An Architect's Dream

[Lori]

Watching the painter painting
And all the time, the light is changing
And he keeps painting
That bit there, it was an accident
But he’s so pleased
It’s the best mistake, he could make
And it’s my favourite piece
It’s just great

The flick of a wrist
Twisting down to the hips
So the lovers begin, with a kiss
In a trystIt’s just a smudge
But what it becomes
In his hands:
Curving and sweeping
Rising and reaching
I could feel what he was feeling
Lines like these have got to be
An architect’s dream

It’s always the same
Whenever he works on a pavement
It starts to rain
And all the time
The light is changing

[Adey]

"It’s just a smudge, but what it becomes in his hands:
Curving and sweeping, rising and reaching,
I could feel what he was feeling.
Lines like these have got to be an architect’s dream.."

I've been thinking a lot just recently about the role of The Painter in Aerial.

My original assumption was that this character was merely a writing device, there to give Kate the opportunity to explore light and form within the the concept's framework. It may well be that that is all he is, but I'm now seriously thinking that the Painter is a representation of a universal creator figure - (a) God if you like..

The Painter is the architect of not just the painting in the piece, but the ultimate architect who has devised everything. The world perhaps is just the "smudge" created by intention (and in parts by happy accident) along the most incredible lines worthy of any universal draughtsman. And he/she would be an architect who remains concerned about his creation or collection of forms "It's raining, what has become of my painting, all the colours are running" Humankind as the chorus merely observe the smallest part of the miracle, the changing of day to night and back to day, noting that the colours in the sky are running into the inevitable sunset..

Some of us here have described Aerial as Kate's exploration of a small concept. Is it the truth that the concept is actually a huge universal one of creation and man's place in it?

Fancifull? Discuss if you have an opinion..

[Xanadu]

adey said:

Some of us here have described Aerial as Kate's exploration of a small concept. Is it the truth that the concept is actually a huge universal one of creation and man's place in it?

..

I think I may have mentioned small at one point, but perhaps that wasn't the correct word. I still believe it to be simple in some way... I suppose in that she was searching in so many directions on all the albums for enlightenment.... through religion, education, sexuality, etc.... but found that true spirituality doesn't lie in the complicated options around us that we so avidly pursue. Unconditional love, awareness, compassion, and pursuit of natural beauty have held the ladder and the keys all along.

I always considered the painter and architect to be one of a higher spiritual creator. I thought it the first weekend I heard Aerial.

I have always tried to take in the quiet beauty of the things most take for granted. I have thought, on occasion, that I am the only person stopping to look at a colorful sunset, as the world rushes by, or the way the clouds hover low in the Southern California foothills and appear like an ancient Asian woodcut. These creations are appearing and changing all around us. Just look at the light....

Or maybe I just have the point of view of an artist's eye.

Thanks for opening this conversation Adey.

[Al Truest]

xanadu76 said:

adey said:

Some of us here have described Aerial as Kate's exploration of a small concept. Is it the truth that the concept is actually a huge universal one of creation and man's place in it?

..

I think I may have mentioned small at one point, but perhaps that wasn't the correct word. I still believe it to be simple in some way... I suppose in that she was searching in so many directions on all the albums for enlightenment.... through religion, education, sexuality, etc.... but found that true spirituality doesn't lie in the complicated options around us that we so avidly pursue.

I'm glad this line of thought has been introduced as well. Just today I was thinking along similar lines. Spirituality may just be 'somewhere in between' the simple and the complex. Truth should not be complicated, but; an artful representation should not be dictatorial or obviously blatant. Emotion and truth is best portrayed (IMHO) by a sharing of joyful revelation. I get this from "Aerial"

Unconditional love, awareness, compassion, and pursuit of natural beauty have held the ladder and the keys all along.

And all elements that she has explored on the album.

I always considered the painter and architect to be one of a higher spiritual creator. I thought it the first weekend I heard Aerial.

I did not at first. Unless you see that she portrays a higher power as less than omnipotent and omniscient. I see the artist or architect as someone - may be Kate, or possibly her mentors - that show an arrival or even provide perspective in the latter case.

I have always tried to take in the quiet beauty of the things most take for granted. I have thought, on occasion, that I am the only person stopping to look at a colorful sunset, as the world rushes by, or the way the clouds hover low in the Southern California foothills and appear like an ancient Asian woodcut. These creations are appearing and changing all around us. Just look at the light....

"Oh how we long for something to make us feel so"....

