Chapter 20:  Presence, and  Joy

• Language and our perception of reality. • Yuri Orlov: “[O]ur scientific theories are about our own logically organized descriptions.” •  Noncomputable functions at the quantum level of accuracy. • What we can say about Nature is not Nature. • Duchamp and “bringing the intellect back into art. • The “language of presence.” • Truth and insight, in a burst of gamma rhythm in the brain. •  Joy in Nature and joy in Art. Our truncated, and thus enfeebled and distorted, understanding of Logos. • Logos in early Christianity. Buddhist Emptiness. • Heraclitus and the thought underlying, and intrinsic to, the thing made. • Anaxagoras, Parmenides, and the division between reality and Nous—Mind, intelligence. Plato and the Ideal Forms. • Semiotics, the study of signs. • The more an idea is removed from the physical the more respectable it is. • Full intellectual thought is Whole-brain thought. • Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology in Christianity. • Division between mind and matter never entirely comfortable. Sol Le Witt and Alexander Calder. • Pope Benedict XVI on the Logos in contemporary Christianity • Nicholas Gier: two kinds of human reasoning. Aesthetic order. • Human laws and the Logos. Why “Word” as metaphor for the thought of God? • Freud and Jung: Eros and logos. • “What is it that works of art do for us?” • Leonard Bernstein on The Word, and “ambiguity” in music. • The moods inherent in musical tones. • Joseph Campbell and the sanctity of the real. • Martin Heidegger: things seen as “bearers” of their characteristics, although the core and its attributes occur together. • Heidegger on the translation of Greek words into Latin. • The work of art exists in the vast territory of the non-verbal. • The wonder of contemporary art in which almost anything is allowed. • Hans Arp, Dada, and the “natural and unreasonable order” of Nature. • Order is essential to life, but it is not life. Logos, and the way in which we and the world are.

 

There is no quantum world. There is only abstract quantum mechanical description. 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 practice a mysticism which avoids all rigid formulations of both nature and God has usually been favorable to the growth of science. For its attitude is empirical, emphasizing concrete experience rather than theoretical construction and belief. It is unfavorable to science to the degree that science confuses abstract models with nature….
 [Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman, p 85]
 
Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing.... Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity.…[I]f I’m carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday’s, if I think [verbally] while I’m painting, if I meddle, then woosh!, everything goes to pieces.
                  [Paul Cézanne, quoted in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906)]
 
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
       [Paul Cézanne]
 
[The] self-surrender so familiar to creative minds is nearly always hard to achieve. It calls for a purity of motive that is rarely sustained except through dedication and discipline.
                              [Martin Heidegger, ”The Origin of the Work of Art,” p 647]
 
 
     Once again: Science, “what we can say about Nature” is said in symbols, numbers, and words, set forth in various kinds of “rigid formulations.” Science builds mental models made of symbols, and it is easy to confuse the models with the being of Nature. At the same time, an experience of a fragment or moment of Nature’s encompassing and ever-changing reality (which of course includes human beings and human actions)—or of a work of art—can now and then seem to be a wordless answer to an unasked, or continually asked, question, can seem to provide a wordless insight, however brief, into some kind of ultimate truth. Why is that? Why did Cézanne judge his paintings by their coherence, or lack of it, with “God made objects”?
     Questions as to the influence of the structures of language and logic on our perception of reality arise in relation to apparently mysterious characteristics of the quantum level of existence, characteristics demonstrated and accepted since the early twentieth century. Professor Yuri Orlov observed, in the paper he presented at the Nordic Symposium on Basic Problems in Quantum Physics in 1997 (quoted on page 338),
 
[A] conceptual departure from classical mechanics follows from a realistic look at scientific theory. We have nothing to say about undescribed matter besides the fact that it exists; our scientific theories are about our own logically organized descriptions of observed and nonobserved subjects, and our predictions about future observations of the latter.
                                       [Yuri Orlov, ”Peculiarities of Quantum Mechanics, Origins and Meaning,” 1997, p 23]
 
And in his conclusion to that paper:
 
The mysteries of quantum mechanics can be explained if we recognize that at the quantum level of accuracy we enter a world in which logic and language become parts of nature, and where we have to deal with noncomputable functions.
  [Ibid. p 50]
 
We enter a world where everything changes, and things happen all together, unpredictably, not one by one and not in orderly sequence—that is, the Real World. In this world, things in the totality of their attributes and their actions, and in their relation to one another both as seemingly static entities and in movement through space and time, can be approached only novelistically; that is, creatively. It seems to me that science is obliged to recognize this at the quantum level because so little can yet be said about a subatomic particle, other than that it is a particle, that it does or does not carry an electric (positive or negative) charge, and that it moves in a certain way. The fact that these aspects of it occur simultaneously, and that together they are what it is, and that measuring one precludes exact knowledge of the other, cannot be ignored. But every entity in the universe is like that, although most embody an infinity of aspects. In every case, we can talk about its attributes only in a sequence of statements through time, not altogether at once.
     That what we can say about Nature is not Nature is obvious, but we forget this. Theology is merely what we can say about God, or fancy that we can, and Musicology is what we can say about Music, and so on. When Christian theology speaks of Nature, it is generally to argue about such things as whether God can be said to be immanent in Nature (Pantheism) or transcendent beyond it (Classical Theism), or both immanent and transcendent (Panentheism). Religious institutions of every kind seem to give very little beyond lip service to our responsibility for Nature. We habitually accept whatever Science may say about it—its “logically organized descriptions” of it—as truth, because we believe they can be proven true or false. Physicists themselves sometimes express wonder that mathematical logic can take us as far in our exploration of reality as it appears to do.[1] But as Dr. Orlov points out, at the quantum level (the most fundamental level recognized by Science thus far) “we have to deal with noncomputable functions.”[2] 
 
     Creative thought, by contrast, does not use words or symbols until late in the game: we use them to make such thought communicable to ourselves and others. But words are inadequate, equations limited, written statements rudimentary and—unless poetic—static. According to Plato, “No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form which is unalterable—which must be the case with what is expressed in written symbols.”[3] More than a century earlier, Heraclitus had pointed out that everything is continually in flux, that is, changing, and through the years many philosophers have warned against what the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley called the “mist and veil of words.”[4] Although most philosophical thought in the 20th century was concerned with linguistics in one way or another, that focus on the peculiarities and limitations of language has provided no escape from them. Yet we are more than ever mesmerized and distracted by words and numbers, whether written or spoken, and look to them as the source of truth and meaning.
     Artists have objected to this rule of words again and again. Marcel Duchamp loved dictionaries and word play in both French and English and back and forth between them—puns, double entendres, funny stories—but his friend and biographer Calvin Tomkins tells us that, though broadly well-read, he was “not much drawn to books”:
 
[O]ver the years he has come to the conclusion that words, spoken or written, are hopelessly inadequate as a means of communication. “As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted,” he has observed. “Language…I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it.…[O]nly a sentence like ‘the coffee is black’ has any meaning—only the fact directly perceived by the senses. The minute you get beyond that, into abstractions, you’re lost.”.…(“Words get their real meaning  and place in poetry,” he has said.)
                  [Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant Garde, p 31]
 
When Duchamp stated, as he repeatedly did, that he wanted to bring the intellect back into art, it is thus likely that he meant something other than thoughts expressible in “words and sentences.” I imagine that by intellect he meant whole mind.
     Here is an exchange between a director of theatre—whose work is in the actual physical presentation of that art within the dimension of time—and a critic, whose medium is words. The critic has complained that the director, in his productions of Shakespeare, sometimes makes free with the order of the received verbal text, cutting and pasting passages in a kind of collage in order to reveal new resonances within it. The critic considers this disrespectful of the sacred texts, which are to him, he says, “what the Bible is to committed Christians.” (Some critics see all art as “texts” standing in need of analysis and interpretation.) The director responds: “I think there is a context here that you are missing, or you are not accepting. I’m saying that the language of the theatre goes far beyond Shakespeare’s language. It’s a language of presence, of actors in time and space.”[5] Many kinds of thought are foundational to that theatrical “language of presence”—experienced in the intricately complex patterns of visual, aural, physical, kinetic and verbal relationship within it. Together they constitute the full logos of the work of art in its wholeness. Everyone involved in a theatrical presentation contributes to its uniqueness, including the audience seated in the theatre in hope of the sublime. A dancer with the Merce Cunningham company once told me that when warming up on stage before a performance—in theatres all over the world—the dancers could often predict how the evening would go simply from the sounds made by the crowd assembling on the other side of the proscenium curtain.[6] “The language of presence” is our first and most fundamental language, subtle, nuanced, powerfully communicative, and as old as life.
 
