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CT ARTSCENE BLOGSPOT

The Sublime: philosophical selections by Longinus Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, & Wordsworth
a brilliant short essay by Janice E. Patten, faculty of San Jose State University.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) : A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin
of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful (Bartleby.com - complete text)

Longinus on the Sense of the SUBLIME

The Web Gallery contains over 8,500 digital reproductions of European paintings
and sculptures created between the years 1150 and 1800.
http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

Northern Renaissance Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

The Artcyclopedia

The Artchive

Gallery Worldwide -contemporary art

Pablo Picasso cubism history /www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

Advanced Techniques and Materials of Music
(Dr. Gordon J. Callon)

A Guide for translating symbolism in Renaissance art:
Caesar Ripa (fl. England, 1600) -- "ICONOLOGIA or Moral Emblems
various images of virtues, vices, paffions, arts, Humours, elements & celeftial bodies"

Caesar Ripa's  ICONOLOGIA transcribed by Rawn Clark on Adam McLean's Alchemy website.

The William Blake Archive

FLIGHT -- a video poem by Lisa Seidenberg, incorporating the poem "Journey Home" by Rabindranath Tagore.

http://movingpoems.com/filmmaker/lisa-seidenberg/

"This is flight, a videopoem," writes Lisa Seidenberg A.K.A. Miss Muffett. "Tagore’s poem is displayed in silent-movie-style intertitles with footage of the refugee crisis from Hungary, Greece, and Austria over a soundtrack of Russian choral music — an effective, high-contrast juxtaposition, I thought."

The poetry is sublime, the music haunting and beautiful, and the images powerful, filled with deep empathy, and tugging at the conscience of the world.
~Johnes Ruta AzothGallery.com

Sadly and happily, I am a slow reader. Sadly because this has held me back in certain ways, but happily because it has given me the gifts of deep vicarious experience in slow motion, such as in reading the depth of discoveries and wonders in Ralph White's memoir "The Jeweled Highway." Even at my own pace, this book is a fascinating "page turner." Ralph is the co-founder of the New York Open Center, the most significant holistic learning center in any U.S. city, and since 1983 its Executive Director. Through its overseas Esoteric Quest conferences and New York lecture series, I've been privileged to know him since 1995.

As he describes in his book, he was a participant in the Findhorn spiritual/ecological learning commune in northern Scotland in the 1970s, and the program director of the renown Omega Institute where it had started in Bennington, Vermont. In 1981, he helped build its permanent center from an abandoned Yiddish camp in Rhinebeck, New York.

But, most of all, Ralph White's warm, poignant, and compelling narrative of his life story qualifies him as a true Humanist. From his early childhood in Wales his family moved for work to the coal-dust covered English mill town of Huddersfield, a place of tedium and hopelessness, devoid of any of the color of life or culture. Through academic achievement, he was able to attend Sussex University in the south of England, where his future began to unfold.

Crossing the U.S. to study in Seattle in the late 1960s, he then hitched with friends to Mexico, Guatemala, Columbia, and Peru to bus along treacherous mountain roads and climb to Machu Picchu. With vivid memories and a flowing writing style, White describes the hardships of these dangerous and lonely travels, and long, isolated periods of working to save up the money to escape the places where he'd been marooned on his way back. Eventually back in the U.S., these pioneering and exhausting adventures, and his own intellectual exuberance, gave him the renewed strength and resources to take on the hard work of creating and building up these learning centers which are at the forefront of the Consciousness Movement, providing profound alternative paths and learning experiences to city dwellers of both corporate and modest means. Even then, White's own path led to further and on-going amazing adventures !

For me, Ralph White's memoir has been a quest both along one Humanist's "Jeweled Highway" of life, and a journey to the spiritual richness of the crystal palace of Enlightenment. Great Work, Ralph !

~ Johnes Ruta
New Haven, CT
Independent Curator & Art Theorist
http://AzothGallery.com/
azothgallery@comcast.net

Book Info:
Ralph White -- The Jeweled Highway : on the Quest for a Life of Meaning
Forward by Thomas Moore
Published by: DivineArts -- DivineArtsMedia.com, 2015
Studio City, California
Amazon.com Books

From: Johnes Ruta, Art Gallery Director of the New Haven Free Public Library, http://AzothGallery.com/

Dear Cyra,
On my third visit on Sunday, November 23rd, to the YBAC's exhibition "Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in 18th century Atlantic Britain," I was again curious as to the label of the introductory item of the exhibition "Elihu Yale; William Cavendish, Second Duke of Devonshire; Lord James Cavendish; Mr. Tunstal, and an Enslaved Servant" as the painting is identified as "Unknown artist." As the question of this painting's authorship was not specifically addressed in any of the three interesting online interviews on the Yale Center for British Art web page for this exhibition, I would like to make a contribution of my associated research:

As an art curator and theoretical analyst, I would like to respectfully suggest that the artist of this painting might be John Smybert (Smibert) (1688-1751). I am led to this idea, by a study that I made three years ago on Smybert's painting "The Bermuda Group" which is in the permanent collection of the Yale Art Gallery, depicting the Empiricist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley and his entourage, on the eve of their voyage to Newport in 1729. The stated purpose of their mission was to establish a ministerial training college on the island of Bermuda, a mission ultimately unsuccessful. John Smybert was born in Edinburgh, and worked as a painter and plasterer before coming to London where he studied with Sir John Thornhill. His painting style is similar to Thornhill's but much more distinct in his depiction of faces. This Smybert painting, which I first saw in the 2011 Yale Art Gallery exhibition "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," is now on display in the permanent collection in the 2nd floor rear room of the new Street Hall section of the Yale Gallery.

On first seeing this "Bermuda Group" painting, my interest was invoked as an example of a peculiar branch of the 18th century philosophical movement Empiricism as taught by George Berkeley, whose outlook, as stated in his 1709 "A New Theory of Vision," was seen by many of his contemporaries, even such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, as a concept tantamount to solipsism. However, in the light of modern medical technology, CT Scans, and MRIs, we may consider that Berkeley was onto something closer to a modern physiological understanding of brain function.

My research essay on aspects Berkeley's brand of of Empiricism, and his intended application towards colonial psychology, as suggested in Smybert's painting, is attached [included below on this blog, ed.].

The date of circa 1708 is attributed to the "Elihu Yale..." group painting, at which time Smybert would have been 20 years old. according to Richard H. Saunders' thesis on John Smibert, the artist came from Scotland to London in 1709:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Wklq3JItYOgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22John+Smibert%22+paintings&hl=en&ei=uIXhToHCLKjf0QG76o
DTBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22John%20Smibert%22%20paintings&f=false

In the "Bermuda Group" piece as in the "Elihu Yale," the same palette of vivid colors is applied, the positions, settings, and strong focus of faces are highly similar, and the sanguine painting tones of complexions are in the same palette. Both paintings are of similar large scale. The constellation of figures follows the same conceptual pattern. Most notably, compared to other painters of the time, the treatment of background motifs are uniquely similar, in the YBAC painting, with dark, indistinct trees on the left. In the background center of the YBAC painting stands the base of a large column, whereas, in the Bermuda painting the background stand a widely-spaced columnade. On the right, are more lightened, medium-brown trees with detailed limbs and branches, with closely matched yellow-green foliage, and a circle of children with joined hands. Both paintings share a high degree of suggestion of aspects of individual personalities of each figure. --- There is certainly also the possibility that John Smybert saw the "Elihu Yale" painting, and thereby followed its style. Following the failure of Berkeley's Bermuda project, Smybert settled in Boston, where his portrait work became successful.

