Prodigal Daughters - sample by Helen Martineau

Other books by Helen Martineau On the Inside: An Intimate Portrait of Sheila Florance (2005) Marriages of the Magdalene (to be published 2016)

Prodigal Daughters A NEW VISION OF SPIRITUALITY AND THE INNER HISTORIES OF THE ARTS

HELEN MARTINEAU

2015910645 978-1-5035-0594-0 978-1-5035-0593-3 978-1-5035-0592-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Cover illustration Dances in the Wheel of the Cosmos by Monica Bisits Designed and typeset by Helen Christie

Rev. date: 07/17/2015

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Contents INTRODUCTION Why I Wrote ‘Prodigal Daughters’. What it is About PART ONE: THE ARTS AND US – A DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP

1 :The arts and our twenty-first century crisis: how can they help? A fountain of inspiration; Reading the ‘signs of the times’; In genuine art we are looking at deep revelation; Personal and archetypal consciousness; Do we really value the arts? What is art really about? How the artist reveals spirit; When the artist becomes a prophet; Art needs a responsive audience; Opening our eyes to take in the big picture; The work belongs to all.

2: Macrocosm and microcosm – how the fullness of our human nature connects with the archetypal sources of art Behind the artistic drive – the difficulty in accessing our inner nature; The inner life of the soul; The complex world of the fourfold human being; How the four levels are organised on earth and in relation to the higher worlds; Cosmos, self and the arts – on knowing the macrocosmic-microcosmic connection; The archetypal source of the arts; On metaphysical maps – mapping the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm as expressed in the arts.

3: Interweaving threads – as human consciousness evolves the arts travel with us An inside-out history; Charting the evolution of consciousness; The first arts – communal and indispensable; The coming of agriculture and the sun mysteries; City states and divine rulers; Learning to think philosophically and intellectually; Towards the ‘consciousness soul’; This world has the answers? Personal vision, deep-seated longing. PART TWO: THE ARTS IN THEIR GLORIOUS DIVERSITY

4: Architecture and sculpture – how to rediscover the forms of the sacred Building for us; The earliest architecture; Temples of spiritual power; Places of worship that welcome everyone; Our own space; But shouldn’t form follow function? A revolutionary geometry; So many choices for today’s architect; Domestic buildings; Sculpture – visual art in three dimensions; How we experience sculpture; Nourishing forms in nourishing spaces – bringing them home.

5: The two-dimensional visual arts – reflections of heavenly light Visual art doesn’t have to replicate what’s before our eyes; The problem of trying to make two dimensions become three; The importance of colour; Colour and light; Spiritual colour gives the meaning; The attributes of colours; Artists explore the potency of light and colour; Line and drawing; Democratising ‘big art’ until pictures find a place in any home; Photography; Pictures that move within their frame; Totally machine

art; What of the prophetic? There’s controversy; As the world opens up.

always

6: Music – the food of love Otherworldly music; Music is about us; Pythagoras and the cosmic laws; Greek modes and their ongoing influence; Intervals and their meaning; Further into music for the consciousness soul; Musical instruments and spiritual archetypes; Music for the I AM; Timbre revisited in new ways; Song; Troubadours then and now; Recording and more.

7: Dance, drama and Dionysian power Deep entertainment; Dance – why it is more than movement; Seeing the dance; The dancer’s body is like a musical instrument; The evolution of dance; Dance is also inherently sexy; From personal display to revolutionary moves; On improvisation and the search for meaning; Drama – a mirror on our world? All kinds of drama on all kinds of screens; Secrets of Dionysus – towards live drama; From Mystery to the stage in Greece; ‘The Play’s the thing…’; The actor; Deadly or holy theatre?

8: The art of the word – when the Logos speaks through us Our repertoire of heavenly and earthly sounds; The art of poetic language; The birth of poetry; Poetry separates from drama; Reclaiming the lyrical; On Storytelling; Big story – the novel; Grammar is good medicine for us; Symbols and signs and the loss of meaning; Persuading or manipulating – two poles of the same technique; Learning to speak art-fully. PART THREE

SEEDS OF THE FAR FUTURE ARE BEING PLANTED NOW

9: The creative process – what artists know; the creativity we all need A unique ability to be consciously creative; Three spiritual qualities of creativity; The artist examines the creative process; The cycle of creativity – first beingness; The cycle of creativity – onward from point to point; The part played by the senses; Making good use of our senses; Moving beyond the senses; When creativity fails; The questions we need to ask.

10: What now? Where next? – Crises, dilemmas and redemptive possibilities Change is in the air; An existential crisis? Let’s slow down a bit; Anything can be art? Anyone can be an artist? A shift towards arts democracy; Postmodern trends; Calling up music from the underworld; What if the arts slide into non-arts disciplines? The harmonious trinity of human expression – on their breakings and reunitings.