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It was written, then, on my page of the Book of Fate, that at five in the afternoon of the twenty-eighth day of September in the year 1786, I should see Venice for the first time as I entered the lagoons from the Brenta, and, soon afterwards, set foot in this beautiful island city, this beaver-republic. So now, thank God, Venice is no longer a mere word to me, an empty name, a state of mind which has so often alarmed me who am the mortal enemy of mere words.
                 [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy]
 
     For the early Greeks as for Goethe, the essential source for what we can truthfully say about a thing is the thing itself, whether that thing is an apple tree or a painting..[7]  The studies of insight described in the previous chapter appear to demonstrate that truth is recognized “in a burst of gamma rhythm,” a blaze of the highest activity of which the brain is capable.[8] Such recognition is clearly not “logical,” in the usual sense. It can feel like, and may in fact be, the wordless recognition of an aspect of God, or of God’s work or making—and therefore of God’s “thought”—and it is accompanied by joy.
 
The Ascetics of India…designed the disciplines of yoga…precisely to take the “I” out of their thinking. They thus acquired a new vision, finding that once it was no longer regarded self-referentially, even the humblest object revealed a numinous quality.…When they have transcended the condition of normal, secular consciousness, they experience—the texts tell us—the indescribable joy and liberation of Nirvana. A Christian monk might say that they come into the presence of God.
                       [Karen Armstrong, in her Introduction to Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence, pp x - xii]
 
     It is impossible to speak a thing, whatever one’s belief system. The good kind girl speaking diamonds and rubies and her wicked sister who speaks toads and lizards are characters in a fairy tale—symbols representing the knowledge that our words to some extent represent our minds, our innate characters, and that words can be used to bless or curse. But even in ancient Egyptian and Hebraic scriptures, only gods can speak a thing into being. Words are potent symbols, long believed capable of magic, but words cannot be gods.
 
     Human beings of earlier times had less temptation to confuse reality with words—whether spoken or in-the-mind. A mile was a distance walked with one’s body, a full bucket of water had a body-known weight. The stars and planets swinging slowly in the vast patterns of their movement were seen on every clear night, piercing the dark void with light, piercing the heart. The miracle which is the real world was available in every moment; our place in Nature and our dependence within it were as present to consciousness as the experience of our individual being inside our own skin, and essential to the fullness of that experience. To observe the orderliness and the chaos of the world and of human nature, to mentally select and gather sensed features of these, and then to speak of them in symbols could be imagined as a continuity, part of one process. Today we are more and more separated from the natural world, in what is a radical distortion of our experience, and our idea of reality tends to be generated by what is said, written, or photographed, with often appalling political, environmental, and aesthetic consequences.
 
     The underlying patterns of things physically existent in the world, whether objects or systems, the logics of their being, include the position (in both space and time) and character of each thing’s constituents down to the most minute sub-atomic particles, or out to the furthest resonance of audible sound. The human maker of living art cannot be conscious of most of this on any level expressible in words; it is both achieved and known by insight, and words distract us from that process. “To say ‘green’ is to lose the grass.”
     Recorded voices of experts holding forth inside museum headphones not only distract us from the experience of looking at visual art, but strengthen the false idea that the significance of the object being looked at, the “meaning’” and “understanding” of it, lie in what can be said about it. Wall texts are better, in that they allow various faculties of the mind—both the selective fact-gathering/ organizational/verbal and the vastly inclusive sensory/insightful/non-verbal—to play their parts in the experience; the viewer looks, experiences, thinks, reads, thinks, and looks again.[9] At the opera, the translated libretto is broadcast above the stage, though in as short a form as possible. It may operate rather as a mantra does in meditation, keeping the verbal brain occupied so that we can fully focus on and be aware of the musical and visual riches of the production.[10] But in everyday life we intentionally live more and more in the style of the left hemisphere of the brain, feeling more secure where knowledge is quantifiable and expressible in words, and can be judged “right” or “wrong” for the purposes of examination. We suffer for this specialization. What is it that is lost, forgotten, and therefore unknown? That which is beyond words and therefore can be approached only by metaphor.
     The novelist, poet, and critic John Berger has written that “Works of art exist in the same sense that a current exists: it cannot exist without substances and yet it is not in itself a simple substance.”[11] This “current” is the Logos. It manifests as a pattern of relationships; “it cannot exist [for us] without substances,” without the furry brown caterpillar, or the work of art, or the Incarnation of Christ. The experience of this “presence’” may be older than consciousness; it could be said that to be fully conscious is simply to be consciously aware of it. And the Logos, whatever we may call it, is what we seek in both nature and the arts. An encounter with it, aligning us temporarily with that living, all-encompassing, all-inherent order, is accompanied by a profound and inexplicable pleasure, the joy of connection with that life —as observer or as maker, as writer or as reader, as composer or performer or listener. After Emily Bronte’s death, her sister Charlotte wrote of her,
 
The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition….
   …As far as the scenery and locality are concerned…[she] did not describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the heather, their produce. Her descriptions, then, are what they should be, and all they should be.
                       [Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell (1850) in Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, pp 13, 22]
 
Joy in nature and joy in art: such testimony arises from the same experience as that of the first century theorist currently known as Pseudo-Longinus. As we have seen, Christopher Alexander asked, in what is at the same time a statement of fact: “…[W]hy 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.”[12]
     It is possible to imagine that within the overall moving pattern of the universe in space and time—rational within the “reasoning” of the “Creator,” that is, within the Logos—there occur instances and moments in both Nature and the human-made arts when that organization, moving and changing within time, arrives at something we can see to be extraordinary, awe-inspiring, to one degree or another “sublime.” It may be that if we could take in the Whole throughout its infinity in time and space, we could see that as an entirety it has this quality—divine, since though multiple, indivisible.[13] However our capacity is very small, and we are fully awake only seldom; we recognize sublimity only occasionally and within a limited range.
     The experience is one of love, and we say so: “I love Ibsen;” “I love the way a crow trundles along.” We make and search out art in hope of it, and look for it in Nature, without knowing what it is we crave. The esteemed architect Louis Kahn wrote:
 
I felt first of all joyous. I felt that which Joy is made of, and I realized that Joy itself must have been the impelling force, that which was there before we were there, and that somehow Joy was in every ingredient of our making. When the world was an ooze without any shape or direction, there must have been this force of Joy that prevailed everywhere and that was reaching out to express. And somehow the word Joy became the most unmeasurable word. It was the essence of creativity, the force of creativity.…You cannot make a building unless you are joyously engaged.
   I would like to feel that I have not forgotten, nor have you as I speak to you, about the stream of Joy which must be felt. Otherwise, you really don’t feel anything.
                   [Louis Kahn, quoted in John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis Kahn, p 6]
 
 
     A friend who has become an avid fly fisherman tells me: “Standing alone in a good stream...there’s something there, behind the stillness, the sun on the water, the air...I don’t know what to call it, but I know it, and it’s the main reason I go fishing.” He is describing an experience of the Logos, and it is clear that joy is involved.
 
