Sacred Clowns & the Corn Mother

In her rich narrative description of the Corn Mother mural, Pola Lopez writes:

On either side of the mural are placed two Heyoka, or Koshari, Sacred clowns, who are watching this all unfold and are Medicine Men who teach us that we are all mirrors of each other, that we take ourselves too seriously as in our egos, and that we need to practice more respect. 

In close association with the clowns, we find images of the key regional foods:

Wrapped around the curved lines at either end are members of the Three Sisters, our main substance, the squash, the beans and of course corn in the center.

There is not much to add, or perhaps too much to say about clowns and the stories of past, present and future. When I first started to act seriously, in college, my first role was playing the title clown in J.M. Barrie's PANTALOON, an homage to the dwindling Pantomimes in the early 20th C. 

 

Charles Dickens loved clowns, fairy tales and the 1001 tales of the Arabian Nights. He was a devoted fan of the great 19th C. clown, Joseph Grimaldi, and often wrote about the power of his performances. In A Christmas Carol, he makes clear his debt to fairy tales as a tool for focusing on the terrible ways we treat children. His original assignment was to write a parliamentary pamphlet on the Plight of the Poor Man's Child.  That project merged with a 5 year long obsession with mesmerism (originally a medical movement to heal the patient by loosening the bonds of Past, Present and Future), and a close friend had a very sick young son. That political pamphlet turned into a timeless ghost story about what happens when money grows more important than the care and education children.

One of my favorite movies is Fellini's I Clowns.  You can watch it by clicking that link. Another favorite is Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Here is an article about the difficulties in making that movie. It took 20 years to get it released in the USA. That's how terrified USA was of Chaplin's clowning during the McCarthy era.

Clowns can arouse laughter, fear and anger, but in the sacred traditions of the Pueblo Clowns, all of those possibilities have a shamanistic function. They are a full frontal assault on your ego, a signal to pay attention to something bigger than your little worries and fears. Pola says that a common feeling that they arouse can be, "If you see a Clown, RUN!" 

The Corn Mother Storyteller

 The Corn Mother Storyteller is rising, as if from the dust of the Agua Fria, in New Mexico.

On Wednesday, June 13, I took the Rail Runner from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, to spend the afternoon with Pola Lopez, and to see the Corn Mother Storyteller Mural she's working on there, supported by Three Sisters Collective. Tara Trudell, poet and artist, and Autumn Dawn Gomez (co-founder of Three Sisters) joined up with Pola and helped her paint. 

The Corn Mother is the heart of the whole mural. Many themes and meanings converge with her at the center. She is a storyteller. As you can see, there are children in her lap. Sometimes, she is shown with 100 children, all of them as hungry for stories as they are for food.   

I took these photos as the artists worked. They also shared with me some of the meanings hidden in the work, and a few of the stories held by each "pottery shard" that is placed within the larger mural. 

The colors of the traditional ceramic pottery fragments found in this area are black and white. That accounts for the brilliant contrasts of red, black and white you see at work here.

Corn Mother tells many stories in this mural. It was an honor and a blessing to see and hear some of the stories buried in the past, and emerging back to life in this specific neighborhood of Santa Fe, New Mexico. There is much loss and pain, many hopes and dreams, and astounding beauty living within these vibrant colors, electric geometries and potent symbols.
There is much to learn, more to be experienced, and much to DO, or STOP doing.  

Looking at this, what do you see, hear, and feel?

Click here to track the details of the Three Sisters Mural Narrative: Corn Maiden Storyteller ~ Shards of Our Stories - written by Pola Lopez ©2022

In later posts, I'll add more photos and my own thoughts about how these stories live in our collective imaginations. More than once, I've thought about Charles Dickens' devotion to fairy tales, theater, clowning and the Arabian Nights. He weaved the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future into a holiday celebration of children, games, and storytelling. Like this mural, Dickens constantly dramatized a dire warning, especially in his vision of Ignorance and Want, about the sacrifice of children to economics.  

Mural location is at Baca St and Hickox St.  

Many thanks to Stanley and Marty for getting me to and from the Rail Runner station in Albuequerque.

