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Leonardo had a phrase for his notebooks which he called "scrittura infinita": infinite writing. This didn't mean an infinite number of words, since that is impossible. It meant, says Carlo Vecce, whose book "Leonardo and his Books" I bought at the Galileo Museum in Firenza in June of 2019, as follows, from a different book: Leonardo’s writing should be regarded more as a “textual window” than as a sheet filled with script. . . . “Scrittura infinita” (infinite writing) meant that there were no boundaries between forms of expression, languages, intellectual disciplines, and experience [21]. (C. Vecce, “Words and Image in Leonardo’s Writings” in C. Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), p. 75.) In other words Leonardo combined, like William Blake would rediscover and reincarnate three centuries later, verbal and visual imagery on the same surface with the same pigment. It also means what Vecce says (see above) about all realms of knowledge being interconnected with each other and with all forms of experience. It's a network diagram we should all easily recognize and have no excuse not to, especially when pointed out to us in very plain terms. What if we apply such thoughts by Leonardo, which existed before today's challenges of climate crises, democracy decline, and super-AI/GPT, to today's challenges of climate crisis, democratic decline, and supersmart AI/GPT's? (We can filter Leonardo's essays on planetary destruction -- "Of the Cruelty of Humans" and "Of Selling Paradise" -- into the mix one layer down or one frame to either side; and the talking bronze heads of his day, not to mention three centuries before his day, with moving jaws which answered all questions correctly are also context. So it's all there if we are just honest enough to admit it.) Well, it would certainly mean that our experience as humans, both in its past form of accumulated traces and images which we call memory structure, or the mnemosyne atlas, and its present-moment, relatively indeterminate, novel manifestation, makes out of all the arts and sciences a network fabric which is interwoven with and by non-human nature as its affected environment. If we mint mechanical shovels to dig up forests so the rocks below them can be mined to make more shovels, the world of human and non-human existence will be woven into dead forests, mining pits, shovels, shovelers, tailings, and disappeared birds, soils, flora, pollinators, mammals, reptilians, amphibians, and likely much re-atmospheric carbon dioxide. That's what one might call an ugly, dead, life-corroding fabric which despite its grotesque poison quality and unnecessary crudeness is what humans often cause. We are good and adept enough at causing it that, as Leonardo bluntly forecast, we might soon as advancing humans cover the entire planet with such a fabric of ruined life. What is the other fabric which remains possible? Well, unless you argue there is nothing left to destroy, and since it's all already been destroyed who cares, indeed that even you and your ability to do or love anything has been destroyed, you must concede if you are at all honest and accountable to reason, logic, fact, reality, and decency, that we humans can choose to weave a fabric in the three dimensions of us, nature, and all Art which is non-fatal to life but on the contrary heals, preserves, and respects both living nature and its inanimate kindred citizens like water, air, soil, and climate (the mixing of sun and wind). Many like to say the planet's "vegetative soul," as Leonardo called it, is lost, a dead void already, for purposes of profit (Of Selling Paradise), and some like to kill for fun (Of the Cruelty of Man), and many more become befuddled when the rich and powerful say and do the first two things and curl up terrified in their burrows to wait out the danger. Despite all that, at some point you have to leave your burrow to eat or at least drink, and you might see another burrow-dweller out and about, and share some thoughts. Or, maybe you've been lucky to inhabit a safer place where you can leave your burrow for whole days at a time. Whatever the reason, you are part of Nature as well as part of Art (which are each in turn part of each other like a braid), and you are always adapting and shifting, in one way or another, even if you don't know it and can barely feel it at your most alert and calm times of sense. It might just be your unconscious DNA and the environment's stored present-moment skillset that does the adapting and you are just along for the ride. Still it's happening. In this wonderful and possible state of the least-worst occurring, like in Blake and Tokarczuk who team up in "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Deceased" (2019) to show a different bridge, a different set of them in network form, we can sometimes perceive how to think, talk, visualize, and write about that network set. We may choose to look and listen if we wish, even if we have no guarantee of better times; and arguably, is it not a misdeed and a wrong never to try at all unless we are guaranteed success, from the viewpoint of planetary adaptation? It never guarantees anything so never to bother to choose by conscience without a guarantee means never to follow conscience at all. Which is not so admirable, if we are honest about it, and if no humans every try the planet has no chance. A woven fabric in which all threads respect life and each other would look like La Gioconda, La Joconde in its adoptive home of Paris, in which the garment is formed by the flowing rivers and geology, the eye maintains line and rotation in synchrony as do the atmosphere and curling hair, and mirror mirrors mirror be it of princes, or life sustaining itself, or art by humanity along different paths than cruelty and selling. The garment of nature and art is both worn by Esperienza, which Leonardo deemed the "one true maestra," and woven by her hand. This is a portrait of the planet, consisting of Art, Nature, and Humanity, all blent, and of its heart which for humans is experience and experiment. The agency, such as it is or was, that can choose the better way (sometimes called simply the Tao, or right makes might) is called Esperienza in Leonardo's infinite writing, Italian for experience and experiment, the principle he defended and personified as "the one true maestra" of which he was the "disciple": "Body born of the perspective of Leonardo of Vinci, disciple of experience. Let this body be made not of examples from another body but only of simple lines." (That is from the notebook page we call today the Codex Atlanticus 520r, that leaf-node in the network, high-res and translated on the Galileo Museum's website at https://teche.museogalileo.it/leonardo/foglio/index.html?num=ATL.1039.1&lang=en ) It isn't me who says all this, but Ken Burns' new film about Leonardo which premieres tonight on PBS. This same Esperienza, experientia, was also Francis Bacon's foundation for all Science and Hamilton's concept, learnt from Hume, which along with Time formed the only sound basis for any constitution, union, nation, polity, or democracy. When princes truly look in the true mirror, which is not always impossible, they can change and for the better. +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
