Zen Archives | Fusica

HYPNOKYO

or how to combine the art of writing meaningful non-sense texts with hypnosis methods

Next week I am teaching a group of hypnosis students in Taipei. They are the students of a man who goes by the nickname of La Mian (ramen, or Japanese thick noodles) who is specialized in hypnosis and teaches and applies it in a wide range of methods. He came to my workshop Ocean of Voices recently, a 3-day exploration of the richness of musical traditions around the world (focusing on the voice). We had several amazing sessions where everyone went through his or her own transformations while singing, chanting, drumming, playing, or just listening to everyone else. Paths to change the body, change the mind and empower your creative imagination through the voice: a dynamic key or bridge that sits in between the body and mind, working its logical and illogical ways in both directions.

Photos taken during the Oceaen of Voices of workshop in Nantou, Taiwan. Above, La Mian with the Bunun people from XinYi. Below, session during the workshop.

You could call the logical part the verbal: the voice as speech, as reason and gossip.

You could call the illogical part transverbal: the voice as sound and music, as noise and non-sense.

Transverbal is a term Michael Vetter coined to group together, and give purpose to, his vast corpus of creative work, in music, in visual arts, in writing. It led, among other things, to his writing of okyo’s, which is Japanese for sutras. His sutras were not Buddhist texts, but used the sounds of the Japanese language as a template from which he created ‘texts’ without meaning. It was not merely a capricious thing, a joke, or an anti-religious sentiment. Vetter was serious about it. He had practised chanting and reciting actual sutras for year after year during his 13 year stay in Japan, going about the streets begging for alms or performing ceremonial. But, in a true Zen vein, he would not eschew the occasional humorous twist in his own okyos either.

I got to know Michael Vetter’s okyos in the mid 1990s and was impressed with their form and sound and Vetter’s precise reasoning for why he created them. Later I began to write my own occasional okyos. Last year I decided to write an okyo every day for one year, to commemorate Michael’s birth (in 1943) and passing (in 2013), now eighty and ten years ago. I shape these okyos, naturally, but they also shape me, and invite me or teach me to push for new ideas about sound, language and symbol. Here is one example which I will take to the Hypnokyo workshop:

Here is another one

And here is one that you can listen to in the video, below:

So next week my okyos are going to be tested by students of hypnosis. They learn a range of sounding techniques that could enhance or expand their hypnosis practise. I am really looking forward to see what they will do with it, and hope I can be their guinea pig to test the efficacy of the okyos. Not long ago, hypnosis was regarded as somewhat occult, esoteric and strange. In recent years it has become more widely accepted and it began to loose its strangeness in public opinion. The approach now seems to be more practical: it is yet another way for us – complicated, sensitive and often limited and hyperrational human beings – to understand the mysteries of life and self, and to make sense of the world around us in new, more attuned ways.

You can enjoy listening to one of my okyos in this video (thanks to Sky for editing).

And I will read this week’s episode of one of my favorite newsletters, which happens to be devoted to clinical hypnosis.

I still hear you!

Today it is 6 years ago since Michael Vetter (1943-2013) passed away. One year after his passing I wrote a blogpost called ‘Five Reasons to Remember Michael Vetter’ and those reasons still stand. In part I still ‘think through’ Vetter’s way of looking at the world and of looking at creative processes (not to mention in practising music and other arts). That is, I wonder how he did things I am doing or want to do, and try to find what I can still learn from him. Since that time (and in fact long before that, to be sure), my taste for music and sound ventures (or ventured) in many directions where his taste certainly did not go. But it is not his art alone that matters. With all that searching and groping, I sometimes lose a sense of what is essential. Not for music and sound per se, but for the bigger picture of how it all fits in with the other aspects of life (and death). And it is here that I find enduring inspiration from this versatile German artist.

Michael Vetter had a remarkable critical attitude towards a wide range of topics, traditions and disciplines. He knew exactly what he needed from them and was always able to state with great clarity how they related to each other and, if applicable, to his own work. Another feat is how he succeeded in developing a total vision for the many arts he practiced (fine arts, performing arts, and writing, to start with) and for spiritual and contemplative practises, primarily Christianity and Zen Buddhism. He knew both from inside out – and that is something not many composers or musicians could say. Most of them who claim Zen inspiration have flirted with it or studied it from a distance. Vetter lived the life of a monk several months a year for a decade, practising alongside Japanese monks and the occasional foreigner. He also studied theology for some years, which at the time (early 1960s) meant deep-reading of existential and other philosophical and psychological authors. Small wonder a large portion of his work is imbued with themes at the heart of the human experience. Often, in fact, he looked one or more levels deeper, beneath the surface, to find the roots of symbol, communication, emotion, illusion, aesthetic form, signs …

Michael Vetter making Indian ink drawings, Academia Capraia, Italy, 2009 (photo by Mark van Tongeren)

Some of Michael Vetter’s boxes with about two years worth of daily ink drawings, Das Buch der Zeichen. Photo by Mark van Tongeren

There is a lot of music out there that can touch me deeply, from the abstract (Morton Feldman’s Coptic Lights) to the popular (Stevie Wonder’s Black Man or A s, which recently made me burst out in tears), from the dream-like and hallucinating (Biosphere’s Substrata) to the Romantic (Schubert/Müller’s Winterreise), etc .etc. And even though I know and do believe that quite a few of all those artists that I like have interesting ideas, I also know that many of them don’t necessarily have a vision that resonates deeply with me. The case with Vetter is different. He was someone whose works I often enjoyed or admired, but who also inspired me with his grand vision about, well, almost anything. I have deep respect for the way he could balance his own interests in the arts, in society, in spirituality and religion, and –not last but not least either – in everyday life. And then how he weaved all those themes together in a remarkably consistent and coherent whole, so that each part could always be linked in multiple ways to any other part. Many of us would at some point have to let others do the talking, for example when tough philosophical questions come up; or shy away from certain artistic challenges; or not quite know how our contemporary work relates to, say, late mediaeval painters; not so with Michael. He would always have an answer and keep you wondering about the next three questions. Which, of course, he would whole-heartedly welcome and answer too.

O yes, it is time I write up some of my ideas about him in a more substantial way – even if it were to see if I could emulate his ability to answer just a single tough question of some scope (I did try it, partly). The magnitude of his vision was simply too much to know where to begin during these past six years, but I consider it not yet too late to do so.

I still hear you, Michael Vetter!

Bonus video: Jetzt… Du (Now… You), from the 1986 Zen record series, played on the Japanese koto zither.