A meandering post, a goodbye and a hello for all dear learners
The Organization of Energies
It has been repeatedly intimated that there is a difference between the
art product (statue, painting or whatever) and the work of art. The first
is physical and potential; the latter is active and experienced. It is
what the product does, its working. For nothing enters experience bald and
unaccompanied, whether it is a seemingly formless happening, a theme
intellectually systematized, or an object elaborated with every loving
care of united thought and emotion. Its very entrance in the beginning of
a complex interaction; upon the nature of this interaction depends the
character of the thing finally experienced. When (then;-) the structure of
the object is such that its force interacts happily (but not easily) with
the energies that issue from the experience itself, when their mutual
affinities and antagonisms work together to bring about a substance that
develops cumulatively and surely (but not too steadily) toward a
fulfilling of impulsion and tensions, then indeed there is a work of art.
It is by way of communication that art becomes the incomparable organ of
instruction, but the way is so remote from that usually associated with
the idea of education, it is a way that lifts art so far above what we are
accustomed to think of as instruction, that we are repelled by any
suggestion of teaching and learning in connection with art. Our revolt is
in fact a reflection upon education that proceeds by methods so literal as
to exclude the imagination and one not touching desires and emotions of
men. Though- For some the powers of imaginative projection are so great
that poets may become the founders of civil society (Dewey/Shelley)
What, Keats asked, would be the result if, ".. every man spun from his
imaginative experience an airy citadel like the web a spider spins,
filling the air with a beautiful circuiting. For then man should not
dispute or assert, but rather whisper results to his neighbour, and so by
every germ of spirit sucking the sap from the mould ethereal, every human
being might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of
furze and briars with here and there a remote pine or oak, would become a
grand democracy of Forest Trees."
Blake.. 'looked whence the voice came and was then aware of a shining
shape, with bright wings, who diffused much light. " As I looked, the
shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study
opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me,
moved the universe - it was the arch angel Gabriel"'
"The ancients were not far wrong;-) when they placed Goodness in the
centre and Beauty on the circumference of a circle; goodness, I say, is in
a single center, and beauty is in four circles. The single centre of
everything is God. Around this continually revolve four circles: Mind,
Soul, Nature and Matter. Mind is a fixed circle; Soul moves of itself;
Nature moves in another, but not by another; and Matter moves both by
another and in another. The center of the circle is a point, single,
indivisible, and stationary. >From it many mobile lines strike out to
their respective circumferences. This divisible circumference revolves
around the centre as though on a hinge, and the nature of the centre is
such that although it is single, indivisible and fixed, nevertheless, it
is found in many or rather all of the separate moving lines. But since
nothing can be touched by anything unlike itself, the lines drawn from the
circumference to the centre cannot touch a midpoint of this kind except as
each touches one certain simple motionless midpoint of its own. Who will
deny that God is rightly called the center of everything, since He is
located, single, simple, and motionless within them all; but that
everything that is produced from Him is multiple, complex and movable, and
that these things flow from him, they flow back to him in the image of the
lines and circumference? - Thus Mind, Soul, Nature and Matter, proceeding
from God, strive to return to Him from every possible direction. - So God
the center of everything who is the simplest unity and the purest
actuality is infused into everything. Not only because He is present to
the whole but also because He endowed everything he created with some
particular function or power, completely simple and distinctive which is
called the identity of that thing, and from which and to which, as from
and to its center (God), the rest of its parts and powers hang, it is
certainly fitting that these things, as soon as they have been created,
should gather around their center, this identity of their own, before they
turn to their creator, so that through their own center they may cling, as
we have now several times repeated, to the center of everything. The
Angelic Mind rises to its own apex and head before it ascends to God, and
it is the same with the Soul and the other two circles. Of those invisible
circles of the Mind, that is, and of the Soul and of Nature, this visible
circle of the material world is an image, for bodies are the shadows and
traces of souls and minds, and shadows and traces show the shape of the
thing which they represent."
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, It is the breath
of a buffalo in the wintertime, It is the little shadow that runs across
the grass, And loses itself in the sunset.
'There are, I know, human beings either doomed or blessed to a way of life
which deprives them of any of the normal indulgences and privileges of
their communities. It is almost as if they are charged with a role that
sets them apart and makes them incapable of joining in the society of men.
They are as it were victims of a kind of Ancient Mariner compulsion of the
spirit, which makes them incapable of participation in the round of life
which is symbolized in its essentials by the church of collective
humanity. It is not that such men do not feel human in themselves and seek
to share the company of their own kind. If once known and understood, as I
was to come to know you who was also one of these uncomfortable breed, it
is clear that the longing within them to be part of the ordinary community
of man is greater than that of any of those who daily take for granted
such a belonging. They are rather like those lone animals I have so far
often observed in the heart of Africa who can neither join nor leave the
herd, but are forever moving around the far perimeters of their fellow
creatures to lead a form of existence wherein they have to learn to make
their peace with the fact that the most they can achieve is a satellite
companionship. I can remember times without number when I have seen these
satellite souls rebelling against isolation and that fate which compelled
them to face alone the daily dangers of a life in the desert, veld and
bush; dangers in which the numbers of the herd were no certain protection.
