found this portfolio recently...........a series of Lithographs I did in the mid 1980's. I find I still enjoy them. The entire collection was called "A HOUSE OF DOORS", and they were all photographic imagery collaged and worked on lithographic stones. The editions were about 10 each.

Some rooms diminish, some rooms compress.
Rooms can be tricky.
What I chiefly remember
are doors.

I live in a house of doors.

"Leda and the Swan" (1986)

"Day of Radience" (1986)

"When Rain Sang" (1985)

I Remember
White dresses I wore.
I can't remember the girl's name.

"Funny", she said
"How time takes the names out of things,
and bleaches the rest kind of transparent."

Funny. Chiefly,
I remember doors.

"Streetcar" (1986)

"Sybils" (1986)

Wonder Boys (and Girls)

Last night I was watching one of my favorite films, Wonder Boys, based on the novel by Michael Chabon.

It stars Michael Douglas, who has left behind his roles as sex god and warrior cop, to become the rumpled, often stoned professor Grady Tripp, a novelist who teaches creative writing in Pittsburgh. Unable to finish his second novel, which has grown into a vast meandering tome of thousands of aimless pages, he is in the middle of a divorce, and is having an affair with with his boss's wife, who is also the Chancellor of the university. His chaotic life becomes further complicated by one of his talented, eccentric students, played by Tobey Maguire.

Towards the end of the movie, a car door flies open, and Professor Tripp's manuscript flies out, a white snowfall of typed pages, into the Allegheny river, hopelessly lost and fluttering nicely downstream. That part always gets me..........I usually rewind it. It's a moment of commedic loss, but also a kind of amazing grace. After that, everything else falls apart as the dishevelled professor ultimately finds his
way into a more authentic life.

I read a fabulous quote by Laurie Anderson recently in which she described herself as an "anthropologist" after a journalist asked her why she had chosen to work at MacDonald's and at an Amish farm. She explained that she was always trying to learn about new ways of living, new cultures, and found immersion the best way to keep her creativity and curiosity enlivened.

So.......I guess I'm leading up to something here. I'll indulge a ramble until I find my way.

I’m sitting at borders bookstore in Tucson, the only coffee shop I’ve found that does not have a piped in rock and roll station. I resent background noise, and find what is usually offered harsh, angry, ugly, screaming, painful, complaining, or hyperactive. These energies are constantly broadcast. Is there a restaurant or coffee shop that plays Gamelon, or Chopin or even "easy listening music" anymore? Nope. At any rate, you can think here. It is also beautifully air-conditioned, and since it’s 108 outside (a reasonably pleasant June day in Tucson)……….

Every time I come back to Tucson in high summer, my higher functioning seems to immediately cease. I become stressed, irritable, unable to think clearly, and I tend to enjoy venting as much road rage as I can get away with, probably because I lack both a radio and an air conditioner.

Good fore-giveness practice.

Listening to my coffee clutch pal rant this morning didn’t improve my mood. J. is a true contemplative, who meditates daily, has a PhD and lives a very simplified life in a van that runs on biodiesal. Which is probably uncomfortable in the summer, and may be why his usually fascinating discussions about religion were today punctuated with denunciations of what he considers the hypocrisy of just about everyone, from Muktananda’s sex addiction to Sai Baba being a pedophile to Joseph Smith’s 50 wives to what he considers the Dali lama’s fake smile. Whew. That was exhausting. I hope he feels better tomorrow. I've had such rants myself.

Good fore-giveness practice.

I’m about to take a 6 week intensive course that will end with me receiving an ESL teaching certificate. This will be grueling, and no doubt I'll be twice as old as everyone else there. I'm doing this because next year, Great Spirit willing, I want to do volunteer work, and this would be a useful skill to take to the table. I'm also unemployed now, so some means to earn income is a good idea. I'm even applying to the Peace Corps. I'm also considering asking Dana Dakin if she can use me in Ghana in some way – and I am also considering volunteer opportunities in Morocco and Nepal.

