726
history of ornithology painting;
14
Zhang Feng’s rendition of “Immortals’ Secrets in
a Stone Cave,” painted during a “sightseeing” trip between Nanjing and Zhenjiang
in 1657.
15
Each proffers ecological obscurity made manifest through art.
These are works of imagined space, enriched by memory, hope, dreams of lost
civilizations within civilizations, all of those figments of human qualification that
also beguile the flow of equations used in science, natural history, and mathematics,
particularly the combinatory theories oriented to the very “existence of monochromatic subsets for finite colorings of large structures… or infinite”.
16
In the language
of “topological dynamics,” “Infinitary Ramsey Theory,” and “measurable decomposition,” it is not uncommon to read that one theorem “has definite aesthetic advantages over” another theorem.
17
Similarly, the languages of landscape, of art in general, evince whorls within
whorls, true and magnetic norths of unspoken elocution that help us to conceal as
much as is revealed about the human species. In the ecological context, the unsullied horizons are temptational obscurities of the first order, promising an untrammeled future.
Such obscurities are not merely the Zen-beholden product of some difficult-ofaccess obscurantism, as the term has often been used, levied against any number of
deliberately abstruse equations. By obscure we hasten to record that transition
between that which can be asserted to be unknown and that which we assume by
common assent is known. A table, a chair, soil in our palm, the night sky, any palpable sensation, anything that we take to be as is, commends the span between that
which is not and that which appears to be. The history of philosophy, of mathematics, of physics, as has previously been intimated, enshrines the dialectic with a fervor. It is not the case that nothing comes of nothing, the Greek of Aristotle and
Parmenides—οὐδὲν ἕξ οὐδενός; and the Latin of Lucretius—ex nihilo nihil fit.
18
Unknown deaths—easily 100 billion humans throughout time, hundreds of trillions
of Others—become something, do something, go somewhere, reincarnate, reabsorb, and re-tool all the metabolic internalities of their life when death appears to
subsume it. This is not nothing, this transitional chasm of salient facts in both its
irrepressibility and cyclic, systemic mathematical predictability, philosophy shorn
to a pure syllogism combining time and substance. The earth herself is the ultimate
14 See Where The Truth Lies – The Art Of Qiu Ying, by Stephen Little, with contributions by Wan
Kong and Einor K. Cervone, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, 2020, p. 81.
15 See The Artful Recluse – Painting, Poetry, And Politics In Seventeenth-Century China, Edited by
Peter C. Sturman and Susan S. Tai, Essays by Peter C. Sturman, Timothy Brook, Jonathan Chaves,
Jonathan Hay and Hui-shu Lee, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, 2012, p. 197.
16 See Elemental Methods in Ergodic Ramsey Theory, by Randall McCutcheon, Springer-Verlag,
Berlin, 1999, p. 1.
17 ibid., p. 2.
18 See John Burnet’s Greek translation, https://lexundria.com/parm_frag/1-19/b; and Lucretius’ De
Rerum Natura, 1.148–156, The Nature of Things. Trans. A. E. Stallings. New York: Penguin
Classics, 2007.
80 Temptational Obscurity That Brings Hope to Life
history of ornithology painting;
14
Zhang Feng’s rendition of “Immortals’ Secrets in
a Stone Cave,” painted during a “sightseeing” trip between Nanjing and Zhenjiang
in 1657.
15
Each proffers ecological obscurity made manifest through art.
These are works of imagined space, enriched by memory, hope, dreams of lost
civilizations within civilizations, all of those figments of human qualification that
also beguile the flow of equations used in science, natural history, and mathematics,
particularly the combinatory theories oriented to the very “existence of monochromatic subsets for finite colorings of large structures… or infinite”.
16
In the language
of “topological dynamics,” “Infinitary Ramsey Theory,” and “measurable decomposition,” it is not uncommon to read that one theorem “has definite aesthetic advantages over” another theorem.
17
Similarly, the languages of landscape, of art in general, evince whorls within
whorls, true and magnetic norths of unspoken elocution that help us to conceal as
much as is revealed about the human species. In the ecological context, the unsullied horizons are temptational obscurities of the first order, promising an untrammeled future.
Such obscurities are not merely the Zen-beholden product of some difficult-ofaccess obscurantism, as the term has often been used, levied against any number of
deliberately abstruse equations. By obscure we hasten to record that transition
between that which can be asserted to be unknown and that which we assume by
common assent is known. A table, a chair, soil in our palm, the night sky, any palpable sensation, anything that we take to be as is, commends the span between that
which is not and that which appears to be. The history of philosophy, of mathematics, of physics, as has previously been intimated, enshrines the dialectic with a fervor. It is not the case that nothing comes of nothing, the Greek of Aristotle and
Parmenides—οὐδὲν ἕξ οὐδενός; and the Latin of Lucretius—ex nihilo nihil fit.
18
Unknown deaths—easily 100 billion humans throughout time, hundreds of trillions
of Others—become something, do something, go somewhere, reincarnate, reabsorb, and re-tool all the metabolic internalities of their life when death appears to
subsume it. This is not nothing, this transitional chasm of salient facts in both its
irrepressibility and cyclic, systemic mathematical predictability, philosophy shorn
to a pure syllogism combining time and substance. The earth herself is the ultimate
14 See Where The Truth Lies – The Art Of Qiu Ying, by Stephen Little, with contributions by Wan
Kong and Einor K. Cervone, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, 2020, p. 81.
15 See The Artful Recluse – Painting, Poetry, And Politics In Seventeenth-Century China, Edited by
Peter C. Sturman and Susan S. Tai, Essays by Peter C. Sturman, Timothy Brook, Jonathan Chaves,
Jonathan Hay and Hui-shu Lee, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, 2012, p. 197.
16 See Elemental Methods in Ergodic Ramsey Theory, by Randall McCutcheon, Springer-Verlag,
Berlin, 1999, p. 1.
17 ibid., p. 2.
18 See John Burnet’s Greek translation, https://lexundria.com/parm_frag/1-19/b; and Lucretius’ De
Rerum Natura, 1.148–156, The Nature of Things. Trans. A. E. Stallings. New York: Penguin
Classics, 2007.
80 Temptational Obscurity That Brings Hope to Life