Peter Thabit Jones Interview

Peter Thabit Jones Interview

Aug 29, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Carolyn and I have admired the work of Welsh poet, playwright, opera librettist, and biographer Peter Thabit Jones, who is the author of sixteen books, has won numerous awards for his poetry, and is regarded as an expert on the life of Dylan Thomas.

Peter Thabit Jones was born in Swansea, Wales in 1951. He was raised near Kilvey Hill, by his grandmother. His only memories of his grandfather are of him being “seriously unwell” in a bed in their parlor. Thabit Jones said that his grandfather’s nearness to death at a young age made him “really focus on life.”

Thabit Jones describes his earliest memory as being of the landscape that he could see from his home. As a toddler, he recalls looking out through the open kitchen door of his grandmother’s home and seeing Kilvey Hill, which he has described as a “huge, hulking shape” that dominated the area. As a child, Thabit Jones explored “every corner” of Kilvey Hill and the terrain of Eastside Swansea, and it was here that he developed his “pantheistic belief… that we are connected to nature.”

Thabit Jones describes Kilvey Hill as “the touchstone to that reality that, down the years, changed into memories: my first bonfire night, first gang of boys, first camping experience, first love.” In 1999 Thabit Jones published a book of poems inspired by his time there, called the The Ballad of Kilvey Hill, and in 2007 his poem Kilvey Hill was incorporated in a stained glass window, created by Welsh artist Catrin Jones, in the Saint Thomas Community School in Eastside Swansea.

As Thabit Jones grew older, he explored the busy docks nearby, the beach, and the seaside town of Swansea. He was “curious about the reality of things” and “the depth of experience.” Thabit Jones began reading the work of well-known poets, such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, and Ted Hughes. Reading the work of these monumental poets helped Thabit Jones to realize that he was “not alone in wanting, almost needing, to see ‘shootes of everlastingness’ beyond the curtain of reality.”

It was in 1975 that Thabit Jones began to find his own voice as a poet. Thabit Jones describes the turning point in his life as occurring after the death of his second son, Mathew, when he experienced deep personal grief.

In 1993, Thabit Jones began tutoring English literature and creative writing at Swansea University, which he continued doing until 2015.

In 1997, Thabit Jones began corresponding with New York poet, critic, and Professor Vince Clemente, who helped to inspire him, and they began sharing poems in progress. That same year, Thabit Jones visited New York University, as well as other schools and organizations in New York and New Jersey, where he gave poetry readings. In 2001, Clemente, via correspondence, introduced Thabit Jones to American publisher and poet Stanley H. Barkan, who has been a great supporter of Thabit Jones and his writings and is also Carolyn’s publisher.

In 2005, Thabit Jones founded the international poetry magazine The Seventh Quarry, which he edits to this day. In 2006, The Seventh Quarry was awarded the second best Small Press Magazine Award by Purple Patch U.K. Awards.

Thabit Jones is a recognized expert on the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who I wrote a profile about a number of months ago. In 2008, Thabit Jones embarked on a six-week Dylan Thomas Tribute Tour of America— from New York to California— with Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas. The tour was organized by Clemente and Barkan, who they shared as a publisher. It was on this trip— where they visited a number of cities across the country, lecturing, answering questions, and reading prose and poetry by Dylan Thomas— that Thabit Jones first met Carolyn, and their adventure is recounted in Thabit Jones’ commemorative book America, Aeronwy, and Me.

At the end of their tour, Thabit Jones and Thomas were commissioned by the Welsh Assembly Government in New York to write the book Dylan Thomas: Walking Tour of Greenwich Village. Their book serves as a self-guided tour of ten places in Greenwich Village, New York, associated with Dylan Thomas, and it contains a foreword by Hannah Ellis, the granddaughter of Dylan Thomas. Thabit Jones’ guided journey is also available as a smartphone app and as an escorted tour through New York Fun Tours.

In 2017, Thabit Jones published a book of his play The Fire in the Wood, which is about the life of Edmund Kara, the celebrated Big Sur sculptor that I wrote a profile about a number of months ago. That year it was performed at the Actors Studio of Newburyport in Massachusetts, and in 2018 it was performed at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, California.

Thabit Jones has taught numerous writing workshops throughout Europe, does poetry readings around the world, and his poetry has been published in many magazines, literary journals, and newspapers, such as the U.K. Poetry Review, the Salzburg Poet’s Voice, and the New England Review. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Lizard Catchers, Garden of Clouds, Under the Raging Moon, A Cancer Notebook, and Poems from a Cabin in Big Sur.

Thabit Jones’ poetry has been translated into over twenty-two languages, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including First Prize in the International Festival of Peace Poetry in 2007, the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, The Society of Authors Award, The Royal Literary Fund Award, and the Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art.

For a number of years, Thabit Jones has spent his summers as writer-in-residence at the cabin by Carolyn’s home in Big Sur, and he is the author of The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, which is an inspiring and enthralling biography of Carolyn that was just published this year.

In an interview with Peter Thabit Jones conducted in 2009 by Kathleen O’Brien Blair, he shares some of his thoughts on how he writes his poetry, and humanity’s relationship with nature. Here are some excerpts from their conversation:

Kathleen: What is it about the little things and passing vignettes of life that catch your attention?

