Lake Shasta past Buckhorn and the Hatchet Mountains
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From San Francisco to Portland (1,123 kilometers); night in Richmond, California, slumped in a chair, trying to justify the work of art so as to save the long threads of time one by one. I had lived so well “anyway” that I retreated from the plausible petty-bourgeois optimism—I entered a darker but less insipid world. It was precisely when my passion for art flammified my daily impurities, but I only began to doubt art’s “salvation” when I climbed Lake Shasta past Buckhorn and the Hatchet Mountains, a spectacular pass in the Northeast, thick with trees and snow. Art seemed quite vain to me next to the cruel purity of the natural world, the perfect and cruel nature. The ghostly Mount Shasta in the distance... lakes in the mountains; the towering blue sky of the mountain air. Lamoine... ravines beside the railroad; open spaces; forests and mountains all the way to Dunsmuir—a small logging town with a train station in the mountains (Shasta in the clouds on the hillside, in the wandering of ghosts in the snow). How the specters there display themselves in the broad blue day, up there... The large inn facing empty spaces to the north and freight trains full of coal. Guests in the hotels. Mountain pines. I felt I could not decipher the full meaning of it all except by placing myself in the future and sketching with my eyes a seemingly vague and unintelligible future—but a future that (despite everything) filled my entire present with meaning. All that "life" was naturally projected before my eyes in a "non-thematic" way and was the object of what Heidegger called "pre-ontological understanding." Most of the time what I saw was psychic energy in its purest form.
Post script
ResponderExcluirAn unmistakable sound world reaches us fully through Matisse's open windows to summer or Dufy's effervescent waters. The writer's entire inner silence suddenly comes into play. And I have my doubts about the terrifying extent of all this: such plunges into the void, however, are practices common to Zen Buddhism, Neoplatonic and Plotinian figurations of eternity, and Kabbalistic tropes of divine seclusion and negativity. However disparate their contexts, they are all doctrines that constitute the backdrop to the "aesthetics of emptiness" (where the "minimum" signifies the plenitude of immeasurable freedom and potentiality). This (in fact) requires further explanation, and it is the most serious matter I can think of. In the most convincing of Japanese architectural solutions and in their archipelagos of stone and sand (the actual scale can be disturbingly tiny), silence is clothed in light and light in silence, as in the analogous attempts of modern art to "touch the void."
The theosophical concepts and the mysticism of light, ultimately Neoplatonic or Dionysian, that prepare and accompany all these minimalist tonalities would eventually extend to the art of Ad Reinhardt, Elsworth Kelly, and the entire American school of "illuminated ones of the void" associated with the Pacific Northwest. But it is in a series of seven canvases composed between 1931 and 1938-39 that we see how Mondrian's mastery of capturing the dynamics of the void was more ascetic and absolute than that of the others. One need only think of his Composition in Red of 1931, followed a year later by With Yellow and a Double Line (in which the spaces between the lines take on a seminal intensity). The series, which includes Composition Blue and White of 1935, Composition White and Red of 1936, and Composition with Blue of 1937, seems to constitute a true triad moving toward the two dominants. There are the masterpieces of 1938: Rhombus with eight lines, Red and Composition in Red.
ResponderExcluirAlmost nullified or limited to formal marginality, the presence or movement of primary colors only further emphasizes the whiteness of their central areas. In the best Mondrian, the impression one gets is that precisely what is not on the canvas is what shapes the controlled but profoundly fertile freedom of the central space. It is precisely from the mute fertility of all that emptiness that the algebraically representational versions of Broadway and Boogie-Woogie will emerge in his later works.
ResponderExcluirPost script
ResponderExcluirimmediate urgency to the void in motion or to the absolutes of light or shadow -----
intentionality in freedom
what Aristotle called "entelechy"
the pure unfolding of potential form
contact with generative forces
prefiguration of the modalities of being and saying
capable equally of incorporating possibilities and insinuations of a nominal substance and a mimetic objectivity to which the white spaces at the center of a Mondrian or the "galactic dust" toward compaction in Reinhardt's "black on black" have assured free access.
Post Scriptum
The investigation of the meaning of mathematical elements in much of non-objective and minimalist aesthetics is absolutely fascinating. The hypothesis that pure mathematics, with zero as its originating source, truly has a guaranteed place in the originary vortex of pre-being and that its "principia," moreover, were already operative before the development of humankind's limited intellect. Descartes, Leibniz, and Plato also seem to have perfectly intuited this entire paradox. Pure mathematics belongs to the realm of creation.
The analogies regarding creativity in both absolute poetry and pure mathematics are intuitively plausible. Mathematical imagination may derive from the same areas of the preconscious labyrinth from which classical music and the other arts derive. Einstein was paraphrasing Schopenhauer (and could also have quoted Leopardi) when he professed that "the impulse to escape from everyday life with its painful brutality and desolate monotony was undoubtedly one of the strongest motives leading men to devote themselves to the arts and sciences, especially mathematics." Plato and Erdos formulate the same sentiment even more exaltedly: the true poet and the number theorist, the composer of the Goldberg Variations no less than the author of the Goldbach Conjecture, are spirits equally possessed by the infinite and engaged, at various important points, in a common quest.
ResponderExcluirOn both the practical and sociological levels, the project of theoretical and applied sciences is eminently collaborative. Since its origins, their work has always been developed by a community of inquiry, research, and purpose. Even when they compete intensely in their pursuit of intellectual priority and material benefits (such as the Nobel Prize or patents), scientists communicate with each other in a "cyberspace" of reciprocal perception that predates, by millennia, today's networks of informational immediacy.
ResponderExcluirPaul Valery , não sem um toque de misticismo , já havia escrito belamente sobre essas
ResponderExcluir''Existences singulières dont onsait que leur pensée abstraite, quoique très exercée et capable de toutes subtilités et profondeurs , ne perdait jamais le souci de créations figurées , d´ápplications et de preuves sensibles de sa puissance attentive. Ils semblent avoir possédé je ne sais quellescience intime des échanges continuels entre l ´arbitriare et le nécessaire ''.
Para Valéry , Leonardo da Vinci representava o ''tipo supremo desses indivíduos superiores ''.