[Humbly dedicated to the memory of an American artist and journalist
Daniel Pearl recently murdered in a foreign country]
Dear Rol and all Dear Learners,
I have given over four days and twenty five years of backlooking
contemplation to your "bookends";-) I have written three replies, each
long enough to get into "three parter" territory, ...and the rest;-)...
and I have a relatively;-) 'short one'. I think that the 'short one' would
educe some more both welcomed and appreciated "bookends" from you that in
turn would educe some more rightly confused contributions from me...and
then again I get a vision of a Pope and Michelangelo;-) again...
One thing I want to say that emerged in all the posts by way of my reply that
I drafted (-I very, very rarely 'draft' anything Rol;-). The 'field' between
Michelangelo, Popes and the world was C O M P L E < E << E <<< X ;-) and I
once pointed to one level of that complexity in a post here at the LO digest
;-) that got called 'Wisdom'. And 'wisdom' like 'faith' and in some places
'religion' is a very slippery thing, like a 'black mamba' in the grass. I
think also there was a link to 'metanoia' arising then.
It is not for me to say what changes large or small you have wrought, are
creating right now and will become free to create in the future, whether
both 'within' for yourself and 'outside' for others in the interconnecting
systems. I have often wondered how people us included 'do good' in the
world, and especially how we/they may freely 'do the good' in the world if
we/they have an eye, an ear, a mind and a heart pointing toward any or all
Creator. It's a strange thing but so far as I know it, one cannot do
anything in terms of 'co-creating' or 'collapsing' that forfeits a place
in Paradise created/kept there for oneself. You may not have my 'place'
and nor may I gain yours. And yet you can have any part of my life and I
yours, and indeed my entire life in certain circumstances is mine to give
for yours, so long as we keep to the 'closed system' of our turnings and
froings here upon Earth. That is a very strange thing. A 'strange
attractor?'
I often think, thinking of 'complexity' in respect of what someone else
once wrote of quantum mechanics...that, if you think you understand it,
its a sure sign that you don't...which is unerringly like people say of
Tao ;-) One way I came to understandings of my friend Mnr. At de Lange and
which I have said explicitly here at LO is that, "I gave up trying to
understand his writings." It worked a treat for me...which is just like
someone said of understanding alchemy...which takes us back to archetypes,
'strange attractors', Lorenzian 'initial conditions' and the
undefinability of 'sought' outcomes in a complexifying world. A side issue
looming for me, right now, just about two meters and forty six degrees
vertically to my left...is the growing scientific disturbance upon the
field of ethics as geneticists start to demonstrate (?) that genes replace
in larger and larger part notions of individualized 'free will' as a
determinant of our human behaviours amid the hurly burly we call life, so
that it becomes like a deepening shadow haunting the courts or the panels
of judges who condemn us each and all upon a basis of 'free will'....when
none exists...
STOP.
START.
I often wonder what we do in the 'outlines' world of the 'commentators of
complexity' (sic) wherein making one person smile is almost;-) certain to
make another 'cry' or 'grimace'.
Here, now in this our shared consensual modality of language, as text is
stroked, tapped out in our free time;-) it is tough to talk the 'complexity
angles' and remain anything but dizzy. I think that is what I find so
profoundly connective between you and me, me and At, me and many others and
things...what is happening (maybe) is something metanoiaic on a 'one to many'
level, as if our little (lets be dismissive of ourselves;-) bickering,
practices at Dialogue, assumptions of critiques and appreciation, melded and
welded conversations, sometimes this sometimes that, might be enabling of
something else that we do not yet prescribe...and yet in a precise we do, ARE
preSCRIBING, but the patterns being so close to us in the here and now that
we can't fathom them yet...the cloud has not reached some critical mass...the
'cloud of unknowing' doesn't unknow enough yet to BECOME metanoiaically
enabling sufficient anyway for us to live more at peace in ...as Varela said
it, ' worlds without ground.'
