The Sacred as a Pervasive Quality of Existence: Exploring the Multidisciplinary and Global Ramifications of Toyin Falola's ''Ritual Archives'' : Part 2

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The Sacred as a Pervasive Quality of Existence

Exploring the Multidisciplinary and Global Ramifications of Toyin Falola's ''Ritual Archives''

Part 2

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Abstract

This is an exploration of the sacred as a pervasive quality of existence, from its conventionally religious contexts to the arts, to ostensibly secular frameworks, represented by science.

This paper is composed of a sequence of expository text into which is integrated, at intervals, images and accompanying text responding to the images, an image/text combination illustrating and amplifying the ideas developed in the expository body of the essay.

The essay is a response to the inspirational power of Toyin Falola's essay ''Ritual Archives'' through an exploration of the explicit values and evocative possibilities of its first and third paragraphs, arguing for Falola's essay as facilitating understanding of the sacred beyond the African religious contexts it primarily addresses, penetrating into a universal and multidisciplinary radius of value.

This is the second part of a project examining ''Ritual Archives'' paragraph by paragraph. The first part is ''[Edited]From Religion to Science in the Constitution of Ritual Archives: Between Toyin Falola's African Ritual Archives and the Pirate Site and Pre-Eminent Knowledge Space Z-Library and Scientific Cosmology and its Artistic Evocation in Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable: Power and Paradox in a Personal Journey through a Miniscule Fraction of Awesome Knowledge Cosmos''.

Contents

The Power of Toyin Falola's "Ritual Archives''

Image and Text: Bruce Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set, an African, Primarily Artistic but also Spiritual Ritual Archive

Image and Text: Anselm Kiefer's Shevirat ha-Kelim, The Breaking of the Vessels, a Western, Primarily Artistic but also Spiritual Ritual Archive

Image and Text: Archives in A Discovery of Witches, Knowledge Spaces and Objects

Understanding Ritual, the Sacred and the Archive

Image and Text: ''Intense Bombardment on Gaza City Picks Up During CNN On-Air Segment''

Existence, Consciousness and Cognitive Processes as Forms of the Sacred

Images and Texts: Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable

The Power of Toyin Falola's ''Ritual Archives''

The most accomplished piece of scholarly prose I have encountered so far in my admittedly very limited reading of the breadth of work by polymathic scholar and writer Toyin Falola is his essay ''Ritual Archives'', in The Toyin Falola Reader and The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy edited by Falola and Adeshina Afolayan.

''Ritual Archives'' explores the significance of African religious archives. On further reading of the essay, however, I have come to understand it as particularly rich for facilitating appreciation of archives of sacred value in all environments, African and non-African, and even significant for understanding the sacred as going beyond explicitly religious frameworks to include engagement with profound questions of the structure, dynamism and meaning of existence across disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences.

The force of the essay emerges from its combination of expressive resonance and ideational range, richly imaginative yet intellectually disciplined, demonstrating the linguistic dexterity of a poem and the semantic scope of something straining beyond its envelope of immediate reference, pointing to universes of value exceeding its ostensible world of meaning.

These qualities are evident in the incantatory force and evocative range of its opening paragraph, a superb piece of writing, of classical value in relation to the philosophy of religion, and, as I hope to demonstrate, of the history of thought in general.

It may be described as an example of the multifarious sublime, in which grandeur of effect is created through the piling up of disparate elements within close proximity, ultimately generating a unified whole, a strategy well developed in some examples of classical African shrine aesthetics, particularly in the Niger Delta, and also dramatised by the work of Niger Delta artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, in among other works, his installation Akporode and his Oracles multi-media sequence::

By ritual archives, I mean the conglomeration of words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects that document as well as speak to those religious experiences and practices that allow us to understand the African world through various bodies of philosophies, literatures, languages, histories and much more. By implication, ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and Earth-based human beings. To a large extent, ritual archives constitute and shape knowledge about the visible and invisible world (or what I refer to as the “non-world”), coupled with forces that breathe and are breathless, as well as secular and non-secular, with destinies, and within cities, kingships, medicine, environment, sciences, and technologies. Above all, they contain shelves on sacrifices and shrines, names, places, incantations, invocations, and the entire cosmos of all the deities and their living subjects among human and nonhuman species.

