The Hidden Sphere
(of Artistic Concerns) Cecil Orion Touchon

5

The universe does not look at itself
 through human conventions
 such as beauty and ugliness.
Likewise, if our eyes and our minds are open
we will not judge things in such a limited manor.

The creative harmony has no shape of its own.
It assumes no particular form.
Yet, through it, all of our shapes and forms emerge.
It accommodates all shapes and forms 
like a gessoed canvas or a blank paper.

The more aware we are of the nature of harmony
the more profound it becomes.(1)
The more we try to explain it with reason 
the more convoluted and confusing it seems .(2)


footnotes

(1)  For him nature has become a mystery. The mystery stands before his pensive brow, his eyes gaze keenly and his ears are strained whilst reason exerts every effort of the intellect to think it out and traces every movement in order to understand it; but, alas, infinity has no ceiling or floor, no foundations or horizon, and, therefore, the ear cannot catch the rustle of its movement, the eye cannot see its limit and the mind cannot comprehend. Reason cannot understand anything and intelligence cannot judge anything, for there is nothing in nature which can be judged, understood, or examined; it has no unit which can be taken as a whole. All that seems to us to be separate and single is untrue; everything is at once linked and undone, but there is nothing separate, and therefore there are and can be no objects and things - hence any attempt to attain them is senseless. What can one embrace when there is neither line, plane nor volume? There is nothing that can be measured - hence geometry is the conditional visual state of non-existent figures. There is no point from which one could draw a line; even in imagination one cannot set up the point, since imagination knows that there is no empty space.; nor yet can one draw the line of another figure, because everything is occupied and filled, and the point or line itself is already multitudinous, infinite in breadth, depth height, time and space, and in infinity everything will be nothing, i.e. incomprehensible to consciousness intending to master the elucidation of the line or volume or plane. The world is like a porosity, and not a hollow one. So what will I cut out of this infinite porosity of sieves? A line or a point? Here perhaps lies reality.

Kasimir Malevich, God is not Cast Down, section five


  (2) "I tried to find what Order is. I was excited about it, and I wrote many, many words of what Order is. Every time I wrote something, I felt it wasn't quite enough. If I had covered, say, two thousand pages with just words of what Order is, I would not be satisfied with this statement. And then I stopped by not saying what it is, just saying,"Order is." And somehow I wasn't sure it was complete until I asked somebody, and the person I asked said, "You must stop right there. It's marvelous; just stop there, saying, 'Order is.' "

Louis I. Kahn, Between Silence and Light, John Lobell (Shambala, Boulder 1979)
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