Replying to LO28819 --
Dear At and LO,
I was putting something together, of which what is below is a part, and I
thought it might add to your topic "Uncovering the Act of LO."
Just a light aside, " I want to live forever - not through my work, but
through my age." Woody Allen.
I don't know if to 'deconstruct' that 'wish' or just remark that Woody's a
New Yorker at heart;-)
I have no idea where I could find it again, but somewhere I read an essay
by Maturana that spoke of the possibility of whole lineages of
homo-sapiens that had died out, lines of development among hominids,
cultures if you will, many sophisticated, peaceful, maybe agrarian that
flourished in some arcadian state wherein women led societies and the
children were truly kept alive forever. Maturana's thought was that
somewhere a memory resides in each person of the collective unconscious of
this 'state'. Maybe Rick knows where we could find that essay? There is
gathering hard scientific data for such a proposition.
Here is a credo of creativity that I read within weeks of returning to a
child-like status as an art student in the mid seventies. Klee (Swiss) who
writes below was a musician, scientist and artist who kept a meticulous
record of his pedagogy at the Bauhaus in pre-war Germany. I imagine that
if At ran an art department he would design it pretty much thusly...but
that is for At to say;-) I have set it out here to complement a few things
At has written in his posting about LI and LO recently and our co-creative
human development.
In a preface to the two volumes of Klee's Notebooks, 'The Nature of
Nature' and 'The Thinking Eye', nothing, writes Giulo Carlo Argan, is
further from the artist's mind than the assumption that he is producing a
scientific work. What is important to him is to specify a dimension or a
perspective, to recognise the limits of space and time in which one's own
existence manifests itself, to reweave the weft of the universe, from the
starting point of one's own ego, with its will to make or shape.
Thus, he thinks, must the world appear to those who do not stand apart
from it and contemplate it from outside; to those who see it from the
inside, with its infinite prospects, its diverging paths which cross,
wheel round, then open slowly along the apparently capricious curves of
life's parabola; a world ever eccentric and peripheral, 'irregular', yet
nevertheless secretly obedient to certain laws, and ever striving to
develop in order to find its path and break through to reality.
Thus space (and here we may note the similarity with the thought of
Husserl and Heidegger) will no longer be a logical sequence of planes but
above-below-in front-behind- left-right in relation to the 'I' in space;
time will no longer be a uniform progression, but in a before and after
relation to the 'I' in time; and as nothing is static, that which is now
in front, soon will be behind, and that which is now before will be after.
Space and time are simultaneously subjective and objective; for this
reason the sequence of values is endless and each value is not permanently
bound to the object, but to the existence of the object in this or that
point of space and time. It is bound to the recollection of its having
been, to the possibility of its future being, under completely different
conditions of space and time. The object itself has no certainty; it might
have been and might be no longer; it might not be, but might be going to
be. Since it is, ultimately, only a meeting of co-ordinate lines, a
luminous point in the dark expanse of possible space and time, it could
change into another object, whose trajectory may come to pass through that
point. Should the unforeseeable parabola of our life pass through that
point it could be that we might 'become' that object. Reality is a
never-ending metamorphosis; this is a thought that Paul Klee had inherited
from Hieronymus Bosch, and shared with Kafka.
There is however something which differentiates man's being from his
actions, which differentiates cyclic changes of history from the
unconscious changes and happenings in reality, something which, in the
formal instability or metamorphosis, succeeds in isolating and defining
forms and in making definite points of light.
It is the aim and the will of humanity somehow to control its own destiny,
to know itself and clearly to establish its position in the confusion of
chaos. Finally to 'save itself', if this expression still means something
when confronted with an empty void. Nothingness, which stretches beyond
the horizons of life, impels man ineluctably to find a solution here and
now, within the uncertainty of the particular state of his society and of
the individual within society.
The main thread which unravels itself throughout the whole of Klees theory
is the search for quality; it is in this search for quality, namely the
search for ones own absolute authenticity, that mankind as Kierkegaard
would say desires desperately to find in order to justify itself, and
perhaps, to save itself.
But it is not enough to desire this; to do or to become is life itself and
it is only by acting consciously, and methodically, that one can attain
some quality or value, which is also the value of existence, a full
consciousness of each moment of it.
It may be said that Klee's art and theory represent an attempt to
reconstruct the world according to values of quality; and since these
values are not given and are embedded in layers of false experience, it
becomes necessary to distil these values by a transformation, a reduction
to quality of the quantities. In other words, it becomes necessary to
reduce progressively the conglomeration of quantitative phenomena which
fill the universe and human existence, to the point of that irreducible
and immutable minimum, which in fact represents quality, and to which is
to be found in all things that are real, although revealed only in
meditation and in the production of works of art. In Klee was deep set the
eternal inner rhythm between poetics and didactics. [When I merely
glimpsed the 'process grammars' of Michael Leyton at Rutgers I
instinctively knew that though a scientist he was also an artist, maybe a
visionary, someone who could see through more deeply into the workings of
nature. Instinctively appreciating value in 'giving' reverberating into
and out of nature itself. One of my first questions was to ask if he liked
Klee's works. What a stupid question.]
Klee expressed himself as desiring in his work to 'promote' an inner
movement, to encourage the creative disposition (in others). "We should
simply follow our bent." For Klee it was singularly important not to begin
with clever quasi-scientific hypotheses, examples, no matter how small
were superior for the creative man. "If I can recognise a clear structure
(pattern) it gives me more than any high flown theoretical graphs; the
typical will come automatically from series of (experiences) examples."
Love and best wishes,
Andrew
Andrew Campbell
Oxford
--Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <Richard@Karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.