63
outcomes have anything to do with any reality. And so, with the ancient and conventionally ascribed forms of logic we are lost altogether: No constraints oriented
toward truthful outcomes are sufficient to layer one’s perception of the world with
anything like a truth. And while there are undoubted consequences resulting from
sitting upon a chair (we can be spoken of as apparently sitting on such a chair), any
number of situations are likely to affect that picture, not limited to a direct hit of a
lightning strike, or summer temperatures in southern California exceeding 150
degrees.
7.4 Between Rodin and Tragedy
Seated on the chair, poised pensively like Auguste Rodin’s 1888 six-foot tall “The
Thinker” in bronze, the nature of paradox does not begin and end in human thought.
As Rodin himself wrote “He thinks not only with his brain, but with every muscle
of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”
20
We see a
striking similitude in Alberto Giacometti’s various Solitaire sculptures, less literal,
given to that ancestral absence of identity propounded in the famed third century
BCE Etruscan bronze statue named “Ombra della sera” (Evening Shade) from the
Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, in Volterra, Tuscany.
The nature of paradox is human nature fully illustrated. It is the heart of the fragment, waiting only to be addressed by additional information that transforms irony,
a fallacy, an incomplete thought into something whole. This act of intellectual
accretion simulates closure, but only in mind. Everything we contemplate grips us
with an absolute yet ecologically untenable process. That is the comprehension that
guides us; its every word issued from our lips. We have no other outlet. Our music
may imitate the wild howl; all those modern petroglyphs embarking backward into
the sanctum of elegant confinements and romantically warmed hearths. Humanity’s
professed love of life, and of individuals, may lay claim to all of those perceivable
companions and candidates around us. But ultimately, we remain trapped by every
memory and reflex that has accumulated; by hundreds of millions of years of neurological trial and error behind us (Fig. 7.3).
This dilemma, a closed circuit of introspection, or life-support system in which
all variables are exogenous, causally independent, is exacerbated by its most pronounced and relative weakness: It cannot recognize its inability to enter a new realm
of perception. To do so would require recourse to indigenous components.
Dramatically, that would mean breaking the fourth wall of natural history and fronting the prospect that what happens outside ourselves, by the agency of our own
behavior, also happens inside. That our bacteria have essentially willed our destiny
in a collective, if unknown, frame of contexts that we continually step into; and that
that stepping mirrors everything around us, Nature.
20 Rodin – A Biography, by Elizabeth Ripley, J.B.Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1966, p.40.
7.4 Between Rodin and Tragedy
outcomes have anything to do with any reality. And so, with the ancient and conventionally ascribed forms of logic we are lost altogether: No constraints oriented
toward truthful outcomes are sufficient to layer one’s perception of the world with
anything like a truth. And while there are undoubted consequences resulting from
sitting upon a chair (we can be spoken of as apparently sitting on such a chair), any
number of situations are likely to affect that picture, not limited to a direct hit of a
lightning strike, or summer temperatures in southern California exceeding 150
degrees.
7.4 Between Rodin and Tragedy
Seated on the chair, poised pensively like Auguste Rodin’s 1888 six-foot tall “The
Thinker” in bronze, the nature of paradox does not begin and end in human thought.
As Rodin himself wrote “He thinks not only with his brain, but with every muscle
of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”
20
We see a
striking similitude in Alberto Giacometti’s various Solitaire sculptures, less literal,
given to that ancestral absence of identity propounded in the famed third century
BCE Etruscan bronze statue named “Ombra della sera” (Evening Shade) from the
Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, in Volterra, Tuscany.
The nature of paradox is human nature fully illustrated. It is the heart of the fragment, waiting only to be addressed by additional information that transforms irony,
a fallacy, an incomplete thought into something whole. This act of intellectual
accretion simulates closure, but only in mind. Everything we contemplate grips us
with an absolute yet ecologically untenable process. That is the comprehension that
guides us; its every word issued from our lips. We have no other outlet. Our music
may imitate the wild howl; all those modern petroglyphs embarking backward into
the sanctum of elegant confinements and romantically warmed hearths. Humanity’s
professed love of life, and of individuals, may lay claim to all of those perceivable
companions and candidates around us. But ultimately, we remain trapped by every
memory and reflex that has accumulated; by hundreds of millions of years of neurological trial and error behind us (Fig. 7.3).
This dilemma, a closed circuit of introspection, or life-support system in which
all variables are exogenous, causally independent, is exacerbated by its most pronounced and relative weakness: It cannot recognize its inability to enter a new realm
of perception. To do so would require recourse to indigenous components.
Dramatically, that would mean breaking the fourth wall of natural history and fronting the prospect that what happens outside ourselves, by the agency of our own
behavior, also happens inside. That our bacteria have essentially willed our destiny
in a collective, if unknown, frame of contexts that we continually step into; and that
that stepping mirrors everything around us, Nature.
20 Rodin – A Biography, by Elizabeth Ripley, J.B.Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1966, p.40.
7.4 Between Rodin and Tragedy