During my residency at Djerassi just this last October,
I got into a discussion about pattern with the composer
Mamoru Fujieda. He works with the data he receives from
the electronic life field of plants and transforms this
raw material into music. We were talking about the difference
between a process in which the choices come exclusively
from the will of the artist, and a process in which the
choices come from what already exists beyond the artist,
and the artist becomes a kind of channel. Mamoru referred
to it as the difference between talking and listening. I
referred to it as the difference between seeing works of
art as finite entities or part of something that goes on
forever.
This conversation took place within a gathering,
and another person opined that pattern was repetition. I
disagreed. I then got into trouble by recounting a discussion
I had with a former teacher, Dennis Leon, in which Dennis
pointed out to me that my early paintings were composed,
and my more mature paintings were not. Dennis told me that
both were segments of a larger continuum, but the former
were selective, while the later were random. He suggested
that the intention of the later was less vain. Well, the
word “vain” pushed some buttons, and I was not able to crawl
out of it. Most thought I was speaking of the vanity of
a single artist, when in fact I was talking about the vanity
of a world view.
There was also argument about the difference
between what is whole and what is finished. Some seemed
to believe that being whole and concluded were the same
thing, just as they misunderstood what I meant by “vanity”.
We got hung up on semantics, and everyone was too tired
to stay up late enough to find the common page.
I later
had a private, cathartic conversation with Sari Broner,
a poet, who was the only one in the room who spoke openly
that she understood what I was trying to say. We talked
about how pattern was not mere repetition, but the sense
of simultaneity and accumulation. If there is more than
one thing going on, if there is any kind of company, it
becomes pattern. If there is more than one then there is
relationship and linkage. Pattern is a series of relationships
and linkages, and what determines these intersections is
not rational or composed; it’s intuited, and in the realm
of experience, which is much more difficult to define succinctly.
Pattern is a form of weaving, and it can be as indecipherable,
expansive and irregular as it wants. It may include clusters
of repetition, but more accurately and subtly, it is rhythm,
which is also an unlimited proposition. I think of jazz,
of John Coltrane, of playing on the outside. If it is indecipherable,
which Sari and I agree that it is, then we can’t know it
entirely. It is bigger than we are, it is mysterious, unfinished,
and infinite.
There is no vanity in this realm, because
first of all, it’s not about us; we’re just in there, along
with everything else. To be a part of something that goes
on and on is to admit that we’re not in control, and we
have to work with what is passing through us. Sari and I
also joked that it is another East Coast-West Coast thing:
that the East Coast looks toward Europe and the colonial
paradigm of singularity, linearity, and hierarchy and the
West Coast is part of the Pacific Rim, which is heavily
influenced by cultures who believe in a more organic, borderless
model and is in the shape of a circle. (It has just struck
me that if the East Coast wanted to envision an Atlantic
Rim; its own circle, it could also look to Africa, and its
side of South America, but I won’t pursue that argument
at this time).
Another aspect of pattern that Sari and I
explored was the directions in which it can move. To say
that pattern is repetition is to think that it moves laterally,
like a road. It moves across a surface. During the controversial
dialogue that I referred to earlier, both Mamuro and I voiced
that we felt that beneath pattern, for example the electronic
patterns of plants, there are more patterns, to which my
opponents in this debate objected. They viewed pattern as
just pattern, like what’s printed on fabric. During my comforting
and conciliatory talk with Sari, she assured me that she
too believes that pattern also goes down, like archeology,
in layers. There are patterns beneath patterns, patterns
within patterns, patterns on the off beat...and there are
patterns with which to tune a piano that are not regulated
by notes that are equidistant from eachother but by the
non-linear laws of nature. Gregory Bateson refers to the
underlying pattern as the meta-pattern. Sari refers to it
as divinity. When I mentioned Gregory Bateson to Mamuro,
he and I became instant comrades despite the acute language
barrier.
Ken Kageyama’s response to all the hullabaloo about
vanity, what a pattern is, and whether or not it goes down,
in, and on and on was to say that when he was in the desert,
it was so quiet and filled with space that he could hear
ants walk. We started to talk about being able to perceive
what is inaudible, invisible, and beyond the human world.
I recounted the story of “Horton Hears a Who” from Dr. Seuss,
about a giant but gentle animal with very big ears who heard
and sympathized with something so tiny that everyone thought
the elephant was nuts. Mamuro hears plants, Ken hears ants,
Horton hears little tiny people of a dandelion. To say that
one can hear these things is to say that there is something
beyond human limitations, which is a world view that lacks
vanity.
©Sono Osato
