“Years ago, when Bob and I were reading philosophy together–as a way of getting to know each other, really–we stumbled upon the formulations of a late medieval Neoplatonist theologian and philosopher, a mathematician known as Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464). Nicolas has this wonderful way of talking about the difference between logic and faith or, alternatively, between knowing and truth. Logic, he suggests, knowing, is like an n-sided polygon nested inside a circle. The more sides you add, the more complexities you introduce, the more the polygon approaches the circle which surrounds it. And yet, the farther away it gets as well. For the circle is but a single, seamless line, whereas your polygon seems to be breeding more and more lines, more and more angles, becoming less and less seamless. No matter how many sides you add, no matter how closely the inscribed polygon begins to approximate the circle, it never reaches the circle, and at a certain point a leap is required, from the tangent of the arc, from endlessly compounding multiplicity to singleness of being. Another name for that leap, of course, is grace.”
I have been reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a book written by Lawrence Weschler that follows over thirty years of documented conversations with the artist Robert Irwin. It is breaking my heart in the best way.
I think a lot about the cyclical and contradictory trajectory we are all on as artists. Always there is this pattern of building something up, only to arrive at a place where it becomes necessary to strip away; to get at the essence. But the amazing part is that the thing is somehow better for it. To have only started with the sphere would deprive the polygon somehow of its history and richness, though its surface qualities as it ultimately becomes a sphere may appear unencumbered.
