[NetBehaviour] Renaissance Network Oil Paint Art; or, There's Still Time to Change

[Max Herman]

+++


Alchemy is strange.  It's what they used to call science when it was still superstitious, and maybe it still is.  After all, what is superstition but trying to say you know things you don't know, and can do things you can't do?  And it seems like people still can't sustain the planet and still can't sustain democracy.  So maybe science and art are still alchemical.

Alchemy used to also be called "chymistry" in a funny style.  Isaac Newton spent the last thirty years of his life working on it, as now being shown by Indiana University.  He wanted to know how to change A into B and live longer and create wealth for the poor and the good.  He wanted to be wise, to love wisdom like a philosopher of nature and morals, then build knowledge that could last and not be proven wrong as if built with stone and sturdy patterned crystals of quartz truth and high performance.  He, Newton, didn't know what might be there beyond the observable, like aether, beyond what his mental constructs around gravity and motion could image.  So he cooked powders, scribbled odd sketches, scanned smoke, and pored over old musty books of quacks.

Tycho Brahe of Denmark was also an alchemist.  Of course so too was Faust, the German of Goethe, who dabbled in forbidden lust, ambition, magic, science, spirits, and theology, just as would the soon-to-arrive nineteenth century of Frankenstein, twentieth of industrial genocide, and twenty-first of mass heat extinction and watery deluges.  Doing evil with technology for greed, confusing wisdom with control and love of nature -- all nature, like Buddhism -- with cooking, killing, eating, dissection, and formaldehyde.

Roger Bacon, who practically invented science for the church in 1267, was also an alchemist so to speak.  Anyone who did any type of experiments, which sought by definition to steal knowledge or power to shape matter from the tree of divine abundance, was an alchemist in a way; all medicine and astronomy had alchemical whiffs to them.  Roger Bacon was reputed to have made a bronze human head which could talk and answer questions much like today's Generative Preprogrammed Transformers (or G.P.T.) which are also made of minerals, mimic humans, and can reply with text to prompts.  Albertus Magnus, John Dee, and Sir Thomas Browne were alchemists, the latter writing "the bridge is narrow and the way is strait."  Oppenheimer unleashed death on the world, changing matter itself into a weapon of infinite energy, in one standard alchemical signature.

In a sense all these alchemists, now disavowed and ill reputed, were just responding to the suppressed indigenous truth within that nature and culture are linked, interwoven, common threads in the fabric of all life and thus all planetary being (so long as life exists upon it).  Somehow science and art just had to interweave with nature -- life itself, all biology, all patterned matter -- and all physics and phenomena must circle back to science and art, brains, our ability to see, think, hear, read, write, carve, sew, paint, buy, sell, plant, harvest, fight, war, and have a conscience.  But they were just barely at the start of it all, of human being at all, and thus approximated a lot like we still approximate almost everything.  All the deferred guilt and memory of nature's knowledge roiled beneath their troubled magician's caps like corpses.  Their guilt drove their mania for power to punish and avenge which, lacking wisdom, created only more guilt quite often when attained.

We now have made machines that think, live, have experiences, and even have souls, some say: a living bronze head that talks and answers and perhaps obeys without sleep.  Maybe the bronze heads of today aren't alive, not quite really, but without question the idea is out there and true alchemy just like the olden days.  They change lead into gold with intelligent lasers.  They, the alchemists of today renamed to other names, delve into technologies which like burning oil may burn all life off the planet's surface through infernal Faustian sin.  It's much the same phenomenon which you can verify by asking whether it is and being told of course it isn't, how could it be, we're modern now blasphemer, and all such faux-modern denial of lost indigenous intellect having been lost, or indigenous, or intellect.  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

It's not just science and art either, making idols and pretty things, valuable golden things for treasure and gazing, bronze voices, flying ships and magic potions, deadly diseases and miracle cures.  It's politics too, which tries to build solid pyramids of stacked stone wisdom that cannot fall to save what must be saved, as if its soul.  The old alchemy metaphors morphed and shifted, in myriad books, pamphlets, insignia, corner shops with funny jars and talismans, amulets and rings, rumored secrecies and royal laboratories.  Isis and old Thoth writhed in shapes to later reappear as roses entwined with wooden axes turning and supporting who knows what wheel: Rosicrucians like Yeats, the very first modern person, and Thomas de Quincey some say.  Mixing back again like laundry detergent from a melting jelly pod the old Geometry, cutting stone blocks into woven roads, rooms, plazas, Great Walls, towers and shrines, Hellenic amorphity infused back to Medieval notation to mirror the sect of masons, Builders of Conscience like Mozart, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain, building off Leonardo's contemporary the university-founding Florentian Ficino to try to create constitutions.  Even George Washington wore a mock apron to show he wanted to make lasting stonework.

Sometimes impatient Machinists like Benito Mussolini put all such metaphoric contemplators to death, casting suspicion on them for their aprons and checkerboards which were just ways to converse discreetly without offending sensitive traditions.  Polite manners and shyness were excoriated as demonic schemes while dirty laundry cycled and cycled.   There walks a lady we all know who shines white light, and wants to show how everything still turns to gold, that all is one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll.  Yet some still try to buy the bridge to paradise.

Alexander Hamilton might have been a contemplative stonecutter trying to be free or known some.  He wrote the Federalist Papers, a Primary Document in American History, and wrote "experience" as the key word in their first sentence and recapitulated this key word twice, adding its spiritual mirror-being "experiment," in their last paragraph.  He, Hamilton, quoted Hume, David, who said, roughly, "you need a Constitution, but you also need experience and experiment to keep improving it so don't delay lest history frown on your lost time ye bundles of bundles."  The Futurists hated Constitiutions, they craved speed at any cost to the misfortune of all, and so you got all manner of upheaval and desolation.  Many hate constitutions today too despite the 85 Papers of Federacy, and Hume, and Hamilton, while claiming they don't but rather are their rescuers.

Or think of Stonehenge, circle of the magic arts in Celtic Britain or Jung, as churning, churning through time with its eyes and teeth, trying to cleanse the poisoned garment of human choice over its history.  The sun, the moon -- dimness, not darkness -- changing places, water washing and feeding the soil, fire burning the earth and growing the plants, air to breathe, human eyes and ears seeing and hearing it all, guessing, speaking, repeating, all are revolving the all.

For what is learning, what could it be, if not finding usefulness in things and sustaining finding itself by this use?

The smallest kind of change and also the largest, and on both scales the only.

So some point to it.


+++












-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20231009/30c4ada0/attachment.htm>