From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jun 05 2004 - 16:35:34 BST
Hi Johnny,
> I don't know, Platt, I guess I've experienced enough beautiful dynamic
> quality in the pitch dark, that I don't fully understand the MoQ.
Are you talking about sex?
> You should read The Celestine Prophecy, you'd really like it. That was the
> book about plants eminating light and energy and so on, and how you could
> focus thought on a plant's energy and it would grow faster. Not a bad
> beach book, but not quite philosophy. Lila sometimes ventures into beach
> book territory, too. Therefore I don't think it is the definitive
> philosphical work on patterns or value or morality or metaphysics, or even
> quality.
I read the Celestine book and I agree it's not quite philosophy. As I
recall it talks a lot about connecting with invisible energies and other
New Age sorts of things, but I'm really not into crystals or pyramids or
banging on a tom-tom while male bonding in the north woods. Lila is a
different story. It's got depth.
> Pirsig does spend a lot of time talking about halos and words like
> "enlightened". But isn't that just a metaphor for being able to see? In
> the dark you can't see, you need light.
In the dark of the mind's eye we sometimes see much more than we see in
the light. Anyway, we need the dark to know light.
> And seeing helps you form
> expectations, it helps you survive. Surely people noticed this a long time
> ago and decided this light was a cool thing. And painters noticed that
> paintings that were entirely black not only didn't sell well, they used up
> all the black paint. Who knows what sort of protoplasmic reactions they
> provoked.
I think there's at least one painter who painted a square all black, and some
museum put it up on the wall as art. No doubt some decorator someplace copied
it and sold it to a client for tidy sum, laughing all the way to the bank. As Al
Capp said of modern art, "A product of the untalented sold by the
unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
> Jonathan Edwards spent a lot of ink writing about beauty, as did our mutual
> friend Arthur Schopenhauer. So I don't denigrate beauty's hugely important
> role in patterns and being. But what you've written below seems entirely
> self-referential and redundant. Is it the beauty, or the "special value",
> or the "DQ", or the "primary radiance" that we are seeing? Which reveals
> which?
It's all the same big enchilada.
> I guess I don't care so much if I don't understand the MoQ through being
> knocked off my horse on the road to damascus, I just want to talk about
> Philosophy and ontology and morality. Johnny.
I'd rather respond to DQ by pursuing Beauty. But maybe your way of
responding is talking about philosophy and such. As for the horse and your
being knocked off of it, the allusion escapes me.
Regards,
Platt
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