D SPERRY FINLAYSON

When we say a painting works, it is as if we are acknowledging that the body is intact, whole, energetic, responsive, alive. This can be said…irrespective of whether it is abstract or figurative, stylistically experimental or conservative.

[English critic Andrew Forge, quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, p 389]

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

[Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, p ix.]

[British Scientist James Lovelock] was struck by the unusual composition of gases that constitute our atmosphere…he found carbon dioxide was ten times what it would be if the atmospheric gases were allowed to go to equilibrium; sulfur, ammonia, methyl chloride are all present in huge amounts above equilibrium. The same is true of the percentage of salt in the sea. Millions of tons of it are washed into the world’s oceans every year, yet the salt concentration remains stable. [Lovelock] concluded that the planet’s “persistent state of disequilibrium” was “clear proof of life’s activity.” He found that, in contrast, the Martian atmosphere is in an equilibrium state. He therefore predicted, correctly, that no traces of life would be found by our Viking probes.

[John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror, p 162]

Life—the life which animates us and all other creatures and all plants, down to the one-celled entities which cannot be categorized as either plant or animal—is an exception to the general movement of all things in the universe toward entropy and dissolution. Life is entirely dependent upon order for its existence, and it produces order, in a system which can still be seen to be miraculous. As far as we now know Earth is the only place in this unimaginably vast universe where life exists. Imagination can add living systems to distant planets, and make up stories about them, but the only life of which we are sure is here on Earth, and even here its origin continues to be a mystery:

How can a collection of chemicals form themselves into a living thing without any interference from outside? On the face of it, life is an exceedingly unlikely event. There is no known principle of matter that says it has to organize itself into life. I’m very happy to believe in my head that we live in a biofriendly universe, because in my heart I find that very congenial. But we have not yet discovered the Life Principle.

[Physicist Paul Davies, quoted in National Geographic magazine 1/2000, p 45]

Though life is one of the most interesting of all the mysteries, we generally take it for granted unless it is at risk. For life to occur, there must be a hugely complex order…and something else. Life and order are almost synonymous, but not quite; order, the serene condition, must be animated for life to come into being.

The most remarkable thing about a corpse is how unlike the living being it is, paint it as we may. And yet the bronze statue of a long-dead hero on his horse can have “life”—we can “almost see” the rider’s eyes flash, his cloak blowing in the wind, the horse tossing its mane. We speak of a painting, a portrait, or a character in a novel or opera as having “life.” We ourselves can be exhilarated (that is, cheered, enlivened, gladdened, inspired) by a concert or a ballgame. What kind of “life” is this? What does it mean when a great basketball player says “Sometimes the game really took off”?…“took off” the way an airplane does, into another condition of being, where the heavy machine is supported by the air through which we walk so easily?

Life is orderly, death is disorderly. When death occurs, the intricately balanced systems of the body rapidly break down. As long as we are alive we are physically producing order within our bodies and brains. Such continual self-renewal gives unique characteristics to living systems, characteristics which in scientific terms are “autopoietic,” that is, self-creating:

Autopoietic structures lie at the highly sophisticated end of nature’s spectrum of “open systems.”…Autopoietic systems [such as ourselves] are remarkable creatures of paradox.…because [they] are self-renewing, they are highly autonomous, each one having its separate identity, which it continually maintains. Yet, like other open systems autopoietic structures are also inextricably embedded in and inextricably merged with their environment…Autopoietic systems have definite boundaries, such as a semipermeable membrane, but the boundaries are open and connect the system with almost unimaginable complexity to the world around it.

[John Briggs & F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror, p 154]

Thinking is ordering; we categorize, and organize, and in making things we search for both an orderly method and an intrinsic order within whatever we make. The word “organize” means to give something organs, to give it an organic structure, quite literally to bring it to life—and the word “organic” means both “structural” and “organized.”[1]