All of this, of course, scares the hell out of me. I've spent so much of my life alone in studios, within the self-absorbed life of an artist. What if I get malaria? What if all there is to eat is yams and overripe bananas, or worse, monkey jerky? What if they have a revolution, and no one believes my story that I’m really a Canadian (should I get maple leaf earrings and a matching hat?) What if I have to share a dorm room with a Baptist missionary who aggressively worries about my soul? What if there are really, really big spiders? Would that test my own faith?

What if I get to meet aids orphans, what if I get to teach girls how to read or draw, what if I fall in love with a whole village.……and never want to return to this life? What if ……….

You see, I’ve had this dream about joining the Peace Corps, and going to Africa, for 30 years. If it’s ever going to happen, now is the time to put it into motion. And perhaps, to be candidly honest, sometimes I am weary of living in a "facebook world", a world where friendship seems to mean you share one paragraph group emails with 500 people, a world I've become increasingly out of step with. I say this as I sit here surrounded by laptops and cellphones and earplugs. Everyone is going a thousand miles an hour. I can't touch anyone anymore at that speed.

In some ways, I'm not unlike Professor Tripp. My magnus opus could flutter into a river somewhere, on the Camino to Compostella maybe.........and I'm not sure I'd care all that much, or if anyone would notice for that matter either. Impermanance. I really don't know who I am anymore.

Which might not be such a bad thing. There's a big world out there.

The Questions of Maat

"In Ancient Egypt, it was said that in the Underworld Maat waits before the door all souls must enter. She holds a scale and a feather. Maat weighs hearts, and none may pass until they have answered her questions, and their hearts are as light as the feather of truth. Can each answer "yes" ? How heavy is each heart? Because to dream a new life, to be born again, you must know the life you have lived, forgive and be forgiven." **

I want to say how touched I am by those who so kindly sent me their good wishes in comments for the last entry.

It's been said that we don't live our lives - life lives us.

Arriving at 60 is a tremendous passage for me. I remember meeting Dana Dakin, founder of Women's Trust in Ghana, who said that there were three life passages: first you learn, then you earn, and finally, you return the gifts you've gained to the future.

Certainly, I feel the "lightening" that comes with transit into my 6th decade. I have the urge to get rid of things that weigh me down, aren't relevant, demand my attention in some way. Old love letters that just make me sad, pretty dresses that no longer fit and probably never will, dusty boxes of mementoes, weary assumptions, heavy handed beliefs, habits of mind that once were useful, but now are boringly repetitious. I see that most of my assumptions are erroneous, block my vision, and are probably unfair to somebody, somewhere, including myself. Unused possessions require care, require storage, require energy, require memory. Time to light-en up.

A reporter once asked Pablo Picasso, at 90 or so, what he thought, after such a long and distinguished career, his greatest work was. He immediately replied "The next one."

I've been reading a wonderful book by Natalie Goldberg on writing and Zen, called "Writing Down the Bones". She tells of meeting the writer Meridel le Sueur. In her eighties, Meridel told her that she lived nowhere. She visited people and places, writing wherever she was. The elderly writer asked Natalie if she knew a place to purchase a used typewriter. When she is ready to leave, she said, she will give it away so she doesn't have to take it to her next destination.

Now that I understand. Why should one wish to lug a typewriter around, or a bulky suitcase, or for that matter, an old grudge, a worn out storyline, or an exhausted persona?

This is the lightening of the heart and mind called for when we reach the "Return" phase of our lives, whether that occurs at 30, or 80. The balance that the Goddess Maat demands when she weighs hearts at the passageway. Maat's name, literally, meant "truth" in ancient Egyptian. Her questions do not "damn" those who wait before the door....but without answering them, without finding the truth of one's life, no passage to other realms is possible. Maat's questions are the questions each soul must answer sooner or later. "Who have I not forgiven?" "What have I done that I cannot forgive myself for?" "What part of my life story have I not been able to forgive?" "What am I unable to let go of?"

