Chapter 17: Again, < >´
• Restatement of the meaning of < >’. • “The point of creative paradox” can only be experienced. • Christopher Alexander, Robert Pirsig, David Bohm, and common human experience. • Robert Henri and the “Art Spirit. • Cézanne and “nature’s eternity.” • Carl Jung and the “participation mystique.” • The danger in giving names to the unnameable. • Random fractals and computer graphics. • Pixels, grids, and complex carbohydrates. • Beauty in an equation, a theory. • Christopher Alexander: learning how to do it, not how to talk about it. • Time may evolve and shift. • < >’ is a matter of relationships. • Henry James and the necessity of the frame. • Nature: things which happen in the same way only once. • General ignorance of now-essential scientific understandings. • Is a pattern less real than a thing? • We want to know the rules, and to see ourselves as in charge of them. • Cause becomes effect, and effect modifies cause to make a new cause. • The first mark on the canvas limits the possibilities. • Corporations and creativity. • Intuition, now respectable again. • Donald Coxeter and multilateral symmetry. • Film-making and occult symmetry. “Naturalness” in wine. • A simple demonstration: an abstract painting.
Before beginning let me state once more, as well as I can, what I mean by < >´. The symbol represents a manifestation of a profound dynamic balance within the continually changing relationship of order and disorder in Nature. Any living being is an instance of such dynamic balance, and the attainment of it is a possibility for us not only in the arts we make, but in everything we do. There are moments in space/time when this significant reality is clear to us, when we are able to experience the unusual or the everyday as poignantly full of life and meaning; such experience is of that which has been called the Logos, grace, the Tao, prajna, the quality-without-a-name, life-energy, dynamic equilibrium, aesthetic ambiguity, a sign of God the originating Mystery, and so on. Perhaps it could be called “the point of creative paradox.” But it cannot be identified or described in words. Words, since they must occur sequentially, can only express a duality—they cannot be spoken or written or even thought at the same instant, or in the same place on the page, whereas, as Heidegger points out, the thing (being, work of art, aspect of nature, any “thing” at all) occurs simultaneously with its attributes, in the present moment.[1] We have the words “unity” and “the one,” but we cannot, in the same instant, say what is unified. It can only happen, whatever the medium of its manifestation, and when it does we recognize it only if we are awake.
Clarify the five eyes and develop the five powers;
This is not intellectual work,—just realize, just know.
[Cheng-Tao-Ko, Song of Enlightenment, thezensite.com, (9/29/2011]
Although most of us can remember experience in which we “just realize, just know,” it has no comfortable place in our western system of thought. What are we to do with it, then? A cosmology which does not allow for it is too narrow, somehow too stingy-hearted, to convince us; it leaves out too much, it is inadequate to our experience.[2] But those of us who acknowledge mystery, and even insist upon it, don’t want fake mystery. We don’t want ghost stories, or detective stories, or those irritating works where answers to the fundamental questions are implicitly promised and never delivered, and the mystery turns out to be a trick: the Magus is a con man. We are curious about phenomena we don’t understand and science can’t yet investigate—and perhaps can never investigate—but which we experience as being fundamental to our life.
In attempting to write about the “quality without a name”—about < >´—words like “transcendent,” “epiphany,” and “inspiration” keep coming up, words associated with religion. But the subject here is not the province of any particular religion; it is a matter of human experience.
Christopher Alexander reminds us of something we all know, or used to know: that although it is obvious that we are individual beings and personalities, much of our experience in the world is in fact the same. Over many years, he and his students and associates at the University of California at Berkeley have made a broad and thorough study of what it is that people actually respond to in architecture and in art.
We assumed from the beginning that everything was based on the real nature of human feeling and—this is the unusual part—that human feeling is mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncracies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they talk about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same things. So, from the very beginning…we concentrated on that fact, and concentrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same. [his emphasis]
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol. I p 3]
The philosopher and novelist Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; An Inquiry into Values, followed a similar logic with his students in the English department at Montana State College in 1959. He points out that “for centuries rhetoric instructors in our culture have been paid to pass and fail students on the quality of their writing without ever having any viable definition of what that quality is or even if there is such a thing at all,” which could be seen as bizarre.
It was a common mischievous practice for students to send the same rhetoric paper to different teachers and observe that it got different grades. From this the students would argue that the whole idea of quality was meaningless. But one instructor turned the tables on them and handed a group of papers to several different students and asked each student to grade them for quality. As he expected, the students’ relative rankings correlated with each other and with those of the instructor. This meant that although the students were saying there is no such thing as quality, they already knew what it was, and could not deny it.
[Robert Pirsig, “Subjects, Objects, Data and Values,” p 12 [http://www.moq.org/forum/Pirsig/emmpaper.html (1/6/15)]
Mr. Pirsig transferred that exercise to his classroom by getting students themselves to judge four papers a day—until they realized that they did indeed know what quality is, although quality can’t be defined; instead, “when you see it you know it.”[3]
David Bohm wrote: “Each person takes up his own particular combination [from what] is available to him…. And so, at least in this way, each person is different. Yet, the underlying basis is characterized by the fundamental similarity over the whole of mankind, while the differences are relatively secondary.”[4] And Heraclitus, circa 500 BC: “The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.” That 99.9% of our DNA is identical to that of any other human being, a fact scientifically established fairly recently, supports this.[5] However, a currently fashionable claim in art theory is that because we live in our separate containers of mind and body, at different times and in different cultures, our experiences must be radically different.
If you and I are present at the same superb—or dull or disastrous—concert, and both of us give the music our full attention, my experience of it clearly cannot be reproduced by you, or yours by me; we each have our own from within the confines of our individual being. But the two are likely to be closely similar—unless inner distractions, prejudices and preconceived notions interfere. There is friendship in the presumption of that, even if we’ve never met. If we do meet at some later time, and discover that we were both there that night, our feeling is that we have something real in common, something which we can only minimally communicate to friends who were not there, and then only by metaphor or comparison. The more powerful the experience, the deeper that bond is felt to be.
