Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

Ingrid Geisler is interested in intersections and organic, horse-like forms.  Intersections are places where things come together even if they are also different.  From the perspective of this website, the whole of life is a potpourri of intersections.  Intersecting material objects, intersecting ideas, intersecting feelings.  Love is a kind of intersection, too.   

For her part, Ingrid Geisler has a deep feeling -- maybe a love -- for two kinds of horses: actual horses, made of flesh and blood, and horses within our imaginations, who have archetypal power of their own.  Her sculpture is an intersection of these two kinds of horses: the actual and the archetypal.  She creates organic, horse-like forms.

Along with Ingrid Geisler, many of us in the JJB community are interested in the relation between intersections and organism.  Whitehead's philosophy is a philosophy of organism, and he was committed to the view that organisms are living wholes who possess something like subjectivity.  But for him a living whole was not a self-contained capsule devoid of connections with others; a living whole -- a horse, for example -- is a coming together of the world itself, as contained among other places in the very parts of her body.  A soul is an embodied soul and thus a compound soul.  Ingrid Geisler makes this clear.

The horses in our imaginations are both bigger and smaller than the actual horses.  They are bigger because they have archetypal power, with energy and wisdom from which we can learn.   Sometimes, as Ingrid explains with her sculpture, they are even monstrous, with six legs rather than four.  Ingrid Geisler is not afraid of monsters.  Sometimes they come to us bearing gifts, if only we have eyes to see. 

And yet horses in our imaginations are also smaller than actual horses, because they are always slightly less than our finite kin in pastures, and who live and die, just like us.  There is something ultimate about the concrete creature made of flesh and blood, equine or human, that can never be captured in archetypal imagery.  Ingrid Geisler knows this.  She has been a companion to many an actual horse, having ridden horses most of her life.  She knows there is a difference between a sculpted horse and a horse she can ride.  But there is a connection -- an intersection -- within the difference

From the perspective of Whitehead's philosophy, which shapes much of this website, both kinds of horses -- the imaginal and the actual -- are real.  Something is real if it can really be experienced.  A feeling is real; a dream is real; a goal is real; an idea is real.  

Ingrid Geisler helps us see some of these invisible realities.  What is this place?  Some philosophers speak of the place of imagined realities as the realm of the imaginal.  Ingrid Geisler works at the intersection of the imaginal and the perceptual.  

Can horses like this breathe?  Some of us in the JJB community speak of the divine reality -- God -- as the animating spirit within creation.  The breath of life.  We all know that this breath is contained in each and every actual creature of the flesh: from the smallest of microbes to the largest of mammals.  All are animated, not only by their intersections, but also by the divine breathing.  What Ingrid Geisler shows, with her work in wood, is that horses within the realm of the imaginal can breathe, too.  Look closely and carefully, she seems to say to us, you can see them breathing!  Sometimes they even offer us gifts.  Let's let the artist speak for herself:

When I work with a horse, we exchange something that others cannot see. Often the exchange is in the form of a lesson, perhaps patience or understanding. Though these lessons are not manifested physically, they are beautiful hidden gifts that can only be discovered if looked at closely and carefully.

One of the better hopes for the world today is that people learn to receive gifts from animals.  So many of us in urban societies have lost touch with the palpable wisdom of our kiindred creatures of the flesh.  Of course if we work with animals or befriend them, we know they are souls in their own right, replete with intelligence and personality.  But if we do not, we may think of them simply as "animals" who are somehow less intelligent than us, and sometimes a bit frightening.  We forget that they can be our spiritual teachers, "if looked at closely and carefully."

There is something very artistic, and very Buddhist, about Ingrid Geisler's emphasis on close and careful looking.  Buddhists use the word "mindfulness" to name the act of perceiving something carefully, letting it speak to you on its own terms, in its own way.  We can perceive actual horses mindfully, and we can perceive imaginal horses mindfully, too.  If we are to receive their gifts, we must let them speak to us with their bodies, their souls, their heart-minds.