I am always stunned by the wisdom found in language we so unconsciously take for granted every time we open our mouths. (and each language has its singular depths of meaning). In our English usage, to "fore-give" is to do just that - to give the energy forward. To the future, to the unknown, to new possibilities of good relationship and shining creativity, high adventure. As well as the evolution of wisdom and full circle compassion. When we don't fore-give, we're left dragging around psychic baggage, grey thought forms, stories told so many times they have lost any semblance to the truth.

I am not saying that fore-giveness is not a complex process. Sometimes it involves working through unconscious layers of experience, telling our story over and over until it can be seen, and sometimes we need help to do these things from wise or impartial listeners. But ultimately I believe fore-giveness comes from being able to gain a wider perspective, the Soul's perspective. Being able to see the broad weave of our lives, the ways we were challenged and deepened by our experiences, our betrayals, our failures, our losses, our ignorance.

I remember years ago there was a man I was attracted to. The eros of my experience fueled enormous creativity in me. His considerable talent inspired me as well. And because I had a lot of half-baked, naive ideas, and did not know how to confront him, he also had a lot of fun manipulating and humiliating me, probably, just because he could. I still cringe when I think about it. But until I was able to fore-give him and myself, I was unable to see the gifts in that experience. Had I not met him, I would not have created what I did. And I also probably would not have moved through naivete I had outgrown, and more importantly, a "victim" template I was deeply entrenched in. Ultimately, he empowered me. That's the paradox of Maat's Truth.

Raukkadessa is a Finnish term Kathy Huhtaluata uses in her Saami inspired music. It means, she told me, "beyond love". I find it profound - because even love, as we experience it, can be a veil, impenetrable in the present moment, and beyond is something beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond time itself. Beyond love is the the soul's love, the greater pattern.

A Buddhist once told me that we should cherish all sentient beings, because, from the perspective of reincarnation, any sentient being you meet has at one time or another been your mother, brother, lover, enemy, has been your food, or has devoured you.

One thing is certain. When we don't fore-give, we are unable to move fore-ward, because we are stuck in the past. And from my perspective, one of the wonderful things about having had the privilege of achieving the maturity of 60 years, is that one has the means and experience to finally know just that.

The rest is just practice. Carrying water, and chopping wood.

** This was from a 2002 performance I did with Dorit Bat Shalom, Mana Youngbear and Valerie James in Oakland. The actual questions of Maat are in various translations - we recited some of them in the background, in English and in Hebrew (since we lacked a native speaker of ancient Egyptian) while a dancer performed in the mask of Maat.

Farewell, at last, to the Faire

On a more prosaic note, the California Renaissance Faire just finished, and for the first time in 30 years, I actually lost money on the show. When this happens, it's time to hang it up.

So, I guess I'm now unemployed.
Well, it is about time I do something else anyway........

I remember a lot of incarnations on the "circuit". From being a dancer in the early 70's, to a Tarot card reader at the N.Y. REnfair, to the mask empire I had for a while with three permanent booths in the 90's. I remember............so much.

My friend Joyce Weiss at the Arizona Renfair

I may very well be the first mask artist on the "circuit" to create pagan mythological masks. I'll say it here, and be done with it, but just about everyone who has ever worked for me or even with me now has a mask business, and usually it includes some design and certainly techniques gained from me. I've put "fairies', "butterfly masks", and "greenmen masks" on the map. I won't say that it hasn't pissed me off sometimes..........still, it's how it is in our world. And in the big picture, I'm glad that I not only shared the art, but helped people out.

One of many, many Green Men.


This was with my ex husband, Duncan Eagleson, a talented artist.

This is the "rock and roll" Green Man.


Hey, now that I think about it, I've helped to re-populate the world with GREEN MEN.
As professions go, one could do worse.

Me when I was younger and in love with Kerry McNeil, the Bagpiper from Glencoe. I wonder where he is now? Handsome and ornery as ever, no doubt.

