Chapter 2:     < >´

 •The instinct for imperfection. • Order as we require it. • “Dynamic balance” in the universe. • Heraclitus and the Logos. • A “Theory of Everything.” • Universal order and the arts. • Relations among things, from the universal to the quantum level. • Simplistic stories can be told in symbols. Example of two apples. • Logos in West and East. • Names as diminishment, as inadequate, as essential. • The “dance” of atoms in the brain. • The symbol < >’: a rationale for it. • Each work its own order, and not a mirroring.

When the Prince of Wales is dressed by his valet, no detail is forgotten. His suit is the finest, the most perfectly cut, that the tailors of Saville Row can provide. His linens are exquisite, his shoes are supple and glossy, his hair is carefully brushed. The valet has forgotten nothing. When the daily ritual is complete, the Prince stands before the pier glass and sees that all is perfection. He takes hold of the knot of his tie and moves it slightly to one side.
 
     The image which the newly-dressed prince sees in the mirror is one of harmony, quality, and perfection. To bring himself into the real world, he moves the knot of his tie very slightly to one side.
     Biological life itself requires an underlying order—its chemical ingredients in certain quantities and in certain relationships to one another—and then a spark…of what? Solar energy is the current choice of scientific theorists, but no one knows the real answer. We can manipulate living cells in many different ways: we cannot make one.
     Everything which lives, and every object or occurrence which is Art, manifests an intrinsic and individual order—that order being but one of an infinity of possible orders in which all the parts are in a state of more or less harmonious balance. For a creature or plant or work of art to “live,” this inherent balance must at the same time exist at a mysterious point of potential or immanent imbalance—poised at some kind of imagined boundary between order and chaos. Consciousness of such enlivened harmony is probably experienced, even if only rarely, by all human beings. At moments of full awareness we may suddenly and rapturously “see” it, and may remark on it, but most of the time we ignore it or forget about it. It appears to have been valued since the earliest days of our existence as a species—its liveliness is clearly evident in the vivid and subtle drawings of animals at Lascaux and other ancient sites. Today, in the early twenty-first century, because of our increasing separation from the natural world (the world of living creatures and landscapes, of the patterns of sun and stars and weather, in all their variety and complexity) the experience is more than ever lost to us, to our great detriment. And whether the artist-discovered form of its expression is simple or complex, the search for it, except in moments of inexplicable grace or luck, is a heroic journey.
 
     The English language has no word for the lively intrinsic order, the dynamic balance among parts, that I'm talking about here. It consists perhaps in mysterious but intensely experienced points of being in the ever-moving flux of the universe, the vast and profound orderliness through time of which we are now and then aware. The ancient world referred to that orderliness with the Greek word Logos, which signified and encompassed relation, pattern, reason, meaning, thought…and also word.[1] Logos was an immanent rationality; it could be perceived in the world. The term appears in Indian, Egyptian and Hebrew systems of thought as well as in the Greek.[2] The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was born more than 500 years before Christ, called this great order “the Divine Logos”; it was a fundamental conception in his profound and perennially influential philosophy.[3] For Heraclitus, Logos was the reasoning, the thinking, of God, as evident in the natural world, which is constantly changing within the dictates of its fundamental laws, producing the varying harmonies and unities and disruptions found within the diversity and multiplicity of Nature. Today it might be described as a universally active design, operating in the three dimensions of which we are most commonly aware, and simultaneously in a fourth—that of time. A beautifully simple and elegant mathematical formula for the Logos would constitute the “Theory of Everything” sought by physicists in the twentieth century.
 
Heraclitus, in trying to account for the aesthetic (that is, literally, sensed) order of the visible universe, “discerned at work…Logos…not above the world or prior to it, but in the world and inseparable from it…[R]elation…not speech or word…it gives order and regularity to things and makes the system rational.” [emphasis mine]
                                                                               [Encyclopedia Britannic, Vol. 17, p 870b]
 
     In his own time Heraclitus was nicknamed “the Riddler,” and “the Obscure.” He wrote, “Man is not rational; there is rationality only in what encompasses him.” This is the fundamental creative rationality of God, not what we today revere as “reason,” which is something human and verbal or mathematical.
 