Aristotle said that the soul is the form of organization of the living body (that is, in Heraclitus’s term, its logos). To organize something is in a very real sense to bring it to life, and the soul is the specific arrangement of all its multiple attributes, by which it lives. In the individual person, animal, or tree, the arrangement, though in general like that of all others of the same species, is at the same time unique to that individual. This assembling into a whole, an organization, is different from, say, ordering a line of cubes into a row, where similar units can be added to the order indefinitely. It is different from the orderliness of crystal formation, in which the shape of the crystal is dictated entirely by the chemical makeup of the substance. The order necessary for life, whether organic or aesthetic, is an arrangement of parts wherein the order is specific to those particular parts, and intrinsic to the whole; it is inseparable and indistinguishable from the whole and from its parts. Every single quality of each part contributes to that wholeness: the parts interact with each other in all and every one of their characteristics. This meaning of “whole” is fundamentally related to the origins of the word “Holy.”[2] Similarly, the word for “alive” in ancient Greek is etymologically the same as the word for “ensouled.” To be “ensouled,” in Aristotle’s terms, is to be alive as a specific and to some degree a unique form of organization. The particular individual soul is the specific web of relationships making up this particular creature, its individual < >´. I believe that when we love, that is what we love, whether we experience it in a dog, or a towering of summer clouds, or a person. At different times, to differing degrees, and depending on our own present condition, that love may be mostly for the physical, or the spiritual, or the intellectual aspect of another thing or being, or overwhelmingly all at once. To love a person, a work of art, or a tree, is to respond from my < >´, my particular living organization, to that of the tree, the person, the work of art. That is why it occasionally feels like a somehow pre-ordained recognition, a revelation of something profound and even already-existing. Mysteriously, a new < >´ occurs, made up of us and that which we love.

“[T]here are moments which one can call the crises which alone are important in a life. These are moments when the outside seems abruptly to respond to the sum of what we throw forth from within, when the exterior world opens to encounter our heart and establishes a sudden communication with it.”

[Michel Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” Documents, Volume 1 no 4 (1929): quoted by William Pietz: “The problem of the fetish I,” p 12 fn. 27, Res 9 Spring 1985 (published by Harvard’s Peabody Museum]

In the language of Chinese aesthetics there is a specific term for “life” in art, as set forth by the fifth century art critic Hsieh Ho. He considered the ability to produce this quality in a painting, to infuse the work with spirit in order to endow it with ch'i—the vitality of life itself—to be the first and most important of the six canons which an artist must fulfill in order to be truly great. The other five are the essentials of craftsmanship.

To the Chinese, the one attribute that distinguished great art was the mysterious quality of “vitality,” defined…as “Breath-Resonance-Life-Motion.” Unlike craftsmanship, which could be learned by mastering the lessons in the five… canons of art, the ability to impart life to a painting could not be taught. It was considered a gift from Heaven itself—a gift that put the possessor in harmony with the world, enabling him to perceive and re-create the inherent spirit of his subject.… “Alas! Such painting cannot be achieved by physical movements of the fingers and hand, but only by the spirit entering into them. This is the nature of painting.”

[Edward H. Schafer, Ancient China p 122]

It was during the fifth century CE that Mahayana Buddhism first arrived in China; by the eleventh century it had become established at every level of Chinese society. A movement called Neo-Confucianism then arose in an effort to restore the diminished authority of Confucianism. Its most important feature was a new metaphysics evolved in response to the Buddhist challenge:

…the concept, borrowed from Mahayana, that behind all universal phenomena there lies a unifying principle or noumenon which is present in man as his true nature…use[d] the Chinese terms li (principle, structure) and ch'i (matter-energy), the former being immanent in the latter in the multiplicity of phenomena which embraces moral as well as natural principles. Thus…moral action required the investigation of the principles (each an aspect of the one great principle, the Way) inherent in the world around [us].

[Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy p 243]

The symbol < >´ expresses both li and ch'i as described here. Like the Neo-Confuscianists, I contend that < >´ is intrinsic both to the natural world around us and to our own individual natures, our natures being part of the world. Chinese medicine charts the channels through which ch'i, matter-energy, is said to flow through the body. The living entity cannot function properly when its structure, li, is disturbed such that life energy, or ch’i, cannot flow. Ch’i is inherent in the organization of the living being—and its structure, or li, is indeed “immanent” in it, it permanently “pervades it.”[3] Each is necessary to the other.

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Is it presumptuous to argue with and comment on ancient ideas about which I have only read? How can I know, depending as I do on translation, and living in an entirely different time and place, what these authors really meant by what they wrote? Certainly there is a respectable body of opinion that says I can’t. I am making the assumption that people of earlier times existed within the boundaries of their bodies in the world much as I do, and that we are all talking about the same phenomena, about experienced order and structure, about life and energy. No matter what our culture or politics or technology, human beings past and present have lived in very much the same world, and more than ninety-nine per cent of our DNA is the same in all of us. We all depend on the sun for energy, planet Earth for food and water, the air for oxygen. We all love and despair, are content or anxious, are born and know that we must die, no matter what other ideas are included in our stories. In looking at or making art or anything else, we all experience the same mysteries and the same need to try to understand them. Currently, however, we find that, in academic institutions at least, ancient authors are often quoted in order to contrast their antique and amusing notions with our own sophistication and expertise. C.S. Lewis noted this in The Screwtape Letters:

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View.…When a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true.…To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge…this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded…. [I]t is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.