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     How did we arrive at our truncated, and thus enfeebled and distorted, understanding of the ancient Greek word Logos? We have retained only two of its possible meanings (human reasoning, human word), almost entirely ignoring its first and deepest significance for our most important intellectual ancestors: the patterns and rhythms of being inherent and evident in the natural world and in the universe around us. An experience of that Logos is always possible to us in Nature, in our human life, and in the arts, although, like my fisherman friend, we “don’t know what to call it.” Its full resonance can be imagined, however hidden, in Christianity, and would have been much clearer in the first centuries of that religion’s growth and influence. Such meaning was essential to the poetic power of the prologue to Saint John’s Fourth Gospel in its original Greek; it is essential to our understanding of that work’s full significance.[14] Echoes of it can be heard in various Christian texts throughout the centuries. Here is Saint Athanasius, a fourth century Bishop of Alexandria, justifying Christian beliefs in “Refutation of the Gentiles,” (that is, refutation of Greek criticism of those beliefs), a chapter in his book On the Incarnation:
 
For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are.
 
All things derive from the Word their light and movement and life, as the Gentile authors themselves say, “In Him we live and move and have our being.”[[15]] Very well then. That being so, it is by no means unbecoming that the Word should dwell in man.
                                                                                [Athanasius, On The Incarnation, chapter 7]
 
     In Buddhism, that which underlies and generates all manifestation, and is intrinsic to it, is called Sunyata, “Emptiness:”[16]
 
To name or symbolize the joyous content of this emptiness is always to say too much, to put, as they say in Zen, legs upon the snake. For in Buddhist philosophy emptiness (sunyata) denotes the most solid and basic reality, though it is called empty because it never becomes an object of knowledge. This is because, being common to all related terms—figure and ground, solid and space, motion and rest—it is never seen in contrast with anything else and thus is never seen as an object. It may be called the fundamental reality or substance of the world only by analogy…. However, it may be realized by the intuitive wisdom which Buddhists call prajna.…For prajna is the mode of knowledge which is direct, which is not knowledge in terms of words, symbols, images, and logical classes with their inevitable duality of inside and outside. [[17]]
  [Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman p 114]
 
Alan Watts’s observations here—that “emptiness” is not an object of knowledge, that it is the most fundamental reality, and that knowledge of it is not knowledge in terms of words, symbols, images, and logical classes set up by the conscious human mind —can be seen to resemble Heraclitean statements about the Logos.
     But again, how did we in the West lose, or why did we discard, this profound, fundamental—and in the real world, obvious—philosophical understanding?
 
     As far as we know, Heraclitus was the first Western thinker to build a philosophical structure around a perception of the Logos as the inherent pattern of the universe in space and time. He understood that innate pattern to be an embodiment of the “thought” (necessarily imagined as analogous to human creative thought) both underlying and intrinsic to the Creation. To comprehend this idea we have only to remember the familiar everyday relation between anything at all that is made—whether in abstraction or in the realm of the physical—and the whole-mind thinking and imagining of its maker.[18] The pattern of thought and the embodiment are not separate; the thought is intrinsic to the thing made. Such a practical, experiential understanding of reality is monistic rather than dualistic—it does not divide matter from Mind, effect from cause, or God from the world; it recognizes a wholeness. If we pause for a moment to think about it, this reality is entirely familiar in all that we do and make, every day, as thinking beings. It is easy to recognize it, as long as we remember that in fact verbal thought is only one kind of thought, and that it is limited.
 
     Heraclitus lived and died at Ephesus, in Asia Minor, between approximately 540 BCE and 480 BCE. In the century, more or less, between his lifetime and that of Plato (424-348 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE), it appears that within Greek philosophical circles conceptions of the Logos gradually changed. During the same general period of time, a complete Greek alphabet became available, modelled on the Phoenician system but including symbols for vowels. Thought could now be expressed in written words, providing a foundation for further thought, in an edifice which could be maintained and expanded through generations. However all knowledge not adequately expressible in written words and other symbols would be implicitly devalued and set aside in the process, and the full significance of the word Logos may have been to some degree a peripheral casualty of the full development of written language. Indeed, the conception was not generally understood in Heraclitus’s time: he wrote, “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.”[19]
 
     The philosopher Anaxagoras (c. 510-428 BCE), was a younger contemporary of Heraclitus. He too was born on the coast of Asia Minor, but travelled to Athens at the age of twenty, and was living there still when Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE) was a young man. Anaxagoras conceived of a supreme intellectual principle independent and separate from the world, “unlimited and self-ruling.” This was Nous; that is, Mind, intelligence. Anaxagoras wrote, “The other things have a share of everything, but Nous…is alone itself by itself…. And whatever sorts of things were going to be, and whatever sorts were and now are not, and as many as are now and whatever sorts will be, all these nous set in order.”[20] Another important pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides—born about 515 BCE—also proposed a deep division between reason and experience; he considered  experience to be potentially illusory.[21] The theory of ideas later expounded by Plato continued this clear conceptual separation between the material world and a world of higher reality.[22]
     An extensive doctrine of the Logos was developed by the Stoic philosophers, who were influential throughout the Hellenistic world for about 500 years, between the 3rd century BCE and the end of the 2nd century CE. They imagined Logos as analogous to human reason and speech, and also as intelligent, material, a personage.[23] Their ideas were still rooted in the physical world, like those of Heraclitus, but were eventually superseded by Platonic and Neoplatonic conceptions of disembodied principles (“principle” understood as fundamental source or foundation, essence), independent of that manifest world: transcendent. As in the cosmology of Anaxagoras, supreme among those principles was Nous, or Noos. This “Mind” was not seen as being one with the universe and intrinsic to it, as in the philosophy of Heraclitus; it was understood to be a separate, transcendent entity.
 
     Lewis Hyde describes Nous as “the mind that can form an image or representation of some sort and ‘float’ it, detached, to be considered and shaped or changed before it is either discarded or acted upon.”[24] This is the capacity for abstraction; it is thought, reasoning, liberated from making and the limitations of the physical. Professor Hyde observes that “[o]nly noos gives the mental poise needed to navigate in deep ambiguity.”[25] It is, he says, “the mind that creates and reflects upon signs.”[26]
     Nowadays, the study of signs is known as “Semiotics.” One of the discipline’s best-known scholars, Umberto Ecco, tells us that
 
…A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.
[Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, quoted in Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, p 60]
 
A living cat cannot be used to tell a lie or to “tell” the truth; the cat is truth. Any occurrence of < >´ is experienced as truth. Disembodied abstraction—looking at ideas and possible actions without putting them into practice—is of course essential to our thinking, and at least since Plato it is the thought we have come to admire and trust most. But all thought is fully tested only in reality, and as we stray further and further into an understanding of the world based predominantly on words and symbols—on signs—we are more and more lost, and more and more susceptible to lies and to lying.
     Contemporary Western thinking still assumes the clear division between the mental and physical realms established in Greek philosophy by Anaxagoras and Parmenides.[27] Plato imagined a world of pure Ideas, the realm of the “Forms.” The Form is perfect and eternal, while the version found in nature or made by the artisan is merely a “semblance” of it. In Plato’s account, Socrates talks about the idea of a bed, (its logos), which has real existence, versus the bed made by a craftsman, which has no “true” existence:
 
“And what of the maker of the bed? were you not saying that he too makes, not the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the bed, but only a particular bed?” “Yes, I did.”
   “Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true existence, but only some semblance of existence; and if any one were to say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.…”
[Socrates in Plato, The Republic, Book X]
 
For the slave-owning Greeks, it would have been convenient to establish a hierarchy of value between thought and craft, between the philosopher and the artisan. But away goes the real world, the world of the made and of making! A bed is a horizontal surface on which one can lie down to rest. In actuality it can, and does, take any number of forms. The Form “table” has a flat top, and some sort of base to hold it off the ground at a useful height, but it too can occur in many forms—and a table can serve as a bed.[28] In neither case is the idea the reality. As Alan Watts pointed out, the menu is not the meal.
     The Platonic proposition that only the “higher” and “purer” intellectual realm is actually “real” leads logically to a presumption that the more an idea is removed from the physical the more respectable it is, the more worthy of the attention of cultivated minds—the more Ideal. In such a system of thought, the supreme Creative Principle (Nous, Mind or Intellect) is of course entirely separate from the brutish and disorderly physical world: it is transcendent in a realm of harmony and order, like Pythagoras’s ideal world of number.[29] The underlying assumption is that “thought,” or “thinking,” is the thought of which we are conscious (that is, verbal and numerical thought), and that “reason” is logical symbolic reasoning.
     In actuality, full intellectual thought is whole-brain thought; the verbal statement of it is a late step in a long and complex process, but once made it may allow us to see inconsistencies and possible errors in our thinking. Much of the most creative thought cannot be made conscious, let alone expressed in words or numbers. Verbally expressed thought is thought in the same way that the Apple company logo is an apple.[30]
 
