Sine Parole – 31 May 2018

Petervan Artwork © 2018 - "Trampoline" - Acryl on canvas - 120x100cm

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Verleiding/Seduction (Poem)

Woorden maken me moe

De stilte ontwaakt me

Het bombast verveelt, vervelt

Kwetsbaarheid heelt

Traagheid verdiept

Het banale en marginale

Dragers van schoonheid in lelijkheid

Dan nog liever

De verse bloesem in de hoge kruin

De geur van gegrild vlees

De liefde van merrie en veulen

De drang naar zorgvuldigheid

De kracht van eenvoud

Zuiverheid, Alertheid en coherentie

Allen verleiden ze me

 

+++ rough translation +++

Words make me tired

Silence awakens

Bombast bores and peels

Healing vulnerability

Deepening Slowness

Banality and frugality

Carriers of beauty in utter ugliness

Then rather

The fresh blossom in the treetop

The smell of grilled meat

The love of mare and foal

The craving for careful

The power of simplicity

Purity, alertness and coherence

They all seduce me

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About Time

My tempo has become so slow and peaceful that it starts to be incompatible and dysfunctional with the rat race of so called “normal” life of deadlines, busyness, and fragmentation of everything, especially time.

So it’s about time I write something about time.

Baby Swaddling photo series © Sharon Ann Burnston 2005

“Swaddling bands white as snow are wound around the newborn baby. The womb will have been such a snug fit, so the nurse binds the body tight, to mitigate the shock of its abrupt projection into limitlessness. Person who begins only now to breathe, a first filling-up of the lungs. Person who does not know who they are, where they are, what has just begun. The most helpless of all young animals, more defenceless even than a newborn chick.”

 From Han Kang’s “The White Book”

About a year ago, I visited an exhibition about Chronos/Kairos and synchronicity in the 13th century castle of Gaasbeek, in the heart of the “Pajottenland” – sometimes also referred as Breughel-land, because Breughel painted a lot of his paintings here – a region west of Brussels, where I spent the first 25 years of my life.

Pieter Breughel the Elder
The parable of the Blind Leading the Blind – 1568

The little chapel at the horizon still exists and it is the chapel of Sint-Anna-Pede, a hamlet of the little village Itterbeek, west of Brussels. During my early twenties, I literally lived 100 meters away from this chapel.

In the instruction for the book about the aforementioned exhibition “Kairos Castle”, Luc Vanackere, the director of the castle, writes (my rough free translation):

“Some time ago, I read a an interesting text by Joke Hermsen about “waiting”. She mentioned Heidegger, who said that “asking means being prepared to wait”. Waiting is not easy in an era where everything has to move fast. We suffer from a collective shortage of time and seem to be chased by Chronos, the god of the measurable, linear time. TicTac, busy busy. Mandatory deadlines, continuously buzzing smartphones, traffic jams and too slow computers. Everyday frustrations, all well recognisable.

Much longer ago, I was in primary school. When the big holiday period started in July, it looked so endless. A sea of time, immense literately. A broad intermezzo, a “time-in-between” when nothing should or must, but where everything could, where boredom settled in as a not so unpleasant feeling. A listlessness creating space for sharp observations. A slow motion where the tumult of time quieted everything down and small things got enlarged….

“Time-in-between”, the time of the right moment when new insights are born and epiphanies are possible. The “Kairotic intermezzo” breaks radically through the dictatorship of Chronos, and stands for transformation, inspiration, passion, and creativity.

This is about that mysterious moment when our soul is unguarded and spreads out its wings. Kairos manoeuvres virtuoso between two worlds: the measurable and the immeasurable, the known and the un-known, backing out of our knowledge, covertly showing us a glimpse of the possible”

Le moulin de l'oubli – art photography by Gilbert Garcin - 1999

In the trailer of last year’s film https://www.driesfilm.com/ the Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten  says:

“The word fashion I don’t like, because “fashion” means something which is over after 6 months. I would like to find a word which is more time-less”.

And during the film there was a sequence about the difference between art and the fashion industry, basically suggesting that (the art) industry has finality, in the sense that if your product/collection does not sell you can close shop.  It is a subtle balance in such a time-full context to create artistic tensions that sell.

And then, last week, I finally got to read the book “Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision-Making” by Venkatesh Rao

A deep read – quite sure I only grasped half or less of it – adding the dimension of “Tempo” that Rao defines as:

“the set of characteristic rhythms of decision-making in the subjective life of an individual or organisation, coloured by associated patterns of emotion and energy”

He talks about calculative rationality vs. narratives rationality, about archetypes and doctrines, situational awareness, and much more.

In my opinion, he is looking at a Kairotic dimension of patrimony (about which I wrote already several times on this blog) and in that sense the book helped me to better articulate the concept of patrimony to include:

• Models of archetypes
• Models of tempo
• Models of doctrine
• Models of stories, narratives
• Externalization of narratives
• The legibility of the patrimony as an externalisation

All this is about narrative-driven decision-making, and the sentence that brings it all home is:

“All our choices are among life stories that end with our individual deaths.”

Many different life stories, often constructed confabulated after the facts to make sense of our own life, cascading one after the other, in hopefully an upwards learning spiral, but with 100% certainly always ending in the ultimate entropy of death.

Rao makes reference to the Double Freytag Triangle and the Freytag Staircase:

That’s why – 60 years into my staircase – I believe it is important to externalise some of these learning, stories, narrative, insights, interruptions, provocations, and interventions in physical artefacts, and store this information beyond death for future generations.

For sure, the new-born baby at the start of this post did not know she was at the bottom left of the Freytag Staircase, and indeed did not know who she was, where she was, and what had just begun, and that in the end she needed to create artefacts.

 

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Sine Parole – 23 May 2018

Petervan Artwork © 2018: "Cowboy Henk in his Garden" 
Acryl on canvas - 120x100cm

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Sine Parole – 2 May 2018

Petervan Artwork © 2018 "Blue Boat" - Acryl on canvas - 100x120cm

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