Dear Learners and At de Lange.
It is customary for an artist occasionally to pay homage to another more
admirable artist. Hence the following.
For the last five days I have been unable to read from these postings, the
server said "this file does not exist".
This morning it is back.
-Good shock!
'Farewell Remarks' from At de Langeb
- Bad shock!
Imminent immergences!!!
Careful reading picks up the message 'reduced contributions'.
Imminent emergence!!!
Somewhere, in the middle At writes,
"I wish I had the poetic talent to draw a complex picture with a few
words. When a picture is so complex that it includes all of reality, how
many words do we need to draw the entire picture? From a scientific point
of view, the more complex a phenomenon becomes, the more complex its
mental image also becomes."
The following might not 'appeal' to all the readers of this list, when I
have re-read it it may not even appeal to me, but I will post it anyway.
'A la prima' as they say!
What is evident to me and tacitly I think others, is that the essential
'value' of the notional thing that is this growing LO lives within, is the
'space'.
Open, 'blank' and unblinking p.c. screens that are flickering all around the
world.
If there is a primary 'leadership' going on here it is Mr. Rick Karash who
provides the principle 'fashioning hands' (metaphorically and literally) that
create and maintains the opening space of and for the growing 'pot' as it
spins on the wheel of time and energy. His touch so light one hardly notices.
For picture equivalent go see a Vermeer. He painted with invisible brushes;
all the world is in just one painting, for those with eyes steady and still
enough to see. While making the most sublime paintings of stillness and
serenity he was landlord of a tavern and brought up twelve children. (-No
comparisons implied Rick).
When I first started to read from this list and came upon At de Lange I did
not see the great wall of his mind, studded with equations, logic and
learning as something to keep me out.
I saw it as a great round wall keeping something in. What it keeps in is his
vision. Pick any contribution and it is full of doors, windows, and
peepholes. The ethics I found as the foundations and was encouraged by that.
He reminded me of Spinoza the great ethical philosopher who spent his life in
some seedy room in the Low Countries polishing lenses.
In the evenings, after putting in a day at work he wrote things like this
short and sweet posting for posterity, "Learn to see the world, 'Sub specie
aeternitatis'." You say, what?
I say "Under the aspect of eternity." You say, "Cannot, will not." I say
"Will not, cannot."
Spinoza taught me.
You say, "I would will, but still I cannot." I say " Then turn. Revolve
inward. Then outward. Imagine. If you imagine enough what you imagined at
first can become a living reality.
Here's what I mean expressed poetically and also in my own simple learning
sense.
A Collective Celebration of Uncertain Souls-
"A space, in which we dwell, rooms ought to care."
'Space' and 'place' are not the same. Space becomes place through the actions
conforming to one's ideas surrounded and surrounding the 'womb' of our
personal identity. Our rooms house an 'ecology' of self. A cultural habitat
to which we belong. It is the first orbit of the world around the nucleus of
the ego. The dwelling place is the immediate expression of self, the index of
the body or bodies encoded in the configuration of the parts, even the
shuffling of the parts speaks. (So many departuresb
The German philosopher Hegel linked this anthropocentric ideal to the
creation of art: -
"The universal and absolute need out of which art, on its formal side,
arises has its source in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness,
i.e. that he draws out of himself, and makes explicit for himself, that
which he is, and, generally, whatever is. The things of nature are only
immediate and single, but man as mind reduplicates himself, in as much as
prima facie he is like the things of nature, but in the second place just
as really is for himself, he perceives himself, his ideas of himself,
thinks himself and only thus is active self-realizedness."
According therefore to Hegel, human self-consciousness unfolds in
theoretical and practical activity. In the latter case especially the
human being achieves 'self consciousness', "-by the modification of
external things upon which he impresses the seal of his innermost being,
and then finds repeated in them his own characteristics. Man does this in
order as a free subject to strip the outer world of its stubborn
foreigness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of things a mere
external reality of himself." This projects man as 'being' at the centre
of everything. It is neither wrong nor right, it is just an apparent
empathetic imperative we seem to carry within us. How we 'realise' this is
as various as there are singular people. Connecting the 'Field' of 'Self
' with the 'Field' of Nature? Senge and Bohm among others, 'sense' the
need for us to, '-reconnect with nature'. If we can just play with the
idea, (as Jessica does) that we can connect deeply to our benefit, then
the question becomes how best we do that?
For me very personally, At's understanding or 'view' of nature in all it's
'aspects' expressed as 'sub specie aeternitatis' aka 'whole', aka
'interconnected', aka 'deep creativity', was to experience 'metanoia' par
excellence. He did it through an act of astonishing generosity in my
experience. Others might have taken such a reply for granted.
I deliberately chose to come to this list or space/place speaking of my
'lack' of learning in one sense, as a child.
I am personally prepared to go back, however far it takes and overturn
whatever it takes if I can get more whole in the sense I get is possible from
At de Lange sensing that might be a 'worthy way' to spend my life. Spending
money is one thing, but it's no 'reason' to live. (Socrates)
I have written below a sort of question answer session that is pretty much
all of how At de Lange greeted me in a private mail. It kind of links up with
my first posting to the list, about the way I lost the thread of numbers
early on in life and how deep creativity of another kind brought it back.
'A Dusky Dark Circled Rainbow Unfolding'
(Text from an email question and Mnr. de Lange's reply Dec 20th 1998)
"Msr,
I recall as a child how my teacher would put a dot of black ink into some
blotting paper. Then slowly we applied increasing amounts of water and lo'
and behold, out ran the colours, all of them, like a dusky and circled
rainbow."