Peter: I think the little things are all revelations of the big things, thus when observing something like a frog or a lizard one is observing an aspect of creation, a thing that is so vital and part of the larger pattern that none of us really understand. Edward Thomas said, ‘I cannot bite the day to the core’. In each poem I write I try to get closer to the core of what is reality for me, be it the little things or the big things such as grief and loss.

Kathleen: When you write, do you write a poem and then pare it down to its bones, or do the bones come first?

Peter: For me the bones come first, a word, a phrase, a line, or a rhythm, usually initiated by an observation, an image, or a thought. Then once I have the tail of a poem I start thinking of its body. Nowadays, within a few lines, I know if it will be formal or informal. If it is formal, all my energies go into shaping it into its particular mold, a sestina, or whatever. If it is informal, I apply the same dedication. Eventually after many drafts, a poem often then needs cutting back because of too many words, lines, or ideas. R.S. indicated that the poem in the mind is never the one on the page, and there is so much truth in that comment. The actual writing of a poem for me is the best thing about being a poet: publication, if possible, is the cherry on the cake.

Kathleen: Wildness and nature always seems to overcome our best efforts to cage, encrust, or otherwise tame it. Why do you think so many people, and the modern world as a whole, think they can best it? What is it about people, do you think, that they just have to keep trying at that?

Peter: Well, man has to dominate, not just nature but each other. Man strives to be godlike and getting nature/wildness under his thumb maybe confirms that side of his ego. Maybe there is an element of envy too, the freedom of an eagle in the sky, the sheer force of a river, the dignity of a mountain. Modern man has also lost his respectful relationship with nature. Pre-literate people understood and appreciated the preciousness of the world they inhabited, that they were mere brief visitors to the Earth, protectors of it for the generations to come.

by David Jay Brown

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Paul Gaugin Profile

Paul Gaugin Profile

Aug 22, 2023 | Artists, David Jay Brown, Interviews

Carolyn and I have admired the work of French painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin, who was an influential post-Impressionist artist. Gauguin styled himself and his art as “savage, and he is particularly known for his experimental use of color, as well as for his paintings of the people and landscapes in Polynesia.

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848. His father was a journalist, and his mother was the daughter of a proto-socialist leader. Due to the political climate in France at the time, in 1850 Gauguin’s family sailed to Peru and his father died of a heart attack on the voyage. Gauguin lived in Lima for four years with his uncle, mother, and sister.

It was in Lima that Gauguin first encountered art, when his mother collected Pre-Columbian Inca pottery. In 1855, Gauguin and his family returned to France, where he lived with his grandfather in Orleans. Gauguin learned to speak French, although his first and preferred language remained Peruvian Spanish. Gauguin attended a Catholic boarding school, and although he did well in his studies, he disliked the school.

In 1865, Gauguin joined the merchant marines, and three years later he joined the French navy, where he served for two more years. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he worked as a stockbroker, and he became a successful businessman for eleven years. Gauguin came to art late in his life; he had no formal art training, and there is little in his early life that seems to predict his outstanding artistic career.

In 1873, Gauguin married a Danish woman, and over ten years they had five children. It was around this time that Gauguin began painting in his spare time. Gauguin also visited galleries and collected works by Impressionist artists. Gauguin formed a friendship with Camille Pissarro, and he visited him on Sundays to paint in his garden. Pissarro introduced Gauguin to a community of other artists, such as Paul Cézanne, who he also occasionally painted with. In 1881 and 1882, Gauguin showed paintings at Impressionist exhibitions in Paris, although he received dismissive reviews at the time.

In 1884, Gauguin moved his family to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he pursued a new career as a tarp salesman, which he wasn’t very successful at, perhaps because he couldn’t speak Danish, and there wasn’t much a market for French tarps in Denmark. However, Gauguin’s wife was able to support them by giving French lessons to diplomats.

It was during this time that Gauguin’s marriage began to fall apart, the stock market crashed, and he began painting full-time. In 1885, Gauguin returned to Paris, where he initially had difficulty re-entering the art world, lived in poverty, and was forced to take a series of menial jobs. However, Gauguin continued to paint, and in 1886 he exhibited 19 paintings at the last Impressionist exhibition, although many of these paintings were from very earlier periods in his life, such as from his time in Denmark.

In 1886, Gauguin spent time at an artist’s colony in Brittany, where he was popular with the young art students. In 1887, Gauguin sailed to a French Caribbean Island with painter Charles Laval, where he intended to “live like a savage.” Up until this point, Gauguin’s paintings were done in an Impressionist style, and this was where he changed his style. His paintings Tropical Vegetation and By the Sea were done in a new post-Impressionist style, where he began working with blocks of color in large, unmodulated planes.

Later that year Gauguin returned to France, where he adopted a new sense of identity— connected with his Peruvian ancestry, and incorporating “primitivism” into his artistic vision. Primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that values that which is simple and unsophisticated, and seeks to express the experience of primitive times, places and people in art or literature, as well as in a philosophy of life.

