1a) The Universal Harmony,
immutable in its constancy, is the potentiality from which all things come
into existence.
2a) The Creative Harmony
as a thing to be studied is mysterious and elusive.[1]
3a) From beginningless past
to endless future; across the vast expanses of time and space; through
the endless births and deaths of all existent things; from the smallest
of the small to the greatest of the great; the Universal Harmony remains
constant.
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footnotes
1] Investigating reality means investigating what does not exist and is incomprehensible; but for man what is incomprehensible is non-existent - hence it is something non-existent that is being examined. Man has defined the existence of things that were formerly incomprehensible and non-existent for him, and wants to investigate them; if we take any of the things that man has defined and try to investigate it, we see that, under pressure from our tool of investigation, it immediately disintegrates into a large number of component parts which are fully independent; further investigation will prove that the thing did not exist, that only the sum of things existed. But what is this sum of things? In what numbers can it be expressed? To answer these questions it is essential to elucidate the sum of each thing from the sum that disintegrated. One begins the investigation of the disintegrated things and under the pressure of the investigation the things again disintegrate into a multitude of things, whose investigation will prove that these disintegrated things also in their turn disintegrated into independent things and bore a mass of new links and relations with new things, and so on ad infinitum. The investigation will prove that things do not exist, that at the same time there exists their infinity, “nothing” and at the same time “something”. Thus the investigation has not added anything to our understanding, nor has it drawn the sum of things, for if it attempted to give a sum, it would produce a whole row of figures, whose infinity would not be read. The community treats this sum simply, dividing it up, producing a sum that it can understand, and then multiplying it endlessly according to a plan it can comprehend. I suppose that the whole of science, seeking the foundations of anything, acts in the same way. Breaking up the endless string of the senseless collection of figures into separate sums, the sum of which must remain unknown, the community rejoices that it has read the sum, which is therefore clear and comprehensible; but this is only the community’s delight and deception, since in reality it has understood nothing, not having read all of the pages. Neither the first nor the last page exists, and similarly neither the first nor the last figures are known. What figures stand in a thing, and what figure of a general sum does the thing comprise? Thus one can no more build sums that one can build objects. Kasimir
Malevich, God is not Cast Down, section ten
Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past, (time regained, 1927)
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