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| http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/7359619-utopias-3 |
" Sometimes we find ourselves in the presence of a form that guides and encloses our earliest dreams. For a painter a tree is composed in its roundness. But a poet continues that dream from higher up. He knows that when a thing becomes isolated, it becomes round, assumes a figure of being that is concentrated upon itself. In Rilke's Poèmes francais, this is how the walnut tree lives and commands attention. Here, again around a lone tree, which is the centre of a world, the dome of the sky becomes round, in accordance with the rule of cosmic poetry."
Gaston Bachelard - the Phenomenology of Roundness -
the Poetics of Space ( 1958)
Utopias 3 on blurb website
Utopias – 3 The Music of the Spheres.
Algorithms that
forecast weather or predict climate change can
be represented through the
medium of computer generated images. These data visualisations are the modern
equivalent of cave paintings of the Palaeolithic era that suggest early
attempts to create an account of nature. The emergent idea of nature as a
concealed power echoing everyday life, seems to have found a literal expression
in those caves. Iegor Reznikoff found that the positions of paintings or symbolic
dots coincide with the locations in caves that have specific reverberant
qualities. (1) Singing and the first music possibly took place in these
natural echo chambers. Echoes out of the dark produce an sense of an uncanny
evoked response from an invisible world. These underground sites mark the start
of the human species' fascination with nature that would eventually be explored
through scientific and artistic enquiry.
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| welcome to the Anthropocene |
In the 6th
century B.C. Pythagoras is said to have been intrigued by the different pitches
of sound make by blacksmiths' hammers. As the story goes, Pythagoras noticed
that specific weights of hammers, and later, distinct lengths of strings,
produced the musical notes that were already known. He discovered the octave,
and understood that it was the result of physical differences that can be
measured. The idea of number, proportion and scale became a new paradigm in an
early form of natural philosophy known as the music of the spheres. Astrology,
alchemy and mathematics were recruited to explain nature in an imaginative
scheme of correspondences. Followers of the music of the spheres believed that
the metal lead, bears, the herb hellebore and the planet Saturn shared the same
attributes because lead is heavy, bears are slow moving, hellebore promotes
sleep and Saturn (relative to stars) moves slowly across the sky. (2)
Philosophers imagined the Sun, Moon, stars and planets rotated at
different speeds on a system of crystal spheres. This vast machine would have
generated characteristics in humans, animals, plants and minerals on Earth via
inaudible celestial music emanating from the spheres. The 'sub lunar world'
(our world) was a zone of change and flux, whereas the celestial spheres were
thought to be an unchanging region of perfection. Until the end of the
Renaissance the music of the spheres explained how specific forms, living and
mineral, arose from the generality of existence. Before the separation of science and art, the
music of the spheres was a kind of cosmology which described how form and
function emerged from the nexus of creation guided by the organising power of
music
Persian paradise
gardens were already designed as a rectangular border
Plato believed
that beauty was an expression of a hidden world of perfection composed of
invisible geometrical shapes such as the pyramid, the cube and the sphere. The
irregularity of real objects, plants and bodies resulted from their distance
from perfection. Just as astrologers said that the stars tell us how to lead
better lives, Plato said that visible beauty was inseparable from moral beauty.
What we would today call 'psychological well-being' was for Plato a question of
living a life in accordance with the celestial harmony - a synchronisation of
the human soul with the harmony of the spheres. The music of the spheres was a
philosophy for regulating all human affairs, not just an explanation of nature.
In A.D. 1595
astronomers such as Johannas Kepler were still trying to incorporate the music
of the spheres into the emerging discipline of science. He was excited to find
that the ratios of the distances between the orbits of the then known planets
could be explained by visualising platonic solids situated in the spaces
between them. For the five known planets there were five Platonic solids; the
tetrahedron, the cube, the
The idea that
celestial spheres controlled nature was
eclipsed by the belief that the essence of matter and life was from within, and
potentially under the control of human intelligence. By the 17th century
references to Platonic shapes were limited to art, and a style within formal
gardens such as those at Vaux-le-Vicompte, Versailles and Chantilly. The elaborately
geometrical gardens, with cones and spheres represented by topiary, were part
of the language of power. The grid pattern of latitude and longitude that
mapped
the world also
enabled the exploitation of its resources and the colonisation of Africa and America by European nations.
As cartography and science advanced
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries it became easier to accommodate
irregularity of form within observational frames of reference. The true shapes
of continents were
recognised after they had initially been imagined to be geometric.
John Constable owned a copy of Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena
by Thomas Forster. Published in 1815, the book demonstrated that clouds could
be classified by shape and type. The
morphology of plants and animals was analysed with algebra in 1912.(3) The
periodic table characterised the elements and threw light on the compounds they
form. (Gold has 79 electrons and mercury has 80 electrons). Elaborate schemes
of analogies were not required to explain nature after science established that
structure and form comes from below and not from the stars. In 1925 
The discoveries of craters on the
Moon in 1609 and sunspots in 1610 had already suggested that nature is not
perfect. 19th century theories of entropy and evolution showed that physical
processes are contingent on the flow of energy (which will cease when it is
evenly distributed) and that natural selection creates species that are only
just good enough for the environment in which they survive. Improvements to
form and physiology are preserved ad hoc by DNA. In recent
history the concept of perfection has been replaced by relativism and the
belief that systems (mechanical, living and styles of art) can only be
optimally organised for their particular time and place. Even the Gaia theory
is not concerned by the potential destruction of 'perfect' earth systems. It
claims that we are at risk if we pollute the Earth, not because we have defied
a perfect 'world soul' (as Plato might have said) but because the
self-regulating meta-ecosystem is not structured for us, but merely in a way
that includes us. Further overexploitation could cause it change to a new state
in which life continues but without our species, like a horse unseating its
rider, or shaking off a fly.
(1)
Sound
resonance in prehistoric times: A study of Paleolithic painted caves and
rocks.Reznikof, I : Journal of the Acoustical society of America 123,3603 (2008)
(2)
James, J. The Music of the Spheres; Music, Science and
the Natural Order of the Universe: 1993: London: Abacus.
(3)
Thompson,
D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form: 1912: Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Music of the Spheres BBC Radio 4 In Our Time
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c1fct
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