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Posts Tagged ‘singularity’

The Wisdom Beyond Words

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 30, 2025| 3 Comments »

The Wisdom Beyond Words– Coming to Principle Gallery, June 2025

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

— Thomas Merton, Hagia Sophia (1961)

I was looking for something to accompany the new painting shown here, The Wisdom Beyond Words, and came across this passage from Thomas Merton. It’s the opening section of his prose poem Hagia Sophia written sometime around 1961.  Though it speaks through the dogma of Catholicism, it matches very well the belief system I somewhat laid out here a week or so back. As it often is with most religions, the underlying structure and belief is very much the same idea but with symbols, stories, and representations that reflect cultural differences. 

In short, this passage captured in words what I see and sense in this painting. It could very well be used to describe the theme of my Entanglement exhibit that opens June 13 at the Principle Gallery, which I have described as being how everything is contained in small part in every other thing. Much as it is in the theory put forward by Stephen Hawking that when a star dies it collapses into itself until it is finally a single tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of the black hole formed from the star’s collapse. A single point of immense mass and energy This was referred to as a Singularity. 

Hawking looked at this singularity and wondered since this was the end point of star’s death could it not also be the starting point for future new universes that might emerge if this singularity were to explode outward– the Big Bang Theory.

The underlying thought is that the universe and all that it is was once a single thing before the Big Bang created all that we know the universe to be now from that single point.

We were all part of one thing. We were that one thing.

And it’s that unity and wisdom of all things, much like that of which Merton wrote, that I sense in this painting. 

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The Singularity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- Lux Templi

Lux Templi-At the West End Gallery

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

— Marie Howe, The Singularity

Yesterday, I came across a post from about four years ago of this short animation of a poem from poet Marie Howe. The post and the poem had slipped my mind, but I was moved upon reading it again.

Her poem is titled Singularity and refers to the theory from Stephen Hawking, and others as well. The accepted theory is that when a star dies it collapses into itself until it is finally a single tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of the black hole formed from the star’s collapse. A single point of immense mass and energy This was referred to as a singularity. 

Hawking looked at this singularity and wondered since this was the end point of star’s death could it not also be the starting point for future new universes that might emerge if this singularity were to explode outward– the Big Bang Theory.

The underlying thought is that the universe and all that it is was once a single thing before the Big Bang created all that we know the universe to be now.

We were all part of one thing.

No, we were that one thing.

That is as simple as I can put it and still understand it. I am not even sure that simple explanation is correct. Probably off by a large fraction, like the final garbled message in the old Telephone Game, where something is whispered in one kid’s ear at a table. They then whisper it into the kid next to them and so on. By the time the message gets to the final kid, the message usually only contains a small part of the original message. I am probably that kid near the end of this process.

 Admittedly, and much like Howe explains to her audience, my own grasp of advanced physics and most other great scientific theoretical concepts is limited. But the idea that we were once one and that we may all at some point become one again is somehow appealing to something inside me. It makes me think that maybe a form of singularity is the goal of all art– both an inward reduction of totality into a single tiny point as well as an outward explosion of this same totality.

Expressions of mortality and rebirth.

I don’t know for sure. This is just what the kid next to me whispered in my ear. If I’m way off base here, blame it on him. 

 The entire Marie Howe poem is below the video. Take a look then get the heck out of here. I got plans to either collapse or explode this morning. Not sure which it will be. Probably a theory on that somewhere.

 

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

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