Improvisation

Further Fragments on the limits of understanding…

Out Loud! oil on wooden panel

Once Miles Davis asked me, “How do you play from nothing?” And I said, “You know, you just do it.” And that actually is the answer. I wish there were a way to make “I don’t know” a positive thing, which it isn’t in our society. We feel that we need to “know” certain things, and we substitute that quest for the actual experience of things in all its complexity. When I play pure improvisation, any kind of intellectual handles are inappropriate because they get in the way of letting the river move where it’s supposed to move.

Keith Jarrett

When I first discovered Keith Jarrett’s music in the mid 1970’s I was immediately struck by what he was doing. Not only did it sound wonderful to me, inspiring and taking us on a rich and varied emotional journey; his approach connected with all my deepest intuitions on there being another way of doing things.

ἐγὼ μὲν οὐκ ἔχοιμ᾽ ἂν εὖ λέγειν τύχην, χρὴ δ᾽, ἥτις ἐστί, καρτερεῖν θεοῦ δόσιν

I could never bring myself to say that fate is kind, but we must endure what the gods give, whatever that may be.

Euripides, Alcestis

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.

Iya Prigogine

This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication…. Every separation is a link.

Simone Weil

...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism...

Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" from Thesis VII 1940

...Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein...

Walter Benjamin, "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" von These VII 1940

Going back to 2010 and the beginning of the Dark Mountain Project I’ve entered conversations around the concept of Uncivilization. There was a certain hypothetical quality surrounding all this. Still so much, “Well where would we be without x?”

Somehow, even after recent insights into the way any System of Thought; whatever Edifice of Thought we might speculate into existence; would come to the same end. It’s only now that I can read Walter Benjamin’s statement, “from inside” the perspective he had in 1940.

The Twentieth Century left countless such “Easter Eggs” for us. Recognizing and realizing where we now stand, we can now begin to see the way the usual abusive defenses and qualifiers and calls to, “Be reasonable!” fall away; and we are left with the incontrovertible truth that the whole thing has been corrupt; and is now rotting all around us.

We’ve had the kind of perspectival shift the victims of the Titanic crossed, going from the hypotheticals of a tilting deck to the stark realities of 29º seawater.

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Why do you create authority? What is the cause of your creating authority? It is, as I have said, the search for security, and I shall have to say this so often that it will become almost a formula for you. Now you are searching for a security in which you think you will need to make no effort, where you will not need to struggle with your neighbour. But you will not attain this state of security by searching for it. There is a state which is fulfillment, which is the assurance of bliss, a state in which you act from life; but that state you attain only when you no longer seek security. Only when you realize with your whole being that there is no such thing as security in life, only when you are free from this constant search, can there be fulfillment. So you create authority in the shape of ideals, in the shape of religious, social, economic systems, all based on the search for individual security. And you yourself are therefore responsible for the creation of authority, to which you have become a slave. Authority does not exist by itself. It has no existence apart from him who creates it. You have created it, and until you are aware with your whole being of the cause of its creation, you will be a slave to it. And you can become aware of that cause only when you are acting, not through self-analysis or intellectual discussion.⁠

Jiddu Krishnamurti⁠

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

James Baldwin

Civilizations die by suicide, not murder.

Arnold Toynbee

It is to see the truth of this without distortion. This puts an end to all choice and therefore to all effort.

My mind wanders. Why? I want to think about a picture, a phrase, an idea, an image, and in thinking about it I see that my mind has gone off to the railway or to something that happened yesterday. The first thought has gone, and another has taken its place. Therefore I examine every thought that arises. That is intelligent, isn’t it? But you make an effort to fix your thought on something. Why should you fix it? If you are interested in the thought that comes, then it gives you its significance. The wandering is not distraction – do not give it a name. Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also. Mind is made up of innumerable demands and longings; and when it understands them, it is capable of an awareness which is not exclusive. Concentration is exclusiveness, it is resistance against something. Such concentration is like putting on blinkers – it is obviously useless, it does not lead to reality. When a child is interested in a toy, there is no distraction.

Krishnamurti in Rajahmundry 1949, Talk 1

We have access to intelligence when we are not trapped within Thought, within the idea of an atomized self. Intelligence/Love/Connection exists as a medium through which the Universe unfolds. Intelligence is infinite. Intelligence is also unavailable to us if we are trapped in Thought. Intelligence can be difficult to see…. The actions of intelligence; which flow through us unmediated by Thought; can be difficult to perceive. It can be; if we are “well-trained,” hard to distinguish the actions of intelligence from deeply conditioned thought. Except that the actions of conditioned Thought will always spring from a fundamental dishonesty and will always come with “unintended consequences.” These actions are entangled with desire and Will and are corrupted by Thought. Action that springs from intelligence appears as Grace, not as wish-fulfillment. Telling these apart is why truth and the instinct to uncover and eliminate falseness is essential. It is why mass-outbreaks of delusional thinking are so dangerous.