[C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

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We speak of art as “lively,” or “full of life” and somehow know what we mean, though we don't often ask how this can be, or why. In daily life we use “lively” as meaning “quick,” which now means “rapid,” but once meant “alive.” As so often with this sort of fundamental subject, the meanings of the words go in a circle, one word being essential to the definition of another; in the dictionary, “lively” takes us to “quick” which takes us back to “alive” again. Ancient and pervasive assumptions and understandings are embodied in the language, and things we no longer consciously know are still remembered there.

Artists commonly experience a work as “coming to life,” or “dying under my hand.” Its degree of liveliness can change, back and forth, many times during the process of making a painting, or a theatrical production, or any other work of art. The artist experiences joy, misery, terror, triumph, all intensely, as the work moves along, or “stops dead”…and then of course there is the powerful kind of rapturous peace when the challenge of discovering this new form of < >´ has been met. The same rapture is described by the heroes of creative science and mathematics. It is sometimes called the “Eureka feeling.”

The contemporary Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu described the ecstasy of art, both for its maker and its receiver:

When I write a piece of music I note on the score the kind of emotion I have in mind. I may think a piece about a garden should be calm, and still. But at the same time, it should be a strong calm, so I say, “ecstatic;” calm but ecstatic. One might think you can’t combine the two—calm and ecstasy—but there are moments in a Japanese garden that are very still and restful, but something intensely sensual, almost erotic, is going on at the same time.

[Toru Takemitsu, in Dream Window; Reflections on the Japanese Garden, documentary film directed by John Junkerman, Smithsonian, 1992]

The composer receives experience from the garden: he labors to provide something akin to it in his musical composition.

Within the created world which is the work of art, order and the disturbance of order can occur in varying proportions. Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon is “ugly,” (just as Alice B. Toklas told Gertrude Stein it was), because it verges on a condition of chaotic death. The harmony of the whole is in a distressingly precarious state, the figures wrenched into harsh and angular forms, the faces grotesque, the shapes at war. I do not look at it for long, but sometimes, after rooms or books or centuries full of academic pomposity or lesser Impressionist prettiness, what a relief.

In making a painting using only saturated colors as they come from the tube, in strong contrast with one another and without the visual relief of neutral black or white, the working artist will almost inevitably arrive at a place where, though the shapes may be in harmonious relationship, the colors quite literally vibrate in mutual antagonism. At this point the experience is of color’s negation in an unbearable black shimmer of warring vibrations, of death. The artist experiences a true terror, a dis-ease. For the work to be bearable, it must be rescued, brought back to a condition of some degree of chromatic harmony. The most profound works of color walk the thrilling edge of this precipice. In the Demoiselles, color confrontations are avoided, but its formal relationships go far to the chaos side of that edge. On the other hand, in some of Picasso's portraits—of his mistress Dora Maar, for instance—harmony reigns, despite the radical way in which the figure's parts are re-ordered. The artist's changing feelings toward the women in his life through the years can probably be traced by sensing the balance of order and disorder in his portraits of them. The game of “how much disorder can you stand?” is now played in all the arts, but if the dynamic balance tilts too far into chaos the work is no longer art; we can talk about it, but we cannot contemplate it.

To design a hideous building on purpose shows a confusion between excitement and the feeling of being alive. The smack in the face we get from such a building is meant to awaken us from our presumed sleep. It has been typical of the art of our age that it affronts us…you must kill the normal. This point of view assumes that there can be no magic in life as it is normally lived.

[Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic, p 124]

Order is fundamental to beauty, but in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon noted that “There is no perfect beauty but has some strangeness in it,” and we continue to quote him because our experience is that his claim is true. He was referring to the saving inconsistency necessary for life—that which in my proposed symbol is represented by ’ . But again, to say just where and how this occurs in a finished work is impossible. Life is not a perfect order with disorder tacked on, as my symbol might suggest; it is somehow an order enlivened by an intrinsic element of disorder. We are in the same moment both satisfied and thrilled.