I would very much be interested in your opinions of these observations. Thank you!

Respectfully submitted for your interest,
Johnes Ruta
independent curator & art theorist -- since 1988; organizer of Philosophical Forums
Art Gallery Director New Haven Free Public Library - since 2005
http://AzothGallery.com/
azothgallery@comcast.net
203.387.4933
22 Willard Street
New Haven, CT 06515

Smibert began drawing while apprenticed as a painter and plasterer, on moving to London he worked as a painter of coach carriages and a copyist.He studied under Sir James Thornhill at his academy, then travelled to Edinburgh and Europe seeking work as portraitist. He gained a reputation for his works copying old masters and receiving commissions for portraits in Italy and returned to England to capitalise on this.

Smibert painted a group portrait of the 'Virtuosi of London' society, of which he was a member; others in the group were John Wootton, Thomas Gibson, George Vertue, Bernard Lens, and other artists. He did not complete the painting, but did produce portraits in London up to September 1728, including one of Bishop Berkeley.

In 1728 he accompanied Berkeley to America, with the intention of becoming professor of fine arts in the college which Berkeley was planning to found in Bermuda. The college, however, was never established, and Smybert settled in Boston, where he married in 1730. He lived at the corner of Brattle Street and Queen-Street. He belonged to the Scots Charitable Society of Boston.

In 1728 he began painting "Dean George Berkeley and His Family," also called "The Bermuda group", now in the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, a group of eight figures; it is maintained that the person farthest to the left is actually the artist himself. He painted portraits of Jonathan Edwards and Judge Edmund Quincy (in the Boston Art Museum), Mrs Smybert, Peter Faneuil and Governor John Endecott (in the Massachusetts Historical Society), John Lovell (Memorial Hall, Harvard University), and probably one of Sir William Pepperrell; and examples of his works are owned by Harvard and Yale Universities, by Bowdoin College, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and by the New England Historical and Genealogical Society.

In 1734, Smibert opened a shop where he sold paint, other artist's supplies, and prints. In his studio above the shop, he displayed casts and copies of Old Masters that he had painted in Europe. This collection, which Richard Saunders has termed "America's first art gallery", provided much of the early artistic education for Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Trumbull.

Horrors Which Remain:
Examining Siegfried Sassoon and World War I

contributed by Jenni Farnsworth

It is an obvious and fundamental fact that artistic expression is both a form of personal freedom as well as being a challenge to (and weapon against) the kyriarchy and its numerous manifestations worldwide. Art is inherently subversive and uncontrollable; Audre Lorde wrote that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, and art is, of course, one of the tools with the power to both dismantle the old and construct something new. In the shadow of the 100th anniversary of the first world war, it is fascinating to examine the ways in which soldiers - themselves victims of the politicians who valued profiteering and antiquated colonial worldviews over human lives - used art to describe and grapple with the horrors they witnessed. Post-traumatic stress disorder was many wars away from being recognized, and so artists - particularly writers - strove to return a sense of individual lives to the massive, faceless numbers of the dead and dying.

“All a poet can do today is warn.” - Wilfred Owen

Today they are called the war poets (1), those young men who were brought to the trenches to die and who instead left proof that they had lived. Some - including Wilfred Owen - did fall beneath the weight of history’s careless cruelty, while others survived to write about their experiences with what would one day be called ‘post traumatic stress disorder’ (2). Although it is a step forward to recognize the very real trauma experienced by soldiers, to go beyond dismissing it as ‘shell shock’, there is also the danger of reducing it to a simple problem to be treated and dismissed. Hypervigilance, feeling of detachment, outbursts of anger, and harrowing flashbacks; these are the symptoms of PTSD (3), while also being a very human reaction to the wounding of the self which occurs when we observe, or commit, atrocities. Siegfried Sassoon, whose own life was a fascinating meeting of privilege and lack thereof, became an avowed pacifist in fierce opposition to the jingoistic, nationalistic sentiments which sent out the barely grown to slaughter other children in the name of peace (4). His poetry and prose rings out with the continual aftershocks of the war’s horror, as well as the empty promises of glory which were fed to young men with no idea of what they would witness:

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never think there was a bloody war on!…
O yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft … they never cease—
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

from “Repression of War Experience” by Siegfried Sassoon (5)

“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority” - Siegfried Sassoon

Supported by pacifists such as Bertrand Russell, Sassoon’s “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration” was read out in the British House of Commons and published in the London Times (6), a brave and fierce act of speaking truth to power. For refusing to bow to the “war of aggression and conquest”, Sassoon risked his very life; having survived his time in the trenches, his life still laid in the hands of politicians, who may very well have sentenced him to military execution. The forerunner of PTSD (7), shell shock, was instead blamed for his outrage - as shell shock was a politically motivated diagnosis (8), this subversion of its intended use stands as an attack of its own against the powers that be. Sassoon was forced into treatment for his ‘war neurosis’, where he met Wilfred Owen, also suffering under the weight of his experiences. Both returned to the frontlines out of a sense of duty to their fellow soldiers, who suffered under the yoke of regimes both understood to be self-serving liars. Sassoon returned from the war; Owen did not, and died at the age of 25 (9).

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

from “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen

Notes:

1. “Modern History Sourcebook: World War I Poetry”, Fordham University, last accessed May 28 2014

2. “The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry”, Penguin, last accessed May 28 2014

3. “PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)”, PsychGuides.com, last accessed May 28 2014

4. “Siegfried Sassoon”, The First World War Digital Poetry Archives, last accessed May 28 2014

5. “Fateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses”, Journal of Contemporary History, last accessed May 28 2014

6. “Form and Uses of Language”, the Open University, last accessed May 28 2014

7. “PTSD History and Overview”, National Center for PTSD, last accessed May 28 2014

8. “Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–1930”, Oxford Journals, last accessed May 29 2014

9. “Wilfred Owen”, Shropshire Tourism, last accessed May 29 2014

This Pretty Poetics

by Maxwell Clark

"Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems[...]"

--Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself'

Poesy is the doing of anything. Poesy is there in the poet who works out any poem. A poem is any product of any behaviors whatsoever. Each of us who do things are poets. Each of us poets are the unacknowledged legislators of our common world. Each of us is also dependent on the poesy of the other poets going beyond us, as if we ever were alone, for each of us to be most fully beautiful. Beauty is the excess of light over from within gravity, or an excess of what is over and apart itself, i.e. desire. Poesy affirms desires, in whose faith is their creation.

