{"id":13301,"date":"2021-08-27T13:54:20","date_gmt":"2021-08-27T13:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=13301"},"modified":"2021-08-27T13:54:42","modified_gmt":"2021-08-27T13:54:42","slug":"music-meditation-painting-and-dreaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=13301","title":{"rendered":"Music, Meditation, Painting\u2014and Dreaming"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Phillip Glass \u00a0is a composer and performer who lives in New York City. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary classical composers, particularly because of his innovative minimalist style. A member of\u00a0Tricycle\u2019s Board of Advisors since its first issue, he was chair of its Board of Trustees from 2006 on and is now a chair emeritus.
<\/strong><\/em>Fredericka Foster<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0is an American painter, cultural activist, and educator, born and raised in Seattle, Washington. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We are on the phone, freewheeling about our practices: music, art, and meditation. Another day, we are in Philip\u2019s kitchen, sitting at a wooden table. Behind us are comfortable couches and a private outdoor space. Philip\u2019s partner, the artist Saori Tsukada, is working with flowers in the urban garden surrounding the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Fredericka Foster<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philip Glass (PG): <\/strong>I was talking once to Gelek Rimpoche<\/a> [1938\u20132017] about meditation, and I asked him, \u201cIsn\u2019t it just paying attention?\u201d Yes, he said, \u201cthat\u2019s absolutely what it is.\u201d Meditation is a nice fuzzy word that we all like to talk about\u2014but paying attention is placing your mind and functioning in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the few years I have practiced meditation, I have worked with a number of texts. Say I am reading texts I have read many times\u2014I\u2019m thinking of the first Panchen Lama\u2019s book on guru devotion [Lama Ch\u00f6pa: The Guru Puja<\/em>], which is not well understood. It is not about the guru; it is about the devotion. When I decide to really pay attention, I go back in my memory and look at some of the initiations I have taken. I watch the language change from awareness to remembering. It is possible to train the mind to increase memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I once asked the [scholar-teacher] Demo Rinpoche how many books he had memorized, and he replied that he wasn\u2019t doing much memorizing at all\u2014he thought only about 19! I\u2019m sure it is many more now, and Gelek Rimpoche had memorized a library. The Tibetan culture cultivated the idea of memorizing. The passing on of wisdom could have been very accurate, since this was their main way of sharing information. The Tibetan lamas would memorize entire books and then, looking at a particular page, include the footnotes from other books they had read to verify a particular idea or lineage in the book they were writing themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"philip
Philip Glass at his studio piano in 2017 | Photograph by Danny Clinch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fredericka Foster (FF): <\/strong>And here I am, still working to memorize all the texts that I work with daily! Memorization<\/a> is also a part of a visual artist\u2019s training. When we learn to draw, we work from reality\u2014say, at its simplest, a still life. First we draw a series of lines to establish a compositional placement on the page. Then we memorize a line, draw it, and go back to the source to check it. We keep doing that until we have trained our hand to accurately follow our eye. Another memory exercise involved going through a pile of one thousand prints in a day and then discussing what we had seen. Or we would spend hours in front of a single painting and then sketch it out later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: Culture has often been passed from one generation to the other through the power of memorization. We know the Bible was written 200 years after the birth of Christianity, so we assume it was made up. But it is possible that a sharp mind could remember very clearly and pass it along to another sharp mind, so the passing along of wisdom could have actually been very accurate, maybe more accurate than you would find in books, which are subject to typographical error, bad editions, and missing pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Fredericka Foster at her Soho art studio in June 2021 | Photograph by Celeste Sloman for Tricycle<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: Tibetan Buddhism attracts a lot of visual artists, and I suspect it is because we take easily to the many visualization exercises available for practitioners. I remember your telling me that your father taught you to play mental chess, which would certainly serve to sharpen your memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: Yes, he began doing that with his brother to pass time while they were waiting for the papers to be delivered for their paper route. And he continued playing with me and my brother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you go back to the 15th and 16th centuries, people didn\u2019t write down everything. Many people didn\u2019t write at all! One memorizing trick was to visualize a bookshelf and to actually visualize the names of the books on the shelf. I tried this once to see if it would work with a dance company in Australia. There were 20 people in the company, and we worked with them for a few days. With each member, I visualized their name on a book cover and put it in a certain location on an imaginary shelf. The last day I was able to say goodbye to each one, correctly remembering their names while looking at the bookshelf I had created in my mind. And they said, \u201cHow did you do that?