artist's-books in Lithuania

 

 een Hand Gebonden Kunstenaarsboek Joseph Joh'n', Joop,Visser a hand-bound Artist's-Book / le Livre d'Artist / ein handgebundenes Künstler Buch / Mahler Buch

Joop Visser: "When sixteen, the first encounter with poetry, and I mean when it hit me, and kept me hooked for the rest of my life, was when reading William Langland's (somewhat 1350 I seem to remember) 'Piers Plowman'. The introduction is as an introduction to life; my life anyway, and it is from there that I understood what art could do, and how I were to plunge into it. One sentence in perticular was 'the wording' of 'me', this was - in fact is - 'my story', I could even overlook the 'God-bits in the end - God and I would never 'make it' -, and when reading on it would show to be that essential poem for me forever."

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;
And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.
Thanne gan I meten a merveillous swevene --
That I was in a wildernesse, wiste I nevere where.
A as I biheeld into the eest an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft trieliche ymaked,
A deep dale bynethe, a dongeon therinne,
With depe diches and derke and dredfulle of sighte.
A fair feeld ful of folk fond I ther bitwene --
Of alle manere of men, the meene and the riche,
Werchynge and wandrynge as the world asketh.
Somme putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful selde,
In settynge and sowynge swonken ful harde,
And wonnen that thise wastours with glotonye destruyeth
What this mountaigne bymeneth and the merke dale
And the feld ful of folk, I shal yow faire shewe.
A lovely lady of leere in lynnen yclothed
Cam doun fom castel and called me faire,
And seide, "Sone, slepestow? Sestow this peple-
How bisie they ben aboute the maze?
The mooste partie of this peple that passeth on this erthe,
Have thei worship in this world, thei wilne no bettre;
Of oother hevene than here holde thei no tale".-
I was afeed of hire face, theigh she faire weere,
And seide, "Mercy, madame, what this to mene?"

This is getting somewhere, then again, most of us come from, and live with the ideas of the 'WANDERER'; Joop does see and apreciate that, but cannot live by the idea too much:

Oft him anhaga
Often the solitary one
are gebidedh,
finds grace for himself
metudes miltse,
the mercy of the Lord,
theah the he modcearig
Although he, sorry-hearted,
geond lagulade
must for a long time
longe sceolde
move by hand
hreran mid hondum
along the waterways,
hrimcealde sæ
the ice-cold sea,
wadan wræclastas
tread the paths of exile
Wyrd bidh ful aræd!
Events always go as they must!

 

 

The book for the 5th. Intern. Artist's Book Triennial Vilnius has the (up is only the prologue) poem by William Langland as the central-theme. That together with:

fa anna la na sirbun, ka-anna ni ja hu
adhra dawrin fi mel in mudhayyali

in a translation by Mr. J. W. Redhouse:

"Then there appeared unto us a herd (of wild oxen), the heifers whereof (from their tails) were, as it were, maidens of Dawr in long-trained mantles."

 

 

Greek mathematicians were exciting for a fair few of the school years

The free-spirit of poetry and music would guide the artist for the rest of his life - now that sound basis was there,
& the romance of Maxwell's Electrodynamics
( the textbook says: Recall that Galileo's Principle of Relativity says that the mechanical laws of physics are the same for every inertial observer. And this led to the understanding that there is no public notion of speed---no universal agreement on what the speed of an object is---the speed of an object is a private "relative" concept. This is what led us to abandon Aristotle's notion of absolute rest and replace his spacetime with Galileo's Spacetime.

However, there is a serious problem: Galileo's Spacetime is incompatible with Maxwell's Laws of Electrodynamics and Optics. The source of the problem is the appearance of a "constant speed"--a fundamental constant of nature: the speed of light--automatically built into the Laws of Electromagnetism and Optics. (It turns out that if this speed were infinite, then there would be no conflict between Galileo's Spacetime and Maxwell's Laws of Electromagnetism and Optics. But, this speed is not infinite. So, there is a conflict.)

None of all that would ever be of consequence, it is just 'food for the mind' / pondering over an endless, and dangerously adventurous voyage that mankind seems to make, seemingly unaware of the consequences it has for all other species: 'where there is the one, the other cannot be' seems to be a basic rule.

 

 

 

Joseph John V. Componist

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