Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

The Gates of Hope—A Poem by Victoria Safford

My favorite Michael Leunig illustration – the most evocative for me – is his The Garden Gate. It accompanies his poem How to Get There:

Go to the end of the path until you get to the gate.
Go through the gate and head straight out towards the horizon.
Keep going towards the horizon.
Sit down and have a rest every now and again,
But keep on going, just keep on with it.
Keep on going as far as you can.
That’s how you get there.

However, in my mind I now also want to link the illustration to the following poem by Victoria Safford. I heard it read by Parker J. Palmer and it just so resonated for me.

 The Gates of Hope

“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope—

Not the prudent gates of Optimism,

Which are somewhat narrower.

Not the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense;

Nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness,

Which creak on shrill and angry hinges

(People cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through)

Nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of
“Everything is gonna’ be all right.”

But a different, sometimes lonely place,

The place of truth-telling,

About your own soul first of all and its condition.

The place of resistance and defiance,

The piece of ground from which you see the world

Both as it is and as it could be

As it will be;

The place from which you glimpse not only struggle,

But the joy of the struggle.

And we stand there, beckoning and calling,

Telling people what we are seeing

Asking people what they see.”

Victoria Safford, the minister of White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church, in Mahtomedi, Minnesota (www.unitarian.org/whitebear), is the author of Walking Toward Morning.

In Conversation With Brian Eno: Steven Johnson sits down for a discussion about music, imagination, and art

I’ve long found Brian Eno (Eno, is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer (early Roxy Music), and visual artist) a fascinating and insightful character. His little book A Year with Swollen Appendices (pub. 2007) stares down from the shelf at me as I write this post.

“…Eno spoke at length about his definition of art and culture, and its continued importance in an era increasingly focused on STEM values—science, technology, education, and math—where it can sometimes feel as though the goal of our education leaders and politicians is simply to train a new generation of C++ programmers. I listened to it, appropriately enough, driving up Interstate 280 through Silicon Valley after a visit to the Computer History Museum, and it struck me that Eno had made an essential point about the role of art in both creating and making sense of social transformation. ‘We’re going to be in a world of ultrafast change,’ he said. ‘It’s really accelerating at the moment and will continue to. And we’re going to have to somehow stay coherent. What are we going to be doing? I think we’re going to be even more full-time artists than we are now.’…”

~ Steven Johnson, from here. Youtube excerpts from the conversation via the link to the left.

I’m certain I need more artists to help me make sense of this world that I inhabit; and more help to ‘read’ and enter more fully into artistic expression. A good starting point for me, aside from just spending time with literature, poetry, film, paintings etc. was this little book by Ossian Ward, Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art (pub. 2014).

The Importance of Art

“…My faith is that art becomes an increasingly important testing ground, free of control and ideology, in which we can examine ourselves and our needs, desires and dreams. It has to be released from both the institutionalizing effects of the museum and from the commodifying effects of the market, while still recognising the critical importance of both – the first for appraisal and the second for nourishment. Art is a basic human need, a basic human activity. It is what makes us human and offers us the tools to become ourselves. In a time when we are driven mad by the lure of false desires and the promise of objects of consumption, art can be a free and open space of experiment and experience. Art can release us from the need to possess objects of power and allow us to enter the field in which the power of objects frees us.”

~ Antony Gormley from Antony Gormley on Sculpture, p.77.

Nick Cave’s ‘The Sick Bag Song,’ a Broad ranging Poem Composed on Tour

Nick Cave's 2014 tour of North America with The Bad Seeds. The account of this 22-city journey 
began life scribbled on airline sick bags 
and grew into a restless full-length epic, seeking out the roots of inspiration, 
love and meaning.

The new book – The Sick Bag Song - by Nick Cave is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory shaped around the events of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 2014 tour of North America. It "blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy, fantasy, autobiography, and journal entries."

More on the book here (The Guardian), here (The New York Times) and here (The Australian).

The Journey that Is Maria Popova

Maria Popova, like philosopher Julia Kristiva (b. 24^th June 1941), was an immigrant from Bulgaria. In Kristeva’s case it was to France, while for Popova, it was to America. Popova describes herself as “a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large.” The means of disseminating her reading, curiosity and thinking is her website Brain Pickings, founded “mostly”, she writes, as “a record of [her] own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

Popova has been able to scale her journey to a size I would never have the time to do, but our interests and motivation remain very similar. I too am a reader, a collector, a thinker, an asker of questions, an explorer, a wayfarer, a person who sees connection and layers of meaning and significance, and a sharer of what I discover on my own journey and quest to become more fully human, free, authentic, truthful, alive and whole. Very modest and low budget by comparison, Prodigalkiwi has been in existence for well over 10-years. It has a small readership, and at its heart it is the record of a journey: my journey, interests and explorations through the fields of theology, spirituality, art, philosophy, literature, religion, psychology, architecture, film and more besides. 

I only discovered Popova via the Australian publication Dumbo Feather (conversations with extraordinary people / issue 36 - 2013) and then most recently via a regular US-originating conversation now called On Being (and before that, Speaking of Faith). I had not seen her site Brain Pickings, but since the On Being conversation I’ve visited it many times. It’s been such a fascinating experience – the intersection of so many interesting themes, stories, and people.

You’ll find the On Being conversation here.  

The Painter in the Painting: Euan Macleod Exhibition in Hamilton

Over the weekend I went see a local Euan Macleod exhibition. Thoroughly enjoyed it and will visit a few more times.