Painting and sculpture and the other arts made out of matter share one appealing characteristic, which is that they can last for a period of time as stable singularities, and can be found repeatedly in museums and books—unlike happenings in performing arts like dance and theatre, or even in nature. Musicians and actors can make the music and drama of the past manifest as a reality in the present, but always as a new event. The singular quality of Nijinsky's dancing is all hearsay now. John Berger observes that “the painted moment” seen in Vermeer’s view of Delft across the canal has changed virtually not at all in three centuries, but that there is more to be gained from it than the painting’s solid pictoriality:
[T]his painted moment, as we look at it, has a plenitude and actuality that we experience only rarely in life. We experience everything we see in the painting as absolutely momentary. At the same time the experience is repeatable the next day or in ten years. It would be naive to suppose that this has to do with accuracy: Delft at any given moment never looked like this painting.…
[John Berger, The Sense of Sight, p 150]
Is the ability to keep things an unqualified advantage? It means that for a long time every tenor will be compared to Pavarotti’s recordings. But we have an insatiable appetite for greatness: there is never too much or even enough, and we crave it in new forms—fresh and to some degree coherent with our contemporary reality. The commercial circus that is now the public "Artworld” might collapse if it weren't for our ability to gather sustenance from works in museums and books: without them we might demand that art be significant, that it serve to give us our lives, that it be more than merely “transgressive,” “perverse,” “beautifully horrifying.”
[International “Artworld power broker” Jeffrey Deitch] gave the Austrian artists’ collective Gelitin carte blanche to perform at a dinner party he threw last winter in his Wooster Street gallery…. While two hundred and fifty guests dined at long tables with white tablecloths and silver candelabra, the all-male Gelitin crew, swigging bottled water and wearing buckets on their heads, spike heels, fishnet stockings, and not much else (unless you count the fetishistic pendants dangling from their pudenda) hammered together the prefabricated elements of a wooden structure that rose like a bridge over the tables; the bridge had four arched platforms at graduated heights, and when the crew finished nailing them together they climbed up—still in their high heels—and urinated into the hats of their colleagues at lower levels. “It was spectacular, perverse, uplifting, beautifully horrifying, and deeply transgressive,” according to Deitch, whose tolerance for transgression is probably limitless. Most of the guests showed a similar sang-froid, although they had neglected to bring umbrellas; only a few of them left before dessert.
[Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, 11/12/07 p 70]
Related to the belief that we all see things differently is the idea that we see and hear as we are trained to see and hear, and that since our sensory and intellectual experiences are determined by all the various influences making up our education over time, we therefore cannot know what people of other times saw and heard.[6] John Berger asks the necessary question,
If art is bound up with certain phases of social historical development, how is it that we still find, for example, classical Greek sculpture beautiful? Hadjinicolaou argues that what is seen as ‘art' changes all the while, that the sculptures seen by the 19th century were no longer the same art as seen by the 3rd century B.C. Yet the question remains: what then is it about certain works which allows them to ‘receive’ different interpretations and continue to offer a mystery? Hadjinicolaou would consider the last word unscientific, but I do not.
[John Berger, The Sense of Sight, p 200]
The quality, the pattern, the unique and essential character, the lively coherence of innumerable inner relationships which allows a work of art to “offer a mystery” is that which I indicate by the symbol < >´. My claim is that it is the same as, or an expression of, or an instance of, the quality of relationship which we (rapturously) find in Nature, that which the ancient Greeks called Logos. Further, that great art in all its forms is That, and at the same time that this fact cannot be stated in words, except as a gesture toward something unknown. The painter and revered teacher Robert Henri called it “the Art Spirit,” and warned against “the mistaken idea that the subject of a painting is the object painted.”[7] Great art is an instance of the Logos in the Heraclitean sense—it is not a mirroring of nature; objects in nature are not its deepest subject. It may and often does attempt such mirroring, but a successful mimesis does not make it art. Cézanne spoke of the “flavour” of “nature’s eternity.”
“Everything we look at disperses and vanishes, doesn't it? Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing.…Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity.”
[Paul Cézanne, in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, a Memoir with Conversation (1897-1906, p 148]
“Nature as it is seen and nature as it is felt, the nature that is there,” (he pointed towards the green and blue plain) “and the nature that is here,” (he tapped his forehead) “both of which have to fuse in order to endure, to live that life, half human and half divine, which is the life of art or, if you will…the life of god. The landscape is reflected, humanized, rationalized within me. I objectivize it, project it, fix it on my canvas….”
[Ibid., p 150]
Carl Jung described the state of mind to which the “art spirit” is available:
…The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to a state of participation mystique —to that level of experience at which it is humanity that lives, and not the individual, and at which the weal or woe of the single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all.
[Carl Jung, in Brewster Ghiselin ed. The Creative Process, p 209]
Robert Pirsig recognizes such a “participation mystique,” the point at which it is “humanity that lives”:
Quality occurs at the point at which subject and object meet. Quality is not a thing. It is an event. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be no subject, quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
[Robert Pirsig, “Subjects, Objects, Data and Value,” Brussels, 1995. www.moq.org/forum/Pirsig/emmpaper.html (9/20/15)]
Human beings exist as part of Nature; it is as natural beings, elements of nature, that we respond to art. Art’s pattern is our pattern; indeed, Christopher Alexander calls that pattern “I-ness,” as we will see later.
It surprised me to learn that designers of computer software find Christopher Alexander’s conception of “the quality without a name” applicable to their work, and use the acronym “qwan” to refer to it.[8] Dutch software designer Willem van den Ende explains,[9]
Building software is in many ways unpredictable. We put software in to the world, which changes the world, feedback from which then again changes the software. Software is alive in the sense that more and more software in existence today evolves without the presence of its original creators.
What makes good quality software can not be described, people know it when they see it or have it in their hands. Hence the quality without a name makes sense for us.
[Willem van den Ende, in an e-mail, October 12, 2011]
Robert Pirsig explores what he calls “the Quality” in his novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Lila. He has developed a “Metaphysics of Quality,” known as “the MOQ.”[10] Quantities of information and commentary on all this can be found on the Web.[11]
The danger in giving names to such concepts is that by giving < >´ a name we’ll forget that we don’t know either what or where it is. To suggest, as I do, that it is a co-existence of randomness and order in a radiant coherence is only to offer a possible clue to its nature.[12] Such a clue will not allow anyone to achieve it; its significance can lie in our acceptance of the understanding that it is importantly other than simply “harmony” or “beauty” or “symmetry” or “good or bad” in the usual understanding of those words: it is indeed the very quality of life. Mr. Pirsig calls it “Dynamic Quality,” (in my terms, < >´) as distinct from what he calls “Static Quality” (for which I use the symbol < >). He has concluded that Dynamic Quality is both moral and creative. It is, he says, “the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new.”[13]
Quality is morality. Make no mistake about it. They’re identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. The world is primarily a moral order.