Image and Text: Bruce Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set

2-17358810_211626975985618_1517985188540816027_o 2.jpg

An African, Primarily Artistic but also Spiritual Ritual Archive

The scribal, the abstract, the figural, the vegetative, the metallic, all cohere in a multifariousness dramatizing arcane power in Bruce Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set.

The multiplex universe of possibility in Falola's depiction of ritual archives seems to come alive in Onobrakpeya's installation, an example of the artist's mastery of the aesthetics of classical African shrine instllations, uniquely dramatizing their sense of eldritch power and numinous presence in works of art aglow with his inimitable originality even as they radiate the inspiration of their classical models.

The scribal esotericism of such knowledge systems as the semi-secret Nsibidi of the Nigerian Cross River and Cameroonian Ekpe/Mgbe esoteric orders is evoked by the inscriptions on the screen dividing sacred from profane space, a recurrent feature of classical African ritual zones, inscriptions demonstrating Onobrakpeya's self created Ibiebe script, inspired by his native Urhobo language, filtered through the artist's sensitivity to the compelling force of arcane visualities in projecting mystery and otherness, expressive techniques he reworks to galvanize the sensory universe of the viewer, pulling him or her in while sidestepping the specificities that may be alienating for people for whom classical African spiritualities are strange and forbidding.

The symbol density of ritual is alive here, suggested through a structure evoking creation through processes that are beyond the basic values represented by the gestures and bodily motions evident in everyday life, motions charged with amplified meaning in reshaping space through such semantically pregant forms as those of Shrine Set.

Beyond such descriptions of the visual immediacies of this work, what could it signify, what particular references could it have been organized to project through its inscriptions, its figural and abstract forms?

Very possibly, the artist's intentions are not focused on the the directing powers of forms of constructing meaning, aspiring instead to envelop the viewer in an enactment of mystery, distant from accustomed realities yet concrete in expression as it reshapes structures akin to the everyday universe of forms in ways that take them beyond the confines of the known, an archival construct the values of which are activated by the uniqueness of the viewer's imagination in dialogue with a concretely perceived space.

But, does the concept of ''ritual archives'' and its formulation here by Falola not apply beyond Africa to all contexts in which the sacred is evident?

If the first sentence were reformulated in the following way, would it not remain valid, would it not be even more illuminating for a broader range of experience?

Image and Text: Anselm Kiefer's Shevirat ha-Kelim, The Breaking of the Vessels

A Western, Primarily Artistic but also Spiritual Ritual Archive

The scribal, the abstract, the metallic, glass, are integrated in a multifariousness

dramatizing arcane power in Anselm Kiefer's

Shevirat ha-Kelim, The Breaking of the Vessels

At the beginning of time, the vessels constituting the architecture of the universe through which the ultimate creator poured his divine power as he shaped the cosmos shattered under the force of the divine radiance, the shards henceforth becoming the universe as it currently exists, splintered in terms of centres of value, a disconfiguration the aspirant is to correct through virtuous living, thereby raising the dispersed divine sparks trapped within the broken vessels to their origins in divine unity.

This cosmogonic occurrence, as visualized by Isaac Luria, a thinker of the Jewish school, the Kabbalah, is known as Shevirat ha-Kelim, The Breaking of the Vessels, the title of German artist Anselm Kiefer's installation, in which wires, inscribed with the names of the ultimate creator, Ain Soph Aur, are arched over a bookcase on the body of which is written the names of the archetypal vessels of cosmic creation, the protuberances of the bookcase on which these names are visible holding together a collection of charred books, the entire ensemble overlooking a room littered with shattered glass.

