"Science" by Robert Kelly

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Science

Science explains nothing
but holds all together as
many things as it can count

science is a basket
not a religion he said
a cat as a big as a cat

the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

--Robert Kelly

Barfield on Art and Science

"It is no longer enough that an occasional artist here and there should see his parcel of truth and speak it out, while the actual direction taken by civilisation continues to be wholly determined by a soi-disant scientific method of knowledge.  Science must itself become an art, and art a science; either they must mingle, or Western civilisation, as we know it, must perish to make room for one that may have spirit enough to learn how to know God's earth as He actually made it."

--Owen Barfield, from "Thinking and Thought" in Romanticism Comes of Age

"This Lime Tree Bower My Prison"

The following poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes me as almost an unconsciously developed manual for Goethe's "exact sensorial imagination," the practice of seeing deeply into nature by, first, observing a natural phenomenon carefully and faithfully, then enlivening and extending the image of the phenomenon retained in the mind.  In his poem, Coleridge at first grieves his inability to follow his friends as they traverse a landscape with which he has become intimately acquainted.  As he travels the landscape in his mind, however, he realizes, not only that Nature is fully present in even the humble bower that he had cursed as his prison, but that the contemplation of the natural is, itself, an expression of Nature's vitality.  With this understanding, he finds himself in the presence of "Love and Beauty" and, in the final line, is able to attribute to one of his wandering friends a sentiment that could well be the motto of those who are awake to the potential of the Ugly-Beautiful: "No sound is dissonant which tells of Life." 

This Lime Tree Bower My Prison

ADDRESSED TO CHARLES LAMB,

OF THE INDIA HOUSE, LONDON

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; -- that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
                                    Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven -- and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
                                            A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight; and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On The Next Big Thing

Although my idea of a video game is still something along the lines of Space Invaders or Pitfall (remember Pitfall?  I made up a whole backstory about that little pixelated guy), I found this gaming article in Slate interesting.  Here's an excerpt:

While gaming feels too much like a boys' club for my liking, the goal of  'trying to make more games that appeal to women' is problematic. The television shows that attain not just ratings but cultural admiration—like Mad Men—aren't usually created with gender targets, but with the goal of telling a story that captures the nuances of human experience. I would guess women like Mad Men just as much as men do, even though the values of the show's characters are overwhelmingly sexist. Similarly, I don't think gaming will broaden its audience by focusing on subject matter so much as execution and intention—the why that Hecker asks developers to consider in his talk.

After reading that, I stumbled on similar sentiments from The Guardian concerning Harry Potter:

As is often the case with cultural phenomena, it seems to have helped that Potter defied the conventional wisdom of the time. A focus group would surely have concluded – as the eight publishers who turned down the original manuscript presumably did – that there was no modern market for stories about a bespectacled wimp at a boarding school. But within a decade he was a billion-dollar brand.

The lesson here seems to be that, like life from the Primordial Stew, culture should be allowed to bubble-up from whatever pool it was born in.  Attempts to manipulate audiences by manufacturing cultural phenomena may succeed but they will not endure.  For me, this is another reminder that real shifts in mass consciousness should be regarded as gifts from the gods.  We can teach ourselves to receive them but we cannot create them.

A Utopian Vision

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A few weeks ago, I finished Peter Dickinson's children's trilogy The Changes in which the inhabitants of the British Isles are one day without obvious cause overcome with a revulsion for technology. People flee the cities but what follows is not the establishment of an agrarian utopia because, with the people's disdain for machines, comes superstition, suspicion and cruelty. What has stuck with me about the story is its fairness in casting medieval provincialism and contemporary machine-dependence as equally symptomatic of deadened minds. It is unwise to relax too completely into the corporate mind of any era. Our relationships with nature, with each other and with the artifacts of our culture require our vigilance to remain healthy relationships.

