Replying to LO28532 --
> Last night my dear wife and I had been to a family for which we care. The
> youngest is a girl who is still in primary school. The last couple of
> weeks she had been more out of school than in it. What is happening to her
> is destroying her motivation and eventually her potential.
Oh, my dearest At de Lange - i wanted to stay away for a while and find a
'foundation stone' - but it can wait.
I sent out a very, very complex image among some friends today. Such an
image as it has never seen the light of day before. Perhaps one of them or
more;-) will send you a copy of it. The original from which it is a
'copy' (technologically it cannot be the original i send out;-) is beside
me. It has definition or clarity increased by about 30%. I have only
received one response to it so far, it was saying that the recipient was
very disturbed by it. It is indeed a disturbing image.
Last year I created an image with the title: Different journeys of
different people - absorbed, lived, embodied, care and concern. No14 Gosh!
what a long title is it knot;-) It is an image unlike many existent in the
visual fine arts. It is on the one hand;-) simple and on the other;-)
complex.
I have a friend whom I have mentioned before. He is one of America's most
distinguished Professors (in my humble opinion). I wrote to him as an
artist and he met me half way. It was made a little easier than say with
other distinguished professors because he, like me, is British, and artist
and interested in the connections between spirit and matter. (He would put
it far better than me). He invented the system of 'process grammar' by
which congition is understood as the recovery of history from shape. He is
author of Symmetry, Causality, Mind he is among many other accomplishments
President of the International Society for Group Theory in Cognitive
Science and the International Society for Mathematical Aesthetics. A
typical response to a painting of mine would be something along the lines
of, "Wow! -completely blew my mind again. Each fold and twist of paper and
light seems to get my eye." But of No.14 it was different. He was
transported to an elevation that few sensibilities might conjure out of
pigment and water on glass. He saw a landscape, nightime, similar in
resonance to that which must have been seen by the allies as they flew
over Europe on bombing missions, strange landscapes, mysterious...." I was
struck by the power of his response. The next image, No.15 is that image
reconfigured where i have made light chase form over the scanner bed, and
from this angle of attack created a tower or column that appears to be
collapsing. In the mass appear faces or forms of biological origin, it
looks a bit like an X Ray image of the spinal column. I then created an
identical image, save one minimal unit of change so that No.15 is in fact
now two collapsing columns, as near identical as possible but without
being identical. These images I created before September. Now i choose to
see No.14 as a view from above, and No.15 a view from the side.
Today i see that the President of the United States of America is being
grilled because of 'intelligence' he had concerning hijacking of planes.
He does not deny it, nor do the agencies that serve the nation. They do,
however, flag up that no-one could have known to what end (flying
missiles-bombs) they would be used in such horrifying circumstances. It
would, indeed, have required some imagination. I will repeat that. It
would, indeed, have required some imagination.
After 9/11 I read among the ocean of reportage a phrase that i was tacitly
scanning for. 'Asymmetry'. In the immediate aftermath an essential dynamic
pattern of this our new emergent age rang like a bell into this eye like a
splinter of glass. The central thesis of my friend's work it happens
resides within notions of symmetry and asymmetry with regard to all forms
of creativity.
My other friend who responded today to my new image refers back to 9/11
saying that somehow nothing can look the same for her anymore, it has
changed the way she sees. So in my little work she sees many disturbing
things. That cannot be surprising to me anymore since the work arose under
the beating of an angel's wings. I have tried to use the metaphor of the
angel for a long time now here. I think it would do the LO's some good to
get of its pedestal of late twentieth century pedagogy of business science
metaphysic, and off its zazen cushions in comfy hideaways, and candlelit
dinners for the officianados.
You are, we are in vast degree so far as this blind and idiot artist can
see bereft. You cannot see what is coming. You cannot feel what is coming.
I think that the part of corporate America and the UK for that matter that
has the power to change things, shake, shake, shake;-) has already turned
its reflectivity away from the 9/11 to the 911 that comes with a straight
six, a hundred thousand dollar price tag and not much less than 360bhp.
If i and my distinguished academic and creative 'friend' had put those two
images from ?/07 -?/08 onto the President's desk with the title "9/11 twin
towers or columns collapsing", and a memo "urgent tacit form<>content"
what would have happened? Of course, NOTHING. Maybe that it is that
NOTHING is all that ever happens. Now there is a strange thing to say in
polite company;-)
In my complete folly i have around me, like angles sitting on the tip of
my pin, tens of thousands of small children, many asian and many african.
I can see them clear as day in roofless buildings, classes devoid of
anything. I see beside me May leading her children by the hand to the
ocean, fifteen miles from her compound. They have never been to the ocean.
Like the frog beloved of the buddhists who, living all his life by a pond,
when taken by the hand to visit the ocean by the frog who came from the
ocean, well At......... he exploded!
For just the last two years i have been studying the lives of the Saints.
It was a way to stop myself exploding and going mad. I have studied many
other things as you know. My deepest sense is that we are entering into a
new dark age. In certain places, certain human hearts, new kinds;-) of
lights are being formed, these lights for example may illuminate certain
blind spots. But exponentially as the light increases so the dark
increases until somehow in some way as yet to be imagined the very nature
of what we call 'light' itself becomes changed irreversibly. And there
will be no more light and dark. That is the light my friend saw, it is the
light you pointed me to a long time ago, when I was a little boy;-) that
grew from the spreading dark of the black ink. I have before me the
metaphor of light travelling as a pilgrim travels, but beyond the speed of
light. See how ignorant I am...what could possibly travel faster than the
speed of light?
I have begun to glimpse how voluntarily one might have to walk into the
dark of dark to become new light. I cannot get out of my head that phrase
- "there is a storm blowing in paradise."
At, you surprise me. You came here to us looking for solutions to this
family's problems, and yet you know full well it is not to be found
anywhere here.
Someone you also know;-) who does good beneficial work in the third world
once asked me why I spent so much time and energy here...Mmmmmm, I am
starting to ask myself precisely that same question. For sure if I had
directed one thousandth part of that free-energy toward your family you
would not need to be writing now on their behalf.
Love,
Andrew
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