The confluence of the bookcase evoking cosmographic structure with the burnt books and the broken glass create an associative relationship between Kabbalistic cosmogony and German/Jewish history represented by the Nazi destruction of Jewish businesses and burning of Jewish books in Germany in an event hence known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Wikipedia on the event gives the following overview:

Kristallnacht...was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening.^[4] The euphemistic name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers.^[6] Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.^[7] Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed,^[8][9] and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.^[10] British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany drew worldwide attention.^[6] The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."^[11]

Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered.^[a] Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 deaths by suicide.^[12][13] Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.^[14]

The spatial configurations of Kiefer's installation, in its internal constitution and its reshaping of the resonance, the associative force, of the space within which it is installed, suggest an epic scope, a great story at the intersection of cosmology and history, the beginning of time and moments of temporality as they unroll into the future, ''huge, unbounded in scale and scope, constituting and shaping knowledge about the visible and invisible worlds, mutually implicating secular and non-secular universes, directionalities of life and communities as subsumed within the entire cosmos'', a summation interpreting this work in terms of Falola's summation on the nature of ritual archives, a correlation inspired, to a degree, by Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, which depicts how Kabbalastic cosmogony played a strategic role for some Jews in explaining for themselves the coexistence of good and evil in the world as they underwent the absolute inhumanity represented by the Holocaust, the climatic event, presaged by Kristallnacht, carried out over years across various European countries, consummated in the destruction of many generations of old Jewish communities and the deaths of six million Jews.

Image from Colin Herd's "Confronting the Past'', Aesthetica Magazine.

Furthermore, it is not only the conventionally sacred or explicitly religious that can be understood in terms of ritual archives as described in the opening sentence of the essay. The elaboration of the concept of ritual archives in the rest of the paragraph describes such archives, as also including, along with the usual forms of the sacred, data on natural and visible worlds and on secular forces within sciences and technologies.

The following extension of the various forms of thought and expressions referenced by Falola as evidencing sacred archives in that first sentence would therefore be true to Falola's conception and also be historically valid:

Furthermore, the interpretive possibilities of the third paragraph of the essay, quoted below, help reinforce this understanding of ritual archives, of records and processes of the sacred, as shaping knowledge beyond the conventionally religious or sacred:

In varied ways, a countless number of sages, priests, devotees and practitioners created oral and visual libraries, which are linked to ritual complexes and secular palaces. Subsequently, cultural knowledge has extended from the deep past to our present day. It is through their knowledge that histories and traditions were constituted, while identities were formed, and philosophy as we know it emerged.

This paragraph can be slightly reworked to dramatize its interpretive range:

I wonder if the continuity between such examples of the unity of the sciences and the sacred, as in the yantra geometries of Hinduism, Islamic geometries, the numerical and geometric symbolism of the Pythagoreans and Plato, correlative with other ideas from ancient Greece, and the subsequent history of human thought from those ancient foundations, from the humanities to the sciences, can be more evocatively described than by that third paragraph of ''Ritual Archives''.The exploration of existence, even in intellectual terms, was understood by a significant number of the most impactful of these earlier thinkers in terms of the sacred.

The Western cognitive tradition, in particular, from Europe to North America, from the ancient Greeks to the present, highlights the continuity of ritual archives between a more explicitly religious past and a supposedly secular present, a continuity all the more striking in its evidence in a culture which is generally understood as moving from the dominance of the sacred to that of the secular, a view that might have informed Falola's bifurcation between what he describes as Western conceptions of archives and ritual archives in the African context.

Falola's conception of ritual archives may be better understood as a globally represented category than a strictly or largely African one, a category evident also throughout the history of Western thought, co-existing with the more rationalistic category he contrasts it with, a more limited category he calls ''Western'', but which may be better understood as an orientation in thinking which has achieved dominance in Western thought without being exclusive, even in the West. Falola may therefore be seen as incidentally describing, in terms of ''ritual archives'', a globally evident orientation and development across the world, though exemplified in his essay by Africa.

