Astronauts may wax poetic viewing the earth from outer space, taking pictures of that lovely, touching, fragile little planet. Sitting at the roadside, drawing butterflies on black-eyed Susans, swaying grasses, viewing this earth from inner space, unimpeded by a space suit, how lovely! Drawing moths and beetles colliding with my desk lamp, how fragile! Seeing my neighbor on his cane dragging himself to the mailbox, how touching...
-Frederick Franck, Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing
Years ago I interviewed artist Frederick Franck, artist and author of Zen and the Art of Seeing among other books. He gave me a pamphlet he had written about Pacem in Terris, the sculpture gardens he and his wife Claske created. The gardens, he said, are “a sacred place that speaks to the sacred space at the core of the human heart.” In the pamphlet I came across this quote:
Art is not a luxury! Art arises from one’s depths or it is not art but kitsch! Art, for me, is and was my digging tool for Meaning, for Truth . . . my own truth that may speak to your truth. Art then becomes a “religious,” a spiritual act, not in any sectarian sense but as a witness to a “religious” attitude to sheer being, to existence as such, being Supremely Meaningful.
Here are some favorite excerpts from my interview of Frederick:
Nothing I do is made to please. Or shock. It comes from inside. When I walk through an art museum, I look to see what is art and what is kitsch. What is calculated to please, to sell? Lots of modern art seems to me to have been designed. Like designer shoes. What the hell is a designer shoe? It may be valid as a thought, valid as intelligence, but it is not art. Art arises from the deepest recesses of one's being. It might be absolutely unacceptable. Van Gough was unacceptable. He sold one painting in his life and that for twenty-five gilders. But if you look at a piece by Van Gough, you know it is authentic. It came from his core. If I listen to Mr. Bach, I never doubt where it came from. It is not Mr. Bach who is creative, it is something mysterious. It is not intuition because even intuition can be put into words.
When I start a drawing I am scared. Drawing from life, which I do at least once a week, I have to prove I can still do it. I did a drawing yesterday on the beach. There are thirty figures in that drawing. I scribbled them down in a kind of ecstasy mixed with despair. I could never do it again. Drawing is a strange process, for even where it succeeds you never do justice to what you see. If you draw well today, you can’t assume that tomorrow you can continue on that level, you have to start all over again, from scratch. No guarantee of success, unless you are a hack who uses a routine.
I asked Frederick about the spiritual path: “Do you yourself feel that you live according to your own truth?” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said:
No. I wish it were true. But I am always aware of it when I fall short. I am awake to it—to the existence of my truth. Our own truth is our true selves. It can’t be discovered, but perhaps it can be intuited. You can get in tune with its potentiality. And then you are out of tune again. It is not a true path at all. ...
One’s truth is of course bottomless. When (Daisetz T.) Suzuki was ninety years old, which is very old – I am almost as old now myself – he wrote what was perhaps his most profound essay. It was entitled: The Unattainable Self. That is a very good way of saying it. Indeed it is unattainable. One cannot say one has discovered it.
Some excerpts from Frederick Franck books:
Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing
...my eye has always been in love with the splendors of the world that surrounds us...I only have to stop drawing for a week to feel my eye go dim, to feel starved and impoverished....One day I realized suddenly that the seeing and the drawing had fused into one single undivided act. I called it seeing/drawing. It was a revelation, and it changed my life.
When I hear someone proclaim: "I am an artist, something in me whispers, "That so?" But if they say: "I paint," or "I draw" or "I play the piano," I like to talk to them about painting, drawing or playing the piano.
I had strayed into (the) gallery world a few decades earlier. Once in it, it is almost impossible not to become contaminated by ambition, competitiveness and fear: the ambition of a museum purchase, anxiety about not getting a review or`` getting a bad one, of falling by the wayside.
...when you looked at the leaf I had drawn you said, "That's it, that is the breakthrough! Who taught you?" I answered, "I taught it to myself," "Hm!" you said. "Just don't think now that you are a genius, but go on drawing. Go home and draw everything, everything!"
And that is what I am still doing.
The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Eveiything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking — at the world — through the evermore-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes, stereoscopes — the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.
If we could still really see what day after day is shown on the six o’clock news, we would burst out in tears. We would pray, or kneel, or perhaps make the sign of the cross over that screen in an impotent gesture of exorcising such evil, such insanity. But there we sit, programmed as we are to look-at, to stare passively at those burning tanks, those animals choking in oil spills. We perfunctorily shake our heads, take another sip of our drink, and stare at the manic commercials until the thing switches back to smiling bigwigs reviewing honor guards, rows of corpses, and beauty queens preening.
