Invisible Lines
At what point to the lines of science and art intersect? I am reminded of a novel I read by Italo Calvino called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller:
“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
It was in reading this particular novel that I realized that the novel is always a minor work, always outside of the reader. Intertextuality taught me that the novel speaks when it is entwined with another, when two voices from seemingly different places intersect and voice something new, not quite fragmentary as they would be alone, but multiple, folded together with new peculiarities, whether incongruous or whether strikingly similar. In the midst of so many leaves, so many branches, different when in blossom but when their seeds scatter, when the fruits are carried to another soil they intermingle, speak in a secret language that is found not in words but the impulses underlying what is spoken, from that deep reverie or solemnness in the unconscious. The lines that intersect are found in the refrain, the lacunae in which one writer says what another cannot, that implied silence which is filled by the insights of another. Does this not suggest what writing is looking for, what that craft means by turning thoughts into signs and inky gestures, looking for the multiple in the singular, making narratives, meta-narratives to voice what cannot be spoken in the every day of our existence, whether because of the great push that gathers inside of us, our mutual suspicion that what everyone else sees is not the same as what we see? That may be true, but what we are, we only are because of objects, persons that allow our daydreams, reflections, deepest impulses to speak. To be is to speak, to convey whether in discovery or art what is and where relationship lies.
Consider those hypersensitive nerve endings at the tips of the fingers, their sensing of rough edges, and how the cannot calm themselves by touching one another. A closed circuit, a body that perceives, can understand and relate to thousands of minute and seemingly mysterious signals. The signal of being overwhelmed by straight lines, by violence rather than confluence, that stark Medieval landscape that altered so much through the flying buttresses, non-linear Gothic geometries that happened so fast, so spontaneously and with such elegance, that Byzantine pornography that opened the rigid boundaries of sexuality, or William Blake’s portrait of humanity as children, both tortured and blissful and filling in the contours of suffering with a gracefulness that was like water; it will only be watched, admired, filter through and clarify but will not change, will not submit to power or the closed circuit. Our nerves and eyes speak with vast dictionaries, rendering silent what cannot be spoken, but when it is it will only be able to filter, clarify, change landscapes. Those printed works, major works that are anything but complete, only offer more and more tracings, sketches of a world unseen but expected to come. Incompletes that trace the places where music, symphony, even that silent music of mathematics shows that we are anything but what we say we are, what we have been able to speak.
It is more as though the confidence with which we begin to trace solid concepts displaces that world of the actual, those Platonic essences and perfect concepts really an undermining of matter itself, process itself. With centuries of Euclidean geometries, edifices that spoke with the confidence of a straight line yet could not even understand the power of that straight line, the power of something infinitely turning inwards, so starkly represented by the symbol of Fascism, it’s ninety degree angles and straight lines turning confidently inwards towards a saturation of power, saturated confidence without even quite understanding that Euclid himself did not understand the straight line, and for Pythagoras the straight line could not be measured notwithstanding determining the angles between, the obtuse, the invisible tracings that held the straightness together. It is merely to assist in understanding a perfect pattern, a perfect order that is held together with something different, an underlying order of thousands of intersections that are delicately held in balance by tiny, living and dying movements. Music already inherent in matter, matter already beyond itself and, although striated from above, in actuality laterally forming, forming through curvature, geodesy, highly complex fractals that are elusive and demand our fascination and, time.
To understand that space itself is already striated, that inside of our bodies are not straight lines or even edifices made of the same materials, but spores, bacteria, symbiotic living organisms that live with us, are fascinated with us, and are us. That our eyesight depends upon archaic bacteria that have fossilized in our retinas out of dependence, to live in comfort and send signals into our thoughts to be transformed into a reality. Every aspect of our existence is some kind of reflected pattern, refractions of light into understanding, gradually translated into the language of literature, storytelling, architecture, cinema. We seek narrative, but it constantly depletes itself, is always overwhelmed by a source decay, a sinking into perceived time, the emptying of desire into comparison, into questions of what is valuable because of the appearance it has, the sound that it makes. Suddenly, our invisible lines of discovery are replaced by the episteme, the ontological solipsism that Descartes dreamed into existence, the formation of habit as existence, or at least social existence, suddenly evoking a widespread schizophrenia between what is spoken and what is felt, the ever-changing personalities, attitudes, attachments to matter. Suddenly the race towards light, towards a surface that is narrated from inwards into an external power of appearance, control, the ability to contain what exists without.
So what am I trying to say here? It is that, although we believe that out existence is determined inside of ourselves, in actual fact we are not even stable, not even remotely that body that we think we are; we are matter organising itself into what matter has always been, but been unable to express, and that is a scientific expression of it to say the least. It indicates just how far abstraction has taken us, that is to say, that matter can be expressed as a concept with detachment. Which might lead to the more wonderful notion that in between matter is a certain immanence, a certain implicit understanding of itself that manifests in what we all know are simplifications, narratives, empty gestures that allow us to sleep with gentleness, to enter into the space of dreaming with more ease. And that is where we find who we are, in the space of dreaming and in gradually being able to withstand the frugality of life, the understanding that we know that we are dying so that we can live. So what am I trying to express? That there is a soul, a world soul, and it is trying to speak but getting thinned out, more disparate, as we evade its existence, as we try to emerge from our vulnerabilities with power, affluence, a hardness which is only a brittleness.
