Golgonooza

When I went to the first Temenos Conference on art and the renewal of the sacred at Dartington Hall, one of the highlights of the program was a studio performance (with masks but no costume) of Japanese Noh drama with an accompanying lecture. I was transfixed. For two hours I sat (in their remarkably uncomfortable theatre) simply absorbed in the compelling flow of engaged feeling, bound in a ritual of gesture, sound, and music. This was surprising since most of my ventures to the theatre (before and since with notable, if rare, exceptions) are best characterized as ventures in patience, followed by disillusion! Thinking it might be a 'fluke' of place and circumstance, the next year, I discovered a Noh troupe was in London and here I could experience a full, costumed, ritualized performance. No fluke, once more I was mesmerized and left the theatre a few inches from the ground, thinking, 'This is what theatre is'.  A world beyond simple naturalism, an archetypal wo...

The Wheel of Existence, 18th century, Eastern Tibet. Marco Pallis was a myriad gifted man: a mountaineer, a musician, and a metaphysician. His book, 'Peaks and Lamas' is an enthralling account that draws on all three gifts. It is, as the author forewarns at the beginning, a composite book where we literally climb to the limits of the sheer physicality and mental toughness that a mountaineering ascent requires; and, explore inwards into the subtlest dimensions of the human spirit. In the middle rests how both the topography and the religion of the Himalaya have shaped diverse cultures but, most importantly, the Tibetan. The book was written out of two expeditions in the 1930s, neither of which, to Pallis' deep regret, involved permission to enter Tibet (that would come in 1947) but ones that both, in Sikkim and Ladakh, enabled him to taste the depths of place and tradition. Tradition was a deeply important word for Pallis as a Traditionalist, a member of the ...