The prettiness of any poesy or poet or poem is the beauty of their gravity-overcoming light within gravity. Desire is desire for more light to be released from gravity. Or perhaps not released, but melded further into the empty abyssal compaction of gravity, if just so also as to become the more unmixedly luminous. Poesy is the beauty of light emanating from, in, around, and of gravity. Any poem is just an aspect of light jutting out into some precarious stasis with the otherwise abyssal compaction of gravity.

Poesy teaches the life of the poet in their poem. Poesy expresses what remains of the poet there in their poem. The poet thus addresses others. But only insofar as others before affected the poet with their immemorially more raw desire. A poet only focuses the prior desires of their others, i.e. brings their light over above and out from gravity.
.....

Others either hide away or show forth their own faces of light across from the gravity of the poet’s subjectivity. A poet subject to the gravity of themselves alone is no poet. Only their inspiration by the light of the presence of their others secures poets as poets.

.....

Others either face the poet in the beautifying light of their poesy or they turn away. The more others turn their light from the poet the less each and every one of these poets is beautiful. The poesy of a poet is the facing of others towards, into, through, and then beyond the herein absolutely passive presence of the poet. Poesy is the facing of the other’s light through a thus beautified receptacle of a poet and their attendantly generated poems. Others face a poet’s poem as themselves gone beyond themselves through this poet, as an aspect of the ensemble of others (also poets) facing their light through this poet.
......

Light is the poesy which gravity compacts into poems. The poet is an enclosure of gravity suffused with too much light. A poet is already a poem. A poem is already a poet. Poets and poems are local accretions of the cosmic metabolism of light and gravity. .......

A poet is a gravitational density more or less porous with light. The poem, as the poet, materializes in how light ever disarrays gravity’s inertia. As was the poet, so is their poem. Poesy is the interminable proliferation of light within gravity.
........

The poet is the poem is the light of poesy overcoming gravity from within. There is not any way to predict any future forms taken by the catalyzation of gravity by light. Nor is there any method for securing the least regularity in poetic outcome on this cosmic register of poetic formation. Future poets and their poems will take hold as formed only out of the chaotic generativity of gravity and light, any otherwise more telling details are futile to assume.

.........

A poet, as their poem, is a face that conveys more or less of the light of many otherwise faces. Poesy is not in the gravitational attraction of a poet or poem on others, it is in how the light of others’ faces somehow shows through the self-enclosing gravity of a poet or a poem.
..........

Poesy is light weighed down by gravity. Poets and poems are local mixtures of gravity with light. Poesy is never the doing of one poet alone; poesy is the facing of an otherwise light in, through, and beyond the poet, until gravity reclaims this inspiration as a discretely compacted poem.

...........

Gravity slows the poesy of light into poets and poems. Poets and poems are torpors of light. Light has no poesy, produces neither poets nor poems, minus its reciprocal presence within its antitype of gravity.
............
~ by Maxwell Clark January 4. 2014
maxclark84@gmail.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] The preconscious, as in Freud, is the “non-repressed” unconsciousness, whose activities are far more easily brought into consciousness than many other of the more repressed elements of the unconscious. My paintings, as such, are not very truly explained by the fields of depth psychology, dream interpretation, or any neurotic repressions, etc. If I simply do not think the fully repressed contents of my psyche have or will or even can come to surface on my canvases, this is insofar I am enough aware of the tremendously difficult science (linguistics) of their psychoanalytic cure.

INDIA.

To me, the most interesting portraits in this painting are those facing the viewer directly. Intelligent and maternal gaze (with a hint of irony) of Dean's wife seems to belong to a female who represents a good grounding force for her rotund yet "immaterial" husband. The child she is holding suggests a possibility of a fresh start and perhaps an amusement of a future generation viewing the pompous setting.The most captivating, however, is the very direct, piercing glance of an artist himself, reminiscent of an insertion of Diego Velazquez into his painting of the Spanish royal family ('"The Maids of Honor", I think). He appears to see himself at once as a witness, social critic and a detached, somewhat elevated observer. Although in the background and almost added to the picture, he is the one holding the true power, not prominently placed Berkeley. So I believe Smibert managed to mock all the other males in the painting, sharing the ground with the mother and the child instead. Thus he gave himself the best spot and got paid for it too. How is that for an enlightened self-interest, if not entirely "immaterial" philosophically in this case. But at least he is the most unpretentious person in the group. Never under-estimate the power an artist! I am happy (and envious) you are beginning to practice the power of your art of writing again, but it helps to increase my own writing urges too.
Warmly,Magda

Johnes Ruta, a complex writer and art critic and reader of Western Philosophy, presents an interesting and challenging essay which reflects social-spiritual tendencies in human society from Berkeley’s century until our times.

The idea of writing this essay was inspired by John Smibert’s 1729 painting of “The Bermuda Group,” displayed in the Yale Art Gallery exhibition “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The artist Smibert depicts in a traditional and documentary style a major figure of Eighteenth century philosophy, the David George Berkeley and his entourage – family, sponsor, and teaching administrators. Ruta gives a subtle, aesthetic description of the painting, compositional disposition of personages – dominated by the tall stature of Berkeley. The figures are related to the whole atmosphere of art work, but in the same time each of them seems to have their own mind-inside preoccupation – similar to Berkeley’s concept of Immaterialism that Ruta relates to solipsism.

Berkeley and his group descended from London in 1729 with the main goal to create on the island of Bermuda a college “for better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations” and to convert the people to Christianity.

Inspired by the philosophical ideas of Berkeley, Ruta develops a multi-layered social-spiritual web which represents a dynamic, dramatic relation between Idealism and Materialism, the continuing search of the human mind to define the truth, the reality, and the field of knowledge. He considers Berkeley a preeminent figure in the philosophical movement called Empiricism. This system originated with thinkers like Epicurus (senses: valid source of knowledge), Thales, Aristotle, Descartes (mind perception is superior to the senses), John Locke (experience if essential), or Leibniz.

Ruta shows that “in terms of categories of Idealism and Materialism, the concept of Immaterialism – argued by Berkeley has been variously misunderstood.” and also, when the idea of Immaterialism “became close to solipsism (only one’s own mind is sure to exist), there have been generated conflicting interpretations…” The principles of solipsism can be summarized as: 1. Egotism (isolation of the self), 2. Metaphysical (individual perspective), and 3. Epistemological (history of the field of knowledge.)

Ruta emphasizes that Berkeley, as this “preeminent Western Idealist in the metaphysical sense” sustains that deep distinction between mental states and external things, and, Ruta continues, “Berkeley expressed this with the Latin formula “Esse est percepi” (To be is to be perceived.) , and thereby concludes that “Berkeley’s concept of Immaterialism is carried to its logical extreme “with this view of the world which defines a subjective reality from each person” (a purely subjective uni-verse.)

The philosophical Berkeley sees the whole universe as a manifestation of a supreme deity, the God and “any order humans may see in nature is the landscape of the handwriting of God…”

In the Eighteenth century, the sophisticated term of “Immaterialism” (and solipsism) would be applied only to the privileged classes, superior beings, and the land-owners (“to preserve the social order as the perceived and correct order of the universe.”

