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| "A House of Doors VI." (1985) |
ART CRITICWith renovations almost done, I find myself nervously finding little jobs to keep doing. The reality of having returned from my summer's pilgrimage, transformed, yes, but needing to set a new course and a goal..........is leering at me from the shadows of my errend ridden life. I do mildly ask for guidance, although I sometimes imagine my guides find me frustrating. I don't dream, I'm as psychic as a brick these days, even the I Ching is bored with me. So I find myself pondering a little synchronicity that happened yesterday morning - whether it was precipitated by what Joseph Campbell called "invisible support", or I did it without realizing I had, doesn't really matter.
This life will be
my dubious masterpiece,
an exhibition
in some dusty, star-strewn gallery.
Maybe, one in a series,I'll call them
"Studies in Blue and Red":
blue for capillaries, and the sky
too vast to fathom,
red for the tangible heart.
I leave it to the Critic
to analyze technique,
style, and historical relevance.
If I don't receive a glowing review,
I pray, at least,
they will find my work original.
(1975)
I was listening to CD's the other day, and one of them was by Mussorgsky. The collection which never fails to take me, in my imagination, to the grand galleries of an earlier era, and the windows into other worlds that a painting really is. I thought I left all the cd's by the player, but when I made my bed, "Pictures from an Exhibition" tumbled out from the sheets. I went to bed with it? That seems unlikely. But I did, indeed, "sleep on it".
Pictures at an Exhibition is a collection in ten movements for piano by by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874. Each piece is a musical interpretation of "pictures" the composer might have seen at a post-mortem exhibition of the paintings of his friend Victor Hartmann. As Wikipedia describes the work,
"The sudden loss of the artist shook Mussorgsky along with others in Russia's art world. Stasov helped organize an exhibition of over 400 Hartmann works in St. Petersburg. Mussorgsky lent works from his personal collection to the exhibit and viewed the show in person. Fired by the experience, he composed Pictures at an Exhibition in six weeks. The music depicts an imaginary tour of an art collection. Titles of individual movements allude to works by Hartmann.......He described the experience in June 1874: "Hartmann is seething. Sounds and ideas float in the air and my scribbling can hardly keep pace with them."
When I get that I'm experiencing a synchronicity, an event that has, like the figures in dreams, symbolic and meaningful content, I try to meditate upon the event. A synchronicity is a "Living Metaphor", and can represent guidance, solutions to questions, or, as the Trish and Rob MacGregor (http://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets) suggest in their wonderful new book Synchronicity and The Other Side, a synchronicity may represent spirit contact.
Perhaps, it's just plain time to go back to work, back to the studio. I'll take my little synchro as encouragement, and a reminder.
