"Say: 'I am a child of earth and of Starry Heaven; But my race is of
Heaven [alone]', this you know yourselves."
(Orphic tablet)
Dear Leo and fellow learners,
Thank you for your responses to my writings on and off the list Leo, they
are deeply appreciated.
' Brilliant splashes of yellow shining gold amongst deep blue pebbles the
spaces of essence reveal the bareness of our souls, the gaps of
creativity.'
These reflective and appreciative words were written in one brief moment
in response to a painting made in just a few brilliant seconds while two
people, colleagues for a day worked together in a creative setting. A kind
or reciprocating emergent bifurcation at the edge of a shared chaos;-) I
would wish to call joy. To speak so finely of stones, mere pebble and
spaces... or is it speaking of something else?
-Suddenly a spiralling galaxy appears.
How much and like what do you find these words Leo?
May I ask that we consider 'gaps' as kinds of 'silences'?
Now Leo, that really may be profound learning and art.
Let me share a moment of metanoia with you.
About twenty-five years ago I was given a folder containing original
Michelangelo chalk drawings. I had come to the Museum to study them all
and copy just one. There is much reverence attached to this. For example,
the images must be viewed in a frame protected by glass having been taken
in board mounts from boxes with hands that are wearing white cotton
gloves, the light source must be indirect/diffuse. First I sat in silent
contemplation with one of the objects. The paper was very smooth, like
rice paper. It was a fragment, a few inches in each dimension. Paper was
rare and expensive which is why artists worked both recto and verso in
those days. The work was titled 'Man with Fantastic Hat'. Most large
monograms on Michelangelo would include it. Red chalk was the medium.
I had already prepared a sheet of hand made paper, mounted and pasted onto
board. The paper had been washed with tints of pigment to reduce the
brilliance of the new paper to that of the old now subtly time-modulated
paper. I had several sticks of hard quality chalk with me.
Before I began I became wrapped in attention to the form/content of the
composition. I noticed the amazing deftness of touch, whereby hundreds of
circular lines radiated building virtual forms from nothing. I saw how
some lines were compacted and tight and held the energy in, so to speak,
and other lines seemed to shoot free, like the trace of collided sub
atomic particles. Then I noticed how each line carried within itself just
the correct weight at each point of its deft turning so as to convey the
sense of defined form but not so much as to set up any interference with
neighbouring marks. In other words, every line was pitched in exactly the
right dynamic.
Then as I withdrew the 'analytical' gaze and comprehended the work more
whole as a 'synthesised oneness' I realised something that would make it
impossible (for me anyway) to copy it.
It had not been drawn line by line as I would have laboriously to do it at
all, but it had been lain down as if by a single exhalation.
It was his stillness in my commotion.
It seemed that it had not been stretched out linearly along some length of
measured time but had simply been wrested instantly into the paper, and
all I could think of by comparison was the gentle imprint in the swirl of
a fingerprint. It was that uniquely refined and defined and simply
'there'.
The same hand that made this had painted the Sistine Ceiling. It had
painted the great scenes of the Last Judgement and it had sculpted the
Pietas in marble. It had created the space between those two fingertips of
God and Adam; so nearly touching in the Creation scene.
And suddenly I was gripped in the embrace of an inner silence that still
reverberates. It is inescapable. Like the great 'nothing' that fascinated
Leonardo as it filled the cosmos he understood. (Stood within)
How can I now carry you through?
Maybe we can pass from what is outside to what is inside. Dostoevsky said
that, 'What is inside is outside and what is outside is inside.' It is
after all only another form/way of one to another;-)
In his late great age Michelangelo (six days before dying) reportedly
worked on the smashed remains of what then became his great Rondanini
Pieta. (Creative collapse;-). What was to have been a mighty dying
figure, (of which just the arm now remains of the original) Christ figure
he had intended he actually carved from the remains a severely reduced and
emaciated figure of Christ, but is it reduced?
As At would say, 'you will have to judge for yourself.'
At his ending it seems he began anew. This is well enough documented
throughout his life. A borne constancy-in-fragmentation that was inherent
to his very nature so we are told.
How 'FITTING' and 'DEEPLY CREATIVE'.
If you wish to see the ocean of 'creative collapses' look at the life's
waves-works.
He created in this new radical Pieta a new silence within the found
silence and he carved it out from the nothing of his spiritual
self-abnegation.
But this silence reverberates too, as yours does Leo.
How?
The silence is the growing space, the possibility space, the dwelling
place of something larger than material form that only the truly (open
ended) learningful person can maintain as a living place, you can call it
'open heart' or 'open mind'. Indeed you can call it anything.
Silence is for me a possibility space in people's hearts and minds- a form
of living emptiness; a forever-openness to the world and all its
possibilities, a forever waiting for some connecting moment or other. More
is given than taken in the moment of exchange. Free energy?
Being limitless it is by nature infinite. In this silence there is no
extinction of thought, feeling or will but there may be renunciation of
what was and is externally acquired, a detachment that makes possible a
renewed relation to the (any) unknown without the great burdens of fear we
normally attach to it.
'Look, look well.' Dante said.
Look well then at the Christ figure in the silence of his final moment in
'creative collapse', He slips away as she gently holds him, but at the
same time it is He who supports her. In silence and forever attached the
corporeal mother and son 'hold' each other up in some form of eternal
agape.
Unfolding the enfolded?
They slip neither upward or downward.
Silence here is reunion and reconciliation.
Two figures blend but incomplete, '-the master's last word; it is a silent
word, and for us it has become synonymous with silence.'
>Andrew, since you are able to sense my interiors (though describing the
>exterior), I need no other words. Silence contains enough information.
So very FITTING and BEAUTIFUL Leo-
Silence contains everything. And in everything is in silence.
Silence is not bounded by measure. Small or large is the same for it.
'la morte e'l fin d'una prigione oscura.'
That such a soul could think of life as a dark prison!
What a contradiction.
' Vorrei voler, Signor, quel ch'io non voglio,
Tra 'l foco 'l cor di ghiaccio un vel asconde,
Che 'l foco ammerza; onde non corrisponde
La penna all'opra, e fa bugiardo '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.'
What is this mystery? What is the veil?
What was the nature of what I saw that day in front of that small silent
drawing?
"Toward the end, his draughtsmanship dissolved in gentle planes, ethereal
clouds and the sfmato of a diaphanous atmosphere; it had become quite
immaterial.' Rolf Schott
Life and death.
Nothing more and nothing less.
Eros and Thanatos.
I see the vision of a silent and transforming 'cross'.
In this transfiguration as in the drawing I found Michelangelo's
transforming love of the world.
X > +
In the final years he bought farming land, with the intention to live a
meditative and reclusive life.
'Behold now the hope and desire of going back
to ones own country or returning to the primal chaos,
like that of a moth to the light,
of the man who with perpetual longing looks forward with joy
to each new spring and each new summer, and to the new months and years,
deeming that the things he longs for are too slow in coming
and who does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction.
But that this longing is in its quintessence the spirit of the elements,
which finding itself imprisoned in the life of a human body
continually returns to its source.
And I would have you know that this same longing is in its quintessence
inherent in nature
and that man is a type of the world.'
Leonardo da Vinci.
>Leo, I can see your face before me, 'a face (is) inexhaustible, the most
>exciting surface on the face on the whole earth.'
Where else have you come from, where else can you go to?
Love,
Andrew Campbell
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