Paul Laffoley
Alchemy (1973)
Oil, acrylic, ink, lettering on canvas 73 1/2 x 73 1/2 in.
Subject: The Alchemical Process
Symbol Evocation: Traditional Western Magic
Comments: During the Middle Ages the magical practices of ancient, Egypt, Greece, and Rome became codifies as alchemy (the power and techniques of universal transformation) with the study of the Qabalah as its energy source. This is a perfect analogy of the way Christianity became the creative extension of Judaism. However, alchemy, then at its mature power was considered just another Gnostic heresy, and the personal practice of it as an example of blasphemy. The distinction between magic and religion that was accepted by the Medieval world was neatly summed up in 1920 by the synoptic chronicler of the occult, Lewis Spense, when he wrote: "It has been that religion consists of an appeal to the gods, whereas magic is the attempt to force their compliance." This is why alchemy is often called the confused precursor of the modern sciences of chemistry and physics-- which it is not. Science appeals to the myth of invariance in nature (the "laws" of nature) in order to euphemize out of existence the gradual hubris as a result of attempting a complete control of nature (never the intent of alchemy). In a certain sense both chemistry and physics could be viewed as failed forms of alchemy.
When Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519) separated alchemy into what we now call art and science, he not only began the Italian Renaissance and the modern world, but he also discovered a way to keep the enterprise of magic alive right under the nose of the church. The price that was paid by the rest of humanity was:
1) traditional magic had to go underground into secret organizations that became the world of the occult-- the hidden, and
2) over the next 500 years there occurred a very unhealthy separation between the intellect and the passions at the societal level.
The operating nomenclature of alchemy as it applies to the major substances of transformation are:
A) the Body,
B) the Soul, and
C) the Spirit,
which were rendered as mass, consciousness and energy during the International Gothic Period and into the Renaissance. The Church considered the Body, the Soul, and the Spirit to be its exclusive property; and its obvious attempt at the theological neutering of these sacred concepts into the secular forms, simultaneously accomplished two tasks:
1) it gave science, a new and fast rising bureaucracy of learning and authority something of its own to chew on besides the Church's authority, and
2) allowed the Church the leverage to quietly push alchemy off the stage of knowledge and into oblivion-- or at lest that is what it though that it did.
The final paroxysm of tension between thinking and feeling, which spiked at the end of the 19th Century, was eloquently recorded by the philosopher/historian Sigried Giedion, in Space, Time, and Architecture: Growth of a New Tradition (1941-1967). Ostensibly a polemic for modernism in architecture, it became for me, one of the major influences in the current revival of alchemy, because it documents the transforming power of a willful and impassioned vision for a present and future world.
- text (c) Paul Laffoley
Utopia: The Suspension between the Possible and the Impossible (1973)
Ink, Acrylic, Letraset on Board. 28 1/2 x 28 1/2 in
Subject: The dynamics of the intentional community
Symbol Evocation: Heaven on earth
Comments: When the German Existential Lutheran Theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) wrote, in 1951, an essay entitled Critique and Justification of Utopia, his conclusion was: "utopia: the suspension between the possible and the impossible." The 1950s was not a very sympathetic era toward utopian thought. It was a time coming down off the negativity toward utopia expressed by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in the 1930s and 40s. By the 1960s (a pro-utopia period) Tillich's apocalyptic non sequitur began to make sense. Because, utopia means one thing when you strip it of all scholarship and classical references to such notables as: Plato, Saint Thomas More (who coined the term "utopia" in 1516, Francis Bacon, Tommaso Campanella, Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells and all the rest.
Utopia amounts to one simple concept: Heaven on Earth. Well, how can you have that? Isn't heaven supposed to be an "afterlife" experience-- if it exists at all? Was Northrop Frye right when he claimed the idea of utopia was worth the ink and paper the word was written on? Well I for one believe it does exist, meaning it has existed and can exist again because its ontological status is a special modality of mysticism-- a social mode.
Consider the symbol of structure of utopia:
The breathing in of the universe: When the one falls instantly and without effort into the many. This is the female aspect of the manifestation-- the breathing out, the great release. But when the many attempt the long and arduous struggle to come back to the one, this becomes the male aspect of the manifestation of the universe-- the breathing in-- the path to utopia or the alchemical task to resolve aspects of consciousness as a manifestation of the collective will with aspects of consciousness as a manifestation of one's immiscible self.
