A counterclockwise spiral from the centre - By Sven Pertelson

It all started at a symposium. No, not one of those boring talking shops that they have these days ! A real Greek style symposium, where the thinkers got drunk on large amounts of rough red wine, while some sober scribe noted down the ideas, then they looked at the ideas the next day. Now that is the sort of brainstorming I like. In Vino Veritas, or whatever the Greek for that is.



The idea that came up was to do with the way we see art, in particular paintings. When the eye sees the the brush strokes on paper and for example interprets them to be a starlit night with a moon in the sky and a glass and a bottle on table, do those things become real somewhere? In the same way when the quill and ink have written words on the paper, do the things written become real? What about music? Do the notes written on paper make a pair of feet dance somewhere?

Like parrots, some of the philosophers kept on repeating the old established arguements. Others went back, stripping back the ancient tree of knowledge, trying to get to the root, the truth. Time passed and like butterflies our minds began to flit from idea to idea. Our thoughts eventually spiralling down to some common ground. Debating the meaning of happy and sad. But we were like fish, trying to make sense of a tree or a car. It all seemed as useless as debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, or why horses could not fly.

It was only as we looked round the room the next morning did we realise that the picture on the wall contained all the things we had been thinking about. So perhaps art could become real, at least when we were drunk.