[Robert Pirsig, Lila; An Inquiry into Morals, p 111]
This is of course consistent with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emphatic statement that “Ethics and Aesthetics are one.”[14]
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Computer-generated images have long been made more convincing by introducing unpredictable elements to the process of their production.
In the real world the intermixing of fractals unfolding at different scales gives richness to natural forms and to the time they evolve in. Similarly, the fractal measure has been made richer and more useful by the concept of the “random fractal.” Here a variety of generators are used which can be chosen at random at each scale. Random fractals not only have an intricacy of detail but also a freshness and unpredictability characteristic of real systems. By combining an iterative scaling with a random element of choice, coastlines, mountains, and planets can be generated that are realistic enough (though completely imaginary) to be used in movies, videos, and advertising.
[John Briggs and F. David F. Peat, Turbulent Mirror, p 108]
Note the lovely word “freshness” turning up here as being desirable even in the context of the programming of machines. Images made by computers can be made to appear more “fresh” and “unpredictable” by randomness and irregularity, thus believable enough to be used commercially. Digital graphics are made up of entirely regular pixels—a mathematically perfect grid of tiny squares, unlike anything in nature except crystals, (which actually vary in size and conformation). We apprehend this fact on some subconscious level, as when we can sometimes discern the difference between digital and analogic prints of photographs, between digital music and “live” music, and even between digital music and music recorded on a vinyl disc. In an analogous example, the fundamental difference between animal fibers and natural fibers generally—which have differing properties, and are not consistent even within a species—and synthetic (that is, man-made) fibers, is that all synthetic fibers look the same. This difference can be seen at both microscopic and normal levels.[15]
When images are reduced to the entirely regular pattern of a mathematically exact grid, they lose “quality”; the pixels are far too small for conscious discernment, yet we do experience them. A grid is soothingly predictable—it acts as a kind of sedative, however weak, and this is more than a metaphor: complex carbohydrates, like those found in vegetables and grains, feed us: simple carbohydrates, like those in “processed” flours and sugary cereals merely sedate and stupefy us, and make us fat. In nature, of course, the number of variables, the degrees of nuanced subtlety and unpredictability, are so great that no machine able to produce them can be built. However beyond a certain point most of us—perhaps all of us—can be fooled, tricked, deceived. Eventually we get accustomed to, and even sentimental about the fake, as in the craving many now feel for the junk “comfort” food of contemporary childhood.
In a New Yorker article in 2006, Jim Holt writes that “we have arrived at a critical watershed in scientific theory,” and that these are “strange days in physics,” since:
For the first time in its history, theory has caught up with experiment. In the absence of new data, physicists must steer by something other than hard empirical evidence in their quest for a final theory. And that something they call “beauty.” But in physics, as in the rest of life, beauty can be a slippery thing.
[Jim Holt, The New Yorker, 10/2/06 p 86]
Mr. Holt goes on to state that three qualities are required for beauty in a theory: the first is simplicity, the second is surprise, the third an aura of inevitability. Einstein’s theory of general relativity is the current standard for such beauty in physics, he says, because nothing about it can be changed or even modified without destroying its logical structure. Physicist Stephen Weinberg has compared the great theory to Raphael’s Holy Family, “in which every figure on the canvas is perfectly placed and there is nothing you would have wanted the artist to do differently.”[16] Dr. Weinberg must be aware that his assumption that human beings are able to tell when everything in a masterpiece is “perfectly placed” would generally be considered “unscientific.” He testified simply as a human being.
Rollo May observed, in his book The Courage to Create:
[M]athematicians and physicists talk about the "elegance" of a theory. The utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches one's sensibilities—these are significant factors determining why a given idea emerges…we have the subjective conviction that the form should be this way and no other way…the "truth" itself is simply there. This reminds us of what the Zen Buddhists keep saying—that at these moments is reflected and revealed a reality of the universe that does not depend merely on our own subjectivity, but is as though we only had our eyes closed and suddenly we open them and there it is, as simple as can be. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that “this is the way reality is and isn't it strange we didn't see it sooner" may have a religious quality with artists.
[Rollo May, The Courage to Create, p 73]
This somehow “immutable, eternal quality” awakens our inborn human capacity for awe and gratitude—that is, our religious sense.
In the view of French physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has a really sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.”[17] And the author of an article in Harvard Magazine wonders whether “Beauty, then, might be a bonus awarded when one discovers some truth about the order of the universe.”[18]
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Christopher Alexander writes with broad erudition and deep heart about “the quality-without-a-name” in art and architecture. In the prologue to his beautiful and richly illustrated four-volume work, The Nature of Order, published in 2002, he describes his journey toward a logical theoretical basis for a profound and humane architecture:
Making buildings at the level of beauty which was common in 12th- or 15th-century Europe and in hundreds of other cultures in all eras of human history except our own is very hard for us.…
…I wanted to be able to do the real thing—and for that I had to know what the real thing is. The reason was not intellectual curiosity—but only the practical reason that I wanted to be able to do it myself.
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol 1 p 2]
He wanted to learn how to do it, not how to talk about it. He and his students and associates at the University of California at Berkeley investigated the quality in architecture and visual art over a period of thirty-five years, and identified many principles and “patterns” that can help in working toward it. [19] My own reason for undertaking the solitary investigation that led me to some of the same conclusions was essentially the same.[20]
Professor Alexander, whose first education was in science and mathematics, and who is a painter as well as an architect and professor of architecture, describes his reluctance to accept his own discoveries:
Issues which were straightforward in other ages—such as spirit, for example, or the life that can exist in stone—are inadmissible for us. I found it almost unbearably difficult to accept some of the theoretical concepts I was led to in the course of my work on these topics.…
As a scientist trained in mathematics…at Cambridge University…[i]n the end it was my respect for empirical truth that made me give up my doubts, and gave me the strength to formulate conceptions that are—for an empiricist of 20th-century training—suspicious or potentially ridiculous.…like some kind of science fiction.