Reading Dante in 2021

We're about halfway through this reading project. We've been reading La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy.  Dante died 700 years ago, in 1321. 

I recently walked very quickly through the distilled collection of paintings at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The main galleries are shaped like a huge H, and that reminds me of a book by Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, where she writes about the letter "H" as the basic building block of a ladder. At the museum, the center of that middle rung of the H that connects the two long galleries of Western paintings, there stands a large and beautiful statue of Buddha. Is there a hidden joke here? The Buddha stands at what would be the hinge of the "Enlightenment" between the classic past of the West, and the roar of its future. 

After walking through a range of sculptures by Rodin, the Buddha greets everyone as soon as the walk through the front doors. A guard stands near the Buddha, and guides members to one desk of the left and single or group ticket buyers to another desk on the right. That's how the art pilgrimage begins.

On the bottom floor you can find a very large collection of the oldest artwork in the building. It all comes from Asia, and from many different countries. 

My own mini-pilgrimage through the history of Western paintings began in a room with work created around the time Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, and in the century after Dante's time. The oldest Western painting in the collection shows iconic images covering the life of Christ. 

The collection proceeds through a range of explorations to make painting more elaborate and detailed, then more realistic, then baroque, then impressionistic, and it ends again with abstract art, and even a few geometric images from the Russian painters who were heavily influenced by mysticism. At the very end of the last gallery, there is a very large and colorful canvas by Sam Francis.

Here's the link to CJ Fearnley's page, Reading Dante in 2021. It's full of rich resources. You can skim the surface or dive deep. Your choice!

This reading project has inspired me to revive this long dormant blog. At the beginning, I had the intention of exploring the connections between poetry, plays, politics and prophecy. That intention seems more important now than ever.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

This statement by Winona Laduke throws light on our whole range of global problems. 

"It's Time to Move On from Fossil Fuels."

As they say, at closing time in the British pubs, "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME." T.S. Eliot picked up the line for The Waste Land. It's now closing time on Spaceship Earth. Do we drink up and move on? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we... what? What is to be done? This is the heart of the issue. Where does the USA want to make an investment? Where do the people want to make an investment? Do they share the same goals? 

35 years ago, with the publication of CRITICAL PATH in 1981, Bucky warned that it was time to move on from fossil fuels. He warned us about Wall Street lawyers. He gave a shout on the massive transfers of wealth upward and outward. 

With the reunification of the Sioux nation we are seeing individual integrity at work. Bucky might say, they are operating like "the crew of a ship when the ships in danger. Spaceship Earth's in danger. Find out what needs to be done." 

Bucky was a profound theorist on democracy, believing that there is no group integrity, without individual integrity. Native tribes are showing us the way across the river and over the mountain range of corporate indifference. We must activate our own initiative to solve the world's biggest problems. 

From the Dakotas the battle cry is stated simply... "Water is life." Bucky, as a former US Naval engineer, would completely agree. We live on an ocean world. His Dymaxion Map teaches that all the continents are one island surrounded by ocean. The moral: "It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It couldn't be done before--- this taking care of everybody. Only a few years ago the technology of doing more and more with less and less reached the point where it could be done." 

For Bucky, our problems demand a comprehensive design strategy rooted in individual initiative and integrity. Bucky's design target was simply stated, "Make the world work for all of humanity." Start with Universe, and then, work your way down to your specific locality within Universe. He also said, "We have a choice... Utopia or Oblivion. But don't let up. Don't let up or we won't make it. Keep at your integrity more than ever in all your life before, and we will make it." 

Pleasure and change

Bertolt Brecht warned that if theatre fails to give pleasure, it fails in it's most essential purpose. He also wrote:

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights, and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself. [A Short Organum for the Theatre - #35 (1948)]

Theatre should bring pleasure as it works to transform all fields of action. Without pleasure, it can't seem to do its job of capturing attention and putting it to work. The action of each character, in almost every play, either carries a seed of change or is a force to stifle the seeds of change planted by other characters. Characters want things, and there has to be a change if they are to get those things. Theatre can be more than the playing of a given game on a defined playing field. Plays, as they express themselves in space and time, can change the game and the playing field itself as the game is being played.

