Dane Rudhyar - How to Integrate Spontaneity & Planning.pdf - adios39

Many youths today are attracted to folk singers using a guitar to accompany

themselves; and the Spanish type of passionate and seemingly utterly free songs which

belong to the category of FLAMENCOS stir great enthusiasm in a growing number of American

devotees. Early in this century, most musicians thought that all these folk songs were

spontaneous expressions of the common people, especially of peasants in village festivities

or around home fires during long and lovely winter evenings. It was often said that in these

songs you could hear the very soul of the people unhindered by the learned rules of

professional music, freely singing itself in moving improvisations.

However, when learned composers — like Bela Bartok in Hungary and Romania —

came to collect and study a great number of the popular songs of their countries, or when

deeper students analyzed the foundations on which the Spanish FLAMENCOS were built and

the traditions indelibly connected with the playing of the guitar or of other popular

instruments, it was discovered that the songs which expressed so spontaneously and

perhaps naively the "soul of the people" were actually based on the modes or scales of the

still older music of the church or on involved numerical and symbolical concepts whose

sources could be found in Pythagorean or mystical-occult traditions. Even the word

"flamenco" proved to be derived from the name of the bird flamingo and to imply a complex

background of symbolical meanings traditionally associated with this bird.

If I mention these facts, it is because they are most revealing, inasmuch as they show

how the seemingly most free and spontaneous expressions of simple and untutored people

are actually conditioned by patterns and concepts which were formulated by men carefully

trained for long years in places of sacred, religious, or occult learning. These men steeped in

sacred thought had provided in the past foundations of a new culture; the symbols and the

artistic and musical proportions they embodied in sacred images and chants later on were

taken over, simplified, divested of their deeper meanings, and used as the framework

within which "the people" came to express in spontaneous utterances their feelings, their

love, their anguish, their reverence before the great mysteries of ever-renascent life and

ever-present death.

In other words, wherever we find spontaneity and improvisation in collective popular

outpourings of feelings, we should realize that this seemingly absolute freedom is only

relative. The improvisations are basically structured by patterns and concepts created

beforehand by great minds who established basic forms and scales, also by inventors who

built instruments according to symbolical shapes (for instance, the guitar was conceived

originally in relation to the shape of a spider — an animal much used in primitive symbolism

because of its ability to weave according to accurate geometrical shapes).

The True Freedom

The conditioning of structure and the freedom of the spontaneous flow of feelings: these

two elements constitute the essential polarities of human behavior. Spontaneity requires a

deeply accepted sense of basic structure. Someone, somewhere did the planning, the

thinking which sought to express a fundamental attunement to the great rhythms of life, of

the earth, of the whole cosmos. In churches, temples, schools of initiation, or guilds, the

principles of this attunement were absorbed, unconsciously in most cases , by the

peasant, the neophyte, or the apprentice. Thus, structural foundations were provided which

became the framework within which spontaneity could manifest freely just because it was

held within secure bounds by the once "sacred" structures of symbols or musical scales.

Structure and spontaneity : these two factors within all significant human activity

can be said in astrology to correspond respectively with Saturn and Venus. Saturn refers to

the conditioning framework within which the emotions of the individual person (or of a

human collectivity) are safely free to express themselves in shapes, gestures, or tones —

thus, through plastic arts, dancing, and music. Venus gives to the poet his moods, his

anguish, his ecstasies; but Saturn provides him with collectively understandable words and

syntax. "Chaos" begins when the traditional frames of reference of a culture (Saturn) are

either destroyed consciously or carelessly ignored and individuals sing, paint, write without

any understandable or communicable frame of reference, glorying in unconditioned,

unstructured, uncommitted spontaneity.

"Chaos," nevertheless, can mean — and it did mean in ancient Greece — a state of

"con-fusion" (the "melting pot" of races and cultures) in which old and obsolete structures

and traditions are "fused together" in order that new symbols and new modes of behavior

may emerge. The process of structural dissolution (Neptune) follows the shock of a new

revelation (Uranus) and leads to a condition of atomization (Pluto) required for the

emergence of new potentialities of integration (the as-yet-unknown planet Proserpine?).

These new potentialities, however are not arising "spontaneously" in the usual sense of

the term spontaneous (meaning literally "of one's own"). They manifest at certain times

within "seed men" who have experienced Plutonian "hell" in the darkness of the

underground (the place for all seeds before germination); but these potentialities manifest

as the result of a "descent of the spirit" and this spirit is that of God or (which means much

the same thing) of man, the soul of humanity as a whole. Only later will the result of this

divine impregnation — the little germ — break through the crust of the old seed. A

spontaneous breakthrough? It is indeed, but each germ carries within it the genetic pattern

of the life species of which it is an expression; it carries a Saturn-emanated structure.

There may have been a mutation leading to some structural modification, perhaps a

radical transformation; yet it still is structure. It results from a planning activity. The

medieval sculptor was presumably free to imagine new forms which revealed under Venus'

inspiration the surge of feelings that truly were his own; yet his work did fit into a specific

place within the immense edifice of the cathedral. It belonged to a vast human and cultural

effort. He may not have known how he knew why he used certain shapes and proportions;

but that unconscious knowing was the voice of Saturn within him — Saturn, which

originally was the ruler of the Golden Age (i.e., of the very beginnings of a great cycle of

human evolution).