For Kiwi-born, Sydney-based artist Euan Macleod (b. 1956 / Christchurch)  “…the canvas is not only a mirror in which he finds himself, it is also a doorway into a world that lies beyond ... These paintings have, at their core, a sense of the mystery of human life and of a vast perplexing universe which lies beyond human comprehension ..."

Macleod’s work is concerned with the natural landscape and human presence within it, a human presence that can be read as the artist himself, or as a symbolic representation of humanity. I’m always struck by the ethereal nature of the human presence in Macleod’s paintings. It’s most often a male presence, a male who is not fully present. One wonders at why this not fully present male is actually not completely there; not completely distinct or apart from the scene; distinct and fully embodied?

On one of the exhibition’s accompanying texts it is written that: “Macleod’s paintings are parables and allegories; they sing mournful songs and tell wise tales.” But, I think they’re more than this. They invite questions. They invite an encounter with the subconscious. Two of the questions evoked by Macleod’s work are invariably, “in what ways does the walking / ethereal male lead the viewer toward reflecting on new ways of experiencing what it might mean to be a male in the world?” “What kind of male is he?”

Most helpful in engaging with Macleod’s work is the extremely well written Australian publication EUAN MACLEOD: The Painter in the Painting (Pipers Press / 2010 ISBN 0975190199) by Gregory O’Brien. It features over 200 colour images.  

The Euan Macleod exhibition – The Painter in the Painting -  is now on at the Waikato Museum in Hamilton until Jul 2015 – more information here.

On Creativity

I listened, earlier in the week, to a short but interesting conversation around the theme of the psychology of creativity. The interviewee was Dr Bruce Sheridan “is the Chair of Cinema Art + Science at Columbia College, Chicago, and North American regional Chair of CILECT, the world organisation of film and media schools.  He has returned to New Zealand as the fourth Creative Fellow for the University of Auckland’s Creative Thinking Project, to deliver a series of public lectures drawing on recent research into creativity and discussing evidence from neuroscience and cognitive psychology to make the case for reintegrating art and science in education.” You'll find the conversation here. 

During the interview he mentioned a couple of books and/or authors, worth exploring.

Dr. Fred Mandell

Becoming a Life Change Artist: 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life (Paperback)  – August 3, 2010.

Can Art Save Us? (Paperback) – January 2015)

Also

How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery (Hardcover)  – January 20, 2015. I had a look through this book yesterday in a Hamilton bookshop. Not really me, but it did have some interesting and insightful things to say.

________________

7 Ways Art Can Make You a Better Leader by Fred Mandell.

• “Intense observation.  There is this misconception that art is about the “beautiful.”   In truth, art is about understanding a subject with what John Maeda, former president of Rhode Island School of Design, calls “extreme intensity, and then expressing that intensity with the available means to the artist.”    In order to understand intensely we must observe with intensity, see something for what it truly is and where there are the possibilities of extending its potential.  Such a capability requires we develop the ability to suspend pre-judgment and stereotypes.  We must let go of our current paradigms and begin to see new connections and make sense where none initially appears.  This is at the center of art and at the core of leadership.

Clive James and His Consuming Love of Poetry

Last week was a poetry week for me. I listened to poetry. I listened to poets. One of the highlights was a BBC 3 and excellent interview with Australian born-UK domiciled Clive James, broadcast on the 18^th December 2014, and recorded at his home in Cambridge, UK. It runs for 44 minutes and is a delight to listen to. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

“In an extended interview, Philip Dodd talks to Clive James whose writing and broadcasting in the last fifty years has made him one of the most distinctive voices in Britain. He confirmed his credentials, as a translator last year with his version of Dante's Divine Comedy and his latest book, Poetry Notebook, is a testament to his consuming love of poetry in general. Philip Dodd explores this passion with him and learns how it has informed and illuminated his thinking throughout his life.”

Here it is. I’ve previously featured James here. 

Listening to the World with Poet Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is one of my favourite contemporary poets and what a delight it was to hear her in a recent conversation. The first of her poems I ever reflectively read was West Wind #2

West Wind #2

You are young.  So you know everything.  You leap into the boat and begin rowing.  But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.  Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me.  There is life without love.  It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe.  It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.  When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.

~ Mary Oliver ~ [Note, well worth reading is Roger Housden’s reflection on this poem contained in his excellent book Ten Poems to Open Your Heart.]

Often quoted, but rarely interviewed, American Mary Oliver is one of that country’s greatest and most beloved poets. At 79, she honors listeners of Krista Tippett’s broadcast On Being with an intimate conversation on the wisdom of the world, the salvation of poetry, and the life behind her writing.

You’ll find the podcast here.

Bill Viola: Video Artist

Today, two conversations with my favourite video artist, American Bill Viola (b. 1951)

The first, from The Spirit of Things,  dates back to 2011, as far as I can tell.

“Few video artists can boast a hallowed placed in the world's churches and cathedrals, but Bill Viola's spiritual vision has been widely recognised by both the artistic as well as the religious establishment. In a rare and profoundly spiritual conversation, Bill Viola talks to Rachael Kohn at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image for the Melbourne Festival of the Arts…”

You’ll find the podcast here.

The second conversation is shorter and more recent. It’s a conversation with Bill Viola and his wife. A preview in the build up to the 2015 Adelaide Arts Festival.

“…'Rembrandt of the video age': Bill Viola explores the elemental wonder of his childhood." 

You’ll find the podcast (and video’s) here.