aporia (2018) …
Carefully preserved belongings of a passed loved one, glass sculpture with cremation ashes.
Aloysius (lovingly, painstakingly repaired with peculiar remains), Mr Monster and Robin. Bound together in material disintegration (having spent 518 days striving devotedly to connect with Lady W), now rely on Pinky, magick and other tenuous yet auspicious connections to the eternal and the universe to receive a sign … only to attain a state of aporia. They persist and live in hope …
When a close friend died in 2017 I needed to clear her flat. I was amazed by the magic I found in her ‘stuff’. Things that she had treasured, which were now being disposed of. No-one but she understood their real significance. What if the objects themselves existed independently, in and of themselves, with their own ‘lived’ or ’embodied’ experience ..?
Object Oriented Ontology (OOO)
Ontology (noun)
- A branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being
- A set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them
Object Oriented Ontology
An object-oriented account of metaphysical substances (term coined by Graham Harman in 1999)
OOO Basic Principles
- Critique of anthropocentrism (the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects). Beginning with Kant: philosophers argued that objects conform to the mind of the subject and become products of human condition
- In contrast to Kant, OOO philosophers maintain that:
- Objects exist independently of human perception
- Non-human object relations distort their related objects in the same fundamental manner as human consciousness
- Therefore all object relations (human and non-human) exist on an equal ontological footing with one another (Harman, G, 2005, p8)
Metaphysical (adjective)
- Relation to metaphysics
- Based on abstract meaning: synonyms: abstract, theoretical, conceptual, notional, philosophical, speculative, academic
- Antonyms: empirical
- Transcending physical matter or the laws of nature: synonyms: transcendental, spiritual, supernatural, paranormal
- Antonyms: physical
- Of, or relating to, the metaphysical poets
Metaphysical Poetry
Termed by Samuel Johnson
- Highly intellectual
- Marked by bold and ingenious conceipts (17th Cent poets)
- In congruous imagery
- Complexity and subtlety of thought
- Frequent use of paradox
- Often deliberate harshness/rigidity of expression
A “metaphysical conceit” is different to an extended analogy – it doesn’t have a clear cut relationship between the things compared.
John Donne
A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning
(A couple faced with absence from each other is likened to a compass)
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
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