     Eventually, the Greek conceptual separation between the material world and a transcendent Nous (Mind, God) could be seen as congruent with the Hebrew belief in a transcendent God who spoke in sacred words to his people. Such apparent congruence, supported by the almost immediate translation of the Greek word Logos by the Latin Verbum, meaning simply Word, would serve to ease and allow the convergence of Greek philosophy and Judaic religious thought in Christianity. The complex history of the Hellenistic world in which that accommodation was achieved, and the intense theological and philosophical arguments of the time, make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the foundations of  Christianity.
     It is important to remember that even in those ancient times there was no impenetrable barrier dividing West from East. For centuries, conquerors and traders carrying ideas as well as technical innovations, war, and commerce, had followed the various routes comprising the system known as the Silk Road, which extended from the Yellow River Valley in China west to India, to the great Mediterranean civilizations, and eventually to Rome—and back again. In one example, it is now an acknowledged fact that monks sent by the great Indian emperor Asoka carried Buddhist teachings to the Middle East more than two hundred years before the time of Christ.
 
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     Although the conceptual division of mind and matter is fundamental in our Western thinking, that separation has never been entirely comfortable. In 2008, two wall texts in a New Hampshire art museum still tacitly debated the point.[31] One quoted “conceptual” artist Sol Le Witt:
 
“What the work of art looks like isn’t too important. No matter what form it may have it begins with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned.”
 
The other, sculptor Alexander Calder:
 
“When everything goes right, a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprises.”
 
The first, the “intellectual” view—that of many theorists of contemporary art—gives primary importance to the verbally expressible idea in mind, whether the mind of artist, critic, or informed observer.[32] In Le Witt’s “conceptual art,” the realization can be executed in the mundane world by any skilled worker; there is no room for chance, for the surprising “happy accident,” no spontaneity, no possibility of impromptu adjustment to new insights and opportunities arrived at in the process of making. To the most zealous believers he actual, “made” work is unimportant: it constitutes a “show and tell for grownups.”[33] The alternative viewpoint is that of the artist, who knows from experience that ideas are cheap, and that art exists only in the reality—which has usually been achieved with so much difficulty and in the face of such psychic peril. The first is glib, self-satisfied and certain; the second may appear a bit awkward in its imprecision, but it recognizes the fact that art can happen, poetry and joy occur, only when, as Calder said, “everything goes right” in the often uncontrollable and unpredictable real world, where time and chance, luck and insight, and the varying skill and discernment of the artist affect the eventual outcome.
 
+
 
     In a lecture given in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI we have a canonical exposition on the significance of the word Logos in contemporary Christianity:
 
Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical (that is, Hebrew) understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the λόγος”.… God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word—a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.
                          [Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University; Memories and Reflections,” Regensburg University, 2006]
 
I find this confusing, since creative reasoning is in fact difficult or impossible to communicate in words. According to the dictionary, the word “reason” now can mean a cause or justification for doing or thinking something arrived at by common good sense, or, alternately, a mental process following strict rules for valid proof and inference (rules first established by Aristotle).[34] This latter kind of reason, which we call “formal logic,” is a human contrivance, and a broadly useful one; it is the reasoning demanded by Science. It is set forth in words and symbols, and is therefore “capable of communication” from its inception.
     However such formal logic is not creative. Creativity is a process involving insight; it is not verbal until its conclusions are expressed in words. “Good common sense” is whole-brain thinking in which intuition and insight play a part, and Pope Benedict clearly understands this. Later in his speech, he asserts that we must overcome “the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable”—to the provable by strict rules—and in overcoming such self-limitation, “once more disclose[reason’s] vast horizons.”[35] As to the ancient analogy between God’s reason and ours,
 
[T]he faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which—as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated—unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language.                                                                                                        
   [Ibid.]
 
So: God’s infinite reason is infinitely unlike ours. Within the scope of our own (analogous but infinitely unlike) reason, we must not limit ourselves to empirically falsifiable—scientific, Aristotelian—reasoning, but must explore the “vast horizons” of another kind of reason…this even though empirically falsifiable reasoning is now the generally assumed meaning of the term.[36] This seems to me an admirable demonstration of what can be accomplished (and so smoothly!) with words. It is a clever way of asserting that the Hebraic and Christian “Word,” as preached today, is somehow deeply congruent with the ancient Greek Logos, while in the same speech giving a scholarly nod to the full, broad meaning of the Greek term and claiming its territory for Christianity.
 
+
 
     The American philosopher Nicholas Gier recognizes two kinds of human reasoning: analytical (scientific) reason, and what he calls “synthetic” or “aesthetic” reason. In his view, both the Logos of Heraclitus and the Nous (that is, cosmic Mind) postulated by Anaxagoras are “synthetic” conceptions.
 
The etymology of the logos, the Greek word behind “reason” and “logic,” shows that the idea of synthesis is at the origin of these words. The Greek logos is the verbal noun of lego, which, if we follow one root leg means “to gather,” “to collect,” “to pick up,” “to put together,” and later “to speak or say.” We already have the basic ideas of any rational endeavor. We begin by collecting individual facts and thoughts and put them together in an orderly way and usually say something about what we have created.
    Except for Parmenides the pre-Socratic philosophers did not appear to follow any logical principles. Aristotle thoroughly criticized them, especially Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, for this deficiency….It is significant that Aristotle called his logic Analytics, so let us call the logic that conforms to traditional rules analytic reason, and let us call the mode of thinking drawn from the etymology of logos synthetic reason. Furthermore, synthetic reason is descriptive rather than prescriptive, a way to understand how people actually think rather than how they ought to think. [emphasis mine]
                         [N.F. Gier, "Synthetic Reason, Aesthetic Order, and the Grammar of Virtue," Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 18: 4 (2001), pp. 13-28]
 
Many of Professor Gier’s observations are harmonious with claims I have made throughout this book. At the most fundamental level, he says, synthetic reason (whole brain reasoning) is concerned with “the order of the human mind and the structure of the world.” Human rationality consists in our ability to “put the world together (lego) in a way that makes sense” to us. Importantly, he observes that analytic reasoning is easy to articulate and make explicit, while synthetic reasoning is not. Wittgenstein’s enigmatic phrase stating that “meaning is a physiognomy,” says Dr. Gier, implies that “meaning is based on aesthetic order rather than a strict rational order of words relating to objects regardless of their context.” This “aesthetic” order is an order recognized by our sense/minds, the order of the thing’s being, its particular is-ness, its ti esti.[37] Is that order congruent with the logos of what Cézanne called “God made things”? To the extent that it is so congruent it is true, and meaningful. An understanding that meaning is based on aesthetic order (that is, order sensed by seeing, listening, tasting and so on) is rare indeed. It may be one implication of Duchamp’s choice of objects for his Readymades, since [38] however humbly commercial and mass-produced they may be, they embody the simplest, most easily recognized, widely known, stable, easily produced, and predictably successful of such relationships. Duchamp said in words that he wanted to get away from “art,” but in practice he clearly and effortlessly demonstrated art’s most fundamental attribute, that is, its being as a set of relationships (using phi, the “Golden” relationship, the subtlest of the few we have been able to identify) —in a characteristic visual double entendre.[39]
 
     We do our best to be reasonable, but little indeed can be known of God’s “reason,” acknowledged by the Roman Church to be infinitely unlike our own. Over generations we note what behaviors seem to work well in relation to the way in which the world actually is, its Logos, and then make rules and laws, both religious and civil, requiring those behaviors—rules and laws expressed in words. To then worship the words as such is to forget, to lose awareness of, the original experiences and accrued understandings in the real world which they can only point toward. There are systems of belief (for instance Zen Buddhism) in which the aspirant is instructed to give full attention to that real world, determinedly free of words or any other screen of symbols making it simpler and in theory more comprehensible—but necessarily less true.
    I have been unable to find any satisfactory justification for “Word” as metaphor for the thought of God, other than long custom. It may in fact have been intended only as a marker used to hide its opposite—that is: the Unnamable, Unspeakable, Inconceivable—in an effort to escape words by using a symbol intended to escape ambiguity by pointing only to itself.[40] “Word” could originally have been envisaged as a device for “hiding in plain sight,” designed as protection from misunderstanding and over-use. However its use may both cause and reinforce misunderstanding. Worship of words is the foundation and/or justification for fundamentalist fanaticism of every kind, as we see again and again.
 