In the conclusion of his essay, Ruta says “Subjective Idealism,” as proposed by Berkeley, was surely only a domain of the privileged classes and is still being fought for in the 21st century. There are indeed many problems of our contemporary world: social movements discontent with governments, the struggle of people to find truth, the correct relations between the members of society. Inspired by Ruta’s essay, I would like to present some additional ideas, concepts from some philosophical thinking, religious teachings, and some spiritual thinkers and writers.

* Buddhist School – Vaibhasika

-- Direct Perception and inference are valid conditions.

-- Existence of: * sense perception

* mental direct perception

* yogic direct perception

-- existence of Ultimate and Relative Truths.

* Buddhist School – Sautrantikas

-- existence of Ultimate and Relative Truths.

-- Ultimate Truth: a phenomenon that is able to perform a function.

-- things that exist momentarily.

-- physical sense powers are not valid cognition.

-- mental perception is valid cognition.

-- existence of direct perception: sense, mental, yogic, self-consciousness.

* Buddhist school of Mind only (Cittamatras)

-- the basis of all phenomena is the mind.

-- the appearance of all external objects is similar to dreams; external objects do not exist and they only exist in the mind.

* Buddhist Mahayana school

-- all phenomena are in a continuum of change, and flux movement.

-- all phenomena are depending arising: depend on causes and on conditions.

-- Theory of Emptiness: lack of inherent existence.

-- Selflessness * of beings

* of objects

-- all phenomena are impermanent , except 3 categories: * emptiness

* space

* analytical and non-analytical

-- the existence of the mind of clear light : the most subtle mind, the Buddha nature

-- Bodhicitta : the love, compassion for all beings

-- the Great Beings – Bodhissatvas – take the vows of Bodhicitta – to help all other beings to become liberated from Samsara abd obtain supreme state of Enlightenment.

-- Buddha Sakyamuhti : never think “I, mine, me.”

* Sri Ramana Maharishi -- the essential question: Who am I ?

-- the nature of self : contrary to perceptible experience, not an experience of individuality

but a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness.

* Self = God

-- the self is ever present

-- the silent self is god

* Sri Chinmoy

-- “Man and God are eternally one.”

* Pard Mahansa Yogananda “The Divine Romance”

-- “Christ is right here, he can be seen if you look within your forehead at the point between the eyebrows, the center of Christ-consciousness, the seat of the single or spiritual eye.”

* Caroline Cory “The visible and invisible worlds of God.”

-- the Creator Source is without beginning and end.

-- the Creator Source is not one being or one person. It is layered multi-dimensional existence.

-- we are one minute particle of the Creator Source.

* Gabriel of Sedona “The Cosmic Family”

-- our planet is going through important changes : we are passing now from 3rd to 4th dimension.

-- subtle, superior beings are involved in helping our planet.

-- some of these great beings take the human re-personalization in order to help direct our planet.

-- Deo-Atomic = atomic structures in alignment with God and Paradise absolute and are connected to cosmic vibration patterns.

-- Deo-Atomic Cells aligned with Paradise absolute and are cells of future Light Body.

-- the fourth epochal revelation was fulfilled when the Creator Son of our local universe,

Christ-Michael bestowed himself as a human mortal, Jesus of Nazareth to portray the nature of his Paradise Father.

* Urantia – the cosmic name of our planet.

-- Urantia is Planet 606 in the system of Satania, in the constellation of Norlatiadek, in the universe Nebadon, in the super-universe of Orvonton.

-- Michael (Christ) of Nebadon chose among all the planets in his universe for his Seventh Bestowal, as a human mortal, in which he revealed the loving nature of the Universal Father.

-- Urantia is sometimes called “The World of the Cross” because it is the only planet in the 700,000 local universes where a creator son was put to death by his own creatures.

* KRISHNANANDA (“2012 End or beginning.”)

-- “There are ‘Light Beings,’ Astral Masters and a Divine Plan waiting to help us and gift to us higher living facilities and comforts. We have to get ready to receive them. We can qualify by just going back to our original state : the state of love, peace, and truth. Positivise, remove all violence, corruption and aggression.

-- We have to meditate and channel Light a lot to transform. It is actually possible for the transition into the Light Age to be peaceful; and painless.

* Quantum Theory

-- All our thoughts, emotions, and activities are recorded on a subtle level (“Crystal Cave”).

When we are passing away the recordings from the “Crystal Cave” are transferring to the matrix of the Earth (the subtle energetic grid) for the benefit of Humanity.

January 2012, Valeriu Boborelu

From Paganism to Mysticism to Religoin the number three has always had some spiritual purpose....The top point of the three represents the upper world, the botom point of the three represents the lower world and the middle point represents the present physical world... Could it be fair to say that the number three is some key to harmony or enlightenment?? Like if there maybe a balance of upper and lower world would that bring harmony.....The middle is a cosmic loop and we can say the middle point of the three is a zero....The zero is a spiritual number in mysticism for a portal witch maybe it is fair to say is the present and the moment....Maybe the key to all this and the number three is learning to live in the present...I once jamed out in a band and the lead singer used to say God was in the present....With the number three the top and bottom meet in the middle and the middle can be what represents the present and maybe the key to life is being in the present...

This is why we have and what the world is -- third dimension....from the upper and lower world combined in a cosmic loop.....I wonder what other keys there are with other numbers to unlock dimensions???

The full moon. When the earth,moon,and sun are combines...Could this have to do with the mystical number three? They say its the best time to do spell work and its not 28 days its really 29 days...so looking at 3 originally the top (higher) the middle (physical) and the bottom ( lower) while you look at three like that look at the time of the full moon and look at 3 which in theory the top which is our sun can represent higher the middle this time is the moon and that can represent lower and the bottom instead of lower world is earth our physical which makes the full moon effect and gravitational changes ideal for spell work and anything metaphysical.. My point is looking at "3" the combination of the three worlds upper,physical,and lower can be switched around to go into another cosmic vibration such as the full moon and also women tend to give birth on that day which is 29 days not 28...technically 29...so with 3 would it be fair to say that you can metaphysically play with the combinations???

And if these cosmic bodies align then think of other combinations of moons,sun and planets....could it be the keys to unlocking difrent dimensions or realities if done correctly??

Unity, Duality, Trinity The Vortex of the Absolute: Tracing the scientific and moral background in the schematic of Dante’s "Divine Comedy," and how allegory is used to reveal the continuous unfolding of natural levels and lines of energy describing a harmonious universe, in three parallel dimensionsof geological, human, and astronomical history.
by Johnes Ruta,1996.

An Humanities Timeline Bibliography by JOHNES RUTA (New Haven, CT)

Views and Visions of Thomas Cole by CARL  PFLUGER  (Quebec, Canada)

Book Reviews
by Joseph Caezza

Contributed by JOSEPH  CAEZZA (Norwich, NY):
"THE VOICE OF THE EAGLE: the Heart of Celtic Christianity, John Scotus Eriugena's Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John,"  translated with introduction and reflections by Christopher Bamford;  Lindisfarne Books (2000) 335 p, $16.95

"THE HERMETIC MUSEUM: Alchemy and Mysticism" by Alexander Roob. Taschen Books, Hohenzollernring 53, D-50672 Kolin, (1997); 711 pp., $29.95

"DWELLINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHERS," by Fulcanelli; Archive Press, (1999); 530 pp. 38 plates; $150.00 hand crafted, leather bound, limited edition; $49.99 hardcover.