Not that the [Greek] temple and its precinct became just one fixed and rigid symmetry. Its often wild or precipitous site, its winding processional path which followed the course of an earlier one to reach some ancient altar, the accident of a sacred spring—all this kept the geometry from becoming too dry. The Acropolis complex as a whole—like that of the sacred precinct at Olympia, whose construction in large part preceded it—is quite asymmetrical; an accumulation of elements of different origins, styles, and purposes, it is built along no central axis and is collectively beautiful because of the very ease and “naturalness” of the placing of the elements…. At the peak stands the perfect form of the Parthenon, corrected for all illusions or “appearance,” and pure in every proportion. Yet obliquely on the cliff, as a sort of counterweight, stands the highly irregular Erechtheum.… For Greece, the Erechtheum is an unbridled building—all impulse and diversity, you could say, whereas the Parthenon is all unity…the two structures, with all their contrasts or perhaps because of them, together form an admirable composition, or whole. [emphasis mine]

[William Harlan Hale, The Horizon Book of Ancient Greece, p 215]

In Nature, an essential relationship between order and disorder is present in every cell of every living creature, from the single-celled entity which is our most remote ancestor to the most highly evolved human being. It is built into the DNA molecule.

The greatest single invention of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule of DNA. We have had it from the very beginning, built into the first molecule to emerge, membranes and all, somewhere in the soupy water of the cooling planet three thousand million years or so ago. All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of that first molecule.…

We could never have done it with human intelligence.…[I]f our kind of mind had been confronted with the problem of designing a similar replicating molecule, starting from scratch, we’d never have succeeded. We would have made one fatal mistake: our model would have been perfect…it would never have occurred to us, thinking as we do, that the thing had to be able to make errors.…[I]t is no accident at all that mutations occur; the molecule of DNA was ordained from the beginning to make small mistakes.

If we had been doing it, we would have found some way to correct this, and evolution would have been stopped in its tracks.

[Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, p 23]

When death occurs, the organism stops producing its self-sustaining (that is, “autopoietic”) order—and becomes inert matter. A familiar aphorism says that “Perfect order is perfect death.” We have all experienced the truth of this: the mad desire to laugh on solemn occasions, or to say something shocking in a social situation where all the proprieties are being carefully observed, with stifling predictability. Or let us imagine a flawless, perfectly bilaterally symmetrical celadon green vase standing alone on a pedestal in the center of an otherwise empty square white room. It looks like a decoration in a very fancy funeral parlor. The room is somehow ominous; unless we put a folded newspaper, or a lily, into the vase, leaning to one side and disturbing the order, we hesitate to go in.

The study of chaos in the twentieth century has revealed that in the physical world it is the most orderly system which may be most at risk of degenerating into disorder. Perhaps it is a sense of this immanent danger that makes perfect order feel so stifling and even threatening. We instinctively fear chaos, and perfect order is likely to produce it eventually.[4] The desirable alternative to both perfect, sterile order and to chaotic and entropic death is < >´, which is the condition of life, which is what we love.

Apparently then, in the works of human beings two kinds of death are possible—an excess of disorder, and perfect order. Of the two, death by disorder is infinitely easier to achieve. We merely have to stop taking care, and order begins its inevitable slide into entropy. Any human creation—a language, a garden, a political system, a building, a marriage—will fall into disorder if not cared for. The living body will die if it is not given air and water and food and exercise. The mind will atrophy, or fail to develop, if it is not used, not provided with adventures.

On the other hand, the complete and “perfect” order which can feel like another kind of death is extremely difficult to achieve, and never lasts. It requires skill, attention, discipline, and maintenance. And in most situations, it is impossible—there is always an enlivening element of some kind in the real world. A bilaterally-symmetrical building is animated by shadow patterns, by people walking in and out, by the orderly but irregular living shapes of nearby trees, and by their ever-changing movement. We ourselves don’t stand upright and balanced, experiencing perfect symmetry, for long. The Prince moves his tie to one side, feeling suffocated by perfection.

It is now possible to twist long lengths of cold iron by machine, so that their form is “perfect,” but I read some years ago that the builders of the National Cathedral in Washington want variations, want the iron to “look old;” they take it out of the machine and then heat and manually twist sections so that irregularities will occur. In fact it is not the aged look that is really important; it is the sense of life that can come from slight irregularities produced by the slightly erratic rhythms of fire and material and human craftsmanship—and this is what the artisans crave.

