SCHEMATIZING (14)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 2, 2023

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

“We must try to achieve the fullest consciousness of our existence which is at home in the two unseparated realms,” writes Rilke to a translator of his Duino Elegies (w. 1912–1922, p. 1923), because our existence is “inexhaustibly nourished by both.” He adds: “There is neither a here nor a beyond but the great unity.”

Referencing this letter, Lawrence Durrell would remark, in his A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952), “This is not only good mysticism, it is a not entirely inadequate view of the kind of thing the relativity philosophers are talking about.”

Mysticism, modern poetry, Einstein’s theory of special relativity… all circling around a notion of the mutually constitutive identity of opposites within a given system. How to depict such a system? With “some of the humility of the modern scientist for whom there are no more ‘facts’ but simply ‘point-events’ strung out in reality,” suggests Durrell. In analyzing modern poetry, he confesses: “In reality we are simply making a rough-and-ready star-map of a universe which we do not perfectly understand.”

Which is a not entirely inadequate description of a G-schema.

PS: Jordan Belson (1926 – 2011) was an American artist and abstract cinematic filmmaker who created nonobjective, often spiritually oriented, abstract films. Much of his work is meant to evoke a mystical or meditative experience. I encountered this particular art work at a multi-artist Drawing Center (NYC) show — “Of Mythic Worlds” — that was on exhibit earlier this year.

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SCHEMATIZING (14)

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