| Purple (and the family of purplish hues) is one sixth of the colors
available to us; from a purely statistical perspective we might expect
that 16.6 % of all things to which we apply color would be purple, but
we certainly do not use it with a propensity commensurate with its magnitude
in the spectrum. Detailed
statistics on this matter have probably never been compiled, but it seems
fairly obvious that we humans use purple, not only less than 16% of the
time, but probably far less than 1% of the time.
It is an ostracized color.
Perhaps it is too lurid, somehow uncomfortably sensual, reminding
us of blood-engorged reproductive regions.
Perhaps it is the strange intensity it possesses; it is so evocative,
and yet we cannot quite find an emotion to correspond with it.
Among the six colors of the spectrum, purple seems to be somehow
richer and more vibrant than the others - almost suffocatingly heavy with
its saturated, inscrutable energy.
It is the darkest, most mysterious color.
It is likely that much of our aversion (perhaps we feel only
reticence, and not blatant repulsion, but we avoid it, nevertheless) to purple
is unfamiliarity: we simply do not often encounter purple in nature, and have
never really learned to relate to it.
The endless green of the jungles where we first evolved as a species was
punctuated by blossoms and fruits of white, yellow, orange, and red; and the
vast half-dome of the sky generated many easily comprehensible spiritual
associations for the color blue. But
where was purple, other than in the subtly fading terminus of the rainbow? There are, of course, purple flowers, but
they are not naturally abundant in most parts of the world; selective breeding
in the last 100 years has multiplied their number many times. And there is, also, vaguely purplish hues
found in sunsets (and in the shadows of snow and distant landscapes, that take
their color from ambient skylight), but such tones are far-removed from the
rich, full-chroma purples I am discussing here. The historical rarity of pure purple is a
strange but true fact: until the early 20th century, much of the world lived and died without ever
seeing purple, except in the rainbow.
The other five colors of the visible-light spectrum can all be made
with naturally occurring pigments.
These pigments - prepared from a broad variety of plants and minerals
- were (and are) used to make things like paint and ink, cosmetics, dyes
for cloth and leather, and glazes for pottery and ceramics, but there was
no naturally occurring pigment that would make a genuine purple.
Countless attempts to find one failed.
A crude, dusky, vaguely purplish color could be produced by mixing
blue and red, but because those natural pigments were not chromatically
pure, the result was a purple of perhaps only 50% intensity, and nothing
like the luscious, pure violets seen in flowers (which will not yield their
pigment in a stable form) or in modern chemical pigments.
There was, actually, one way to produce a fairly intense (but still
not completely pure) purple from natural pigments: Tyrian purple, harvested
from the shells of purpura mollusks.
However, the shells were so rare that the dye extracted was vastly
more expensive by weight than gold.
Even the extravagantly wealthy could not afford it and its use became
the exclusive purview of kings. It
is for this reason that in ancient times purple was the color of royalty.
And how often have you seen a king in the flesh?
In fact, it was not until the late 19th century when synthetic chemical
dyes were first made in Britain that purple entered the realm of common
experience (William Perkins, an amateur scientist looking for a synthetic
alternative to quinine - a malaria treatment - was fiddling with chemically
similar coal gas and inadvertently invented a pure purple dye).
Perhaps after 100,000 years of existence without purple, we humans
are still a little suspicious of the chromatic newcomer.
Octaves of Light
Visible light is only a tiny fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum.
We cannot see low-energy long wavelengths like radio-wave, micro-wave,
and infrared radiation. Nor can we see high-energy short wavelengths like
ultraviolet, x-ray, or gamma radiation.
Light is a vast linear continuum of waveform energies, with frequencies
ranging from the very low (tens of meters in the radio spectrum) to the
very high (hundred billionths of a meter in the gamma spectrum).
The human eye begins to detect electro-magnetic radiation at wavelengths
of about 7000 angstroms - the color red - and is able to resolve wavelengths
of increasing energy up to about 4000 angstroms - the color purple (an
angstrom is one ten billionth of a meter).
