|
There was some discussion a few weeks back about Joni Mitchell & lyrics to "Refuge of the Road." Just found an interview in which she discusses several meetings with Trungpa & crazy wisdom pedagogy: Joni Mitchell
by Dimitri Ehrlich
Interview Magazine April 1991
How's the art world treating you?
Well, the thing about the art world is that everyone wants to pigeonhole the artists. And the problem I've run into is that to align my myself with a gallery means to really curtail my freedom. I paint in, like, four different styles, but they want you to get a recognizable style going, like Lichtenstein or something. But in a way, everything you appreciate goes into you and comes out sooner or later. It creates the mulch for later work. I like that idea. Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan lame, once said that everything in life is fertilizer: you scatter it on the field of awakening. Rather than saying that everthing you hate about yourself is shit and that you're going to get rid of it. He loved the word "shit," didn't he?
Trungpa did some very weird things.
Oh, yeah. He was the bad boy of Zen. I wrote a song about a visit I made to him called "Refuge of the Road." I consider him one of my great teachers, even though I saw him only three times. Once I had a fifteen-minute audience with him in which we argued. He told me to quit analyzing. I told him I couldn't - I'm an artist, you know. Then he induced into me a temporary state where the concept of "I" was absent, which lasted for three days. Wow, that's very rare. Immediate transmission.
Immediate, and from then on it was my decision whether to make that my life. But you can't function from there as an artist. Did you ever tell him how much you learned from him?
Yes. At the very end of Trungpa's life I went to visit him. I wanted to thank him. He was not well. He was green and his eyes had no spirit in them at all, which sort of stunned me, because the previous times I'd seen him he was quite merry and puckish - you know, saying "shit" a lot. I leaned over and looked into his eyes, and I said, "How is it in there? What do you see in there? And this voice came, like, out of a void, and it said, "Nothing." So, I want over and whispered in his ear, "I just came to tell you that when I left you that time, I had three whole days without self conscious-ness, and I wanted to thank you for the experience." And he looked up at me, and all the light came back into his face and he goes, "Really?" And then he sank back into this black void again. How would you sum up Trungpa's effect on your life?
Well, who knows? His particular lineage uses a teaching device that involves shocking you. Trungpa stopped me in my tracks. Made a space. Wham. He pushed back all this stuff, and it stayed pushed back for three days. I once asked a Tibetan lama about duality. He just took my head in his hand and smacked our heads together. It was, like, bonk. He said, 'You think too much." You are a bright cookie, you know that? Your questions have almost been too cerebral for me.
Sorry. They have been a bit dense.
But on the other hand, I like what most might consider stupid questions.
As in, What's it like to be a singer?
Um, that's not a bad one. I could answer that. Full interview cached at: http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:KALBJTqVOXkJ:www.jmdl.com/articles/view.cfm%3Fid%3D132+Joni+Mitchell+Chogyam+Trungpa&hl=en
To subscribe, send a message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Or go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/
and click 'Join This Group!'
SPONSORED LINKS
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
|