11: Towards integral consciousness and deepening inner unity Embracing possibilities – or closing them down; Looking inward to open up the future; Communicating from the Self and awakening empathy; Crossings – underlying archetypal connections and a feeling for inner relationships; Towards unity – links through the language of artistic elements – rhythm, shape/form, space, time, force and dynamics; The connection with our will, thinking and feeling; Our senses can cross the borders; The deepening of art – entering within; We are the arbiters – developing a genuine aesthetic; The

artistic journey – a road for us all. ENDNOTES LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

To Mario

Introduction WHY I WROTE ‘PRODIGAL DAUGHTERS’. WHAT IT IS ABOUT

This work grew out of my lifelong love affair with the arts. As a child I wrote poems and stories, including what might now be called graphic novels, for my friends (which compensated rather well for not being good at ball games). The idea of being a writer faded in adulthood. That is until thirty years later when I started writing seriously and became a published author. Childhood ballet lessons, which became the source for dramatic dance compositions in the living room to the few LPs my parents owned, did lead to professional training, performance and choreography. I also undertook a diploma in visual arts and studied literature in my university degree. I pulled this all together and taught arts subjects in schools and creative movement freelance with diverse populations. Music found a special place in my heart when I learnt to play guitar and sang in a choir. Drama? That occurred mainly by proxy – I often worked with actors and was married for many years to a film and theatre director. Over this multi-faceted journey the arts have crept into my bloodstream and still live there. I know that good art in all its forms can move people deeply. Without the experience I feel bereft. Yet 12

something else led me to ask: Why art? This was the longing to comprehend the meaning, or meanings, of our existence – or at least give it a try. In my twenties I lived in a four-hundred-year-old house in the north of England, complete with a far more ancient well in the cellar and a ghost in the attic. We were two families, all of us good friends. One summer afternoon we sipped our wine beneath the venerable trees in the garden contemplating big issues of birth and death and everything in between, as one does. My friend started singing Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, and followed up by declaring, ‘That’s us, stardust, billions of years old. We’re part of the earth, part of the universe and when we die the molecules we are made of merge back into the earth. That makes us eternal. Simple.’ The notion of webs of interconnection and unbroken wholeness is ancient. It hangs on despite plenty of opposition. It has been proposed as a theory from the ancient Greek philosophers to our time by unorthodox theoretical physicist David Bohm and biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. I accepted the soundness of these ideas, which often imply a more than physical connectedness, while hankering for that ‘aha’ moment when everything clicks, the epiphany that means you ‘know’ in a profound way. It led me to delve into various metaphysical philosophies. In 1984 in a Buddhistic frame of mind I went trekking in Nepal, a northwesterly route towards Machapuchare, a beautiful unclimbed peak sacred to the Nepalis. The local people 13

were delightful and welcoming, the lofty Annapurna ranges were unbelievably stunning and separation from civilization had loosened up everyone in our small party. I kept a journal rather than taking photos and it contained a series of small epiphanies, more or less like this: The silence was a palpable hum. The song of the mountains. Exhaustion and an overpowering sense of the majesty around made me burst into tears. Sitting weeping on a rock ledge while the mountains stood, impassive, I felt my tiny part in the everlasting surge of creation and destruction that was more than my senses could fathom. The spare and refined air had heightened my intuition of a mystery that was life-affirming. But back at work offering more artistic activities for people to enjoy, I began to wonder. The arts live in our worldly senses and yet they too can invoke a feeling for that mystery beyond the senses. In this lies their potential to unite us with a larger whole. But how? Could there be a spirit of art, some universal arts impulse? If so why do we have the motivation to create such a diversity of art forms? And what is going on in our experience of them? These were challenging new questions for me yet the opportunity to address them opened up in the very asking. Within two months I had encountered Mario Schoenmaker who had founded a centre which grew out of the 1970s human potential movement. It was also 14

home to an unconventional church, called the Church of the Mystic Christ. This community included a college with studies based on mysticism and esotericism across ages and cultures, along with Mario’s own inspiring vision of a life lived in harmony with the spiritual aspect of self. It wasn’t a doctrinaire place and the teaching embraced freedom of expression and complexity rather than the simplistic answers that confine so many human systems, religious or secular. My years there were personally transforming. What I learnt also gave me the means to explore the art forms as an avenue of human expression here in the world that embraces the profound dimensions of the spiritual. I studied formally in the college and graduated with an honours diploma. Subsequently I was employed by the college and designed and taught a course, The Spiritual Significance of the Arts, which built on the diploma study. In addition articles I wrote on different art forms were published. That period came to an end with Mario’s death in 1997. This book is a further development of my work during those years. The need for such expansion was obvious when I had another look at my study and course notes. It’s a given that learning never finishes, and the arts are an ever evolving adventure in a wonderful and very important field of human achievement. I have not attempted a critical academic study, or a comprehensive survey in the manner of historians like E.H. Gombrich or Kenneth Clark. Rather, the task I set 15

myself was to explore different themes and to call on selected artists in various fields – works I have personally experienced or others which illustrate the deeper purposes behind the art forms. Central to my approach is the hypothesis that artistic creation involves spiritual activity and that this metaphysical dimension gives depth to our appreciation of the arts. This is not about ‘spiritual art’, which is a misnomer. There’s religious art, yes, but more germane to the artist is the spirit in which he or she works. In what follows I investigate the nature of that ‘spirit’ and how artists have approached the spiritual in their artworks. My aim has been to back up the proposition that there is an imaginative, inspirational and intuitive world, a metaphysical dimension within our human consciousness available to every artist in any field. Inherent in this is the understanding that this dimension, inaccessible to ordinary sense consciousness, is as real as anything physical. The value of the arts as I have come to understand them is that they create a bridge between the two worlds and give us a genuine feeling for things beyond everyday consciousness, things that could not be conveyed in any other way than by symbols in images, sounds, shapes and movements. I also hope to bring the value of the arts closer to home. I am convinced of their direct relationship to our lives in the world. The creative process involved in making genuine art comes from a wholehearted creativity we can all apply in most aspects of our lives. As well, because of their distinctive nature I agree with 16

countless practising artists who believe that the arts can play a redemptive role, helping in lifting us out of the mire of our deeply troubled world. Although I drew on many sources in my initial research, the finished work has become my personal story about the artistic and spiritual interconnection. I hope you will enjoy the subject as much as I have enjoyed writing about it. Helen Martineau