The Jaded Princess, Gloria K. Alford

Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, Feb. 23 - July 1. Show featuring work inspired by the art & history of China. Reception 4 - 6 PM, Sat., Feb. 23.

For more on MAH and upcoming event:
http://www.santacruzmah.org/
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We're a couple. I scribble, she sculpts and paints... The Jaded Princess will be part of a Museum-Wide Exhibition, "Ying: Inspired by the Art and History of China," coming up at Santa Cruz' Museum of Art and History (MAH). The show runs from February 23 to July 1. The Jaded Princess, a life-size sculpture made in the late 1970s, took a year to produce and was constructed using antique circuit boards. Gloria's piece is a replica of the Chinese Jade Burial Suit of Chinese Princess Tou Wan, Han Dynasty, 140 B.C.

According to the catalog, "The concept of this exhibition resulted from [Curator Susan Hillhouse's] visits to the studios of a group of artists" in Chengde, China. "...this museum-wide presentation opens a new path of discovery through contemporary artists from China, the Bay area and Santa Cruz, deepening our understanding of Santa Cruz County's many cultural heritages."

Gloria's Jaded Princess has been exhibited in several Art & Technology shows, at UC Santa Cruz, in San Jose and elsewhere. Hopefully, one day Bill Gates will see and want to purchase it.


Artist's Bio:

GLORIA ALFORD became a mixed media artist by default. Refused admittance into a Graduate Art Program in Madison, Wisconsin, she enrolled instead in a Home Economics course where she learned printmaking. But on cloth, not paper. She went on to use some non-traditional methods and materials, such as solar cells, hand-made paper, plastic, cloth, computer chips, plus acrylic, watercolor, and methods like vacuum forming plastic, collage and paint.

Gloria’s best-known piece, The Jaded Princess, represents the artist's concern with the duality of technology--a provider of "the good life" and, at the same time, a vehicle for destruction. The circular chips covering the princess' brain are bomb detonators, by design. However, Ms. Alford's princess is intended as an affirmation--a sleeping beauty, or technology preserved, awaiting awakening by the prince of technology.

Exhibited at the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Gloria's mixed-media work, said the Museum's Director "was popular with the conservatives as it was with the more avant garde enthusiasts."

Still true to her origins as a mixed media artist, Gloria Alford now works with varieties of paint and collage on paper and canvas.

For more, see:
http://www.gloriaalford.com

and the posting that follows this.

Words, Words, Words

Following up on (previous) posting re: William James' Principles of Psychology and James' thoughts on what has come to be known as "stream of consciousness," I think of Gloria K. Alford's painting titled "Words," Acrylic on Paper, 22 x 30... which appears here with her permission. If it's possible for a painting to catch something of the nature of language, language of a certain kind... language coming into being, language (and this is going to sound strange), taking the form of "words," and, for me anyway, tapping into what I think of as "stream of consciousness," well, this painting does that. Gloria doesn't often include words in her pieces, and I'm not exactly sure how or why it happens here. But... well, one day I may use it as a cover for a book, again, with her permission.

I know, but don't know... "What's it all about?" I ask. "Words, words, words," she says. "How much communication happens with words? There's so much, speaking, but also the printed word, which is what I have in mind. Nothing profound. Any kind of meaning you want to give it is okay by me," she says. "Which is itself," I say, "a way of playing with words, giving it back to the reader..." Back, in other words, to the beginning, to Gloria's question, "How much communication happens with words?"

Consciousness, Garrison Keillor, Writers Almanac

I know, it's right there... Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac, an archive of his radio show. Consciousness... well, this, on William James' birthday, January 11... what is a blog? It's a journal, an archive, a record of where you've been and what you've thought and what led you there, here, there, the track(s). Enough that it be for yourself. Someone else cares to look in? Fine. Anyway, here's a snippet of what I want to save:


It's the birthday of the psychologist and philosopher William James, born in New York City (1842). He was the older brother of the novelist Henry James, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his era. He was a man who started out studying medicine and went on to become one of the founders of modern psychology, and finished his life as a prominent philosopher. He was a professor of physiology at Harvard when he was hired to write a textbook about the new field of psychology, which was challenging the idea that the body and the mind were separate. He could have just written a summary of all the current ideas in the field but instead decided to explore the issues of psychology he found most interesting and perplexing. He took twelve years to finish the book called, The Principles of Psychology (1890). It was used as a textbook in college classrooms, but was also translated into a dozen different languages, and people read it all over the world.

One of the ideas he developed in the book was a theory of the human mind which he called "a stream of consciousness." Before him the common view was that a person's thoughts have a clear beginning and end, and that the thinker is in control of his or her thoughts. But William James wrote, "Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows."