The idea of giving an unseen gift a physical location was the inspiration of my Trojan horses. Each horse has a hidden space, but unlike in the original story where warriors hid in the hidden compartment, my horses’ compartments are empty. The gift itself, the experience of learning a lesson from a horse, is about the process and is unseen.

The act of receiving a gift from an animal requires respect.  And respect requires that we know that there is something about the animal that we can never possess, never grasp, never own with our eyes, never see.  This is, as it were, the hidden space.

The original Trojan horse was a monstrous piece of work; it was enormous. My work is not monstrous in terms of size or scale; it is, however “playfully and suggestively” monstrous. I draw upon horse anatomy and alter it in a way that I imagine mythmakers in the past drew on and altered the creatures around them in order to activate their myths. I draw upon mythical beast imagery for the forms I create, because mythical beasts, unlike real animals, do not need to function or obey natural laws of the physical universe to exist.

If we are to recover a sense of archetypal imagination, if we are to receive gifts from animals, we must befriend monsters.  Not necessary the scary kind who are all about viollence, but the playful kind who challenge our stereotypes of what has to be.   If we are accustomed to thinking of horses with four legs, we need to befriend horses with six legs.  The very reality of six legs, while shocking at first, reminds us of the sheer continency of life: the way in which it unfolds in unpredictable and playful ways.   At the same time that we befriend monsters, we must also befirend the primal, the beastly.  The work of Jan Harrison, profiled in another article in JJB, reveals the beastly (GO).  And the work of Ingrid Geisler reveals the beastly, too, albeit in a more cedar-like way.  The beast is the primal energy within each of us: what the Hindus call our shakti.  It is not evil or good, it is simply intense and powerful and playful.

The horses are an amalgamation of parts that are not necessarily, individually recognizable as equine and characterized by oddly shaped limbs ending in wheels. Each horse disassembles and often has moving parts like functioning wheels or sliding openings. The parts are intricately assembled in soft and familiarly, warm cedar wood, which draws the viewer to investigate the workings of the many interlocking pieces.

In Ingrid Geisler's art we receive several gifts.  One of them is a simple invitation to play, to realize that there is a place in life for the imaginal.  Another is the invitation to recognize intersections, to see that things are what they are because they are "coming together" and have moving parts.  And still another is the invitation to investigate, to be curious, to want to understand things.  Ingrid Geisler is a scientist as well as an artist: a person who is curious about the world even as she also has a sense of the primal and the beautiful.   For those of us in the JJB community, these two qualities -- curiosity and playfulness -- are both spiritual and scientific.  We see something of the deep Togethering, whom some address as God, in the impulse to wonder, to know, to play, to explore, to investigate.  The spirituality of Ingrid Geisler's work is not only in the horses she sculpts.  It is in the spirit she brings to the sculpting. 

Working with wood as an art material was a new experience for me and the look of my horse images shifted to become more playful, whimsical, and toy-like. It took me a while to figure out how horses and wood work together. Working with horse anatomy posed unique problems that traditional joinery solutions were not equipped to address, because the parts do not come together at ninety degree angles as they do in traditional furniture. As a result, I was forced to make up my own joints and connections to accommodate my desire to create interesting intersections and organic horse-like forms.

Ingrid Geisler makes connections and makes up connections.  This making up of connections is more than fabrication, although fabrication can be healthy.  It is a willingness to create something new, to add connections to the world.  The deep Togethering dwells within each person, not only as an impulse to investigate already existing connections, but also to create new ones.  In Whitehead's philosophy this is called novelty.  It is the willingness to make new connections and, in so doing, find our place in a creative universe filled with qi: that is, with what the Chinese call continuous creativity.  The horses in the work you see have qi.  With their warm and cedar feel, they breathe.  And Ingrid Geisler adds to the world's constructive qi by making new joints.   The newness, the novelty, the freshness.  There's a freshness deep down, said the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins, and it is divine.  There is a freshness in the horses of the imagination, and it is divine, too.