In 1888, Gauguin began searching for what he called “a reasoned and frank return to… primitive art.” He began painting with broad planes of color, clear outlines, and more simplified forms. Gauguin coined the term “Synthetism” to describe his style during this period. This refers to the synthesis of his paintings’ formal elements with the ideas or emotions that they conveyed. Gauguin no longer used lines and color to replicate an actual scene, as he had as an Impressionist, but rather explored the capacity of those pictorial forms to induce a particular feeling in the viewer.

That same year Gauguin traveled to the south of France, where he went to stay with Vincent van Gogh in Arles. This was done partially as a favor to van Gogh’s brother, Theo, who was an art dealer that had agreed to represent Gauguin. However, as soon as Gauguin arrived in Arles, the two artists began engaging in heated exchanges about the purpose of art. Gauguin had initially planned to stay in Arles through the spring, but his relationship with van Gogh grew ever more tumultuous. During a particularly intense quarrel, Gauguin claimed that van Gogh attacked him with a razor, and van Gogh then reportedly mutilated his own left ear. This proved to be too much for Gauguin to handle, and so he left for Paris after staying only two months.

Gauguin eventually relocated to the remote village of Le Pouldu. There, he engaged in a heightened pursuit of “raw expression,” and he became interested in the ancient monuments of medieval religion, such as crosses and representations of Christ’s crucifixion. Gauguin began incorporating this imagery into his artwork, such as in his painting The Yellow Christ. Gauguin said that he identified with Jesus, because he felt lonely and misunderstood, and he compared his suffering and burden to that of Jesus. In his artworks, Gauguin painted Jesus with some of his own facial features.

In 1891, Gauguin moved to Tahiti, where he had a romantic image of an untouched paradise. However, when he arrived he was disappointed by the extent to which French colonization had actually corrupted the island. Nonetheless, Gauguin attempted to immerse himself in what he believed were the authentic aspects of the culture there, and he emulated Oceanic traditions in his artwork during this period.

In 1893, Gauguin returned to France, thinking that his new work would bring him the success that had thus far eluded him. In 1894, Gauguin created a book of his impressions of Tahiti from his journals, illustrated with his own artwork, titled Noa Noa. However, this project, and an exhibit at a gallery in Paris, met with little success. Gauguin self-published the text from his diary at the time, and it wasn’t published until a hundred years later with the woodblock illustrations, drawings, and sketches that he originally intended to accompany the text.

In 1895, Gauguin left for Tahiti again. However, he was increasingly “disgusted” with the rising Western influence in the French colony. In 1901, Gauguin moved to a more remote environment, on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa. He purchased land there, and with the help of his neighbors, he built a home that he called “the house of pleasure.”

In 1902, Gauguin began suffering from an advanced case of syphilis, which restricted his mobility, and he concentrated his remaining energy on drawing and writing. During this time Gauguin worked on his memoir, Before or After. Gauguin died in 1903, at the age of 54, and his memoir wasn’t published for another twenty years.

After his death, Gauguin’s influence grew substantially. A large part of his collection is now displayed in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Gauguin’s paintings are rarely offered for sale, but when they have been sold their prices reached tens of millions of dollars. Gauguin’s 1892 painting When Will You Marry? became the world’s third-most expensive artwork when it was sold for $210 million in 2014.

Some of the quotes that Paul Gauguin is known for include:

Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism.

In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.

by David Jay Brown

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Buckminster Fuller Profile

Buckminster Fuller Profile

Aug 7, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Scientists

Carolyn and I have admired the work of inventor, architect, designer, philosopher, and futurist visionary Buckminster Fuller, who created numerous inventions and architectural designs. He is most well-known for his development of the geodesic dome, and for coining and popularizing the terms “synergetics” and “spaceship earth.”

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts in 1895. His father was a successful businessman, and he was the grandnephew of journalist and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller. As a child, Fuller suffered from undiagnosed nearsightedness until the age of four, and he was teased by his elder sister Leslie for being “stupid.” Fuller spent much of his youth on Bear Island, off the coast of Maine, where he learned to sail and made tools and other items from materials he found in the woods. By the time he was twelve, he had invented a new system for propelling a rowboat.

Fuller attended the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and in 1913 he was admitted to Harvard College, the undergraduate college of Harvard University. Fuller described himself as a “non-conforming misfit,” and he was expelled from Harvard twice— in 1914 for spending all his tuition money to court showgirls with a vaudeville troupe, and in 1915 for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.”

From 1917 to 1919 Fuller served in the Navy as a shipboard radio operator. In 1917 he married and had a daughter who died in 1922, just before her fourth birthday. Around this time, Fuller became president of a business that sought to provide affordable housing, and in 1927 he lost the job. Fuller became seriously depressed, drank heavily, and he took long walks by himself around Chicago. Fuller began contemplating suicide by drowning himself in Lake Michigan so that his family could benefit from his life insurance policy.

As he was contemplating suicide, Fuller had a profound, life-changing, mystical experience, that would provide direction and purpose for his life. Fuller felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground and enclosed in a sphere of white light. A voice spoke directly to him and said: “From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

Fuller said that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He chose to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” In 1927 Fuller resolved to think independently, and to commit himself to “the search for the principles governing the universe, and help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them… finding ways of doing more with less, to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more.”