"ANTIMONY IN MEDICAL HISTORY,"  by R.Ian McCallum; Pentland Press, (1999); 125 pp. 22 illustrations, hardcover, 15 pounds sterling.

Bop Tweedie’s first album release is a professional sounding and technically well-produced musical experience which creates a colorful fabric. His tracks have the sensation of being “songs” with no lyrics: a diverse range of jazzy layers of melodic and harmonic sounds.

The first cut, “a crash course in crashing,” carries a medium up-tempo beat with a “Trance” melodic flow, the effect is mesmerizing. A second layer of musical melody then envelops us and draws us down on a penetrating descent into psychic depths which remain navigable along extended lines of harmonic sounds. This is great and sophisticated listening !

Tonal harmony appears to be the underlying structure of Tweedie’s music, where the strains also carry one off into the ether, but without the loss of one’s bearings. The musical tones work mostly in the positive major keys, starting and ending with feelings of exhilaration. The instinctual effect is that of birds in migration, flying far above the land by internal compass.

The second cut, “doe a dog”, generates a positive hypnosis with an array of strangely familiar voices: quiet conversations of incomprehensible words below the threshold of meaning. The next cut “doesn’t the rain smell nice?” brings forth oscillating water-like waves of feeling; underscored with quiet laughing voices that are set to a dance beat.

“fee plus fie equals fo fum” builds a trance that rises up from beneath into a motive energy flow with upbeat harmonic levels added. “headphones plugged into nothing” carries a sweet Calypso island beat in a melodic progression. In “i’d rather be famous,” quiet voices up rising from the depths are now layered over the buzz of an electrical current in the key of C, with the refrain “I’d rather be infamous!"

In “march of the cicadas” as in “milk of wonder,” mating calls from insect antennae radio signals invoke hyperactive speed dancing. – Welcome to life and love in the cicada dimension! In contrast, “the rise and fall of your chest when you are sleeping” then presents a sweet and sonorous relaxing piano melody.

There is a fine continuity of mood in Tweedie’s compositions in lessons perhaps learned from early electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros. But Tweedie significantly evolves beyond intellectual-sounding synthesized notes into a deeply emotive compendium. His patterns of voices, instruments, and electronics in experimental jazz time-signature progressions like those of Dave Brubeck, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman, produce moods opening into a future-conscious dimension -- the kind of future we hope for, rather than dystopia. -- Indeed, Tweedie’s titles, culminating with “think before you think” and “standing in a garden on a whim” propel this positive evolution, and trail us off into affirmative consciousness with a hypnotic back-beat…

Cordially, Donna Marie Joyce

"Deer & Other Stories" by Susan Tepper (2009, Wilderness House Press)

Reviewer: Johnes Ruta, independent curator & art theorist

Nonetheless, I did stop by to view the Dr. Felix Bronner exhibit this past week. As usual, it was another inspiring set of works. I noted a palpable feeling of particles/ matter/ energy in all of the works. With the restful and calming primary color of seafoam green, “Seascape” was a great way to start the exhibit. “Roaring Over Print” is fantastic to me – it’s an apt metaphor these days for my state of mind, and equally well depicts my office space.

Finally, I enjoyed “And What Can You See?” .. I’m still not precisely sure what I did see .. Every time I glanced at the work during my short visit, the experience was different – but it was a great adventure!

Hope to see you in 2010! Thanks again for continuing to include me on your art opening invitations list.

All the Best,

Donna Marie Joyce
November 16, 2009

In Guston’s later works we see his self-portrait emerge as a Sad Sack, schlumping along the surface of the earth, his stubbly bandaged face,his Cyclopean stare. His gaze sees his world, his problems with himself and with the act of painting. He also looks at the problems in our world in its time. If you’ve ever painted or struggled with creating something, Guston’s hand will tear at your heart. Gooey, thick pink blobs, peach and red, crudely rendered black lines and tan mushy, gushy paint resists casual flow and shows us that the artist has been humbled in making his mark. I could wear his reddened paint as a skin, or I could dive into its viscous depths, traveling to the internal workings of his all-too-human heart. It’s his self-portrait, but it speaks to anyone who has ever felt like that Sad Sack, unable to ignore the siren’s call of paint and surface, to attempt transforming the intangible into the palpably tangible over and over again.

Guston’s Everyman is a trusted observer, reporting on the way it feels to question one’s own abilities as well as the authorities in charge of our lives. Fearlessly honest about his position in this life, underwhelming on the outside, this grubby, stubbly man goes along unnoticed and unhampered. We are invited to take the journey with him, through the course of his ugly, raw paintings. To paint about the life of Everyman, and possess an ounce of truth, we have to submit to showing it’s ugly side. Guston shares the company of history’s heavyweights: Hugo, Goya, Bosch, Joyce, Bukowski and Kerouac. We know his Sad Sack to be, atleast in some small way, ourselves.

As Guston’s paintings evolved, the self-portrait externalized and became more universal. Symbolism is the way to abstraction and Guston’s Everyman became a Wheel. After working my way through his oeuvre at the Met years ago, the last canvases stopped me cold. The simplicity, the palette – born of flesh,blood and bone, and his beating heart, rang so true that I couldn’t stop my tears. These canvases, printed themselves upon me and gratefully, have never left my memory, still remaining powerful and immediate.

That wheel was going “home.” Guston suffered from a near heart attack that same year and death was a question he undoubtedly explored. The sky is darkening in this painting. The wheel is monolithic, its rustic bolts and crude wooden construction heavily outlined in black. The rough wood glows yellow (like a halo?). The moon rises to the left of the half-buried wheel from the horizon line of a deep scarlet earthen road (or is that a turbulent sea?). The moon rising is reminiscent of mythology. The reflection of the moon on the earth/sea surface shows us the path to the Underworld or the Spirit World or redemption. It signals that death is imminent.

Going “home” might entail a final judgment before God prior to being granted entry into Paradise. “Home” is the place to die and put the earthbound body to rest. The Wheel is a timeless metaphor every tribal storyteller, shaman or folk musician has passed down. Through Jerry Garcia, Johnny Cash, mountain music, gospel songs and spirituals, and eastern religious practices, The Wheel of Life keeps turning. No one can get off; it keeps going ‘round. The fact that Guston evolved in his painting to the point where he, too, entered that storytelling tradition shows anyone brave enough to look with an unblinking gaze, that “home” is very real, very true, and that we, too, will one day be that Wheel. Slowly turning, revealing its face to the viewer, resolute in its direction with the moon rising in the horizon, half stuck, no longer able to hide flaws, like Guston,we are on a path to “home.”

Ellen Hackl Fagan
efagan4@optonline.net

To preface an understanding of his new work, Mr. Boborelu had sent me an outline and diagram of the 5 Buddha Families and the 5 Realms of Samsara, representing the transcendent, brilliant, & compassionate states of Mind and Reality . . .

