numbers
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008i had thought about numbers. numbers seemed to be the first step to a rather linear thinking, a chrono-logical order.
and one night in dream i saw these nine rooms:
1 was a brown room with cardboard boxes
2 was a white room with a table without a plate/a top and a bathtub filled with ink.
3 was a red room with a tryptichon
4 was a yellow room with two people watching each other in distance in a diagonal line separated by a breathing window in the center.
5 was a grey room with piano strings that were drawn through space and formed a pattern, a vibrating structure. and a refridgerator with an open door and a frozen portrait inside.
6 was a coloured room with a table like an assembly line and chairs
7 was a blue room with a couch like a stretcher and a projector who projects movement on a portrait hanging on the wall
8 was a green room with watering cans pouring water on images on a green gras ground. images like graveyard stones.
9 was a black room with various clocks in the ’sky’ showing different times on their faces and a telescope ‘watching’ them from the ground.
i thought: is there someone in these nine rooms?
and i thought about the nine muses.
i read everything i could find about the muses, the daughters of mnemosyne, memory.
and i wrote text for every room.
one day i was looking into a german philosophical dictionary and found a diagramm of the middle age.
this diagram has 9 lines and is called ‘pons asinorum’. which is latin for the asse bridge
and this term is used in the sense of ‘a help, a bridge to remember’.
the diagram was drawn to symbolize, to probably help to remember aristoteles’ syllogism, and the inventio medii.
but the article did not explain how to use this diagramm and when i called the at the verlag, even the man who had written the article could not tell me how to use this diagramm.
after a certain method, that i do not know or understand, this diagram leads to a certain understanding of something else, a certain logic.
i thought: somehow this diagram fascinates me in its beauty and structure.
‘my logic’ and only knowledge will be that i draw it in a certain way when i copy it down from the book.
my way to draw it, each line after line will reveal (means i will find on my way) other ’signs’
so i basically draw 9 lines which in the end will be the ‘pons asinorum’.
but i go with the process, the movement, so relevant for my way are the 9 signs i get on my way of drawing the 9 lines for this diagram called the ‘pons asinorum’.
i am not trying to say something about the mathematical or philosophical context in which the pons stands- i go with drawing purely the lines of the diagramm- which corresponds with my process with the rooms i saw in my dream, i do not know what it means but kind of ‘draw’ again and again.
1. one line on white paper- gesture on the material, a movement in space.
2. the second line mirrors the first line that mirrors the second line and both define an imaginary field or a channel.
3. three lines of the same length form a pattern, a structure or layers.
4. the fourth diagonal line connects the 3 lines before: a ‘balance’ measures imaginary weight.
5. the fifth line forms an ‘x’ with the fourth line: a ’sandclock’ measures imaginary time.
6. the sixth line ‘crescends’ the imaginary volume.
7. the seventh line mirrors the sixth line: an arrow points back (left in the written/drawn space) to an imaginary past.
8. the eightth line: a shifted symbol of eternity- imaginary continuity or eternal presence?
9.the ninth line mirrors the eighth line: an arrow points forward (right in the written/drawn space) to an imaginary future.
the pons as my process of drawing and interpreting signs gave me an idea of how the dynamic movements of ‘thousand rooms my place’ might be.