In 1933 Fuller designed a transportation vehicle called a Dymaxion car that was prominently featured in the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. Dymaxion was a word that he coined that blended together the words “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension,” to sum up his goal of “maximum gain” and “advantage from minimal energy input.” The Dymaxion car’s aerodynamic bodywork was designed for increased fuel efficiency and top speed, and its platform featured a lightweight hinged chassis, rear-mounted V8 engine, front-wheel drive, and three wheels. There were limitations in its handling at high speeds, so it was never mass produced, although Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, and other car manufacturers were interested in marketing the car.

During the mid-1940s, Fuller also invented the Dymaxion House, which was designed to be an inexpensive, energy-efficient, unusually strong, lightweight, home that had its own power source and was transportable. Fuller also designed a Dymaxion map of the world, which represents the surface of the world on an icosahedron (a polyhedron with 20 faces), which can be unfolded and flattened to two dimensions, and more accurately displays the size and shape of the oceans and continents than traditional flat maps or globes.

Between 1948 and 1949, Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Although he was shy and withdrawn, Fuller was persuaded to participate in a theatrical performance produced by composer John Cage. During his rehearsals, Fuller broke through his inhibitions, and he became confident as a performer and speaker. It was here at Black Mountain College that Fuller began working on the project for which he is most famous, the development of geodesic domes.

A geodesic dome is a hemispherical structure based on a polyhedron composed of triangles. The triangular elements of the dome are structurally rigid, and they distribute the structural stress throughout the structure, making them unusually strong and able to withstand very heavy loads for their size. Many homes and other buildings have been built using this design, such as military radar stations, civic buildings, and exhibition attractions.

Fuller developed a novel system of mathematics known as “synergetics,” which is used to study systems in transformation, and emphasizes how whole systems generate behaviors that are unpredicted by the components of the system in isolation. Synergetics is interdisciplinary in nature, and it embraces a broad range of scientific and philosophical topics. Fuller’s two-volume work, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, which was published in 1975 and 1979, distills a lifetime of Fuller’s thinking on this complex subject.

Fuller also influenced language and coined many new terms. Fuller invented the words “livingry,” as opposed to “weaponry,” “world-around” instead of “worldwide,” and “sunsight” and “sunclipse,” instead of “sunrise” and “sunset.” He popularized the term “Spaceship Earth,” to promote a worldview that encourages everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew that is working toward a greater good. Fuller used the word “Universe” without the word “the” or “a” preceding it, and always capitalized the word, which our late friend Robert Anton Wilson incorporated into many of his books.

Fuller created many other inventions during his lifetime and is the author of more than thirty books. He was awarded 28 U.S. patents, and many of Fuller’s most famous architectural and design works were attempts to leverage technology in service of humanity. Some of his most popular books include Critical Path, Grunch of Giants, and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. In his book Critical Path he demonstrates how the resources on earth are plentiful enough for every human being to be living the lifestyle of a millionaire, if our resources were evenly distributed, and not wasted on weapons and war technology.

Fuller’s philosophy was embraced by the counterculture, and he was a hero to many in the alternative spiritual communities during the 1980s. I met Fuller twice during this time. In 1981 I asked Bucky to write something in my personal journal, that I had named Amazing Days. Bucky wrote, “To David, all days are amazing!”

Fuller died in 1983, shortly before his 88th birthday. During the period that led up to his death, his wife had been comatose in a Los Angeles hospital, dying of cancer. While visiting her he suddenly said excitedly, “She is squeezing my hand!” Fuller then stood up, had a heart attack, and died an hour later. Then his wife died thirty-six hours later. They are buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1996 the Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to the chemists who discovered a molecule that they called Buckminsterfullerene or Buckyball, after Fuller, due to its structural similarity to the geodesic domes that Fuller designed. In 2004, the U.S. Post Office released a commemorative stamp honoring Fuller on the 50th anniversary of his patent for the geodesic dome, which replicated the cover of the 1964 issue of  Time magazine about Fuller’s work.

Some of the quotes that Buckminster Fuller is known for include:

Dare to be naïve.

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing— a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process— an integral function of the universe.

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty… but
when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

In order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.
Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.

by David Jay Brown

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Deepak Chopra Interview

Deepak Chopra Interview

Aug 2, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Interviews, Spiritual Teachers

Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of physician, inspirational speaker, and spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra, who is the author of more than 80 books on the topics of alternative medicine, self-improvement, and spirituality. He is well known for integrating modern theories of quantum physics with the timeless wisdom of ancient cultures.

Chopra combines conventional Western medical approaches with traditional Ayurvedic medicine from India, and has been one of the leading figures in mind/body medicine for close to 40 years. His work has had a significant influence on many Western physicians, and he helped to bring the notion of holistic medicine to many people’s attention with his innovative combination of Eastern and Western healing.

Deepak Chopra was born in New Delhi, India in 1946. His father was a cardiologist, and head of the department of medicine at a New Delhi Hospital, as well as a lieutenant in the British army. As a child, Chopra went to a Catholic missionary school, and was very interested in Shakespeare, the dramatic arts, debating, and cricket. He told me that he “had a wonderful childhood.” His “parents were extremely caring and loving,” he said, and his “father flooded the house with books of knowledge and literature.”