In a large diptych of four fitted panels in black and white only, totaling 8 feet high by 12 feet wide, Boborelu has created what I’d describe as a "geometric object field” : a painting in which black fractal objects on a white ground vibrate beyond the visible animation of objects into a deep spiritual contemplation. These forms capture a momentary / instantaneous Space / Time Continuum.

In another painting, measuring 40" x 40", flowing currents of bright red, green, yellow, and blue paint move diagonally downhill across the canvas from upper left to lower right. This motion seemed to create a flowing bridge of colored space which juxtaposed this piece and the diptych together.

The sensation of this bridge connected over a kind of open space, and this space seemed to occur in the time frame between my initial impression of the artwork and the moment in which the smaller painting then carried me into the threshold of a Buddhist state of Contemplation. This sensation then proceeded to a second threshold, in which the black and white fractals and the colored animation took on an energy of Matter, such as a vision of the conception of Life.

~ Johnes Ruta, independent curator
New Haven, CT

Longinus: "On the Sublime"

Longinus, writing in the classical historical tradition says that the sublime implies that man can, in emotions and in language, transcend the limits of the human condition. Longinus's approach is contradistinguished from Plato's declaration of poetic inspiration as dangerous divine madness or the poet as liar. Yet like Plato, Longinus feels that the human was the art or technical aspects, while the sublime was the "soul" or that which eluded our experience of art. In order to understand the sublime, we must have some notion of what exists beyond the human, empirical experience. Longinus explains that this "beyond" is comprehended in terms of metaphor, or in terms of what is absent from the empirical world. Our sense of the sublime is an illusion, which draws the reader to new heights, to the realization that there is something more to human life than the mundane, the ordinary. In fact, the sublime entails a kind of mystery. The sublime is that which defeats every effort of sense and imagination to picture it. It is that whose presence reduces all else to nothingness. It can be defined and described only in symbolic terms, which ironically defies the pictorial arts to sketch it. It remains only for the art of the metaphorical language of poetry to give the suggestion of the sublime.

Longinus's contribution to conceptions of the beautiful/sublime also includes the poet's "joining" with this vision of greatness. We gain a greater sense of freedom, by our sense of our capacity to join in this greatness. Hence when we speak of Longinus we think of verbs such as "transport," "transcend," "awe-full," "flight," "amazement," and "astonishment." One particular quotation summarizes this idea: "For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard."

Longinus centers also on figurative language, discussing the great writers of the past and their importance, our "possession 'by a spirit not one's own. . . . The genius of the ancients acts as a kind of oracular cavern, and effluences flow from it into the minds of their imitators." He holds Plato up as a model and an ideal of great literature, thereby answering and defending Plato's style against his critics. The decline of letters in his day is due not to despotism, but slavery to pleasure and greed. He shows us that great thoughts have been uttered by men of the past and can be uttered again. Sublimity becomes, for him, the source of the distinction of the greatest poets and prose writers, something like a thunderbolt that could strike anywhere. Because of his belief in sublimity, he also believes in the privileging of mental processes. He holds in an almost mystical way that the composer is identified with what he describes; and because of the excitement of the moment of inspiration, the hearer or reader is also a participant in the feeling of sublimity. And so it was that Longinus first brought passion and the concept of readerly complementation to the study of literature.

Edmund Burke: "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Burke is clearly in the debt of Longinus, but his fundamental orientation is different. Drawing from the empiricism of John Locke, Burke assumes all our knowledge comes by way of sense experience, combing simple impressions into more complex ones. Imagination, for Burke, is more closely aligned with Coleridge's conception of "fancy." It operates in two ways, by "representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses" and by "combining those images in anew manner, and according to a different order." Therefore, according to Burke, the imagination cannot create anything "new"; it can only reorder and combine basic sense perceptions.

More important than taste are distinctions involving the sublime. The sublime applies to large, grand parts of nature while the beautiful is evident in small parts. In addition, Burke associates the fear of death, dismemberment, terror, and darkness (e.g., a howling wilderness) with feelings of sublime. Locke does not think that darkness is sign of terror, but Burke feels an association of utter darkness makes it impossible to ascertain one's safety, sensing immanent danger evokes a feeling of the sublime. He sees a difference between what the mind expects and what occurs in any given situation. Part of his thesis involves the fact that fear robs the mind of reason, hence evoking the sublime. He says:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

In Burke's terminology, the "passions which concern self-preservation, turn mostly on pain and danger" (55). To make circumstances appear terrible, however, obscurity is necessary. "All privation is great because they are all terrible: Vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence. Low and intermittent sounds and shadows bring about feelings of the sublime. Above all, the actions of the mind are affected by the sublime."

Sir Uvedale Price considered the nature of the sublime, but argued in a line consistent with ideas of the picturesque.

Kant says that sublimity does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature without us (so far as it influences us). Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g., the might of nature that calls forth our forces, is called then (although improperly) sublime. Only by supposing this idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displays in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in us of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it. ("Of the Dynamically Sublime in Nature"; Adams, Critical 396). In Kant, "the mind feels itself set in motion in representation of the sublime in nature; this movement, especially in it inception, may be compared with a vibration with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same Object. The point of excess for the imagination is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself." ("Analytic of the Sublime" 107, qt'd in Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime 105)

Wordsworth on the sublime and the Beautiful: in speaking of seeing the mountains of Langdale pike--

Let me then invite the Reader to turn his eyes with me towards that cluster of Mountains at the Head of Windermere; it is probable that they will settle ere long upon the Pikes of Langdale and the black precipice contiguous to them. If these objects be so distant that, while we look at them, they are only thought of as the crown a comprehensive Landscape; if our minds be not perverted by false theories, unless those mountains be seen under some accidents of nature, we shall receive from them a grand impression, and nothing more. But if they be looked at from a point which has brought us so near that the mountain is almost the sole object before our eyes, yet not so near but that the whole of it is visible, we shall be impressed with a sensation of sublimity.--And if this analyzed, the body of this sensation would be found to resolve itself into three component parts: a sense of individual form or forms; a sense of duration; and a sense of power. . . . A mountain being a stationary object is enabled to effect this in connection with duration and individual form, by the sense of motion which in the midst accompanies the lines by which the Mountain itself is shaped out" (351-2). . . .Individuality of form is the primary requisite; and the form must be of that character that deeply impresses the sense of power. And power produces the sublime whether as it is thought of as a thing to be feared, to be resisted, or that can be participated. To what degree consistent with sublimity power may be dreaded has been ascertained; but as power, contemplated as something to be opposed or resisted, implies a twofold agency of which the mind is conscious, this state seems to be irreconcilable to what has been determined, exists in the extinction of the comparing power of the mind, & in intense unity.(356).

"Imagination . . . so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech" (Prelude 6.592-93). Human sight rises in intensity from memory through salience tot he occlusion of the visible. Imagination also rises "like an unfather'd vapour" to target man's fight to remain autonomous and self-reliant.

