square white world

James Gleick calls the flight from Europe to the United States in the mid-1930s, ‘the greatest intellectual migration in history.’ The aptness of his description struck me and I wanted to record it here. [James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, Abacus, London, 2006, p. 167]

– Ad Reinhardt, from the Black Paintings, 1966

On Physical Intuition, compare with Donnellan’s million muscles (here):

– Ad Reinhardt, first figure (inverted) from Symmetrical Three Figure Hatch (Male into Female), 1946

A certain kind of pragmatic, working theorist valued a style of thinking based on a kind of seeing and feeling. That was what physical intuition meant. Feynman said to Dyson, and Dyson agreed, that Einstein’s great work had sprung from physical intuition and that when Einstein stopped creating it was because “he stopped thinking in concrete physical images and became a manipulator of equations.” Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic.

– Ad Reinhardt, second figure (inverted) from ibid.

Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.

– Ibid., p. 244

– Ad Reinhardt, third figure (inverted) from ibid.

This is the best of, one of, all possible worlds:

Even to physicists well accustomed to theoretical constructions with awkward philosophical implications, Feynman’s summings of paths – path integrals – seemed bizarre. They conjured a universe where no potential goes uncounted; where nothing is latent, everything alive; where every possibility makes itself felt in the outcome.

– Ibid., p. 249

– Ad Reinhardt, Symmetrical Two Travelers, 1946

– Matrëshka [poss. derivation above], Condom Alley, Auckland, 21/5/09

The sun would not radiate if it were alone in space and no other bodies could absorb its radiation. … If for example I observed through my telescope yesterday evening that star … 100 light years away, then not only did I know that the light which it allowed to reach my eye was emitted 100 years ago, but also the star or individual atoms of it knew already 100 years ago that I, who then did not even exist, would view it yesterday evening at such and such a time.

– H. Tetrode quoted in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, James Gleick, Abacus, London, 2006, p. 120

– Tony Fomison, Study after Holbein’s Dead Christ, 1971-1973

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant. This mood is no delusion, in Sokrates’ belief. It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved.

– Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet, Dalkey Archive Press, London, 1998, pp. 152-3

– Tony Fomison, Study of a Hand, 1970

I am very committed to painting and therefore, very prejudiced! I believe that vision is everything, but that despite the large population today, its is probably as rare as ever. And I don’t mean optical vision, I mean the narrated, imagined vision of the visionary.

– Tony Fomison

JG Ballard dies six days before my father. He is 78, renowned for the surgical prose of his novels and the ordinariness of the life he chose for himself after enduring the internment camp at Lunghua, 1943-1945. His last book is a memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008)

Augusto Boal dies on the Saturday following my father’s death a week before. He is seventy-eight. Boal is Brazilian, he went into exile around the time of the anti-revolution, the military coup, of 1964, following Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Argentina. Boal shares the characteristic with my father of never patronising, treating those who ‘don’t get it’ with a big smile, and an ‘It’s OK not to get it.’ Boal is the inventor of a truly non-representative theatre, with all the paradoxes that go along with that, in theatre of the oppressed and later in his work with legislative theatre. He dies of respiratory failure at the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro. He returned to Brazil after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1985 but continued to travel widely and teach and delight with his ebullience and energy and pragmatism. He is missed, globally.