I would think sets of complexologists would agree with K Richardson who
agrees with Wittgenstein, who agrees (I presume with Lissackians;-) that
what is needed in discourses about complexity is..."Definitions that are
fluid and not static" Complexity is incompressible so 'they' say;-) so
creating 'shared lexicons' can be dangerous to the 'enterprise' of
learning in the field of fields. I sometimes think of Fine Art as
'complex' and is also acting as a place of a 'limited' (not limiting)
lexicon that has compressibility, like overdetermination in dream
formation, and as archetypes when manifest as symbology or mandalas (Jung
et al) and so to pull us back to LO ...it came as no suprise to me that
Senge once wrote that "complexity will best be dealt with through the
unconscious." To paraphrase;-) LIFE and EVOLUTION and the problems
associated with mankind's NON SPONTANEOUS outcomes may now only become
capable of HARMONIC RESOLUTION via the SPONTANEOUS interPLAY between the
PHYSICAL and the METAPHYSICAL; a new HARMONY PLAYED out of the CONTINUAL
movements of the DANCE...what At sees as 'the Dance of LEP on LEC'
mediated via the seven essentialities...which need not be ROTE LEARNED in
order to be practiced.
Michelangelo saw in every block of marble (so 'they' say) a perfect
sculpture. I think he had an inkling;-) of his CREATOR, whom he both
adored and feared in almost equal measures as seeing each human as
becoming/being in the same manner. The ABLATIONS of life would wittle that
PERSONALITY to his absolute CORE of realization, whether as a POPE,
Michelangelo or the small boys who emptied the buckets of excrement from
the POPE's private chambers;-). I once made a copy of a Michelangelo ink
drawing of his great female 'love' Vitoria Colonna. I made it on a green
handmade paper and underneath I set in red ink by a typographic method
what he had exclaimed in writing,
"Vorrei voler, Signor, quel chio no voglio,
Tra 'l foco e 'l cor ghiaccio un vel asconde,
Che ' l foco ammerza ; onde non correspone
La penna all'opra, e fa burgiardo 'l foglio..."
I would will, My Lord, what I do not will.
Between the fire and the ice cold heart a veil is interposed,
which the fire absorbs; meanwhile what I write
does not correspond to what I do, and makes a lie of this page...
Michelangelo I interpret here as expressing a subtle yet powerful force of
complexity in the round. One fire was being extinguished so another may
burn differently. That is METANOIA for me so far as I can get with it this
morning;-) To compare say, his early Pieta with his last is to see that
ESSENCE, it is to see and feel METANOIA in GEN(I)US. It can turn me INSIDE
OUT in a quantum REMOVE in a way quite inexplicable UNLESS the seed of the
METANIOA is already planted deep inside me. If one only saw the outside
and the NOWNESS without feeling for the INSIDE and the future emerged from
the past how would one appreciate the husk, the collapse of all TASTE that
the 'Rondanini Pieta' represents it, just as he found in a entirely
humanly complex summation a next-to-nothingness, a desert(ed) vision and
his most simply divined EVERYTHING. An ART beyond all art. RICHNESS
HAMMERED OUT OF POVERTY. It was the DEAFENING SILENCE of a man Thomas Mann
called the ANVILLE. Six days before he left earth for heaven he INHERENTLY
gave his last masterwork not to any Pope or Cardinal or any great noble,
he gave it to Antonio del Francese, the most humble person he knew, his
servant.
To follow the lines;-) of Michelangelo from the stark and sometimes clumsy
searching linearity to the sfumato of a diaphanous complexity as I did
some thirty years ago as a keen student was to be initiated early into
both the complexity of living things and to see autopoiesis at work. I
believe that the study of great ART and ARTISTS will bring much good into
the world. You are very right then in my most humble opinion, speaking
here and now even just as an artist,... let alone as any other form or
guise (disguise;-) of 'commentator' when you say/said about the importance
of 'small actions'. It is a 'pattern' that I have often seen, noticed, how
some great and good thing is created out of many small actions in some
form of co-creating concert.
Michelangelo created on his sixtieth birthday a tiny drawing for a friend
Tommaso Cavalieri -- the "Fall of Phaeton." In black chalk (Royal Library,
Windsor) under the guise;-) of a Greek myth he shows the Fall: his own and
that of mankind. The composition is a step pyramid of interlocking bodies.