We are more constrained than any people who have ever lived. Thought has eliminated every feasible sanctuary of intelligence that had existed on this Earth. It has brought us to MAD in ways beyond the Machiavellian intentions of its creators. It has poisoned our organisms and the entire biosphere. It is driving the weakest and most delusional actors and providing them with the appearance of no limitations upon their Wills. When we attempt to enter into relationship with intelligence we find no support. Thought is always there, ready to drag us back into its machinations. This occurs internally and in our attempts at relating amongst our selves. That the illusion of separate selves that have no responsibilities to the whole; that the illusions of power are so blatant and equally invisible to most of us most of the time; these limit us tremendously. That Thought is always there to push us into exercising our Wills and then exhausting them and falling into despair….

The actions of Nemesis, holding our “feet to the fire,” provide our only “advantage.” In the past there was always room to side-step any true engagement with intelligence. There was room to avoid consequences and dissemble and hide bad faith. The appearance of Grace could have been imagined when all that was happening was an indulgence in deepening our debt-burden to reality. Nemesis does not destroy Grace. It simply makes it impossible to avoid the consequences of bad-faith, including fantasies concerning fulfillment and privileges mistaken for the actions of Grace.

We perceive our disconnection and lack of true security as Will. We rattle our cages with the actions of Will and expect this will free us of constraints. There are two phases to this. First we intoxicate ourselves with the illusions of power and then we exhaust ourselves when Will proves illusory and provides nothing it has promised. We vacillate. We rebound from one of these states to the other in mounting urgency that also works to mask what is really happening and keep us trapped in delusion.

Thought. Orwellian Double-Think is but an unnecessary and actually confusing doubling down. To be trapped in Thought, whether single-acting or Double, is to be confused and thrown into incoherence. Every reaction to incoherence only deepening our resistance to anything that might break the cycles. Thought, not double-think, just ordinary Thought, has riddled our beings with simulacra, replacing, displacing everything genuine. Nowhere more tellingly than with our reactive relations to intelligence.

A quick and easy heuristic: Wherever we find the term intelligence used within institutions it, intelligence, has been replaced by learned incoherence. “Education” has become – and not just “last week” – an endeavor to root out and displace any possibility of intelligent action and replace it with conditioned reaction.

I’ve always sought intelligence within practices related to art and craft; as I’ve used these terms.¹ I’ve also taken it as a working hypothesis that “Professionalism” is a mechanism by which Thought defends itself. That any call to “act professionally” is a sign of bad-faith and an attack on intelligence as it might appear in whatever manner it might surface. This is particularly pernicious within the realms of art and craft, as well as the realm of the sacred. At these times; when we are attempting to respond intelligently by attending to the roots; we are then hit with professionalism…. And whoosh! Intelligence disappears form sight!

Conditioning is pernicious precisely because it acts upon us outside of our awareness. Nemesis aids us by making the consequences of conditioning impossible to ignore.

If we can remove the urgency and panic driven by Will from our attention we discover intelligence and experience it directly.

For this to happen we need to be thoroughly disabused of Will and its promises. This is what Nemesis does for us. So long as we see Nemesis as a foe to be fought it will increasingly double-down on dire consequences. Trapped within Willfulness we cannot imagine this as anything but an attack, ad infinitum. When Willfulness is exhausted Nemesis can be seen as it is, the defender of Grace.

The trick is that so long as we conflate the survival of the “Self” with existence we cannot abandon Will and we will ride the missile all the way to its target.

This is the trouble with strategies. Any strategy; any intention to simulate an actual encounter with intelligence; by soothing the Will into believing it is still “in charge;” keeps us trapped within illusion.

This is the way professionalism infests art. “Sincerity! Once you can fake it then you’re getting somewhere!” No art happens without our having entered into relationship with Intelligence/Grace. Still, when art is seen as just another profession and valued only for its economic rewards, by the artist or their “audience,” this is soon ignored and every strategy employed to make the results repeatable and consistent. We long for the unique and ineffable and then demand that we can experience it on demand.

This demand, this Willfulness, infects all of our judgements and destroys the possibilities for coherence in any of our actions.

I keep returning to the image of a friend attempting to help someone who is overdosing on barbiturates. They must do everything they can to keep their friend from slipping into unconsciousness while frantically hoping that help will arrive soon. From the perspective of the victim all their actions seem disturbing and even violent and unfriendly. “Just let me sleep!”

“What have I done to you!”

This is how I feel when I keep insisting that there are no short-cuts. That every insight gained is immediately at risk of turning into the new shape for the same old bind.

We can’t trick ourselves into dissolving Thought. There are no strategies that will accomplish anything other than maintaining Thought’s hold upon us.

Put directly: we wish for security. We wish to be enlightened as a way of ensuring our security once we’ve begun to doubt that power and Thought will provide; but we haven’t escaped Thought so long as we refuse to see that the kind of security we wish for does not, can not, exist.

Nemesis won’t let go until we let go. We’re playing chicken with what-is and what-is never loses.

The unique and ineffable is outside of Time, “Psychological Time,” as Krishnamurti would say. The existence of a living, vibrant, active biosphere we can perceive glimpsingly as a unity exists outside of Psychological Time. We can even glimpse the fact that it is our insistence on the dominion of Psychological Time that is the root of its destruction. We glimpse our own participation in creation when we experience moments of creative intelligence acting through us.

These are hints that there is another way of being. Also hints that such ways cannot be bent to Will. That without abandoning Willfulness we can never fully re-enter creation.

1. Realms…