It occurred to me in time that this kind of separation, even in the
animal, was necessary to create a greater awareness which it was
impossible to acquire in the context of sympathetic numbers of their own
kind. In the years I had already spent in devout and keen observation of
the creature of Africa, it was most striking how these lone phenomenon
developed senses so keen that it was most striking how the beasts who
preyed on them and their kind would leave them alone, because they
realized they were no match for the qualities of vigilance produced by
loneliness and isolation. It was in fact far easier to prey on animals who
assumed that there was safety in numbers and if this were true and
necessary for the renewal and increase of animal awareness, how much more
so for the human being. Unlike the animal, the human had no sheer, blind
obedience to the will of nature, which is instinctive. On the contrary, he
has an inspired kind of disobedience to the laws of nature which led to a
recommitment of life in a more demanding law of individuality designed for
the growth of a consciousness. This growth set the implacable precondition
that any new awareness has to be lived out in isolation before it can be
understood and known, and made accessible to society. I believe that you
are just such a spirit.'
Will'm Blake took my hand and led me to the window of his tiny second
floor room and down below was the sight and sound of children at play,
'That is Heaven.'
Now listen up learners, sailors upon a wide and storm torn, divided
Oceanic.
- But you do dream don't you?
Yes, of course, lots, but not of elephants.
But not of elephants!
Well, I do dream of elephants and whales and whales and elephants all the
time, and I know nobody sees more whales than me. - I dream more about one
whale I have never seen and an elephant I have never seen. Ach! If only I
could see and catch them at it... I.. ever since boyhood and I first
started reading adventure books I've had a recurring dream in which I
watch a great black river wind out of the dark, dark land covered with
very thick bush, broadening as it made for the sea from which I appear to
be observing as if from a ship of some kind. A red dawn is breaking so
quickly and with such violence that it seemed more like an explosion. It
stained the river so that its waters looked like a stream of blood.
Swimming up the centre of this river I see what I recognize to be a sperm
whale of gigantic size. Hardly had I seen this when I saw out of the deep
dark forest step a black elephant as great and majestic among its kind as
the sperm whale now swimming toward it. The elephant walked to the edge
of the river, stood still on the edge of the dawn stained water, and
stared for a moment at its oddly quixotic reflection. Then it threw up
its trunk and trumpeted a sort of reveille for the day. As it did so, the
whale once again changed course and made again for the elephant. Seeing
this the elephant walked into the edge of the water to meet it, the
solicitude was Biblical, like the father and the prodigal son. (Once the
whale had been a land living animal) Now the whale put its trunk down
beside the great dark head of the whale and they conversed together. As
the phrase 'conversed together' fell from my lips I was near to crying
with emotion aroused by the thought of it. Yes, they talked God damn, they
talked. When they had finished the elephant turned and walked, rather
sadly back up the bank and vanished into the bush, leaving only a shimmer
of gold on the trembling olive green leaves to mark the place he had
re-entered his own element. But the whale did a slow, dignified circle
like a king leaving a palace. When in the middle of the water he.. can you
guess what he did? ... It began to sing and, still singing, went out to
sea.
Blake ended his life living with his wife in two tiny rooms at Fountain
Court. One room was used as a reception room where his temperas and
watercolours hung around the walls; the second room was a workshop,
bedroom, kitchen and study where they led their ordinary lives. There was
a small fireplace in the corner opposite the window and bed, a chair and
small table nearer the window where he engraved. Samuel Palmer once
visited and remarked, " -there was no squalor, clean and orderly,
everything in its place.' And another friend;-) wrote, '-there was a
strange expansion and sensation of FREEDOM on those two room very seldom
felt elsewhere.' Like Turner, Blake loved the meandering River Thames and
from his window they could just see a part of it through the gaps in
buildings, he said, ' like a bar of gold.' Angels and Spirits. "They are
the powers of memory and the imagination that create art that, in Blake's
non Newtonian universe, are not abstract forces but spiritual beings."
(Ackroyd)
(We KNOW today that the 'great whales' may talk in the most tender and
moving voices to one another deep down in the privacy of the sea, but they
do not, even when harpooned, make any audible sound on the surface, not
even in the flurry of death and accompanied by the cruellest pain.)
(Notes from Laurens Van Der Post, John Dewey, Blake, Ficino, Isapwo
Muksika Crowfoot, c 1890)
Love and best wishes for the new year ahead.
Andrew Campbell
Oxford
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