Even atheism is a fundamentally mystical wordview.
“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
It was in reading this particular novel that I realized that the novel is always a minor work, always outside of the reader. Intertextuality taught me that the novel speaks when it is entwined with another, when two voices from seemingly different places intersect and voice something new, not quite fragmentary as they would be alone, but multiple, folded together with new peculiarities, whether incongruous or whether strikingly similar. In the midst of so many leaves, so many branches, different when in blossom but when their seeds scatter, when the fruits are carried to another soil they intermingle, speak in a secret language that is found not in words but the impulses underlying what is spoken, from that deep reverie or solemnness in the unconscious. The lines that intersect are found in the refrain, the lacunae in which one writer says what another cannot, that implied silence which is filled by the insights of another. Does this not suggest what writing is looking for, what that craft means by turning thoughts into signs and inky gestures, looking for the multiple in the singular, making narratives, meta-narratives to voice what cannot be spoken in the every day of our existence, whether because of the great push that gathers inside of us, our mutual suspicion that what everyone else sees is not the same as what we see? That may be true, but what we are, we only are because of objects, persons that allow our daydreams, reflections, deepest impulses to speak. To be is to speak, to convey whether in discovery or art what is and where relationship lies.
Consider those hypersensitive nerve endings at the tips of the fingers, their sensing of rough edges, and how the cannot calm themselves by touching one another. A closed circuit, a body that perceives, can understand and relate to thousands of minute and seemingly mysterious signals. The signal of being overwhelmed by straight lines, by violence rather than confluence, that stark Medieval landscape that altered so much through the flying buttresses, non-linear Gothic geometries that happened so fast, so spontaneously and with such elegance, that Byzantine pornography that opened the rigid boundaries of sexuality, or William Blake’s portrait of humanity as children, both tortured and blissful and filling in the contours of suffering with a gracefulness that was like water; it will only be watched, admired, filter through and clarify but will not change, will not submit to power or the closed circuit. Our nerves and eyes speak with vast dictionaries, rendering silent what cannot be spoken, but when it is it will only be able to filter, clarify, change landscapes. Those printed works, major works that are anything but complete, only offer more and more tracings, sketches of a world unseen but expected to come. Incompletes that trace the places where music, symphony, even that silent music of mathematics shows that we are anything but what we say we are, what we have been able to speak.
It is more as though the confidence with which we begin to trace solid concepts displaces that world of the actual, those Platonic essences and perfect concepts really an undermining of matter itself, process itself. With centuries of Euclidean geometries, edifices that spoke with the confidence of a straight line yet could not even understand the power of that straight line, the power of something infinitely turning inwards, so starkly represented by the symbol of Fascism, it’s ninety degree angles and straight lines turning confidently inwards towards a saturation of power, saturated confidence without even quite understanding that Euclid himself did not understand the straight line, and for Pythagoras the straight line could not be measured notwithstanding determining the angles between, the obtuse, the invisible tracings that held the straightness together. It is merely to assist in understanding a perfect pattern, a perfect order that is held together with something different, an underlying order of thousands of intersections that are delicately held in balance by tiny, living and dying movements. Music already inherent in matter, matter already beyond itself and, although striated from above, in actuality laterally forming, forming through curvature, geodesy, highly complex fractals that are elusive and demand our fascination and, time.
To understand that space itself is already striated, that inside of our bodies are not straight lines or even edifices made of the same materials, but spores, bacteria, symbiotic living organisms that live with us, are fascinated with us, and are us. That our eyesight depends upon archaic bacteria that have fossilized in our retinas out of dependence, to live in comfort and send signals into our thoughts to be transformed into a reality. Every aspect of our existence is some kind of reflected pattern, refractions of light into understanding, gradually translated into the language of literature, storytelling, architecture, cinema. We seek narrative, but it constantly depletes itself, is always overwhelmed by a source decay, a sinking into perceived time, the emptying of desire into comparison, into questions of what is valuable because of the appearance it has, the sound that it makes. Suddenly, our invisible lines of discovery are replaced by the episteme, the ontological solipsism that Descartes dreamed into existence, the formation of habit as existence, or at least social existence, suddenly evoking a widespread schizophrenia between what is spoken and what is felt, the ever-changing personalities, attitudes, attachments to matter. Suddenly the race towards light, towards a surface that is narrated from inwards into an external power of appearance, control, the ability to contain what exists without.
So what am I trying to say here? It is that, although we believe that out existence is determined inside of ourselves, in actual fact we are not even stable, not even remotely that body that we think we are; we are matter organising itself into what matter has always been, but been unable to express, and that is a scientific expression of it to say the least. It indicates just how far abstraction has taken us, that is to say, that matter can be expressed as a concept with detachment. Which might lead to the more wonderful notion that in between matter is a certain immanence, a certain implicit understanding of itself that manifests in what we all know are simplifications, narratives, empty gestures that allow us to sleep with gentleness, to enter into the space of dreaming with more ease. And that is where we find who we are, in the space of dreaming and in gradually being able to withstand the frugality of life, the understanding that we know that we are dying so that we can live. So what am I trying to express? That there is a soul, a world soul, and it is trying to speak but getting thinned out, more disparate, as we evade its existence, as we try to emerge from our vulnerabilities with power, affluence, a hardness which is only a brittleness.
Even atheism is a fundamentally mystical wordview.
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