Men have no comprehension of the Logos, as I've described it, just as much after they hear about it as they did before they heard about it. Even though all things occur according to the Logos, men seem to have no experience [of it] whatsoever…how the Logos applies to each thing, and what it is.
                [Heraclitus, Fragment 1, quoted by Sextus Empiricus (fl.c. 200 AD) in Against the Mathematicians, trans. Richard Hooker 1995]
     Today Heraclitus is sometimes said to be the founder of metaphysics —metaphysics being defined as “the science of things transcending what is physical or natural,” or as “abstract theory or talk with no basis in reality.”[4] Certainly order in this our universe is not any physical thing; it is coherent relation, between and among things, and within each of them—between the materials used in a building’s construction and its height, as well as between it and the building next to it and the park at the corner, or between the degree of sourness in different species of wild berries and the winter survival of birds.[5] Material things are related in an infinity of ways, far beyond our capacity to list or definitively describe even those we can discern. Every single one of their characteristics, probably down to the quantum level, is involved in such relationship.
     It is important to note that the relations among things, and among the parts of things—the distance between them, their comparative heights, sizes, scents, sounds, colors, textures, tonalities—are unquestionably as real as the things themselves. They are not there because we imagine them and name them in some kind of ecstatic fog. They are, just as much as material things are. The metaphysical part comes when we attribute Logos, the creative reasoning or thought presumed to cause such relationships, to some kind of imagined First Mover, or Creator God. Science will never do this, of course. Science says what it says about Nature most satisfactorily in mathematical symbols, which are so much more precise (and so much more limited) than are words. But as the great twentieth century quantum physicist Niels Bohr pointed out,
 
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. 
                [Niels Bohr, quoted in J.S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, p 142]
 
In this book, however, I am concerned with how things are, in both Nature and the Arts.
 
     The twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger reminds us that the fundamental mystery is that anything is, that there is Being at all. It is easy to see that as soon as there is more than one thing, there is relationship, and that there are relationships among and between the parts and qualities of even the most solitary object.
     Let us look at two ripe apples of similar size, placed on a level surface, a table. They are never exactly alike; the relationships between and within them are too numerous to list, and many are too subtle to see. But if we represent the apples to ourselves as two imaginary geometric spheres, alike in every respect, we can say confidently that there are two of them, and represent that fact by a mathematical formula: 1+1= 2. The more the statement is reduced to an abstraction, the more uncontestably factual we believe it to be. We like such a fine simple statement of fact; we feel secure in it, even though there is nothing of the color, shape, freshness, aliveness of an apple in it, let alone the light falling across these two remarkable and beautiful objects, their shadows on the table, the air around them, their scent and taste, the fact that they can feed our bodies as well as our minds, their connection and symbolic associations in memory, and so on and on.
 
Language has borders that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvelously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.”
[Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p xiv]
 
      The Logos—if understood as an intrinsic and underlying order, inseparable from the world and perceptible to the observing consciousness—is that which science seeks and great art embodies. To say that, in this meaning of the word, Christ is the Logos of the world (as St. John did in the Fourth Gospel: “And the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth”) is a profoundly mysterious and at the same time perhaps instinctively comprehended statement. It connects Christianity not only with Greek philosophy but with ancient, determinedly non-dualistic views of existence essential in Hinduism and Buddhism—views with which it is likely that interested people living along the great trade routes east of the Mediterranean sea at the time of Jesus were to some degree familiar.
     Full comprehension of the original Greek meaning of Logos could help us to account for some of our own experiences of nature and art; I hope to make this clearer as we proceed. However it symbolizes a reality which language, limited as it is, can only point toward.
 
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     The working artist—whether architect, composer or choreographer—senses a seeming infinity of possible orders arising from a mysterious and apparently inexhaustible source. The problem is to capture one of them in a form available to the human senses—that is, in an aesthetic form—using the materials at hand (paint and canvas, stone, the sounds of musical instruments, the human body, trees and landforms, the human voice), and within the constraints of the project. What is ardently desired is the form particular to this set of circumstances, these materials, this time, the receptive consciousness of this human being. There is sometimes a sense that the unknown set of relationships, the new form, already exists somewhere…but where? and how to get at it? When the “right” form has at last been found it feels inevitable, the only possible satisfactory harmony of those particular elements. It feels like—truth. Scientists describe their most profound insights in the same wondering way. All this is related to the Logos as Heraclitus understood it, the new form being somehow a new instance of, the new scientific discovery a new insight into, that vast system of relationship.
     The ancient Chinese concept of the Tao, the force animating all that exists, includes both source and form. A scholar tells us,
 
The word Tao, after which this body of belief is named, means literally the way, or the path; figuratively it can mean basic way of life or underlying order of nature. The Taoist use of the term emphasized the latter….  [emphasis mine]
   …The Lao Tzu pictures the tao, the way, as a great inexhaustible womb, the origin of all individual beings and experiences.                    
[Edward H. Schafer, Ancient China, p 62]
 
Lao Tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching:
 
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!… Oh, hidden deep but ever present! I do not know from whence it comes….
 [Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Four, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English]
 
…[I]t is intangible and elusive, and yet within is image…it is elusive and intangible, and yet within is form…it is dim and dark, and yet within is essence.
                                                                                                                                                               [Ibid. Twenty-One]
 
     Heraclitus understood Logos to be the underlying form, or relation among parts, of all that is, and the Tao was understood to be both underlying form and the infinite source of all forms. Both are “intangible and elusive,” and yet always available to the senses, that is to aesthetic experience. Again, it is a matter not of any thing, but of relationships among things and the parts of things, those relationships being somehow powerfully meaningful to us, and at the same time necessarily specific to the things in themselves. Nor is the source of this a place, no matter how mysterious. To call it a “womb” or a “source” or a “well” is simply metaphor; in order to communicate with one another about it we have to call it something, and there is no name. “I do not know from whence it comes,” says the Tao Te Ching.
 