+
 
    Today, 2500 years after Heraclitus and the Buddha, when I look in my word-processing software’s dictionary for the meaning of the word “Logos,” I find it identified first as a theological word, meaning the “Word of God,” and then as a term used in Jungian psychology to represent the principle of reason and judgement, often contrasted with eros.[41] Freud used the term eros to indicate the life instinct, and Jung to mean interrelatedness; both used it in contrast to logos. But obviously Logos as originally conceived includes Eros. Today, logos and eros are frequently used as if opposed, for instance in Lewis Hyde’s wise, poetic, and scholarly book, The Gift:
 
We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use-value, and gift-increase, all of which are linked by a common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, “shaping into one.” And we have, on the other hand, analytic or dialectical thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of logos, of differentiating into parts.
 [Lewis Hyde, The Gift, p 155]
 
     Logos as Heraclitus first established it in philosophical thought is the direct opposite of “differentiating into parts”—or rather, encompasses it. Today we take “Logos” to mean what Heraclitus insisted it was not: that is, a matter of words, of verbal reasoning.
     An intuition of the divine Logos, the order or pattern of relationships intrinsic to the universe, was of course experienced long before the advent of Heraclitus and the other pre-Socratic philosophers—probably far back into our animal ancestry. Adaptation to its great inscrutable moving system is the principle according to which each species shapes itself to its environment over time, and comprehension of it must have been an early goal of conscious thought. However, like “symmetry,” and “beauty,” “Logos” is a word which for us has lost its most profound and ancient meaning. Such terms point to the mute poignancy of real experience, and are something of an embarrassment in an almost entirely verbal and mathematical intellectual culture.
      In a New York Times review of educational theorist Howard Gardner’s 2012 book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century, Alan Ryan says that Professor Gardner wants us “to educate the young and ourselves to take beauty seriously, to cultivate our aesthetic sensibilities, and to learn how to form intelligent judgements about works of art of all kinds.” Further, says Ryan,
 
[Gardner] has some interesting, if elusive, thoughts about what exactly it is that works of art do for us. Resorting to some simple phenomenology, he observes that “we gain pleasure, a warm and positive feeling, a ‘tingle’ if you will, from the beholding of the object.” It seems a large omission to say nothing about disturbing masterpieces more likely to produce a shudder than a tingle.…
                          [Alan Ryan, “One Virtue at a Time, Please,” The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012. p 55]
 
A well-known expert on art like Professor Gardner, or a journalist as loftily dismissive of “simple phenomenology” as Mr. Ryan, should be able do better than “a warm and positive feeling,” a “tingle,” or even a “shudder.” Certainly Longinus and many others have managed to do so. Here again, the underlying difficulty is an apparent lack of understanding of the mental processes involved in the making and appreciation of the arts and so much else. Mr. Ryan continues,
 
What art criticism does, almost invariably, is seize on particular works of art and try to recreate the emotional tone of the encounter of spectator and object. When Gardner explains what he likes about the objects and installations he talks about here, that is just what he does, too.                                  
   [Ibid]
 
The “emotional tone,” and the “tingle, if you will” apparently refer to our reaction to an experience of < >´, an experience made possible by insight. In fact the encounter is intellectual (it is an activity of the thinking mind), without being verbal. This is an absolutely crucial distinction now generally forgotten or ignored. We respond to such experience with a particular kind of triumphant joy, as in Richard Diebenkorn’s “mounting sense of right response, an extreme and almost physical sympathy with the presentation.”[42] The intellectual/sensual experience is accompanied by joy, as the insight experiments described in the previous chapter can demonstrate scientifically for those without personal experience of it.
 
+
 
     Through the centuries, many people of curious mind have puzzled over what it could possibly mean to say, as St. John does, that the “Word” is God, or that a specific man, who is also God, is that “Word.” In Goethe’s Faust it is the conundrum that the elderly scholar has set himself to explore when the Devil appears to him as a black poodle.[43] The 5th century Church Father Theodoret, Bishop of Syria, called John’s Gospel "a theology which human understanding can never fully penetrate…."[44] Despite the mass of scholarly argument and discussion devoted to the topic over nearly two thousand years, there is still no convincing answer to the question. Here is Leonard Bernstein’s half-playful musing on it:
 
I have often thought that if it is literally true that In the Beginning Was The Word, then it must have been a sung word. The Bible tells us the whole Creation story not only verbally, but in terms of verbal creation. God said: Let there be light. God said: Let there be a firmament. He created verbally. Now can you imagine God saying, just like that, “Let there be light” as if ordering lunch? Or even in the original language: Y’Hi Or? I’ve always had a fantasy of God singing those two blazing words: Y’HI—O-O-O-R! Now that could really have done it; music could have caused light to break forth.
                            [Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question; Six Talks at Harvard, p 15-16]
 
Great music is moving pattern, ratio, order, enlivened by some degree of irregularity, made of sound and occurring in time. Bernstein identified this “expected unexpectedness”[45] in various musical manifestations of what he calls “ambiguity.” [46] The pattern heard is non-verbal and is apprehended non-verbally.[47] It is a version of Logos arrived at, somehow—“when everything goes right”—by one of us, and is often associated with the divine, whether it be the “sublime” performance of a concerto or a “heavenly” bouillabaisse.
 
     In earlier civilizations, belief that coherent sound is the underlying reality of the cosmos was common. The concept was highly developed in ancient China, and formed the foundation of many aspects of that extraordinary culture, which flourished for 5000 years. The Emperor’s most important task was the daily establishment of the “Kung,” the supposed foundation tone of the universe, which varied somewhat within time. Every instrument in the empire was to be tuned in accordance with the heavenly tone, the sounding resonance of stability and balance, so that all harmonies might be coherent with that divine energy; when the celestial realm changed, if the Kung were not adjusted accordingly, the society would fall into disorder and disharmony. [48] The tone believed to be the fundamental tone, the “yellow bell,” was related to the pitch we call “middle C.”[49]
     At a concert, a focused listener sometimes feels that the music is playing within her own body—which of course it is; the whole body vibrates with the sound waves produced by the various instruments. Musicians know the different psychological effects of the tonal relationships found within a single octave:
 
The intervals of the simple scale produce as varied feelings as the pure sounds of speech. The second [the interval between do and re in any musical scale] is like the first step into the world; we feel we cannot possibly stay at the point to which it brings us—it is bound to lead us elsewhere. Compare with its tentative mood the assertive quality of the fourth [the interval between do and fa.]
                               [A.C. Harwood, The Recovery of Man in Childhood, p 149]
 
     To make music one must be aware of the different qualities and moods inherent in musical tones and in the patterns of relationship among them, as affected by rhythm, tempo, and volume. Anyone who plays a musical instrument is probably conscious of such realities; almost all of us are aware of them at least subconsciously. There is no need to name them, and really no possibility of doing so. There are many other experiences in sound for which the English language has no word. I have already offered the example of the quality of the silence when the long, sonorous boom of a great bell has faded away, and we keep still, listening. The Japanese have a word for it.
 