Of course, none of the modernisms that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth had much use for the programmatic, narrative or illustrative dimensions of painting, tending to view them as a kind of contaminant to the purely formal, and increasingly abstract, visual or "painterly" elements. So it is understandable that Cole's reputation suffered from this change in the climate of artistic fashion, because he always was, in the manner fashionable in his own time, a thoroughly literary painter, who always assumed that the visual arts refer to some range of concerns beyond themselves - and who had no problem, by the way, in sometimes addressing those concerns in writing as well as in painting. As recently as 1962 James Thomas Flexner clucked disapprovingly over Cole's "dangerous literary gifts" - as if he would have been a better painter had he been illiterate, a kind of idiot savant!

But more recently, fashions have been changing again -- is this one of the more beneficent effects of post-modernism? - making possible some steps toward rehabilitation. The most recent of such steps (and probably the biggest so far) is Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, a major exhibition organized at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC by William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, displaying about 70 of Cole's paintings and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue (more useful and informative than such publications often are) including essays by J. Gray Sweeney, Christine Stansall and Sean Wilentz, as well as by Wallach and Truettner themselves.

This exhibit is especially welcome because it makes a serious effort to get beyond that conventional wisdom of the past century or so, and to consider all facets of Cole's work with a more integrated and comprehensive view - closer at least to the painter's own intentions. Wallach, Truettner and their colleagues have also done much to place Cole in his social, political and cultural context in early nineteenth-century America. Their particular interpretations here must still be regarded as limited and tentative - no single formula could encapsulate so protean an artist as Thomas Cole - but there is no question, I think, that they are on the right track in trying to re-integrate "the two Thomas Coles" (as Professor Truettner titles his essay) and in taking Cole seriously as that rarity of the modern world, an artist who actually thinks: about nature and history, life and literature: about humankind and its place in the world.

And as for how all that thinking inflected Cole's work as a painter - well of course, some of his works are technically better than others, and some are more derivative than others; and yes (the conventional wisdom was right to this extent) he developed his most original insights by working closely with some of the particular features of American scenery - features which were then still largely new to European eyes - but then going beyond this, he applied that insight to something both wider and deeper, developing (to invoke a pair of Cole's own favorite terms) a historical "vision" as well as a painterly "view." And that, one might say, is what landscape art, in its most authentic sense, is always trying to be about. For although landscape may sometimes seem to be a naive genre of painting, in reality it is not. Historically, both in China and in Europe (the only two cultures so far to have fully developed landscape at all) it arose very late in the artistic tradition. Only after many centuries of representing more or less distinct individual figures did people begin paying serious attention to the background in which those figures were placed, to the connecting spaces between them: in short, to their total environment. And it seems probable that such developments always depend on, but in turn contribute back to, parallel developments in such other fields as science, philosophy, religion, history and literature. In China, where painters were at least officially expected to be literati, a relation between landscape painting and both religious and philosophical Taoism, for example, has long been taken for granted. In the West (where of course our whole landscape tradition is much younger) such connections have been more problematic; but it is helpful to keep them in mind when trying to understand Thomas Cole, who was so passionately (and sometimes profoundly) religious, literary, and historically-minded a painter: in all of his work, even the most superficially "naive" of his wilderness scenes.

No, there were not "two Thomas Coles"; but there is an unresolved duality within Cole himself, and within his work: a division too glaring to be ignored. Toward the end of his own essay in the catalogue Professor Wallach approaches this division, rather diffidently, when he writes:
" . . . if a fault line runs through Cole's art, it lies between the historical and
the ahistorical, between the landscapes and allegories that in a more or less
fragmentary way evoke the stages of history and 'mutation of earthly things'
and the religious allegories and related paintings. Yet even this division is in
a sense unnecessary since, as we have seen, the historical and the ahistorical
were themselves closely connected.."

I would put it rather differently. Virtually all of Cole's work is historical; but the difference between, say, The Course of Empire and The Cross and the World is between "natural history" and "supernatural history" - what German theologians in the nineteenth century were already beginning to call Heilsgeschichte ("the History of Salvation") and which they represented as the central theme of all Biblical religion. Another way of describing this "fault line" might be to say that his work was always religious - but that Cole actually believed in (or at least tried to believe in) two different religions at the same time. Christianity (to which, given his own historical origins, Cole could scarcely escape having at least a nominal commitment) co-existed in him with his personal version of that fully religious reverence for Nature which he seems to have believed in most strongly - which has actually been around, in one form or another, a good while longer than Christianity itself, but which was just re-emerging with special force and intensity in Cole's own Romantic period - and which was the real source of Cole's strength and originality as a landscapist.

I'm not sure how conscious Cole was of the tension between his two religious loyalties - my suspicion is that he could not admit it to himself, and kept trying, out of a dogged sense of duty, to impose his familiar but somewhat shop-worn Christianity onto his more impassioned but less articulated Naturalism - but its effects show, often quite painfully, in his more didactically Christian pictures. Few things in the history of art can be more literally excruciating than those crosses glowing like neon signs in the desert -- a "prophecy" come literally true in our time, which Cole, had he lived to see it with his eyes of flesh, would certainly have abhorred! - or those insipidly phosphorescent figures of Christ and of angels (anemic, attenuated derivatives of Raphael and his successors, the bane of so much post-Renaissance Christian art . . . ) which seem to have dropped down like aliens out of a UFO (often accompanied by unnatural laser-like light effects) into an otherwise passably naturalistic landscape in such paintings as The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of his Journey, or the Angels Ministering to Christ in the Wilderness. Of course one could always argue that such gauche intrusiveness is a respectable artistic convention, meant to suggest the absolutely transcendent and supernal power of the Divine; but such an argument would have already conceded the most important point: that at least in its symbolic language, Cole's Christianity is always referring ultimately to some source of value which does not co-exist comfortably or harmoniously with anything we can readily recognize as "nature", that is, with the world as we know it on Earth. And it could also be argued that much of the awkwardness in these Christian paintings results from a much simpler and more technical cause: Cole's notorious weakness in handling the human figure. It is true that his figures are often inept; but not uniformly so. Generally they are at their worst when Cole seems not to have a clear sense of how his humans fit naturally into their surroundings, when he just sticks them in for more or less clearly arbitrary and symbolic purposes. He sometimes did this even in his "pure" wilderness scenes. (Truettner and Wallach give one especially egregious instance of this: when Cole painted The Falls of the Kaaterskill in 1826 it was already a busy tourist attraction, with the usual clutter of hotels, walkways and protected bridges overlooking the Falls. Cole omitted all that from his painting; instead, he placed a solitary Native American in the scene. This poor Indian is stuck there, quite awkwardly and unaesthetically, leaning against his bow on a bare ledge right in the middle of the painting. Clearly, he serves here only as a self-conscious sign or label, as if one had written a caption: "THIS PICTURE REPRESENTS AMERICA BEFORE THE WHITE MAN".) But cases like that are extreme, and rare. Cole's level of technical accomplishment varied considerably from time to time, but he could and did paint human figures credibly enough when he had reason to: when this was clearly demanded by his conception, and supported by what we would call the "human ecology" of his design.

