#poeisis

[mcz404]

gotta post the winter holiday artwork I did way back in December! All the Solstice of Snow PCs, doing lovely holiday things <3

[marimuntanya]

[figurationoftheinvisible]

What is the Figuration of the Invisible?

Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens (Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.) — Simonides of Keos (c. 556 – 468 BC) 

Ut pictura poesis is a Latin phrase meaning "as is painting, so is poetry." The statement (often repeated) occurs most famously in Horace's "Ars Poetica." “Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over.”

- What is the etymological meaning of poesía? - In Greek, "poiesis" refers to a making, a creation, a bringing into existence. Plato writes about this in the Symposium: that mortals strive for immortality in relation to poiesis. “In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating (poiesis).” In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay.

According to Plato, such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: 

Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, 

Poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame, 

Poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge. Hence the Greeks valued arts like poetry, oratory and theatre so highly: to create is godlike, divine. In contrast, Aristotle says that creation is a product of physis, of individual biology. It’s that original divide in Western thinking—what is the original, highest source? Is it material or immaterial?

This was an ongoing debate, something philosophers liked to argue about that has no real correct answer. The Greeks (and later the Romans) considered oratory the highest form, because it was part of statecraft (poiesis in the city)—it was the duty of a citizen and it shaped minds and destinies. In this context, theatre emerged as another form of oratory.

This debate was revived during the Renaissance; in Italian it's just referred to as the paragone, the argument over which is the highest and greatest of the arts and why—i.e. the paragon of the arts. For example, Leonardo da Vinci considered music as secondary only to painting, but some argued that music was supreme because it transcends time and has no fixed form—it is immaterial, and thus partakes of the divine.

Obviously Leonardo was totally biased,

and the debate was never really settled. During the Baroque period it became the fashion to paint ut pictura poesis, which is an allegorical style that fused painting, theatre and poetical subjects and sentiments. Artists asked what should be the purpose of the arts, and what is the essential nature of representation? Is it to create? Is it to copy, to mimic nature? Both? Horace (a Roman poet and scholar from the time of the Emperor Augustus) defined the purpose of the arts: “The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together...both pleasure and applicability to life,” during the Renaissance this tenet became central. But music does shape minds and move the soul, it affects the emotions most directly, and it is unbound from time and space; all strong arguments.

Horace also said that some types of music are better than others, to form and inspire the spirit, for example, of the warriors. But in order to be a true artist, one must create. Thus the Renaissance artists used conceptual, imaginative strategies of disegno (design). They created composite images in their minds (e.g. the best features of the five most beautiful women to create the Universal Ideal of the Beautiful); they used their creative ingenuity to plan on paper and canvas with sketches; they read the ancient poets and scholars and tried to apply their teachings.

Thus the same principle: the arts should instruct and edify the audience, and in turn they can do that best by being beautiful, for in the Platonic conception the beautiful is inspiring of moral Beauty/Goodness. And the figuratione dell'invisible, is to create something out of nothing; the figuration of the invisible.

Leonardo calls the painter the lord and creator (padrone, signore, creatore) of all things which occur in human thought. To bring into existence something that did not exist before—surely music is free to do that, just as painting is. Precisely because music too is not bound to copy nature, but with an unparalleled degree of freedom creates forms (figure) out of a material neither tangible nor visible. 

Images:  Simon Vouet, St. Cecilia, c. 1626 Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, details, c. 1472

[elijahmarkelcraneiii]

pillar one; soul- cycled: off-grid, off-road - terracing you

you ever just go over a speed bump and get out of the car and...

hate the speed bump?

curse at it?

give it a look and then look away?

run it over again and again hoping it changes to soft ground and reliable formation?

perhaps to continue to enjoy the goddam ride...

well with situations in life are similar to that same thing

for instance a speed bump is there to improve safety conditions, same for divine encounters, conscious conversations, and even physical collisions.

like that lover you lied to, god provided a spiritual speed bump for you to slow down and for them to do the same, then you both to proceed with caution.

that friendship experience that brings you back and forth like a gravitational pull, but then on the course of redemption god provides that speed bump, to sustain the safety and precaution of another's feelings, intentions, and persistence.

the connection with anyone is what you put in is what you can get out of it - why not put in more love, more life, and more experience.