At the summit Zeus mounted upon an Eagle flings his thunderbolt at the
youth who cannot control his four horses, veers off his solar course and
plunges into the river Eridanus. Huddled together beside an unconcerned
river god are the Heliads, Phaeton's sisters and daughters of the Sun-god,
and his friend Kynos changed into a swan. The drawing (of the falling
group of horses) is full of powerful foreshortening and contortions, not
unlike as if the medium of time/space were compressed mediumistically;-),
these contortions became the foundations of mannerism, the lexicography of
a pictorial symbolism readying to account;-) for expressions of impending
catastrophe.
Maggior paura non credo che fosse,
quando Feton abbandono li freni
per che'l ciel, come pare ancor, so cosse:
Not greater was the dread, when Phaeton the reins let drop at random, whence
high heaven, whereof signs yet appear, was wrapt in flames.
Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XVII
Schott writes of the image: "The isolation in space of the three groups,
which Michelangelo finished with more care than any other drawing, is
pregnant with meaning."
I think COMPLEXITY reflects us all as in an age PREGNANT with possibility
for new meanings. A QUESTion not an ANSWER.
His art is for me a wonderful MODEL of CLARITY for those who wish to DO
some of the MAPPING in the JOURNEY from the LINEAR paradigm of SIMPLICITY
to that UNLINEARITY of COMPLEXITY'S need;-) for artists in and of the ART
of ONE to MANY MAPPINGS.
I wish I could share with readers here right now the vision of
Michelangelo's last Pieta, maybe we can put it up somewhere Rick) (I have
attatched a picture file) If we can't then let me bring metaphysic into
physic, past through present into future via compassions grace... imagine
if you can a lonely man standing amid a field of stick like people, tens
and tens of thousands compressed together like stalks of grass amid them
all is this white European, a journalist who he tells us consumes eight
litres of water a day in that furnace crucible field. Around him they live
on tiny sips of water from wooden carved cups they hold up as if in
prayer. Amid the 'sfumato' out from the 'throng' emerges a stick like man
with... bony elbows and ribs like ruts in a baked road.' And though he is
probably;-) dying there if not then, even so he offers the European a
drink in the stinking heat. "It was as if the Good Samaritan had been
offered succor by the man overtaken by thieves ...a small epiphany of
sorts."
I believe all epiphanies are small. I believe all are internalized to a
degree beyond any human linear measure. I believe that only one flame lives
at the CORE of every living thing, and it is LOVE.
[Host's Note: Andrew's picture file is at
http://www.learning-org.com/images/LO27913_PietaRondanini.jpg
...Rick]
Rol, in your writing to me I see shadows of someone else's epiphanies.
Your own. The lasting image for the European was the 'dignity and
patience' of the African man left standing, ***just***, in the baking sun
for his measure of water.
Rol, in that first letter to me five years ago you said that you thought
'all businessmen and women were kinds of artists.' I had not thought to
exclude you then in that and despite your own reservations;-) now I find
nothing to change my mind. I think as you said it, your artistry resides
in many 'timely and tiny movements', many innered movements, 'invisible
movements for an invisible God' as Augustine said it? Dunno;-)
'Unappreciated movements' in a field of shakers and movers? Dunno;-)
Patience and dignity? Certainly! Rol ...will the academical complexifiers
allow us a little certainty?
There are many ways to appreciate 'complexity'. One way for me was as a
young artist. For about three years I studied with Peter Redgrove who was
then as now a poet but had been a distinguished scientist before I met him
at art school. Peter read natural sciences at Cambridge became a research
scientist and scientific editor before becoming visiting poet at Buffalo
University and Gregory Fellow at Leeds University. I regret very much not
spending more time with him. Ah well! Here is a fragment of a poem he
wrote called,
THE MOISTURE-NUMBER
The moisture number of the species:
Humans are two thirds clear water;
It is the cloudiness that speaks,
The stagnant turbid water that fights and talks
Under the flooding clouds, on the torrential battlefields
By the hurtling river that bleeds.
The peeled fish swarm and couple
In the pond of skin, the water bag
Between the bones
Water departs like a soul
Like a white shadow
Leaving a little dried crust
Between bones like a cleated footprint:
Travels over the world, water
Enters fresh wombs of brackish water.
At, you love words so and discovering for us where they may have come
from ...will you please help me with the etymology of the words,
genus,
genuine
and genius?
Love in Appreciation,
Andrew Campbell
Oxford
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