Image and Text: Archives in A Discovery of Witches

Knowledge Spaces and Objects

The arcane, the archive and the textual, wonders of learning in the search for knowledge, immediate or mysterious, are evoked in this collage of images by myself from the TV series A Discovery of Witches, inspired by Deborah Harkness' novelistic trilogy of the same name, an image network suggesting, for me, Falola's words from his essay ''Ritual Archives'', ''Objects speak and communicate without words.'' (920)

The collage evokes for me the sensitivity to hermeneutic codes, their mysterious possibilities, the magical pull of the archives, such as libraries, where they are stored as books and scrolls, and the embodiment of universes of knowledge by the human being, themself an archive, values animating Falola's Decolonizing Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms and his essay ''Ritual Archives.''

These values are suggested for me through the collage's evocation of the film's visual dramatization of the mesmeric spell of books, libraries, scientific laboratories and scientific knowledge, weaving together the allure of mysterious knowledge represented by the occult and the power of critical thought developed through modern scholarship and science as these forces intertwine in Western history.

These ideas are projected in the collage by images of the torn pages of a book, top left, depicting the unity of various forms of being, the fragments all the more precious for the disappearance of the book in spite of centuries of quest for it, a quest driving the novels and the TV series; the witch Satu Järvinen, amazed in her entry into the Witches Archive, top right and bottom right, her presence in the luminous and mysterious beauty of the space evoking an idea of magical culture as humanly embodied supernaturality and knowledge of spiritual formulae embedded within a rich textual universe mapping and transmitting knowledge across generations; and the witch Diana Bishop, bottom left, weaving the threads constituting the tapestry of existence, dramatising the idea of human aspiration to reach beyond the material world into perceiving and shaping the metaphysical constitution of the cosmos.

Falola's lines from ''Ritual Archives'' incidentally speak to the visual and ideational force of the film and the books, artistic forms dramatising Harkness' engagement with the diverse cognitive worlds active within Western civilisation at varied levels of privileging, at different times, of the constituent parts of these worlds, suggestive of the cognitive multiplicity Falola works towards foregrounding in his contributions to African thought:

By ritual archives, I mean the conglomeration of words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects … huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and earth-based human beings.

… ritual archives constitute and shape knowledge about the visible and invisible world (or what I refer to as the “non-world”), coupled with forces that breathe and are breathless, as well as secular and non-secular, with destinies, and within cities, kingships, medicine, environment, sciences and technologies. Above all, they contain shelves on sacrifices and shrines, names, places, incantations, invocations, and the entire cosmos of all the deities and their living subjects among human and nonhuman species. ( 913)

Understanding Ritual, the Sacred and the Archive

What is the sacred?

May it be understood in terms of a spectrum of possibilities, from the explicitly spiritual and religious to any understanding of the universe, in its parts and its totality, beyond the mere fact of its existence and material value to include a sensitivity to it as a zone of wonder, beauty, power, inspiring curiosity, even if not linked to any particular spiritual or religious context?

What is ritual?

A ritual is a process through which a person participates in the sacred, calls upon the sacred or sensitizes oneself to the sacred.

Can mathematical and other scientific procedures constitute ritual in a sacred sense?

Would that not depend on the attitude of the scientific constructor to what they are doing?

They might be like Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, trying to understand the cosmos as created and sustained by God, Newton carefully demarcating what may or may not be understood by the scientific processes of induction and deduction he employs for this purpose, as he describes his approach to knowledge in ''The General Scholium'' of his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

Could the scientist consider their work to be sacred in a non-religious sense, demonstrating sensitivity to the beauty, wonder and inspiring mystery of the cosmos and the human being, as these intertwined realities present themselves to the observer without reference to any ideas of value beyond their empirically observable qualities?

Without prejudice to the views of scientists, in their similarities and differences, a student of the history and philosophies of science may understand these human endeavours in terms of the sacred.

