There is a third intermediate room between rooms 2 and 3.

A piano player sits alone. Again and again she practices a long cascading arpeggio. The passage of music is from a longer work with many such cascades. The sheet rests open on the rack. Her eyes instinctively look at a photo of her as a young woman. Once upon a time, I played this well, she hears a voice saying in her ears.

Today she has decided to play for one hour. No more and no less. It has been some years since she has played. She stopped playing. She flew apart into different pieces. The part that had been drilled and trained to achieve somebody’s version of perfection became a merciless tyrant inflicting shame and self-judgment upon her other parts. Like all tyrants, it needed some means of goading what it wanted out of its subjects. And like all tyrants it did so to hide from the shame of its own emptiness. It drove her toward a breakdown.

Eventually she learned that there’s no reasoning with a tyrant. The tyrant has no reason. The tyrant has only likes and dislikes.

Today her aim is simply to allow her fingers to play what they can play according to the notes. The body has its own intelligence. Whatever free attention she has, she directs to sensing her fingers. Not a thinking about her fingers, but a simple direct sensing.

She sees how often she must re-direct and come to her fingers. She sees how often there is an urge to mutter something inwardly. She sees how often there is the picture of having already mastered the piece. She does not judge what she sees. This is not an exercise in morality. She simply re-directs her attention to sensing herself. It is simple, but it is not easy.

There is an intermediate room between rooms 1 and 3, between time and decision. This is the room called 5. Here, the substance of matter is time itself. The forms of things are the forms of life, sensitive sheathes transforming in experience. Here is the inside. In the finer regions of the room called 5, life is even sensitive to itself. In this room are living beings, phi-ve fingered and sometimes furry. Here you can know, you can feel, you can sense. Here there is self.

All must eat to live and nourish one another. You eat and are eaten. In between, you must pass on the codes, the information. You must pass on the material. Life is a vessel of many pasts and many futures that live thereby. Here the earth grows living wires in the depths of its oceans, beneath even the floors of its oceans; it grows wires on its surface, beneath its soil, in its atmosphere. Within even the simplest expression of life is an image of time transmitting its intelligence both from the past and from the future into the moment of contact. DNA, cell, plant, animal, human. The wheel turns round again — human, animal, plant, cell, DNA — but never turns in quite the same way twice. There is no going back. There is no re-creating of initial conditions, although going forward is sometimes going back.

Life is such a vessel that we living can be to ourselves and to others and to the unseen something of meaning. In the receptivity of mind can be scryed the archetypal expressions, the painters of Lascaux lighting the dark recesses with their transmission. There are regions of this room where life feels its own birth and death. There are regions of this room where life sees itself through the eyes of fellow journeyers of the path of life. There are regions of this room where the beloved is embraced. There are regions of this room where number speaks and where the plant intelligences guide. There are regions of room where there is the joy of remembering yourself.

Life is also nearly indelible in its efficiency to survive. The individual is the host of the selfish gene, and the gene is the host of the big picture. Life there is on this planet in particular and life there has been for longer than the shapes of the continents and oceans have persisted. It serves a need. The stayingness of life is in the transmission of itself through itself, in the alchemy of sounding into speaking. Topdown, bottomup, middleout. In the face of Life, the living dream big dreams. The imagination of an ant is elephant-sized. If it discerned this truth, it would scurry screaming from a cliff. Life burns with the fire keeper out of view and can imagine the hand of the unseen only through the touch of the fire tongs. Yet, life also has the gift of fire. And so it is that life has two faces. The self is divided. I eat and am eaten.

There is an intermediate room between room 1 and room 2. Time and eternity strive to blend. It is a room of contrasts – hot and cold, wave and particle, obdurate and munificent, plasmic and predetermined. It is the room called 4, a gallery of the furniture of existence. Here there is form standing in the time of heavy things ticking like a set of Russian dolls. It is a place where you can hide stuff inside of other stuff.

