On An Overgrown Path

My recent post What would you do if your homeland was invaded? which questioned Benjamin Britten's pacifist position of "I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example" generated a healthy debate. In the main the responses supported Britten's position and my personal ambivalence on the subject was reflected in another post about the Buddhist precept of not taking the life of any living creature. But the difficulty of adopting a consistent position was underlined by my visit last week to the scene of the Allied invasion of Normandy . The obscenity of taking the life of any living creature notwithstanding, it was impossible not to be deeply moved by the ultimate sacrifice made by so many young combatants to protect the personal freedom that we now take for granted. How to protect freedom threatened by a demonic autocracy while also protecting human life may well be an insoluble koan. But there is no doubt that an important contribution can be ma...

The apotheosis of the first phase, however, was an extraordinary event called Pseudo Immercion. This grew out of an approach by members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), whose founder had been in the vanguard of the uptown avant-garde for fifty years and had heard about Pseudo through the art grapevine. At the centre of the event was a performance of Suite for Five , a piece first presented in 1956 to music composed by Cunningham’s late partner, the celebrated composer John Cage, with visuals by the MCDC’s designer and sometime stage manager, pop art godhead Robert Rauschenberg . As New York as lox, Cunningham and Suite for Five awed the young pseudites, while the dancer rejoiced in the youngsters’ energy and sense of possibility. [Dennis] Adamo and [V. Owen] Bush borrowed a sophisticated Silicon Graphics computer animation system which allowed a delighted Cunningham to make a toy monkey dance as if it were alive, with flesh-and-blood members of the Company scattered a...

Synchronicity abounds: last night I was reading Ajahn Amaro on the first Buddhist precept of not taking the life of any living creature. This morning I woke here at our rented property in France to find the apparently lifeless body of a young cat with its head wedged in a square section metal pipe that had been left lying on the ground nearby. Further investigation showed that the cat was still just alive, but very firmly wedged in the pipe – presumably having chased a mouse into the pipe at speed. Trying to pull the poor creature only produced awful cries of pain. I then tried putting water and shampoo onto its fur to help it slip out, but all to no avail. Which left the awful choice of risking breaking its neck trying to pull it out, or letting it die horribly. Two locals who appeared told me to kill it humanely – humane maybe but still taking the life of a living creature. By now almost two hours had passed. So in one last desperate attempt I cut four splints out of a plastic m...

'It happens to everything eventually, it all must be trampled underfoot. Whether it is Tibetan culture being destroyed by the red cadres of the Cultural Revolution, British institutions being demolished by Margaret Thatcher’s handbag, or Buddhism being wiped from India by the Turkish invasions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Kali in her many manifestations will take them all. The good things just seem to last longer, but they have to go, their goodness corrupted from within; sometimes they can be like old trees – still outwardly impressive but with rotting centres, waiting to fall with the next storm. The Buddha said that although his teachings would last for five thousand years, they too would eventually disappear.' That is Nick Scott writing in Rude Awakenings , the chronicle of his pilgrimage with Ajahn Succito to sacred Buddhist sites in India. My photographs taken at a butterfly farm on L’Isle de Noumourtier graphically remind us of how impermanent good things a...

When considering whether he should or should not conduct Mahler’s reconstituted Tenth Symphony Leonard Bernstein unabashedly said to a colleague “I have one question, will it give me an orgasm?” That anecdote appears in Jonathan Cott’s Dinner with Lenny . Classical music today is all about box ticking. We ask does it tick the accessibility box? Does it tick the inclusivity box? Does it tick the equality box? Does it tick the funding box? And does it tick the Twitter box? However, somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten the most important question: does it tick the orgasm box? Dinner with Lenny was borrowed from the Second Air Division Memorial Library , Norwich. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

While on the road read David Michie’s engaging The Dalai Lama’s Cat , photographed enlightened temple cat at Le Jardin des Olfacties and heard Ton-That Tiêt's bracing Les Sourires de Bouddha . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2013. No freebies used in this post.

Modern Occidentalism is threatening to flatten out the whole world and mold it to a single rather dull pattern, throwing away all that diversity whereby man has expressed himself through the centuries. Not only are all the Oriental civilizations in acute danger as a result of the Western encroachment, but also the West itself seems prepared to let go whatever was great or worthwhile in its own heritage. That is Marco Pallis, who featured in a previous path , writing in his seminal contribution to the perennial wisdom school Peaks and Lamas . He made that prognosis half a century before the digital revolution, but his words are eerily prophetic of how the early promise of digitally-empowered wisdom of crowds mutated into social media-empowered conformity of crowds . However change is a constant and Marco Pallis and his fellow perennialists can justifiably be criticized for opposing progress. But now there are signs that perennial wisdom is mutating into a post-digital Spring which embr...

Recent reading has included the newly published Dinner with Lenny , a full-length transcript of Leonard Bernstein’s last major interview which was given to Jonathan Cott in 1989 and originally intended for publication in in Rolling Stone magazine. Their discussion goes where today’s classical music revisionists dare not go and at one point the musician and Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan is quoted in the context of Bernstein’s Mahler interpretations. There is more wisdom in one page of Dinner with Lenny than in the entire oeuvre of today’s self-styled cultural commentators and if Universal Music’s Max Hole and BBC Radio 3’s Roger Wright would but take the time to read it the world would be a slightly better place . My own brush with what Jonathan Cott tactfully describes as the polyamorous Lenny is recounted in Simply chic symphonies? . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Dinner with Lenny was borrowed from the Second Air Division memorial Library , Norwich and my thanks go...