Science may be appreciated in terms of the sacred as inherent to humanity in its dramatization of the wonder of existence, highlighting the difference between existence and nonexistence through the fire of consciousness, in a cosmos ablaze with meaning, purpose and coherence within the ultimate mystery of its fundamental origins and significance, a structure opening itself up to human amazement and understanding in a continuously unfolding synergy, metaphorically speaking, between mind and cosmos, in which understanding develops perhaps infinitely.

What is an archive?

An archive is a collection of items chosen for their information value in relation to a subject or subjects. A ritual archive, in the general sense, is a collection of items of sacred or religious significance. Falola may be seen as expanding the concept to include science and technology, and natural forms, such as trees, and processes, such as ritual, meditation or other forms of action relating the performer with the sacred or dramatizing the sacred as inherent in the performer.

Image and Text: ''Intense Bombardment on Gaza City Picks Up During CNN On-Air Segment''

Intense Bombardment on Gaza City Picks Up During CNN On-Air Segment

Rituals of destruction, rituals of death, rituals of supplication, the terrible music of bombs, the savage beauty of overwhelming firepower and its catastrophic force, the sublime horror of human lives and environments laid waste, as the human voice calls out in sonorous beauty in appeal to the creator of the universe, the whole enveloped in darkness, as the children of Abraham, Jews and Muslims, Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs, battle in fratricidal warfare in a conflict spanning generations.

A ritual archive as an event or a record of one. This is a CNN news recording, linked in the title under the picture visible directly above, of Gaza City during an Israeli bombing of the city in the early hours of 12th October 2023, a city which, before this bombing sequence, was the largest and most populated location in Palestine.

The event and its recording are remarkable for its poignantly paradoxical juxtapositions, constellating around the rhythm of the Islamic call to prayer rising into the air in between the smashing force of the bombs going off in the city where these calls to prayer resonate. The bombing and the sacred chants blend into a discordant melody, a contrastive rhythm of haunting power, evoking questions emerging from the confluence between human creativity and human destructive force.

In the midst of decades of conflict of varying degrees of intensity, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and its Gaza militant allies attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, in a shockingly audacious and unanticipated raid, terrorizing and killing Israeli civilians as well as foreign nationals in their homes and at a party, as well as killing soldiers in their bases, in a death toll of 1,195 and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza.

Israel responded with a bombing and eventual ground campaign that has lasted from October 2023 to this moment of this writing in December 2024, killing more than 40,000 Palestinians, largely non-combatants, decimating Gaza's medical, water, academic, cultural and other infrastructure, leveling its cities and towns, making the entire population refugees, amidst the emergence of disease and starvation, as Hamas leadership within and outside Gaza is steadily decimated, and the war expanded into Lebanon and Iran amidst disputes within the international community of the relationship between self-preservation and justice in the conflict, in general, and this latest, particularly defining stage of the struggle.

These issues are echoed in the juxtapositions ironically evoked by the commentary of Aaron Cohen, the Israeli analyst in the video, on the extensive Israeli bombing campaign in the densely civilian populated Gaza Strip in the stated aim of dismantling Hamas as the group is described as blending into the civilian human and physical infrastructure of Gaza and the questions around such stated aims as the conflict blossomed into months in which a good part of Gaza was destroyed, its population displaced or killed.

The level of dedication to mutual destruction represented by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, amplified by the embedding of these destructive creativities in religious ideologies by some parties in the conflict gives the struggle an epic, sacerdotal force, as immovable will clashes with unflinching power, two peoples struggling for existence on the same piece of land, more similar to than different from each other, yet mirror images to each other of what the other rejects.

''Ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope'' Falola states. The emotional depth and associative range of the event recorded in the video is focused in the aural expansiveness of the video, the juxtapositions of the bombing and prayer as well as the archetypal resonance of a man and a woman discussing contexts of human destruction and human creativity.

Philosopher/theologian Nimi Wariboko responds, in a personal communication, to the resonance of the amazing juxtapositions represented by the recording of the night bombing :

Please take a moment to listen to this video clip. Listen to the end, about five minutes.

