The Palaeolithic artist: part 19

Natural light near the entrance of Moose Mountain Cave
The jagged appearance and fracture lines can be
compared to the same motifs in Picasso's painting.
As limestone is sedimentary, and an ancient
seabed it can fracture along its strata as well as
due to other forces. One such force is
conveniently shown in the screen shot
here where, on the left, a slab has fallen.

Pablo Picasso's Le Bordel d’Avignon reflecting
the Altamira Cave. The comparison with the blues in
the Moose Mountain ice cave are just a happy
coincidence.

The only unexplainable part of yesterday's post is that of Nietzsche's and Van Gogh's final descent into insanity in the same year, but coincidences do happen.. The references to syphilis is that, in that time, any psychic process was explained as being due to syphilis by those people too far along the Logos (extraverted, materialist) scale to be able to comprehend such things. People closer to the middle of the scale, and on either side, can communicate with each other fairly well, and if the extravert is only minorly expressed, and the introvert is not too far down that side of the scale, then really remarkable collaborations can occur and these can often result in the greatest of discoveries. It is also fascinating that too strong an extravert can then go on to assign another extraverted cause in the treatment of the original extraverted explanation of the psychic phenomenon. It becomes like a mirror reflecting another mirror.





I should mention, at this point, and especially for anyone who has come across this page through a Google search, that "psychic" here means "of the psyche" and is not the sort of thing that can be seen performed on the stage. It is a Jungian term.

My friend Robert is a geologist, the other day he told me that he would never have gone where I did in the Moose Mountain cave because such places are unstable. Look at the geological map below. The right-angled space is not original to the cave, nor is the pile of material to its left, or even the narrow passageway to the right. At some time, the cave was much bigger and more open. It is always changing and it is very difficult to chronologize such changes.

After reading yesterday's post last night, it occurred to me that some people might have become rather disturbed by the three (mine included) interpretations of the painting. mostly in life, we are presented with only two interpretations and we find comfort in thinking that one is right and the other wrong. When we have three interpretations and they all include some elements of each other, we can suddenly feel that reality is being pulled away from beneath our feet; that there is no objective reality at all just different, and subjective, perceptions of realities.

While I am doing this "housecleaning", I should mention a couple of other things that I have been doing which is probably not too obvious: part 16 demonstrates the difference between wholistic and holistic. The former is analytical: 123, ABC; everything in order. Holistic, as part 16 is, can be seen as one of those plastic toys that delivers a 3D image when you shine a light on it. If you break one of those into small parts, the complete image is still visible on each part, it is just of lower resolution. The first part consists of  quotes from a number of Jung's papers and books. I tried to arrange them so that each one is closest to another which shares a greater number of similarities. You can read them in any order and the meaning will slowly come into greater focus. The links are also designed to add further depth. The second part, while being on material matters, is also designed similarly, but not as strongly expressed as the first part. Part 15 should reveal that I believe that the divergence of species through "natural selection" is pure bunk, and instead I see very gradual evolutionary changes  through the agency of epigenetics, but that will take an entire post to do it any justice, and also will come later, as will the one about how postmodernism only rarely works inside of an academic environment, and then only with very independently-minded professors. students have little hope at all. All of the posts have various embedded structures, too. You might like to try and figure out each of them. Tomorrow: A tale of two caves, Rising Star Cave in South Africa and, of course, Altamira.

This installment is dedicated to Constantinos Ragazas (Along with Jung and Picasso...)



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