James's ideas about consciousness were especially influential on writers, and novelists from James Joyce to William Faulkner began to portray streams of consciousness through language, letting characters think at length and at random on the page. Consciousness itself became one of the most important subjects of modern literature. He also helped invent the technique of automatic writing, in which a person writes as quickly as possible whatever comes into one's head. He encouraged audiences to take up the practice as a form of self-analysis, and one person who took his advice was a student named Gertrude Stein, who went on to use it as the basis for her writing style.

William James wrote, "The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures." He also wrote, "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."

more...

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.

William James was born at the Astor House in New York City, son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., James George Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Jung.

[Wikipedia]

MARGIE, THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY

Back from swimming, open mail and there's Margie, The American Journal of Poetry, 2007, an annual of poetry, (440 pages!) edited by Robert Nazarene and (among others), Troy Jollimore, Canadian poet-friend and author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Cover photo bears the caption, Robert Nazarene, "The Boy With Nothing To Lose."

Margie includes One-Stop Foot Shop, one of the poems slated for this "work in progress" (see Blog posting #1), Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia. Hard to know who reads these things, but here's the poem:


ONE-STOP FOOT SHOP

Podiatrist Father:

“We walk with angels
and they are our feet.

“‘Vibrating energy packets,’” he calls them. “‘Bundles of soul
in a world of meat.’ Early warning system—
dry skin and brittle nails;
feelings of numbness and cold;
these are symptoms; they mean something.
I see things physicians miss.

“All you have to do is open your eyes, just open your eyes,
and you’ll see: seven-eighths of everything is invisible, a spirit
inside the spirit.
The soul is rooted in the foot.
As your friend Bly says, ‘The soul longs to go down’;
feet know the way to the other world,
that world where people are awake.
So do me a favor: dream me no dreams.
A dreamer is someone who’s asleep.

“You know, the material world is infinite,
but boring infinite,” he says, cigarette in hand,
little wings fluttering at his ankles.

“And women,” he says, smacking his head,
“four times as many foot problems as men.
High heels are the culprit.

“I may be a podiatrist, but I know what I’m about:
feet. Feet don’t lie,
don’t cheat, don’t kiss ass. Truth is,
peoples’ feet are too good for them.”

Baba Hari Dass

In 1985, after 14 years in Canada, I wrote a feature for The Toronto Star about attending a week-long yoga retreat with Baba Hari Dass, a silent monk who communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. The retreat was held at a YMCA camp several hours north of Toronto. I attended with my then-wife and our two children, ages 8 and 14. That was the story: What is it like for a married couple and their children to do "yoga," chant, meditate, listen to talks on Ashtanga, or Eight-Limbed Yoga, and experience a new way of being together as a family?

As I understand it, one is either a monk who dedicates him/her self full-time to the discipline, or a householder. Husband to four wives, father to five children, my karma is what it is. But I've long been fascinated by that intersection, that tension between the sacred and the insane. Sorry, meant to say profane.

Apparently pleased with the article, Baba Hari Dass' people invited me and my wife, a visual artist, to teach at Mount Madonna School in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Later that year my then-spouse returned to Toronto and I stayed on at Mount Madonna. What to do? I began by seeking advice from the silent monk who I'd come to like and trust.

"How come she left?" I asked.

"She found you boring. She wants fun," he wrote on his small chalkboard.

"Am I boring?"

"No, you have different natures. Women leave you because they want excitement. You are a writer. You live in an abstract world which doesn't excite them."

"False expectations is the cause of 'broken heart,'" he continued. "Nothing is permanent. But we are looking for permanency."

Here's a man who's never been married, I thought. Would I trade places with him? Better celibacy, I decided, better the life of a monk than the hell of what one goes through with a divorce. That was then...

People ask: Does it get easier, breaking up... then breaking up and going through it again? I just shake my head.


is a silent monk who has not spoken since 1952 and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. This verbal silence is a process which gradually quiets the mind and eliminates unwanted thoughts. While this concept may be initially difficult for most of us to understand, the example of Baba Hari Dass is ample expression of the potential for peace that lies within each of us as the result of spiritual discipline and devotion to helping others. Babaji is first and foremost a master yogi, having practiced the disciplines of yoga from childhood. In addition he is an accomplished author, builder, philosopher, sculptor, and proponent of Ayurveda (the ancient Indian system of health and healing).

http://www.mountmadonna.org/yoga/babaji.html


*Ashtanga Yoga

Ashtanga Yoga, also known as Raja Yoga, is the scientific method of enlightenment propounded [more than 2,000 years ago] by the ancient sage Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras. It is the Yoga that Baba Hari Dass has practiced since childhood. Since his arrival from India in 1971, Baba Hari Dass has been active in training students and teachers of Yoga in the United States and Canada. Through his compassionate example, young and old alike are learning the gentle art of peace.*

Because there has been much confusion over the past few years regarding the term Ashtanga, we wish to be clear that we do not teach a contemporary method of asana that has come to be known as “Power Yoga” or “Ashtanga”. Though asana (seat, or posture) is but one limb of Ashtanga Yoga and Hatha Yoga, it is often identified as Yoga.