"Like our thoughts Andrew!"
"In your way of understanding, may I ask what aspect of the system of
essentialities is the exercise I describe? (-Is it Passion?)
"This exercise can become a very nice study in all seven essentialities. -
Physically it is known as the chromatographic effect. The local law
controlling this is known as Fick's Law. The traditional field of physics
cannot explain this law. But in terms of irreversible thermodynamics it has a
wondrous explanation. -
The Essentialities then: -
Liveness. The water moving from a wet to dry because of the difference
in water potential.
Sureness. The motion of the various substances in the ink depends upon
the motion of the water as carrier phase. But they move at different
velocities as the water because they are not water.
Wholeness. The substances cannot move without the motion of the water,
furthermore the paper is needed to provide a path for the water and ink to
move.
Fruitfulness. Water on its own can move through the paper. But it has to
connect with the ink to show by means of the ink its motion. Should we use
oil, almost no colours will spread out.
Spareness. The blot of ink can sustain only a certain amount of coloured
substances, the smaller the dot, the sooner it will fade away.
Otherness. The blot of ink contains various coloured substances. We are
not aware of them in the ink itself. On the other hand, each of them alone
does not make the colour of ink we want.
Openness Should we use pure alcohol as a carrier medium, we will find
completely new generation of colour patterns. Some colours will move faster
and others will move slower."
"What then is the paper Monsignor?"
"The paper is the context or background which provides an innate structure.
It forces the water to move from a high to a low concentration."
"What is the black pigment- is it entropy?"
"The black pigment itself is a metaphor for packets of energy. The spreading
(dispersion, dissipation) of the pigment is a metaphor for the entropy,"
"What is the water?"
"The water and the black pigment does the same thing, namely spreading
outwards. The main difference is that the water assists the black pigment in
spreading rather than the other way round."
"What are the colours that unfold?"
"The colours are the various colourful substances mixed to give the ink-just
the right- colour, wetting and flowing properties."
"Finally Monsignor, is this way of learning as a child, through guided
discovery like wisdom unfolded through action (abstract/reification) and is
the wisdom of my teacher (whomsoever they may be) the 'entropic' aspect of
'becoming'?"
"Oh Yes! The moment when the water makes contact, we can think of
bifurcation. Some substances begin to move (emergences) while one or two stay
at the fixed blot."
"If you wish more understanding Andrew you must find a advanced monograph on
irreversible thermodynamics. But remember this, whatever explanation you find
there it is all based on the "law of entropy production." -in the
material/physical world. (The monographs will usually show that Fick's law
involves one of the Onsanger reciprocal relationships.)
Secondly, you will now have to use the chromatography as a metaphor
for learning. It will be a serendipitous metaphor if learning itself has
nothing to do with "entropy production". But, if learning itself depends on
"entropy production" (as I have discovered)- even though now in the abstract
(spiritual) world, then it is not a serendipitous metaphor anymore, but a
complementary metaphor. That makes it an extremely powerful metaphor."
So, let me try to pull something together. Imagine I was a kind of kid who
never saw 'real flowers', like some kids in the ghettos of our countries
never see 'real flowers' growing out of the ground because it's pretty much
all concrete and tarmac, a different kind of desert to the one At' loves- or
is it?
But it isn't flowers that I don't see, it is 'pictures' that I don't see. So
I spend all my life 'making pictures'.
Though we do not say 'pictures', we pay respect to artists and say 'works of
art'. Play to you, work to me.
All the same, minus the adjectives?
Twenty five years then of making paintings, visually attentive to
'masterworks' and nature though never once did I 'see' fully, wholly the
true, deep, gorgeous, all encompassing, rounded multicoloured, fluid,
powerhouse, deeply expansive, outwardly reaching, all encompassing 'vision'
of what was prior to that shift of mind more than a stain, a lacking void. As
Senge might say it, I was not so much walking on one leg, I was looking with
less than half an 'eye'.
I never saw until At' opened my fuller apprehending faculties, that the
stains of this world may not be just 'dark and deep' they are connected to
the very essence of the spirit and matter of their formation (light). A
'paradigm shift' of the first order.
Oh, I had 'sensed' it alright, I had 'felt' it alright, I had intuited more
in that stain than anyone else might believe possible, especially if they did
not want to believe (move) what was implicit (implicate), but I could never
have 'unlocked' it without the new 'glasses'.
The glasses of the 'essentialities of deep creativity'.
'Something from nothing.'
/_\F<0
Just a new way of 'looking to the world of experience', that's all.
If only my teachers had taught me about 'serendipitous entropy production in
chromatography' (John Gunklerb
So, At de Lange I reckon you deserve a holiday of sorts. I reckon away from
the 'counters of beans and words' who know the 'cost of everything and the
value of b
The desert has it's own technology, as you have hinted at more than once.
To my mind, severely limited and limiting, as it no doubt is; you have done
more than paint or draw some mere 'picture'. You have done more than create a
picture of all reality. You have, so far as I can see given a way to create a
new working and living reality.
It remains to be seen what is borne upon that gentle wind that you are.
(Confucius)
Here is a farewell gift then via Basho, that 'gentleman' of few words who,
like most pilgrims, wandered within two qualities, lightness of touch and
oneness with nature.
"Come, see real
flowers
of this painful world."
I cannot help but think of the 'gift' of the paper, the stain and the water.
Best wishes,
De nada
Andrew Campbell
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