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Volume I p 2]
In his book The Old Way of Seeing, the architect Jonathan Hale wrote,:
The principles that underlie harmonious design are found everywhere and in every time before our own; they are the historic norm. They are the same in the eighteenth century houses of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the buildings of old Japan, in Italian villages, in the cathedrals of France, in the ruins of the Yucatan. …[T]he disharmony we see around is the exception.
If a building makes us light up, it is not because we see order; any row of file cabinets is ordered. What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds, or trees.
[Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, p 2]
Such understanding is radically opposed to current dogma in architecture and the other arts. Christopher Alexander again:
Much of the time I find myself wondering if the theory I have presented in this book can really be true, or if I have merely concocted some fantastic fiction. But occasionally, in a few lucid moments, I see clearly, and it seems to me that it must be true, simply because there is no other explanation which is equally convincing and seems to cover all the facts. Then in another instant I am doubting again, because it is just too difficult for a hard-boiled empiricist like me to believe that the metaphysical part, especially, of what I have written, and my analysis of the nature of space and matter, really can be true.
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Volume I pp 3-4]
This “metaphysical part” presents a major difficulty to anyone writing in our era, in which so much of intellectual life piously aspires to an uncorrupted and “scientific” objectivity, materialism, and secularity.
The current world-wide enthusiasm for fundamentalist, literalist religions of various kinds has only inflamed the argument, distracting us into a finally uninteresting battle between “liberal” secularists and materialists on the one hand, and “conservative” religious dogmatists on the other. These hostile positions are in fact merely opposing forms taken by the passion for certainty and the intolerance of mystery, one using science as authority, the other the sacred Word. Professor Alexander’s view of reality, which accepts the utterly unknowable as an essential aspect of the real, is likely to be as much anathema to a fundamentalist as to an atheist. Here are two examples of “metaphysical” thinking from among the many to be found throughout his text:
[T]he ultimate questions of architecture and art sometimes touch some connection of incalculable depth between the made work (building, painting, ornament, street) and the inner “I” which each of us experiences…that interior element in a work of art, or in a work of nature, which makes one feel related to it.
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol IV, p 2]
This is Carl Jung’s “participation mystique,” and Robert Pirsig’s “point at which subject and object meet.” Professor Alexander again:
It has been said that God is immanent, that all matter is imbued with God, that God is the ultimate material of the Universe. And that may be so. But if so, why is it that this shining forth of God is visible more in some things than others; why is God more visible in some events, and less in others. What causes the life in things; what causes God to be more visible in one thing, more visible in one moment, less visible in another.
[Ibid. p 146]
Since the beginning of this book, I have been writing as though < >´ either is or is not—some thing or some place is a happening of < >´, or it isn’t. But certainly God is experienced in some things more than in others, though perhaps present to some degree in all things; the enlightened person or the saint, unburdened of egotism, sees God in everything. I am able to conceive of the idea that God exists to some degree in every thing that lives, including the Earth seen as itself a living being in the Gaia hypothesis. But so far I am blind to any resonant Presence in the arrangement of parts in a strip mall or in a computer game’s brutalist cartoons, let alone in an act of sadism—that is, blind to it in many of the works of human beings, however “natural” they may be.[21] Certainly it is difficult for us to be entirely natural, to be in full accordance with the Logos. When we do manage it, we ascribe it to Grace, or Inspiration.
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A possibility: In the great flux, the multitude of movements, the interweaving and intersecting ebbing and flowing wholeness that is the Real, it happens that there occurs a point or area of being, more or less fleeting, where order and disorder meet in what is often called a dance. It may be experienced as a sign of God, or felt to be God-made. Is it in fact ultimately explicable, like other phenomena once thought to be mysterious? I don’t know. Is it “The Living God”—in some unimaginable way “personal”—or is all that is simply mechanical, though incomprehensibly complex? I don’t know, nor does anyone. Time is of course an essential dimension and element in this great ongoing drama, but time turns out to be very different from our ordinary conception of it:
In the past we have thought of time as an inflexible yardstick to hold against change. But if time is evolving and shifting like a turbulent stream?…[P]erhaps this is why psychological time seems to stretch or squeeze like rubber, some moments seeming to fly by, others dragging out.
[Briggs, John and Peat, David F., Turbulent Mirror, p 108]
And further,
Time…becomes an expression of the system's holistic interaction, and this interaction extends outward. Every complex system is a changing part of a greater whole, a nesting of larger and larger wholes leading eventually to the most complex dynamical system of all, the system that ultimately encompasses whatever we mean by order and chaos—the universe itself.
[Ibid. p 147]
The lines of force of a magnet. The lines of force between the Earth’s poles. The magnetic force of gravity—of the planets, of the sun, of each of us, of every object. The respiration of animals, plants, trees, human beings. The lovely arcing patterns made by particles as radioactive substances decay. All the invisible forces, attracting and repelling, in an infinitely complex moving pattern, a great cosmic abstract pattern of which each of us is both a microcosm and a part. And each of us a complex and subtle living sensing device, more capable of awareness and sensation than we can imagine, each a conscious receptor of the astonishing and ravishing Creation, feeling its rhythms in our minds and bodies. We look and listen and feel a need to make our contribution to it, joining in the exuberance, abandoning ourselves to the dance, but with minds alert to every sensation, making our moves with acute sensitivity, taking joy in our part in the procession in a finely tuned combination of moving and being moved—or we sit quiet and still, simply observing.
Since time itself may “evolve and shift,” and everything moves and changes in every moment, must the phenomenon of enlivened balance, of < >´, necessarily be transitory? Such moments in the world, when order and disorder harmoniously co-exist, are perceived by human beings as full of life and saturated with meaning, and as almost unbearably precious. In great art a version of that point of active paradox, that is, of maximum creativity, is held more or less stable and can be retained and even reproduced, however approximately. Love for that condition of being, a craving for it, is the artist’s motivation.
We obviously see only a tiny part of the movement of reality, and only at our own scale in space-time, unless we use sensing machines. Even then we build expectations in terms of statistical probabilities, not of certainties. Some things move vastly more quickly than we can detect, others far more slowly. But when the moment of “dynamic equilibrium” occurs, we see it, feel it, hear it, taste it, know it—if we are awake, and thus momentarily ego-free. Occasionally it will catch our attention and bring us into the present moment. And we can allow such a happening—in attending to or making art, in connecting with other people, in choosing one action over another. When we achieve this we are, in that moment, a blessing in the world. Christopher Alexander writes,
[T]he religious disciplines are just those which have taught people how, practically speaking, to lose themselves….