If our powers of perception were just a little stronger, if our
vision could resolve just slightly farther into the ultraviolet at around
3500 angstroms (that is, if we could perceive across a range of frequencies
where the longest wavelength was fully double that of the shortest
wavelength) we would see a very interesting pattern emerge - a strange
and wonderful pattern that is second nature to any musician...
Sound is also waveform phenomena, a linear continuum of ever-increasing
energies ranging from low frequencies to high.
There is, however, a mysterious phenomenon rolling around inside
that linear continuum, a regular, periodic repetition of sameness called
an octave. Strictly
speaking, an octave is nothing more than a doubling of frequency; if a
particular tone of 440 Hz (vibrations per second) is doubled to 880 Hz,
they are one octave apart. What
is truly strange is that, despite the fact that one tone is much higher
in frequency and energy than the other, they are the same note.
All this is so obvious to musicians that they may wonder what the
mystery is here; if you are not familiar with music theory, just hum the
first 2 notes of Dorothy’s famous song from The Wizard of Oz (Some-where...over
the rainbow) - they are the same note, one octave apart.
Now this is a very strange thing for a linear continuum to do.
Imagine a wailing siren, beginning at a very low pitch, the lowest you
can hear (about 20 Hz), gradually and steadily going up in pitch towards
the highest pitch you can hear (about 20,000 Hz) - an ever escalating ascent
of increasing energy. The
effect would be like the sonic equivalent of the trajectory of a rocket
blasting away into the darkness of space above.
But with each and every doubling of frequency, that siren is once
again wailing the same note - higher, distant, more energetic to be sure,
but somehow still the same. Its
as though that linear rocket was loop-the-looping all the way to orbit.
Hiding within that linear continuum is another, cyclical
continuum. This secret periodicity
is also present in light.
The human ear can detect tones across a range of about ten octaves.
Perhaps seven of these are musically useful, and we can hear all
of them thundering like the Hosts of Heaven in a Rossini overture or a
Beethoven symphony. If all
that musical information spread out across seven octaves (with harmonic
undertones extending out to the limit of our hearing) had to be compressed
into a single octave, the effect would be rather like the sound that came
from Edison’s first wax cylinder recording device: squished thin to meaningless
incomprehensibly. Fortunately,
we do get to enjoy a great range of sounds across many octaves.
Sadly, we miss most of the great symphony of light: we are not able
to see even one entire octave of the electro-magnetic spectrum; our vision
fails as the octave approaches, thus preventing us from actually witnessing
the periodic sameness that defines the octave.
| We can, however, see the principle at work in a simple pedagogical
device used by every young painter: the color wheel.
When white light is broken up into its constituent parts by a prism,
the pattern extends in linear fashion from red through to purple.
But it is also possible to artificially map that progression onto
a circle: red at the top, blending clockwise into orange and yellow, which
blends into green on the bottom blending up into blue and purple.
And this is where the color wheel illustrates the point: the purple
blends effortlessly back into the top - it is, in fact, a combination
of blue and red. Purple,
at the far end of the rainbow and vanishing into imperceptibility as it
approaches the ultraviolet octave ever farther away from the scarlet beginning,
gradually acquires an inexplicable sameness to red.
It’s as though the progression is, at once, moving ever more distant,
and, simultaneously, moving ever closer.
Purple is the chromatic equivalent of the 7th, that lonely note
of longing just before the octave that musically yearns for resolution
in the completeness of the 8th note.
A doubling of frequency and energy has brought the wandering adventurer
(chromatic or sonic) to a distant, higher plane...and yet somehow back
home to the source where it began - a mythological return to the womb where
it might begin anew, regenerated and reborn, once again young and vigorous,
seeking new frontiers and new treasures...
|
 |
The Truth about Lines and Circles
Linear progression and cyclical periodicity are very different kinds
of things, and it is difficult to reconcile these separate and distinct
modes of being within a single phenomena - waveform or otherwise.
How can something be dynamically linear, beginning one place and
ending another, and also statically cyclical, beginning and ending in the
same place? How can something
always be penetrating into new and unexplored domains, and, simultaneously,
watching over the same territory again and again?
