As in, how to continue the Six Persimmons painting now at the stage shown below. I am thinking about how the internal dialectic of the painting might be explicated in terms of it being a sublation. What is happening here has correspondence with Hegel’s term, Aufheben. I see numerous correspondences between pictopoiesis and other fields of thought and discipline, in this case philosophy.
In the links above, I notice the sentence, “In Hegel’s logic, self-contradiction is legitimate and necessary”
This holds true with the painting and points to one reason why it is so challenging at this stage. I know my system as well as could be (having built it up from fundamental units) and I know that I have to see it through to conclude this painting. But the necessary self-contradiction it inevitably contains means I have to inhabit very uncomfortable regions along the way. I remind myself that the avoidance of complacency leads to progress overall. This helps as that is a principle with general application, holding true outside pictopoiesis. As I jump off the cliff I have to trust that I can fly but I know for a fact that I don’t have wings
How then to navigate my way ahead on this? As always, Whitman in his Song of Myself (section 51) has a line to offer which I can turn to for solidarity:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Extract from foreword notes (ref above):
“What are arguably Whitman’s most famous lines appear here: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Whitman is recasting one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central ideas: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. . . . Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. . . . To be great is to be misunderstood.” For Whitman, as we have seen, the self is a continually evolving and expanding entity, and new experiences will always broaden and challenge and upset what a self believed earlier. We must learn to be grateful to arrive at contradictions and to cultivate a sense of a self open and aware enough to “speak against” (the root meaning of “contradict”) the self that existed yesterday. As “Song of Myself” has demonstrated throughout, a self that does not change is a stunted identity, dead to the transforming stimuli of the multitudinous world around us, stimuli that include the transforming words of this poem.”
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