\u201d Well, what I was doing was trying to see if that thing worked. It did work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen that intensity of attention is applied to creating, you can\u2019t stand outside and watch it; you have to give up the witness.\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: And we both did a lot of memorization in school\u2014of poetry, speeches, and so on. It\u2019s helpful when we memorize sutras and prayers today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: All that also serves to assist us with the flow of attention. I once heard someone say he didn\u2019t understand meditation. I said, \u201cForget that word; just pay attention to what you are doing.\u201d We had been talking about infinity, and my friend suggested it was the flow of eternity, and I said that is the whole idea, the process of the mind attending to what you are doing, one moment at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find that when that intensity of attention is applied to creating, you can\u2019t stand outside and watch it; you have to give up the witness. People ask me all the time, \u201cWhere did that music come from?\u201d I have no idea, because all my energy went into writing the music. Since I had no awareness of myself writing, I had extra energy to increase the depth of concentration. It left me without the awareness of doing the work. I discovered that being aware of myself creating was an indulgence I couldn\u2019t afford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>. It sounds like you have somehow overcome dualism when you are writing music. It\u2019s like the state we work to achieve in order to become one with the object of meditation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: Actually, when I decided to explore where music lived, I found that music comes from dreaming. I noticed I would wake up with a piece of music very clear in my mind. I thought these were stray ideas, but then I became curious where these ideas came from\u2014the dreaming function of the mind is not ordinarily available to us. So I decided to wake up and write it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, I was considering working on King Lear<\/em>, a play I don\u2019t like very much, and I was thinking I don\u2019t want to write music for this<\/em>. I finished the play and went to sleep. Then, at 5:30 in the morning, I heard music playing, and realized it was King Lear <\/em>music and that the play was all about Lear\u2019s relationship with his daughter; everything else was distraction. I went to the piano without hesitation. I started to write words by hand to describe the idea, then I sketched the music\u2014a few measures. I thought it was the beginning of Lear<\/em>, but actually it was the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"philip
The English National Opera company performs Philip Glass\u2019s Satyagraha<\/em> at the London Coliseum in 2018. | Photograph by Thomas Bowles \/ Alamy Stock Photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: I keep pen and paper at my bedside and write or draw ideas as they appear. I haven\u2019t done much with these ideas, but you are inspiring me to pay closer attention to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: Dreaming is the most personal and unique function that we don\u2019t normally share with others. In analysis, we paid a lot of attention to dreams, but I am not talking about Freudian analysis and projecting it onto everyone else. What I learned from analysis was to give up my interest in the uninteresting\u2014all those family issues made me bored with myself, and I didn\u2019t have to do that anymore. Maybe the analyst knows this is what is happening. I read that during the first two hours of sleep, the mind looks at the day just past and sorts out memories to be preserved and those to be put away. The mind acts as an archivist. The creative part comes close to morning, before you wake up. When I wake up, I ask myself What was I just thinking<\/em>? It is probably what I was dreaming about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: Are you talking about lucid dreaming<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: No, but I can stand at the door of my dream and look into the room, as it were. It\u2019s not complete, but it\u2019s enough. Before I write, I access that dreaming state. I may never understand the dream, but what is important is that the material of the dream has become available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: You encouraged me once to see the Cocteau Orphic trilogy, which inspired you to write an opera triptych. Those three films explore dreams and myths and can be watched again and again. When I moved from doing paintings exploring the symbols of faith and myth to working with images of water, I felt that I moved into metaphor and closer to the dream state. I am so relaxed looking at water. It frees my mind to wander, and I get new ideas, or watch old ones come