(This logical contradiction is reminiscent of the eerie problem
of wave/particle duality: depending merely upon how we choose to make a
measurement, the fundamental constituent parts of existence are either
continuous waves, or not-continuous particles.
That is, the universe is infinite, and the universe is not infinite.
How can it be both?)
In mythological terms, these two aspects represent, one the one hand,
individual aspiration, the importance of the hunt, the trajectory of the
spear, and the irreversible cause and effect of life and death; and on
the other hand, communal harmony, the importance of the harvest, the repetition
of the seasons, and the eternal regeneration of new life from the dying
seeds of the old.
What brought the Never-Returning and the Always-Returning
together and bound them in a bizarre marriage of opposites?
Strangely, this mysterious union of two contrary and even antagonistic
modalities - manifest in everything we see and hear around us - has a shape:
one of the most wonderful (and abundant) forms in the universe.
If we trace a circle, winding around and back upon itself again and
again, and then move that cyclical tracing in a linear direction perpendicular
to the rotational movement, we encounter the geometric manifestation of
this enigmatic consonance. When
linear action (the ethos of aggression directed outwards) is brought together
with circular repose (the ethos of nurturing directed inwards), the resulting
form is a spiral.
Spirals of Life
This geometric form is everywhere, from flowers to galaxies, but its
most immediate relation to humans is its presence in the structure of DNA,
the molecular building blocks of living things.
The fundamental unit of organic matter (wherein is held all the
instructions required to assemble an organism from nothing more than molecules)
is shaped like a double-helix: the spiral is the geometry of life itself.
DNA is rather like a ladder that has been twisted; it has two outward
vertical supports of alternating phosphate and sugar molecules, bound by
horizontal rungs called base-pairs.
It is down the center of those rungs, along an axial spine of hydrogen
bonds, that DNA divides during replication.
There are only two kinds of base-pairs - an adenine-thiamine rung
and a guanine-cytosine rung - and so when the DNA divides, the severed
base-pair rungs can only reconnect with the correct base partner - a very
precise molecular lock-and-key mechanism.
The order in which these base-pairs are stacked up on top of one
another is how genetic information is stored in the long, complex DNA molecule.
DNA endeavors to ensure that the replica will be a faithful copy
of the original, and there is an army of little enzyme proofreaders that
check and verify the work of duplication.
It is by the mechanism of DNA, working its mysterious morphological
alchemy, that life gradually rebuilds and reshapes one form into other,
different forms. This gradual
genetic restructuring process is called evolution through random mutation
and natural selection. In
a nutshell, life began, so the theory says, something like this:
About four billion years ago a randomly-formed complex compound of hydrocarbons
cooked up in the bubbling soup of the early earth ocean, found itself,
quite accidentally, with a chemical structure that somehow enabled it to
initiate a bafflingly simple chemical reaction: it chemically attracted
and assembled atoms and molecules identical to its own constituent parts
from the surrounding soup and, somehow, chemically assembled a copy
of itself. And the copies,
which had this same unusual property, made copies of themselves - and so
on. Bombardment by high-energy
ultra-violet radiation (and perhaps also from cosmic rays - the thunder
of distant super-novas) caused random errors in the replication process.
99% of the errors were catastrophic, and so the deviant molecules
were no longer able to make copies of themselves.
But those remaining mutations (1% or less) were actually more robust
and even better equipped to make copies of themselves.
And so the process went, and after only twenty iterations of this
wonderful chemical reaction, there were billions of tiny replicating molecules,
and then trillions and trillions.
It is, perhaps, not too surprising that with so many little chemical
factories churning out new little factories, that once in a great while
some extraordinary accident would happen, and a new development would have
a significant advantage over previous and subsequently obsolete models
- and thus begin making superior little factories. This happens in our
human-made factories all the time - and we are far less prolific than nature.
Scientifically speaking, there is no intention, no pre-set inclination
toward a particular result in this process; mistakes happen and they are
almost always detrimental. On
rare occasions these mistakes are beneficial and the lucky organism is
better able to exploit opportunities in the environment, and more likely
to pass the beneficial adaptations to their offspring.
