Dualism

The LPRU's work up to now has been dominated by this misplaced anxiety, the irrepressible desire to conquer our fears, penetrate the ciphers and finally 'know' these Artefacts as if they were our own. By doing so, we think that we mimic the artefact-makers themselves, whose only motivation for working as they did must have been to divine some understanding of their fate, by reaching out for a realm beyond the present, an unknown god, a vision of perfect, transcendent knowledge — or so we tell ourselves.

In the Farmhands' Journey we find the description of an encounter with an invisible presence, the sensation of an approaching, undulating body which the narrator can only describe as ’the kind respiring of Constance’. The full account of their meeting is almost banal. Neither fearful nor ecstatic, the narrator is clearly comfortable in their limited knowledge of the event. ‘True’ knowledge of the presence is the domain of the world-body. The narrator understands that it is not threatening, is of the world (non-supernatural) and thus connected to them by a hidden bond.

‘Accepted mystery’. To us, a mystery is often a kind of dualism — predicated as they are on gaps between the known and the unknown — and the solutions to many ‘dualisms’ are themselves mysteries and the cause of significant tension: the mind/body conundrum; our thoughts/feelings and the inadequacy of our language to express them; Plato’s cave... Binaries might be passé nowadays, but a certain Manichaeanism lingers on in our collective unconscious. And this quasi-religious ‘reaching’, this fixation on impassible breaches — bringing light to darkness, reconciling irreconcilable opposites — is not an acceptable framework for LPRU researchers, when shadow and form are not the same but ‘exist in the same way’ (Leach).

[...]

Classical Art took as its basis the human need for transcendence: the belief in higher levels of being to which we could be transported by the right words or pictures. This attitude is now out of fashion and has been secularised: instead, art’s function is to help us ‘learn more about the world and ourselves’. In any case — and forgive the generalisation — the basis of much art remains a sort of fatalistic dualism, where ideas and lives have to be captured in order to be appreciated, raised up. But the Lye artefacts originate from cultures without transcendence, without tiers: a system where words are not means towards ends, but actual things, existing alongside parts of the so-called ‘phenomenal world’. To make things, to use language, was phenomenal. It was to take part in the recycling of the matter that made up the world.

It is not a question of doubt or of a desire to understand, to know. The strange epistemology of the Lye Planet disregards this framing: things are ‘understood’ innately, biologically, by the world-organism on the stem’s behalf. What follows is a tradition of artefact-making which sees their function not as interpretative — and certainly not ‘spiritual’ in the sense we understand the term — but as a practical, accompanying gesture to the natural world, contributing to its circuits.

[...]

The real tectonic shift occurs when individual visions and wider cycles fall out of balance. We should be wary of drawing fast conclusions about Decline-era bereavement; the supposed emergence of a desire to resolve mystery. Forget not the Lye enamourment with the fragment. When a Lye inhabitant made an artefact, they contributed to the planet something small but nevertheless recognisably tied to them and to their world: visions to supplant mysteries — perhaps to help make homes in them — but not to answer them.

back