The path to utopia is expressed as a non-oppressive environment free from all systems whether they are hierarchies, holiarchies or heteroarchies. The form is the major fractal of the manifest universe-- the logarithmic spiral of equilangular spiral that makes an infinite number of revolutions around the one, becoming closer to it-- the source of all without ever violating the one from the power of the ego. The goal of this mystical topology is the utopic-- the space of the utopia. It is the space of nature, which when fully revealed to human consciousness demonstrates the unity of concepts which are apparently separated by the becomingness of history, such as: the abstract/ the real, the objective/ the subjective, death/ life, mass/ consciousness, the profane/ the sacred, matter/ spirit, body/ soul. Utopic space is the action of bringing together the dream of reason-- the freedom of the will as pure being (transcendence) with the temporal ecstasy of the imagination-- the control of the will as pure becoming (morality).
Since the path to true utopia is a fractal vector, it is the control of four other vectors that would, if released, veer toward spaces other than utopic space. Utopian or utopic space exists as a dimensional portal between the 4th and 5th dimensional realms. It is literally a symbolic space and is therefore an a-dimensional and not non-dimensional space. To be a-dimensional means that it is a space that transcends the natures of the dimensioned spaces that bound it, and it subsumes the natures of the boundary spaces. If utopic space loses the tension of its quadruple nature, it will simply collapse into a space of boundaries, depending of course, upon which of the spaces suddenly becomes dominant.
The boundary-- non-utopic-- spaces are:
1. Eutopia: A life lived in relation to the mystical experience and which abdicates the common good and all social connections and responsibilities. In this space the ego believes that it has become God. The vector is directly into the source of all.
2. Kakatopia (or Dystopia): Lives are lived in the knowledge of their mutual alienation ("we are all alone together"), in mutually repellent spaces-- this is the literal bad place. The vector continues the initial explosion of the one into the many which in now unnecessary.
3. Kenotopia: Lives lived in a space of comfort and ignorance without stress, striving or goals. It is the kitsch place. The vector is a circle, which is established at fixed distances from the source of all, depending when the life left the true path to utopia, and can therefore account for differences and levels of taste even in the realm of kitsch.
4. Oligotopia: A group of lives develops a system by which they can leave the path to utopia and enter kenotopia, which because of the system becomes the bureaucratic place. The vector is a line away from the source of all which is stopped by a pre-existing kenotopic space.
The fractal spiral of nature is evolution if the human consciousness was not present. To become one with nature means to be on the path to utopia. To be in or live in utopic space has a metaphor which I have always liked-- that is the Wheatstone Bridge invented in 1872 by Sir Charles Wheatstone. It is a device for measuring electrical resistances and consists of a powered conductor joining two branches of a circuit and a galvanometer. The electromotive force introduced into the circuit is totally balanced by electrical resistors. Both the power and the resistance can increase in a balanced potential. An ideal Wheatstone Bridge, which possesses an infinite resistance to an infinite electrical power supply, would produce an undetectable rising tension unless entry into the system was gained.
This system of utopic space has always seemed to me to be the most vivid, because it represents the attempt to engineer the meeting of the immovable object with the irresistible force, and this process is observable only from within the system. Like utopia itself, it seems not to exist unless you are actually in it.
- text (c) Paul Laffoley
THE PHYSICALLY ALIVE STRUCTURED ENVIRONMENT : THE BAUHAROQUE (2004)
31, 1/8 x 31, 1/8 Media: India ink , photo-collage, vinyl letters on acid free board
The Modern Movement in architecture was based primarily in Utopian Solutions to its constructed Tasks. To complete these Tasks The Moderns combined Science [ as the desire to differentiate Nature indefinitely with Personal Intuition, so as to inform the architect when to make an end. Modernisms most pressing problem was assumed to be the construction of Mass-Housing that is truly affordable by all.