Travelers of the present moment come here looking for evidence. There are those who come to hear something different than the echo of their own consciousness. They are looking for artifacts. Some come here because they’re tired of artifacts and hope to find something truly new. Some come here who have found in their body an entirely unknown something and wish to know more.

In certain places and times in this room there are works of art that have woven into their fibers the form of something beyond themselves. You might easily miss them amongst the rest. Some see only the furniture. Some see circumstantial evidence of higher dimensions.

The tricky thing is that here there are no perceptions. There is only the evidence of perception. The condition of the room between time and eternity is such that the forms are not living forms. Their laws are outside of themselves. They radiate heat. They spark and emit threads of discharge. Some things stand as the walls of Machu Pichu stand. There is plasma turning in octaves of space/time. Yet they persist not from an inner action, but from the persistence of their outerness. Things do not copy themselves from themselves. Their will is not their own. The lights are on.

There is a short film archived here of a woman bathing her child in a park with a city in the background. The colours are gold and red and blue. It is a long shot interspersed with closeups. It became famous for a time in a certain place, perhaps because of the immediate contrast between the emotional connection of the mother and child and the blue background hum of the city. There is also contrast in the location. Why is the woman intimately bathing her child in the park? It was famous also because of the fact that the actors playing mother and child were actually mother and child, the mother a famous star. Also, the film was shot not long before they were both killed along with others in an airplane crash under strange circumstances. This film was famous for these reasons, for a time. But it was not famous in the room called 4. In the room called 4 there is the evidence, which, of course, is not nothing. Yet, you can collect all of the headlines and still not solve the crime. Nevertheless, there is a good crossword on page 3.

To imagine a present moment without a door into the room called 4 is to imagine utter insanity. For even if there are loopholes and things that go missing from the evidence room, there is a measure of hope in the fragments of a story that can be pieced together from the surviving artifacts.

There is the question of who? This is where the mystery is. Whodunit? In the room called 3 there is much that is undetermined. There are threads of evidence and the disclosure of clues and even lifting the cup to your lips to sip is an act of creation. Here, doors are doors only so long as there is the will for it to be so. Stories that look like everyday facts discover something quite different than they appear. There is no question of how or what, only who. The very periphery of the present moment vanishes into the great rushing emptiness of the void, and all along the isthmus between existence and non-existence blooms creativity like a lush garden on the verge of a vast desert. The air is sweet. The soul-stuff plies in threads. There are stories told of the travelers of the void, but who could possibly live to tell such tales? Who can cup in their breast such sucking emptiness? That way madness lies.

In the room called 3 everything and everyone is in a state of sensitivity. The very atoms whisper. All are witness. And just as every desert has its caravanserai, so the void has its gathering places. And like the caravanserai, there is tea and sohbet and chess. Be prepared to hold your own. Be prepared to turn soberly in your drunkenness. If they suffer you gladly, it must be you who is the fool. Or not, as the case may be.

In the room called 3, the door opens into anywhere, anytime. There is much that depends on who you are when entering through that door. There is strange coincidence. So much arises through bewilderment. You are never far from the desert.

There is something hidden-strange, non-actual, ineffable. Closest perhaps to a peerless Egyptian granite of a man and a woman. We are found in the place of our nakedness, in the intangible schema of something traced without regard for time, empty of it, and yet potent with expression in perpendiculars and curves. It is a wholeness of indelibility. These are the arisings of the room called 2.

Here is eternity luminously inchoate. All of the senses strain to picture even a drop of its oil. So much is wished that is hidden from view, so much can be encoded upon itself.

Here is the form of a man who can do nothing but fail. Here is the love letter written upon the heart that didn’t know it was there. Here is the star about to go supernova. Here is the ineluctable genius of the grand unified theory of everything. Here is the ashen-faced scientist mystically peering into the mushroom-shaped oblivion where he witnesses the excoriating light pick the flesh off of the bones of the Earth. Here is the form of sorrow and of joy. There may be a way in, but there is no way out of the room called 2.

In the room called 2 you cannot say exactly what things are, but there is the certainty that they will stand as they are. There is no king or queen, or mother or father of this room. There is the form of the writing upon the wall.

