Across The Tracks and Through The Looking Glass

I’ve started some new canvases, based on some old ideas. Some of these are mutating and jumping off onto paper into graffiti outlines.

rant begins after the jump….

I’ve dug into some old writing of mine from way back, in which I touch on the basis of this concept, expanding on a line of enquiry put forward by, and quote from Aldous Huxley.

Nature in its savage state is bristling with…clues and cues to the eternal, even those which do not appear immediately do so when viewed either up close or from afar.

A Sung painting of faraway mountains, clouds and torrents is transporting; but so are the close ups of tropical leaves in Douanier Rousseau’s jungles, when I look at the Sung landscape I…(or one of my ‘not Is’ is reminded) of the crags, the boundless expanses of plain, the luminous skies and seas of the minds antipodes…in leaves with their architecture of veins, their stripes and mottlings permeate the depth of their interlacing greenery, and something in me is reminded of those living patterns of the Visionary world. Huxley, Aldous-Heaven and Hell  (1956)

Magnified or distant examples life forms, in fact close ups of any of natures building blocks, the systems, shapes and dimensions nature finds success in, are in fact exactly the same species of systems, shapes and dimensions that comprise the “flora and fauna” of the inner world.

For millennia these were described in many ways without the necessary technical nomenclature to denote what maybe more accurate comparisons with micro organisms, nebulae or microscopic worlds.

They used instead the only similes they knew, treasure from the deepest, darkest places under the ground the only objects whose properties mimicked transcendental perfection, those endless births and proliferations of geometric forms in their sparkle turning into ever more beautiful visions which transport the beholder beyond in an instant.

“The topaz and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and the carbuncle and gold.” Is the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel’s description of his vision of what he calls the “Garden of Eden”.

The Vedic Otherworld was Utterakuru and is

“…watered by lakes of golden lotuses. There are rivers by thousands full of leaves…of sapphire and lapis lazuli… the lakes resplendent like the morning sun are adorned by golden beds of red lotus”.Huxley, Aldous-Heaven and Hell  (1956)

The ancient Pagan Welsh ‘paradise’ was Ynisvitrin, the Celtic ‘Isle of Glass’. The Buddhists’ paradises comprise of stones of fire. These methods of description are the best physical phenomenon that people at this point in history could reference in an attempt to describe the visual ‘symptoms’ of an unrelatable ecstatic event.

The Hubble Telescope, fractal geometry and electron microscopes, are now showing for the first time physical manifestations of this universal energy which has been experienced internally and told of in legends since the dawn of man.

It seems astonishing, at first, that so little in the way of definite conclusion or correlation has been acknowledged, but with further thought the two worlds, those of subjective enlightenment, and that of objective technological observation are and will always be intrinsically divided, we can however glimpse a thread that leads toward a higher order.

Anyone who finds this interesting should read Huxley’s book which is the best I’ve read on the transcendental aesthetics which unconsciously influence our every waking moment and manifest throughout history in the art, myth and folklore of humankind.