If the theatrical plays fail to be as faithless and unpredictable as our economy, then how can they hope to illuminate the machinations of our present practices of political economy? Today, economics pretends to be science, while denying it is a political process closer to the arts. Certainly accounting statements and balance sheets have been the great works of fiction of the last 40 years. They are works of art that have had a huge impact on the world around them. If fake balance sheets can change the world, why can't plays? The denial of politics, the devotion to gossip and half baked commentary, and a blind faith in fake sciences makes the whole process more brutal than it needs to be. Economists pretend objectivity while initiating and supporting economic warfare through all means possible.

If theatre is a smaller field of action that comes to life within a larger field of action, then directors, actors, designers, technicians and producers must all realize that all the larger fields change daily. Their rules are constantly rewritten before too many people can learn them. A play and its production elements may stay basically the same, but if the structure of oppositions is sound, and the spirit of performance remains alive, the audience will often think the play has been rewritten in light of shifting current events. A well thought out theatrical structure does not need daily reworking if the overall structure is sound and the vision complex, but it must be able to breath with fresh life each and every day.

Actions brought to life within a theatre can lead to fresh perceptions that can arouse the will to act differently in the world outside the theatre, but only if each performance is awake to the moment with all the many resonances of that moment. Theatres resonate. They expand and contract with each shift in action. They expand and contract with each audience that moves into and out of any particular performance. They expand and contract with each production that moves into and out of a theatre's larger season. Theatres expand and contract with the arc created by each season of plays presented within them. Even skeptics believe in the ghosts of past performances that linger in the air.

If a theatre takes its role seriously, it can be the soul of a city, illuminating all the larger expansions and contractions... the local fears and longings that Einstein claimed to be the major motivations of man. Theatre can do that for a city better than films manufactured for the nation and for the world. In theatre, you have to be there, or travel a great distance to be there. If it can genuinely settle into its place and time, it can reach out to the Universe.

The loss of repertory and the scheduling of very short runs robs both artists and audiences of the experience of living with a strong work of art over a substantial period of time. Present conditions preclude the creation of great works of theatrical art. The work of great theatre companies reveals itself over time. In today's world, there is no time because time is money and there is no money. Imagination dwindles under false equations.

Theatre is repetitive and ritualistic, but, like all good ritual, it must stay awake to itself. Unlike more traditional rituals, it also constantly reinvents itself, even exchanging whole ritual structures for one another in a well designed repertory. Is this why Plato hated poets and playwrights? Was it because they didn't hold still and deliver the appropriate and approved truths? Were they too alive?

What's a play to do?

Aristotle defined tragedy as an imitation of an action. Comedy also imitates action, but Aristotle believed comic actions have different qualities and different characters to act them out. For the Greeks, an action was a movement of spirit, usually from inside to outside. (See Francis Ferguson's introduction to the Poetics for a detailed discussion of this idea.)

I use the Greek and Elizabethan plays as models for leaping off into the idea that a genuinely vital theatre for widely diverse audiences will inevitably crash collide poetry, politics and prophecy. If it wishes to do so, theatre can strike at the heart of our most volatile conflicts, cracking them open to fresh air and cleansing winds.

Is theatre actually our best and most underused tool for voyaging into conflicts that threaten to undermine society and culture? Can it help us decide whether we should crack our eggs at the small end or the large end?

Is there a plague loose in the land? Can theatre help cleanse the land? Was theatre originally designed to be a purification ritual? In its many failures to do that, can we find the key to building that better mousetrap... to catch the conscience of the King? And if we succeed, will the world beat a path to our door?

That is the hope of all theatre people... a blessed fusion of money and meaning. We continue to strive after the most effective fertility rites.

This will be an exploration of poetics... the theory of making things. A poem is a made thing. A play is a made thing. However, to make a play come alive in a theatre, then others must be willing to step into it. This is true of both traditional and experimental work. A willingness to step into a play can be triggered by either love or money, sometimes both.

And why is it that scriptures, poems and plays so often fold into and out of each other?