Contemplation of a Forest

This morning I understood some things that had been brewing in my mind for quite some time.

Repetition of form is hidden by color, the shape of negative space, light and shadow, and the process of time; time, which renders some shapes more aged and malformed than others.  Because of the interplay of differentiated and complicated shapes, we ironically tend to ignore the geometry of nature and call it organic.  An organic form is generally conceived of as an amorphous form, like an amoeba, rather than a geometric one, which a maple leaf is exemplary of.  A forest, then, is made up of limited forms in various states of existence according to time.  Trunks and branches are essentially the same, branches being like smaller trunks. These trunks and branches have, in time, broken and fallen to the floor.  They exist on the forest bed with fallen leaves, which have also been altered through time.  This creates the foundation of the forest.  Visually, it is a mess of decomposing forms with a sort of brownish, red color.  Conceptually, it is a vision of the future, while the branches and leaves on the trees create a vision of the past.  Furthermore, we see how the foundation, the future, creates the past, (the decomposition of such material which feeds  new growth) and how also, the past creates the future.  We could learn from this, possibly, that there is no time, or rather, that all things exist in all states - always.  Hence, time is not an illusion, but functions cyclically and not linearly.  Returning to the discussion of forms…

If you ask a child to draw a leaf, a flower, or a school bus, the visual response that will often manifest is not of a leaf, a flower, or a school bus.  Rather, it is of a shape, a symbol, that represents a leaf, flower or a school bus.  Here, the brain, through memory (created by the passage of time), is accessing the general form of these things because they are part of a system of shapes.  All flowers have centers and petals.  Most leaves are oblong in shape.  A school bus is a large vehicle, in the shape category of vehicles, and more specifically in the shape category of trains, trucks and buses.  In the vein of a question explored in a prior blog entry, do we perceive existing order, or do we create order?  Do we perceive symbols and shapes that already exist with a message?  Or do we create meaningful symbols out of a physical world that is meaningless?  Perhaps it is the former.

Back to the forest.  This morning I recognized that what I was looking at was a repetition of the same few shapes, like a kaleidoscope.  What made my vision appear organic was the three-dimensional quality, the placement in space, of these shapes.  What was organic about the composition of the forest was not the way the leaves were arranged (this too was very geometric and fractal-like) but the amorphous shapes the leaves made out of negative space (here we are reminded that the essence of a cup is its empty space, and not the thing itself). These shapes in space felt chaotic, and so should they be, as space is without form, (when we break a cup, it loses its form.  It no longer contains.  What might have been held by the essence of the cup has gone wild, become amorphous.  We call it a mess.  This is chaos).  Yet, it was only looking through space (space, the essence, that in which form exists and makes use of) that I was able to see the geometric composition of the forest.  If one meditates on an area for some time, yet allows their mind/brain to also ingest the whole of what they are seeing, peripheral vision and all, then the geometry of the composition becomes apparent.  By this I mean, you can actually see it, the fractals, the tiny shapes that create the larger shapes that are repeated throughout the vision.  Honing this practice, a sort of visual meditation, may actually enable us to see the three-dimensional world in the second dimension, if only for a second, where we may actually become aware of the patterns that create the physical environment, that are hidden by color, light, space, and time.

I have learned many of these ideas by contemplation of nature, but also by my personal creation of art.  It is because of artistic creation that I am able to apply what I have learned in painting, to life itself.  And it works!  Continually creating helps the artist perfect the order that lay in their unconscious, that is the universal web (we can totally call it The Matrix!) that contains us all.  It is the concept of the Yin Yang in Eastern thought that manifests in all of creation, and moves even, throughout the mind.  In Psychoanalysis it is called the unconscious. 

The artist, then, has an unconscious duty to provide a visual for how nature functions.  Sight is merely a sense.  When we close are eyes, are we expected to believe that everything disappears?  Of course not. This should tell us that things exist regardless of our senses.  What does this mean?  This means that how things are presented to us are clues to how the universe functions.  Through our senses, we paint a picture of existence itself.  And in painting this picture, we do not create it, but we provide for existence a form that is only as complete as our understanding of it.  Why then madness?  Lack of understanding.  The primary characteristic of madness is narcissism.  This means a great deal of information about reality is being ignored, and the "mad" individual is focusing mostly on his or her own personal existence and experience, rather than existence itself.  This is not a bad thing, but indicates a developmental level that must, in time, be surpassed.

The physical world is an illusion in the same way that art is a lie.  But art is not a lie.  This is a misconception.  Art and the physical world are abstractions, manifestations of Truth.  Both are paths to be explored.  Everything physical is slave to a process that alters it in time.  Everything is constantly being destroyed and created anew to either move us toward creation (evolution) or destruction (extinction).  Though we cannot avoid destruction, we can maneuver our tendency toward destruction to evolve us, rather than destroy us.  What we literally perceive in the physical world, as well as in dreams and visualizations, is the source of scientific discovery.  Hence, we can learn about the way we act as individuals, and as humanity, by understanding nature through all of our senses.