+
 
     Since our experience of reality and our naming of it are both functions of mind, of the curious and conceiving world within our skull, it is not surprising that we are liable to confuse one with the other. In fact we generally move as quickly as possible to the safe haven of the brain’s left hemisphere, which signifies (names) and then categorizes-as-known, just as in the Garden of Eden story (name animals, eat forbidden fruit, from then on categorize everything as to some extent good or evil). We then assume that since we know the name and the category we know the reality. Inadequate as they ultimately are, words, our own and those of others, are powerful for us. Experience of that power would lead naturally to the idea that magical spells and charms can prevent calamity, enhance fertility, bring down disaster on an enemy, and so on. In some traditions it gave rise to beliefs that the gods “speak” the world into existence.
 
     In an alternative understanding of reality it is possible to see the Whole as sacred, so that every object and being within it can be experienced as participating in the profound mystery of all being.
 
[T]hat which is no “that” at all because it is transcendent of all categories, is the “essence” of one’s whole being. It is immanent—it is right here, right now, in the watch you wear, in the piece of paper on which I’m writing. Take any object, draw a ring around it, and you may regard it in the dimension of its mystery.… Any object, any stick, stone, plant, beast or human being, can be placed this way in the center of a circle of mystery, to be regarded in its dimension of wonder, and so made to serve as a perfectly proper support for meditation.
    Already in the eighth century B.C., in the Chãndogya Upanishad, the key word to such a meditation is announced: tat tvam assi, “Thou art that,” or “You yourself are It!” The final sense of a religion such as Hinduism or Buddhism is to bring the individual an experience, one way or another, of his own identity with that mystery that is the mystery of all being.…[That identity is] not this “thou” however that you cherish and distinguish from all others.
                                 [Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, p 26.]
 
     The Whole is ever-changing, always becoming, always dying: “fires kindling, fires going out” as Heraclitus said.[50] From the Baghavad Ghita: “I am the ritual and the sacrifice. I am the offering and the fire which consumes it, and he to whom it is offered.”[51] Occasionally we are able to experience this whole or a small part of it—a sonata, a view, a gesture, our own being—as existing in a state of dynamic balance, of “easy discipline,” “perfect” coherence, “perfect” beauty, “self-organizing criticality,” vitality—a reality represented here by the symbol < >´. It can occur in all kinds of forms and to various degrees.
     We are able to know God and Nature and all worlds real and imagined first and always through experienced reality, through beings and happenings and actions and the way in which they are, and as they change through time. (When we imagine other worlds we can only furnish them with things we know in the real world, although perhaps in unexpected combinations and proportions.)[52] Words are entirely different, entirely other; they are merely symbols we use in order to talk and write about reality; their validation is found only in the realities they signify.
 
     But how do we get at real things in what Zen Buddhism calls their “suchness,” and Joseph Campbell their “dimension of wonder”? The twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger proposed that to experience works of art in their “unsullied actuality” we must resist the urge to “impose ourselves upon them.” We impose ourselves by categorizing them, interpreting them, theorizing and gossiping about them. In Western culture, our human tendency to do this is exacerbated by our very languages, a problem which Heidegger traced, in part, to the early translation of ancient Greek words into the Latin of the efficient, pragmatic, and all-conquering Romans—without the breadth and depth of the Greek meanings. (Logos is an instructive example of such a word.) Heidegger writes,
 
A simple propositional statement consists of a subject…and a predicate, in which the thing’s characteristics are asserted of it. Who would wish to attempt to undermine these simple fundamental relations between thing and statement, between sentence-structure and thing-structure? Nevertheless we must ask: Is the structure of a simple propositional statement (the combination of subject and predicate) a mirror-image of the structure of a thing (the union of substance with accidents)? Or is the structure of a thing as thus envisaged rather copied from the framework of a sentence?
                       [Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, Hofstadter and Kuhns eds., p 654]
 
Thus, he says, the structure of our sentences underlies our tendency to understand works of art and other things as being each some kind of core reality which carries its attributes or characteristics:
         
[T]his thing-concept (the thing as bearer of its characteristics) holds not only of the mere thing in its strict sense, but also of any entity whatsoever…. Yet even before all reflection, attentive dwelling within the sphere of things already tells us that this thing-concept does not hit upon the thingly element of the thing, its self-growth, its self-repose.
                                                                                                                                                                            [Ibid. p. 655]
 
How lovely “its self-growth” and “its self-repose” are! How respectful, even reverent.[53] In giving our undistracted attention to Nature (and great works of art, and instances of human grace and courage, compassion, insight, and grace of every kind in everyday life), we experience within us a degree of humility and gratitude, and even of love. But our tendency is instead to rush at them, eager to name them, to dismember and dissect them—and then, our primal connection to them all but destroyed, to feel disappointed, cheated, and angry, like the well-informed young man visiting the sand and stone garden at Ryoan-ji.[54]
 
    Heidegger tells us that the language of classical Greece expressed the reality, always there, that the “core” and the “attributes” occur together: they are a unity, a one-ness. Ancient Greek names are not arbitrary: “Something that can no longer be shown here speaks in them,” he writes, “the basic Greek experience of the being of entities in the sense of presence [Anwesenheit].” The standard Western understanding of being, he continues, is founded in the Roman appropriation (into Latin) of the Greek name without its full significance, a serious matter:
 
This translation of Greek names into the Latin language is in no way the inconsequential process it is taken to be even today. Beneath the apparently literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different kind of thinking. Roman thought appropriates the Greek words without the corresponding experience, equally original, of what they say…. The groundlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.
                                                                                                                                                                            [Ibid. p 654]
 
This is precisely our situation: we have our joyful experience of the Logos of the natural world, and we have our unsurprising confusion in the face of our only signifier for it, which is the term Word. We have no reason to connect the two, or to experience the ancient resonances between our religious teachings and Nature; loss of the primary meaning of Logos has impoverished our intellectual understanding of reality. Such “groundlessness” can only increase as we are more and more separated from the actuality of our being as creatures part of, and dependent upon, Nature—beings intrinsically other than machines, other than the all-devouring, all-destroying “consumers” essential to the continuing expansion of financial markets.
 
+
 
     “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 only exists up to the moment when it is expressed in language,” wrote Erich Fromm.[55] The essential existence of the work of art, in its “suchness,” its “repose,” lies in the vast territory of the non-verbal.[56] I have already noted Marcel Duchamp’s frequent assertions that he wanted to put the “intellect” back into art, scorning the “prettinesses” of “retinal art.” He said that since Courbet, art had been “entirely retinal.” Predictably, the assumption has been that by intellect he meant only the thinking of the verbal, left hemisphere of the brain.[57]
 
     In 1969 the celebrated New York critic Clement Greenberg, a champion of the Abstract Expressionists, wrote:
 
Art in any medium…creates itself through relations, proportions. The quality of art depends on inspired, felt relations or proportions as on nothing else.… A simple, unadorned box can succeed as art by virtue of these things; and when it fails as art it is not because it is a plain box, but because its proportions…are uninspired, unfelt.… No amount of phenomenal, describable newness avails when the internal relations within the work have not been felt, inspired, discovered. The superior work of art…exhibits “rightness of form.”
    [Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: Art in the Sixties,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, p 300]
 
Arthur Danto, in his 1997 book, After the End of Art, asserted that this paragraph demonstrated Greenberg’s “almost breathtaking obtuseness” in the face of “an important work of the 1960s,” Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.[58] As late as 1992, Greenberg had not changed his mind, says Danto, although art “had gone through a revolutionary moment, one that invalidated forever the easy transit from aesthetics to art criticism.”[59]
     Unsurprisingly, I agree with Greenberg’s statement that “art in any medium…creates itself through relations, proportions.” I don’t agree that his opinion is invalidated by contemporary art, or that the transit from aesthetics (the activity of the perceiving, non-verbal mind) to good art criticism (which must use words) was ever, or will ever be, an easy one. Good art is made good by the artist, not by the theorist, and goes on being good no matter what is said about it. As for Morris’s box, a cube skillfully made of wood, it is beautiful: polished wood is beautiful, good workmanship is beautiful, and the cube is one of the ancient Greeks’ “ideal” platonic solids. The recorded sounds of its making may add a further aesthetic dimension to the piece, a kind of magical poignancy, a poetry, a coherent irregularity. Its essence is in these sensual/mental, “felt” attributes; theories about the work may enrich the experience of it, or not, but they have no part in that which makes the work meaningful and valuable. The wonder of contemporary art is that thanks to art history’s “revolutionary moment,” almost anything is allowed. However, as always, only a few among the many current idea-carrying fetishes will turn out to be great art. And also as always, it is not the verbal mind, but the human sensory mind that will perceive the difference—will recognize, in the work, Matisse’s “only valid thing”—as is the case in any culture, in any period.
 
