A Simpler Way, Eh!
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At, you will understand that i am thinking along the lines;-) of Paul
Dirac and Pauli ...and of course dear Michael Polanyi and Albert Einstein.
I was once asked about simplicity and complexity's relation, I mean as
sides of the same coin - though i'd prefer a globe... the idea being
suggested is that there may be a grander simplicity on the other side of
complexity.
My mind, my tiny mind, wanders and wonders of the symmetry and asymmetry
breakings...and flows back to the principle of complementarity...after
which it gets lost;-)
I have to leap and to reiterate in a hard, competitive Darwinian landscape
and mind-set that seems to grip, like some fascist dictatorship, the
softer gentler minds and ''being-becomings'' in this world, the sentiments
of Hannah Arendt...that, in a complexifying world we must learn how to
make promises, and learn how to keep them.
For those who are for whatever numerous reasons unable to learn
authentically 'promises' are all powerful, and i lament and wail at the
'managers' of the world, whoever they deem themselves to be, who with the
benefits to hand ;-) of the 'mind mappers' and 'hypnotists' et al. walk
others through the many gates with the many inscriptions, verbal, scripted
and visualised set above...
In another place i hardly ever visit anymore, that you'll understand...i
read an account of a man who found something fundamental ;-) in the desert
solitude. Reading the account i was struck dumb for a number of
hours...and i thought how strange;-), with seven years wandering in this
cyber desert, semi desert i should so easily have missed this beautiful
both scientific and artistic description, this authentic account ;-). Put
short, and i hope not to injure the man's visions, he said that the
further he went into the heart of the desert (almost a perfect 'chaos' in
cultural complexity terms) he found his 'being' relation incrementally
increasing....and as he strode out of the heart of the wilderness his
'becoming' aspect grew...And how, oh how I was reminded of my one to one
TIME with Michelangelo's visions i cannot recount. But in my mind, beyond
the ''cobblestones'' of Michael Polanyi, there the two visions of the
desert wanderer and the servant artist of his church melded into one
realisation, not unlike that hinted at by Einstein...pointed to by nearly
all the great minds of this century...whose ideas what,...0.00025 percent
of the population of the world would be aware of?
Culture is a medium as well as a message and we are all messangers.
I have created a little artwork...some might have seen the image privately
shared before. If you want to experience what i suggest is a core
chaos<>order experience print it out at highest resolution onto that
rather expensive emulsioned photo paper and place the image when fully dry
under a sheet of glass on your desk or coffee table, it needs be in a
place where you will see it with all aspects of your conscious attention,
in focus, in drift, semi focus, semi drift, one hundred centimetres one
hundred and forty seven point two centimeters...then from different angles
of view, from directly above, then from other angles of height and north,
south, east, and west and then there will be the second and third person
responses from colleagues and friends and family...John, what is the
disgusting mess on the table...Have you squashed that animal on
purpose...yet, still, amid all that 'chaos' and 'confusioning' in some
unmentionable relation something will start to dawn in you about that
image, and once it has risen above a certain angles it will never, ever
let you go. (threshold)
[Host's Note: Andrew's artwork is in a PowerPoint file, 750k, at:
http://www.learning-org.com/docs/Blowing_in_the_Wind_Rose.ppt
..Rick]
Now, i don't want to be accused of sharing my work here as a backhand way
of having my private gallery to turn a quick profit. Nor do i want to take
advantage of the time and hospitality of our host Rick. So please know
this. The image was destroyed a long time ago, as were nearly all the
images i have shared and will share here. The exceptions being as in the
case of works of art by those i have the pleasure to work with on my
ricketypaitingtable, like At's daughter, Ilse-Marie and Dan's niece, Kari
Palm.
[There are lots of completely disgusting reasons why a van Gogh painting
with cheap colours on not so good canvases can command a price tag of some
fifty million dollars and more...and there are some beautiful reasons too.
Like President Mandela, Vincent had a keen sense of proportionality and
complementarity and he too knew that not one nor all his work was worth
the life of one single child...in fact...for the person who years ago
asked me why i thought he killed himself...that is the exact, precise
answer i would give...Vincent had had a brother Vincent who had
predeceased his own birth and near the end Theo van Gogh, who'd been his
cultural lifeblood had had a son, and named hiim ;-) Viincent ;-)....
You, get in tune with nature ;-) and see what she does with chaos and noise.
(note from Prigogine)
I want to (but won't) digress to talking of 'morphic fields' a la
Sheldrake, and TIME, a la peter Beamish and 'doves' and 'blocks' that are
'circles' and how, when trying to think of a way to write an opening
letter to a scientific community without disturbing them overmuch i stood
still under a mulberry tree and something landed on my head, some tiny
seed or twig ;-) and for a moment I thought nothing of it ;-) and then I
thought to look up, directly up. There was the dove, head at a slant,
looking directly into my eye with his blackcurrent all-pupil-eye and
.....but you would have had to have been there, felt that, seen it, walked
away to know what comes next...
When our erstwhile 'social scientists', 'leaders', 'masters pretending to
be servants' can accomplish the feat of that dove, when they know how knot
to appear in the guises they prefer...then 'people' may start to begin the
work of 'making and keeping the promises'...
Making art and keeping art is easy compared making and keeping
promises...but for those who think that 'art' is made, and 'promises' are
made for that matter;-) solely ;-) for the bene-fit ;-) of this side of
the siimplcity(|)complexity equation...Oh dear, oh dear, do i have news
for you.
I want to share again Walter Benjamin's account of Klees image Angelus
Novus, which he owned for a while.
Please, if you can bare to, think upon the image of the World Trade Centre
that still, calm morning of the ninth September 2001, before, during and
after.
"Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away
from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his
mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of
history. His face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence
that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels
him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
[On his death in 1940, Walter Benjamin bequeathed the image to Gershom
Scholem philosopher and scholar of Jewish mysticism]
Instead of new orders of ...''managers'', ''workers'', ''sub managers'',
''executive managers'' and ''supervisors'' 'and "stakeholders" may i hope
we might start to build organizations with new 'kinds'' of peoples
called...''Caretakers<+>Angels''...
Dennis, I walked round the fields this morning thinking ...
Listen in Dennis, listen in and I will open for you a letter written
between Vincent and Theo around August/September 1888 (...so, not long
left for our dear Vincent)...
" Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle -- more like music
and less like sculpture -- and above all it promises colour. If only it
keeps this promise...As for stippling and making haloes and other things,
I think they are real discoveries...About my clothes, certainly they were
beginning to be the worse for wear, but only last week I bought a black
velvet jacket of fairly good quality for 20 francs, and a new hat...Oh, my
dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can do very well
without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am,
do without something which is greater than I, which is my life, the power
to create. And if frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create
thoughts instead of children, he is still a part of humanity. And in a
picture I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting. I want
to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo
used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and
vibration of our colouring. -- To express hope by some star, the eagerness
of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly, there is no delusive realism in
that, but isn't it something that actually exists? "
There, you have it Dennis...the calm within the storm, a ''Caretaker'' and an
''Angel''
Love,
Andrew
North Moreton
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