[T]he great religions all taught [this] essential prerequisite for making works of one-ness. Few other disciplines have done so.…
…[P]aradoxically, in the moment where this absolute identity and not-separateness is attained in a thing, and it truly becomes one with the things that surround it, it stands out shining with an extraordinary power which could never be reached under any other circumstances.
This is, perhaps, the central mystery of the universe: that as things become more unified, less separate, so they also become most individual and most precious.
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol IV p 309]
And then,
It is in my struggle to want this simple, unobstructed purity that I am helped, most of all, if I try to make each thing a gift to God.
[Ibid.]
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< >´ is a matter of relationship, rather than of any thing. We can experience it only moment by moment, only in the actually existent—and it must occur within some kind of limiting frame in time or space. It lies in the relationship of parts to one another and to a whole; the frame (such as the limits of our vision, or of our attention) dictates what is the whole for us in the moment. Henry James wrote,
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to be so.
[Henry James, in his Preface to Roderick Hudson, quoted by Michael Swan in his introduction to Ten Short Stories of Henry James, p 8]
“I come along just when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter,” wrote Ansel Adams. An atheist might chortle, “How naive! He thinks God goes fussing around arranging things for him!” But Adams was writing to someone he could assume would understand his metaphor. The great photographer knew the potential for < >´ when he saw it, and was alert and technically able enough not only to recognize that potential but to catch and keep it, and to manipulate it as necessary in the darkroom. The materialist might make the same remark ironically, and Adams probably intended it playfully—however the reality is not affected.
In a 1995 New Yorker account of a 1945 visit to Hitler’s sometime mountain retreat, the “Eagle’s Nest,” Philip Hamburger wrote that the building’s exterior resembled a state penitentiary or a guardhouse, and that inside, everything appeared “out of proportion or off key.” But then he moved to a window:
I walked to the window and was staggered by the jagged, snow-capped Bavarian Alps. Their beauty is of a magnitude touching the threshold of pain.…
In every direction, the vistas, once again, were too beautiful for rational thought.…I turned away for an instant, then turned back, and the mountains were gone, swallowed in clouds. Another blink, and the mountains were there, casting a spell. I told myself that in surroundings of such wild, unpredictable pagan beauty anything could happen. Anything.
[Philip Hamburger, The New Yorker 5/1/95, p 71]
“Beauty…touching the threshold of pain”—great art is both an instance of that beauty, and a tribute to it. The artist is a person who knows where to put what, and can now and then encompass order and disorder together, in a one-ness, as nature does. If the photographer turned up an hour later, sometimes even a few seconds later, his quarry might be gone: the shadow would be a different shape, a cloud would have covered the moon. But by then there might be something else. Photography is an art uniquely equipped to capture such instants in the great flow of visible reality, but they are recognized by all true artists. Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch tells us, “In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it.”[22] Nature is made up of astonishing things which happen in exactly the same way only once, and of things we don’t “see” because they happen too fast for our conscious sensory and mental equipment, or we’re otherwise preoccupied and don’t recognize them.[23]
It is all unique, again and again and again. Sometimes there is < >´.
I want to persuade the reader that almost all of us perceive this quality…that it is real…an objectively real physical phenomenon in space which our cognition detects.…[I]t changes from place to place and moment to moment, and…marks, in varying degrees, every moment, every event, every point in space.
[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol. I, p 64]
Clearly, I believe that Christopher Alexander and Robert Pirsig and Jonathan Hale and Longinus, and so many others quoted here, are talking about the same quality. We circle around the same mystery, and our deepest conclusions are similar. Christopher Alexander names and illustrates twelve fundamental characteristics which he finds present in visual works manifesting the quality which he has come to call “I-ness,” since in the moment of recognition it characterizes the viewer as well as the object.
Again: in Nature, this liminal quality of being, between order and disorder, comes and goes, engendering new orders which eventually decay into disorder. In making art, we make a version of our own, which in turn produces its lively order in the mind that receives it. I have already quoted British psychologist Anthony Storr, who wrote: “The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.”[24] Great art can bring the mind, for a time, to the condition of < >´, which is experienced as delight—“delectation,” as Bach said—elation, inspiration, gratitude, joy, love, and may be so even when its subject matter is frightening or transgressive.[25]
Today, many of us live in ignorance of a number of now-essential scientific understandings. The certainties of a material, Newtonian universe have been impossible for physicists since 1910. The universe is not made of defined matter suspended in empty space: it consists rather of energy in different forms. Microbiologist Bruce Lipton describes a current conception of the atom:
If it were possible to observe the composition of an actual atom with a microscope, what would we see? Imagine a swirling dust devil cutting across the desert. Now remove the sand and dirt from the funnel cloud. What you have left is an invisible, tornado-like vortex. A number of infinitesimally small, dust-devil-like energy vortices called quarks and photons collectively make up the structure of the atom. From far away, the atom would likely appear as a blurry sphere.
[Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief p 101]
To move in closer by means of that imaginary microscope would make things even less clear:
As its structure came nearer to focus, the atom would become less clear and less distinct. As the surface of the atom drew near, it would disappear. You would see nothing. In fact, as you focused through the entire structure of the atom, all you would observe is a physical void. The atom has no physical structure.…
…The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.
[Ibid. p 12]
Each of us is a microcosm of Nature, going into and out of < >´, at every level of our being. Since the atoms in our brain are more or less continually replaced it is the brain’s pattern that retains our memories, our sense of continuity, of individuality, of self.[26] This pattern varies within the limits of its underlying order. The eminent physicist Richard Feynmann on this: “…[W]e come to realize that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out, always new atoms but always performing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.”[27] Why “only” a pattern or dance? Is the pattern not marvelous? Is a pattern less interesting, or less “real,” than a thing? Surely the individuality of any thing is simply its pattern, the way in which it is? This dance of pattern is what we experience and think of as solid dependable matter in all its forms, from sidewalks and chairs to galaxies and our own bodies.
In our avidity for certainty, security, and perfection, we want to know the rules, and to see ourselves as in charge of those rules. When the light turns green it’s safe to go ahead. When the dog growls it is wise to be careful. Flirting leads to trouble. The problem is that in cleaving to our logic and our multitude of rules we lose the experience of the everyday world as miraculous—we sleep while awake. We lose spontaneity, and forget to be on the lookout for epiphanies; we forget to look for what the world is really like.