Chopra completed his primary education in New Delhi, and graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1969. Chopra had a particular interest in neuroendocrinology, the branch of medicine that studies the relationship between the nervous system and hormonal system, because he was interested in finding a biological basis for the influence of thoughts and emotions. After Chopra graduated from medical school, he worked for six months in a village in rural India.

In 1970, Chopra moved to the United States, and he began a series of residencies at hospitals in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts. In 1973, he earned his license to practice medicine in Massachusetts, becoming board certified, and he set up a private practice in Boston.

In 1981, Chopra retuned to New Delhi, where he met with a physician who introduced him to Ayurvedic medicine, an ancient Indian medical tradition that includes herbal treatments, special diets, meditation, and yoga. He then took up transcendental meditation, a form of silent mantra mediation, which he practiced regularly for several hours a day.

Ayurvedic medicine and meditation had a profound influence on Chopra’s medical perspective. He became disenchanted with prescribing drugs as the primary way to treat medical problems, and adopted more holistic treatments. Chopra became a spokesperson for the Transcendental Meditation movement, and in 1985 he became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine. Chopra established the Maharishi Ayur-Veda Health Center for Behavioral Medicine and Stress Management in Lancaster, Massachusetts, which utilized both Ayurvedic and Western practices, and he treated a number of celebrity patients, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and Madonna.

In 1989, Chopra published his landmark book Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine, which integrates Western medicine, neuroscience, and physics with the insights of Ayurvedic medicine, and became a New York Times bestseller. Chopra contends that all occurrences within the mind and brain possess physical representations elsewhere in the body. Mental states, including thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories, are believed to directly impact physiology through neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin.

A year later, this was followed by his book Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide, and in 1993 Chopra was interviewed on the Oprah Winfrey Show about his books, after which he gained a huge following. That same year, Chopra moved to California, where he became executive director of Sharp HealthCare’s Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine, and head of their Center for Mind/Body Medicine, a clinic in an exclusive resort in Del Mar.

In 1996, Chopra co-founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad. Chopra is the owner and supervisor of the Mind-Body Medical Group within the Chopra Center, which in addition to standard medical treatment offers personalized advice about nutrition, sleep-wake cycles, and stress management based on mainstream medicine and Ayurveda.

Chopra has lectured around the world, and has made presentations to such organizations as the United Nations, the World Health Organization in Geneva, and London’s Royal Society of Medicine. Esquire magazine designated Chopra as one of the top ten motivational speakers in the country; and in 1995, he was a recipient of the Toastmasters International Top Five Outstanding Speakers award. In 1999 Time magazine selected Dr. Chopra as one of the Top 100 Icons and Heroes of the Century, describing him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.”

Chopra’s books, which have been translated into more than 43 languages, explore many spiritual and health-related topics. His book How to Know God: The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries presents a seven stage theory of how people perceive religious experiences. Some of his other bestselling books include The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Unconditional Life, Perfect Health, The Return of Merlin, The Path to Love, and Return of the Rishi. He has also produced more than a hundred audio and video titles.

I interviewed Deepak Chopra in 2003 for my book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. I found him to be a very eloquent speaker. He expresses his ideas with clarity, simplicity, and charm. We spoke about the relationship between the mind and body, whether or not one can be certain of spiritual beliefs, psychic phenomena, mystical experiences, and the nature of God and consciousness. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

David: What do you think happens to consciousness after the death of the body?

Deepak: Nothing happens to consciousness after the death of the body. When two people are speaking on the phone, and the lines are cut off, nothing happens to them. If the room I’m sitting in is destroyed, nothing happens to the space I’m in. Consciousness just loses a vehicle to express itself. If I destroy my radio set the broadcast is still happening, but it’s not being actualized in the physical form, because the instrument is missing. So, I think that when the instrument gets destroyed, consciousness ceases to express itself in the realm of space-time and causality, until it finds another vehicle to express itself. And, after a sufficient period of incubation, it does do that, by taking a quantum leap of creativity.

David: You know Deepak, even though I sense that there’s wisdom in what you’re saying, I have to admit, that I always have this scientific skeptic inside me that questions all spiritual and mystical assertions, when they are expressed as facts. I’m curious as to how you can be so sure about things that have mystified human beings since the beginning of time — such as the nature of God, the existence of a soul, and what happens to consciousness after death. What gives you such a sense of certainty about your spiritual ideas?

Deepak: The only thing that can give you any degree of certainty is direct experience, and I come from there. Science is just one of the ways to express the truth, and it’s really not an adequate way. Science is not an adequate way to express the truth; it’s just a way to express our conceptional map of what we think the truth is. The conceptional map of science keeps changing. So, I think science is extremely inadequate as a way of understanding reality. Reality is the observer, the process of observation, and that which is observed. Science addresses only that which is observed, completely excluding both the process of observation, and more fundamentally, the observer. So actually, even though I express my ideas in a scientific vocabulary, because that seems to be the fashion of the day, I really don’t think science is adequate to address these deeper questions.

