STUDENTOASIS.COM INTERVIEWS LOUISE LANDES-LEVI November 23, 1999 Angelika's Kitchen. 4:45 p.m. Tuesday. Late in the afternoon and I'm speaking with Louise Landes-Levi, poet. Christen- Louise I just want you to tell the students all around the world, a little bit about why you do, what you do, your love for what you do. Just how you feel about your work. I'm so impressed with your poetry, your music. I consider you a hidden treasure and I know that you regard yourself a secret place and I think that's so beautiful and especially when you told me about what Rinpoche had said, that to get into the secret places one has to know special mantras. Louise- Well here we're talking about objective and subjective experience. I think that when Guru Rinpoche spoke about the secret places and the mantras he was talking about something very specific. Whereas when we meet ordinary personalities it's a little less specific how to open the gates of their perception and their heart. But I think, for instance, you with your empathy and kindness were able to do that to me; so I would say the secret to entering the hidden treasures in our neighbors is empathy and kindness. I've been more or less in this condition since I was a child. I started writing poetry as soon as I learned how to write letters. I never really adjusted to the life of my parents and they also didn't really adjust to my presence. So early in life I found a hidden place, which was a bush in a woods near to my parents' house, and I started my meditative practices in that little bush. I could climb inside it and it became like an alternative house or shrine and many of the practices of concentration which I later learned from my master Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche I already was doing then like watching the sunlight on the water or by being very very still and just looking out from the tree which I climbed and called the tower. The situation with my parents was very, very difficult. So somewhat similar to you, I learned concentrative skills in order to deflect all the aggression and rejection. Therefore I loved school and I think a lot of my freedom later on in life came from a very dedicated attitude to my studies both in high school and in college. I went to the University of California in the 1960's and I was somewhat over-prepared so they put me in a special program for the undergraduate students and from that special program for undergraduate students and from that special program they developed the Tussman School of Education, which was a kind of alternative to the breadth requirements of the period and had a much broader attitude to undergraduate studies. In order to graduate I wrote a play called Doina, which was an opera, taking place in Eastern Europe and I wrote both the music and the text and it was about a girl in a village in Macedonia who loses her lover and then goes to the place of battle in order to reclaim his body. I based that plot on an early Chinese tale about a women whose lover disappears in the Chinese Wall and she's sure she can find him back and she does through mystical trances and prayers. You could say that that was my first formal effort to integrate western and eastern thought and modes of expression. I later went on to study at the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music. I played in an opera called The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company where we, (this was in 1960's), we listened to Ionesco records and from these records we learned rudimentary mantras and melodic formations and created a whole opera from these fragments. Later I studied in India, in Bombay, and after that I left India and I started my life here in the West. Do you want me to go on? Christen- Now, that's so beautiful and such words of wisdom to help the students all around the world, and also I think to encourage them to follow their heart, open themselves up to their calling rather than being so worried about a conventional life. Louise- Yeah, I have found this very much from the time I could really speak, I wanted to write poetry but I was ashamed to tell this to people. I was only like, six, seven or eight. So whenever my parents' friends asked me what I wanted to be, I said I wanted to be a garbage collector to kind of throw them off. And they'd be so amazed by my response that they would leave me alone. They'd stop bugging me and I was free to pursue my aesthetic leanings. I have to say my father was a big help because he was an amateur art historian. My mother, she showed me the power of emotion, unfortunately her emotion was mostly negative especially in reaction to me. But I got see displays that most people only see in the theatre or in the movies and I actually lived with this. So the idea of deeply, deeply felt emotion was very familiar to me. I also think that in the Romanian culture there was a lot more emotive sensibility, for instance, than here in America. So I grew up with these Romanians coming of course, coming from the tragic history of the Jewish people in Europe and I think I learned a lot about very, very deep feeling and also the transformation of suffering into service from my collective ancestors despite the problems in the immediate house hold. I preserved my desire to "be a poet or write poetry." I went to the University of California both because my parents would not permit me to be in New York City where my boyfriend was but also because there was a renaissance there. The Beat Poets had gathered strength under the direction of Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger and Lawrence Ferlinghetti who later formulated the City Lights Press. So I went to study partially to be more near that vibration. And I did meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and he later advised me first in India to publish myself my first book of poems. He said he liked the poems. He had no time to put a book together but suggested to me that why didn't I make a "cheap edition" in India which I did before leaving and later after I had been living outside of America for then almost a decade and a half, he published my first book here called Concerto. He was a great help to me, a great elder, and a great preserver of a certain kind of poetic integrity and support. I'd like to mention here that at a certain point my poetry was thrown away just as I was entering the so-called public sphere with it. This was a terrible trauma and it was followed by an additional trauma of not being able to fulfill a pregnancy. So there were two very strong losses within a few years of each other and after this I needed help and at this point became a Buddhist practitioner. I met my teacher and he became my teacher because he was the only one of those who were teaching at the time who actively supported my poetic state and he insisted that I write as a practice so that my natural condition of being became the medium both of my expression and of my devotion. That was very very quintessential for my development. Also I had been published by some very good publishers here in America like New Directions but had always suffered very deeply from the way they treated me or the difference in their attitude to what I was doing and my attitude. So when I was with Namkhai Norbu in the context of the sangha or Buddhist community, I began to publish my own books, much as I had in India earlier with the advice of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and I found this to be such a wonderful way to approach people and to make one on one contact and to bring also a certain classical dimension from my upbringing and from my translations into a kind of punk or contemporary hands-on distribution of cultural material. It was the most empowering