No wonder that once the art of seeing is lost, Meaning is lost, and all life itself seems ever more meaningless: "They know not what they do, for they do not see what they look-at."
"Not seeing what they look-at” may well be the root cause of the frightful suffering that we humans inflict on one another, on animals, on Earth herself.
How did I discover this seeing/drawing, in which the seeing and the drawing fuse into one undivided act, in which eye and hand, body and soul are no longer split?
It happened around 1960 — on the equator. I was serving as an oral surgeon on the staff of Albert Schweitzer's legendary jungle hospital in Lambarene. Before leaving New York, I had vowed to use my time in Africa to get into as close a contact with Africa and Africans as possible. I had brought two good cameras.
Soon, however, clicking the shutter, even a thousand times, did not satisfy me. The machine separated my eye from the reality it perceived. People in the leprosy section of the hospital would hide their disfigured bodies and flee approaching camera-toters, but they sat for me as models, they felt that the act of’ drawing reverenced, dignified them. I locked away my cameras and, glad I had packed my drawing gear, started to scribble down whatever struck my eye. Almost at once the very quality of my perception changed. Nothing interfered now between my eye and what it saw. Every dot, every line on the paper had gone through my whole organism. I was no longer the onlooker; I had crawled under Africa’s skin.
The revelations of seeing/drawing on the equator was the beginning of my defection from the New York art world, from the need for yearly exhibitions on Fifty-seventh Street or Madison Avenue. I had strayed into this gallery world a few decades earlier. Once in it, it is almost impossible not to become contaminated by ambition, competitiveness, and fear: the ambition of a museum purchase, anxiety about not getting a review or getting a bad one, of falling by the wayside.
Art is the most profound, most irrepressible response to life itself, whether that art is drawing, dancing, playing a flute or acting on stage....If one's art does not rise up from the deepest recesses of one's being, it risks being not art but kitsch.
The poet Masaoka Shiki wrote: "I had a flowering branch placed by my pillow. As I draw it faithfully, I feel I am gradually coming to grasp the secrets of creation."...
When I draw the rose, it looks back at me. It contains all the secrets of Creation, as Shiki saw so clearly. Through that rose I am in touch with myself, with my Self. To be in touch with the Self, with the innermost workings of life, is what Zen is about.
Skull in the grasses
all that remains
of the warriors ‘dreams.
- Buson
'The mystical of the world is that it exists,'
Wittgenstein
Astronauts may wax poetic viewing the earth from outer space, taking pictures of that lovely, touching, fragile little planet. Sitting at the roadside, drawing butterflies on black-eyed Susans, swaying grasses, viewing this earth from inner space, unimpeded by a space suit, how lovely! Drawing moths and beetles colliding with my desk lamp, how fragile! Seeing my neighbor on his cane dragging himself to the mailbox, how touching....
It is almost funny to remember how in the years when I was still on the exhibition merry-go-round, I was always worried: Was what I was showing really 'original' enough? Was it really 'of my time'? Was it 'strong' enough?
It was of course not 'original' enough, for original means, as I found out later, to be in harmony with the Origins; I was not 'of my time' but of its follies and fads. And as to “strength”: Is not to be afraid of tenderness the ultimate weakness?
Listening to a Bach fugue, to his Magnificat I do not hear a Mister Bach "expressing himself," I hear that which transcends Bach and us. I hear what no theology has ever proven: that — under whatever name — God must exist. I hear proof that the Experiment Man has not failed: This music too was made by one of us humans! We, humans, can do more than build missiles and produce junk food for body and mind! We have painted as Piero della Francesca, written elegies as Rilke, requiems as Verdi, Mozart, Schubert, Palestrina!
The Courage To Grow Old, edited and with an introduction by Phillip L. Berman
I was serving on the medical staff of Albert Schweitzer at his legendary jungle hospital in Lambarene when the Grand Docteur was well into his eighties. Only while at Schweitzer's did my professional skills give me real satisfaction. I treated people in dire need who came paddling down the Ogowe in dug-out canoes, and the unfortunatesfrom the leprosarium which Schwetzer build with his Nobel Prize money. But I did more. I drew and drew, and so I came to terms with African earth, with African faces. I penetrated and was penetrated by African ways of being human, for to draw is to become what you draw. Once, returning from New York, I carried thirty letters for Schweitzer in my briefcase. They had been written at the behest of a sixth-grade teacher at a public school in the South Bronx. I had gone there to speak about Schweitzer on an invitation I hestitated to accept until my wife, Claske, said: "If it had been the Sierra Club, you would have jumped at it." Andso talked to these thirty slum kids of whom not two seemedto be of the same genetic mixture and very few who grew up with both their parents. "You don't have to read all these," I said to the old doctor, "but may I drop them a line of thanks on your behalf?" No," he said, "read them to me! These are the things in lifethat are really important." Then, bent over his table, I saw his arthritic hand start to write a long, warm letter to Bella, the teacher in the Bronx: "I know how hard a job yours is. I come from a family of teachers ..." Puttering in his drawer he found a photo of himself with hispet pelican and another with Peter, his baby gorilla, resting on his arm. "Send these," he said.