The condition “Life” is one of enlivened order, in a universe where, generally, everything tends toward entropy. As human beings, conscious of what we do, we must not only survive, constantly rebuilding our own individual order, but must produce order, thereby making an environment where our life will thrive. We seem to have lost our respect for this fact, and even our recognition of it.

While it is true that an order which is too rigidly perfect is both deadly and vulnerable,[5] the vicissitudes of fate, natural cataclysms, and our own laziness and conflicting interests all generally prevent us from coming anywhere near the achievement of a perfect order. Tyrants attempt to construct social and political orders which allow them complete control and security, at great cost in suffering to the people they rule: such orders collapse eventually. Perhaps democracy, with all its imperfections, but with its built-in checks and balances to mitigate those imperfections temporarily, is the most flexible and changeable and therefore most stable political organization through time, if cared for with “constant vigilance” as a living system. In his fascinating book, Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde says that he wants to argue for the paradox that “the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very thing that cultures are based on.”[6]

The sinister power of a perfect order is recognized in many cultures, even if only symbolically. Joseph Campbell tells of a team of Navajo artists who were invited to demonstrate the process of making their tribal sand paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[7] The works were produced with great technical skill and precision, but a detail was always left out of each one, to protect the people handling it from its potential power. The museum asked that one painting be fully completed so that it could be copied for its collection. The artists laughed, but refused, saying that to complete the image would be dangerous. Navajo tradition teaches that the meticulous perfection of such designs must be destroyed before the next dawn; not to do so would endanger the harmony of the universe, the security of the society, and the safety of the shaman who made the painting. In Kyoto, Japan, in the early 1990s, a large sign beside the entrance road to the great Zen garden of the temple of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto stated, in English, that the arrangement of the stones in the broad rectangle of raked sand in that garden is perfect. However it said also that there is no point within the grounds from which all the stones, and thus the perfect whole of the composition, can be seen at once. “This expresses a great philosophical truth,” says the sign. What do the Western tourists who read it think that means? Ah, the inscrutable East!

Order never lasts: it erodes away unless it is maintained—it is only as permanent as the materials of which it is made and the care given it. Even a Zen sand garden must be tended daily, and any garden of plants is evanescent, changing from season to season and year to year, its form through time dependent on human maintenance. A flawlessly cut diamond may be permanent, relatively speaking, but its only life is in the movement of light reflected from its facets, and in the myths of inherent value and sentiment which have been invented to maintain its status as a commodity.[8]

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A commitment either to perfect order or to utter disorder is a perversion, since both are anti-life. But it is order that is scarce and desperately needed in our sprawling urban environments, where silence is unknown, noise is ubiquitous, art is seldom seen, and trash and neglect disfigure the streets. An oasis of obvious order provides a still point in the disorder of our lives: a perfectly proportioned building, a black and white checkerboard marble floor in a busy public space, a carefully cooked and seasoned dish, a conscientiously maintained park, a system of manners, a ballet—these things are exceptions in the general disorder of urban life. Those who can afford to will live in the parts of the city where they are available. The poor must do without, except for the orders that they themselves may generate and maintain.

The achievement of the condition < >´ requires that order arise out of disorder, or that the unexpected or anarchistic event occur when order becomes too oppressive. This process is ongoing, and the story of its continuing manifestation is what we call “History.” The horror of our own time is in the pervasive sense of an ever-and-inevitably increasing overall chaos, in spite of the theories and ideologies and technologies that promise to reverse such chaos, and the increasing monotony of our built environment.

Bilateral symmetry is one obvious way of ordering. Sequence and repetition are others. They are soothing and reassuring, but they do not thrill us. To interest us, a degree of orderliness must be present, but we are more intrigued and delighted when the method whereby that order is achieved is not obvious. (Twenty-five centuries ago Heraclitus wrote, “An unapparent harmony is stronger than an apparent one.”)[9] When such an “occult” but experienced harmony is brought to life, when < >´ is achieved, our pleasure is much more than simple sensual pleasure. It is intellectual, psychological, and perhaps moral as well—even though, and perhaps in part because, both its rationale and its source are ultimately unknowable.

The search for < >´ is that creativity which we tend to view with solemn respect as an activity of the especially gifted, but which is as natural to us all as is our breathing. When we make and respond to things we are to one degree or another artists and craftspeople; when we try to understand things by measuring, categorizing and comparing them we could be called scientists. Science seeks to discover and understand the great systems of enlivened order already present in the universe, from the smallest and most ephemeral subatomic particles and their patterns of occurrence to the furthest and oldest phenomena at the outer edges of all that we can see or imagine, and the orders to be found in our relations with other people, personal and political. Art discovers new orders in the process of making them manifest.

