Response to silent dialogue LO24956 Mark Feenstra
Dear Mark and Learners
"Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found out it is
ourselves." Robert Frost
(1974)
Hello!
Hello!
What are you doing?
I am studying this little van Gogh painting.
Why?
Because I feel it has something to 'say' to me.
So how long have you been here?
Two years now.
Two years- two solid years?
No, but every week I come, every Thursday.
Blimey..¦has it spoken yet then?
Yes, but I have to keep moving.
Sorry!
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
"We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the sources and
the causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we
sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which
we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life
and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed
among the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is
often unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes then
become the constant object of our hopes and fears; and while the passions
are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the
imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of these powers, on which
we have so entire a dependence." David Hume. Four Dissertations (London,
1757) p172
'Becoming 'as At de Lange expresses it; may that be called potential? May
that be called potential energy? May that be called effective energy? May
that be called effective vision?
Now are you all a 'world viewing' to me or a 'world picturing'?
Both/and?
"-and it is potential that releases itself especially to the sense of
sight -, it withdraws (with/draws) from physical contact (touch) enabling
its inspection. - At such a distance one may pierce the utility of today,
beyond mere addition, - the primitive eye becomes an instrument for
viewing the future, sense making meaning where others are blind. Vision
precedes all metaphor as it makes from the pr-lingual forms of expression.
Aesthetic perception (apprehending to comprehend the better) even when
standing in the very face place of nature the artist may mis-represent it
deeper. The artist may because - *he or she has seen*"
Samewise looking at pictures.
Monet once said, It simply doesn't matter whether my cathedral or London
series of pictures or any others I have painted are 'after nature' or not,
it is no-one's business but my own. I know a lot of artists who paint from
nature and produce nothing; it's the result that counts.
Looking thus requires ceasing of bending to immediate need and want or
outcome oriented life however pressing the purpose, to some extent all
such impress leads to impasse.
Nor need we always be so over concerned with interpretation since any live
community brings forth a consensus of interpretation via natural
inter-operation.
" The poem of the mind is the act of finding what will suffice. It has not
always had to find; the scene as set; it repeated what was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed to something else. (Its past was a
souvenir)."
So what can one (or more;-) derive from standing sometimes periodically
for decades with images, that can be a tree, a hill or a painting or
sculpture?
Well, it brings out from me as much as I might project into it, and in
this way 'paintings' just like the landscape and of course other beloved
'others' are like mirrors in my mind. With my own life, life works and
life associations, especially in coming to understandings of so-called
'art objects' there is construction and destruction in the relational
field.
Can one have that kind of fruitful dialogue with an object?
In all forms of cultural objects I can find whatever level I desire of
"koinonia" (impersonal fellowship) be it mountains or Bucket. In all whose
presence I am free to determine myself and associative meanings, just as
others will surely have variously done before me ever since the object
became a public shared object. This fellowship through increasing
experience can unfold the enfolded implicates of the creator. Just as with
the objects of my own creative life I can move freely around in the field
of my experiences, I can become more subtly refined collecting ever more
subtle meanings and intonations even as I re-enter new zones as the
comfort ones may evaporate at each departure and re-entry. But what I can
often sense by this skilled attending, this refined apperception (?) of
rare personal mastery within shared vision.
What may emerge from within such a ternary silence? (subject-space-object)
That 'slowly' of what it does not say, the avoidance of saying at all
reveals the deepest richest part of absolute 'dia-logos' itself. The
attending to reaction in the world, the very choreography within the dance
of change itself. "The surest progress is through deep and accurate
observation to the reaction of the personality (I believe) that quite
apart from it's therapeutic value much of our future depends on a more
accurate and deeper observation and understanding of reactions. This
conviction is based upon the assumption that the nature of resistance is
based upon the individual having good reason for wishing to be unaware of
certain drives, therefore it follows that the more we are able to
recognise ways in which the individual defends his positions the more
effective change will be. [Free association is such a principle and it can
render such increased accurate observation possible.] (Karen Horney)
I wrote about six months ago that I had ceased 'trying to understand the
writings of At de Lange.' That was the very deepest point of both departure
and arrival into his particular vision as it 'resonates' with me. Blindness,
Mark?
Hmmm. Maybe.
Beyond comprehension to apprehension may be a suitable commencement.
What can I see in a picture/contribution here, what can I listen into what is
my inter-est. (Arendt)
Shared being. Human mode of the being intermediate.
Untouchable-untouchability as a virtual web.
"It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with
its innumerable wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves
its purpose. WH Auden thought this 'in-between' as something like
'hovering between Old Masters and unknowing children' in its authority;-)
"Art produces stories and images - historical and personal - which survive
and seduce because they continually raise antagonists and alternatives to
their own existence;-)"
-"We may have to learn to live from now on in the interstices of intention
and interpretation;-)"
How empty is an (your) empty window?
"To come to the pleasure you have not," etc.
How blank is your white page?
At my empty window I find the voices. I speak between.
Then voices find my eye.
The vision commences and what is taken is given back and re-given.
Who among us finds the sense of a visible narrative of transcendence in
the structure itself, white spaces, black spaces self-same?
Backgroundbecomeforeground.
Read St John of the Cross then, why not - better than Senge anyway? (Peter
you don't mind me;-)
St John's poetic vision will 'have you flying' like a little child again
under some north Starr;-) over mountains and fortifications so that
between this and that and netti, netti (not that, not that) selfhood is
transcended or is negated (erased) in epiphany.
"For God and art can never be heard, only overheard - just as the best
strategies are underplayed."
If silence be an emptiness then it may be well heard in this receiving
hear. It is in the whole as whole, hole as hole, holy as holy that the
'web' is.
Emptiness fulfilled at this empty window is where the dialogue starts with
you, and me?
"But most often I have to be led to hear or believe, I hear what he tells
me through the voice of another, a messenger, an angel, a prophet, a
messiah or postman, a bearer of tidings, an evangelist, and intermediary
who speaks between God and myself." Jacques Derrida
So we may safely be blind?
" The most beautiful and profound emotion that we can experience is the
sensation of the mystical. It is the fundamental e>motion that stands at
the cradle of true art and science." Einstein
More e>motion not so much e>mail
A silence audible.
Best wishes,
Andrew Campbell
Post scripted for Winfried Dressler and Sue Starr
"Whoever circumambulates about the heart,
becomes the heart of the world, soul ravishing.
-- The mystic's soul circles about annihilation,
even as iron about a magnet.
Because annihilation is true existence in
his sight, his eyes have been washed clean of
squinting and error."
-- Jalaudin Rumi.
((O))
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