The Islamic call to prayers amid the shelling and bombardments in Gaza is surreal, haunting, evocative, and speaks to the immensity of Being-Itself that seems to ignore or is unperturbed by the activities or sufferings of human beings.

The call-to-prayer seems to be saying God supersedes all earthly reality. Does it echo the sound of the vast fecund nothingness from which all creation emerged? Or does the call evoke the feeling that Being-Itself, God, is mourning and moaning in pain as Death patrols the streets of Gaza and Israel?

Existence, Consciousness and Cognitive Processes as Forms of the Sacred

As Falola's formulation suggests, could something not existing in a religious context be sacred? Could it be understood to constitute a ritual archive, as he states?

Could a work of art, could a scientific or technological form, such as a mathematical equation, a telescope or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Institute for Nuclear Research, through which particles are crushed against each other at great speeds to simulate the collision of elements understood to bring the universe into existence in scientific cosmology , facilitating understanding the fundamental constituents of the material universe, be understood as a ritual archive?

All forms in existence dramatize the wonder of existence as opposed to non-existence, existence the ultimate logic of which is unknown. ''Why is there something [ the universe] rather than nothing?'' as one view puts it.

The glory of existence is amplified by the range of forms in existence, their existence enabled by myriad processes.

Existence is further highlighted by the presence of life, a form of existence demonstrating a kind of interaction between the constituents of an entity and between that entity and its environment.

The magnificence of life is further strategised by animate life, life forms, from insects to various larger animals to humans, that are able to move from one place to another, thereby enabling greater interaction with the environment and greater understanding of the environment and the entity in question than would have been otherwise possible.

Life is made even more amazing by the presence of consciousness, and its necessary expression in self-consciousness, the awareness of self as distinct from the environment, amplifying the wonder of existence, enabling interaction between consciousness and its environment at a much higher level than would otherwise be possible.

A human construct, such as a mathematical equation, dramatizes the wonder of consciousness, within the glories of existence and life, the self trying to understand the universe in which it finds itself, using mathematics, a tool derived from nature as well as constructed by humans, in pursuing this goal.

In representing consciousness, a quality that takes the universe from containing only inert matter to also embodying sentience, a sentience capable of seeking to understand the universe and itself, the mathematical equation being the tool of enquiry into the universe, such an equation conflates the glory and mystery of existence.

It embodies sacred values, values at the intersection of questions of being and non-being, existence and non-existence, life and non-life, within the context of the great ''why?''.

Why do these possibilities exist? By chance or by design?

Images and Texts: Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable

An Artistic Ritual Archive, Referencing Science but also Evoking the Sacred

The scribal, the abstract, the metallic, against the immensity of sky,

all seamlessly cohere in dramatizing arcane power in Gayle Hermick's

Wandering the Immeasurable

Picture by Julien Marius Ordan

CERN-PHOTO-201707-179-2 at Globe July 2017 on CERN Document Server

Gayle Hermick's steel sculpture Wandering the Immeasurable may be interacted with as a ritual archive, projecting other ritual archives represented by scientific diagrams, mathematical equations and other scientific expressions.

Wandering the Immeasurable is a steel sculpture consisting of coiling ribbons evoking the dynamic interactivity constituting the development of knowledge in the history of science, in general, and of physics in particular, the "science that deals with the structure of matter and its motion and behavior through space and time as demonstrated in the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe unified through the related entities of energy and force" ( a definition I coupled together from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica on ''physics'').

CERN Description of Gayle Hermick's Wandering the Immeasurable:

"At CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research] on Place Galileo Galilei, in front of the Globe of Science and Innovation [ the CERN public educational space], is a monumental work of art: a 15-tonne sculpture in stainless steel, measuring 7 metres tall and 10 metres wide.

Baptised “Wandering the Immeasurable”, it takes the form of a ribbon of steel, endlessly coiling and uncoiling to represent infinite possibilities and spanning almost 4,000 years as it retraces part of the history of scientific and technical knowledge worldwide.