That matter and energy are different forms of the same thing appears to have been demonstrated empirically by physicists at Harvard, in 2007. Professor Lene Hau and her team of investigators, working with matter and light in a vacuum capsule at temperatures near absolute zero, succeeded in changing light into matter, moving it through space, and changing it back to light again. They slowed a two-mile-long beam of light from its usual approximately 186,262 miles per second all the way down to 15 miles per hour, captured it in a cloud of chilled atoms, transferred it to another cloud of atoms, then reconstituted it exactly as it originally was and sent it on its way.[28]
Physical or chemical systems are said to be deterministic: that is, the rules which govern them stay the same.[29] However a majority of the systems which shape our reality are only variably predictable. Tomorrow’s weather can usually be foreseen, but the ten day forecast will always be an informed guess. And complex organic systems like ecologies or species or societies exhibit another defining feature: the rules can be said to change as a result of the rules. An organism’s rules of operation shape its action; if that action changes its environment, the organism changes its rules in a feedback response to the modified environment. Cause becomes effect, and effect modifies cause to make a new cause.
Similarly, in painting: the first mark is a response to the subject, to the artist’s intentions and hopes, memories and habits, to the possibilities and limitations of the medium, and to the specific rectangle of canvas and its surface. The next move is ruled in part by the alteration of the world within the frame brought about by that initial mark on the blank ground. The blank ground has infinite potential; real anxiety is felt in making the mark which limits that potential. The painting proceeds in this way, the set of events and relationships within the work to which the artist responds becoming more and more complex, and the number of possible moves in relation to the whole decreasing until it feels to some extent as if the work itself is dictating the next moves; they begin to feel inevitable. Novelists often say that after a certain point in the creative process, the characters begin to tell the author what they should say or do next, though of course one can break the pattern at any point and redirect it.
The creative process always feels dangerous, no matter how often one has been in that place. One of Iris Murdoch’s protagonists, a writer, laments:
How tiny one’s area of understanding is[,]art teaches perhaps better than philosophy. There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about.…[F]or most of us “dreaming on things to come” and “it is too late, it is all over” is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on.
[Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince, Viking Press, 1973. p xiii]
True courage is required. In a poem which is in part about his daughter’s struggle in writing a story, Richard Wilbur says: “It is always a matter, my darling, of life or death, as I had forgotten.”[30] One does forget; otherwise one might not be frightened at finding oneself there again. It is a very place of fright: frightfulness appears to be essential to it. The journey is both terrible and marvelous, like life itself.
New understandings of creativity derived from the science of complex systems and from biology are of interest in a variety of sectors. Large corporations need flexibility and variability in order to respond to a rapidly changing commercial environment, and some of them at least are paying attention. There is increasing awareness that new order arises, is born out of the little-known realm where order and unpredictability or uncertainty co-exist, rather than out of stable organization or lifeless entropic chaos. The British business columnist Simon Caulkin wrote:
The distant outcome of actions can’t be plotted, because the structure of the system makes the future unknowable. The corollary is that viable strategy is not something that is the result of prior intent by a foresightful leader. Rather, it emerges from multiple possibilities thrown up by messy group dynamics in organizations in collision with the environment…managers should think of themselves as gardeners rather than executives…instead of intending it they must let it happen.…Attempts to make the system stable work only at the expense of making it incapable of interacting with the environment.
[Simon Caulkin, “Chaos Inc.,” Across the Board magazine, v32n7, July-August, 1995]
He continues, “This is nontrivial stuff. What we’re talking about is a real restructuring of thinking about how the world works and the way to handle it.”[31] In one example, the founder of the Visa International corporation declared that Newtonian, hierarchical organization in any sphere is “an aberration of the Industrial Age, antithetical to the human spirit, destructive of the biosphere, and structurally contrary to the whole history and methods of physical and biological evolution.”[32] Such anti-reductive thinking on the part of a corporate executive might seem somehow reassuring—the biosphere is at least mentioned—but let us be wary, as Jeremy Rifkin warned in 1983:
At first glance, terms like “perspective,” “scenarios,” “models,” creative possibilities” appear to signal a newfound awareness by humanity of its own limitations, of its inability to ever fully grasp or comprehend the truths of the universe. Not so. It is not humility that animates the new cosmological jargon but bravado.… Perspectives, scenarios, models, creative possibilities. These are the words of authorship, the words of a creator, an architect, a designer. Humanity is abandoning the idea that the universe operates by ironclad truths because it no longer feels the need to be constrained by such fetters. Nature is being made anew, this time by human beings.
[Jeremy Rifkin, quoted in John Briggs and David F Peat, Turbulent Mirror p 201]
Today we at last begin to understand that nature is not in fact being “made anew”—it is being destroyed, despite our various efforts to slow the devastating juggernaut of what we call “progress.”
Nonlinear scientists study the paradoxical realm of creative chaos as “Chaos” and “Complexity,” but our everyday understanding has not caught up with the crucial distinction between creative and entropic chaos. My computer’s thesaurus offers an assortment of possible alternatives for the word “chaos”:
“DISORDER, disarray, disorganization, confusion, mayhem, bedlam, pandemonium, havoc, turmoil, tumult, commotion, disruption, upheaval, uproar, maelstrom; muddle, mess, shambles, free-for-all; anarchy, lawlessness, entropy.
Informal: hullabaloo, hoopla, all-hell-broken-loose.”
Hurrah! It is as exciting as a thunderstorm. It is invigorating, even funny—but it presents chaos as the very antithesis of order, not as a creative source of new orders. And yet…the list itself seems full of life. We have all watched storms and uproars from sheltered places, and know the feeling of exhilaration they can bring.