together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: The challenge of any artist is to keep the fire of creativity alive. What we mostly do is, we get good at doing something, and we keep doing it and don\u2019t change much at all. If I look at the work of Sol LeWitt<\/a> [1928- 2007], it is extraordinary, but it doesn\u2019t change much. [Josef] Albers did manage to work with a square in a square over and over, but while they might look the same, they are not the same at all because of the influence of color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An artist like me wants radical change. I found that the engine of change was working with new people and the new ideas they brought to the conversation. It didn\u2019t turn into a formula, but I often did this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bob Wilson and I did [the opera] Einstein on the Beach<\/em>, and it was very successful. To avoid doing \u201cThe Son of Einstein on the Beach,\u201d I next did the opera Satyagraha<\/em>, which was completely different. That was counterintuitive. We all want to please people. Your gallery wants you to make more of the same kind of paintings because they were successful. Most people follow success with another similar one, but I wanted to keep creative thinking alive in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every time I made a big change, I would lose a lot of people, but I would get some new ones. I found 50 percent of people liked it and 50 percent didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: After the Fischbach Gallery [where I regularly showed] left New York and went online, I found my work changing. I\u2019ve always had to solve a new problem with each painting, but now I feel free to change what I was doing in a more radical way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rose Devouring Covid 19<\/em>, Fredericka Foster, oil on canvas, 18 in. x 24 in., 2021. The rose, a symbol of healing, came to the artist in a dream state. | Artwork courtesy Fredericka Foster<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: I\u2019ve noticed your work is changing. I have turned this change idea into a mantra: I am never happier than when I don\u2019t know what I am doing. Still, I have moments of panic. How is this going to work? It can be very stressful trying to do new things, and I am not always completely successful, but I change as much as I can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I discovered it was impossible not <\/em>to do something familiar to some degree. When working in theater, I had to have at least one person who would come with me into a new project. I had to find a compromise about what I was willing to know and not know. I found I had to take something with me. Parts of my language would have to be the same, or my task would become impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: In your ninth symphony, I feel like you are communing with the cosmos; there seems to be a seamless interaction between art and meditative revelation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have turned this change idea into a mantra: I am never happier than when I don\u2019t know what I am doing. Still, I have moments of panic.\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: Our minds are working all the time, but we can\u2019t drive thoughts into awareness. As an artist, you are distilling your thoughts all the time, or listening to music, or paying attention to images. You are probably painting very differently now than you did when you were young, and some of that will be due to the fact that you have learned how to master your attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once when I was in the mountains of Mexico with friends, we had to cross a valley to where we left our car. It looked to me like we didn\u2019t have time to get there. If it got dark and we were in the desert, we would be in trouble. We started walking in a focused-intention kind of way\u2014they called it a walk of attention. A walk that would have normally taken 40 minutes took 10. I had that experience of being able to pay attention to my attention, to actually cross a valley in a much shorter period of time so that we got to where we needed to in the light. We\u2019re talking about pretty hardcore reality. The only way to do it was to command my attention to the point where I was able to make that happen. You can say \u201cWell, you just made that up.\u201d Of course I just made it up; how else could it have happened if I hadn\u2019t made it up? But the fact of the matter is, I got across the valley before the sun went down. I know you\u2019ve experienced something like that in painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FF<\/strong>: Yes, and at those times it seems that the painting paints itself. Later, I think, How did I do that<\/em>? I\u2019ve also experienced the sensation of entering the consciousness of animals, or even fish, when I have been watching water; suddenly feeling the sense of hunger and of being prey at the same moment\u2014imagination becoming compassion. Music, art, and meditation are all means of accomplishing deep mental targeting of our feelings of interdependence and compassion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PG<\/strong>: Bravo!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: https:\/\/tricycle.org\/magazine\/glass-foster-meditation\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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