'On one side of the ribbon, 396 important discoveries are inscribed in their language of origin, accompanied by the names of their discoverers,' explains Bernard Pellequer, who [was] in charge of the Globe’s programme of events and the realisation of [the] project.

'The story begins with sexagesimal calculations in Mesopotamia, and ends (for the time being) with the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. Of course, the exploration continues, which is why the end of the ribbon remains suspended, as if awaiting future events...'

''Wandering the Immeasurable''

on CERN Document Server

Picture by Jeanneret Guillaume

CERN-PHOTO-201410-213-6

Visitors can therefore retrace the history of science step by step and will find some familiar names here and there. On the other side of the ribbon, Hermick wanted to showcase the language of science. From Pythagoras’ much-loved theorem to the cryptic Standard Model Lagrangian equation, the mathematical alphabet becomes more complex the more the ribbon unwinds.

The story behind this work of art dates back to 2005, when Gayle Hermick, a Canadian sculptor, discovered CERN. 'After visiting the CERN site for the first time in 2005, I was captured by the enormity of what the LHC [ the Large Hadron Collider ] represents – experimentation based on centuries of scientific exploration,' she recalls. 'Current physics theories are based on those that came before them, which were, in turn, based on other precedents. The connections between theories weave together the story of science, creating a fabric of complex detail.' Out of this inspiring encounter between the artist and CERN, a project was born.

"The sculpture has numerous symbolic connections to CERN, technologically above all, as the sculptor chose to work with an industrial metal, stainless steel, which had to be laser cut. From the point of view of diversity too: by granting the place of honour to men and women from around the world who have contributed to science through the ages, Hermick's work reflects the nature of CERN, whose very existence is built on international collaboration. Finally, this sculpture, like the Globe itself, acts as a bridge between science and society. 'This work allows visitors to understand a part of the history of science, from its beginnings to today,' underlines Pellequer. 'This educational role is also one of CERN’s fundamental aims.' "

For me, this work of art is a ritual archive dramatizing another ritual archive, the history of physics, which itself explores another ritual archive, the cosmos.

It is akin to a cathedral, evoking the conjoining of mind, knowledge and cosmos, coiling and uncoiling motion perceived in terms of creative rhythms, evoking unity, the circle of life, the sun, journey and eternity, as the spiral is understood in Igbo Uli and Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi art, a spiral coiling, in this image, into a single eye looking into the universe.

The beauty of this magnificent picture of Gayle Hermick's ''Wandering the Immeasurable'' by Jeanneret Guillaume from the CERN Document Server is in its unity of two seemingly contradictory impressions.

These are the streamlined elegance of a form seemingly in aerial motion, like a bird in flight, and of the same form seemingly suspended in space, a messenger whose body is emblazoned with myriad symbols conveying messages graspable by those initiated into their esoteric arcana.

The aerodynamic rhythm of the entire ensemble is amplified by the juxtaposed presence of the arching ribbon of steel seemingly poised in space before the horizontal elongation of the form that seems to both fly or flow before it, as both the arched shape and the flowing/flying/suspended structure carry on their surfaces inscriptions suggesting messages from distant points of origin, promising enlightenment to those versed in their arcana.

The sense of balance between motion and stasis, between elevated flight and poise in space, generating aerodynamic rhythm complexified by the visual force of a complex network of symbols evokes the values represented by the astronomical and mathematical inscriptions visible on the surface of the form that seems to glide in the upper foreground of the image, like an occult serpent carrying messages of mysterious and profound import, an entity attended by its coiling companion, also ferrying on its body a river of symbols.

Visible on the surface of the upper form are the signatures, the elegantly inscribed names, of some of the greatest figures of the 17th century Scientific Revolution, which, building on earlier developments, created the currently dominant understanding of the nature of the universe, foundational to the creation of modern technological and scientific society, the design of the sculpture suggesting the mental elevation, the imaginative and intellectual dynamism demonstrated by science.