Or maybe I just have the point of view of an artist's eye.

I'd like to think I do as well. But; Art, when it is good, conveys more than joy and understanding. Truth and natural order can be revealed in glimpses. "It's just so beautiful" that we can't possibly take it all in at once. That's why the silence says as much as the song. The patience and perspective that Kate has attained from the past decade and from all her influences from earlier have been so graciously shared in "Aerial" An Architect's dream would be that we could see the grandeur of the intended design. The fact that some things that are out of our control may change is where the 'painter' has taken a cue from the master planner. Take what life gives you and discover joy and beauty, even if it's not what you may have expected.....Things are going to change. What light you shine on the matter can determine how you will perceive your situation. Reach high, dig deep, become panoromic.....now what do you feel?

Thanks for opening this conversation Adey.

Ditto

[LilyWhite]

Wowza! What a lot of interpretation to take in! I take it that she is trying to tell us of the interconnection with all living things that can happen in just one day. I didn't get that "The Painter" is God but will listen for the possibility.

I take it that she is trying to tell us all this stuff is happening around us that we cannot control yet make the world more beautiful if we tune into it. Just in one day she describes worlds right among us all the time and is begging us to join in. But this sounds kind of stupid after all these wonderful inter[retations.

[tannis]

Lucid Dreaming: A Story about Ithiel Town, Architect of Trinity Church

Ithiel Town (1784-1844) was born in Thompson, Connecticut and was destined to become one of America's first professional architects. His 1820 patent for the wooden lattice truss bridge brought him both fame and fortune. A visit to Trinity's attic, with its stout timbers and mortise-and-tenon joints still pegged together nearly two centuries after they were erected, reveals Town's clear understanding of the nature of wood and its load-bearing properties. Trinity Church, consecrated in February of 1816, was designed when Town was thirty years old, and today remains one of the first, if not the first, Gothic Revival churches in America.

In 1829 Town formed one of America's earliest architectural partnerships with Alexander J. Davis. This collaboration, which lasted six years, would produce a variety of important buildings including the U.S. Customs House in New York City and the North Carolina State Capitol. Town was well-traveled, and his New Haven home had one of the largest libraries of books on art and architecture in the country, some of which found their way to Yale College. He was a noted bridge builder and wrote books on steamship navigation and mathematics; in many ways he was a true "renaissance man."

As a connoisseur of art, in 1839 Town commissioned Thomas Cole (founder of the Hudson River School and a gentleman architect who had a strong hand in the design of the Ohio Statehouse) to do a painting called The Architect's Dream. In March of that year, Town gave Cole several books and engravings from his library, a $225.25 deposit on the painting's $500 value, which today would amount to a $10,000 commission. There is evidence that Cole used these books as reference sources for the painting, completed in the summer of 1839.





Thomas Cole, The Architect's Dream, 1840, oil on canvas; image © Toledo Museum of Art

The painting depicts a reclining architect, presumably either Town or Cole, resting with his eyes shut in a dream-like state upon a pile of books and portfolios. Surrounding him is an imaginary landscape showing a progression of historical architectural styles, perhaps signifying the power of human creativity to conceive and build an astonishing variety of structures through the ages. From the Egyptian pyramid to Greek and Roman temples to the Gothic church in the lower left corner of the painting, the work suggests the history of Western civilization in its many forms.

When the painting was first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1840, Town was listed as the owner. However, when he saw the painting he declined to accept it. Town stated, "I wish landscapes to predominate - the Architecture, History, etc., to be various and subservient..." He asked Cole to do another painting, but Cole refused and returned the books and engravings he had received as a deposit. Cole did not, however, remove Town's name from the inscription painted beneath the reclining architect on the canvas, possibly thinking that in so doing he would eliminate an important clue about the origin of the painting's imaginary scene.

Today The Architect's Dream, which measures 53 x 84 inches, hangs prominently on a wall in the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art, where it is a favorite among the Museum's many distinguished holdings. Trinity Church gratefully acknowledges the Museum's written material on the painting as the source of much of the above information.

History of Trinity Church, New Haven, CT
www.trinitynewhaven.org/history/index.html

[tannis]

THE SONG OF THE OIL AND THE BRUSH

Yes, I need to get that tone
A little bit lighter there
Maybe with some dark accents coming in from the side...