thing I ever did. So I would strongly urge young people not to worry about the mechanisms of distribution and production but to find your own way to produce your work. You'll find you'll be able to sell it and to distribute and to pass on whatever it is you want to express in a very natural way if you want. Christen- Louise that is so beautiful and I want to ask you because I find you so wise and in many many ways a visionary and also someone who seems to want to bring people together. What do you think is the most pressing problem that humanity faces and how do you think we can solve that? Louise- Well it falls into different contexts. I think if you're talking about material problems, hunger and famine I think are the greatest problems and the lack of real distribution of wealth. But this lack of distribution of wealth comes from essential egotism I think and also a dualistic attitude, which encourages people to separate themselves rather than to give themselves to others and also which uses economic difference to build barriers rather than as in the Buddhist tradition, the old Buddhist tradition, providing the rich with an opportunity to manifest generosity and benevolence on behalf of those to whom they are giving. In the Buddhist teachings it says that the giver and the giving and the gift are one. So if this can be remembered then the hesitation that causes people to retreat into themselves with critical views and arrogant attitudes can be overcome. And I think a generosity can flow in a much more stable way. I think that hunger and starvation should not be part of our scenario right now. That the amount of money that goes into armaments and essentially harmful sometimes chemically toxic materials could instead be diverted to basically feeding people, averting famine and also giving shelter to those who don't have shelter. On the spiritual level the problem is much the same that the understanding of the unity, of the spiritual unity existing on this planet is very often overlooked in a situation like in America where there is a very strong capitalist economy right now, it's even at times somewhat unfashionable for instance to be humble or to be basically virtuous and I think it's very important for people coming here to remember that those virtues are really the basis for an enlightened world view and for the future benefit of humanity and the global well being. Christen- That's beautiful. Also I wanted to ask you, for young people around the world, what do you think, what do you consider, the biggest obstacle that you have had to face and how do you feel you overcame it? Louise- The biggest obstacle I faced definitely came from my conditioning as a child. I grew up surrounded by either Holocaust survivors or second generation Americans who were so intent on integrating into the American system, in order to protect themselves of course, that they lost contact with these kinds of basic virtues I'm talking about which are universal and not the property of any one religious tradition or racial population. So my parents were very disturbed, especially my mother who came right out of the pogram mentality. She was raised in an orphanage here in New York and never really understood or never was able to overcome the challenges that were presented to her. So my immediate childhood was very violent and very unsupportive. Instead of being trained in things like music or dancing, I was often beaten, criticized and ostracized and it took many many years to overcome the kind of turmoil I was facing in order to discipline the higher energies and the higher functions of my mind in ways that were coming much more easily to other people. It was one thing to discipline myself in the university. I had been trained in that. But to discipline my own inner spiritual vibrations and aspirations was truly an arduous task. Christen- Thank you Louise. There were some other questions I would like to ask you. One more. To date, of all of the works that you have made, which stands out as something that you are most proud of? Louise- By far, the thing I did which I feel has the most to contribute is Rene Daumal's RASA, Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Sanskrit studies. There Rene Daumal was the first European to translate into a quotidian vocabulary the ancient text of wisdom regarding the aesthetics and self knowledge of the East. He wasn't an academician. He was a poet. But he intuitively recognized the use that these texts would have for our century. He wasn't born at a time, I mean he wasn't matured at a time such as ours when there are innumerable teachers, Lamas, Swamis and so forth, teaching. Gurdjieff was his master and Gurdjieff was actually the only esoteric master of the period in Europe that we know about. But he clearly foresaw the use that these texts would have, and also for myself as a poet he laid down in those pages the exact way in which in ancient India artistic creation was seen as a spiritual discipline. Artistic creation did not enter into the domain of egotistic formulation such as it does in our contemporary world for good or for bad. Everybody loves the celebrities and to check them out, what they're wearing, what they're thinking and whom they're sleeping with. I know that. But he in ancient times he was able to resuscitate and present to us the way in which creativity and artistic development could be made part of the spiritual process and could be used not to aggrandize the ego but to render the artist a much more universal and empty vehicle for the object of his creation. Christen- I can't wait until the students around the world are able to read your works, listen to your music. Louise- One other piece of artwork of which I am very proud. I love graffiti. I think that graffiti is so interesting because it puts the page anywhere you want, like on a wall, on a car, on your friend's arm if you're a tattoo artist. It takes away the discipline of the text on the page and returns I think to a more primitive sensibility, for instance, in ancient times when texts were carved on stones. So one piece of artwork, I don't know if it's still around, of which I'm very proud, is a sun which I painted over a swastika in Rome. There, I was doing a recording in Rome, in a kind of wealthy neighborhood, and just outside the building, there was like this huge swastika and I couldn't believe that, like in this well educated, upper class neighborhood, people hadn't erased it. And day after day I looked at this thing. So well after three days I went to a friend of mine who had an art gallery and we agreed we had to do something. So an artist who was having an exhibition in her gallery mixed up this paint for us. And we went out in the night with an umbrella and we painted a big yellow sun with over the swastika and I found out the next day that swasti in Sanskrit means sun. So actually I suppose that my whole personal life process of transforming like the negativity of my childhood into positive emotive energy for my guru, for myself and for others is also a kind of mirror and a kind of universal process of transforming like negative symbols and energies into positive enlightened energy for the survival of the world. Christen- That's so beautiful. And I was so privileged the other day for you to show me that sun that you'd made and transformed from the swastika. Thank you so much Louise and as our friendship continues I hope to have this tape recorder with me so that I can capture your words of wisdom and the beauty of your soul. Louise- Thank you. Christen- Okay for now. Top of page Home | Learn | Mentors/Hidden Treasures | Hotline | Join Us | Member Log-In Mission | Services | Community | Team | Site-Map | Terms of Use ©2000 StudentOasis. All rights reserved.