The whole process is accidental: sometime you get organic muck and
sometimes you get civilized intelligence and space exploration.
Evolution is the best explanation we have for how life on this planet
came to exist in its current form, but the theory does leave a few nagging
questions unanswered...
Some people wonder how the process got started in the first place; this
is the Argument against the First Replicator.
Evolution is simple...once you have a replicating molecule; just
sit back and wait for mistakes to start happening.
But how do you get that first self-replicating bundle of atoms?
The structure of even the very simplest replicator molecule, possibly
some comparatively simple variation of RNA (ribonucleic acid), would still
have to have been so complex (at least 20,000 specific atoms randomly
falling into a perfect 3-dimensional matrix with not one atom out of place)
that one couldn’t reasonably expect it to have formed by random collision
and cohesion (a one in 1040,000 chance, according to calculations
done by astronomer Fred Hoyle). With
only 1080 fundamental particles in the observable universe,
and only 4x1018 seconds since its creation 14 billion years
ago, well, there simply hasn’t been enough roles-of-the-dice for such a
fantastically improbable event to have occurred based purely on
chance: if every particle in the cosmos had a collision event once per
second for 14 billion years, you’d only have had about 10100
events. Of course, blind chance
was not the only force at work upon those bustling atoms in the early terrestrial
soup; nature and chemistry favor a certain few kinds of possible chemical
bonds over a vast number of other statistically possible combinations that
are chemically impossible. But
this line of thought is almost more unsettling.
The laws of the universe are such that the formation of complex
self-replicating molecules, contrary to one in 1040,000
odds, was inevitable?
What are the odds of getting a law that specific?
It’s not scientifically satisfying to require that the emergence
of a perpetual chemical chain reaction (now four billion years and a hundred
billion iterations old) somehow be written into the code of the cosmos
from the beginning.
(Some people, including DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick, think that
maybe the first replicator came to earth on the back of an asteroid from
somewhere else in the universe where life had already evolved - an idea
called panspermia. But
how did that proto-replicator arise?)
Some people wonder, in general, how carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,
and the other elemental components of the organic molecules of which we
are made, know how to do the truly astounding things they do (the Argument
against Teleological Nature). Of
course, organic compounds don’t know anything at all; like a dropped stone
that does not “know” how to fall but achieves that end nevertheless, these
amazing chemicals simply react according to physical properties inherent
in their nature. But that
doesn’t really answer the question.
We can change carbon into other substances, but we cannot break
into the “cosmic code” and give carbon properties other than those it has;
chemical properties are immutable and therefore infinitely strong, but,
it seems, made of a substance so fine and delicate that it can never be
detected. And so if these
“properties inherent in their nature” are not attached to the matter?stuff
of the world, where are they and what are they made of?
How do they get from wherever they are to wherever we are?
And if they’re not anywhere, or made of anything at all, in what
way do they exist? Sometimes
it seems rather like these beautifully perfect, mysteriously intangible
properties were designed.
Perhaps there is an as yet unknown physical principle at work within
the matter-stuff of the cosmos, a secret inclination of carbon that facilitates
the creation of replicator molecules - and thus, life - by entirely natural
processes. But, again, where
did these “natural processes” - this inviolable codex of procedures unerringly
obeyed by all the matter and energy in the universe - come from?
They must be antecedent to the creation of the universe, itself
a natural process, and so where did they reside before that?
Some people wonder, in particular, about the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
the principle of nature that demands that, because some energy is always
lost in any exchange, all systems must degenerate from an initial state
of maximum order to a final state of maximum disorder where no further
functional or observable change can happen (the Argument against Increasing
Order). Contrary to the
ever growing amount of entropy (disorder) in the universe, evolutionary
processes are making structures of ever-growing complexity and sophistication.
That’s OK, says thermodynamic principle, because the system (the
earth) is able to export its waste energy out of the system (to space).
