Maybe I won't go twice. I actually liked the movie, and it felt like it was promising an even deeper experience if I saw it again. But... man, those last two Spielberg movies were just so bad—so forced and clunky—that I feel like "Sky over Washington, D.C." might just reflexively fall apart in the same way those two empty films did. I guess the only thing that really works is Handke's stuff, and everything else feels kind of fake.
Exactly. I guess you can't really grasp the point of a mosaic if you're just staring at one tiny little tile at a time. It’s kind of funny, but maybe we only find the real meaning through that bit of blurriness. Sometimes you just have to step back and push things out of focus to actually see how it all fits together. Like, the further you get from what you're looking at, the better the whole picture becomes, kind of like when you're flying over Manhattan on a plane.
Not really, I mean, sometimes I wanted to draw just because I could, I guess. I never actually had any big ambitions about becoming an artist or anything. What you saw is basically pretty much everything I’ve ever drawn.
Did you draw a caricature that well the very first time you ever picked up a pencil?
I actually found some of my old drawings from when I was maybe five or six years old... they were actually pretty fantastic, honestly. I think all I was missing back then was just a little bit of experience with observation and, you know, processing things emotionally.
Have you ever drawn something better than those people who don't have that (significant) "TALENT" on your very FIRST try!!??
100%
Skills like drawing or playing music aren't really just about technique, so I guess you can't just "learn" them in the traditional sense. Like, just reproducing a guitar solo isn't really playing. It all starts in the imagination, not just in your fingers. Specifically with a caricature, talent is really just being able to type out and realize that fluid flow of imagination.
Back in the day, I really thought I could just sit down and teach myself how to draw. I spent so much time trying to pick up the skill (you can check out some of my old caricatures here: klick), but looking back, those efforts felt pretty pointless. I guess it’s one of those things where you either have it or you don't. If you've got the knack, you've always had it—for me, it started the moment I could actually hold a pencil. But if it's not there? It's never coming. Maybe you can refine your style a bit, but honestly, that only works if you already possess the talent to begin with. It seems like that applies to almost everything else, too. It's kind of a waste of energy... you can't just go changing your blood type 😳
Sloterdijk is originally Dutch, though he was actually born over in Karlsruhe, Germany. I guess some people view the Dutch as a nation that isn't really into philosophy—just mostly focused on drinking, partying, and messing around, if you catch my drift. The best description of a philosopher and their actual ideas I've ever come across was this one on his own website: ! His sentences feel sort of... swollen? Like he’s speaking as a single entity, both mind and body at once. He uses these incredibly precise metaphors, almost surgical in how they hit the nail right on the head.
So, did you just invent hot water? I mean, honestly, we’ve been stuck on the same old ideas for centuries, from the whole Romanticism era all the way down the line. It feels like nothing ever truly changes out here in the West.
..and Escher's standing within global intellectual circles
I mean, you definitely convinced me regarding his status among the intellectuals, but I guess that doesn't really have anything to do with the actual art. Maybe one day you'll realize that you can't actually reach true art through all that scientific intellectualizing. It feels like art is just being used here as a tool for intellectual construction—even if Escher did have some kind of "divine" intuition, I suppose. In other words, if this counts as art, then maybe a physics textbook with detailed diagrams is way more artistic than Wassily Kandinsky. Art can only be offered to the intellect secondarily, sort of *post festum*, but you're jumping on that first ball and all you end up with is your own self-absorbed mental mechanics.
I don't really know why so many people lack any kind of mathematical "ear," but I do know that those who are blessed with that gift are essentially artists who "feel" their way through with their minds. And if feeling isn't a sense... well, I guess I don't know what is.
The split between the sciences—the spiritual and the natural ones—didn't happen by accident, which a lot of people have pointed out, like Dilthey or Rickert. Especially Snow, who noted there’s this fatal difference in mentality, like a total incompatibility, between, say, an art historian and a physicist. It's like a fundamental complementarity in humans where someone might be a genius in one area but totally lost in the other. I guess nobody can be further from art than a mathematician (though exceptions prove the rule, like Bachelard, I suppose). People are just shaped one-dimensionally; it's not really black and white, it's more like white is just less black.
The fact that hundreds of mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, and just regular folks find these high-level symbolic messages in Escher's work... well, I guess people like Brandon Martin7 just don't care about that. It seems like they're mostly interested in tearing down things that are actually meaningful and beautiful to most of us.
That’s basically just bad hermeneutics—treating art like some meditative object to be dissected. It feels like you're kind of degrading Escher.
But hey, no big deal, don't feel insulted or anything, that's just how I see it, I guess. 👍
Do you even know which branch of science symmetry actually falls under?
So, are you telling me that having a mathematical grasp on symmetry is basically the secret sauce to decoding a piece of art, like, the deeper you go? 😵
I have to say, those early posts on this site were actually pretty decent, maybe even worth a look... though the stuff lately feels more like just playing around... or maybe just fodder for those super deep speculations of yours.
👋 I don't want to be too harsh on a mathematician's general instinct for reading art, I really don't, but it might sound a little less convincing if you used something like a "union of plumbers, locksmiths, or stay-at-home parents" as a benchmark for an artwork's quality. I mean, art is all about intuition, whereas math is just this huge, messy pile of pure logic. That kind of approach feels a bit like trying to fix a masterpiece with a pair of tweezers, I guess. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of Escher’s style, but probably not because it qualifies as "art." Anyway, thanks for the link. It isn't exactly about aesthetics, but it's pretty insightful, I suppose.
I guess, being both an optimist and a scientist at heart, you have to admit that the world 'out there' is something inherently unknowable through direct experience, mostly because our own consciousness does so much interpreting—like how we perceive colors, for example.
I finally snagged a copy of Being and Time—the actual original German edition, obviously. I couldn't find it for under $44 anywhere, and all the used bookstores were totally picked clean, but hey, this one looks gorgeous on my shelf. Now the big question is... when am I actually going to get around to reading it? Well, whenever it’s my turn, I guess. Maybe in a few years. I just finished collecting all the original editions starting from Descartes and moving forward. I'm planning to dive into the 'Meditations' pretty soon too (that Time Magazine monologue wasn't a bad little warm-up, though), just so I can finally say I've read something substantial besides Plato.
I mean, I've been let in on the highest IX° secrets, so I spend my time just tantra-ing and doing some alchemy. It’s like... I die and am reborn every single day, I guess. 👋
Truth doesn't just spark questions; I guess it actually brings the answers along with it, too. It kind of tunes up the frequency of our internal mental scanners, so maybe all those facts just get a much clearer tomography.