We present the classical Ashtanga Yoga set forth more than 2,000 years ago by Patanjai in the Yoga Sutras. Ashtanga means Eight Limbed (ashta meaning eight, and anga meaning limb).

The eight limbs* are:
Restraints (Yama):
Nonviolence (Ahimsa)
Truthfulness (Satya)
Non-stealing (Asteya)
Continence (Bramacharya)
Non-possessiveness (Aparigraha)
Observances (Niyama):
Purity (Shaucha)
Contentment (Santosha)
Austerity (Tapas)
Scriptural Study (Svadhyaya)
Surrender to God (Ishvarapranidhana)
Posture, Seat (Asana)
Breath Control (Pranayama)
Withdrawing the Mind from Sense Perception (Pratyahara)
Concentration (Dharana)
Meditation (Dhyana)
Higher Consciousness (Samadhi)

http://www.mountmadonna.org/yoga/babaji.html

MEDITATING WITH RAM DASS – TEACHING A SIX-YEAR-OLD TO “SEE”

MEDITATING WITH RAM DASS – TEACHING A SIX-YEAR-OLD TO “SEE”

That image of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (see Jan. 1 posting) got me thinking of how I started... in 1968, a resident at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony, Peterborough, N.H., I learned that Ram Dass, AKA Professor Richard Alpert*, had just returned from India and was living at his father’s estate not far from Peterborough. So one afternoon--Ram Dass having agreed to see me—I set out on an adventure that continues to this day...

That was my first experience with meditation—

I returned to MacDowell and spent an afternoon with my daughter who was living nearby. I sought to impart something of what I felt I’d gotten from the experience of meditating with Ram Dass. I knew doing so would have value for her, a “gift” that would serve her for the rest of her life. That if I provided nothing else, at least there was this.

Thirty years later, a graduate of Berkeley, top of her class, an environmental scientist, she shared with me her description of the experience. She did so as she was preparing the way for me to meet one of her colleagues, Arjuna Ardagh, author and founder of the Living Essence Foundation.

“By way of introduction, when I was around 5 or 6 my Dad came home from some kind of event or class about meditation. He asked me if I’d ever stopped all my thoughts. We discussed it a bit since even at my age it was pretty obvious that just about everything required some form of thought. Dad had an innocent curiosity that still moves me. It was clear he thought my youth and awareness might provide a perspective that could otherwise be inaccessible to him. Joan Baez was on the stereo and we sat on the couch in front of the fireplace looking out the window. We agreed to try it. We sat there, me on his right, our eyes closed. Trying not to think. It didn’t work but it was my first formal introduction to meditation. Dad had an attentive, childlike, almost fixated quality when he asked how it was for me. He was on fire – passionate, desperate really, seemed willing to put anything on the line to really look, to really see. Until that moment I had believed I was the only one who had the sense to care, to really see.

“So that’s a bit of dad.”
____

*From Dr. Richard Alpert to Baba Ram Dass

In 1967 Alpert travelled to India, where he met the American spiritual seeker Bhagavan Das. As he guided him barefoot from temple to temple, Bhagavan Das began teaching Alpert basic mantras and asanas, as well as how to work with beads. After a few months Bhagavan Das led Alpert to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or as he is better known in the West, Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji soon became Alpert's guru and gave him the name "Ram Dass", which means "servant of God". Under the guidance of Maharaj-ji, Ram Dass was instructed to receive teaching from Hari Dass Baba, who taught in silence using only a chalkboard. While in India, Ram Dass also corresponded with Meher Baba; however, he remained primarily focused on the teaching of Hari Dass Baba. Among other things, Hari Dass Baba trained Ram Dass in raja yoga and ahimsa. It was these life-changing experiences in India that inspired Ram Dass to write the contemporary spiritual classic, Be Here Now, in which he teaches the harmony of all people and religions.

From Wikipedia

New Year's Greeting - Peace

In a bus stop shelter, as you can see... Even in Las Vegas Valley, the
spirit lives.

Happy New Year !!!!