One of the many mask makers I've taught is Peggy Linich and her Satori Masks...........and she recently not only thanked me, but called me a "master". Well, hey! I guess I am! A Master! What do you know!

Rob Fletcher in Maryland

Time has come for me to say thank you, forgive everyone including myself, and wish I could have all the many, many people I've loved and met and danced with on the road........together in a large room with lots of good food and wine for one last Huzzah!

Except for Internet sales, or if I have the chance again to make special masks for theatre and ritual, I think I won't make masks anymore. I did my best work with the MASKS OF THE GODDESS collection. My intention was to create a group of Temple Masks, and I did, and they served that function. To be honest, I just don't want to make commercial masks as primary income any more, not when I've had the experience of making masks that served so much more.

So, although there is no 0ne around to give me a gold watch, I herein declare myself:

RETIRED!

And ready for something new.................Huzzah! It was a wonderful adventure, and there were many, many good times. My love and gratitude to all my fellow gypsy travellers. And it's true what they say.....old Rennies never die, they just keep on rolling.

"Are you going to Scarborough Faire?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to one who lives there,
she once was a true love of mine."

Paleologic - Rafael Montanez Ortiz

"We are the great work of art in progress. WE, ourselves."

Rafael Montanez Ortiz

I decided to post this interview and article I wrote about Rafael Ortiz (from an unpublished manuscript) because it is harmonious with the writings of David Abram in the previous Blog Entry. Rafael, although I am sure he does not know it, was an enormous catalyst and mentor to me as I floundered about trying to find a sense of purpose as an artist.

ART AND ALCHEMY

Rafael Montanez Ortiz has been a controversial artist since the early 1960's. His sculptural and video works, and documentations of his performances, are included in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Musee d'Art Moderni in Brussels.

He was the founder of the Museo del Barrio in New York City, and is also a writer and an educator. Dr. Ortiz has been a Professor of art at Rutgers University for over 30 years.

In the early '60's, Ortiz was known for his Deconstructed works. When he demolished a sofa in 1963 for his Archeological Finds series, the Art World became excited about "restructuring the ready-made" into something else. That was interesting stuff....but what was actually significant to Ortiz was the act of de-construction itself. The sculptures were artifacts, residue, archeological finds left behind by the release of force.

Ortiz came to believe that destructive energies could be released within the "appropriate arena" of art - it could be addressed as both an aesthetic and psychic process, an emotionally transformative means of revealing and exorcising the personal/collective shadow. In 1966, Ortiz attended the DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM (DIAS) in London. His first Piano Concert was at the request of the BBC. In "concert" with Anna Lockwood, a classical pianist, and film maker Harvey Matusow, they systematically "deconstructed" a piano. "Destruction has no place in society", Rafael Ortiz wrote, "It belongs to our dreams - it belongs to art."

When I read this, I thought of the Iroquois, who held a five-day midwinter festival called the "Feast of Dreams". Here members of the tribe brought their significant dreams to the Circle, to be shared and interpreted. If a dream expressed a "soul wish", the tribe endeavored to help the dreamer to work it through, by symbolically dramatizing it for them. In the 1960's, Ortiz became interested in the human potential movement, and studied Tantra, Sufism, and Bio-energetics. In 1978 he took a leave of absence to attend the Rocky Mountain Healing Arts Institute in Colorado. There he studied body-centered healing techniques, including re-birthing. He found that his studies of healing technology corresponded to a long interest in tribal shamanism and native spiritual traditions, wherein fasting, duration running, sleeplessness and physical ordeals were often used to seek vision, to enter what Ortiz calls the Dream. "And what is the Dream?" I asked. "The Dream" he responded, "is the original Art Process."