"Lovers On The Seine" painted by Rolf Harris

Painting is a bodily art, much closer to itself than mythmaking or even the spidery fantasies of alchemical stories... Alchemy can only match that intimacy in one case: in the deviant modern practice of "sexual alchemy," in which the experimenters' bodies become the ovens and crucibles, and their excretions become the desired Stone. Like "creamy" or "buttery" paint, the hermaphrodite is sometimes juicy and liquid, and that's the connection between metallic and bodily alchemy. According to one traditional alchemist, sulfur and mercury normally combine to make pure offspring; but when they are themselves impure, they create a peculiar liquid: When the two embrace one another, shut up close in the rocky places, then a moist, thick vapor rises from them by the action of natural heat ... and it condenses into a mucilaginous and unctuous matter that is like white butter.

Watching the painter painting
And all the time, the light is changing
And he keeps painting
That bit there, it was an accident
But he’s so pleased
It’s the best mistake, he could make
And it’s my favourite piece
It’s just great

Oily and buttery things are also sexual, like the bodily fluids from which all things are born. The same author continues: Mathesius calls this substance gur. Farm workers find it in their groves, but nothing can be made out of it, because no one knows what nature intended to do with it. It could just as easily have been a marcasite, or a metal.

Gur is the substance that congeals into anything: it is equally fitted, as the author puts it, "for the information of an ass, or an ox, or for any metal."

The flick of a wrist
Twisting down to the hips
So the lovers begin, with a kiss
In a tryst
It’s just a smudge
But what it becomes
In his hands:
Curving and sweeping
Rising and reaching
I could feel what he was feeling
Lines like these have got to be
An architect’s dream

Modern sexual alchemy explores these same textures, but directly on the body. There is a sequence of alchemies beginning with traditional metallic alchemy (both practical and "spiritual"), continuing across the often blurred boundary to alchemies that use animal parts and vegetables, and ending in sexual or "human alchemy." In spiritual alchemy, what happens in the vessel is an enactment of what takes place in the mind; but in sexual alchemy, the laboratory mirrors what happens in the body. Like meditative alchemy, sexual alchemy tends to do away with laboratory equipment: it conflates spiritual meditation with bodily enactment, and what is more remarkable, it also conflates laboratory apparatus with bodily parts. Everything that normally takes place in the laboratory (whether literally so, in practical alchemy, or metaphorically, in spiritual alchemy), is moved into the body itself. The bodies of sexual alchemists heat, distill, conjoin, and putrefy, and when they produce the Stone - a fluid rather than a metallic product - it is not merely a metaphor for their minds or bodies, it is also contained within, and born from, their bodies. The fusion or coniunctio of the alchemical texts, which was often imagined as a kind of sexual fusion - whether it was between brother and sister, or King and Queen - is made into an actual lovemaking session.

Oh will you come with us
To find the song of the oil and the brush?

Sexual alchemists have adopted some of the language of alchemy, rewriting to cover bodily functions. The "Eagle" is the woman, and the "Mother Eagle" are the mucous membranes. The "Lion" is the male, and the "Red Lion" is the semen. (Tantric alchemy is an influence here, since mercury is the semen of Shiva.) In ordinary Western alchemy, menstruum is any fluid that dissolves solid matter. Sometimes it is a gentle bath that soaks and permeates a substance, and in other texts it is a harsh acid that envelops a solid in a bubbling foam. The alchemists were aware of the anatomical meaning of the word, but they did not always make it explicit. According to one dictionary of alchemy, menstruum is the fluid proper to animals, just as plants have rain water and minerals have quicksilver. In general, menstruum just meant solvent. with overtones of sexuality and generation. The sexual alchemists make it explicit: for them menstruum is "the magick solvent of the female organ." In the same fashion, sexual alchemists also reinterpreted phlegm. In traditional alchemy, phlegm normally meant the liquid product of a distillation. The alchemists had adopted that usage from medieval medicine, where phlegm was one of the four fluids: (the others were black bile, yellow bile, and blood). The sexual alchemists turned the alchemist's phlegm back into the doctor's phlegm, keeping the connection with distillation, but insisting it is a real, organic, human fluid.

There are various practices in sexual alchemy, some involving orgasm and some not, and many artifially prolonged (in the way alchemists prolonged heating). Using this language, Louis Culling gives a veiled description of a common sexual problem: It is the male Lion who is in command of the process of putting the quintessence into the care of the absorbing Mother Eagle i.e., the various mucous membranes, and therefore the Lion should have a conscience about making an undue imposition upon the Eagle when the operation is entirely for the benefit of the Lion.