[Nicholas] Copernicus' signature is visible beside a diagram of concentric circles suggesting his model of the planets orbiting the sun, the heliocentric picture he pioneered; that of [Johannes] Kepler is placed atop a structure of arabesques within a circle, suggesting his drawings of the orbits of Mars; Galileo Galiei's name is atop what look like circles indicating either spatial location or orbits, alongside images suggesting patterns of stars, each of these inscriptions placed beside a date of the month, evoking records of observations of the sky on successive days, a practice central to Galileo's work in observing the sky using the then novel invention, the telescope.

[Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibnitz' signature is positioned beside mathematical symbols described by mathematician Mansur Boase in a personal communication as a differential equation, an aspect of the mathematical field of calculus independently developed by Leibniz and Newton, ''a way of measuring change, from the movements of the heavens, such as planets orbiting the sun, to rates of growth of interest rates and the cost of a loaf of bread.''

The photograph, through the evocative force of the angle of the shot, indicating looking from below at a phenomenon both majestic and mysterious as it moves in the sky above the viewer, resonates with the significance of the astronomers' and mathematicians' work as efforts at visual and cognitive motion between the spatio-temporal limitations of a human being and the spatial elevation and vast temporal scope represented by the celestial bodies they observe and the universal range of terrestrial phenomena they seek to understand and predict,

The picture suggests a conjunction between the elevated majesty of the sky and the mind of the observing astronomers and mathematicians, between the symbol investigations of the mathematicians and the celestial and terrestrial phenomena they investigate, between ''two things [which] fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and more steadily one they are reflected upon: the universe beyond the self and the self studying the universe, from the starry heavens above and the variegated world below to the observing mind within....beginning from the place one occupies in the external world of sense, extending the connection in which one stands into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation'', as German philosopher Immanuel Kant's conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason may be adapted.

The Parable of the Travellers

A group of people found themselves somewhere, with no idea of how they got there and how to leave there but they learnt to survive in the place. Over the years of their presence there, they observed that some of them would, after some time, walk away from the others and not be seen again, a process presaged by some occurrences leading them to prepare for the person's departure to a place unknown. Various views were presented as to why they were there, how they got there and where those who walked away from the group went to, but none of these views were acceptable to everyone.

Some people decided that rather than try to comprehend how they got there and where they were going from there or why they were there, why not try to understand where they were? What made up the various features of the place? How were they connected? What uses could be made of these features?

Another group was more interested in making sense of their fellow stranded people and themselves. After all, if they were to live in harmony with themselves and with each other, each person needed to appreciate what was of value to them and to the others. Learning more about their physical configurations would also help make the most of their bodies.

''Could these enquries be correlated?'', another group asked. The people, their minds, their physical constitution and the features of the place where they found themselves, as well as its surroundings, understood as one cohesive unit?

''What is the nature of our Universe?

What is it made of?''

Those are the two questions on the CERN website indicating the central goals of this massive internationally run nuclear research centre.

These are questions that began life in the context of myth, spirituality, religion and philosophy but are now also the province of what is now known as science, which, as with one group of the enquirers in the story above inspired by the human condition, limits itself to questions of the physical constitution of the universe, the environment to which the Earth belongs, the Earth being the location in which humans find themselves as travellers without any sense of why they exist, why they are on Earth and where they go to, if anywhere, after walking away from the company of their fellows into the unknown called ''death.''

But, as people explore the universe, the Earth and the human being through the tools of science, the grandeur of the universe, the Earth and of the human person continually reveal themselves to the senses, intellect and imagination of the amazed human through the tools of his or her enquiry.

Why is the human being able to grasp physical relationships between celestial bodies, employing numerical deductions as one of the tools, understanding how and why the planets orbit the sun, why things on the surface of the Earth don't fall into space, as Isaac Newton did with his theory of gravity, insights enabling possibilities undreamt of even centuries after his 17th century, such as his laws of motion and gravitational theory being fundamental in the twentieth century development of space travel, enabling the myriad benefits of space exploration?

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