After returning from Colorado, Ortiz developed Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, his Inner Visioning performances. Each Performance begins with the participant lying on the floor, squeezing a large plastic ball between one's calves. The participant/performer is instructed by Ortiz to concentrate on breathing deeply, and applying continual muscular pressure on the ball. The body begins to arch involuntarily - it is as if one is pulled up from the center of the chest. This spontaneous flexing is a release of energy - what he calls physical and emotional "armoring". By maintaining pressure on the ball, a muscular tension develops which, in combination with concentration upon the breath, creates an altered state of consciousness, a trance state that is visionary, dreamlike, and often emotionally revealing as well.

I myself participated in only one performance. My body increasingly shook, and it was difficult to maintain the breath work. I experienced a gradual intensification of subtle movements of energy - at one point, I literally had the sensation of a "spinning wheel" concentrated in the region of my heart. It was as if a wheel revolved there, made of blue light, pulling me up from the chest without any effort on my part. Within the vortex were many incipient images. It is at this point that Ortiz invites the participant-artist to begin the Inner Visioning process, to pay attention to the images and sensations, memories and emotions that arise.

Participation in Physio-Psycho-Alchemy is an ongoing "work in progress". Some performers, in a kind of conscious, lucid dream, relive primal memories from childhood, or what they view as memories from past lives. Others, as visionary travelers, contact an inner landscape, a country where they encounter beings that converse with them, archetypal forms that illuminate and surprise. This is not something one has an interesting intellectual encounter with, like viewing an exhibit at a museum. Something to "get" and aesthetically move on. It is experienced on levels beyond and below intellect, and the artist/dreamer/performer is both Director and Actor, shaping his or her own performance.

Rafael Ortiz has also created a series of sculptures he calls Waxworks. He collected objects from acquaintances, which he then imbedded in wax, along with the stories about those objects which are written on clear acetate. The objects imbedded in the semi-transparent wax derive from events that had profound affect upon the lives of those they belonged to. The wax, thus, holds their actual experience, as well as their stories. "Wax is, for me, a Transformative medium. We talk about the moon waxing and waning, we talk about a wax museum...in other words, time and the history of time is held in this medium. It's transparent, but not as ephemeral as ice, which can turn to water and evaporate. Wax is a medium that is fluid, that can solidify and melt in the heat of life."

"The idea of putting objects into wax embodies the waxing and waning of time, and the embedded object is the Icon of experience. These are rituals that change us in some way, and my concern, again, is that art become a transformative process that is life-affirming, that moves one into an enhanced self-understanding." "The existential exchange between you and the object is the Context. So, here I have objects in the wax, and a story that goes with them, the Text, that also has gone into the wax, and also becomes part of the Object. And so there is a Text within the Object, and there is an Object within the Text. That's the transmutation, the invisible reality made visible." In his early work, Rafael Ortiz as performer released the Shadow, the unclaimed, in the arena of art. In later work, he invites us to experience themselves as visionaries within a conscious dreaming process, multi-dimensional creators beyond the "surfaces" of an imagined "objective" world. Waxworks is existential Alchemy, sculptures that are rites of passage, moving through both metaphor and time. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTERVIEW WITH DR. RAFAEL MONTANEZ ORTIZ
August 15, 1988

Lauren: You have spent years studying native cultures and shamanism. Do you believe there is a relationship between what we call schizophrenia and shamanism? Joseph Campbell, among others, thought so.

Rafael: Psychogists often view early religions, shamanism, as related to insanity, and that's incorrect. It is a logic process that is "paleological", meaning it is a predicative and sub-predicative association, allowing one to find the relationship between things which ordinarily you wouldn't find. Within the very powerful context of metaphor. You run fast, a deer runs fast, you're a deer. This is an issue of belief. That belief exists, in and out of trance. The trance is only the vehicle for further revelation.

Lauren: The shaman/visionary is not cast into what we might call the unconscious, but chooses to go there?

Rafael: He or she places themselves there for vision, but he or she is already there. In other words, Paleologic is operative as a culture process. Very much like the Senoi, who work with the dream and all of its contradictions on a daily basis, which psychoanalysis would call very neurotic, psychologically distorted, pathological. And that is ridiculous!