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Let us remember that < >´ cannot be achieved by willpower and determination—there has never been, and there never can be, a formula for it; it is a process, a dance. Its achievement requires the full use of all our capacities, which are only entirely available when we are entirely aware. We ourselves are each a manifestation of one of the possible forms of < >´. When it occurs in the world, and we are aware and open to it, it can bring us to our own < >´, to being fully ourselves within the creation. This is what we hope for, from the arts, from nature, and from other people in a relationship of love. The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes:

The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.

[Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self, p 200]

When < >´ is experienced the analytic stance is utterly abandoned —we are simply experiencing, and can only be grateful, surrendering to exaltation.

Vladimir Nabokov tells us:

The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, and if a character or an action fits into the pattern of that world, then we experience the pleasureable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call “real life.”

[Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Ed. Fredson Bowers, p 10]

In his book Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde quotes Oscar Wilde on the circumscribed and particular world of each work of art:

“The telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art,” says Wilde, thinking of all those great creations (Milton’s Satan, Hamlet, Jane Eyre) who are more real and durable than the perishable women and men we know in fact. “…Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.”

[Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, Mischief, Myth, and Art, p 79]

Life is what we want and must have! It is not extra, a luxury. If we do not get it somehow, from the arts, from nature, from other people, we cannot thrive. But each manifestation of it occurs within boundaries in space and/or time.

Bert O. States, who wrote so brilliantly about the theatre, remarked on how a real dog on stage affects the spell of illusion cast by the play:

An animal can be trained or tranquillized, but it cannot be categorically depended upon. There is always the fact that it doesn't know that it is in a play; consequently, we don't get good behavior, only behavior…. In productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona Launce's dog Crab usually steals the show by simply being itself…beneath this is our conscious awareness that the dog is a real dog reacting to what, for it, is simply another event in its dog's life.…[I]n short, what we have is a real dog on an artificial street…The theatre has, so to speak, met its match: the dog is blissfully above, or beneath, the business of playing, and we find ourselves cheering its performance precisely because it isn't one.

[Bert O. States, Great Happenings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of the Theater, p 32-34]

The dog is in, but not of the world of the play. His living < >´ is outside that of the play, not part of that work of art, that world. His impetuous will is outside the structure of the play, and his glorious un-self-conscious being, on the stage, threatens that structure

Let us remember here that an experience of < >´ is an experience of a set of relationships, not of any thing, and that in that experience no one is an expert, no one has superior rights. However the experience of it requires the humility of an inner and outer quiet.

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When a woman has made a [ceramic] vessel, dried, polished and painted it, she will tell you, with an air of relief, that it is a “Made Being.”

[Tom Hill and Richard Hill eds., Creation’s Journey: Native American Identity and Belief, p 235]

The Hopi woman is relieved because she has succeeded in making the full journey. Art is alive in some mysterious sense, and the ability to make it a “Being” is the true artist’s primary strength and gift.

[1] The Oxford English Dictionary

[2] The Oxford Dictionary of Etymolgy

[3] Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy p 243

[4] This will be made clearer in chapter 8, “Order and Chaos.”

[5] Something of this can be experienced in a strongly bilaterally symmetrical space like the great parterre garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte, designed by Le Notre. When walking in such a garden, the realities of vision and space dictate that one sees an ever-changing view of the bilateral symmetries stretching out in all directions and at various levels; some increase in size and others diminish as the vantage point moves, and one simultaneously observes the pedestalled urns of flowers, the statues, the playing fountains, the clouds in the sky, the blowing trees, the strolling visitors. But I was once almost the only person there on a windless and overcast November afternoon. I tried standing quite still and looking at the gardens from a point in the center of the pattern, where multiple equal and bilateral symmetries spread out around me in every direction. The effect was strangely oppressive; it seemed that the landscape was moving in on me from all sides, pinning me in place in a threatening convergence of lines and angles. It was intolerable; I soon walked on.

[6] Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, p 9

[7] In Transformations of Myth through Time audiotapes, Vol I Program 2, side A (299-315): Highbridge Productions 1989

[8] Such myths maintain the commercial value of certain twentieth and twenty-first century visual art, and can then become established as “art history.”

[9] Heraclitus, Fragment 54, Hippolytus Ref IX, 9,5