I thought that by this time I knew a thing or two about Schweitzer, but as I saw the old Nobel laureate laboring over that letter to th Bronx I realized as never before that this man, who had pushed each of his extraordinary potentials as a doctor, a philosopher, a theologian, a musician, to their utter limits, was a human being of awesome authenticity. Since 1913 he had been a pioneer: of foreign aid -- without any political strings attached; of missionary action without the obsession of converting people; of a practical ecumenism that excluded no one; and, at eighty-seven, he once more pioneered: he was the first man of such pominence to protest loudly against atom bomb testing. He had solved the primal question: he had lived his own human truth.
Fingers Pointing Toward the Sacred
Paul D. MacLean, MD, Chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution at the National Institutes of Health:
He described our contemporary human brain as consisting of that 'trinity of brains' he calls the Triune Brain. The most archaic component of this trinity is the reptilian brain, which, with all its skills of foraging, fighting, and mating intact, survives in us after its 250 million year history, and is still as active in our skulls as ever.
This repitian brain is enveloped in the course of evolution by, respectively, the Old Mammalian and the New Mammalian brain. The later develops into two hemispheres, which form that remarkable intra-cranial computer which enables us to verbalize, calculate and think logically.
The intra-cranial computer is rigidly logical. IT is, however, almost devoid of intuition and feeling, so that we would still be less-than-human were it not for the most recent outcropping of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex.
MacLean was able to locate in the pre-frontal cortex capabilities until then unsuspected: the capacity for "insight," namely for introspection into one's own life-process, that awareness of having been born and having to die -- which no other animal ever had. It is this awareness that makes it possible to identify whith the life process in other human beings. The first stirrings of empathy have a chance to arise! From empathy to compassion is but a step...
No crocodile, no cat, has ever had the capacity of a shed of empathy or compassion for its prey.
From the Heron Dance interview:
With the beginnings of the pre-frontal cortex came the beginning of imagination. You imagine the other person or the other being. There you identify. The reverence for life is born right, or the potential for a reverence for life. I found that fascinating.
What Does It Mean To Be Human?
It became clear that what through the years had fascinated me in Shakespeare, touched me so deeply in Rilke's Book of Hours, had moved me to tears in the Agnus Dei of Bach's B Minor Mass, in the Adagio of Shubert's Two-Cello Quintet in C Major, in Gregorian and Tibetan chant, was the celebration of life's fullness and its transiency, its timelessness in time. It must be the ingredient that elevates art to the status of High Art as it is manifest in Egyptian, Assyrian and Medival sculptures, in the sayings of Zen and Sufi masters, in Fra Angelico and Peiro della Francesca, in Vermeer and in the smallest of Rembrandt's landscape drawings, in Mucho's "Persimmons" and Sesshu's angularities. But it is far from confined to High Art, for it strikes the awakened eye whereever it turns -- in the glance exchanged by an old couple, in the nurse's face bent over me as I woke up from anaesthesia, in the handshake of two men on a street corner, a child stroking its kitten -- the Human.
The Ten Commandments of Seeing/Drawing
1. You shall draw everything and every day.
2. You shall not wait for inspiration, for it comes not while you wait, but while you work.
3. You shall not forget all you think you know and even more, all you have been taught.
4. You shall not adore your good drawings and promptly forget your bad ones.
5. You shall not draw with exhibitions in mind, nor to please any critic but yourself.
6. You shall trust none but your own eye and make your hand follow it.
7. You shall consider the mouse you draw as more important than the contents of all of the museums in the world, for
8. You shall love the ten thousand things with all your heart and a blade of grass as yourself.
9. Let each drawing be your first: A celebration of theeye awakened.
10. You shall not worry about “being of your time” for you are your time and it is brief.
Frederick Franck, from The Awakened Eye