But if entropy is, to a significant extent, a statistical law -
there are a near infinite number of disordered states and comparatively
few ordered states, and so chaotic states are simply far more likely to
occur - why don’t we see periodic retrogressions in the evolutionary pattern?
Why aren’t some things devolving into comparatively primitive
forms? Four billion years
is a long time to keep rolling sevens.
Some people wonder how one form (a small rodent, for instance) becomes
another dramatically different form (a bat, for instance), without becoming
coyote food in all the tens of thousands of years it takes to evolve; this
is the Argument against Intermediate Forms.
An eye with only 25% of the visual acuity an eye one million
years hence will possess, is still quite a bit better than no visual acuity
at all. The same adaptive
advantage provided by an eye in the process of evolving into a better eye
is not conferred to a paw in the process of evolving into a wing.
A small rodent is an obviously well?adapted creature, as is a bat.
But after a process of many thousands of generations, in that final evolutionary
step before the erstwhile rodent fully mutates into a proto-bat that can
fly (even poorly), it is only a clumsy mouse with six-inch webbed?fingers.
How could such a ridiculous beast survive among so many hungry and crafty
predators? Obviously the ridiculous
beast did survive; we do indeed have bats in this world.
It almost as though something understood in advance what the end
product would be, and provided some kind of environmental protections for
the developmental transition. We
can only guess at what kind of survival mechanism may (or may not) have
been present because, with the possible exception of archaeopteryx (a feathered
avian lizard), there is precious little fossil record of these (what must
surely be unusual) intermediate forms.
But perhaps such questions are unfair; we are not required to explain
the whole universe just to understand some small process within it.
And so more practically-minded (and less ontologically-minded) people
wonder about the simple arithmetical nuts and bolts of the problem - about
rates of mutation and distribution.
Mammals have a genome of about three billion base-pairs, and 3%
(90 million) of those are expressed in the coding (the remaining 97% of
inactive genetic material serves no known function).
When we look at the genomes of closely related species within a
particular genus, we see that often it is only a difference of 1% that
distinguishes the genetic composition of one species from another.
It is, therefore, perhaps only a difference of 1 million base-pairs
that separates a species from its evolutionary predecessors.
The transmogrification of Homo-erectus to Homo-sapiens, for example,
seems to have required about 1 million beneficial point-mutations in the
genome, and seven million years for those genetic changes to then propagate
through a herd of perhaps 10,000 individuals.
Simple.
Here the question has become significantly more concrete than
“How did life on earth arise?” or “What are the Laws of Nature?”
We are talking here about statistical probabilities that mutations
will occur in specific numbers at specific places on the genome, and that
those genetic changes will then disseminate at a specific rate through
the species by interbreeding. We
have reasonably accurate variables here, numbers that can all be dropped
into a reliable equation that will add up...or not.
Mathematically speaking, it turns out that it is astoundingly
improbable that such genetic transmission of beneficial adaptations
might occur in the time available.
Even if we are unnaturally accommodating with our variables - allowing
for mutation rates in the gametes (reproductive, “single chromosome set”
cells, like the egg and the sperm) far in excess of what actually occurs
in nature, allowing that mutations happen in the active sites on the genome
only, allowing that beneficial mutations are never accidentally “un-mutated”
away, allowing for larger herds (where you have more mutations but require
more time for dissemination), or allowing for smaller herds (where you
need less time for dissemination but have fewer mutations) - the math doesn’t
add up. The process simply
needs more time to accomplish and transmit the changes - much more.
We are not supposed to be here for another billion generations
or so.
And yet here we are, with our obvious morphological similarity to chimpanzees
with whom we share about 98% of our genetic identity.
Evolution is a fact of nature, but there seems to be an important
mechanism at work here that we have not yet identified.
There are two ways to explain the significant discrepancies between
the math and reality of genetic dissemination.
1) There may have been many identical mutations happening in different
individuals simultaneously and thus spreading through the herd at a much
faster rate, or 2) there may have been long strings of ready-made genetic
coding already present in the unexpressed region of the genome waiting
to be “turned on” by appropriate genetic and/or environmental conditions.