The battle between order and disorder in human society is always with us. In popular politics it goes on continually, with the far right fearing a chaos which will undermine past achievements and threaten its security, and using this as a justification for repression—while the far left, fearing a repressive order, may view all rules, all caution, as suspect. If a society is to be reasonably stable, both order and outlets for the forces of creative social chaos must be incorporated in it. In his admirable 1998 book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, Lewis Hyde reminds us that when we free ourselves of a stifling order, there are two possible outcomes of the destruction: a new order, or an anarchy. “Trickster the culture hero is always present; his seemingly asocial actions continue to keep our world lively and to give it the flexibility to endure…. I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very assumptions that cultures are based on.” [33]
We find a similarly paradoxical duality of order and chaos dancing in space/time within the coherent wholeness of the human mind—and this is true not only on the physical level, as we have seen, but in the mental realm as well. There are those who hold that conscious logical reasoning is the only respectable mental activity, and others who see reason as limited and repressive, because reductive. All creatures can be seen to reason on some level; reason evolves in its increasing complexity from a basis of simple reaction to reality. A degree of reductivism is essential to it, since it is impossible to take all the factors relevant to a situation into conscious consideration at the same time. Beyond this, it is the case that a living orderliness—an orderliness in which flexibility and spontaneity are possible—cannot be reached by reason alone, by a reductive A+B+C process; intuition must play its part.
The word intuition comes from Latin verbs meaning to contemplate, to consider. It involves bringing all of one’s faculties to bear on something. Today we begin to recognize the fact that intuition can be far more efficient than reason, even though less logically defensible. Intuition arises, somehow, from all one’s inner stores of memory (the “prepared mind”) and what we call the unconscious, sometimes aided by the mute, often only subconsciously experienced testimony of the senses in the moment. Since the Enlightenment, intuition has been suspect, associated with clairvoyance, second sight, and premonition, and until recently was relegated to the domain of women, those notoriously “unreasonable” people. It is sometimes said that artists tend to be androgynous, that a female artist “thinks like a man,” or that a male artist is “as intuitive and sensitive as a woman,” although probably neither intuition and sensitivity nor the capacity for reason has much to do with gender. Intuition has been scorned in the service of certainty—and perhaps to shore up men’s wishful image of themselves as unfailingly rational beings.
By one often-quoted estimate, the conscious mind processes about 40 environmental stimuli per second, while in the same moment the unconscious mind receives 20 million such stimuli. Please note: that is forty, as compared to twenty million.[34] Clearly, we know a great deal that we don’t know we know. In the dreams of sleep we have access to an astonishingly various and detailed visual and aural archive of locations, personalities, and situations, all apparently stored away in the unconscious mind.
Intuition now begins to be respectable again: brilliant men can be admired for using it as a tool. In 1975, a young Japanese physicist named Yoshiki Kuramoto was intrigued by the phenomenon of self-organization in complex systems over time. He wanted to find a way to give it a grounding in mathematics, and he succeeded, in a “dazzling display of ingenuity.”[35]
Kuramoto did not use the computer to provide hints about how the system would behave. He was guided by intuition alone.…
In a daring mathematical leap, [he] sought only those solutions of his equations that matched his intuition.… He knew what he was looking for, and he was going to ignore everything else. It was a bold way to reason, because if the truth lay elsewhere, he would miss it.
…This was a stunning achievement. Here was a system of infinitely many differential equations, all nonlinear, all coupled together. Such things are hardly ever solvable. The few exceptions that do exist are like diamonds, prized for their beauty, and for the rare glimpse they provide of the inner facets of nonlinearity.
[Steven Strogatz, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, p 55 & 58]
This mental process, it should be noted, is what all artists use as they work. Within the framework of left-brain/right-brain theory, it involves the ability to use both hemispheres of the brain in mutual support, switching from one to the other or, more commonly, using both together in a co-operative whole-brain activity. Our brains are designed to work this way.
Intuition appears to be essential to the study of complex systems beyond the reach of human reason, as we saw earlier in the case of the attempted digitalization of the performance patterns of a Viennese master pianist. [36] The scientist had to trust his intuition in choosing which bits, in the mountains of data generated by his computers, would lead him in the right direction. The project’s purpose: to design a computer program capable of producing music that is sufficiently subtle, variable, and complex to trick us into believing that the performer is a gifted human being—but of course that is only the short term goal. We can presume that the justification for the funding of such research is the perennial hope of a mechanical imitation of human brain function, inwardly consistent and nuanced enough to fool ourselves—a machine that can do all that we can do.
We have long been hypnotized by the belief that everything worth studying can be measured and controlled and explained by “scientific” method, and that discoveries are arrived at by logical reasoning. However, it is now generally recognized that most great scientific breakthroughs occur to people using the full human mental capacity all at once, with intuition, the subconscious, and dreams often playing a generative role.[37] Those who confine themselves, or are confined by prejudice or misinformation to reductive mechanistic thinking are as limited as are those depending only on intuition and “feelings.” In using his full human equipment to solve his seemingly impossible problem, Dr. Kuramoto was working organically rather than mechanistically, working as a human being rather than as some kind of programmed machine.
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A fascinating aspect of the underlying order of the universe was studied by the twentieth century British/Canadian mathematician Donald Coxeter throughout his long life. He invented a system of symbols for the representation of absolutely regular, multi-laterally symmetrical and multi-sided three-dimensional objects—that is, polytopes in multiple (toward n) dimensions. This allowed the algebraic description of theoretical realities—of regular but hugely complex geometric objects in any number of dimensions.
For decades Coxeter and his work were judged to be peripheral to the forward-leading path of mathematical thought. In his era, geometry was out of fashion and favor; algebra, being more abstract, was seen as more intellectually rigorous, and as therefore more likely to produce new insights.[38] However Coxeter, using classical geometry, made discoveries which later turned out to be essential in fields such as data mining, micro-technology, superstring theory, and e-commerce.[39] Ravi Vakil, an algebraic geometer then at Stanford University, observed in an interview:
It’s always amazing when Coxeter groups turn up.[[40]] Someone gives a lecture, on something seemingly unrelated, and then the name ‘Coxeter’ comes up and there is a sort of shiver through the audience. ‘Ah! Here they are again!’ And why are they here? I have no meta-reason, no quasi-philosophical or religious reason as to why they come up. But there’s got to be some reason why they underlie so many different structures. This powerful idea of symmetry, this aesthetically beautiful and extremely simple structure, for some reason underlies the world and so much of mathematics.”
[quoted by Siobhan Roberts, in King of Infinite Space, p 136]
There are various kinds of mathematical symmetry. Mirror symmetry is the most obvious, but there is also rotational symmetry (as in a pinwheel) and what are called translational symmetries (as in an evenly spaced repetition of railroad ties, or a line of evenly spaced columns). “Multi-lateral” symmetries like those studied by Dr. Coxeter are made up of multiple bi-lateral symmetries, which can be algebraically extended into any number of dimensions.
