Friday 4 June 2010

"a new role for the artist?"

Just opened a wonderful book, new ground lost seeds, with a passage by John Fox.

"...it could be useful to lay down the initial ground rules of a culture which may be less materially based but where more people will actively participate and gain the power to rejoice in moments that are wonderful and significant. These could be where more people grow and cook their own food and maybe build their own houses, name their children, bury their dead, marking anniversaries, creating new spaces for new ceremonies, and producing whatever drama, stories, songs, rituals, images, pageants and jokes that are relevant to re-discovered values."

"In such a context the artist would become facilitator and fixer, celebrant and stage manager, a visionary linking the past and the future, and a shamanic poet, the revelator of what used to be called spiritual energy."

Me! Me! I say aloud, still half through the door, the book just out of its envelope. I've had a strong sense since doing Malidoma Some's element rituals that what my singing is all about is ritual. Somehow. Don't know how. Yet. But somehow this Brionyness that I am is profoundly oriented towards contributing to that.

"Equally of course this kind of artist would also acknowledge the artist in us all and offer testament to the innate creativity recurring in every generation and every community where the intuitive is given freedom."

Yes! Exactly! Me me me! My friend Camilo took a quote I band around and put it on a picture.


Here's a picture of Camilo last weekend. Yep, the guy on the left is Bobby McFerrin. Camilo is now even more my hero than he was last week. Bobby of course remains one of my uber-heroes. And now perhaps John Fox too. He's definitely entered the short list.


And what is play about but "giving the intuitive freedom"?

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