            Passersby may stop for music and good food
            But a description of the Tao
            Seems without substance or flavor.
            It cannot be seen, it cannot be heard,
            And yet it cannot be exhausted.
                                               [Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Thirty-five]
 
     Tao is generally translated as “the Way,” at first seeming to imply a path, a road, which if taken will lead in a specific direction, toward some destination. But it is a “way” in the sense of a way of being, the character of your, or my, or a tree’s existence in the present moment, in relation to the world and universe as a whole, rather than a path to any future goal. At the same time, the way in which I am now (which includes my actions) is in fact the path to the future, since it causes the future. (Heraclitus noted the connection between character and destiny.) In the Old Testament, God speaks from within the Burning Bush, “I Am That I Am.” To the degree that I am my own essential self I am in harmony with all that is.
      Such understanding is implicit in one of the four fundamental doctrines of what is known as the “Perennial Philosophy” common to all the great religions. It is summarized by Aldous Huxley in his introduction to a 1944 translation of the great Vedantic text The Baghavad Gita, or Song of God:
 
[M]an possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
   [The Song of God: Bhagavad Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood]
                 
In traditional Hindu philosophy the ultimate being or world soul (which is, importantly, both immanent and transcendent) is called Brahman.[6] In Buddhism,
 
The powerful Buddhist idea of tathata, suchness…the irreducible, indescribable nature of an object, a sound, a person. Aesthetic and intellectual grammars break down under the impact of this perception…a recognition of the fullness and sufficiency of each thing in itself.
 [Arthur Lipsey, An Art of our Own: The Spiritual in Art, p 12]
 
     This kind of talk can of course be labelled (and thus instantly dismissed) as being outdated, Phenomenology; the Ding an sich (thing in itself, thing as such) of Kant, a conception now very much out of fashion. But this “suchness” is not any idea or system of ideas—it is the “irreducible, indescribable nature” of the thing itself, experienced when for some reason we momentarily escape our constant mental verbal commentary and the distortions of the ego, and see—in Nature or in Art—a fundamental and essential lively harmony between all parts and qualities of something, and between them and the entirety. These relationships cannot possibly be identified and listed—they are infinite in number and in subtlety. They constitute “Being,” which is “the defining subject of metaphysical enquiry.”[7]
     To observe that this phenomenon has been recognized in all parts of the world and in all times is simply to acknowledge its ubiquity in human experience. If the experience of it is fundamental, it will necessarily be found in many traditions, and there will be many ways of talking about it. At the same time, when an idea becomes too familiar, and has been labelled and set aside (as for example Platonism, or pantheism, or phenomenology have been), or if it appears to be exotic and strange (with a strange Eastern or Greek name), it may need to be stated in a new way in order for us to repossess it or even to recognize it as part of our own experience. Here it is described as a “dance” by Richard Feynmann:
 
A scientific article…might say something like this: “The radioactive phosphorous content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks.” Now, what does that mean? It means that the phosphorous in the brain of a rat (and also mine and yours) is not the same phosphorous that was there two weeks ago. All the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced, and the ones that were there before have gone away. So what is this mind? What are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! Which now can remember what was going on in your mind a year ago—a mind that was long ago replaced. When we discover how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms, we 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. [emphasis mine]
                     [Richard Feynman, quoted in Harper’s Magazine, August 1999, p 20]
 
Calling it a dance is poetic, a metaphor found in metaphysical writings both ancient and contemporary. The physicist uses this metaphor as the best way to describe a fact of his world. It is a moving, living, changeable pattern, and at the same time consistent, “the same dance” of individuality. He could equally well have called it Logos.
 
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     There are problems with naming fundamental concepts —as the Tao Te Ching says, “Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop.”[8] To name something is to limit it, to tame it, to feel that we own and understand it and thus can ignore it. I have read that Argentinian gauchos give names to captured wild horses only when they have been “broken” to saddle and rider. In Judaism, it is understood that to name is to diminish, and therefore aliases are substituted for the un-nameable names of God. There is always the danger—in fact the likelihood— that the word which is the symbol for a given phenomenon will be misused, or become stale by overuse, and so lose its clear connection with that which it is intended to bring to mind, like any other stale metaphor. This is especially true of words for vastly important entities that have no definitive physical form—words like “God” and “Love,” “Beauty” and “Truth.”
 