David: But still, I don’t understand how you can be so certain. I mean, you say that your experience gives you a sense of certainty— but we can certainly be fooled by our experiences.

Deepak: I’m more certain that I exist than of anything else. Then, in the certainty of existence, is the certainty of consciousness. The fact that I exist is the only thing I can be certain about. Everything else is really a perceptual artifact. I spend three hours in meditation every day, and I’ve been obsessed with these ideas ever since I was a child. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’m certain about anything else. I think the only thing I’m certain about is the nature of God and the existence of the soul.

I’m not certain about what I see or perceive, because I really know, from the depth of my being, that if you can think about something — if you can conceptualize it, if you can visualize it, and if you can experience it through your senses — then it’s not real. It depends on something that you can’t conceptualize, that you cannot visualize, that you cannot experience through your senses, and yet, is much more real than anything that you can conceptualize. So, conceptualization, visualization, perception, understanding, intuition, creativity, meaning, purpose, and decision-making all depend on consciousness.

So, to me, consciousness or God is not difficult to explain; it’s impossible to avoid. Everything else is very difficult to explain. How do you explain perception? Your brain only recognizes PH, body temperature, biochemical changes, and electromagnetic impulses. That doesn’t tell me how you experience a red rose in your consciousness, how you feel beauty or, for that matter, how you experience sexual orgasm. Nothing that we explain in science really explains anything.

by David Jay Brown

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Henri Matisse Profile

Henri Matisse Profile

Jul 5, 2023 | Artists, David Jay Brown, Profiles

Carolyn and I have admired the work of French artist Henri Matisse, who helped revolutionize visual art developments during the first decades of the Twentieth Century with his expressively colored paintings and uniquely crafted sculptures of freestanding figures.

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was born in Northern France in 1869, and he grew up in the Picardy region of France. He was the eldest son of a wealthy grain merchant, who was a strict father. In 1887, Matisse went to Paris to study law. A year later he passed the bar and then worked as a court administrator.

In 1889, Matisse suffered from an attack of appendicitis. While he was recovering in bed, his mother brought him some art supplies. Painting stirred something deep inside Matisse, and he said that he “discovered a kind of paradise” when creating art. “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands,” he said, “I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”

This experience inspired Matisse to become an artist, which deeply disappointed his father. However, his mother encouraged him and said to not follow the conventional rules of art. She advised him to try out new things and to paint his emotions. Matisse later said, “My mother liked everything I did. It is from my affection for her that I always drew what theory failed to offer me, to finish my paintings.”

In 1891, Matisse began to formally study art at an academy in Paris, where he initially painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style. He was influenced by the work of early European masters, as well as contemporary artists and Japanese art. The Eighteenth-Century French painter Jean Simeon Chardin was one of his most important influences.

In 1896, while he was visiting Australian painter John Russell on an island off the coast of Brittany, Matisse was introduced to Impressionism — the Nineteenth Century art movement, emphasized by small, visible brushstrokes that captured the changing qualities of light. Russell was friends with Vincent van Gogh, and he gave Matisse one of van Gogh’s drawings, which made a great impression on him. This experience inspired Matisse to change his painting style, and he started painting with brighter and bolder colors. That year Matisse exhibited five paintings at a salon and two of them were purchased by the state.

In 1897, Matisse painted The Dinner Table, which shows a woman setting a large, elaborate dinner table. Although the painting is now considered to be a masterpiece, it was not well received at the salon where it was first exhibited because people thought that it looked “blurry,” as it is a work done in the style of impressionism, which seeks to capture a feeling more than a realistic depiction. Matisse said, “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”

In 1898, Matisse traveled to London for a year, to study the paintings of English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, and when he returned to London he went into debt from buying the work of painters that he admired. In his home, he displayed the work of Rodin, Gauguin, Cezanne, and van Gogh.

That same year, Matisse married Amélie Noellie Parayre, and in 1902 her parents become involved in a major financial scandal. The family was menaced by angry mobs and fraud victims. Matisse’s father-in-law was arrested, and this meant that Matisse was financially responsible for an extended family of seven. During that year and the following year, Matisse changed his painting style to make his work more saleable and adopted a more somber approach.

Soon after this, Matisse started devoting time to working in sculpture. Although he did his first attempt at sculpture in 1899, he didn’t start investing much energy in this until 1903, when he produced The Serf, which a number of art experts have suggested might have been based upon himself, as he seemed to have “psychologically identified” with the sculpture. Matisse was experiencing poverty at the time, and it was suggested that he “might have felt a kinship with the weight of problems bearing down on the serf’s shoulders.”

In 1904, Matisse had his first solo exhibition at a gallery in Paris, which wasn’t very successful. After this Matisse’s work began showing brighter and more expressive colors, and he joined an art movement known as Fauvism, which depicted simplified or abstract subject matter, and emphasized strident colors and more extravagant brushwork.

In 1905, Matisse exhibited with a group of artists in the Fauvism movement, and the exhibition received both harsh criticism and favorable attention. One critic said of the exhibit that, “a pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public.” Matisse’s painting at the exhibit, Woman with a Hat, was singled out for condemnation by the critics but was then purchased by American novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein.

