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design practice and theory
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design practice and theory
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| What relates Poetry to Design? Similarly one wonders about the relation
between philosophy and design. This page suggests some answers to these
questions.
A good starter is this citation from one of the latest books by Umberto Eco, "Kant e l'Ornitorinco" (Kant and the platypus), Bompiani, 1997, p.42 . " The language of poets seems to place itself in a free zone...They seem to be those that not only celebrate neccessity, but often they allow themselves (and us) to deny the resistance (n) - because for them turtles can fly, and even can escape from death." n.of undeniable facts, (my note) If this seems to troublesome to you you might proceed directly to the page on 'rythm in design' |
| Paul Celan was a german poet born in 1920 in Rumania from jewish
parents.
His life was signed by his imprisonment with his mother in a german concentration camp from which he alone survived. His hundreds of poems became, though hermetic, famous and the subject of analysis by, for example, Peter Scondy, Hans Georg Gadamer, Winfried Menninghaus, Petra Leutner and Paul Derrida. The extraordinary richness of his works sheds a new light on the role and sense of poetry. He died suicide in 1970 in Paris. This is a sample from the volume ATEMWENDE ( change of breath) from 1967 with a possible explanation that does serve me to penetrate, be it in a lateral way, in our topic: the sense of design. |
| DIE SCHWERMUTSSCHNELLEN HINDURCH
am blanken Wundenspiegel vorbei: da werden die vierzig entrindeten Lebensbäume geflösst. Einzige Gegen-
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THROUGH MELANCHOLIC RAPIDS
past the blank mirror of wounds: there the forty skinned trees of life are floated. Only she the counter-
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| These words need explanation:
Celan shows us a place in the mountains, a place where his friends Nietsche
and Buechner used to dwell, there is a forest of giant trees its eternal
peace is disturbed, interrupted, killed forever. Yes activity is going
on: the holy trees (there are only forty of them) are cut, skinned and
floated into the river where they swim, passing through the swirls and
noise of rapids, along a quite lake that mirrors the sky, towards
their destiny of human consumption, construction or pulp. The modern world
is taking its toll but someone is contesting: a woman (is it green peace
?) reports.
past the blank mirror of wounds : history is reflection of past crimes here the forty : a multitude skinned trees of life are floated : revealing words are spoken Only she the counter swimmer : only poetry is struggling
to announce their truth
through melancholic rapids:
Past crimes that are remembered here are a constant theme in Celan's poems, referring to the holocaust, his mother died in a concentration camp. Poets are "Hurt by reality and searching for reality" states Celan in a speech from 1958. (4) The Torah, of which the Cabbala is an exegetic instrument, is an "opaque mirror of knowledge... yet it is shining in the pureness of written doctrine..., writes the eminent scholar of the Cabbala, Gershom Scholem, ... knowledge cannot be retrieved from it." This will explain the 'blank' mirror in Celan's poem. (5) |
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The sin fall , detail, painted by Michelangelo in 1508-1512 on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museum in Rome. |
forty years
St. Augustin indicated in forty the product of 4 (= time) and 10 (= knowledge): 'forty' teaches therefore to live in coherence to knowledge; and, what is more, it took Moses forty years, after first engraving the 10 commandments on a stone slab, to deliver the Torah rolls that he wrote during the exodus through the desert. At Stonehenge forty stone blocks are used as columns in a circle forty paces wide, alluding to an astral origin. (6) This is a famous symbol in ancient religions of India (Veda) and Mesopotamia (Zohar), signifying the emanation of divinity in all things living. Often it is imagined upside down with its roots in heaven and its branches on earth. Much mystification has developed around such sacred texts and its supposed benevolent influences, as in the movement of "The Golden Dawn" which doesn't interest us really in this pages. Even then some positive effects can be found in the net. I suggest this "Tree of Life" site, it offers an interesting biological taxonomy: http://ag.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html
Celan mentions, in his poem, 40 trunks, remnants of trees of life and as it is known that the jewish poet, amongst the different meanings of his texts, always includes the reflection about the distance between words and names, the first being directly accessible to the senses, the other indirectly pointing at the mystical name of God, the forty trunks are in this sense forty words on the way to become names in a poem. Are there perhaps forty religions in the world as a further allusion?
(auriel@primenet ) Explains the french anthropologist Gilbert Durand:
"shell" or "husk". The idea of a covering or a garment or a vessel is common in Cabbala, where it is used, at various times and with various degrees of subtlety, to express the manner in which the light of the En Soph is "encapsulated". For example, the Sefiroth , in their capacity of recipients of light, are sometimes referred to as kelim , "vessels". The duality between the container and the contained is one of the most important in Cabalistic explanations of the creative moment. The word "qlippah " is an extension of this metaphor. A qlippah is also a covering or a container, and as each sephira acts as a shell or covering to the sephira preceding it in the order of emanation, in a technical sense we can say the qlippoth are innate to the Tree of Life. Cut a slice through a tree and one can see the growth rings, with the bark on the outside. The Tree of Life has 10 concentric rings, and sometimes the qlippah is equated to the bark. The word is commonly used to refer to a covering which contains no light: that is, an empty shell, a dead husk...... The "Zohar " attributes the primary cause of evil to the act of separation. The act of separation is referred to as the "cutting of the shoots". What was united becomes divided, and the boundary between one thing and another can be regarded as a shell. The primary separation was the division between the Tree of Life (Pillar of Mercy) from t |