In either case (the precise repetition, in great number, of impossibly
improbably events, or the entire history of the living world written into
the first self-replicating molecule), the mutations cannot be random or
accidental. Four billion years
is indeed a long time to keep rolling sevens - unless the dice are loaded.
Evolution is a demonstration of natural intention; it looks
like the universe already knows what it is building...
One final point about all this procreation is the conceptual catalyst
that fuels the whole endeavor: libido.
Where did libido - the extraordinary affinity that nature has for
itself, the inexplicable compulsion of the forms of the cosmos to come
together and recombine into new forms - come from in the first place?
Once present, it’s easy to understand how it persists. But the origin
of this relentless desire to entangle, in atoms and galaxies and everything
in between, is a complete mystery.
Of course, if it were not present, nor then would nature be.
But that’s a poor explanation: it only explains why something that
isn’t (a non-self-recreating universe)...isn’t.
Fortunately for us, however, our universe is really, really
horny...
A Ghost in the Machine
This evocative, much-borrowed phrase was first used by Gilbert Ryle,
who was arguing against Descartes’ idea of an irreducible mind/body distinction.
He, along with many other modern critics, disagreed with the idea
of an immaterial soul, a “ghost in the machine”, operating the body like
some kind of heavenly puppet master.
He believed, rather, that the mind is simply what the brain does.
But it is also true that conceptualizing ideas is what the mind
does, and it is a little harder to establish a satisfactory connection
between conceptualizing ideas and the brain.
Descartes might be forgiven for believing in, what is still today, a
slippery but still highly compelling description of the phenomena.
The Mind really does seem immaterial, even though it is in many
observable ways somehow connected to the body.
Neurons and synapses are real things that we can manipulate in controlled
experiments, and those laboratory investigations have revealed a startling
mutability of memory, perception, behavior, and even identity.
The stuff which makes us unique and individual is not near so permanent
as we like to believe. The
mind and brain yet possess many secrets and perhaps most of these will
be discovered in the fullness of time.
Some, on the other hand, will probably never be revealed.
One of the remaining mysteries is by what mechanism, and in what form,
we actually archive memories and ideas.
One the one hand, it may be the case that a unique and particular
synaptic matrix of neurons (each with a unique orientation of molecules)
corresponds to a particular idea.
That is, some specific circuit of electrical activity in the brain
represents a bird (or some other objective fact) and corresponds with such
things out in the real world. But
if that “specific circuit of electrical activity” represents a subjective
fact (like liberty), then to where or to what other kind of thing is
that correspondence directed? The
synaptic “picture” of a bird corresponds with a living bird, but the synaptic
picture of liberty corresponds to...?
One the other hand, it may be the case that a very specific orientation
of neuronal and synaptic machinery actually is the idea and not
merely a cognitive representation of it.
But if the cognitive representation of a fact is the fact,
then what is that “other” world out there beyond our skulls?
Does the world project reality into our minds, or do our minds project
reality out into the world? And
if the answer is “both are true”, that really supposes a far more intimate
relation between world and mind than we can ever satisfactorily explain.
These mysteries are actually asking the same difficult question:
What and where is the intent within the cognitive processes
of the human brain, and what and where is the intent in the evolutionary
processes of nature? Perhaps
there is another mechanism at work in nature, operating in some fashion
for which we do not yet have a conceptual framework.
It is completely understandable that science is loath to invoke
totemic spirits when faced with an apparently intractable problem; that’s
not what science is. Science
seeks good answers to good questions and, like Gilbert Ryle, has no patience
for inquiry-ending notions like an ethereal poltergeist hiding in the nuts
and bolts of natural processes. Such
an idea is scientifically ridiculous.
Where is this ghost hiding?
Why can’t we see it, or in any way detect its presence?
How old is it, and will it eventually die?
And if it is conveniently “non-physical”, and therefore not accessible
to any test we might wish to perform upon it, then how can it possibly
interact with and actually affect any physical process?
How does the intangible move the tangible?
Scientific expeditions will take us ever deeper into oceans of the unknown,
and yet nature’s depth is far greater than any probe of human manufacture.