Particularly in Heartsease, the second of the three novels, it is clear that some characters have an affinity with animals and some with machines and, while Dickinson seems saddened that it is not common for people to be able to commune with both flesh and blood and metal and gears, he suggests that the feelings are not that different in either case. Almost every few pages into Heartsease and the final novel, The Weathermonger, one encounters a fascinated description of the personality of either a horse or an engine. In The Weathermonger, a young woman who fears technology more because of socialization than internal inclination realizes that the marvelous antique car on which she had come to rely has become to her more like an animal than a lifeless machine. The implication is that the vitality in our relationship with technology depends on us, on how well we make things and how well we care for them, in how we respect the life of the world that we have harnessed to make them go. This caused me to wonder what a society would look like if we all had minds like those of certain medieval Islamic scientists who thought of themselves as midwives when they were mining metals from the earth. How would we live, learn and work? What would our professional lives look like when our idea of knowing something is more like conaîttre (to be familiar with) than savoir (to know as a fact)?

To begin with, I think our first task as children would be to learn to submit to the guidance of love, to find our kindred entities, to commune with that with which we most desire to commune. In this, there would be tremendous power to live the lives of our choosing. More obstacles are overcome by passion than technology. Goethe, for example, was in love enough with plants to travel everywhere he could to see the different conditions under which they grew, to keep endless journals, make endless drawings, to animate endless pictures of vegetable life in his mind.  He was in love enough with rocks and with animals to make the same kinds of efforts on their behalf and go to great trouble and expense to procure specimens because he, being who he was, could not do otherwise.

There is a reason that, even now, people talk about being "moved" by something.  We recognize the power of receptivity.  When we love something enough to surrender ourselves to it (or, to use my new favorite phrase, to see it "for itself" instead of "for ourselves") then its fullest nature opens up in our imaginations and we know just what to do with it, while the thought of doing something to it never occurs.  Kandinsky loved circles and saw them everywhere in nature.  Seurat saw points of light.  Nabokov saw shadows and mirrors.  They only had to grow confident enough in their relationships with these qualities to look as deeply as they could into what was already presenting itself to their minds.  The result was a collaboration, between themselves and their non-human partners, that stretched rather than violated the boundaries of nature.

If, as Rudolf Steiner believed, part of the evolution of a phenomenon is our concept of it—because it comes into being as the phenomenon we know through our knowing it—then our knowledge of a phenomenon is an essential part of the thing itself.  We and the world complete each other while, at the same time, we each have our very own world to bring into being, guided by our own particular love.  In a society that takes this fact as fundamental, doctors would never talk about diseases but would use their imaginations to sense the arc of their patients' whole being and help them to discover what they need to thrive.  Carpenters and mechanics would work with their materials in the way that Michelangelo produced sculpture, chipping away the stone to find the statue already inside of it.  They would love their materials enough to bring them to new life and the objects we "use" every day would be alive to us because of it. They would be our companions. 

Scientists in this society would be like artists whose job it is to help us see their vision of the world.  We would all be artists.  Teachers would exist to help us surrender ourselves to our art but without telling us what to see.  We would understand the world like we understand music.  Without stopping to consider what it means, our only care would be to sing our world for others.  Maybe we could think about our task as human beings as the creation of a kind of universal harmony of all our songs—because it is our job to express, not to explain—or maybe another analogy would be to imagine each of us bringing our own world into being through our own expression so that all of those worlds would come together as distinctive facets of a complicated crystal.  As we advanced in our love, becoming more and more sensitized, more and more at one with our own kind of knowing, we would be able to use our sensitivity to open up more and more to the knowing of others so that our world and The World would just grow and grow forever and ever.

“Life was a cosmic holiday.”

Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass was perfectly visible—either by the light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out from our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and color, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and the macrocosm were at length atoned—at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home—to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me—sense after sense indescribable, because no corresponding word, no likeness or imaginations exist wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed—yet ever expanding, ever making room to receive—was the conscious being where things kept entering by so many open doors! When a little breeze brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which responded their sweet TIN-TINNING**, myself the joy of the sense, and of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean upon which a ground-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new waves; yet the joy was ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.



--George MacDonald, from Lilith: A Romance

"Missing the Point"

From The London Review Blog

Excerpt:  Thus as I walked around the Frieze show in London in October, it was easy to see that everything was all shiny and shallow, and that it was really a show for children with chequebooks, or adolescents with attitude. The work was silly. Maybe it could have been argued that it was all significant, part of a new movement towards something or other, away from abstraction towards a brash figuration, but I have never been able to listen to arguments. One of the artists had made a big ceramic thing and he was wearing girls’ clothes and looked like Little Bo Peep. I liked him.