A culture that shares its dream daily moves Paleologic into a culture process, information that is exchanged between members of the community, and is valid and rational. It's not "we're all being crazy now". That's how we see it. Paleologic is a holistic kind of reasoning, the sense of oneself being part of the universe, and everything being a part of everything else. It's their sanity. When we feel that, and are then overwhelmed because of our own contradictions, submerged anger, and so on....then all these associations overwhelm us and we are "insane".

Lauren: And scared...

Rafael: Absolutely. These early cultures manage what our later "civilized” cultures cannot, which is being comfortable with a sense of one's place in the universe.

Lauren: Are you saying that much of what we now must examine concerns a return to the past?

Rafael: Yes. A return to something already accomplished thousands of years ago by native cultures of the world, something we buried in our most recent history.

Lauren: What exactly do you mean by "Paleologic"?

Rafael: You can break logic down into Platonic logic, which is ideal, Aristotelian logic, which is more practical, the logic of subject, and then Paleologic, the logic of predicate and sub-predicate association. Once you become ideal, you find things are not related, but are separated, ideally separated. At the Aristotelian level, the world is seen in an even more complicated way, everything breaks down.

In Paleologic there is the concept of holistically defined relationships between everything on all levels. The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic. The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order for us to "have control".

Lauren: And thus blinding us to the essential connections?

Rafael: Paleologic asserts that Spirit resides in all things. And thus we have a responsibility to all things because we're intertwined with them, and they to us. Paleologic cultures least objectify, we most objectify.

Lauren: In the book about your work, published by El Muse Del Barrio, there is a quote by you that struck me: "Destruction has no place in society - it belongs to our dreams, it belongs to art." How can destruction take place in our dreams and art, and not in our lives?

Rafael: Destruction, viewed from our cultural perspective, is the result of a sense of injustice, deprivations, a sense of disenfranchisement, whether coming from the real experience of being disenfranchised, or simply having a tantrum at not getting what you want, that is accumulated. Not everybody wants to become a boxer or a hockey player, which are outlets for that aggression to be released within an acceptable game structure.

Generally, there is no arena within which these forces can be released. Art, being available to everyone, is the perfect arena within which these rituals can occur to bridge gaps between one's conflicts, and one's having to be in the world in some humane way.

Lauren: How did you move from the De-construction Work you did in your youth, to the work you are now doing?

Rafael: For me, before one can appreciate a higher purpose, one has to integrate and resolve one's lower purposes.

Lauren: Which is what the De-construction work was about, ritualizing the tantrum or that collective force that is the root of destructive behavior?

Rafael: Yes, but it becomes re-integrated, evolving to where you are finally sacrificing subtle things, like your ego, your loyalty to an environment or worldview that keeps you from a holistic consciousness. Sacrificing objectification. Not to be entranced forever, to be "blissed out" in some self-indulgent ecstatic state, but to be appropriately connected with the life force in everything.

That's where my work Physio-Psycho-Alchemy begins: the work is then on a level wherein higher purposes can be addressed and accomplished. It's like a trip into Hell, moving in a spiral up to Heaven. But through the experience of your Hell, so you can be integrated and released. Thus, it doesn't become a service for holy wars.

There are many who want to move into their higher purpose, but deny, haven't resolved their lower purposes, their shadows. They assume they can simply discard it. These are the people who start a jihad.

Lauren: If we deny the shadow, we'll somehow project it outside of ourselves?

Rafael: Remember the movie, "Forbidden Planet"?

Lauren: Yes, their "id creature" destroyed their civilization. So, in order to integrate these internal forces, one must see it and be it?

Rafael: Or find a safe haven for it, and art is a haven, a solution.

Lauren: When did you first begin to explore some of these issues?

Rafael: Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had a concern for the visionary, asking how I could move that into art process. I read the DOORS OF PERCEPTION, I read about the Native American peyote ritual, and a number of other related books. That was when I began to seriously think about and explore what information was available about shamanic cultures. To see how I could reconnect from those cultures into my own contemporary art.

