Of Dürer's 'maester engravings..
Jerome
The Knight
Melancholia
..Jerome can be taken as the intellectual/theological; the Knight as a moral rider (Der Reuter); Melancholia as representing artistic creativity.
Of the three, Jerome is ostentatiously Italian, with perfect perspective and light-effects. The Knight is far less perfect and with a definite sense of Gothic linework. The sense of disorder is manifest in Melancholia, but here Dürer has exposed the geometrical side of things almost as a separate entity (to the brooding figure and landscape).
The moral seems to be that pure order and geometry lead to the modern era of an intellect which is not so much theological as sorcerous. This is the modern illusion, where disorder is a vanishing commodity.
The theme of artistic creativity is implicitly disordered, though. How can one be creative in a universe of straight lines? This was born home by reading Lloyd Price's memoir Lawdy Miss Clawdy. The 40s and 50s in Louisiana were of course a segregated era, and he describes the local hot joints with the 'Jook' for blacks on one side and the 'Saloon' for whites on the other.
There were hazards and the odd shooting, and alongside that the opportunities opening up for young, talented black rhythm and blues songwriters, singers, players.
He describes that there was very little information apart from.the broadsheets which dealt principally in white topics. Entrepreneurial blacks such as Johnny Johnson of JET eventually opened things up and Lloyd himself became one of the most creative entrepreneurs (building middle income homes in the Bronx to this day).
The 40s and 50s he describes were, I would say, a land of poetry in an unthinking universe. The main reason is that - like Lil Abner comicstrip - the situation is the locality of differences, and not the central state that deals in similarities.
For all the negatives, the freedom of individual creativity is the positive, as Price states.
It's true we all.did not get along at times, but families don't get along a lot of times; but they are still called families.
I am so proud to be in the American Family. A tree of many colors with universal appeal. It speaks with many tongues and thank you for that!
In this book my love for America is greater than any words I can say. For I am the living proof of her greatness. (page 89)
In our modern disaster-zone of information and diktats, the commune of social-physical reality barely exists. It is vanishing; that is to say, the social-physical reality is going to be replaced by words (information).
A commune historically is not order; it grows through differences interacting haphazardly. There are controls within it, such as the well-known horse race in Siena, a medieval relic.
Reading Price's memoir, he reminded me a lot of Kanye West and the entrepreneurial visionary. Apart from.that, both are egoists but recognize that their success is largely a matter of luck - of time, place, era.
West's endeavors envisage an economy based on commune and family situation in Cody, Wyoming. Where this physical reality is established, the spiritual dimension is there in the creative outlets of the commune. The physical cannot easily be segregated from the psyche.
In terms of black culture, this situation is seen in the relation between blues, gospel and rock'nroll. In a world of natural linework where different things interact legitimately, the erotic and the spiritual are close partners.
Minnie Riperton, who came somewhat later, has a good line in this dichotomy.
LES FLEURS (Riperton, with a 'Suddenly I See' intro)
This is power and truth as well as sex and desire. Flowers inhabit the world of untidiness where lines intersect in the fertility of life. Where roots, blood, dirt, water and the power of the underworld establish rebirth.
This is essentially the lost world that pure order vanishes. Of differences that intersect. The modern experiment in tidiness tends to assume one does not need to be untidy.
This is actually the same theme as Euripides'The Bacchae (prev), where king Pentheus denies the sanctity of Dionysus, god of the vine and unthinking power (lust). Pentheus establishes pure social.ordee, but is then torn apart by the ecstatic followers of the gay god.
The basic point is that if the universe were ordered, it would be robotic, as opposed to poetic. In a world of poetry there exist hazards, but there is not the deathly nothingness of eternal sameness.
The trend us everywhere - north, south, east, west. For example, the restoration of Al Nouri in Iraq.
It's not Mosul. It looks exactly like Sharjah (UAE), said Rasha all Aqeedi. (DT)
A world of straight lines (a la Saudi's Neon City, natch) appeals to a certain type of ego - the followers of sorcerers of the mirror of illusions. The real world has social-physical reality of a haphazard nature, with psychic content (story, destiny).
Whether that world is aristocratic or republican, it essentially belongs to the psyche. Another word for that is religion. The higher-level systems upon which Man is truly dependent.
These systems are not ordered; they are comprised of social-physical differences which interact or intersect. The Duke of Edinburgh, amongst his other pursuits, was a landscaper and farmer attached to the land.
The difference with modern politicians is they are not attached to the land, to the higher-level system such as lochs, islands, stone circles. This is a quote from.the Daily Record.
Deep down it's not just deference for authority or a perverse love of subjugation, but also the prospect of illusory unity, and the illusion of being part of something bigger than yourself.
Fortunatrly, such views are not yet the norm; nevertheless, the power of the word is yet again attacking the unthinking power of nature and higher realities of psyche and religion.
Balance and symmetry are spontaneous formulations of natural systems. As HB169 says, this is not a right-wing perspective so much as a linguistic-phobi one. The sorcerous illusion we live inside gives legs to such banal spokespeople of the worldwide urban order.
