I Art as a Yoga of Perception

"Art," said the late Zen Master Hisamatsu, "either records or longs for liberation." For Hisamatsu, there was no purpose or subject matter other than illumination. This purpose is what American poet Charles Olson had in mind when he dared his readers to make "the magical study which happiness is." When such study is conducted on a prayer mat, we call it meditation. When it is conducted before a canvas or computer screen, we call it art. Such art is sacred. And so is the happiness it celebrates and, in some cases, induces.

In the 20th century, many Buddhist poets took Hisamatsu literally and practiced a poetry of meditation-like mindfulness where poems accrete and are not merely statements of sentiment or parts of narrative. Because they were allied to meditation, poems and paintings became yogas of perception, often beginning from or culminating in insight.

As an artist, whose main technique is that of image manipulation and assemblage, Michael Green practices what I call numinous free association. Symbols, glyphs, images and icons used in his art fraternize and function in a free-ranging and global spiritual companionship that has many secular counterparts in modern art—but none so exclusively religious. Art critic Clement Greenberg once described 20th century poetry and painting as a "haunted house" filled with disembodied cultural content. Michael Green has transformed that haunted house into a kiva where spirits gather to help not haunt. His work records these spirit gatherings—not in Ouija board whispers or Babel-like chatter but full ancestral invocation. Michael's art is, like consciousness itself, a Great Basin where all archetypes reside, renewed by their proximity to prayer and their visitation in a context of devotional awareness.

I contend that Michael, who is as much at home in a kiva as he is a mosque or a zendo, is practicing the deep ecology in his art that he espouses in his life. There is no separation between the two. Art, like medicine, makes things whole. It instructs, delights and, above all, coheres. "For you," wrote the poet Louis Zukofsky, "I have emptied the meaning, leaving only the song." Michael's pictures are vessels and they hold meaning like a cistern holds water and sky and birds, and onlookers that pass in front of it are mirrored back in purity. Image echoes text and vice-versa. It is mutual. Things correspond and co-respond. Hello, says the writer and painter lost in this communion, both of us were object.

II Art as Ecstatic Collectivism

Michael has spent the last three decades of his life as a student of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sri Lankan Sufi who came to America in 1971 and lived here and there until his death in December 1986. Like his student, Bawa was an eclectic pragmatist. Just by dint of his upbringing on the Indian subcontinent, Bawa blended Hinduism with Islam and showed more than a passing familiarity with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. But he also felt deep kinship with Jewish and Christian exemplars and brought fresh, often iconoclastic insight to those traditions. When, for example, he was asked about Christ's crucifixion, he was apt to interpret it as a koan for the human condition with the five nails symbols of the five senses. Our job, he would say then, is to resurrect.

In his multiple, often contradictory tellings of scripture tales, Bawa was a mentor to Michael, encouraging those inspired juxtapositions of symbologies that are a constant in his lithographs. Bawa had a mythopoeic mind, where truth was the simultaneously literal and luminous ground of being. Everything that his students took as real and corporeal, Bawa treated as symbols that he was free to use as he saw fit. Stories got juggled to suit the occasion at hand. Bawa, like Michael, practiced a kind of sacramental surrealism. Like a Zen master, his job was liberation from the suffering and delusion at hand. Once, when walking with Michael, Bawa pointed to his picture and said, "Haram" -Arabic for forbidden. Michael's linkings of past and present are meant, when all is said and done, to make us think for ourselves—very often far outside the confines of convention. "If you see the Buddha on the road, slay him," famously says Rinzai—that is, if he doesn't slay you first.

In any case, Michael composes at the screen and on the canvas in a way that can be likened to what Claude Levi-Strauss in his famous book "The Primitive Mind" called "bricollage"—the gathering of bits and pieces useful in practicing and preserving a unity of culture (or, in Michael's case, consciousness). "Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being," Rumi commands. "If not, leave this gathering." Michael illustrates these lines by showing a pendant like assemblage of Jewish, Hindu and Islamic symbols set against a tranquil sea.

Each of his pieces is like a clearing or an opening. In one we look from a castle turret in which each stone is inscribed with a sacred religious symbol poised against a serene blue sky. Through the window flows an unstrung necklace of pearls. The accompanying poem by Rumi says, "I am not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world of the next, . . ." All that is, the Rumi fragment concludes, is the

consciousness in which all worlds are one "human being." In short, luminous consciousness. Michael continually represents this luminous consciousness as a bouquet of archetypes. Often they make you feel awe. Often they make you laugh.

"Is there one word that can serve as a guiding principle for our lives?" a disciple asked Confucius. "Reciprocity," he answered. "The Illuminated Rumi" is embodiment of this reciprocity—not just between Rumi's words and Michael's Images but also between the component archetypes in his art. There is in Michael's art what Christians call "adoration." In this loving, contemplative milieu, Michael is free to see Christ nailed to a cross as a highly

abstracted version of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree. Michael's thinking is regenerative and healing—the opposite of tragic. His purposes are often shamanistic.

It is important to see "The Illuminated Rumi" as a series of rapturous representations of interconnectedness and mutuality. All the forms and symbols that participate in his gathering are part of a laughing, loving Sufi companionship. The light from which these archetypes have emerged over time was, as Christ proclaimed, "before Abraham." If not for that amiable primal unity and its ultimate intactness within us, there would be no need for creation.

In the final run, Michael's pictures are, to adopt a T.S. Eliot phrase, "objective correlatives" for heightened states of being. In those states, all coheres because all lives in the dance known no other way than to dance—or stand nearby keeping time or keeping bowls filled with water to quench the thirst of any and all in attendance.