I'd drive you crazy, but we would end up in a place we don't know screaming at one another until it caused either a war to sky's end or a celebration of recognizing that we are giving it all we have to be within one another and ones self.

in the essence of being here and now - that speed bump is the moment where we both get that beautiful sensation of nostalgia that we get as kids and look and laugh and say not a word - because we get the feeling of the same thing.

once unexpected, then as we both go about our journey one speed bump like the other - giving us that same keen sense of disposition to recall us back to safety, back to our initiative perspective to feel, be and thrive as we ought to.

to me, no you are not a speed bump - you are those beautiful feelings in my gut, that allow my soul to look over and pull through. In any situation, I choose love. In any situation, I'd choose you over and under - in and out.

choosing life is all we need to laugh and love through the fact that we are in it, and that which we take ourselves away from any speed, any level any collision we aren't built to endure - we coast deep within one span and speed - from time to time my energy will force you to pick up the pace, pivot or push forward in stride.

with godspeed, peace.

by emci

[marimuntanya]

Tawanda Mulalu

Near It Please no longer the need to be harmed by colors.The streets in this continent change as easy as fingernailslatching on to me when you breathe like this. Press hard.Your skin bruises easy a…

Near It

Tawanda Malalu

Please no longer the need to be harmed by colors. The streets in this continent change as easy as fingernails latching on to me when you breathe like this. Press hard. Your skin bruises easy as leaves. I watch leaves cold now while lonely cars glide past the playground. No matter this light that flees early, I allow myself this. I amass a nest of smaller rays— the birds do their final gathering and I am gone again, returning for the rest of this day. Here, an old tree. An old tree by this fence. An old tree by this fence by this road. Gravel intermingles above soil with newer reds revealing themselves as leaving. To beneath roots. Shall I press myself against brick? Pretend? Yes: that I was here, will hear beneath feet beneath brick beneath leaves above you, will hear all along the mass of days in which another dry conflagration falls into this box of tissues and sanitizer. Leaves, then my kids’ hands, finally quiet in the classroom. Masks. I clean their hands and think again of their minds, stumbling across mathematics. Imagine the soft marvel of another planet where other minds do not stumble, cannot marvel, cannot I but only sing. One song and I am the last thought on Earth, the fantasy of Schubert’s four hands, I am not dying. I am not immediately dying. Or I do not know that I will. For the backache, the doctors scan my heart, and find my right ventricle might be thicker than it should be; the left ventricle pumps oxygenated blood to the body. I am so close to safety I could confirm it now: in my chest, a dream gone, breathing.

[marimuntanya]

JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

TO THE POET THAT HAPPENS TO BE BLACK AND THE BLACK POET WHO HAPPENS TO BE A WOMAN

[eidetisch]

We should be careful not to construe technē simply in terms of a technique for making things. Rather technē is a mode of revealing something by way of a challenging forth (Heidegger, Question 21). Technē sets upon things, appropriates them and orders them according to a plan or calculation. It challenges them in their being, to be something else, implying a violence to their being. This, in turn, is distinguished from poiēsis which is a bringing forth – a letting be by allowing something to become what it is in its being. Challenging forth and bringing forth are not alternative modes of presencing, but should be thought together. Poiēsis – as a bringing forth – is that which resists the challenging forth of technē. Technē thus entails a poiēsis but not on its own terms.

[eidetisch]

The difference lies elsewhere, in modern technology's orientation to the world. Modern technology's mode of revealing is not poeisis.

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.

Heidegger's argument in the next few pages may seem quite familiar. It is, in a sense, an ecological argument. Heidegger views the difference between older forms of technology (the windmill, for example, which draws its energy from the wind but does not extractand store that energy) and modern technology which exploits and exhausts--in Heidegger's terms, "challenges"--our planet's resources.

Another example illustrates the difference between technology's "challenging forth" and poetry's "revealing." Heidegger uses the Rhine River, a potent symbol in German national culture, to show how technology transforms our orientation to the world. When we build hydroelectric dam on the river, the meaning of the river changes: it becomes an energy resource. Heidegger contrasts "the Rhine" viewed as a source of hydroelectric power and "the Rhine" as it appears in the work of the German poet Friedrich Höderlin, in which the river appears as the source of philosophical inspiration and cultural (and, for some readers, nationalistic) pride. It is interesting to note here that Heidegger extends his critique of technology to include the tourism industry, which in its own way transforms the natural world into raw materials, a source of profit.