Although the real issue was stated by the Modernists, somehow it was never solved successfully by their many strategies that included but not limited to Architectural Planning at the Macro and Micro Scales that would make anyone who ever attended LÉcole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts take on a green patina , and the study of New Materials combined with Progressive Engineering that looked to Nature as the Source of its Structural Principles. The Post-Modernists who converged Science with Nostalgia avoided the Present, and its problems altogether, in favor of reviving the Past.
As we enter The Bauharoque [the third phase of Modernism] , architects are now faced with such problems as : bulging populations [ the United Nations has predicted that by the year 2050 the worlds population will have reached 18 billion, and this will mean to feed and house these teeming masses will require as drastic as raising three more continents the size of Africa from the ocean floor], un--winnable terrorist wars that seem to keep on escalating, a general and continuous degrading of the worlds natural environment, politics as entertainment and a substitute for religion, or the popular media making money by pitting various interest groups and classes against each other.
I believe that if a strategy for mass housing could found, that would involve non-repressive personal environments [ that would avoid mechanical standardization], a base could be established from which other social problems will be solved. Then finally the quest for meaning in existence could gradually replace the goals of our almost complete secular world. To do this requires the total convergence of Science with Mysticism.
While this task has already been started a few individuals and groups [beginning in the 19th Century], it will not be until the entire world is involved, will a real change be noticed. My proposal ,therefore, for ending the world housing shortage is by growing houses from plant materials and developing genetically altered seeds which will induce habitable forms in single multiple species. These forms will then begin to approximate the rich vocabulary of spaces the history of the Human Species has created from the individual home to the city with mass and image of New York City [ which has now proliferated on the earth where a goal for urbanism is desired]
Recently the sciences of botany and bio-engineering have discovered four fuctions that plants can perform that can aid plant-human relations:
1. Semyon Davidovich Kirlian through his electro-photography discovered that plants bridge the abyss between life and death and regeneration;
2. When tobacco plants are gene-spliced with luciferin from fireflies the plants will light up with 5 watts of cold light. Soon bio-engineering will increase the light level to 100 watts;
3. Spinach leaves exhibit the highest electrical potential of all plantforms: 10volts D.C.
4. Large groupings of groupings of carnivorous plants can control insect populations within a confined area.
What could be a more plausible or delightful solution than to live in a world-wide garden - The New Eden populated with physically alive architecture that could exist almost anywhere on the Earths surface or under the ocean or up in the air, that was produced in growing time of approximately two to three months. Also as Humanity begins to explore other planets and moons ,I do not believe , people will like living in high-tech tin cans on barren wastelands. We would certainly prefer Bio-forming an environment that exists as an individual ,and therefore , has a stake in staying alive, to the ill-fated Bio-Sphere Projects that were simply a complex form of the 19th Century Conservatory or greenhouse. The Conservatory has one basis drawback. It is a building type that requires Human intervention to protect the plant species inside. The purpose of Das Urpflanze Haus or physically alive architecture is to do what all architecture is supposed to do protect us from an alien environment.
We exist on the Earth because of the existence of Vegetation , not the other way around. Over the aeons we have been weakening the life force plant materials by protecting them by artificial cultivation techniques and Hot Houses. What we must do is help plant species regain their rightful place in the world as the Prime Species and avail ourselves of their protection and love by willing to fall in love with plant forms and feed ourselves by eating their delicious fruits and nutritious vegetables [ which are seed pods which are produced in an abundance beyond what is necessary for sustainable reproduction].
Bringing this proposal to fruition will first require prototypes created by grafting plant materials in forms generated by advancements in Combinatorial Topology the branch of mathematics that has the best chance of understanding the true nature of Biology.
The secret of grafting and growing DAS URPFLANZE HAUS [the primordial plant house] to a mature and seeded state is the Ginko Biloba or The Maidenhair Tree. Native to China , it tolerates all climates and soils. It was saved from extinction in the 19th Century by certain Chinese Monasteries. The tree dates from the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era [286 to 245 million years ago], making the Ginko Biloba the oldest flowering plant, and the fact that it was alive during the time of the Dinosaurs live shoots of The Tree can connect deciduous to conifer trees , fruits to vegetables, and grasses to vines. The Ginko Biloba is not subject to the so-called Divine Proportion [.382/.618] which is actually The Proportion of Death.
- text (c) Paul Laffoley