     My subject here, the observed phenomenon—an inherent, and remarkable, harmonious organization or ordered relationship among parts of living organisms or rocks or trees or works of art, combined with the essential imbalance that gives life—must have a name if I am to discuss it. Yet I find no possible name that is not already overloaded with associations and implied qualifiers, or wrongly used. As I have said, there is no word in English which expresses my meaning exactly, any more than there is an English word meaning Logos. To use a group of words again and again would be impossibly clumsy. On the other hand, to invent a word is to risk some sort of onomatopoeic association, or a meaning in a language unknown to me. We name things to identify and control them: this thing cannot be precisely identified, and it cannot be controlled.
 
As soon as I have expressed something in a word, an alienation takes place, and the full experience has already been substituted for by the word. The full experience actually exists only up to the moment when it is expressed in language. This general process of cerebration is more widespread and intense in modern culture than it probably was at any time before in history…words more and more take the place of experience…
             [Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, p 109]
 
     I will use an abstract visual symbol—a kind of ideogram—to represent the phenomenon which is my subject, rather than a word made of letters. It has to be a symbol that has no specifically associated meaning as yet, but should be made of components available in standard typefaces.
     To indicate inherent harmonious order I have chosen < >. It is bilaterally symmetrical in two directions, and bilateral symmetry is a simple and obvious kind of order. It is open at top and bottom, which can suggest mutability, an important characteristic of the order I mean to discuss. In the conventional meaning of the two symbols (lesser than, greater than) they cancel each other out, but they nevertheless together constitute a frame or structure; the space between them is neither greater nor lesser than whatever that space holds.
     To signify the charge of unbalance necessary to give life to this essential order I have decided on ′.
     The complete symbol, then, is < >´.
     In a sense, < >´ is a word, just as “cat” is—it is a group of three abstract symbols which together, in sequence, represent something mysterious, complex, alive.  < >´ represents enlivened harmony, essence of being, specific expression of the sensed living order underlying the universe. It is a way of representing something which cannot be ensnared by any word or group of words. I believe that it is vitally important to represent this phenomenon so that we will remember and consider it, respect it, and cherish it as fundamental to our life.
 
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     It is usual to think of Order as monolithic—as an overall design into which everything fits. Scientists talk of their search for the Final Theory, the imagined formula which will allow them to organize all the known facts about the Universe into one logical system. But the experience of the artist (be she or he a photographer, a composer, a novelist) is that each work of art is a world unto itself, and its singular harmonious order is specific to itself. It is one order among an infinity of possible orders. Discovering a new order is what “creativity” is, and it is still an absolutely mysterious process, the search attended by a sensation of psychic peril and/or of tremendous excitement. And how simple are the orders that we make (our arts, politics, systems of justice, languages, organizations) compared with the order inherent in a tract of woodland, or in Earth's weather systems!  All we can do is to study such orders, in hope of understanding them, which is what science does. Perhaps there is a single underlying Order which unites all the smaller orders that we have been able to discover, but we are far from knowing what it is.
     If in the Arts there are endless possible orders, just as there are in Nature, where do they come from? Where can others be found? The image that comes to mind is of an infinite reservoir, a continuously generating source. The route to this reservoir or source is unmarked and unknown. The artist seeks access, desiring to find a harmonious relationship specific to the current condition and constraints. Each work of art is a world-unto-itself—not, in essence, an imitation of the physical world or any part of it, any more than is a lizard, a rosebud, or a galaxy. The lizard, the galaxy, and Mozart's Symphonia Concertante are all manifestations or versions of the infinitely variable  < >´.
 
     < >´ is the subject of this book. Let us begin with basics: Life, and Death.
 
[1] It is crucial, in the realm of this book, to note that “word” is the last in the parade of realities originally indicated by the ancient Greek word Logos. I will discuss this fact in further chapters.
[2] Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol.14 p 250c.
[3] One contemporary tribute to his importance: “Heraclitus, along with Parmenides, is probably the most significant philosopher of ancient Greece until Socrates and Plato; in fact, Heraclitus's philosophy is perhaps even more fundamental in the formation of the European mind than any other thinker in European history, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle....The ideas that the universe is in constant change and that there is an underlying order or reason to this change—the Logos—form the essential foundation of the European world view. Every time you walk into a science, economics, or political science course, to some extent everything you do in that class originates with Heraclitus's speculations on change and the Logos.” [http://www.spaceandmotion.com/philosophy-metaphysics-heraclitus.htm 3/19/ 2010]
[4]  The Oxford Dictionary of American English.
[5]  The fruits of different species ripen at different times, but they also vary in sweetness. Birds eat the sweetest berries first. By winter’s end the sourest, like sumac, remain to prevent starvation.
[6] Anthony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, p 49.
[7] Anthony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy. p 40.
[8] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (32), trans. Gia Fu-feng and Jane English.