As it relates to my Inner Vision work, certainly then I recognized the importance of the vision quest. I saw it as an important part of the art process. I began to study the Sufis, Yoga, all those techniques in which one's own physiological potential can produce altered and heightened states of consciousness. That became, for me, part of my higher purpose; the idea of our having these abilities intrinsically within our own bodies - within the power of the breath, the nervous system, and the imagination.

Physio-Psycho-Alchemy is about releasing a muscular and skeletal hold that consciousness has on the body as it concerns itself with gravity. You can then begin to feel the power of the life force. It's like floating on the surface of a body of water that is in wave action; and as we give ourselves up to it, we gradually become conscious of the life force, we're letting it flow. That's one level. The breath moves us from an acid state. We release carbon dioxide, which is acid, and taking in more oxygen, we move to an alkaline state, which excites the central nervous system.

The central nervous system then begins to release information, imagery. So, as the body releases, the central nervous system sends energy and information. It's as if every cell in your body makes a phone call to you at the same time. At that point, you can feel a pull from the heart center, up to the center of the universe, and you go through that dance, feeling it pull you up without any effort. Then you're ready for the Inner Vision work.

At that point, the Inner Vision work becomes profound, and is in service of releasing the body to the innate life force, rather than distracting the participant from release, which can happen. That distraction is like being on a journey, and you stop at some curious, fascinating pebble along the way and stay there, instead of continuing on the road. The idea is to continue.

Often, I keep suggesting that the participant goes back to the release, the breath, the next level, in order to not become entranced by suddenly becoming aware of something he or she has never been conscious of before. It's important to combine releasing with the breath work, and experience a complete release before going on to the Inner Vision work. At the beginning of the work, you have to pay attention to where you conserve energy, where your "armor" is.

At the first level of the work, you're becoming conscious of how you hold your body. With breathing and muscular techniques, we learn how to "let go" of the body, and we don't see it as "losing control". With Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, you re-acquire the assurance that you are in complete control, you can give up the body to the nervous system: and as you give up the body, you begin to be conscious of it. There is an interdependency not unlike quantum mechanics. The more attention you pay to the particle, the less able you are to locate its position.

When you consciously "let go" of the body, you consciously "let go" of space and time.

Lauren: When I did my session with you, I experienced an intense shaking. What was that?

Rafael: The shaking is the release. What's shaking is your own armor, and that takes time to release in preparation for the deeper levels of the performance, the Inner Vision work. The average number of performances for a participant is about 12.

Lauren: I have to ask the question you so often receive. How is this art?

Rafael: How is this not art is really the question. Art is not something that is "in the eye of the beholder". That's like saying "life is in the eye of the beholder". Art is an inherent part of being itself. We can say that art is the imagination of form, and that within some greater metaphysic, it is the soul's imagination, encapsulating a history of being, that then seeks the flesh of matter to be. It's called incarnation.

In terms of art process, if you can understand that, see where it begins, you can certainly then envision the imagining itself, in your day to day life, as being works of art. Dreams, awake and asleep imagining. We are the art material, the great work of art in progress: we, ourselves.

Lauren: You have said that there is no separation between the dream and art. What is the dream?

Rafael: The dream is where the important formulations, solutions and relegations occur. It's the state within which the mythic potential that is ours unfolds, and teaches us. We've lost touch with that. Native cultures give integrity to that process.

Again, when I say native cultures, I mean the original cultures of the world, whether we talk about Sumerian, Celtic, Native American, the Mayan, the Hopi, the African shaman.....those cultures within which the dream was central to their evolutionary development.

Our civilization sees the dream as irrational. I remember actually reading once about some scientist trying to invent a pill that would eliminate the toxin secreted by some gland in the brain that would then eliminate dreaming! We want to eliminate it, because we are a culture that is still suffering from nightmares, in contrast to the Senoi in Malaysia, where there is no nightmare, it's all been integrated by the time one gets through adolescence.