     Something of Marcel Duchamp’s motivation and intention in his work may be reflected in an observation made by his contemporary and fellow-Dadaist Hans (or Jean) Arp. Arp wrote of the “natural and unreasonable order” in both Nature and art —in contrast to the “reasonable deceptions of man.” [emphases mine]:
 
Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order. Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today by the illogically senseless…Dada denounced the infernal ruses of the official vocabulary of wisdom. Dada is for the senseless, which does not mean nonsense. Dada is senseless like nature. Dada is for nature and against art. Dada is direct like nature.
                                        [Hans Arp, quoted in Dawn Ades, “Dadaism and Surrealism,” in Nikos Stangos ed., Concepts of Modern Art ]
 
This illuminates an aspect of the Dadaist agenda which has been more or less ignored, perhaps because so very little understood. Like Wild-and-Witless, Hans Arp would have thought that the Yellow Emperor knew what he was talking about.[60] Nature’s order is     < >´; it is “illogically senseless” only in that it operates outside and beyond the arbitrary and predictable “logic” and “reason” invented by human beings in aid of their efforts to achieve security, certitude and perfection. But of course Dada did not escape the “infernal ruses” of the cognoscenti, the designated experts: nothing does.
 
     Great art, the art to which artists like Cézanne and Bach aspired, is made for “the glory of God” however that is named, and for “the delectation of the human spirit,” exactly as Bach said. This “delectation” does not resemble our current “passion” for “anything chocolate,” or for big and cheery, “fun collectible” Balloon Dogs made of platinum and sold and bought for zillions of dollars. It arises from our innate love of truth—of beauty, whether “disturbing” or not—of < >´, in fact. It is the stimulus for Cézanne’s aspiration to make paintings that harmonize with “God-made objects,” and Christopher Alexander’s desire to make his work “a gift to God.”
 
+
 
     We can still experience the thing-in-itself, the Greek ti esti, the be-ing of the cosmos within the dimension of time. A selfless quietude makes possible an awareness of < >´, in its never-predictable occurrence as a seemingly singular and remarkable instance in the “flowing wholeness” signified by the word Logos—as relation, as intrinsic pattern, as perfect coherence, as the reasoning of the divine Mind. It is far beyond words. At the same time, the quality-without-a-name, that is, < >´—like beauty (it can reasonably be said to be beauty )—occurs only in manifestation, whether as a Chekhov short story or as the markings on the body of a fish.
 
     Order is essential to life. But order is not life: for that, there must also be an intimately coherent element of disorder, as the world’s Trickster myths and stories teach. < >´ is paradox: it is order and the disturbance of order manifest together in a wholeness. Logic, which we invented, abhors paradox, seeing it as a sign of error. In reality, paradox is above and beyond our logic, and yet we need logic in order to think consciously—another paradox. Lewis Thomas pointed out that human intelligence would never have designed a replicating molecule similar to that of DNA, since the aim would have been to make it “perfect.” “[I]t would never have occurred to us, thinking as we do, that the thing had to be able to make errors…it is no accident at all that mutations occur; the molecule of DNA was ordained from the beginning to make small mistakes.”[61]
     If we are to survive in the vast, fertile, ever-changing reality into which we were born, we cannot continue “thinking as we do.” We must move beyond our smugly dualistic categorizing of everything in the cosmos into conceptual oppositions like those we set up  between body and mind, matter and energy, science and religion, us and not-us, me and not-me, mine and not-mine. To know how (or whether) all this could come about, or how it would affect our situation, we must begin to make it real—to actually do it—as in any creative act.
 
     Quantum theory has recognized that light is not either a wave or a particle, it is both a wave and a particle. The same is true of a molecule of water in an ocean wave, or any part of any moving thing; we can neither say nor symbolize two aspects of reality at once, but moment by moment we can and do experience such wholeness. Richard Feynmann wrote that "[A]ccording to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time.”[62] All he is really saying is that any entity, however small, has more aspects and embodies more relationships than can be signified in any way whatever, particularly if time and movement are added to the equation. We must remember and respect facts like these, since it is in such mind-dizzying complexity in space and time that we actually exist. The parts of things are important, and discovering what we can of the structures of things and the patterns of how they work both as units and as parts of a greater whole is important, and comparing them to one another is important—but the living Whole is more important, and paradox and ambiguity are necessary to it. The great culture of symbol—word and number, cartoon, map, diagram, pixel—is fatally limited, and it is essential to one of our ways of thinking. We must remember and honor what we already know of Nature, Art, and the human spirit, and learn more, not only by means of verbal and mathematical logic but with whole mind, informed by a humility and awe and gratitude which begin to be adequate to our real situation.
 
     When the inner relationships which constitute a work of art—available to us by means of our capacity for insight—are right, we feel safe in truth, and joyful there. We can then delight in the work and all its attributes, which, as Heidegger reminded us, “occur along with it.” It is impossible to identify what these constitutive relationships are, except in the most fundamental instances, as they are too many, too subtle, and entirely unmeasurable. They are the product of the simultaneous existence of an infinity of unlike things: tone and rhythm, color and line, timing and inflection, detail and stillness, texture and movement—in relation to every other feature of the work and to the whole, through time. Certainly none of them can be said. Everything is, in exactly the way that it is. Art, in being itself, somehow conforms to the Logos—the way in which we and the world, the Creation, are—something vibrantly harmonious in a profound and infinitely various beauty over time: something alive.
 
All things are arranged in a certain order, and this order constitutes the form by which the universe resembles God.
                [Dante Gabriel Alighieri, The Divine Comedy]
  
     At the beginning of this book I resolved to call on the experience of the reader, both past and future, for validation of what I would say; to tread carefully on the solid ground of common experience, as far as it is possible to go, and then to say: from here on it's a mystery. Now, in this chapter, I have come as far as I can. There is no conclusion, except to say that we must remember what we already know, must come to our senses, and must return to a full, and now consciously intentional, use of the whole of our brain, taking joy in, and life from, the glories and beauties of nature and of the arts. The temptation is to assume that the journey is toward “what we can say about the world”—what we can categorize and measure—rather than toward a comprehensive understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, of what we make, and of our own spiritual needs and obligations. What we say in symbols has lured us far away from the world, and at the same time has served to blind us to our desecration and ongoing destruction of our sacred and magnificent Home. It has brought about our alienation from that which we may occasionally know, and in order to communicate with one another may refer to by using one of our many names for God.
 
As a final quotation in a book of many quotations, a Foreword I wish I could have written. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote it in 1930 to preface his book, Philosophical Remarks.
 
     This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery--in its variety; the second at its centre--in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same.
     I would like to say 'This book is written to the glory of God', but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them.
 
November 1930                                                                                              L. W.
 
