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| An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake. The mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward: |
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| The same line, accompanied by complementary forms: |
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| The same line, circumscribing itself: |
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| Two secondary lines, moving around an imaginary line: |
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| Opening page from Pedagogical Sketchbook by Paul Klee |
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At the antipodes of every mind lay the Other World of praeternatural light and praeternatural colour, of ideal gems and visionary gold. ... At the antipodes of the mind, we are more or less completely free of language, outside the system of conceptual thought. Consequently our perception of visionary objects possesses all the freshness, all the naked intensity, of experiences which have never been vocalised... Their colour shines forth with a brilliance which seems praeternatural... ... perceptions of coloured, moving, living geometrical forms. ... Here, in quotation or paraphrase, is Weir Mitchell's account of the visionary world to which he was transported by peyote. At his entry into that world he saw a host of 'star points' and what looked like 'fragments of stained glass'. Then came 'delicate floating films of colour'. These were displaced by an 'abrupt rush of countless points of white light', sweeping across the field of vision. Next there were zigzag lines of very bright colours, which somehow turned into swelling clouds of still more brilliant hues.... |
| Aldous Huxely - Heaven and Hell |
| One of the enigmas of
Upper Palaeolithic rock art are the geometric patterns, such as grids,
parallel lines, zigzags, dots, spirals, nested curves and filigrees,
that appear either on their own or combined with more complex images.
Recent theories, such as that of Lewis-Williams, point to the possibility
that these may be "neural artifacts" left to us by trancing
shamans - clues to the states of consciousness that produced them.
Lewis-Williams and his colleague Thomas Dowson (1988) assert that humans all through history have the same nervous system in common, and that the persistence of certain symbols can be ascribed, not necessarily to a continuing symbolic tradition, but to "the antiquity of the human nervous system and its generation of entoptic phenomena". |
| Trance
States and Metaphor Generation http://www.lila.info/document_view.phtml?document_id=62 |
| If we are to attempt
to cross the neurological bridge that leads back to the Upper Palaeolithic,
we need to look more closely at the visual imagery of the intensified
spectrum [of consciousness] and see what kind of percepts are experienced
as one passes along it. ...
In the first and 'lightest' stage people may experience geometric visual precepts that include dots, grids, zigzags, nested catenary curves, and meandering lines.
Because these percepts are 'wired' into the human nervous system, all people, no matter what their cultural background, have the potential to experience them. They flicker, scintillate, expand, contract... Importantly, they are independent of an exterior light source... Writers have called these geometric percepts phospenes, form constants and entoptic phenomena. ... 'entoptic' means 'within vision' (from the Greek), that is, they may originate anywhere between the eye itself and the cortex of the brain... The exact way in which entoptic phenomena are 'wired into' the human nervous system has been the topic of recent research. It has been found that the patterns of connections between the retina and the striate cortex and of neuronal circuits within the striate cortex determined their geometric form.... In other words, people in this condition (i.e visionary state) are seeing the structure of their own brains. |
| David Lewis-Willams - The Mind in the Cave |
| Circles, spirals, concentric rings, chains, zigzags, wavy lines, meanders, snakes, suns, sunsets and stars typify the Curvilinear Abstract Style. Heizer and Baumhoff (1962:206) describe Curvilinear Abstract works as distributed across Nevada. |
| Paul Souders Rock Art, Shamanism, & Subsistence in the Coso Mountains of California http://www.axoplasm.com/research/rockart/ |
| Archaeologists categorise the range of motifs which make up the decoration on the stones of Newgrange (megalithic tomb in Ireland, constructed c.3200BC). These categories are: circles, spirals, arcs, serpentiforms, dots-in-circles, zigzags (chevrons), lozenges, radials or star shapes, parallel lines, and offsets or comb devices. |
| 101
facts about Newgrange http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/newgrange-facts/art.php |
| In visual arts, two dimensional surface ornamentation that dominates the art of the Gulf of Papua region in southeastern Papua New Guinea is called curvilinear style. The style is characterised by a curving line used to form abstract patterns, such as spirals, circles, swirls and S-shapes... |
| Britanica Online |