In 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso at Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, and the two became lifelong friends, as well as rivals. In 1912 Matisse visited Morocco, and while there he made several changes to his work, such as adding the use of black as a color to his paintings and adding “a new boldness.” Although he was receiving greater notoriety for his work, Matisse’s work continued to encounter some serious criticism. In 1913, an effigy of his painting Nu Bleu, which depicted a reclining nude woman, was burned at a show in Chicago.

In 1917, Matisse relocated to the French Riviera, and his work after this move showed a “relaxation and softening in his approach.” In the 1920s, Matisse engaged in active collaboration with other European and American artists, and after 1930 his work changed again, with “a new vigor and bolder simplification.”

Matisse was visiting Paris in 1940 when the Nazis invaded the city. He fled to the south, but stayed in France, and even had an exhibit in Paris whiles the Nazis occupied the city. However, all of Matisse’s work was purged from French museums and galleries, much of it confiscated by the Nazis, and he had to sign an oath assuring his “Aryan” status. During this time Matisse worked as a graphic artist, producing black-and-white book illustrations and lithographs.

In 1941 Matisse underwent surgery for abdominal cancer that left him reliant on a wheelchair and often bed-bound, so painting and sculpture became physically challenging. Matisse turned to a new medium, where he would cut up sheets of paper, pre-painted with gouache, into shapes of varying colors and sizes, and then arrange them to form creative compositions. Some of these pieces became murals and room-sized works. He called the last fourteen years of his “a second life.”

Between 1948 and 1951, Matisse was commissioned to work on the Chapel of Rosary in Venice, for which he created all the wall decorations, Stations of the Cross, furniture, stained-glass windows, vestments, and altar cloths. This is often considered to be the crowning achievement of his career.

In 1952, Matisse established a museum dedicated to his work, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau, which today holds the third-largest collection of his work in France.

In 1954 Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84. He is buried in a cemetery in the Cimiez neighborhood of Nice.

Today Matisse is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His stylistic innovations fundamentally altered the course of modern art, influenced the art of several generations of younger painters, and his work has been highly valued. In 2002 Matisse’s sculpture Reclining Nude I sold for $9.2 million, and in 2005 his painting The Plum Blossoms was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for $25 million.

Some of the quotes that Henri Matisse is known for include:

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Creativity takes courage.

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

Work cures everything.

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

Why have I never been bored? For more than fifty years I have never ceased to work.

by David Jay Brown

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Frida Kahlo Profile

Frida Kahlo Profile

Jun 26, 2023 | Artists, David Jay Brown, Profiles

Carolyn and I have admired the work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who is known for her bold and vibrant self-portraits that express pain, passion, and inner strength. Kahlo is considered one of Mexico’s greatest artists, where she is celebrated for her attention to indigenous culture and her tenacity in the face of hardship, as well as by feminists for her defiance in breaking harsh gender-biased social conventions and her honest depiction of the female experience. She is a powerful inspiration to many.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City. Her father was a photographer from Germany, and her mother was from Oaxaca, with indigenous and Spanish roots. Kahlo was raised with three sisters, and she described the atmosphere in her childhood home as often “very, very sad,” because both of her parents were often sick, and “their marriage was devoid of love.”

When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, which made her right leg grow shorter and thinner than the left. The illness also caused her to be isolated from her peers for months, and this caused her to begin school later than her peers. In 1922, Kahlo was accepted to the elite National Preparatory School, where she focused on natural sciences with the aim of becoming a physician, and she performed well academically.

However, Kahlo enjoyed creating art from an early age. She received drawing instruction from her father’s friend, who was a printmaker, and she filled notebooks with her sketches. In 1925, Kahlo began to work outside of school to help her family. After briefly working as a stenographer, she became a paid engraving apprentice for her father’s friend.

A severe bus accident at the age of 18 confined Kahlo to bed for three months, and this caused her to live her life in chronic pain. She had spinal injuries and a broken pelvis, as well a fractured collarbone and two ribs. Her right foot was also crushed, her right leg broken in eleven places, and a piece of handrail impaled her.

While Kahlo was recovering from this terrible accident, in her bedridden state, she began to paint. Kahlo’s mother provided her with a specially made easel, which enabled her to paint in bed, and her father lent her some of his oil paints. She had a mirror positioned above the easel, so that she could see her reflection.

Painting became a way for Kahlo to reflect on her life, and to explore questions about her identity and existence. She said, “I paint myself because I am often alone, and I am the subject I know best.” She later stated that the accident and the isolating recovery period made her desire “to begin again, painting things just as [she] saw them with [her] own eyes and nothing more.” Most of the paintings Kahlo made during this time were portraits of herself, her sisters, and her school friends. They are noted as an expression of her internal struggles, and physical and mental suffering. Kahlo’s early paintings and letters show that she drew inspiration from European artists, in particular Renaissance masters, and from avant-garde movements such as Cubism.

In 1929 Kahlo moved to the city of Cuernavaca in South-Central Mexico, where she lived with her husband, Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and was inspired by the city. Here she changed her artistic style and drew inspiration from Mexican folk art. Kahlo’s identification with the people of Mexico, and her profound interest in its culture, remained important facets of her art throughout the rest of her life.

