SICA Notes from the May
29-31 Retreat,
As soon as I
got the email from Leonard Dixon about the SICA retreat in
In this way you will soon become adept at doing work that
is in tune with your soul, and this will certainly make your life happy, for
this skill will grow from your human soul which will have brought to life your
whole inner feeling. As a result, my child, you will acquire a lasting interest
in your work and your achievements will not be disappointing.
This is the true meaning of culture, for its source is the human soul, and it
is received in an inner feeling that has awakened and become free from the
influence of its own subordinate powers. It is a culture filled continuously
with the life-force…
Seen from an ordinary, outer point of view, your work will appear no different
from ordinary work. In reality, however, there will be a very great difference.
For ordinary work and skill are acquired by learning from someone else – or
from a group – unable yet to determine whether or not the work is in harmony
with the one's identity. But the skill in work that you will acquire in this
way is of a quality which has its origin in the human soul….
So what is produced as culture today has no lasting quality
and comes to an early end… If just for the sake of making money, giving this
kind of performance is quite all right and fitting. But we do not only want to
make money, brothers and sisters. We should be able to show real culture,
coming from the jiwa, so that the performances not
only attract the hearts of the onlookers but make them really aware of their
lives… This is true culture…
I was
immediately struck by the similarities of these comments and what I came to
call Organic Poetry. More on that at http://organicpoetry.com/
Marston and I arrived, his wife Hadidjah with Miryam Gordon had taken another car from
Most of the
time between our arrival and the session after lunch on Saturday was spent
talking about culture, which I found frustrating. There seemed to be a lot of
kvetching about not creating. This was especially disappointing because we had
at least three qualified workshop facilitators in our midst just waiting to be
asked to facilitate.
But in the
afternoon on Saturday, the workshops commenced and I felt the energy change
immediately. I was able to facilitate the Organic Poetry workshop I have done
many times in the past. My preference is to work with folks serious about
writing and connecting with those authentic qualities of the Jiwa which Bapak spoke of earlier.
I like to
start workshops with a bit of reading and had the class recite segments from
one of my favorite poems, Michael McClure’s Dolphin
Skull. Some of the gathered found it a bit odd and inaccessible. I think
this may be linked to some of what Bapak was
discussing earlier. I feel our sense of what art or culture is has been addled
by the industry-generated-culture in
which we live. Here’s a snippet from a column I wrote in September,
2008:
I first heard the phrase industry generated culture from Media
Literacy Activist Gloria DeGaetano, who founded the Parent Coaching Institute. In short, DeGaetano says this is a culture which is seeking what it
can get from the people, rather than what it can give to the people. This is a
complete perversion of what culture is supposed to be and it is indeed, often
perverted. See the wardrobe-malfunction incident of the Super Bowl a couple of
years ago, or something much more relevant to people: food.
It is works of
art that go deeper than this impulse that will change our lives and I tried,
perhaps in an awkward way, to encourage participants to go beyond their comfort
zones to a use of speech, in Charles Olson’s words: at its least careless and least logical. His full essay on the
matter, Projective
Verse, has been an invaluable source for my own work for fifteen years.
Participants
at the SICA Organic Poetry workshop seemed to be excited by some of the things
that came up in a couple of random, shared exercises, including one where a
question, starting with why was asked, with the question hidden and the answer
written by the person to one’s left. Examples:
Why do we grow old and die?
Because our
fragments are pixels asserting their right.
Why does it rain on Memorial Day?
Because of the need for meaning and low
blood sugar.
Why is the sky blue?
Because in the
darkness everything is scarier and so dire looking.
Why did he piss on the haystack?
Because no waters
flow uphill.
There were
other exercises and after the workshop we had an acting workshop, which were
short improvisations led by Benedict Hermann. One involved two people, with
each person having one line and only one: Yes
and the other having only No. These
exercises, much like the poetry ones, allowed us a glimpse into our tendencies
and our crutches, as we tend to fall back on them when engaging in something
new and different. It was good to have the experience of the beginner in this
workshop. I found Benedict to be a wise and very capable facilitator.
There were
many opportunities for latihans and testing, thanks to Isman
and I found them to be of a very strong quality, for which I am grateful. I
hope to attend a similar event being planned for
Some tips on self-publishing are linked here.
9:24P – 6.5.09