In his Arcadian pastorals, for instance, human beings (and their artifacts) tend to fit happily into their natural settings. These pictures probably represent Cole's most Utopian vision, the clearest personal declaration of his idea of the Good Life, the True and the Beautiful. For although Cole fully deserves to be recognized as one of the nineteenth century godfathers of the modern environmental movement; although he genuinely loved his wilderness scenes, and certainly contributed largely to that positive re-evaluation of the very idea of "the wilderness" which (in such contrast to the Biblical attitudes of dread and hostility) has been one of the great revolutions in values accomplished over the past couple of centuries; still, Cole would not have qualified as an "environmental extremist", even by the most polemical of definitions current today. He did not assume an irreconcilable antipathy between "Man" and "Nature"; he had none of the misanthropy that sometimes infects the wilder fringes of Deep Ecology. Wallach and Truettner characterize his general attitude as "pessimist conservatism", which is fair enough as far as it goes; but it really doesn't take us very far toward understanding the deepest ranges of Cole's yearnings, his aspirations or his fears. He did fulminate, in writings such as American Scenery, against the "ravages of the axe" in his beloved woods, but his "conservatism" always allowed for a fitting measure of progress, and held out the hope for a harmonious co-existence of the human and the natural: a vision, finally, of Man as an essential (but not tyrannically domineering) part of Nature, hopefully respectful of, and always subject to, the limits of the natural world. This is the vision realized most idyllically in those Arcadian or pastoral scenes, where the boundaries between the natural and the human worlds are shown clearly enough, but generally in soft and mutually yielding contours, not in the harsh lines of a radical confrontation. (Such softness of outline, we should notice, is both a real physical feature of the geologically ancient mountains of Eastern North America, and an instantly recognizable visual signature in most of Cole's paintings; just as those almost incredibly vertical - but equally real - Chinese mountains portrayed by the painters of the Northern Sung School are an equally characteristic "signature" of their work.) In these pictures, Cole's painterly vocabulary begins to express something of the idea of "bio-regionalism" - a term perhaps more familiar to ecologists than to art critics, but one which seems singularly appropriate to the vision of Thomas Cole. These landscapes have been "humanized", it's true, compared to the "wild scenes"; but the humans in them (and their works, especially in the pictures of ruins) have themselves become more integrally a part of the natural scene. And in The Course of Empire - which after all is teeming with human figures - the "fit" is accomplished even more effectively: because it is the over-arching theme of the whole series.

One might almost say that Cole handled his human subjects best when he was able to treat them -- legitimately - as part of the scenery. "Scenery" always was a favorite word of his; and while its theatrical connotations may make some of us uncomfortable, there really is no way around it: Cole's art was theatrical in almost every way. He was well aware of this trait in himself and, not without humor, he sometimes indulged in some fairly broad self-parody about it. In The Architect's Dream (unfortunately not included in this exhibit) he presents us with a fantastic heap of conflicting architectural styles - all framed by a mass of tasselled ropes and drapery clearly suggestive of a stage-curtain. Looking at this picture, I find it impossible not to believe that Cole was having a bit of fun, both with himself and with Ithiel Towne, the architect who commissioned it. (Towne seems to have thought so, too; but lacking Cole's humor, he refused to pay for the picture.) The Architect's Dream is not really typical of Cole's work -- and yet the picture of his which it most closely resembles, in its proto-Cecil B. de Mille monumentality, is The Consummation of Empire, the oversized centerpiece of Cole's best and most personally characteristic series, The Course of Empire - which Wallach and Truettner justly offer as the pièce de résistance of their exhibition.

In this grandest and most completely realized of his "epico-historical works, Cole presented his synoptic and secular vision of the situation of Man-in-Nature, bringing together nearly all his familiar themes and deploying all his painterly styles and vocabularies. In five successive scenes he shows us a civilization progressing from the condition of primitive hunters in the wilderness, through an agrarian/pastoral Arcadia to the megalopolitan pomp of the Consummation - a neo-Classical nightmare suggesting Washington, DC, as it might have been re-designed by Albert Speer - which is then destroyed by war in the fourth scene, to subside into a remarkably tranquil and beautiful set of ruins in the fifth, the only picture of the set from which living human beings are entirely absent. ("Desolation" is the title of this piece, but somehow one does not feel that Cole really felt all that desolate while painting it: this view of the natural world placidly reclaiming its territory from the fallen city is the most hauntingly beautiful picture of the series.) Constant through all these scenes are two features of the natural setting: a precipitous mountain, always visible in the distance, and the long narrow bay around which the city eventually grows. "Mountains and water" - clear symbols of an elemental duality; and, according to Chinese ideas (which Cole may never have heard of, but which he so often seems to have paralleled in his own way) the defining terms of landscape itself. . . .

It is pretty clear that Cole regarded the urban proliferation of the Consummation as a pathological excrescence on the face of the Earth. The really interesting question is, at what level - social, political, cultural, religious or technical - did he believe this pathology to be rooted? Wallach and Truettner stress the political dimension: a warning, rooted in Classical Republican theory, against the "excesses of democracy", mob rule and Caesarism in Andrew Jackson's America. In a way, this re-iterates (though of course with much more scholarly depth) the reviewers of Cole's own time, who tended to focus on the question, "What does this work say about the prospects for our Republic?" (Cole was, among other things, a nationalist artist, and himself a formidable symbol of national pride, at least to the more culturally minded of his compatriots. This accounts, after all, for a large part of the fame he enjoyed in his lifetime.) But while I'm convinced that Cole did devote some of his attention to such political concerns, that is really only the most parochial side of this truly ecumenical artist. Ultimately, The Course of Empire is a religious work, but not a Christian one. Christianity is an explicitly human-centered religion, and in some ways even an egotistical one, fixated on the fate of the individual soul. But if The Course of Empire preaches anything, it preaches something more like the ancient Greek admonitions against hubris, the baneful excess of human ambition, against which the only defense is a scrupulous observance of the intrinsic limits of all things. To mention only one poignant sign of this lesson, Cole plays a fascinating game with his own signature in The Course of Empire. He works it into each of the first four scenes as an inscription on one or another of the stones, growing larger and more elaborately self-assertive in each successive view, until at last in the Destruction it flares out in grotesque and agitated lettering on the base of the colossal headless statue which dominates that composition - and then, among the ruins of the Desolation, it is nowhere to be found. I read this as one of Cole's more transparent allegories: against the rampant egotism which can infect all of us, even Christians and artists. . . . Such moralizing was often enough typical of Cole, and not always accomplished with the same finesse; but at its strongest his vision went much deeper than his Whiggish politics, and deeper than his Evangelical Christianity: to an apprehension of humanity as a species fully embedded in its natural matrix, which we may violate in our arrogance and egotism, but only at the risk of our own extinction.

Copyright (c) 1995 by Carl Pfluger.
Piopolis, PQ Quebec, Canada GOY 1H0
This essay first appeared in THE HUDSON REVIEW, Winter 1995. Reproduced with permission.

In France, "The Front" quickly became a merciless killing-field to which millions of young troops were marched from all sides to be slaughtered with never the advance of a foot of territory ! The Treaty of Versailles demanded immense "Reparations" payments from Germany which led directly to the collapse of the German Mark in 1923, and so to the despair and bitterness that set the stage for Hitler, and so to the next catastrophe.