In 1930 Kahlo and her husband moved to San Francisco, where they spent six months, and she was introduced to American artists. Kahlo further developed her folk style of painting here, and she participated in a public exhibition of her work for the first time, with the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. Kahlo then moved to Detroit, where she experimented with different painting techniques, and her work was featured in several exhibitions, although she disliked the capitalist culture of the United States and experienced numerous health problems.

In 1934 Kahlo returned to Mexico City, where she focused on regaining her health, and only painted several paintings over the next three years. She began painting productively again in 1937. In 1938 she made the first significant sale of her paintings when film star Edward G. Robinson purchased four of her paintings. That same year she met French Surrealist André Breton who was impressed by her work, and he arranged for her to have exhibitions of her work at galleries in Paris and New York City. He described her work as “a ribbon around a bomb.”

That same year Kahlo traveled to New York City to attend the opening of her exhibit, which was attended by Georgia O’Keeffe and other famous figures. Kahlo received much positive attention in the press for this exhibit and sold half of her 25 paintings exhibited there. She also received commissions from A. Conger Goodyear, the president of the Museum of Modern Art, and author and politician Clare Boothe Luce.

In 1939 Kahlo sailed to Paris, to follow up on André Breton’s invitation for an exhibition, where things didn’t go quite as well. When she arrived, she found that Breton had not cleared her paintings from the customs and no longer even owned a gallery. However, with the aid of Marcel Duchamp, Kahlo was able to arrange for an exhibition at another gallery, but further problems arose when the gallery refused to show all but two of her paintings, considering them to be too shocking for audiences, and the exhibition didn’t receive much attention.

Kahlo’s paintings touched on female issues such as abortion, miscarriage, birth, and breastfeeding, things considered to be taboo and never spoken of in public back then. Nonetheless, one of her paintings, The Frame, was purchased by the Louvre, which made her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. She was also warmly received by other Parisian artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.

During the 1940s Kahlo had more successful exhibitions in the United States, in Boston and New York, as well as in Mexico City, and her artwork gained wider appreciation in Mexico, although she struggled to make a living from her artwork. In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado in Mexico City.

In 1945, the government commissioned Kahlo and some of her students to paint murals for a Coyoacán laundry service as part of a national scheme to help poor women who made their living as laundresses. Her financial situation improved when she received a 5000-peso national prize for her painting Moses in 1946, and when her painting The Two Fridas was purchased by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947.

Around this time, Kahlo’s health began to fail, and during her last years, she was largely confined to her home, where she painted mostly still lifes, portraying fruit and flowers with political symbols such as flags or doves. Realizing that Kahlo did not have much longer to live, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo staged her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Arte Contemporaneo in 1953.

Although Kahlo was initially not expected to attend the opening of her exhibition, as her doctors had prescribed bed rest for her, she arranged for her four-poster bed to be moved from her home to the gallery. To the surprise of the guests, Kahlo arrived in an ambulance and was carried on a stretcher to the bed, where she stayed for the duration of the reception. The exhibition was a notable cultural event in Mexico, and it received attention around the world.

Kahlo died in 1954 at the age of 47. During her life, Kahlo created around 200 paintings, primarily still lifes and portraits of herself, her family and her friends. She also kept an illustrated diary and did dozens of drawings. Kahlo’s reputation as an artist grew much further posthumously. She gained more recognition in the late 1970s when feminist scholars began to question the exclusion of female and non-Western artists from the art historical canon and the Chicano Movement honored her as one of their icons.

In 1984, Kahlo’s reputation as an artist had grown to such an extent that Mexico declared her works part of the national cultural heritage, prohibiting their export from the country. As a result, her paintings rarely appear in international auctions. Regardless, Kahlo’s paintings have broken records for Latin American art. In 1990, she became the first Latin American artist to break the one-million-dollar threshold when her painting Diego and I was auctioned by Sotheby’s for $1,430,000. In 2006, her painting Roots sold for $5.6 million, and in 2016, Two Lovers in a Forest was auctioned for $8 million.

Kahlo has attracted so much popular interest that the term “Fridamania” has been coined to describe the phenomenon. She is considered “one of the most instantly recognizable artists,” whose face has been “used with the same regularity, and often with a shared symbolism, as images of Che Guevara or Bob Marley.” Kahlo’s life and art have also inspired a variety of merchandise, and her distinctive look and colorful style have been appropriated by the fashion world. On Instagram, her official account has 1.2 million followers.

A Hollywood film about Kahlo’s life, Frida, was released in 2002, and it earned six Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Makeup and Best Original Score. The 2017 Disney-Pixar animation Coco also featured a character based on Kahlo that was voiced by Natalia Cordova-Buckley. Kahlo has also become an icon for several minority groups and political movements, such as feminists, Chicanos, and the LGBTQ community, as she was openly bisexual and never ashamed to talk about her sexuality. Oriana Baddeley has written that Kahlo has become a signifier of non-conformity and “the archetype of a cultural minority,” who is regarded simultaneously as “a victim, crippled and abused” and as “a survivor who fights back.”

Some of the quotes that Frida Kahlo is known for include:

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.

Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

I don’t paint dreams or nightmares; I paint my own reality.

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

by David Jay Brown

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