Terrific essay. You had me thinking of music the whole time. There's also a lot to think about in the comments on archetypes also--an original that continues to appear, but in forms that must change, in some way, to speak to the societies to which they represent fundamental ideas.
Thanks, Allen. I see the music angle: both flow and structure. I did mention in a previous article how music moves us by mysterious means. Like why do minor notes evoke feelings of melancholy and even sadness? There's also a phenomenon of music about music for musicians who I suppose get experimental. This stuff has the same effect as art about art on the general public: it's horribly uninteresting and even repugnant.
You mention a poetry mentor and his insight that helped you mature as a poet. There's a nostalgic feel to that account, as if it had happened at a time before it was determined that science had solved all the mysteries of life and there was nothing new to learn from anybody. I think the wisdom-dispensing mentor is an archetype that needs reviving, as well as the humble student professing ignorance and seeking guidance. Their relationship exhibits certain behaviours and emotions that build a pattern of creativity in the Bergsonian sense: that each phase in the student's inner growth is somehow new and beyond what he'd become in the previous phase, absorbing and enlarging it.
It appears that Professor Bergson himself had such a relationship with a student at the Sorbonne in the 1920s. Corresponding to your observation that elements of order emerge in the flux of life, there's an account of Bergson's role as mentor of sorts to Serbian poet Stanislav Vinaver in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). West, her banker husband and Vinaver are travelling through Serbia by train when Vinaver wakes up from a nap and West asks him why he's "smiling up at the lamp in the roof. "As I woke up I thought of a beautiful thing that happened to me when I was a student in Paris. Bergson had spoken in one of his lectures of Pico della Mirandola who was a great philosopher in the Renaissance but now he is very hidden. I do not suppose you will ever have heard of him because you are a banker, and your wife naturally not. He did not say we must read him, he just spoke of him in one little phrase, as if he had turned a diamond ring on his finger. But the next morning I went to the library of the Sorbonne and I found this book and I was sitting reading it, and Bergson came to work in the library, as he did very often, and he passed by me, and he bent down to see what book I had. And when he saw what it was he smiled and laid his hand on my head. So, I will show you." Passing his plump hand over his tight black curls, he achieved a gesture of real beauty. "That happened to me, nothing can take it away from me. I am a poor man, I have many enemies, but I was in Paris at that time, which was an impossible glory, and so Bergson did to me." He sat with his heels resting on the floor and his toes turned up, and his black eyes winking and twinkling. He was indestructibly, eternally happy."
Beautiful, Harry! There are no mentors in the age of YouTube. Young folk pretend to know everything because they feel that if they need to learn something, they can find it online. Older, experienced people are therefore (often enough) useless fools to them.
Beautiful, indeed. West describes how Vinaver always started talking about his days as a student under Bergson whenever he felt deeply moved. You get the impression from Vinaver that Bergson had a heart as great as his mind.
Your PV/T talk about "law" reminded me....We see some regularity in a constrained setting and call it a "law"...and over time forget the underlying constraint ("in a closed container", or "under constant velocity; with no acceleration" or "in the limit as x--> infinity") and then march into Reality with our 'law' and over time come to think this Law has broader truth, and somehow 'drives' Reality, rather than being a simple guideline to be used under constrained conditions and based only on what we've observed so far. For me, the foundation of science should be persistent curiosity and regularly refreshed observation...
Thanks RDM. Precisely! I mean, this approach is clearly very productive. But losing sight of the limiting frame, we get locked into a given perspective, quit asking questions, and thereby lose the potential for innovative science.
This article gave me an idea for a poem. Thank you!
Terrific essay. You had me thinking of music the whole time. There's also a lot to think about in the comments on archetypes also--an original that continues to appear, but in forms that must change, in some way, to speak to the societies to which they represent fundamental ideas.
Thanks, Allen. I see the music angle: both flow and structure. I did mention in a previous article how music moves us by mysterious means. Like why do minor notes evoke feelings of melancholy and even sadness? There's also a phenomenon of music about music for musicians who I suppose get experimental. This stuff has the same effect as art about art on the general public: it's horribly uninteresting and even repugnant.
You mention a poetry mentor and his insight that helped you mature as a poet. There's a nostalgic feel to that account, as if it had happened at a time before it was determined that science had solved all the mysteries of life and there was nothing new to learn from anybody. I think the wisdom-dispensing mentor is an archetype that needs reviving, as well as the humble student professing ignorance and seeking guidance. Their relationship exhibits certain behaviours and emotions that build a pattern of creativity in the Bergsonian sense: that each phase in the student's inner growth is somehow new and beyond what he'd become in the previous phase, absorbing and enlarging it.
It appears that Professor Bergson himself had such a relationship with a student at the Sorbonne in the 1920s. Corresponding to your observation that elements of order emerge in the flux of life, there's an account of Bergson's role as mentor of sorts to Serbian poet Stanislav Vinaver in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). West, her banker husband and Vinaver are travelling through Serbia by train when Vinaver wakes up from a nap and West asks him why he's "smiling up at the lamp in the roof. "As I woke up I thought of a beautiful thing that happened to me when I was a student in Paris. Bergson had spoken in one of his lectures of Pico della Mirandola who was a great philosopher in the Renaissance but now he is very hidden. I do not suppose you will ever have heard of him because you are a banker, and your wife naturally not. He did not say we must read him, he just spoke of him in one little phrase, as if he had turned a diamond ring on his finger. But the next morning I went to the library of the Sorbonne and I found this book and I was sitting reading it, and Bergson came to work in the library, as he did very often, and he passed by me, and he bent down to see what book I had. And when he saw what it was he smiled and laid his hand on my head. So, I will show you." Passing his plump hand over his tight black curls, he achieved a gesture of real beauty. "That happened to me, nothing can take it away from me. I am a poor man, I have many enemies, but I was in Paris at that time, which was an impossible glory, and so Bergson did to me." He sat with his heels resting on the floor and his toes turned up, and his black eyes winking and twinkling. He was indestructibly, eternally happy."
Beautiful, Harry! There are no mentors in the age of YouTube. Young folk pretend to know everything because they feel that if they need to learn something, they can find it online. Older, experienced people are therefore (often enough) useless fools to them.
Beautiful, indeed. West describes how Vinaver always started talking about his days as a student under Bergson whenever he felt deeply moved. You get the impression from Vinaver that Bergson had a heart as great as his mind.
Your PV/T talk about "law" reminded me....We see some regularity in a constrained setting and call it a "law"...and over time forget the underlying constraint ("in a closed container", or "under constant velocity; with no acceleration" or "in the limit as x--> infinity") and then march into Reality with our 'law' and over time come to think this Law has broader truth, and somehow 'drives' Reality, rather than being a simple guideline to be used under constrained conditions and based only on what we've observed so far. For me, the foundation of science should be persistent curiosity and regularly refreshed observation...
Thanks RDM. Precisely! I mean, this approach is clearly very productive. But losing sight of the limiting frame, we get locked into a given perspective, quit asking questions, and thereby lose the potential for innovative science.