Something Fresh and Inspired

Excerpts from Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms by Norman Fischer:

“I call them ‘Zen-inspired’ because I approach them the only way I can: as a Zen practitioner, with a Zen eye. But I have not tried to rewrite the Psalms as Zen philosophy. Quite the opposite. My intention has been to learn from them, to expand my own understanding under their influence. Nevertheless, although my way of life and understanding have been thoroughly saturated by Zen, I am still a Westerner, so I have found in the Psalms a very familiar music that seems to express my own approach to enlightenment: the passionate, prickly, and lively noise that naturally seems to rise from the silent depths of my own heart.”

“I do not think I am unusual. Western Buddhists are Buddhists, yes, but they are also Westerners. This makes a big difference. It is why Buddhism in the West is and will continue to be different from what it has been in Asia. No matter how much Westerners try to immerse themselves in the Buddhism presented to them by their Asian teachers (and expressed in the Asian texts), they will always see it colored by Western concepts and views and by a Western feeling for life. You could view this as a problem, a distortion of real Buddhism, and I know that many Asian Buddhist teachers think that Westerners just don’t ‘get’ Buddhism and that it will take several generations for them to get it. While this is a reasonable way to look at it, I prefer to see the problem as an advantage and to view the inevitable mixing of Western and Asian Buddhist perspectives as something fresh and inspired, rather than somehow incorrect.”

*     *     *

Psalm 1

Happy is the one who walks otherwise
Than in the manner of the heedless
Who stands otherwise
Than in the way of the twisted
Who does not sit in the seat of the scornful
But finds delight in the loveliness of things
And lives by that pattern all day and all night —

For this one is like a tree planted near a stream
That gives forth strong fruit in season
And whose leaf doesn’t wither
And whose branches spread wide —

Not so the heedless

They are like chaff scattered by the wind
Endlessly driven, they cannot occupy their place
And so can never be seen or embraced
And they can never be joined

What you see is always lovely and remembered
But the way of heedlessness is oblivion

Psalm 23

You are my shepherd, I am content
You lead me to rest in the sweet grasses
To lie down by the quiet waters
And I am refreshed

You lead me down the right path
The path that unwinds in the pattern of your name

And even if I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will not fear
For you are with me
Comforting me with your rod and your staff
Showing me each step

You prepare a table for me
In the midst of my adversity
And moisten my head with oil

Surely my cup is overflowing
And goodness and kindness will follow me
All the days of my life
And in the long days beyond
I will always live in your house

*     *     *

Meredith Monk was inspired by these translations, “by the upward-seeking forms of spiritual structures around the world, and by Ann Hamilton’s Tower in Sonoma, California” to write her Songs of Ascension.  

Working without Words

“I feel like when I’m performing and I’m really in kind of a state, it’s quite like meditation…especially as a soloist where the forms are precise, but in a different way than when I’m with other people and we’re dependent on each other. But as a soloist I can be very precise and very rigorous and yet at the same time I feel that I’m very open and fluid to what’s happening in the moment. It’s that thing of trying to be really present in experience. In a sense I think that our culture teaches us to describe our experiences, to narrate our experiences, and that’s how we’re one step away from [them]. So in a way, I think that’s why I really like working without words because I think it throws your mind into a very different state.”

~ Meredith Monk, from Inner Voice

Meredith Monk's Songs of Ascension performed at the unveiling of the Ann Hamilton Tower at Oliver Ranch (July 2007).

Stains

"How do we deal with the stains of our own history? How do we take those aspects of our social history, slavery being the largest one, that we have a democratic country that was founded and based in slavery, and how do you talk about that?"

~ Ann Hamilton, from Art:21

Ann Hamilton describes myein, her installation representing the US at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, in the following excerpt from "Histories that Haunt," by Mary Katherine Coffey (Art Journal, Fall 2001):

I took this project very seriously and really thought about how a work can explore some of the absences that are in our historical record, or that are pervasively present, but in some ways invisible to us. Can material form be a way of looking? When I first visited the pavilion in Venice, I thought, "This neo-classical form is every bank in Iowa." This is an American form, and it sent me straight into the arms of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. And yet the building is almost a scale model. When you get in, the facade is not fulfilled by the experience and the volume of the inside. So very early on, I decided that I wanted to take on the building as both an object and subject of the work, to make a work that was both inside and outside of the building. The first gesture of the work was to empty the space, to open the skylights to light for the first time in some fifteen years, and to make alterations architecturally that then embed the work in the structure of the building. The glass wall [in front o f the pavilion] served to distort the view into the building as well as the view out. The glass changed and liquefied the solidity and the authority of the kind of architectural history that you are looking at when you approach the pavilion.

When you first walked in and entered the small rotunda, there was a blind window that had been revealed. It was one we found as we went into the membrane of the building. It didn't offer a view back out, but rather a reflection of your backlit shadow, as you entered. You could then turn any direction within the rotunda to enter an L-shaped configuration of consecutive galleries, two on each side, each one the same, each treated the same except for the change in light.

On the walls was a text--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States 1885-1915--translated into Braille. It's a two-volume work that is based on his research in the thirties on court records from the turn of the last century. Intensely colored fuchsia powder was falling around the perimeter of each of the rooms, catching, rolling, falling off the Braille text and then accumulating on the floor. The voice that you heard was my reading of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in international phonetic code. So if you walked the landscape of the interior of the room and wrote out the letters that you were hearing, you would transcribe the text. Both of the references to language, in Braille and phonetic code, are veiled in such a way that language doesn't become the vehicle through which you arrive at a certain set of information. And so you had to sense your way through this.

A table, the only object in the piece, stood at the exterior and was knotted with white cloth at its surface. In part, it was an homage to my own textile heritage and sensibility, in that tying a knot in a piece of string or cloth was one of the earliest forms of record keeping. The system of government we have is based on legalistic structure. So the record-keeping reference is here in material form.

Excerpt from Testimony: The United States, 1885-1890
by Charles Reznikoff

Several white men went at night to the Negro's
house,
shot into it,
and set fire to his cotton on the gallery
his wife and children ran under the bed
and as the firing from guns and pistols went on
and the cotton blazed up, ran through a side door
into the woods.
The Negro himself, badly wounded, fled to the
house of a neighbor—
a white man--
and got inside.
He was followed,
and one of those who ran after him
put a shotgun against the white man's door
and shot a hole through it.
Justice, however, was not to be thwarted,
for five of the men who did this to the Negro
were tried:
for "unlawfully and maliciously
injuring and disfiguring"-
the white man's property.