Saturn, Ruler of the Golden Age

We have lost the sense of this original Saturn symbol. The adolescent, stirred emotionally

by Venus and rushing along Mars' paths of unstructured desire for whatever object does the

stirring, rebels against any Saturnian constraint. Saturn is no longer for him the father-god

whom his childish insecurity once revered and loved, and who indeed had structured his

being. Perhaps the "god" lost his divine stature by proving himself to be an unsubstantial

figure, unable to radiate the feelings of security the growing child needed for his growth.

The "human, all too human" father appeared then to the child as being an autocrat, making

arbitrary demands and being himself full of fears and anxiety. The teen-ager, as a result,

most often today repudiates all fatherhoods, all Saturnian images. He craves to express

himself "spontaneously," to do just as he "feels," in unconditioned and uncommitted

freedom — or so he believes himself to be free!

But this repudiating of Saturn is not at all the same kind of repudiation as that of the

more mature person who has experienced Uranus' revelations and the dissolution and

atomization of the ancient images and symbols of a tradition by which he had been

structured and to which he had become consciously committed. The 12-to-14-year-old

adolescent has not actually known the conscious and individual acceptance of a Saturn

tradition. He has only been passively subjected to the more or less arbitrary authority of

parents and teachers of early school grades. This is, indeed, an entirely different situation.

If the adolescent rushes out into his teen-age world rebelling against any authority, he does

not do so because there is "chaos" (as I defined the term) within him but because there is

blank emptiness; and he tries desperately to fill this soul emptiness with all kinds of

stimulation — which our greedy society abundantly provides for him in the form of lurid TV,

magazines with voluptuous illustrations, and sexy paperbacks — for the teen-agers

constitute a wonderful market for profits of all sorts.

In nineteenth century Europe, boys aged 16 to 18 went to college eager to find the

kind of Saturnian frame of reference which they could consciously accept as individuals

instead of being passively subjected to it as when living in their family dominated by a more

or less effective father figure. The universities often became centers of revolutionary

activity, for the youth, confronted with broader and challenging new concepts and eager to

commit himself to this greater Saturn, represented by often eminent and progressive

teachers, accepted deliberately this Saturn as a framework into which to pour an emotional

spontaneity.

This Venusian spontaneity was then not dissipated into constant semi-sexual

promiscuity with girls of his class; and his "wild oats sowing," though cruder in most cases,

was less energy scattering because rarely invested with deep emotional significance.

Marriage, after leaving college, most often re-energized the Saturnian traditions of his

family; but then it was a consciously accepted Saturn. It was a Saturn which the young

husband, usually working along ancestral lines, knew he would use authoritatively to frame

the nascent consciousness of his own children.

The Teen-Ager's Search

The real problem for the teen-ager of today who finds no really vital and compelling Saturn

foundations in his paternal home is to find a valid Saturn image embodied in a person he or

she can love and respect — a person who can provide him or her with a new and greater

frame of reference for his Venusian emotional spontaneity. It must be a frame of reference

that is inspiring, dynamizing, and inclusive — that demands of the youth a repolarization of

his or her aimless life-energies and that is powerful enough to be acceptable as if it were a

taskmaster whose discipline one willingly obeys. This is why German youth once joined the

Nazi Party and French teen-agers not long ago enrolled in the underground of activists'

groups in Algeria and in France; they were ready to sacrifice their lives because the

"Movement," or the Party, provided them with a structural framework which stabilized and

gave form to their until then aimless, incoherent, unstructured, and — above all — empty

lives.

Life seems empty if there is no Saturn structure to hold together and give direction to

the emotional contents of everyday existence. Such a life has only one determining aim:

self-indulgence . Self-indulgence is the negative aspect of Venus. Venus represents

primarily in man his "sense of values"; but without some Saturn-projected frame of

reference, the only acceptable value is to bring oneself "pleasure" — all kinds of pleasure,

from masturbation (solitary or not) to sports car speed. A life controlled by the driving urge

to get pleasurable sensations and "kicks" is a life in which the Saturn factor has abdicated or

has been dethroned, perhaps murdered. The majority of fathers in the United States have

abdicated; many have been dethroned together with the great symbols of tradition; and

quite a few are ruthlessly destroyed by their embittered or utterly bored progeny.

Today [1964], at the threshold of a significant period opposing Saturn to an explosive

gathering of Pluto, Uranus, and Mars in Virgo, the issue takes on a crucial and critical

meaning. We have to understand what Saturn signifies as "divine ruler of the Golden Age"

— a new golden age that sooner or later must come; only we must be clear as to what

characterizes a "Golden Age" and not fall for sentimental old stereotypes, which is what

most people do!

It seems evident that the Virgo planets in months just ahead will not tolerate the

Saturnian patterns of a society whose "gods" are dead and replaced by autocrats (ruthless

or benign as they may be) who cannot demand allegiance from the youth or impose a

discipline which nothing any longer supports except matters of convenience and comfort.

But out of the Piscean "sea," a new Saturn may arise, a truly "divine" ruler who will "rule"

from within souls once more filled with significant life contents and dynamized by noble

enthusiasms and the joy of self-overcoming. It is he for whom the souls and minds of

today's empty men and frustrated women should look. His power resides in his ability to

convey a new and greater vision of universal order as well as individual order and in the

sense of stability and structural direction which his very presence arouses in men and

Dane Rudhyar - How to Integrate Spontaneity & Planning.pdf

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