  
[1] See p 325 here: “It’s ‘The Universe for Dummies’!”
[2] A “function” in mathematics is “a variable quantity regarded in relation to one or more other variables in terms of which it may be expressed or on which its value depends.” [The Oxford Dictionary of American English] Relationships between variables obviously cannot be statically “rational.”
[3] Plato, The Seventh Letter, 343a; cf.
[4] Simon Blackburn ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p 220
[5] Director John Blondell, interviewed by critic Tom Jacobs, The Santa Barbara Independent, Oct 23, 2008
[6] A related example: in baseball, the “Home Team Advantage” is a familiar fact. If the players play better away, it’s a sign of team dysfunction. The local fans are part of what makes the game happen as it does.
[7] A Van Gogh painting of an apple tree is as much a “thing” as is the apple tree, though very much simpler, and is of value to us as being also an instance of < >´. We can take life from such things as often as we have access to them (although the effect lessens as we “memorize” them). Plato is one among many (multitudes!) who have failed to understand this, conceiving of art as simply a mimesis, a mirroring or imitation of reality. Cézanne: “When one thing changes the whole must be adjusted to bring it again into a state of nature.” The state of nature is < >´; it is the Logos.
[8] see Chapter 19, p 344.
[9] The new building in Philadelphia housing the Barnes Collection of works of visual art has been much praised, and reviewers in both The New York Review of Books (7/12/2012) ) and the New Yorker (5/28/2012) have remarked on the freedom and pleasure of looking at works of visual art without either headphones or wall texts, as required by Mr. Barnes’ will.
[10] The whole brain is engaged: our need to follow the plot’s emotional sequence is satisfied by knowing the gist of what the singers are saying, and we are set free to hear and see without the distraction of concern about such peripheral matters as the often far-fetched story.
[11] John Berger, The Sense of Sight p 201
[12] Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol IV, p 146, quoted on p 298 here. It doesn’t have to be called “the shining forth of God”; the words only point toward the reality. What matters is a recognition of the actual experience, which can be named in any way acceptable to the person experiencing it, or kept un-named and secret, safe from careless misuse—or represented by a visual symbol which can’t be spoken, as I have chosen to do here. But if any symbol is used, it will soon become stale and therefore useless. It is the reality we need, not symbol.
[13] The “Divine” Golden Section divides a line or bounded space into parts in phi proportion. Though multiple, they are indivisible from one another, held in a relationship that persists to infinity.
[14] “In the beginning was the Word [Logos in St. John’s original Greek text] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” For a fascinating discussion of the spectrum of meanings of Logos and their assimilation in Christianity, see René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, particularly pages 263 through 278.
[15] Athanasius is quoting Cretica, by the early (6th-7th century BCE) Greek philosopher-poet Epimenides.
[16] See the ideogram for Emptiness, Chapter 4, p 37.
[17] One definition of prajna is: “direct insight into the truth.” [The Oxford Dictionary of American English] The term is also used to mean “life force,” “life energy.”
[18] An example is my thought in the making of the models of the Parts of Speech in Latin, illustrated on page 220 here. It is a simple representation in the physical world of an existent abstract structure, a set of relationships. The primary relationships embodied represent relationships within the communal work of art which is the Latin language: the number of parts of speech, the number of aspects particular to each one, characteristics of each of these aspects, and the agreement of various elements with one another in gender, number, and so on.
[19] Heraclitus, Fragment 1 (quoted by Sextus Empiricus [fl.c. 200 AD] in Against the Mathematicians; translation copyright Richard Hooker 1995. From                   www.spaceandmotion.com/philosophy-metaphysics-heraclitus.htm, (7/25/06)
[20] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaxagoras/ (4/12/15)
[21] The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p 278
[22] Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol 14 p 251
[23] Ibid.
[24] Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, p 62
[25] Ibid. p 73
[26] Ibid. p 59
[27] Encyclopedia Britannica Vol. 14-250d and 17-870b
[28] Experts are still arguing over precisely what all this means.
[29] That Pythagorean world, as we have seen, not only ignored “irrational” and “transcendental” numbers and equations, but, legend says, made the mention of them a crime punishable by banishment. However such numbers would obviously be entirely “rational” in the “thought” of any First Cause (Aristotle’s term) or Creative Principle.
[30] The design of the logo is entirely based on phi, the golden proportion, as are most ofApple’sfamously well-designed products.
[31] The Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, 4/12/08
[32] This claim is routinely justified by a questionable interpretation of Marcel Duchamp, as we saw in chapter 13. Duchamp’s real point now appears to have been that anything with good proportions, that is, good relationships among its parts such that together they form a wholeness—is worth looking at, and when given space, and dignity, and full attention, may deserve a place in exhibitions of visual art. The movement of the bicycle wheel—or Iris Murdoch’s “contingency,” or Leonard Bernstein’s “ambiguity”— can provide a necessary irregularity, as Duchamp’s “signature” (R. Mutt 1917) does in the case of Fountain, his most celebrated readymade.
[33] p 241 here.
[34] The Oxford Dictionary of American English
[35] Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” Regensburg University, 2006. The “empirically falsifiable” is a smaller category than we tend to believe; see p 323 and the difficulty in determining  “provability.”
[36] The Oxford Dictionary of American English
[37] This is the order which Aristotle identified with the soul, “that which does not exist without matter.” [Christopher P. Long, The Ethics of Ontology, p 69] see also attribution p 334.
[38] See chapter 13
[39] Double entendre, says the Oxford Dictionary of American English, originated in the 17th century from the obsolete French term double entente meaning “double understanding”—an understanding which clearly would not have to be verbal, as in the ubiquitous example of the silhouette which can be perceived either as a bilaterally symmetrical light-colored vase or as two opposing and identical dark female profiles.
[40] If so, it belongs in the ancient tradition of a Caribbean woman who, when her beautiful child was admired, protested, “My child she ugly”—to keep the child safe from evil forces who might steal her away.
[41] The Oxford Dictionary of American English
[42] See quotation p 187.
[43] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, Part I, in Paul A. Bates, Faust: Sources, Works, Criticism, p 87
[44] The Rev. Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints Vol IV, www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/JOHNEVAN.HTM (1/10/16)
[45] Louis Menand’s term. See page 233.
[46] Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question; Six Talks at Harvard. Bernstein gives a musical example on p 107.
[47] Glenn Gould’s observations on page 285 above are relevant here as well.
[48] Thomas Vaczy Hightower, The Sound of Silence, Part II. (http://vaczy.dk/htm/octave3.htm) (5/30/15)
[49] Ibid. At the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, housing treasures of the Ottoman Empire, one finds among the highly decorated and ingenious Chinese ceramic marvels to be seen there a small set of dishes used only by the Emperor. They are absolutely simple in shape, without decoration, and glazed a clear soft yellow. “According to the Five Elements Theory, the colour yellow belongs to the element earth… a stabilizing energy, a balanced ying- yang.” “Historically, people actually worshipped the color yellow during the reign of the legendary Chinese sage king, a chief deity of Taoism, Huang Di or Huang Ti, better known as the Yellow Emperor. He is the emperor that is said to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese people and is believed to have reigned around 2697 BC to 2598 BC.” http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/Chinese_Customs/colours.htm (5/30/15)
[50] Heraclitus: Fragment 29. “This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been is, and will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.” (Translation: William Harris, [http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/Heraclitus.html] (5/31/15) “Fire” is probably a metaphor here—for something that is powerful, moving, changing, both useful and comforting, both beautiful and terrifying, emanating light, and all-consuming. Who can think of a better one? 
[51] Eknath Easwaren, The Baghavad Ghita: Classics of Indian Spirituality, p 175
[52] If we grow up in an environment saturated with the crass and simplistic images in most computer cartoons and comic books, those images shape and furnish our imagination. They become the visual metaphors in terms of which we report experience, and our source of imagery.
[53] This appears to be pretty much what quantum physicists have been obliged to recognize about reality. See page 313.
[54] See chapter 12, “Critics, Cognoscenti, and the Only Valid Thing,” p 176.
[55] Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, pp 100, 109. Quoted here p 19.
[56] The fact that the art of literature exists there also was discussed in Chapter 14, Part II.
[57] Again, we see that words can produce confusion: “art” here is limited to visual art, “intellect” to the analytic thinking of the left hemisphere of the brain, “meaning” to the verbally expressible.
[58] This was probably a play on Duchamp’s 1916 Readymade, With Hidden Noise.
[59] Arthur Danto, After the End of Art, p 93
[60] See epigraph, chapter 19
[61] Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail p 23. For the full quotation, see p 27 here.
[62] For full quotation see p 6.