	Feature Article The Art of Michael Green As a Study of Happiness An Essay by David Federman
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		I Art as a Yoga of Perception "Art," said the late Zen Master Hisamatsu, "either records or longs for liberation." For Hisamatsu, there was no purpose or subject matter other than illumination. This purpose is what American poet Charles Olson had in mind when he dared his readers to make "the magical study which happiness is." When such study is conducted on a prayer mat, we call it meditation. When it is conducted before a canvas or computer screen, we call it art. Such art is sacred. And so is the happiness it celebrates and, in some cases, induces. In the 20th century, many Buddhist poets took Hisamatsu literally and practiced a poetry of meditation-like mindfulness where poems accrete and are not merely statements of sentiment or parts of narrative. Because they were allied to meditation, poems and paintings became yogas of perception, often beginning from or culminating in insight. As an artist, whose main technique is that of image manipulation and assemblage, Michael Green practices what I call numinous free association. Symbols, glyphs, images and icons used in his art fraternize and function in a free-ranging and global spiritual companionship that has many secular counterparts in modern art—but none so exclusively religious. Art critic Clement Greenberg once described 20th century poetry and painting as a "haunted house" filled with disembodied cultural content. Michael Green has transformed that haunted house into a kiva where spirits gather to help not haunt. His work records these spirit gatherings—not in Ouija board whispers or Babel-like chatter but full ancestral invocation. Michael's art is, like consciousness itself, a Great Basin where all archetypes reside, renewed by their proximity to prayer and their visitation in a context of devotional awareness. I contend that Michael, who is as much at home in a kiva as he is a mosque or a zendo, is practicing the deep ecology in his art that he espouses in his life. There is no separation between the two. Art, like medicine, makes things whole. It instructs, delights and, above all, coheres. "For you," wrote the poet Louis Zukofsky, "I have emptied the meaning, leaving only the song." Michael's pictures are vessels and they hold meaning like a cistern holds water and sky and birds, and onlookers that pass in front of it are mirrored back in purity. Image echoes text and vice-versa. It is mutual. Things correspond and co-respond. Hello, says the writer and painter lost in this communion, both of us were object. II Art as Ecstatic Collectivism Michael has spent the last three decades of his life as a student of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sri Lankan Sufi who came to America in 1971 and lived here and there until his death in December 1986. Like his student, Bawa was an eclectic pragmatist. Just by dint of his upbringing on the Indian subcontinent, Bawa blended Hinduism with Islam and showed more than a passing familiarity with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. But he also felt deep kinship with Jewish and Christian exemplars and brought fresh, often iconoclastic insight to those traditions. When, for example, he was asked about Christ's crucifixion, he was apt to interpret it as a koan for the human condition with the five nails symbols of the five senses. Our job, he would say then, is to resurrect. In his multiple, often contradictory tellings of scripture tales, Bawa was a mentor to Michael, encouraging those inspired juxtapositions of symbologies that are a constant in his lithographs. Bawa had a mythopoeic mind, where truth was the simultaneously literal and luminous ground of being. Everything that his students took as real and corporeal, Bawa treated as symbols that he was free to use as he saw fit. Stories got juggled to suit the occasion at hand. Bawa, like Michael, practiced a kind of sacramental surrealism. Like a Zen master, his job was liberation from the suffering and delusion at hand. Once, when walking with Michael, Bawa pointed to his picture and said, "Haram" -Arabic for forbidden. Michael's linkings of past and present are meant, when all is said and done, to make us think for ourselves—very often far outside the confines of convention. "If you see the Buddha on the road, slay him," famously says Rinzai—that is, if he doesn't slay you first. In any case, Michael composes at the screen and on the canvas in a way that can be likened to what Claude Levi-Strauss in his famous book "The Primitive Mind" called "bricollage"—the gathering of bits and pieces useful in practicing and preserving a unity of culture (or, in Michael's case, consciousness). "Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being," Rumi commands. "If not, leave this gathering." Michael illustrates these lines by showing a pendant like assemblage of Jewish, Hindu and Islamic symbols set against a tranquil sea. Each of his pieces is like a clearing or an opening. In one we look from a castle turret in which each stone is inscribed with a sacred religious symbol poised against a serene blue sky. Through the window flows an unstrung necklace of pearls. The accompanying poem by Rumi says, "I am not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world of the next, . . ." All that is, the Rumi fragment concludes, is the consciousness in which all worlds are one "human being." In short, luminous consciousness. Michael continually represents this luminous consciousness as a bouquet of archetypes. Often they make you feel awe. Often they make you laugh. "Is there one word that can serve as a guiding principle for our lives?" a disciple asked Confucius. "Reciprocity," he answered. "The Illuminated Rumi" is embodiment of this reciprocity—not just between Rumi's words and Michael's Images but also between the component archetypes in his art. There is in Michael's art what Christians call "adoration." In this loving, contemplative milieu, Michael is free to see Christ nailed to a cross as a highly abstracted version of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree. Michael's thinking is regenerative and healing—the opposite of tragic. His purposes are often shamanistic. It is important to see "The Illuminated Rumi" as a series of rapturous representations of interconnectedness and mutuality. All the forms and symbols that participate in his gathering are part of a laughing, loving Sufi companionship. The light from which these archetypes have emerged over time was, as Christ proclaimed, "before Abraham." If not for that amiable primal unity and its ultimate intactness within us, there would be no need for creation. In the final run, Michael's pictures are, to adopt a T.S. Eliot phrase, "objective correlatives" for heightened states of being. In those states, all coheres because all lives in the dance known no other way than to dance—or stand nearby keeping time or keeping bowls filled with water to quench the thirst of any and all in attendance. —David Federman, July 7, 2004 This essay may be reprinted with attribution