fun with formalism

So what, exactly, is the big deal about proportions known since the Greeks (and their Asian and African contemporaries) and about the rules of formal composition known in all of the creative disciplines, and still taught numerically in the design trade, where mathematics matters because room interiors or back gardens that are designed badly won't fit in the space allotted?

(This outburst refers to a friends-only post, for those of you who are not friends for whatever reason...my longest-suffering and longest-term friend is not on the friends list because it is one username and password too many.)

Well, actually the issue is that there really are definable principles that lead to visual pleasure or displeasure, it's just that they have nothing to do with the rules of classicism...it's more that a light, gauzy effect needs to be larger than a small, tightly focused passage of paint, and the both of them need to be a certain distance apart and have a certain possible range of internal texture...which still does not mean that the viewer will actually get any pleasure out of it, because what pleases us is partly given by cultural upbringing, and partly by biological substrate. But it is amazing that the biological substrate can partly be approached by mathematical principles. Partly.

And the qualities of sound, whether heard or unheard melodies of language, are not mathematical per se, but the nature of timbre and such is such that compositional computer programs can be written based on algorithms that create the desired range and intervals. What the originating sounds are...that matters, and matters as much as what the colors are in a painting. There are culturally given associations, but within limits...I shall not go into an entire chapter of my doctoral dissertation, and you will thank me for my choice.

And I think I shall, for just this once, separate out my successive trains of thought and let them run on parallel tracks. Statistics, randomness, and the strangeness of the world, coming right up.

well, anyway, here is the rest of the post

The day brought its usual flood of meaningless coincidences, from the appearance of Bob Dylan in three widely disparate contexts in a single morning (not too surprising, if Dylan indeed said nice things about Barack Obama that may have led people to pull out their old Dylan LPs) to the appearance of a brand-new press release from a relentless self-promoter the moment after I had arbitrarily decided to delete one of their e-mails from 2006.

Clearly, we live surrounded by coincidences in such profusion that I can see why the skeptics are skeptical. They happen not just every day, but nearly every hour.

And if a passage in a book that we open arbitrarily rhymes uncannily with the matter that was on our mind, well, it would now, wouldn't it?

No matter how odd the world becomes, we can remain genially skeptical about whether it means anything. For the problem is that the explanations that other people offer who have gone through similar experiences are simply unconvincing to us; it is as though we have to make up our own stories, and if the stories must be limited by rules of evidence and hypothesis formation, well, that's just us. They are still fictions about the world, as-if propositions from which as much mere fancy as possible has been excluded.

I don't have much interest in crop circles, but a friend posts the more extraordinary ones on a listserv to which I belong, and apparently the one at Barbury Castle this year reflects pi worked out to ten digits...according to one interpreter, who of course is contradicted by the archetypalist who has a completely different mathematical reading based on the proportions of the three circles.



What it means, I would suppose, is that there are some mathematically gifted art students with way too much time on their hands. Anyone who has seen elaborate graffiti murals go up overnight knows what art can be accomplished under half a night's cover of darkness.

Not that I would defend a single one of my propositions or hypotheses. As one of my favorite novelistic protagonists put it, "I think it but I don't believe it." But it was Rudolf Steiner who advised us, according to Owen Barfield, "Think these thoughts but do not believe them," at least not until there is sufficient empirical evidence to suggest the extent to which they might be worthy of belief.