Then, your dreams serve your highest creative potential. The dream is for counsel, whether it's finding solutions for an illness, or ways to engineer a bridge that has to be built. So, the dream becomes the original art process, the art process that is inherent to our being, our imagining, our creativity. We daydream, we sleep dream. That imagining is the original art within which we make this bridge.

Lauren: So our denial of the dream is one of the reasons you once referred to the modern world as "psychotic"?

Rafael: Yes. Unfortunately, a psychotic is the last to know his own psychosis. Until, as with us, it can unfold in some unbelievable catastrophe, such as a nuclear war or ecological disaster.

I was reading a newsletter recently that espoused the most insane notions of what our economy should be like. It was something that is published and distributed to people who are interested in investing in stocks, buying gold and that whole business. What it advocated, without any self-consciousness whatsoever, was the idea of an economy absolutely free of any control. Wherein there was no concern for the support of any persons in society, or for the planet for that matter.

Being your brother's keeper, humanism in such light is seen as witchcraft, subversive, un-American. That to me is psychosis.

Lauren: How do you work with a group in your performances?

Rafael: It is participatory within this idea that art is "actual". It's important for the audience to not be passive. To avoid an abstract/cognitive notion of involvement. The abstract/cognitive allows one to violate physical realities.

We can find all sorts of amazing rationalizations through abstracting that remove us from feeling, from empathy. For me, art that utilizes only cognitive ability is teaching us, at the mythic level, to shift away from the body as a complex sensory experience that can tell us when we've shifted away from higher purpose, from compassion.

Lauren: That shifts us away from realizing that the body is also an aspect of our spirit?

Rafael: The brain isn't just in our heads. The brain is the entire body, which includes the aura, all of the etheric networks that exist between us and all life. Whether we're talking about a forest, or another person, the abstract/cognitive removes us entirely from that experience of communion, the ability to sense what is going on. These abstractions become what is going on.

We can objectify at the drop of a hat. We have no problem making an object of anyone or anything. If the logic of a culture permits you to abstract to that extent, it then permits you to live without conscience. Whereas if you feel interrelated, you have the freedom of genuine conscience.

Lauren: Experiential conscience?

Rafael: Exactly. You feel what you do. This is the paleologic of native cultures. And the artist can reconnect with native cultures in forms, contents, materials, strategies, and metaphysics in a way that includes the present experience.

Lauren: Would you say that you, as an artist, are creating a new shamanic tradition?

Rafael: No, I don't want to presume so much about what is traditionally so brilliant and powerful. I would be happy if I could meet it halfway.

We're talking about a tradition that has grown over thousands and thousands of years. How old is contemporary art? It's a babe in the woods by comparison, in terms of understanding creative process, and how that process serves our relationship to each other, the planet, and the universe.

Within the participatory traditions in art, there is no passive audience. That's a recent idea, which is part of the compromise, the tears and breaks from arts original intentions. The ancient art process was a transformative process; it wasn't a show, it wasn't entertainment. Art becomes entertainment within a culture that objectifies. If one can enjoy that transformative experience, and certainly in early cultures it was enjoyed, you could perhaps say it was "entertaining". When you say entertainment now, what is meant is that it doesn't change you in any way, what it does is to help you to forget.

We need to see ourselves again as part of a brilliant, shimmering web of life. An artist at some point has to face that issue. Is the art connecting us and others in some way, or is the art disconnecting ourselves and others? I think it's not enough to just realign ourselves personally either - our art should also do that for others, and further, it must happen outside of the abstract.

It must be a process that in its form and content joins us with the life force in ourselves, and in others. And that's not going to be easy. But I do believe that secrets and solutions exist in native cultures of the world. They spent thousands of years uncovering those possibilities, and enough has survived through different traditions for artists to find more than enough inspiration.



copyright Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Ph.d., and Lauren Raine (1988)