An intermediate kind of symmetry, familiar and mathematically comprehensible though not mirror symmetry, can be diagrammed as a balance bar with the fulcrum at some position other than the center; a heavy adult sits on one end of the plank, a short distance from the support, while a small child sits far out on the other end—and they balance one another, the plank remains level. (In bilateral symmetry, obviously, the support is set exactly at the center, the two people are of equal weight.) In both cases, it takes a slight push to make the system move.
A much less obvious but still geometrically accessible kind of harmony can be achieved by using “Golden,” or phi, proportions. This is the “dynamic symmetry” of the five-pointed star, or the Nautilus shell, or the double helix of the DNA molecule. Like most of these, Duchamp’s Readymades are both bilaterally and dynamically symmetrical. All such symmetries can be expressed mathematically: they occur in various regular permutations accessible to the conscious mind. None of them is “occult.”
A dictionary first published in 1929 describes symmetry as, first, a “right proportion of parts, beauty resulting from it, congruity, harmony.”[41] This broad definition, usually ignored in our current focus on the mathematically explicable, can apply to harmonies in which the parts constituting the whole may differ from one another in a multitude of different ways. In these “occult” symmetries the relationships are far too subtle and complex for measurement or even an attempt at full description; they can be achieved and recognized only by nonverbal thinking, by insight.
In chapter 4, “Symmetry & Concinnity,” I claimed that the greatest works of art of every kind are instances of occult (that is, hidden, inexplicable) symmetry, as the beating of the human heart and the workings of the human brain appear to be. I quoted the 17th century essayist Sir William Temple, who wrote wonderingly of patterns in Chinese gardens, textiles, and porcelains, “figures where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed….” He observed that “in regular [geometric] figures, ‘tis hard to make any great and remarkable faults.”[42] But occult symmetry cannot be imagined in advance: it can only be arrived at, and then experienced. In Sir William’s opinion the ability to produce it depends on “extraordinary dispositions of nature [that is, “gifts” in the maker, or “happy” accident]…or some great race of fancy or judgement in the contrivance.”
An inexplicable or occult symmetry is a condition of interaction among few or many unlike or similar entities, in which color and size, contrast and texture, shape and detail, opacity and transparency, tone and silence, action and stillness, pitch and timing or emphasis, and so on and on, react and interact; all contribute their attributes and characteristics, all play their parts. Further, when a coherent element of disturbance is somehow incorporated, the statically balanced whole may arrive at an unaccountable resonance and vivacity. Sir William’s “great race of fancy or judgement” is gradually flowering intuition; it is insight as to where to put what to achieve a harmony and balance, a “rightness” which is at the same time both thrilling and mysterious.[43] The ability to find it in a particular instance, here and now—whether in painting or music, literature or drama—is the artist’s essential gift. But as we all know it can also be found, fleetingly, in human activity in everyday life, in a word spoken at the right time, in the setting of a table, in the outcome of a legal proceeding, or in an arrangement of wild flowers. When it happens we rejoice. As in the case of equations: there is an infinity of possible linear equations, and an even greater infinity of nonlinear equations.[44] Such a statement does not bring us anywhere near the whole distance to what is, or could be, but only to the outer margins of the imaginable.
The great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky mused, in an interview:
The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
[Andrei Tarkovsky, interviewed in the documentary “A Poet of the Cinema,” found on a DVD of his film, Andrei Rublev.]
I believe that the words “perfect,” and “harmony” are misleading here, but Mr. Tarkovsky, or his translator, uses the English words available. The world is, and has always been, well-designed to the point of glory, rendering an observer awe-stricken, whether as scientist or as artist or naturalist —but we do not know its boundaries in space or in time, and so can experience only the portion of it in front of us. If we could comprehend the full “flowing wholeness” of it we might be capable of appreciating something of its full magnificence. Art must have boundaries, as Henry James pointed out.[45] Man looks for order and harmony, but to be coherent with the Great Harmony, the Logos, a perfectly balanced and therefore static harmony must to some degree and in some way be unsettled. I imagine that in the process of making a film there are so many uncontrollable events to be managed, and so many varying personalities and budget concerns, that the element of disorder is always given in abundance, and not something a director must take pains to include. A great director, with the help of his team of aesthetic and technical masters, manipulates the elements of the film in the effort to get to < >´: certain contingencies retained in the editing can give an undefinable life to the overall order, as in any work of art. Very occasionally one sees a film that has achieved this level of quality, where there is nothing extraneous, but the work achieves a living wholeness; it is a kind of miracle, like any great work of art. It is a “Made Being.”[46]
References to such “Quality” by whatever inadequate name can be found wherever we turn: in a magazine for wine lovers the editor writes of the term “natural” as it is applied to wine,
Can you taste “natural” in a wine? Actually, you can….
Nobody can tell you a wine is “natural” except you yourself. And that’s what makes this so interesting. You can sense it. I would describe “naturalness” in a wine as having a certain effortlessness and buoyancy. You have the feeling that the wine somehow came into being as a complete creation. It’s impossible, of course, but that’s the sensation. Now, just how the grower arrives at this highly desirable effect is another matter.
[Matt Kramer, editorial in Wine Spectator magazine, 11/30/2010, p 36]
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When reconstituting a jigsaw puzzle out of a box of loose pieces, we are guided to the correct re-arrangement of those pieces by the image printed on the box and identically on the puzzle pieces. Once the pieces are fitted together in their proper arrangement or order, the whole has been remade.[47]
Let us imagine an abstract painting, like the one illustrated here, made up of irregularly shaped and clearly defined areas of bright color. If we cut out and separate all the pieces, and then paint them all in monochrome—white, for example—could the whole be re-assembled in a new way? That is, could these pieces be composed in some other arrangement and yet arrive at a rectangular entity? If the cut pieces were all square or rectangular, then yes—but they are not. [48] (A mathematician could perhaps tell us whether I’m correct in assuming that a different arrangement arriving at the same rectangle would be impossible.) It’s also clear that if any one of these shapes were altered, its functional value as part of the whole which is the rectangle would be destroyed. (Is this one reason why a finished painting has an aura of inevitability, of rightness?) Cézanne said, "There must not be a single link loose, not a crevice through which the emotion, the light, the truth can escape."[49]