Alchemical experience is ordinarily balanced between theory and practice, substances and allegories, observation and empathy. Sexual alchemy is a conceptually extreme practice, and it shows what happens when those distinctions collapse. Its practices pose curious philosophic problems. Even in the most purely meditative alchemy, there is a parallelism that provides an indispensable structure to alchemical thought: on the one hand is the chemical apparatus, and on the other is the alchemist, whose mental state follows and mirrors the metamorphoses of the materials. Sexual alchemy breaks that barrier and insists on the radical impossibility of distinguishing observer from observed, subject from object. It is true that in ordinary alchemical practices it is not always certain whether the adept is in the laboratory, watching the vessel, or inside the vessel, looking out. In illustrations the "son of the philosopher" is sometimes pictured inside his own "Hermetic egg." Sexual alchemy collapses even that tenuous distinction and compels the alchemist to watch his own transformation from within his own body.

Oh, feel it. Oh, oh feel it,
Feel it, my love.
Oh, feel it. Oh, oh feel it,
Feel it, my love.
Oh, I need it. Oh, oh, feel it,
Feel it, my love.
Feel it!
See what you're doing to me?

Sexual alchemy is the most epistemologically chaotic doctrine I know. The sexual alchemist initiates an "experiment" by beginning a sexual session, but from that point onward he or she becomes the prima materia, the doctor philosophiae, and the athanor (furnace) all at once. Even when the process is complete the traditional dualism is not securely restored, because the fluid that the alchemists inspect (once the orgasms are over, and the alchemists are somewhat detached from their labor) is also manifested in and on their own bodies.

Sexual alchemy is the nearest parallel in any field to the involvement of visual artists in their creation. Artists know the feeling that others can only weakly imagine, of being so close to their work that they cannot distinguish themselves from it. As students, artists routinely suffer from criticism when they do not have a clear awareness of the distance between themselves and what they have made. In that state of mind, there is no distinction between theory and practice, observer and observed, substance and allegory, observation and empathy. They are their work. It is just as intimate, and much more confused, than the relation between a mother and her unborn child. The mother knows that the child is inside her, and she hopes that the child is intact as it grows. An artist, on the other hand, may not be sure of any categories - there is no clear difference between the artist and the half-formed work. Neither is in control, neither clearly "makes" the other. The "experiment" of art changes the experimenter, and there is no hope of understanding what happens because there is no "I" that can absorb and control concepts - nothing has meaning apart from the substances themselves. All that is know with certainty is the flow of fluids, back and forth from the tubes to the palette, from the brush to the canvas.

In this domain nothing is secure. The alchemical or artistic work is strangely inside, and the human mind that directs it is also partly its inert substrate. What was once the agent of conceptual control over the work has become the bricks of its furnace, the weave of its canvas. The furnace produces a product that is the furnace, and the mind tries to watch a process that is the mind. Sexual alchemy is a form of the same disease: both propose a treacherous anarchy of unreason.

I'm giving it all in a moment or two.
I'm giving it all in a moment, for you.
I'm giving it all, giving it, giving it.
This kicking here inside
Makes me leave you behind.
No more under the quilt
To keep you warm.
Your sister I was born.
You must lose me like an arrow,
Shot into the killer storm.

In the beginning of the alchemical work, the King and Queen sit demurely, with straight backs, on opposite thrones. Secretly, in glances scarcely visible, they know they are brother and sister. Their feet dangle in a warm pool of menstrual fluid. They will mate, melt, and re-emerge, and afterward melt again many times before the Stone emerges.

The dawn has come
And the wine will run
And the song must be sung
And the flowers are melting
In the sun

Liquids are life, and so it is particularly important that oil painting takes place between solid and liquid, in the realm of the viscous, the gluey, the phlegmatic. The menstruum is also called the Hermetic stream, heavy water, philosopher's water, and embryo's water. Like placenta, the menstruum is a cannibalistic, invasive fluid: just as real placenta will attach itself to adjacent organs and attempt to invade them the menstruum eats away at the King and Queen, eventually dissolving them. The pool and thrones are set in a vase, which has been hermetically sealed. The vessel is most obviously a womb, though alchemists call it a brooding chamber, an egg, the House of the Chick or House of Glass, or the Prison House of the King.

For painters the studio is the Prison House, and paints are the fluids that circulate inside it. Alchemy's lesson here is that everything actually takes place within the body. The insanity of the studio is that it is not architecture - it is not made of wood and cement - but it is nothing other than the inside of the body.

~ What Painting Is, James Elkins, (2000, pp.161-167).