There is no trend or change of order. Nothing follows and in this there is the deep note of aching, of wishing to get on with things. The emanation of this ache finds its way into the very essence of all things. This is the ache of the separation from that which might further come to be.

Hz. Jalaluddin Rumi speaks of the six dimensions of existence. We agree there is up, down, this way, that way, forward and back. As well, many agree that in reading and contemplating his poetry we are given deeper insights into dimensionality.
JG Bennett beautifully renders a six dimensional image of the schema of the present moment in his masterwork, The Dramatic Universe, Volume 4.

The following is a narrative exploration of the theme of six dimensions riffing mostly off of the six short descriptions given on pages 34-35 of that volume.

First is the the room called 1.

The room called 1

The room called 1 is a room full of the machinery of time. Here is Father Time, or as he is more widely known, His Infinite Entropy. He issues new temporal substance somewhat resembling a fine stream of molten lava from a special gland on the crown of His Head. For a time, the molten substance is pliable and then quickly hardens into something most definitely unshakeable. Turning back, one can walk the labyrinthine passageways of this hardened substance, fixed and immutable, and trace something in the many-upon-many filigree ornaments of the past. Turning foward, one can witness the predetermination of the future forming like an architect’s lines upon the phi-expanding horizon of time. It is this flow of time that echoes in the subjective moment of everything existing, drawing with it its like portion.

As now_i flows into now_i+1 the substance of time in its molten state is a perfect mirror of the collected intelligence of His Infinite Entropy anticipating all of the possible existential contingencies in bridging the moment.

Technicians with advanced graduate degrees work tirelessly in areas such as quantum temporal manifold adjustment, holographic re-uptake inhibition and temporal quantization adjusting and maintaining precise control over the objective unveiling of temporality. And so they are robed appropriately for these high tasks. Some wisecracker on the planet earth once hypothesized these experts as Maxwell’s demons, and so there sprung up special societies to celebrate the mystique. These societies form a secret network among the intelligentsia.

The most guarded secret of the most secret of these societies is the unbelievable truth that all of the advanced learning and effort given to adjust and maintain temporality is entirely inconsequential to the flowing of the infinite progress and regress of time. The only source of time is His Infinite Entropy.

The most secret of all the secrets that His Infinite Entropy keeps entirely to himself is that the only way to perfectly preserve his collected wisdom is to entirely cease the flow of time – and although he may harbour the aim, this is something that is not within his power to do. And so the robed experts exist solely to assuage his acute soliloquy. Although a few of the highest initiates suspect this truth, they do so alone never daring to utter such heresy.

There is a gentle purring and his eyes open. His hand reaches up out of the sheets and taps the face of his phone. Three messages overnight. Somehow he was aware of one clicking-in at 4:30. Lying flat on his back he raises the phone up to his bleary eyes. Tanya. Tanya. Dirk.

Fragment of a dream: Walking along a road at night. The city in the distance. The sound of wind in the trees. I’ve dropped something and cannot find it. Someone is behind me.

The coffee is ready in the kitchen. The scent fills the loft like a musky animal. His mouth waters as he shuffles down the hall. All is quiet except for the last chugs of coffee expunging out of the machine. TV on. Top Kill has failed. BP has further plans in the works. Share prices down.

Why hasn’t she gotten back to me?

The new shower is awesome. Water all around. But then again he sees now standing there unable to escape, that he used to like being able to hide in the corner from the spray in order to soap up. How is he supposed to soap up?

The day. Flight plans to Montreal to finalize with Dirk. Lunch with Tanya to discuss the website makeover. How many back doors do they want? And again, Why hasn’t she gotten back to me. Design plans due in the afternoon. An hour at the gym with Mark. He was thinking dinner with her, but apparently not. She hasn’t returned his invitation. It’s game night at The Swan. Maybe he’ll drop by for a game of Monopoly instead.

In the elevator. Puke stain still on the fabric. Smell is gone. Stain remains. What does that man do all day? Stop at floor 20. Alex Eugenta gets on. Older. 50 maybe. His wife has died recently. He went to the funeral with the rest of the condo board. He smiles. Alex Eugenta smiles. Silence and then the rush of downward movement. “Tony, I’ve decided that I going to move,” Alex Eugenta says looking to Tony.

“Hmm,” Tony responds. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Looking sideways.

“I’m going to live with my sister and her family in Peterborough. You met them at the funeral.”

“Right. Of course. Seems like a nice lady. Great kids,” Tony says recalling an image of a young person in tears at the funeral. What am I supposed to say here?

Pause. The elevator glides to a stop. Door silently opens.

In the lobby. “Alex, please let me know if I can help with the move in any way,” Tony says placing a hand on Alex’s shoulder.

Tony moves quickly though the entrance door. There is a suck of pressure change as he walks out into the early morning air. Humid. The July air is thick. He’s sweating already. The morning haze hangs like a suggestion. Beyond it the blue of the sky. He recalls the time he spent as a kid with his Uncle Martin at the cottage. Canoeing, fishing, singing songs. He begins to feel good about the possibilities of the day. He will text Trudy and William about the loft opening up. They are a good fit. Maybe they can do a private sale.

Traffic sounds. The hum of the generator station across the street. The large L’Oreal billboard with a model that reminds him of her. She’s not calling simple as that. Oh well.

People on phones walking. A woman in a dress and sneakers is reading a book as she walks. Joggers. Dogs on leashes. Someone bumps him at the corner and just keeps walking. He looks around for some kind of support. None is coming. A man with earbuds laughs out loud waiting for the light to change. He dribbles coffee down his chin onto his white shirt. He groans.

Lunch with Tanya. “We met yesterday over the udpates. Frederico was on conference call from Rio. Such a prick. Handsome as hell though,” Tanya says speaking quickly with a roll of her eyes.

“And…” Tony replies with a raise of the eyebrows.

“And … “ she offers with a twizzle of her pasta. “The updates work for the client overall. There’s still some inconsistency between the client and supplier portal. That needs to be addressed.”

“Which do they like better?” He already knows the answer. “Do they realize that we’re moving into the red on this project and that we’ll have to re-budget by the end of the week?”

“Tony darling. It’s all good. We’ll draw on our resources for another week until we close it. They’re good for several million down the road. Raising the budget flag now wouldn’t be the right move.”

“What do I tell our team in Mumbai?”

“Tell then we love them,” she says through something she imagines to be a smile.

He concludes that she really gets off on this. He imagines her lying awake at night waiting for the email to roll in.

She’s never been to Mumbai. She doesn’t know their situation.

He spends the rest of lunch wondering. He maintains rapport, of course. He can’t escape his father clearly telling him at all costs to maintain rapport – even if later it comes to stabbing them in the back. They kiss and purl goodbyes to conclude the meeting. She called the meeting so she pays. Tell them we love them. She has no idea.

The afternoon making arrangements with Dirk is harder than he expected. They agree to travel there separately and to return together. He’ll get a few hours on his own in Montreal. Done.

At the gym Mark puts him through a particularly grueling workout. He’s actually thankful for it. His body responds well. He can sense his muscles spinning down in the sauna, twitching then slackening out. The heat is intense and his skin simmers slowly drawing out the deep dirt. A cold shower after and he is steeled for anything. Dressing in the change room he becomes aware of the music. Not really his generation but Uncle Martin educated him. Bowie’s Space Oddity.

Serene detachment. Mellotron clouds. Something urgent. A wet kiss. A purple sensation running down his back. For here, am I sitting in a tin can…

The Swan after the gym. Something like the usual crowd is there. He realizes that he enjoys walking in and hearing his name called. “Tony, please come help. She’s ferociously sharp with the numbers. I’m getting my ass kicked.”  It’s Alfonso. He’s playing Monopoly.

“Someone’s gotta do it,” Tony replies as he approaches to say hello and quickly adds.

“Hi. My name is Marta,” she says stretching out her hand. “Actually, I’m only winning because Alfonso has too many friends here.” She motions with her hand to mimic Alfonso talking.

“Yes, Alfonso is something of a connection,” Tony offers. Alfonso gets up to give Tony a hug.

“Give me some of that,” he says as they embrace.

“Say listen, I want to chat, but I’m gonna mix a bit first Alfons. I’ll be back.”

“By all means, shake it don’t stir it.”

Tony returns later with Kelly. Alfonso has been wanting to meet her. The game is over and Alfonso and Marta are chatting. Introductions all around.

“Marta and I were just talking about some pretty big picture stuff. Wow, my head,” Alfonso says leaning back in his chair. “She’s going at your speed here Tony.”

Marta wrinkles her lips to smile. “Well we hadn’t quite made it to metaphysics,” she says. “We were talking about labels.”

“As in brands?” Tony asks.

“Yes that too, and also about semiotics.” Pause. “But really we started talking about cave paintings.”

“You see Tony boy. I told you.”

Alfonso starts buying drinks for Kelly. Tony and Marta settle in. A new DJ starts his set.

“I guess what got me interested in cave paintings is that all of a sudden they started appearing all over. France, Spain, South Africa, Turkey. In often quite deep caves. Great sound.” Pause. “The thing is, the paintings themselves convey being. They have presence.” She stops to look at Tony. Tony, his head hanging so that his ear can hear better, looks up nodding and smiling. She continues.

“That’s what sustains in art for me,” she stops again. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you my philosophy of art. That’s totally ridiculous.”

“Well if you weren’t telling me about yours, I’d be telling you about mine. And really you’ve got my attention.”

Later. Tony wonders momentarily about whether he was in over his head. Nevertheless, they friended each other. She is beautiful, smart. Empathic. Art begins with cosmic awareness and the struggle to reflect this. Hmm.

He sits in the condo listening to the condo silence of distance volumes of air being moved. The lights are all out. He remembers seeing Alex in the morning. He is moving to Peterborough. He texts Trudy and William about the opening. He will need to visit with Alex with at least a couple of others from the board. He writes an email to the condo board. Alex needs some support.

Looking down at his feet, he suddenly has the strange awareness that he is sitting on a rectangular bed inside a rectangular room inside a rectangular building inside a rectangular city block inside a rectangular city. He’s living inside boxes.

Blessings to all those who attended and contributed to staging “The Art of Seekers” presentation. In this post, you will find a selection of the offerings for the evening along with photos. In upcoming posts we intend to present audio and video of the evening.

The Art of Seekers:

Music, Movement, and Stories of
George Gurdjieff, Thomas de Hartmann and Jalaluddin Rumi

Presented by the idiotplayers

Burlington Central Library / Centennial Hall

Thursday July 22, 2010

Opening Comments

Afghan Melody (piano and tambur)

Song of the Fisherwoman (piano)

Long ago in Mikaïlov (piano and daf)

New Society of Literati and Journalists by Gurdjieff
from Meetings with Remarkable Men. Accompanied by Mamasha (piano)

* * *

Brief comment on Rumi.

Buoyancy by Rumi with Kurd Shepherd’s Melody (piano, flute)

Duduki (piano, daf & darabuka)

The Music and The Tent by Rumi with
Trembling Dervish (piano, drum & reed)

I Am, I Wish / Fingertip Dervish (Movement)

The Canon of Seven (Movement)

Danse Sacrée (Movement)

* * *

Lord Have Mercy (piano)

The Child-Like Sheikh by Rumi with Kurd Shepherd’s Dance
(piano, flute)

Song of the Aïsors (piano, daf, flute, voice)

Closing

* All music by Gurdjieff and de Hartmann

the idiotplayers

Eunji Kim: Piano, voice.

Gregory Dominato: Daf, darabuka, voice.

Jamie Thompson: Flute.

Debbie Kirkland: Backstage.

Ryan Cviric: Front of house.