In an important sense, each great discovery merely opens new vistas
and new frontiers of exploration.
We never get close to the ever-regenerating invitation to keep advancing.
There is a ghost in the machine: something that we cannot
explain has intention and with it is able to affect change in the material
world...through consciousness.
Perhaps this intention is a natural process we do not yet - and
may never - understand, and the ghost is merely a metaphor and poetic fancy.
And perhaps intention really is some other kind of process
entirely, and the lonely Ghost is watching and waiting still for the intrepid
among us...
A Lotus in the Spiral
We see in this image of the mythological forest an incarnation of the
Ghost in the Machine, a luminous spirit dwelling within the living machinery
of nature, guiding it to a specific destiny.
Her gown begins in glowing purple, and spirals down to dark ultra-violet,
seeming to vanish into nature, but the meadow - and the world beyond -
is still very much suffused with its presence.
In Her hands She seems to magically shape some strands of Her hair
into a descending double-helix which ends in a strange symbol - another
geometric representation of the mythological union between action and repose.
At the terminus of the spiral we see a beautifully harmonious composite
form consisting of two geometric shapes in perfectly balanced conjunction.
One form is an upward-pointing triangle; like a mountain to be climbed,
like a pyramid to be built, like a burning flame it is the direction of
our ambitions - the image of aspiration.
The other form is a downward-pointing triangle, and like the yonic
triangle it resembles, it is the image of the womb - the still and silent
sanctuary beyond the known world that is the mysterious source and destination
of all life.
This ancient symbol has many names.
In India it is known as the Anahata - the central, or “heart” chakra.
In Hindu thought, the body possesses two filaments of “subtle” energy
that form a double helix around the spine, crossing at seven intangible
energy centers called chakras. The
chakras are somewhat like mediators, points at which specific energies
of our interior nature engage with corresponding energies out in exterior
nature. The energies of the
lower three chakras are directed outward, receiving the world into the
self: eating and excreting (engaging the self through survival), reproduction
(engaging one other through sex), and ambition (engaging many others through
achievement). The energies
of the upper three chakras are directed inward, pushing the self out into
the world; the shakti’s journey (appropriate meditation will awaken the
sleeping serpent at the base of the spine and bring it through the successive
chakras into mystical illumination) up the “Lotus Ladder” ends finally
in a liberation through the thousand-petalled crown chakra, an escape from
the Illusion of the Self, and consciousness returns to that nameless void
whence it came. Between those
oppositely oriented energies is the Anahata, the center of perfect, interpenetrating
balance where Yoni and Lingam, Yin and Yang, dance.
We have seen that these two forms - the spiral and the six-pointed star
- are the confluence of opposing archetypes, graphic representations of
the mythological marriage of Beauty and Power.
And so there is between Her hands a curious hybrid-symbol composed
of both the double helix and the Anahata.
This strange geometric fusion is real - actually present
in the living molecules of our genetic identity.
An idealized representation of the double helix - two twirling verticals
bound by horizontals - reveals the hidden Lotus of Creation dwelling within...
* * *
Personal Notes on LotusWood
I think it is unlikely that my wife, who has very little patience for
philosophy, will ever read these words, so I’m going to venture an observation
that I think would annoy her: she’s not too interested in the mythological
work I do. Certainly my friends
and family are mostly ambivalent about paintings that are not landscapes,
and so I try not to be too troubled by the absence of a cheering section.
But she surprises me sometimes.
I had painted the background trees and ferns of LotusWood, and also
the foreground figure and helix.
I was just beginning to paint the extreme foreground where the gown
disappears into a carpet of purple blossoms.
I thought the flowers I was painting looked just fine, but Lizzy
came into my studio, full of concern: “No, those are wrong,” she said.
Now, an artist doesn’t want to hear that kind of comment, but one
is rather obliged to listen to someone with 3 honors degrees in science
(but don’t tell her I said so). So
I scraped off the flowers I was painting and started again.
I’m not actually sure if what I did subsequently was better or not,
but Lizzy certainly thought so, and I very much like that fact that this
is her favorite painting.
|
