A walk through poverty to the museum

I thought I would walk to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco between three telephone calls and a lunchtime meeting.

I stepped off my now familiar blocks into a different world. It was black. It was poor. It was threaded with hopelessness. I have experienced many contrasts in my travels and been confronted by the stark realities of poverty but this was shocking, so close to wealth, so stark. It was a five minute walk to Union Square and Louis Vuitton.

The streets wreaked of urine. Every third person appeared deranged. The fabric of the buildings were frayed, faded, disreputable.

Just as soon as you had entered, you were out yet left wondering whether what you had seen was real. It was, sadly, it was.

Then you were at a palatial square and there was the new museum for Asian Art.

It was an excellent collection and running parallel to it was 'Phantoms of Asia' - examples of contemporary art that was responding to Asian religious traditions. There were two very simple, pure abstract Tibetan examples that were very beautiful. One was of receding archways in grey white, ethereal, like a doorway into a transcendent reality. The second was a box the surface of which was a geometric pattern of lines illuminated from within so that the light extended beyond the solid form, dissolving into the room.

But my favorite piece was from late eighteenth, early nineteenth century Rajasthan - a cloth painting of the cosmos. It was rough, primitive, naive but beautiful. Vishnu dreams worlds: one of gods, one of humans. Each populated by diverse, tiny figures, worshiping and delighting caught up in the swirling pattern held aloft by the figure of a cosmic man. The world is rooted in divine vision and consciousness: a consciousness that we share. Only the demons are outside its patterning, locked in their own worlds, by their own actions.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog