Forthcoming
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| 15th century copy of The Cloud of Unknowing (1460). |
5 Απριλίου 2013
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1GFkN4deuZUhttp://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1GFkN4deuZU
Medieval Mysticism: The ‘Shining Darkness’ of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’
A selection from ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ by Anonymous, (late 14th Century).
‘The Himalayas of the Soul’: The Upanishads
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| Sunrise over the Himalayas |
“If a Bible of India were compiled, … eternal treasures of old wisdom and poetry would enrich the times of to-day. […] Amongst those compositions,…. the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita would rise above the rest like Himalayas of the Spirit of man.” (Introduction of Juan Mascaro’s ‘The Himalayas of the Soul’, 1938)
The Upanishads were first introduced into Europe around the time of the French revolution, a fact which Carl Jung saw as itself highly symbolic:
The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great significance to the Western world- rather like the hewing down of Wotan’s oak by the Christian missionaries. For then, as at the Revolution, no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down.
It is certainly more than an amusing coincidence that just at that time a Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, was living in India, and, in the early eighteen-hundreds, brought back with him a… collection of fifty Upanishads which gave the Western world its first deep insight into the… mind of the East. To the historian this is mere chance without any factors of cause and effect. But in view of my medical experience I cannot take it as accident. It seems to me rather to satisfy a psychological law whose validity in personal life, at least, is complete. For every piece of conscious life that loses its importance and value- so runs the law- there arises a compensation in the unconscious. We may see in this an analogy to the conservation of energy in the physical world… . […] Now the doctor in me refuses point blank to consider the life of a people as something that does not conform to psychological law. A people, in the doctors eyes, presents only a somewhat more complex picture of psychic life than the individual.
And so we can draw a parallel: just as in me, a single human being, the darkness calls forth the helpful light, so does it also in the psychic life of a people. In the crowds that poured into Notre Dame, bent on destruction, dark and nameless forces were at work that swept the individual off his feet; these forces worked also upon Anquetil du Perron, and provoked an answer which has come down in history. For he brought the Eastern mind to the West, and its influence upon us we cannot as yet measure. Let us beware of underestimating it! So far, indeed, there is little of it to be seen in Europe on the intellectual surface: some orientalists, one or two Buddhist enthusiasts, and a few sombre celebrities like Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. These manifestations make us think of tiny, scattered islands in the ocean of mankind; in reality they are like the peaks of submarine mountain-ranges of considerable size.” (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1932).
Arthur Shopenhauer discovered Anquetil du Perron’s annotated Latin translation in 1814, just prior to his writing ‘The World as Will and Representation’ (1818). In the Introduction he wrote:
the access to [the Vedas], opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century
Writing in 1868, in his ‘The Philosophy of the Unconscious’, Eduard Von Hartmann said
the Hindus… have in effect implicitly possessed the whole history of philosophy, presenting in figurative and undeveloped form what we exhibit only too abstractly through only too many writers and volumes.
Anquetil du Perron, for his part, said of the Upanishads that they represented “the production of the highest human wisdom”.
The following excerpts were taken from Juan Mascaro’s 1938 translation of the Upanishads titled ‘The Himalayas of the Soul: Translations from the Sanskrit of the Principal Upanishads’, reissued in 1967 as a Penguin paperback with a new introduction with the title ‘The Upanishads’.
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| The Milky-Way over the Himalayas |
Isa Upanishads
There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness. Whoever in life denies the Spirit falls into that darkness of death.
Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?
Into deep darkness fall those who follow the immanent. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow the transcendent.
O life-giving sun, off-spring of the Lord of creation, solitary seer of heaven! Spread thy light and withdraw thy blinding splendour that I may behold thy radiant form: that Spirit far away within thee is my own inmost Spirit.
Kena Upanishads
Who sends the mind to wander afar? Who impells these words? Who is the spirit behind the eye and the ear?
It is the ear of the ear, the eye of the eye, and the word of words, the mind of mind, and the life of life.
What cannot be spoken with words, but that wherey words are spoken. […] What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think. […] What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see. […] What cannot be heard with the ear, but that whereby the ear can hear.
He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.
He is seen in Nature in the wonder of a flash of lightning. He comes to the soul in the wonder of a flash of vision. His name is Tadvanam, which translated means ‘the End of love-longing’.
Katha Upanishads
When the wise rests his mind in contemplation on our God beyond time, who invisibly dwells in the mystery of things and in the heart of man, then he rises above pleasures and sorrow.
When the wise realize the omnipresent Spirit, who rests invisible and permanent in the impermanent, then they go beyond sorrow.
The light of the Atman, the Spirit, is invisible, concealed in all beings. It is seen by the seer of the subtle, when their vision is keen and is clear.
Sages say the path is narrow and difficult to tread, narrow as the edge of a razor.
When the wise knows that it is through the great and omnipresent Spirit in us that we are conscious in waking or in dreaming, then he goes beyond sorrow.
There is a Spirit who is awake in our sleep and creates the wonder of dreams. He is Brahman, the Spirit of Light, who in truth is called the Immortal. All the worlds rest on that Spirit and beyond him no one can go.
As fire, though one, takes new forms in all things that burn, the Spirit, though one, takes new forms in all things that live. He is within all, and is also outside.
The Tree of Eternity has its roots in heaven above and its branches reach down to earth. It is Brahman, pure Spirit, who in truth is called the Immortal.
Brahman is seen in a pure soul as in a mirror clear, and also in the Creator’s heaven as clear as light; but in the land of shades as remembrance of dreams, and in the world of spirits as reflections in trembling waters.
One hundred and one subtle ways come from the heart. One of them rises to the crown of the head. This is the way that leads to immortality; the others lead to different ends.
Prasna Upanishads
The sun is life and the moon is matter.
‘Life is the fire that burns and is the sun that gives light.
Even as a man casts a shadow, so the Spirit casts the shadow of life… .
In the heart dwells the Atman, the Self. It is the centre of a hundred and one little channels. […] From each one of them come a hundred channels more.
Rising by one of them, the living power of Udana leads to the heaven of purity by good actions, to the hell of evil by evil actions, and if by both again to this land of man.
Then Sauryayani Gargya asked: Master… Who is that Spirit that beholds the wonder of dreams? Who enjoys the mystery of sleep with no dreams? Who is that Spirit on whom all the others find rest?
The sage replied: As when, before darkness falls, the rays of the setting sun seem all to become one in its circle of light, though at the hour of sunrise they all spread out again, even so all the powers of the senses become one in the higher power of the mind. […] Then people say ‘he sleeps’.
But in the city of the body the fires of life are burning: they sleep not. Apana is like the sacred home-fire for ever kept burning from father to son.
Even as birds, O beloved, return to their tree for rest, thus all things find their rest in Atman, the Supreme Spirit.
All things find their final peace in their inmost Self, the Spirit… .
As when rivers flowing towards the ocean find there final peace, their name and form disappear, and people speak only of the ocean, even so the… forms of the seer of all flow towards the Spirit and find there final peace, their name and form disappear and people speak only of Spirit.
Mundaka Upanishads
Perform them [the actions of devotion] always, O lovers of the true: they are your path of holy action in this world.
When the flames of the sacred fire are rising, place then in faith the sacred offerings.
The dancing flames of the sacred fire are seven: the black, the terrific, that which is swift as the mind, that which is dark with smoke, the deep red, the spark-blazing and the luminous omniformed flame.
If a man begins his sacrifice when the flames are luminous, and considers for the offerings the signs of heaven, then the holy offerings lead him on the rays of the sun where the Lord of all gods has his high dwelling.
And when on the rays of sunlight the radiant offerings raise him, then they glorify him in words of melody: ‘Welcome’, they say, ‘welcome here. Enjoy the heaven of Brahma won by pure holy actions.’
But unsafe are the boats of sacrifice to go to the farthest shore… . The unwise who praise them as the highest end go to old age and death again.
Abiding in the midst of ignorance, but thinking themselves wise and learned, fools aimlessly go hither and thither, like blind led by the blind.
Imagining religious ritual and gifts of charity as the final good, the unwise see not the Path supreme.
But those who in purity and faith live in the solitude of the forest, who have wisdom and peace and long not for earthly possessions, those in radiant purity pass through the gates of the sun to the dwelling-place supreme where the Spirit is in Eternity.
This is the truth: As from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.
But the spirit of light above form, never-born, within all, outside all, is in radiance above life and mind, and beyond this creation’s Creator.
Mandukya Upanishads
Atman, the Self, has four conditions.
The first condition is the waking life of outward-moving consciousness, enjoying the…outer gross elements.
The second condition is the dreaming life of inner-moving consciousness, enjoying the… subtle inner elements in its own light and solitude.
The third condition is the sleeping life of silent consciousness when a person has no desires and beholds no dreams. That condition of deep sleep is one of oneness, a mass of silent consciousness made of peace and enjoying peace.
This silent consciousness is all-powerful, all-knowing, the inner ruler, the source of all, the beginning and end of all beings.
The fourth condition is Atman in his own pure state: the awakened life of supreme consciousness. It is neither outer nor inner consciousness, neither semi-consciousness, nor sleeping-consciousness, neither consciousness nor unconsciousness.
This Atman is the eternal Word OM. Its three sounds, A, U, and M, are the first three states of consciousness, and these three states are the three sounds.
The first sound A is the first state of waking consciousness, common to all men.
The second sound U is the second state of dreaming consciousness.
The third sound M is the third state of sleeping consciousness. […]
The word OM as one sound is the fourth state of supreme consciousness. It is beyond the senses and is the end of evolution. It is non-duality and love. He goes with his self to the supreme Self who knows this, who knows this.
Svetesvatara Upanishads
I sing the songs of olden times with adoration: may my own songs follow the path of the sun. Let all the children of immortality hear me, even those who are in the highest heaven.
The chariot of the mind is drawn by wild horses, and those wild horses have to be tamed.
These are the imaginary forms that appear before the final vision of Brahman: a mist, a smoke, and a sun; a wind, fire-flies, and a fire; lightnings, a clear crystal, and a moon.
There is ONE in whose hands is the net of Maya… . He is the same at the time of creation and at the time of dissolution.
Like a tree everlasting he [Brahman] stands in the centre of heaven, and his radiance illumines all creation.
May God, who in the mystery of his vision and power transforms his white radiance into his many-coloured creation, from whom all things come and into whom they all return, grant us the grace of pure vision.
There are two birds, two sweet friends, who dwell on the self-same tree. The one eats the fruits thereof, and the other looks on in silence.
Of what use is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes, and in whom all things abide?
He is… the root and the flower of all things.
In the unfolding of his own nature he makes all things blossom into flower and fruit. He gives to them all their fragrance and colour.
He is the wandering swan everlasting, the soul of all in the universe, the Spirit of fire inthe ocean of life.
If ever for man it were possible to fold the tent of the sky, in that day he might be able to end his sorrow without the help of God.
Maitri Upanishads
There is a Spirit who is amongst the things of this world and yet he is above the things of this world. He is clear and pure, in the peace of a void of vastness. He is beyond the life of the body and the mind, never-born, never-dying, everlasting, ever ONE in his own greatness. He is the Spirit whose power gives consciousness to the body: he is the driver of the chariot.
At the end of the worlds, all things sleep: he alone is awake in Eternity. Then from his infinite space new worlds arise and awake, a universe which is a vastness of thought. In the consciousness of Brahman the universe is, and into him it returns.
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one’s mind… rest upon that and not rest on anything else.
There are two ways of contemplation of Brahman: in sound and in silence. By sound we go to silence. The sound of Brahman is OM. With OM we go to the End: the silence of Brahman. The End is immortality, union and peace.
Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the sould finds peace in its own source.
…a m ind which longs for truth finds the peace of its own source… .
When the mind is silent… then it can enter into a world which is far beyond the mind: the highest End.
The mind should be kept in the heart as long as long as it has not reached the Highest End. This is wisdom, and this is liberation. Everything else is only words.
Kaushitaki Upanishads
When a man is speaking, he cannot be breathing: this is the sacrifice of breath to speech. And when a man is breathing he cannot be speaking: this is the sacrifice of speech to breath.
The breath of life is the consciousness of life, and the consciousness of life is the breath of life.
Taittiriya Upanishads
If a man places a gulf between himself and God*, this gulf will bring fear. But if a man finds the support of the Invisible and Ineffable, he is free from fear.
* i.e., ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, circa late 14th Century.
Chandogya Upanishads
Wherefrom do all these worlds come? They come from space. All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end.
Even as all leaves come from a stem, all words come from the sound OM. OM is the whole universe. OM is in truth the whole universe.
There is a Light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the Light that shines in our heart.
There is a Spirit that is mind and life, light and truth and vast spaces. […] He enfolds the whole universe, and in silence is loving to all.
This is the Spirit that is in my heart, smaller than a grain of rice, or a grain of barley, or a grain of mustard-seed, or a grain of canary-seed, or the kernal of a grain of canary-seed. This is the Spirit that is in my heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than heaven itself, greater than all these worlds.
He enfolds the whole universe and in silence is loving to all. This is the Spirit that is in my heart, this is Brahman.
We should consider that in the inner world Brahman is consciousness; and we should consider that in the outer world Brahman is space. These are the two meditations.
There lived once a boy, Svetaketu Aruneya by name. One day his father spoke to him in this way: “Svetaketu, go and become a student of sacred wisdom. There is no one in our family who has not studied the holy Vedas and who might only be given the name of Brahman by courtesy.”
The boy left at the age of twelve, and, having learnt the Vedas, he returned home at the age of twenty-four, very proud of his learning and having a great opinion of himself.
His father, observing this, said to him: “Svetaketu my boy, you seem to have a great opinion of yourself, and think you are learned, and are proud. Have you asked for the knowledge whereby what is not heard is heard, what is not thought is thought and what is not known is known?”
“What is that knowledge, father?” Asked Svertaketu.
“Just as by knowing a lump of clay, my son, all that is clay can be known, since any differences are only words and the reality is clay; Just as by knowing a piece of gold all that is gold can be known since any differences are only words and the reality is only gold…”
Sventaketu said: “Certainly my honored masters knew not this themselves. If they had known, why would they not have told me? Explain this one to me, father.”
“So be it, my child. Bring me a fruit of the banyan tree.”
“Here it is father.”
“Break it.”
“It is broken, Sir.”
“What do you see in it?”
“Very small seeds, Sir.”
“Break one of them, my son.”
“It is broken, Sir.”
“What do you see in it?”
“Nothing at all, Sir.”
Then his father spoke to him: “My son, from the very essence in the seed which you cannot see comes in truth this vast banyan tree. Believe me, my son, an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is reality. That is Atman. THOU ART THAT.”
In the centre of the castle of Brahman, our own body, there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus-flower, and within can be found a small space. We should find what dwells there, and we should want to know it.
And if anyone asks, ‘What is it that dwells in a small shrine in the form of a lotus-flower in the centre of the castle of Brahman? What should we want to find and to know?’ we can answer:
‘The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightening and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe dwells within our heart.’
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| The Milky-way over the Himalayas |
‘What you see when you look into another person’s eyes, that is the Atman… .’
‘And who is he whom we see when we look in water or in a mirror?’
‘The same is seen in all…’
‘The spirit that wanders in joy in the land of dreams, that is the Atman, that is the Immortal beyond fear: that is Brahman.’
‘The spirit who is sleeping without dreams inthe silent quietness of deep sleep, that is the Atman, that is the Immortal beyond fear: that is Brahman.’
The wind has not a body, nor lightning, nor thunder, nor clouds; but when those rise into the higher spheres then they find their body of light. In the same way, when the soul is in silent quietness it arises and leaves the body, and reaching the Spirit Supreme finds there its body of light.
Know that when the eye looks into space it is the Spirit of man that sees: the eye is only the organ of sight. […] When one says “I am speaking,” it is the Spirit that speaks: the voice is the organ of speech. When one says “I am hearing,” it is the Spirit that hears: the ear is the organ of hearing. And when one says “I think,” it is the Spirit that things: the mind is the organ of thought. It is because of the light of the Spirit that the human mind can see, and can think, and enjoy…”
Brihad-aranyaka Upanishads
The source of all forms is the eye, for it is by the eye that all forms are seen. The eye is behind all forms, even as Brahman is behind the eye.
To Janaka king of Videha came once Yajnavalkya meaning to keep in silence the supreme sercret wisdom. But once, when Janaka and Yajnavalkya had been holding a discussion at the offering of the sacred fire, Yajnavalkya promised to grant the king any wish and the king chose to ask questions according to his desire.
What is the Soul? asked… the king of Videha
Yajnavalkya spoke:
It is the consciousness of life. It is the light of the heart. For ever remaining the same, the Spirit of man wanders in the world of waking life and also in the world of dreams. He seems to wander in thought. He seems to wander in joy.
But in the rest of deep sleep he goes beyond this world and beyond its fleeting forms.
For in truth when the Spirit of man comes to life and takes a body, then he is joined with mortal evils; but when at death he goes beyond, then he leaves evil behind.
The Spirit of man has two dwellings: this world and the world beyond. There is also a third dwelling-place: the land of sleep and dreams. Resting in this borderland the Spirit of man can behold his dwelling in this world and in the other world afar, and wandering in this borderland he beholds behind him the sorrows of this world and in front of him he sees the joys of the beyond.
When the Spirit of man retires to rest, he takes with him materials from this all-containing world, and he creates and destroys in his own glory and radiance. Then the Spirit of man shines in his own light.
Abandoning his body by the gate of dreams, the Spirit beholds in awakening his senses sleeping. Then he takes his own light and returns to his home, this Spirit of golden radiance, the wandering swan everlasting.
Leaving his nest below in charge of the breath of life, the immortal Spirit soars afar from his nest. He moves in all regions wherever he loves, this Spirit of golden radiance, the wandering swan everlasting.
So they say that one should not wake up a person suddenly, for hard to heal would he be if the Spirit did not return. They say also that dreams are like the waking state, for what is seen when awake is seen again in a dream. What is true is that the Spirit shines in his own light.
Even as a great fish swims along the two banks of a river, first along the eastern bank and then the western bank, in the same way the Spirit of man moves along beside his two dwellings: this waking world and the land of sleep and dreams.
As a man in the arms of the woman beloved feels only peace all around, even so the Soul in the embrace of Atman, the Spirit of vision, feels only peace all around.
…in the ocean of Spirit the seer alone beholding his own immensity.
…when the Spirit that lives in the eye has returned to his own source, then the soul knows no more forms.
Even as a caterpillar, when coming to the end of a blade of grass, reaches out to another blade of grass and draws itself over to it, in the same way the Soul, leaving the body and unwisdom behind, reaches out to another body and draws itself over to it.
The Soul is Brahman, the Eternal.
It is made of consciousness and mind: it is made of life and vision.
As the slough of a snake lies dead upon an ant-hill, even so the mortal body; but the incorporeal immortal Spirit is life and light and Eternity.
‘I have found the small path known of old that stretches far away. By it the sages whoknow the Spirit arise to the regions of heaven and then beyond to liberation.’
…let the lover of Brahman follow wisdom. Let him not ponder on many words, for many words are weariness.
This is the world of the Spirit, O king. Thus spoke Yajnavalkya.
O Master. Yours is my kingdom and I am yours, said then the king of Videha.
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 Stars over the Himalayas |
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4 Απριλίου 2013
Foucault–ftis-pssion-madnss-eterotopies-stultifera navis
André Devambez (1867-1944), Le seul oiseau qui vole au-dessus des nuages (The Only Bird That Flies Above the Clouds), 1910, H. 45; W. 68cm, © ADAGP, Paris-RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. A reproduction of this painting would appear in L’Illustration (September 17, 1910)
Introduction (‘The Passion of Foucault’, by James Miller, 1992):In an interview years later with the Italian journalist Duccio Trombadori, Foucault spoke with rare candour about the origins and personal significance of Madness and Civilization. Like all his books, it was, he confided, a means of “realizing direct, personal experiences.” “I had had a personal, complex, and direct relationship with madness,” he explained to Trombadori in 1978, “and also with death.”[Foucault] returned to the Hopital Sainte-Anne, one of the biggest and most modern psychiatric facilities in France, this time [not as a patient but] to do research. An unofficial intern, he helped conduct experiments in an electroencephalographic laboratory, learning how to analyze abnormalities in the electrical activity of the brain in order to diagnose brain injuries, epilepsy, and various neurological disorders. He also routinely visited the hospital with his students from the Ecole Normale in order to watch the public examination of patients by young doctors practicing their clinical technique. “I had a very strange status there,” Foucault later recalled. “Nobody worried about what I should be doing; I was free to do anything. I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients.” The ambiguity of his position, one imagines, was also heightened by his own recent brush with madness. “I had been mad enough to study reason,” he later quipped: “I was reasonable enough to study madness.” Maintaining “a distance from the staff,” he began to experience a “kind of malaise.” He spent a lot of time simply watching: “I felt very close to and not very different from the inmates.” He observed the patients, and he observed how the doctors treated them. But “it was only years later when I started writing a book on the history of psychiatry that this malaise, this personal experience, took the form of a historical criticism.”First published in France in 1961, the book had been completed in draft form by 1958, when Foucault left Sweden for a job as cultural attache in Warsaw, Poland. Foucault had done his primary research while living in Uppsala.As the deceptively modest subtitle puts it, the text offers a ‘History of Madness in the Classical Age.’ (As if to emphasize the sober historigraphic aspirations of his work, Foucault in the second French edition replaced the original title with this subtitle.).When Foucault arrived in Sweden in 1955, he had discovered that the library at the University of Uppsala, where he was teaching, contained a trove of documents about the history of psychiatry. He had developed a routine: every day… he disappeared into the archives, trolling for inspiration.What stirred his imagination was varied and often unusual: in the opening pages alone, his footnotes refer readers to a nineteenth-century biography of a saint; an eighteenth-century history of Paris; German, English, and French accounts of leprosariums, most published in the nineteenth century; a sixteenth-century manuscript about hospitals for venereal disease; a 1527 book on penitence and purgatory; the medieval archives of the hospital of Melun; a variety of twentieth-century studies of the sixteenth-century Lowlands painter Hieronymus Bosch; Erasmus’s Praise of Folly; Montaigne’s Essays; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Calvin’s Christian Institutes; and… Antonin Artaud’s strange posthumous work, The Life and Death of Satan the Fool.The text itself sprawls over nearly 600 pages. Flamboyantly learned, it is also deeply personal.A reader’s first impression is of a work of magisterial authority, full of subtle distinctions and meticulous analysis. … bold generealizations are hazarded, only to be hedged, qualified, carefully cicumscribed; the author’s own convictions are insinuated more than argued, with a handful of memorable images leaving an impression that outweighs page after page of detail, often intricate historical documentation.Foucault needed to choose his words carefully, for they would serve several functions simultaneously. A tacit monument to his own effort to “become what one is,” [Nietzsche] the book also had to serve as Foucault’s these principale, roughly the French equivalent of a doctoral dissertation… .Foucault’s own genius- and hermetic complexity of the work it animates- is evident from the outset of Madness and Civilization. Setting the tone for the rest of the book is the stunning first chapter. A bravura feat of symbolic historiography, it weaves together archival research and mythic images in a rich and multifaceted allegory of madness… .Among the first readers of Madness and Civilization were the professors assigned by the Sorbonne to evaluate the learning and scholarship of Foucault’s doctoral thesis. Everyone was dazzled by the author’s erudition and command of hitherto untapped archival sources. Despite reservations that only multiplied the longer they pondered the text, they all appreciated as well its exceptional intelligence. But the book’s central argument- and, even more, its intricate literary form- they found puzzling, even vaguely disturbing.The first scholar to review the massive 943 page typescript was Georges Canguilhem, who had been appointed by the Sorbonne to clear the text for publication… .…if Foucault was right, Canguilhem observed, then “every previous history of the origins of modern psychiatry was vitiated by the anarchonistic illusion that madness was already given- however unnoticed- in human nature.”That Foucault’s hypothesis was historically fruitful, Canguilhem could not deny: the arguments and documentation in Foucault’s manuscript had persuaded him that the development of the scientific concept of madness could not be separated from a history of ‘social ethics’.That Foucault’s… treatment of madness had an unusual kinship with literature was obvious to both Canguilhem and Henri Gouhier, the Sorbonne historian who presided over Foucault’s oral defense of his thesis. Canguilhem, for one, had urged Foucault to tone down his rhetoric and to drop certain passages that seemed to him too sweeping and peremptory, but the younger man had refused. Foucault was wed to the form of his work and would not change a word.The peculiar and highly literary style of the work was, in fact, its single most disquieting feature. During Foucault’s public thesis defense, Gouhier expressed his reservations, noting that the author “thinks in allegories.” Foucault’s thesis, he complained, repeatedly evoked the experience of madness “through mythological concepts” and fictional characters… . “It is these personifications,” Gouhier acutely remarked, “that allow a sort of metaphysical incursion into history, and which in a fashion transform the narrative into epic, and history into an allegorical drama, bringing to life a philosophy.” “Mister Foucault is certainly a writer,” the jury conceded in its offical written report on the oral thesis, but the author’s indisputable talent left his interlocutors feeling uneasy. Again and again, Foucault seemed “to go spontaneously beyond the facts.” Again and again, his style seemed to express “a certain ‘valorization’ of the experience of madness in the light of cases like that of Antonin Artaud.”The Book’s message to historians is clear enough: after reading Madness and Civilization, it is impossible, as Canguilhem immediately grasped, to write a history of mental illness that assumes madness as a biological given. Foucault described Madness and Civilization as being written “under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry“. When asked in an interview “Which Nietzsche do you like?” Foucault replied, “Obviously, not the one of Zarathustra, but the one of The Birth of Tragedy, of the Geneology of Morals.”
Publication history (from ‘Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la Folie’, Edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, 1992): Publication history (from ‘Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la Folie’, Edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, 1992): Publication history (from ‘Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la Folie’, Edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody, 1992): Foucault’s thesis was published in book form as: Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon 1961). A truncated pocket edition was published as Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique in 1964 (Paris: UGE) [note: Foucault oversaw the abridgement himself]. The first edition was subsequently reissued in an expanded form by Gallimard in 1972, with a new preface by Foucault, and now included two essays as appendices; but the revised title Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique was retained. Meanwhile, Richard Howard’s translation of the shortened version with some additional material appeared in 1965 under the title Madness and Civilization (New York: Pantheon). Richard Howards translation of the abridged text, ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’, was the only version available in English until Routledge published a complete translation of the original text, including the new preface and other additional material, in 2006 with the title ‘History of Madness’. “Foucault’s ‘History of Madness'”, Jean Kalfa wrote in the introduction to his translation, “has yet to be read.” In making this selection from the chapter Stultifera Navis I have drawn upon both existing translations, Howard’s translation of the abridged text and Kalfa’s translation of the unabridged text. I have privileged Howard’s translation over Kalfa’s and only used the latter to fill in the gaps left by the former, except in some rare instances where I favoured the second translation to the first, but only after deferring to the French original, so that the result is a hybrid text, an attempt to construct an authoritative version which draws upon the best of both.From the preface to the 1972 edition: “My desire is that this object-event, almost imperceptible among so many others, should recopy, fragment, repeat, simulate and replicate itself, and finally disappear without the person who happened to produce it ever being able to claim the right to be its master…”
Gallery of images (in chronological order): 
Danse Macabre in St. Mary’s Church, Lübecker, by Bernt Notke (destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942)
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Danse Macabre in St. Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn, by Bernt Notke Danse Macabre at the Chaise-Dieu, circa 1470.  The title page of the Office of the Dead from the Hours of René d’Anjou (15th century).  Thierry Bouts, Hell, 1450.  Hans Memling, Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, 1485.  Death Taking The Pope And The Emperor From The Danse Macabre by Guy Marchant 1486. |
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| Michaelangelo, The Torment of St. Anthony, circa 1488 |
 Durer’s Frontpiece to Sabastian Brants Ship of Fools 1494.  |
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Bernardino Parenzano, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1494. ‘Of Useless Books’, woodcut for the Latin edition of Brants Ship of Fools, 1497.  Albert Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498 |
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| Josse Bade, Navicula Stultarum Mulierum, 1498. |
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| Hieronymus Bosch, Diptyche with The Ship of fools, circa 1500. |
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Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, circa 1505. Cranach the Elder, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1506  Marginal drawing of Folly by Hans Holbein in the first edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, 1515. |
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| Matthias Grunewald, The Temptation of St. Anthony from the Isenheim Altarpiece, 1516. |
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| Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1520. |
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| Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, circa 1562. |
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| Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Lepers, 1568. |
Fools cap world map, c 1590.
Stultifera Navis-
At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.From the High Middle Ages to the end of the Crusades, leprosariums had multiplied their cities of the damned over the entire face of Europe. […] …we shall hear their names again in the history of another sickness… . A strange disappearance, which was doubtless not the long sought effect of obscure medical practices, but the spontaneous result of segregation and also the consequence, after the Crusades, of the break with the Eastern sources of infection. Leprosy withdrew, leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exhaltation. What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle.If the leper was removed from the world, and from the community of the Church visible, his existence was yet a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign both of His anger and of His grace: “My friend,” says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, “it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world.” And at the very moment when the priest and his assistants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is assured that he still bears witness for God: “And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God.” Brueghel’s lepers attend at a distance, but forever, that climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ. Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion: in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out. The sinner who abandons the leper at his door opens his way to heaven. “For which have patience in thy malady; for Our Lord hateth thee not because of it, keepeth thee not from his company; but if thou hast patience thou wilt be saved, as was the leper who died before the gate of the rich man and was carried straight to paradise.” Abandonment is his salvation; his exclusion offers him another form of communion.Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain-essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.The role that leprosy had played was first taken by venereal disease. Such diseases were the natural heir to leprosy in the late fifteenth century, and the disease was treated in several leper hospitals. Under Francois I, an attempt was made to confine it to the hospital of the Parish of Saint-Eustache, and then in the parish of Saint-Nicolas, both of which had served as lazar houses. Twice more, under Charles VIII and again in 1559, various buildings and outhouses at Saint-Germain-des-Pres previously used for lepers were converted for venereal diseases. Soon the disease was so common that the construction of special buildings was being considered ‘in certain spacious areas surrounding towns and suburbs, segregated from passers-by’. A new leprosy was born, which took the place of the former, but… these new lepers too struck fear into the hearts of the old.Lepers were far from overjoyed at being forced to share their space with these newcomers to the world of horror: ‘This astonishing and contagious disease is much to be feared: even the lepers themselves reject it in horror, and refuse to permit those who have contracted the disease to keep their company’. But despite their longstanding right to stay in these segregated areas, there were too few of them… , and the venereal, more or less everywhere, had soon taken their place.Yet in the classical age it was not venereal diseases that would take over the role that leprosy had played in medieval culture… . […] It is not in venereal disease that the true heir of leprosy should be sought, but [in madness].But only after a long latency period of almost two centuries did that new obsession take the place of the fear that leprosy had instilled… , and elicit similiar reactions of division, exclusion and purification, which are akin to madness itself. But before madness was brought under control towards the mid-seventeenth century, and before ancient rituals were resuscitated in its honour, it was linked obstinately to many of the major experiences of the Renaissance.A brief overview of this presence and some of the essential figures is now in order.The simplest of these figures is also the most symbolic.Something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance; soon it will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a strange “drunken boat” that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals.The Narrenschiff, of course, is a literary composition, probably borrowed from the old Argonaut cycle, one of the great mythic themes recently revived and rejuvenated, acquiring an institutional aspect in the Burgundy Estates. Fashion favored the composition of these Ships, whose crew of imaginary heroes, ethical models, or social types embarked on a great symbolic voyage which would bring them, if not fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth. Thus Symphorien Champier composes a Ship of Princes and Battles of Nobility in 1502, then a Ship of Virtuous Ladies in 1503; there is also a Ship of Health, alongside the Blauive Schute of Jacob van Oestvoren in 1413, Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff in 1494, and the work of Josse Bade-Stultiferae naviculae scaphae fatuarum mulierum in 1498. Bosch’s painting, of course, belongs to this dream fleet.But of all these romantic or satiric vessels, the Narrenschiff is the only one that had a real existence– for they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town. An itinerant existence was often the lot of the mad. The towns drove them outside their limits; they were allowed to wander in the open countryside, when not entrusted to a group of merchants and pilgrims. The custom was especially frequent in Germany; in Nuremberg, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the presence of 63 madmen had been registered; 31 were driven away; in the fifty years that followed, there are records of 21 more obligatory departures… . Frequently they were handed over to boatmen… . Sometimes the sailors disembarked these bothersome passengers sooner than they had promised… . It is not easy to discover the exact meaning of this custom. One might suppose it was a general means of extradition by which municipalities sent wandering madmen out of their own jurisdiction; a hypothesis which will not in itself account for the facts, since certain madmen, even before special houses were built for them, were admitted to hospitals and cared for as such; at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris, their cots were set up in the dormitories. Moreover, in the majority of the cities of Europe there existed throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance a place of detention reserved for the insane; there was for example the Chatelet of Melun or the famous Tour aux Fous in Caen; there were the numberless Narrtunner of Germany, like the gates of Lubeck or the Jungpfer of Hamburg. Madmen were thus not invariably expelled. One might then speculate that among them only foreigners were driven away, each city agreeing to care for those madmen among its own citizens. Do we not in fact find among the account books of certain medieval cities subsidies for madmen or donations made for the care of the insane? However, the problem is not so simple, for there existed gathering places where the madmen, more numerous than elsewhere, were not autoch-thonous. First come the shrines: Saint-Mathurin de Larchant, Saint-Hildevert de Gournay, Besancon, Gheel; pilgrimages to these places were organized, often supported, by cities or hospitals. It is possible that these ships of fools, which haunted the imagination of the entire early Renaissance, were pilgrimage boats, highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their reason: some went down the Rhineland rivers towards Belgium and Gheel; others sailed up the Rhine toward the Jura and Besancon.But other cities, like Nuremberg, were certainly not shrines and yet contained great numbers of madmen- many more, in any case, than could have been furnished by the city itself. These madmen were housed and provided for in the city budget, and yet they were not given treatment; they were simply thrown into prison. We may suppose that in certain important cities- centers of travel and markets- madmen had been brought in considerable numbers by merchants and mariners and ‘lost’ there, thus ridding their native cities of their presence. It may have happened that these places of ‘counterpilgrimage’ have become confused with the places where, on the contrary, the insane were taken as pilgrims. Interest in in cure and in exclusion coincide: madmen were confined in the holy locus of a miracle. It is possible that the village of Gheel developed in this manner- a shrine that became a ward, a holy land where madness hoped for deliverance… .What matters is that the vagabond madmen, the act of driving them away, their departure and embarkation do not assume their entire significance on the plane of social utility or security. Other meanings much closer to rite are certainly present; and we can still discern some traces of them. […] …the expulsion of madmen had become one of a number of ritual exiles.Thus we better understand the curious implication assigned to the navigation of madmen and the prestige attending it. […] …to hand a madman over to sailors was to be permanently sure he would not be prowling beneath the city walls; it made sure that he would go far away; it made him a prisoner of his own departure. But water adds to this the dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern—a position symbolized and made real at the same time by the madman’s privilege of being confined within the city gates: his exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience.Water and navigation certainly play this role. Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown— as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him. […] One thing at least is certain: water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man.…more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world—a craft at the mercy of the sea’s great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port. At the end of the sixteenth century, De Lancre sees in the sea the origin of the demoniacal leanings of an entire people: the hazardous labor of ships, dependence on the stars, hereditary secrets, estrangement from women—the very image of the great, turbulent plain itself makes man lose faith in God and all his attachment to his home; he is then in the hands of the Devil, in the sea of Satan’s ruses. […] …neglecting an immense literature that stretches from Ophelia to the Lorelei, let us note only the great half-anthropological, half-cosmological analyses of Heinroth, which interpret madness as the manifestation in man of an obscure and aquatic element, a dark disorder, a moving chaos, the seed and death of all things, which opposes the mind’s luminous and adult stability.But if the navigation of madmen is linked in the Western mind with so many immemorial motifs, why, so abruptly, in the fifteenth century, is the theme suddenly formulated in literature and iconography? Why does the figure of the Ship of Fools and its insane crew all at once invade the most familiar landscapes? Why, from the old union of water and madness, was this ship born one day, and on just that day?Because it symbolized a great disquiet, suddenly dawning on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages. Madness and the madman become major figures, in their ambiguity: menace and mockery, the dizzying unreason of the world, and the feeble ridicule of men.First a whole literature of tales and moral fables, in origin, doubtless, quite remote. But by the end of the Middle Ages, it bulks large: a long series of “follies” which, stigmatizing vices and faults as in the past, no longer attribute them all to pride, to lack of charity, to neglect of Christian virtues, but to a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible, but which involves everyone in a kind of secret complicity. The denunciation of madness (la folie) becomes the general form of criticism.In farces and sorties, the character of the Madman, the Fool, or the Simpleton assumes more and more importance. He is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings: he stands center stage as the guardian of truth-playing here a role which is the complement and converse of that taken by madness in the tales and the satires. If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton’s language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy: he speaks love to lovers, the truth of life to the young, the middling reality of things to the proud, to the insolent, and to liars. Even the old feasts of fools, so popular in Flanders and northern Europe, were theatrical events, and organized into social and moral criticism, whatever they may have contained of spontaneous religious parody.In learned literature, too, Madness or Folly was at work, at the very heart of reason and truth. It is Folly which embarks all men without distinction on its insane ship and binds them to the vocation of a common odyssey (Van Oestvoren’s Blauwe Schute, Brant’s Narrenschiff); it is Folly whose baleful reign Thomas Mumer conjures up in his Narrenbeschwonmg; it is Folly which gets the best of Love in Corroz’s satire Centre fol amour, or argues with Love as to which of the two comes first, which of the two makes the other possible, and triumphs in Louise Labe’s dialogue, Debat de folie et d’amour. Folly also has its academic pastimes; it is the object of argument, it contends against itself; it is denounced, and defends itself by claiming that it is closer to happiness and truth than reason, that it is closer to reason than reason itself… . Finally, at the center of all these serious games, the great humanist texts: the Moria rediviva of Flayder and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. And confronting all these discussions, with their tireless dialectic, confronting these discourses constantly reworded and reworked, a long dynasty of images, from Hieronymus Bosch with The Cure of Madness and The Ship of Fools, down to Brueghel and his Dulle Griet, woodcuts and engravings transcribe what the theater, what literature and art have already taken up: the intermingled themes of the Feast and of the Dance of Fools. Indeed, from the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western man.A sequence of Dates speaks for itself: the Dance of Death in the Cimetiere des Innocents doubtless dates from the first years of the fifteenth century, the one in the Chaise-Dieu was probably composed around 1460; and it was in 1485 that Gyuot Marchant published his Danse Macarbe. These sixty years, certainly, were dominated by all this grinning imagery of death. And it was in 1494 that Brant wrote the Narrenschiff; in 1497 it was translated inot Latin. In the very last years of the century Hieronymus Bosch painted his Ship of Fools. The Praise of Folly dates from 1509. The order of succession is clear.Up to the second half of the fifteenth century, or even a little beyond, the theme of death reigns alone. The end of man, the end of time bear the face of pestilence and war. What overhangs human existence is this conclusion and this order from which nothing escapes. The presence that threatens even within this world is a fleshless one. Then in the last years of the century this enormous uneasiness turns on itself; the mockery of madness replaces death and its solemnity. From the discovery of that necessity which inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of that nothing which is existence itself. Fear in the face of the absolute limit of death turns inward in continuous irony; man disarms it in advance, making it an object of derision by giving it an everyday, tamed form, by constantly renewing it in the spectacle of life, by scattering it throughout the vices, the difficulties, and the absurdities of all men. Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become the skull is already empty. Madness is the deja-la of death. But it is also its vanquished presence, evaded in those everyday signs which, announcing that death reigns already, indicate that its prey will be a sorry prize indeed. What death unmasks was never more than a mask; to discover the grin of the skeleton, one need only lift off something that was neither beauty nor truth, but only a plaster and tinsel face. From the vain mask to the corpse, the same smile persists. But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not mark a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety. What is in question is still the nothingness of existence, but this nothingness is no longer considered an external, final term, both threat and conclusion; it is experienced from within as a continuous and constant form of existence. And where once man’s madness had been not to see that death’s term was approaching, so that it was necessary to recall him to wisdom with the spectacle of death, now wisdom consisted of denouncing madness everywhere, teaching men that they were no more than dead men already, and that if the end was near, it was to the degree that madness, become universal, would be one and the same with death itself. This is what Eustache Desbchamps prophesies:We are cowardly and weak, Covetous, old, evil-tongued.Fools are all I see, in truth.The end is near, All goes ill… The elements are now reversed. It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end.In its various forms—plastic or literary—this experience of madness seems extremely coherent. Painting and text constantly refer to one another— commentary here and illustration there. We find the same theme of the Narrentanz over and over in popular festivals, in theatrical performances, in engravings and woodcuts, and the entire last part of the Praise of Folly is constructed on the model of a long dance of madmen in which each profession and each estate parades in turn to form the great round of unreason. It is likely that in Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony in Lisbon, many figures of the fantastic fauna which invade the canvas are borrowed from traditional masks; some perhaps are transferred from the Malleus maleficarum. As for the famous Ship of Fools, is it not a direct translation of Brant’s Narrenschiff, whose tide it bears, and of which it seems to illustrate quite precisely canto XXVII, also consecrated to stigmatizing “drunkards and gluttons”? It has even been suggested that Bosch’s painting was part of a series of pictures illustrating the principal cantos of Brant’s poem.As a matter of fact, we must not be misled by what appears to be a strict continuity in these themes, nor imagine more than is revealed by history itself. It is unlikely that an analysis like the one Emile Male worked out for the preceding epochs, especially apropos of the theme of death, could be repeated. Between word and image, between what is depicted by language and what is uttered by plastic form, the unity begins to dissolve; a single and identical meaning is not immediately common to them. And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme. Figure and speech still illustrate the same fable of folly in the same moral world, but already they take two different directions, indicating, in a still barely perceptible scission, what will be the great line of cleavage in the Western experience of madness.The dawn of madness on the horizon the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of madness. The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to .. teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. One book bears witness to meaning’s proliferation at the end of the Gothic world, the Speculum humanae salvationis, which, beyond all the correspondences established by the patristic tradition, elaborates, between the Old and the New Testament, a symbolism not on the order of Prophecy, but deriving from an equivalence of imagery. The Passion of Christ is not prefigured only by the sacrifice of Abraham; it is surrounded by all the glories of torture and its innumerable dreams; Tubal the blacksmith and Isaiah’s wheel take their places around the Cross, forming beyond all the lessons of the sacrifice the fantastic tableau of savagery, of tormented bodies, and of suffering. Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. The symbolic figures easily become nightmare silhouettes. Witness that old image of wisdom so often translated, in German engravings, by a longnecked bird whose thoughts, rising slowly from heart to head, have time to be weighed and reflected on; a symbol whose values are blunted by being overemphasized: the long path of reflection becomes in the image the alembic of a subtle learning, an instrument which distills quintessences. The neck of the Gutemensch is endlessly elongated, the better to illustrate, beyond wisdom, all the real mediations of knowledge; and the symbolic man becomes a fantastic bird whose disproportionate neck folds a thousand times upon itself—an insane being, halfway between animal and thing, closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of a meaning. This symbolic wisdom is a prisoner of the madness of dreams.A fundamental conversion of the world of images: the constraint of a multiplied meaning liberates that world from the control of form. So many diverse meanings are established beneath the surface of the image that it presents only an enigmatic face. And its power is no longer to teach but to fascinate. Characteristic is the evolution of the famous gryllos already familiar to the Middle Ages in the English psalters, and at Chartres and Bourges. It taught, then, how the soul of desiring man had become a prisoner of the beast; these grotesque faces set in the bellies of monsters belonged to the world of the great Platonic metaphor and denounced the spirit’s corruption in the folly of sin. But in the fifteenth century the gryllos, image of human madness, becomes one of the preferred figures in the countless Temptations. What assails the hermit’stranquility is not objects of desire, but these hermetic, demented forms which have risen from a dream, and remain silent and furtive on the surface of a world. In the Lisbon Temptation, facing Saint Anthony sits one of these figures born of madness, of its solitude, of its penitence, of its privations; a wan smile lights this bodiless face, the pure presence of anxiety in the form of an agile grimace. Now it is exactly this nightmare silhouette that is at once the subject and object of the temptation; it is this figure which fascinates the gaze of the ascetic— both are prisoners of a kind of mirror interrogation, which remains unanswered in a silence inhabited only by the monstrous swarm that surrounds them. The gryllos no longer recalls man, by its satiric form, to his spiritual vocation forgotten in the folly of desire. It is madness become Temptation; all it embodies of the impossible, the fantastic, the inhuman, all that suggests the unnatural, the writhing of an insane presence on the earth’s surface-all this is precisely what gives the gryllos its strange power. The freedom, however frightening, of his dreams, the hallucinations of his madness, have more power of attraction for fifteenth-century man than the desirable reality of the flesh.What then is this fascination which now operates through the images of madness?First, man finds in these fantastic figures one of the secrets and one of the vocations of his nature. In the thought of the Middle Ages, the legions of animals, named once and for all by Adam, symbolically bear the values of humanity. But at the beginning of the Renaissance, the relations with animality are reversed; the beast is set free; it escapes the world of legend and moral illustration to acquire a fantastic nature of its own. And by an astonishing reversal, it is now the animal that will stalk man, capture him, and reveal him to his own truth. Impossible animals, issuing from a demented imagination, become the secret nature of man; and when on the Last Day sinful man appears in his hideous nakedness, we see that he has the monstrous shape of a delirious animal; these are the screech owls whose toad bodies combine, in Thierry Bouts’s Hell, with the nakedness of the damned; these are Stephan Lochner’s winged insects with cats’ heads, sphinxes with beetles’ wing cases, birds whose wings are as disturbing and as avid as hands; this is the great beast of prey with knotty fingers that figures in Matthias Grunewald’s Temptation. Animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in men’s hearts.At the opposite pole to this nature of shadows, madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning. These strange forms are situated, from the first, in the space of the Great Secret, and the Saint Anthony who is tempted by them is not a victim of the violence of desire but of the much more insidious lure of curiosity; he is tempted by that distant and intimate knowledge which is offered, and at the same time evaded, by the smile of the gryllos; his backward movement is nothing but that step by which he keeps from crossing the forbidden limits of knowledge; he knows already— and that is his temptation—what Jerome Cardan will say later: “Wisdom, like other precious substances, must be torn from the bowels of the earth.” This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses. While the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere: that crystal ball which for all others is empty is in his eyes filled with the density of an invisible knowledge. Brueghel mocks the sick man who tries to penetrate this crystal sphere, but it is this iridescent bubble of knowledge—an absurd but infinitely precious lantern—that sways at the end of the stick Dulle Griet bears on her shoulder. And it is this sphere which figures on the reverse of the Garden of Delights. Another symbol of knowledge, the tree (the forbidden tree, the tree of promised immortality and of sin), once planted in the heart of the earthly paradise, has been uprooted and now forms the mast of the Ship of Fools, as seen in the engraving that illustrates Josse Bade’s Stultiferae Naviculae; it is this tree, without a doubt, that sways over Bosch’s Ship of Fools.What does it presage, this wisdom of fools? Doubtless, since it is a forbidden wisdom, it presages both the reign of Satan and the end of the world; ultimate bliss and supreme punishment; omnipotence on earth and the infernal fall. The Ship of Fools sails through a landscape of delights, where all is offered to desire, a sort of renewed paradise, since here man no longer knows either suffering or need; and yet he has not recovered his innocence. This false happiness is the diabolical triumph of the Antichrist; it is the End, already at hand. Apocalyptic dreams are not new, it is true, in the fifteenth century; they are, however, very different in nature from what they had been earlier. The delicately fantastic iconography of the fourteenth century, where castles are toppled like dice, where the Beast is always the traditional dragon held at bay by the Virgin, in short where the order of God and its imminent victory are always apparent, gives way to a vision of the world where all wisdom is annihilated. This is the great witches’ Sabbath of nature: mountains melt and become plains, the earth vomits up the dead and bones tumble out of tombs; the stars fall, the earth catches fire, all life withers and comes to death. The end has no value as passage and promise; it is the advent of a night in which the world’s old reason is engulfed. It is enough to look at Durer’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse, sent by God Himself: these are no angels of triumph and reconciliation; these are no heralds of serene justice, but the disheveled warriors of a mad vengeance. The world sinks into universal Fury. Victory is neither God’s nor the Devil’s: it belongs to Madness.On all sides, madness fascinates man. The fantastic images it generates are not fleeting appearances that quickly disappear from the surface of things. By a strange paradox, what is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like a secret, like an inaccessible truth, in the bowels of the earth. […] In such images— and this is doubtless what gives them their weight, what imposes such great coherence on their fantasy—the Renaissance has expressed what it apprehended of the threats and secrets of the world.During the same period, the literary, philosophical, and moral themes of madness are in an altogether different vein.The Middle Ages had given madness, or folly, a place in the hierarchy of vices. Beginning with the thirteenth century, it is customarily ranked among the wicked soldiers of the psychomachy. It figures, at Paris as at Amiens, among the evil soldiery, and is among the twelve dualities that dispute the sovereignty of the human soul: Faith and Idolatry, Hope and Despair, Charity and Avarice, Chastity and Lust, Prudence and Folly, Patience and Anger, Gentleness and Harshness, Concord and Discord, Obedience and Rebellion, Perseverance and Inconstancy, Fortitude and Cowardice, Humility and Pride. In the Renaissance, Folly leaves this modest place and comes to the fore. Whereas according to Hugues de Saint-Victor the genealogical tree of the Vices, that of the Old Adam, had pride as its root, Folly now leads the joyous throng of all human weaknesses. Uncontested coryphaeus, she guides them, sweeps them on, and names them: “Recognize them here, in the group of my companions…. She whose brows are drawn is Philautia (Self-Love). She whom you see laugh with her eyes and applaud with her hands is Colacia (Flattery). She who seems half asleep is Lethe (Forgetfulness). She who leans upon her elbows and folds her hands is Misoponia (Sloth). She who is crowned with roses and anointed with perfume is Hedonia (Sensuality). She whose eyes wander without seeing is Anoia (Stupidity). She whose abundant flesh has the hue of flowers is Tryphe (Indolence). And here among these young women are two gods: the god of Good Cheer and the god of Deep Sleep.” The absolute privilege of Folly is to reign over whatever is bad in man. […] Louise Labe merely follows Erasmus when she has Mercury implore the gods: “Do not let that beautiful Lady [recalling Erasmus’ personification of Folly as a woman] perish who has given you so much pleasure.”But this new royalty has little in common with the dark reign of which we were just speaking and which communicated with the great tragic powers of this world.True, madness attracts, but it does not fascinate. It rules all that is easy, joyous, frivolous in the world. It is madness, folly, which makes men “sport and rejoice,”… . All within it is brilliant surface: no enigma is concealed.No doubt, madness has something to do with the strange paths of knowledge. The first canto of Brant’s poem is devoted to books and scholars; and in the engraving which illustrates this passage in the Latin edition of 1497, we see enthroned upon his bristling cathedra of books the Magister who wears behind his doctoral cap a fool’s cap sewn with bells. Erasmus, in his dance of fools, reserves a large place for scholars: after the Grammarians, the Poets, Rhetoricians, and Writers, come the Jurists; after them, the “Philosophers respectable in beard and mantle”; finally the numberless troop of the Theologians. But if knowledge is so important in madness, it is not because the latter can control the secrets of knowledge; on the contrary, madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science. If madness is the truth of knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and instead of addressing itself to the great book of experience, loses its way in the dust of books and in idle debate; learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning.O ye learned men, who bear great names,Look back at the ancient fathers, learned in the law.They did not weigh dogmas in shining white books,But fed their thirsty hearts with natural skill. (Sebastian Brant, Stultifera Navis, Latin Translation) According to the theme long familiar to popular satire, madness appears here as the comic punishment of knowledge and its ignorant presumption.In a general way, then, madness is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man, to his weaknesses, dreams, and illusions. Whatever obscure cosmic manifestation there was inmadness as seen by Bosch is wiped out in Erasmus; madness no longer lies in wait for mankind at the four comers of the earth; it insinuates itself within man, or rather it is a subtle rapport that manmaintains with himself. The mythological personification of madness in Erasmus is only a literary device. In fact, only “follies” exist—human forms of madness: “I count as many images as thereare men”; one need only glance at states, even the wisest and best governed: “So many forms of madness abound there, and each day sees so many new ones born, that a thousand Democrituses would not suffice to mock them.” There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains.Philautia is the first figure Folly leads out in her dance, but that is because they are linked by a privileged relation: self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice. “This man, uglier than a monkey, imagines himself handsome as Nereus; that one thinks he is Euclid because he has traced three lines with a compass; that other one thinks he can sing like Hermogenes, whereas he is the ass before the lyre, and his voice sounds as false as that of the rooster peckinghis hen.” In this delusive attachment to himself, man generates his madness like a mirage. The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.In the domain of literary and philosophic expression, the experience of madness in the fifteenth century generally takes the form of moral satire. Nothing suggests those great threats of invasion that haunted the imagination of the painters. On the contrary, great pains are taken to ward it off; one does not speak of such things. Erasmus turns our gaze from that insanity “which the Furies let slip from hell, each time they release their serpents”; it is not these insane forms that he has chosen to praise, but the “sweet illusion” that frees the soul from “its painful cares and returns it to the various forms of sensuality.” This calm world is easily mastered; it readily yields its naive mysteries to the eyes of the wise man, and the latter, by laughter, always keeps his distance. Whereas Bosch, Brueghel, and Durer were terribly earth-bound spectators, implicated in that madness they saw surging around them, Erasmus observes it from far enough away to be out of danger; he observes it from the heights of his Olympus, and if he sings its praises, it is because he can laugh at it with the inextinguishable laughter of the Gods. For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: “In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gambling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly.” Madness is no longer the familiar foreignness of the world; it is merely a commonplace spectacle for the foreign spectator; no longer a figure of the cosmos, but a characteristic of the aevum.For his contemporaries and for the generations that followed, Bosch was above all a moralist, and his work was a series of moral lessons. His figures were born of this world, but they demonstrated the monstrous contents of the human heart. ‘The difference between the paintings of this man and those of others is that others usually portray man as he appears from the outside: Bosch alone dares paint them as they are within,’ said Joseph de Siguenca. And it was that unsettling irony, that desire of wisdom to denounce all folly, that the same early seventeenth-century commentator saw in almost all of Bosch’s paintings, in the clear symbolism of the burning torch (the never-sleeping vigil of contemplative thought) and the owl, whose strange, fixed stare ‘keeps watch in the calm and the silence of the night, consuming oil, not wine.’The paths taken by the figure of the cosmic vision and the incisive movement that is moral reflection, between the tragic and the critical elements, now constantly diverge, creating a gap in the fabric of the experience of madness that will never be repaired. On the one side is the ship of fools, where mad faces slowly slip away into the night of the world, in landscapes that speak of strange alchemies of knowledge, of the dark menace of bestiality, and the end of time. On the other is the ship of fools that is merely there for the instruction of the wise, an exemplary, didactic odyssey whose purpose is to highlight faults in the human character.For [‘Bosch, Brueghel, Thierry Bouts and Durer’] madness unleashes its fury in the space of pure vision. Fantasies and threats, the fleeting fragments of dreams and the secret destiny of the world, where madness has a primitive, prophetic force, revealing that the dream-like is real and that a thin surface of illusion opens onto bottomless depths, and that the glittering surface of images opens the way to worrying figures that shine forever in the darkness. The inverse relation, no less painful, is that the reality of the world will one day be absorbed into the fantastic Image, at that delirious moment between being and nothingness which is pure destruction. When at last the world will be no more, but night and silence have not yet closed over, and all will flame up in a blinding flash, in the extremity of disorder that will precede the ordered monotony of the end of all things. The truth of the world resides in that last fleeting image. This weave of experience and secrecy, of immediate images and hidden enigmas, is unfurled in fifteenth-century painting as the tragic madness of the world.By contrast, in Brant, Erasmus and the whole humanist tradition, madness is confined to the universe of discourse. […] For… [the man of wisdom], it becomes a mere object, and in the worst possible manner, as it often winds up an object of ridicule: they tamed it by the act of praising it.This conflict between critical consciousness and tragic experience underlies all that was felt and formulated on the theme of madness at the beginning of the Renaissance. But it was short-live, and a century later, this grandiose structure, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century was so evident and clear-cut, had almost entirely disappeared. […] In short, the critical consciousness of madness was increasingly brought out into the light, while its more tragic components retreated ever further into the shadows, soon to almost vanish entirely. Only much later can a trace of the tragic element be again discerned, and a few pages in Sade and the work of Goya bear witness to the fact that this disappearance was merely an eclipse; the dark, tragic experience lived on in dreams and in the dark night of thoughts, and what happened in the sixteenth century was not a radical destruction but a mere occultation. The cosmic, tragic experience was hidden by the exclusive privileges of a critical consciousness. […] Behind the critical consciousness of madness in all its philosophical, scientific, moral and medicinal guises lurks a second, tragic consciousness of madness, which has never really gone away.It is that tragic consciousness that is visible in the last words of Nietzsche and the last visions of Van Gogh. It is that same element that Freud began to perceive at the furthest point of his journey, the great wound that he tried to symbolise in the mythological struggle between the libido and the death instinct. And it is that same consciousness that finds expression in the work of Antonin Artaud.It is only by examining such extreme discoveries that we can finally come to understand that the experience of madness common since the sixteenth century owes its particular face, and the origin of its meaning, to that absence, to that dark night and all that fills it. The linearity that led rationalist thought to consider madness as a form of mental illness must be reinterpreted in a vertical dimension. Only then does it become apparent that each of its incarnations is a more complete, but more perilous masking of tragic experience – an experience that it nonetheless failed to obliterate. When constraints were at their most oppressive, an explosion was necessary, and that is what we have seen since Nietzsche.How did it end up being the case that madness was appropriated by reason, so much so that at the dawn of the classical age all the tragic images previously associated with madness suddenly passed into shadow? How ended the movement that caused Artaud to write: ‘the Renaissance of the sixteenth century made a clean break with a reality that had laws both natural and superhuman, and the Renaissance humanism that resulted was not an expansion but a restriction for mankind’?A brief resume of this evolution is perhaps in order, for a clear understanding of what the classical age did to madness.1 Madness becomes a form related to reason, or more precisely madness and reason enter into a perpetually reversible relationship which implies that all madness has its own reason by which it is judged and mastered, and all reason has its madness in which it finds its own derisory truth. Each is a measure of the other, and in this movement of reciprocal reference, each rejects the other but is logically dependent upon it.In the sixteenth century, this tight-knit dialectic gave a new lease of life to the old Christian theme of the world being madness in the eyes of God.“…should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God… what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence.” (John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion) ‘Everything has two faces,’ says Sebastien Franck, for God is resolved to oppose himself to this world, leaving appearances here and keeping the truth and essence of things to himself. For that reason things are the opposite of the way they appear in this world: an open Silenus. (Sebastien Franck, Paradoxes)The abyss of folly into which men are plunged is such that the appearance of truth that men find there is in fact its complete opposite. But there was more: the contradiction between truth and appearances was present in appearance itself, for if appearance was coherent with itself, at least it would be an allusion to the truth, or some form of hollow echo. So it was rather within things themselves that this reversal was to be found, a reversal that henceforth was to be without a clear direction or pre-established end. The movement was not to be from an appearance towards truth, but towards another one, which negates it, and then towards all that denied or contested that negation, so that the process could never come to an end. […] All human affairs, he [Erasmus] says,like the figures of Silenus described by Alcibiades, have two completely opposite faces, so that what is death at first sight, as they say, is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death. The same applies to beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty, obscurity and fame, learning and ignorance, strength and weakness, the noble and the base born, happy and sad, good and bad fortune, friend and foe, healthy and harmful- in fact you’ll find everything suddenly reversed if you open the Silenus. (Erasmus, Praise of Folly. Editors note: see also entry for the Silenus of Alcibiades in Erasmus’ Adages)All is plunged into immediate contradiction, and man is urged to embrace only his own madness: when measured against the truth of essences and God, human order is nothing but madness. And in this human order, the movement through which man tried to break free of his earthly bonds becomes just another form of madness. IN the sixteenth century, more so than at any other moment, Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians shone with incomparable prestige: ‘I speak as a fool’. The renunciation of the world becomes an act of folly, like the total abandonment of the self to the obscure will of God, a mad quest that seemingly has no end, as the mystics had long acknowledged. […] ‘When man abandons the realm of the senses, his soul falls prey to a kind of dementia’ [Nicholas of Cusa]. … the weak reason of man, which is but folly, [is lost] in the abysmal madness of the wisdom of God:It is unutterable in any language, unintelligible to every intellect, and immeasurable by every measure. […] This is because that Wisdom by which, in which and from which all things exist is unthinkable in any thought. (Nicholas of Cusa, The Lyman on Wisdom and the Mind) So closed a great circle. Compared to Wisdom, the reason of man is nothing but folly: compared to the shallow wisdom of men, the Reason of God is caught up in the essential movement of Madness. On the great scale of things, all things are Madness; on the small scale of things, the whole itself is madness. Which means that if madness can only exist in reference to some form of reason, the whole truth of reason is to allow a form of unreason to appear and to oppose it, only to disappear in turn in a madness that engulfs all.
Such is the worst madness of man: the inability to recognise the misery of his confinement, the weakness that prevents him from ascending to the true and the good, and not knowing which part of madness is his own. His turning his back on unreason is a sure sign of his condition, in that it prevents him from ever using his reason in a reasonable manner. For if reason does exist, it lies precisely in the acceptance of the unbroken circle joining wisdom and folly, in the clear consciousness of their reciprocity and the impossibility of dividing them. True reason is not free of the contamination of madness, but on the contrary, it borrows some of the trails first carved out by madness.Be present, then, you daughters of Jove, for a bit, while I show that no one can reach the heights of wisdom, and the very ‘inner sanctum’, as they themselves say, ‘of happiness’, except with the guidance of Folly. (Eramsus, Praise of Folly)But such a path, even when it fails to reach any final wisdom, and when the promised citadel reveals itself to be nothing more than a mirage or a new incarnation of folly, remains the path to wisdom when those who follow it are well aware that it leads to madness. The vain spectacle, the frivolous sounds and the maelstrom of noise and colour that make up the world is only ever the world of madness, and that must be accepted.Here, in the midst of that colourful, noisy immediacy, in that easy acceptance which is also an imperceptible refusal, the essence of wisdom is to be found more surely than in any lengthy search for the hidden truth. Subtly, through the welcome it reserves for it, wisdom invests madness, besieges it, becomes conscious of it and is able to situate it.Where else could it be found, other than within reason itself, as one of its forms, and perhaps even one of its resources? […] ‘Wisdom and folly are surprisingly close. It’s but a half turn from the one to the other. That much can be discerned from the actions of men who have lost their wits.’ [ ] […] Visiting Tasso in his delirium, Montaigne felt… disappointment even more than pity, but the most powerful emotion he experienced was admiration. ‘Is there anyone who does not know how imperceptible are the divisions separating madness from supreme and extraordinary virtue?’ Montaigne experiences a paradoxical admiration, for in the depths of that madness, reason finds the strangest resources. For if Tasso, ‘fashioned in the pure poetry of the atmosphere of antiquity, who showed more judgement and genius than any other Italian for many a long year’, now finds himself ‘in so wretched a state, surviving himself’, it was also becausehis agile and lively mind has overthrown him; the light has made him blind; his reason’s grasp was so precise and so intense that it has left him quite irrational; his quest for knowledge, eager and exacting, has led to his becoming like a dumb beast… . (Montaigne, Essays)If madness comes to sanction the efforts of reason, it is because madness was already part of those efforts: the liveliness of images, the violence of passion, the great retreating of the spirit into itself are all part of madness, but are also the most powerful, and therefore the most dangerous, tools that reason can use. There is no reason so strong that it does not put itself at risk in venturing into madness to carry out its task to the full: ‘there is no great spirit who is not tempered by a touch of madness… many wise men and countless brave poets have ventured into madness, and some have become lost there.’ Madness is a hard but essential moment in the labour of reason. Through it, and through its apparent victories, reason makes itself manifest and triumphs. Madness, for reason, was nothing more than a secret life and a source of strength.Little by little, madness finds itself disarmed… : invested by reason, it is as though it is welcomed [by it] and planted within it. Such was the ambiguous role of sceptical thought, or rather of a form of reason that was vividly conscious of the forms that limited it and the forces that contradicted it: it discovered madness as one of its own figures – one way of warding off anything that may have formed an exterior power, irreducible hostility or a sign of transcendence; while by the same token placing madness at the heart of its workings and indicating it to be an essential moment in its own nature. […] ‘Men are so necessarily mad, that not being mad would be being mad through another trick that madness played.’ [Pascal] That thought is the distillation of the long process of reflection that began with Erasmus: the discovery of a form of madness immanent within reason; and from there a process of doubling – on the one hand a ‘mad madness’ that turns its back on the madness that properly belongs to reason, and which through that rejection, redoubles its power, and through that redoubling falls into the simplest, most hermetic and most immediate forms of madness; and on the other hand a ‘wise madness’ which welcomes the madness of reason, listens to it, recognises its right of abode and allows itself to be penetrated by all its vivid power, thereby protecting itself from madness in a manner far more effective than any obstinate refusal, which is condemned to failure in advance.Now the truth of madness is at one with the victory of reason and its definitive mastery, for the truth of madness is to be interior to reason, to be one of its figures, a strength and a momentary need to ascertain itself.Perhaps that provides one explanation for its multiple presence in the literature of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, an art which, in its effort to master this reason in search of itself, recognizes the presence of madness, its own madness, circumscribes it, invests itself in it and finally triumphs over it. These are the games of a Baroque age.But in art as in thought, a whole process is accomplished which will lead to the confirmation of the tragic experience of madness inside a critical consciousness. Let us ignore this phenomenon for the moment and consider… those figures [of the tragic experience of madness] to be found in Don Quixote as well as in Scudery’s novels, in King Lear as well as in the theatre of Jean de Rotrou or Tristan l’Hermite.Let us begin with the most important, and the most durable— since the eighteenth century will still recognize its only just erased forms: madness by romantic identification. Its features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes. But the theme is tirelessly repeated: direct adaptations…. , reinterpretations of a particular episode… , or, in a more indirect fashion, satire on novels of fantasy… . The chimeras are transmitted from author to reader, but what was fantasy on one side becomes hallucination on the other; the writer’s stratagem is quite naively accepted as an image of reality. In appearance, this is nothing but the simple-minded critique of novels of fantasy, but just under the surface lies an enormous anxiety concerning the relationships, in a work of art, between the real and the imaginary, and perhaps also concerning the confused communication between fantastic invention and the fascinations of delirium. “We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness.” (Cervantes, Don Quixoti, Part II, Chap. 1)Immediately following this first form: the madness of vain presumption. But it is not with a literary model that the madman identifies; it is with himself, and by means of a delusive attachment that enables him to grant himself all the qualities, all the virtues or powers he lacks. He inherits the old Philautia of Erasmus. Poor, he is rich; ugly, he admires himself; with chains still on his feet, he takes himself for God. […] Measureless madness, which has as many faces as the world has characters, ambitions, and necessary illusions. Even in its extremities, this is the least extreme of madnesses; it is, in the heart of every man, the imaginary relation he maintains with himself. It engenders the commonest of his faults. To denounce it is the first and last element of all moral criticism.To the moral world, also, belongs the madness of just punishment, which chastises, along with the disorders of the mind, those of the heart. […] The justification of this madness is that it is truthful. Truthful since the sufferer already experiences, in the vain whirlwind of his hallucinations, what will for all eternity be the pain of his punishment: Eraste, in Corneille’s Melite, sees himself already pursued by the Eumenides and condemned by Minos. Truthful, too, because the crime hidden from all eyes dawns like day in the night of this strange punishment; madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth; its cries speak for its conscience. Thus Lady Macbeth’s delirium reveals to those who “have known what they should not” words long uttered only to “dead pillows.”Then the last type of madness: that of desperate passion. Love disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it pursues itself in the void of delirium. Punishment of a passion too abjectly abandoned to its violence? No doubt; but this punishment is also a relief; it spreads, over the irreparable absence, the mercy of imaginary presences; it recovers, in the paradox of innocent joy or in the heroism of senseless pursuits, the vanished form. If it leads to death, it is a death in which the lovers will never be separated again. This is Ophelia’s last song, this is the delirium of Ariste in La Folie du sage. But above all, this is the bitter and sweet madness of King Lear.In Shakespeare, madness is allied to death and murder; in Cervantes, images are controlled by the presumption and the compensations of the imaginary. These are supreme models whose imitators deflect and disarm them. Doubtless, both testify more to a tragic experience of madness appearing in the fifteenth century, than to a critical and moral experience of Unreason developing in their own epoch. Outside of time, they establish a link with a meaning about to be lost, and whose continuity will no longer survive except in darkness. But it is by comparing their work, and what it maintains, with the meanings that develop among their contemporaries or imitators, that we may decipher what is happening, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the literary experience of madness.In Shakespeare or Cervantes, madness still occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or to reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death.Madness, in its vain words, is not vanity; the void that fills it is a “disease beyond my practice,” as the doctor says about Lady Macbeth; it is already the plenitude of death; a madness that has no need of a physician, but only of divine mercy. The sweet joy Ophelia finally regains reconciles her with no happiness; her mad song is as close to the essential as the “cry of women” that announces through the corridors of Macbeth’s castle that “the Queen is dead.” Certainly Don Quixote’s death occurs in a peaceful landscape, which at the last moment has rejoined reason and truth. Suddenly the Knight’s madness has grown conscious of itself, and in his own eyes trickles out in nonsense. But is this sudden wisdom of his folly anything but “a new madness that had just come into his head”? The equivocation is endlessly reversible and cannot be resolved, ultimately, except by death itself. Madness dissipated can be only the same thing as the imminence of the end; “and even one of the signs by which they realized that the sick man was dying, was that he had returned so easily from madness to reason.” But death itself does not bring peace; madness will still triumph —a truth mockingly eternal, beyond the end of a life which yet had been delivered from madness by this very end. Ironically, Don Quixote’s insane life pursues and immortalizes him only by his insanity; madness is still the imperishable life of death… . [alt trans. The senselessness of his life pursues him, and ironically he is immortalized only by his madness, which becomes his imperishable life in death… .]But very soon, madness leaves these ultimate regions where Cervantes and Shakespeare had situated it; and in the literature of the early seventeenth century it occupies, by preference, a median place; it thus constitutes the knot more than the denouement, the peripity rather than the final release. Displaced in the economy of narrative and dramatic structures, it authorizes the manifestation of truth and the return to reason.Henceforth it is no longer considered in its tragic reality, as the absolute tear in the fabric of this world that opens on to the other, but simply in the irony of the illusion it brings. [….] Madness is deprived of its dramatic seriousness… . Its dramatic function exists only insofar as we are concerned with a false drama, a chimerical form where faults are merely supposed, murders are illusory and disappearances lead inevitably to reunions.Yes despite this absence of seriousness it is still essential- even more essential than before, for if it brings illusion to its climax, it is from this point that illusion is undone. In the madness to which the error of their ways confines them, the character involuntarily begins to unravel the web. Accusing himself, he speaks the truth in spite of himself. In Melite, for example, all the stratagems the hero has used to deceive others are turned against himself, and he becomes their first victim, believing that he is guilty of the deaths of his rival and his mistress. But in his delirium, he blames himself for having invented a whole series of love letters; the truth comes to light, in and through madness, which, provoked by the illusion of a denouement, actually resolves the real imbroglio of which it is both cause and effect. […] It conceals beneath error the secret enterprise of truth. It is this function of madness, both ambiguous and central, that the author of L’Ospital des fous employs when he portrays a pair of lovers who, to escape their pursuers, pretend to be mad and hide among madmen; in a fit of simulated dementia, the girl, who is dressed as a boy, pretends to believe she is a girl— which she really is— thus uttering, by the reciprocal neturalization in which these two ruses cancel each other out, the truth which in the end will triumph.Madness is the purest, most total form of qui pro quo; it takes the false for the true, death for life. […] It has merely to carry illusion to the point of truth. Thus it is, at the very heart of the structure, in its mechanical centre, both a feigned conclusion, pregnant with a secret ‘starting over,’ and the first step toward what will turn out to be the reconciliation with reason and truth. […] Madness is the great trompe-l’oeil in the tragicomic structures of preclassical literature.This was understood by Georges de Scudery, as he shows in the Comedie des comediens, where by turning the theatre into a theatre he situates his play, from the start, inside the illusion of madness. One group of actors takes the part of spectators, another that of actors. The former must pretend to take the decor for reality, the play for life, while in reality these actors are performing in a real decor; on the other hand, the latter must pretend to play the part of actors, while in fact, quite simply, they are actors acting. A double impersonation in which each element is doubled, thus forming that renewed exchange of the real and the illusory which is itself the dramatic meaning of madness. ‘I don not know,’ Mondory says in the prologue to Scudery’s play, ‘what extravagance has today come over my companions, but it is so great that I am forced to believe that some spell has robbed them of their reason, and the worst of it is that they are trying to make me lose mine, and you yours as well. They wish to persuade me that I am not on a stage, that this is the city of Lyons, that over there is an inn, and there an innyard where actors who are not ourselves, yet who are, are performing a Pastoral.’ In this extravaganza, the theatre develops its truth, which is illusion. Which is, in the strict sense, madnessThe classical experience of madness is born. The great threat that dawned on the horizon of the fifteenth century subsides, the disturbing powers that inhabit Bosch’s painting have lost their violence. Forms remain, now transparent and docile, forming a cortege, the inevitable procession of reason. Madness has ceased to be—at the limits of the world, of man and death—an eschatological figure; the darkness has dispersed on which the eyes of madness were fixed and out of which the forms of the impossible were born. Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital.Scarcely a century after the career of the mad ships, we note the appearance of the theme of the “Hospital of Madmen,” the “Madhouse.” Here every empty head, fixed and classified according to the true reason of men, utters contradiction and irony, the double language of Wisdom:. . . the Hospital of incurable Madmen, where are recited from end to end all the follies and fevers of the mind, by men as well as women, a task no less useful than enjoyable, and necessary for the acquisition of true wisdom. Here each form of madness finds its proper place, its distinguishing mark, and its tutelary divinity: frenzied and ranting madness, symbolized by a fool astride a chair, straggles beneath Minerva’s gaze; the somber melancholies that roam the countryside, solitary and avid wolves, have as their god Jupiter, patron of animal metamorphoses; then come the “mad drunkards,” the “madmen deprived of memory and understanding,” the “madmen benumbed and half-dead,” the “madmen of giddy and empty heads”… . All this world of disorder, in perfect order, pronounces, each in his turn, the Praise of Reason. Already, in this “Hospital,” confinement has succeeded embarkation.Tamed, madness preserves all the appearances of its reign. It now takes part in the measures of reason and in the labor of truth. It plays on the surface of things and in the glitter of daylight, over all the workings of appearances, over the ambiguity of reality and illusion, over all that indeterminate web, ever rewoven and broken, which both unites and separates truth and appearance. It hides and manifests, it utters truth and falsehood, it is light and shadow. It shimmers, a central and indulgent figure, already precarious in this baroque age.Madness traces a very familiar silhouette in the social landscape. A new and lively pleasure is taken in the old confraternities of madmen, in their festivals, their gatherings, their speeches. Men argue passionately for or against Nicolas Joubert, better known by the name of Angoulevent, who declares himself Prince of Fools, a title disputed by Valenti le Comte and Jacques Resneau: there follow pamphlets, a trial, arguments; his lawyer declares and certifies him to be “an empty head, a gutted gourd, lacking in common sense; a cane, a broken brain, that has neither spring nor whole wheel in his head.”This world of the early seventeenth century is strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness. Madness is here, at the heart of things and of men, an ironic sign that misplaces the guideposts between the real and the chimerical, barely retaining the memory of the great tragic threats—a life more disturbed than disturbing, an absurd agitation in society, the mobility of reason.But new requirements are being generated:A hundred and a hundred times have I taken up my lantern,
Seeking, at high noon . . , (Regnier, Satire XIV)
 |
| Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters. |
Electro-Shock
c. 1950
Metala, egurra / Metal, madera / Metal, wood
15 x 37 x 25 cm
Rahm Instruments. Model PV. Serial Number 881. New York
Radiostat Supra. Goi Frekuentziako Aparatua Aparato de
Alta Frecuencia High Frequency Machine
c. 1960
Metala, beira, skay / Metal, vidrio, skay / Metal, glass, skay
12 x 37 x 23 cm
Allstrom 110-160 volt. Made in Germany
\
February 2000, Volume 29, Issue 1, pp 125-146
What would it matter if everything Foucault said about prison were wrong? Discipline and Punish after twenty years
Purchase on Springer.com
$39.95 / €34.95 / £29.95 *
* Final gross prices may vary according to local VAT.
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<img alt="
Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, NY.
Photo: Florian Holzherr.
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http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/GUStWsegZ0k?version=3&hl=en_US
Μακέτα υπερβατικής πολεοδομίας από τη διπλωματική εργασία φοιτητή στο ΕΜΠ, για «εναέρια» ένωση πάνω από τις στέγες των πολυκατοικιών του λόφου Στρέφη με άλλο σημείο της πόλης. Οδηγός και για άλλες περιοχές, για αποσυμφόρηση της Αθήνας…Μια προσπάθεια αποτύπωσης μιας άλλης πολεοδομικής σκέψης για το εγγύς μέλλον, που αποκαλείται υπερβατική ή ουτοπική πολεοδομία.Εναέριο χωριό
Εν αρχήν ο λόγος… του Ιουλίου Βερν, μέσα από φράσεις και αποσπάσματα που αποκαλύπτουν στους ήρωές του Μαξ Ιμπέρ και Τζον Κερτ το «εναέριο χωριό», μία μορφή… υπερβατικής πολεοδόμησης μέσα στη ζούγκλα (κρατήσαμε τη γλώσσα απόδοσης. Εκδόσεις «Μίνωας» 1963):
«…Σε τούτο το σημείο, υπήρχανε δύο δέντρα κοντά το ένα στο άλλο. Η κλίση τους είχει βοηθήσει τους ιθαγενείς να στερεώσουν ανάμεσά τους οριζόντια κλαδιά, από κάτω ώς πάνω, σαν είδος σκαλοπάτια… Οσο ανεβαίνανε τόσο πιο πολύ φαινότανε μέσ’ απ’ τα φυλλώματα το φως… Κι όταν τέλος ανεβήκανε κάπου εκατό πόδια πάνω από τη γη, πόσο μεγάλη στάθηκε η κατάπληξή τους! Είδανε μπροστά τους μία πλατεία κατάφωτη από τον ήλιο… Πάνω από την πλατεία ανεβαίνανε γύρω γύρω οι πράσινες κορφές των δέντρων. Στην επιφάνειά της υπήρχανε στη μία και στην άλλη μεριά του δρόμου, αραδιασμένα με τάξη, χαμηλά σπιτάκια, με τοίχο από κίτρινη χωματολάσπη και σκεπή από φύλλα… Τούτο το σύνολο σχημάτιζε ένα χωριό στο ύψος εκείνο και σε μια έκταση που δεν μπορούσες να λογαριάσεις ίσαμε πού έφτανε… Η πλατεία σκιαζόταν από τις κορυφές των δέντρων που οι γεροί τους οι κορμοί την κρατούσαν στον αέρα. Ακουμπούσε πάνω στα γερά τους κλαδιά, εκατό σχεδόν πόδια πάνω από το έδαφος, όπου βρισκότανε ριζωμένα: γερές μπωχίνιες, μπομπάξ, μπαομπάμπ. Ητανε καμωμένη από εγκάρσια ξύλα, πιασμένα στέρεα με αγκίστρια και με λιάνες… Τα περισσότερα σπίτια, δροσερά και βυθισμένα στην πρασινάδα, είχαν σχήμα κυψέλης και ήταν ορθάνοιχτα… Με την ευνοϊκή του θέση το χωριό βρισκότανε δίχως άλλο προφυλαγμένο από κάθε επιδρομή».
Δενδρόσπιτα
Ενα αντίστοιχο «εναέριο χωριό» βρέθηκε πριν από περίπου σαράντα χρόνια στη ζούγκλα της νοτιοανατολικής Ινδονησίας. Ενας πραγματικός οικισμός «χτισμένος» πάνω σε δέντρα από τη φυλή Koravai. Τα υπερυψωμένα ξύλινα σπίτια βρίσκονται σε ύψος που φτάνει έως και τα 35 μέτρα πάνω από το έδαφος. Μια κλειστή κοινωνία που ζει από το κυνήγι και τη συλλογή καρπών. Κατεβαίνει στα άλλα χωριά μόνο για να πουλήσει-ανταλλάξει δικά της πράγματα μ’ εκείνα άλλων φυλών. Θα μπορούσε να είναι το φανταστικό χωριό του Βερν.Τι είναι όμως αυτό που σπρώχνει τους ανθρώπους να φτιάχνουν τέτοιες κατασκευές; Ποια είναι η λογική να υπάρχουν σήμερα «υπερυψωμένα» κτήρια πάνω από το έδαφος; ρωτήσαμε τον Μάνο Μπίρη, ομότιμο καθηγητή Αρχιτεκτονικής του ΕΜΠ, με πλούσια εμπειρία στο χώρο αυτό. Οι λόγοι μπορεί να συνοψιστούν σε τρεις: «Η ανάγκη για ασφάλεια, όπως φαίνεται και στο “εναέριο χωριό”. Το περιβάλλον και οι επιπτώσεις του και η απόκτηση ζωτικού χώρου, όπου δεν υπάρχει.
»Ο πρώτος με το δεύτερο λόγο συναντιούνται. Για παράδειγμα, οι κίνδυνοι από το φυσικό περιβάλλον παλαιότερα ήταν μεγάλοι. Ο άνθρωπος είχε να αντιμετωπίσει, εκτός από τα στοιχεία της φύσης, άγρια ζώα. Ετσι αναπτύχθηκαν προϊστορικά οι πασσαλόπηκτοι οικισμοί, σε ποτάμια ή λίμνες που πρόσφεραν ασφάλεια από τους κινδύνους της ξηράς. Ασφάλεια υπάρχει και πάνω από το έδαφος, ειδικά σε τροπικές περιοχές το συναντάμε αυτό. Τα δεντρόσπιτα σε μεγάλα ύψη προσφέρουν επίσης ασφάλεια.
»Ο τρίτος λόγος είναι η απόκτηση ζωτικού χώρου, εκεί όπου οι σύγχρονες πόλεις έχουν φτάσει στα όριά τους όπως στην Απω Ανατολή, Μπανγκόκ, Ινδοκίνα κ.α. Οι πληθυσμοί επεκτείνονται – επεκτείνοντας κατά κάποιο τρόπο και τα όρια της πόλης “χτίζοντας” σπίτια πάνω σε πασσάλους μέσα στο νερό (σε ποτάμια, σε λίμνες, ή παράκτια).
»Σπίτια πάνω από το έδαφος, πάνω σε δέντρα, σήμερα φτιάχνουν όσοι είναι και υπερβολικά φυσιολάτρες».
Ο άνθρωπος κάνει τις υπερβάσεις του και για εμπορικούς λόγους: τα «tree hotel Sweden», κοντά στον ποταμό Lule, είναι ένα τέτοιο παράδειγμα. Τα σπίτια του δενδροξενοδοχείου απέχουν τέσσερα έως έξι μέτρα πάνω από το έδαφος και τα έχουν όλα.
Ο Mathew και η Erica Hogan, ένα ζευγάρι Αμερικανών, είναι μια άλλη περίπτωση που έκανε την υπέρβασή της στη ζούγκλα της Κόστα Ρίκα. Εχτισε μια κοινότητα (Rinca Bellavista) από ξύλινα σπίτια πάνω σε πανύψηλα δέντρα, που συνδέονται μεταξύ τους με σχονιά και γέφυρες δημιουργώντας ένα διαφορετικό προορισμό για επίδοξους ταξιδιώτες. «Υπέρβαση στην πολεοδομία στη σύγχρονη εποχή σημαίνει πολεοδομία που αποδεσμεύεται από τις συμβατές παραμέτρους του χώρου. Υπάρχουν κτήρια που έχουν δημιουργηθεί με τον τρόπο της αντίστροφης πυραμίδας, η βάση δηλαδή στην κορυφή, και η κορυφή του κώνου στη βάση. Αυτό είναι υπερβατική πολεοδομία».
Δημιουργικότητα
Η υπερβατική, «η ουτοπική πολεοδομία υπό τις παρούσες συνθήκες σε μεγαλουπόλεις που ασφυκτιούν μπορεί να είναι μια δημιουργική ουτοπία. Και όσο κάποια πράγματα μοιάζουν φαντασία, μπορεί να έχουν νόημα στο εγγύς μέλλον», θα πει ο Βασίλης Γκανιάτσας, καθηγητής Αρχιτεκτονικών Συνθέσεων και Θεωρίας στο ΕΜΠ:
«Ενας φοιτητής μου στη διπλωματική του εργασία έπειτα από πολλές συζητήσεις προχώρησε σε κάτι πρωτότυπο, εμπευσμένος από κόμικς και από τον Ιούλιο Βερν στο «εναέριο χωριό».
Ας αφήσουμε τον ίδιο τον Αλέξη Χορτογιάννη, που είναι τώρα φαντάρος, να μας διηγηθεί μέσα από την εργασία του μια μικρή ιστορία: «Δεν είναι πραγματικά παράλογο μία ολόκληρη επιφάνεια της πόλης να μένει αχρησιμοποίητη και να περιορίζεται στα ρομαντικά τετ α τετ των κεραμιδιών με τα άστρα!
»Η καθημερινότητά μας διαδραματίζεται στο επίπεδο του δρόμου ανάμεσα στα κτήρια… και άσε που δεν μπορείς να περπατήσεις με τόσα αυτοκίνητα. Συνειδητοποιείς ότι κινούμαστε κάτω από τη γη! Δεν βιώνουμε την πόλη μας, απλά μεταφερόμαστε σαν μέσα σε κάψουλες από το σκοτεινό μας διαμέρισμα στο σκοτεινό μας γραφείο».
Ετσι λοιπόν προέκυψε η ιδέα να ενωθούν διάφοροι χώροι της πόλης πάνω από την πόλη. Οπως ο λόφος του Στρέφη (βλ. μακέτα), με ειδικούς δρόμους πάνω τις στέγες των πολυκατοικιών, με άλλα σημεία στην πρωτεύουσα. Μοιάζει ουτοπικό. Μια πολεοδομική υπέρβαση όμως που «υπό συνθήκες αποκτά νόημα». Ξανασκεφτείτε το!
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snc-geometrical-collage-painting
1) Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2) Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
3) Illogical judgments lead to new experience.
4) Formal art is essentially rational.
5) Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6) If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7) The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.
8) When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9) The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10) Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11) Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12) For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13) A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artists’ mind to the viewers. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artists’ mind.
14) The words of one artist to another may induce a chain of ideas, if they share the same concept.
15) Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16) If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics.
17) All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18) One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19) The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20) Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21) Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22) The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23) One artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstruing.
24) Perception is subjective.
25) The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26) An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27) The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28) Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29) The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30) There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31) If an artist uses the same form in a group of works and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.
32) Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33) It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34) When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35) These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
THIS IS ONE OF THOUSANDS OF SOL LEWITT’S LARGE SCALE WALL DRAWINGS.
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des01-scal-sky-strbrd-norm-rythm-rept-arch-pgs
This series of hand drawings by Bartlett School of Architecture graduateNed Scott presents a science-fiction world in which London grows a jungle of crops for fuel and food next to Buckingham Palace.
Above: The Mall
The War Rooms, St. James’s Park imagines a future in which the UK’s energy supply has been cut following a war over energy resources in 2050.
Above: The Mall – detail
Scott presents a closed-loop agricultural system where London provides energy and food for itself without relying on imports.
Above: Smart Grid
An anaerobic digester would stand on the outskirts of St. James’s Park, filled with vertiginous crops.
Above: MP’s House
A sky-scraping ‘energy tower’ nearby would have plants growing on every floor, and a smart grid would be installed for efficient energy use.
Above: MP’s House – detail
Scott was inspired by Ebenezer Howard, the late 20th century thinker whose utopian writings led to the creation of several ‘garden cities’ in Britain.
Above: New St. James’s Park
Above: Energy Tower
Above: Energy Tower – detail
Above: The Instrument
Here’s some more information from Ned Scott:
The War Rooms, St. James’s Park
The War Rooms takes a science-fictional premise in which the UK’s energy supply networks are terminated following an Energy War in 2050.
Above: Aerial Perspective
The project explores the implications of the decentralisation of the UK’s energy networks and the implementation of a closed-loop agrarian economy.
Above: Aerial Perspective – detail
The science-fictional scenario presented and the subsequent urban strategies proposed address the challenges the UK faces regarding energy security and fuel poverty, and speculates on the hypothetical consequences of a future where the many risks associated with the UK’s long-term energy strategy come to bear
Above: Anaerobic Disaster
The War Rooms, St. James’s Park introduces an institutional framework for agrarian reform, inspired by Ebenezer Howard, which operates on three simultaneous scales representative of the three protagonists of Clifford D. Simak’s ‘City’: Man, Dog and Ant.
Above: Anaerobic Disaster – detail
Above: Energy Warehouse
Above: Energy Warehouse – detail
Above: Howard Boulevard
Above: Howard Boulevard – detail
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2 Απριλίου 2013
HTML5-JS-Rhino
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introduction html5
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xml(1998)/css/(1966)
xhr()1999)
a,jax(2004)
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics that has support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999.
SVG images and their behaviors are defined in XML text files. This means that they can be searched, indexed, scripted, and, if need be, compressed. As XML files, SVG images can be created and edited with any text editor, but it is often more convenient to create them with drawing programs such as Inkscape.
All major modern web browsers—including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 9 and 10, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari—have at least some degree of support for SVG and can render the markup directly.
The SVG 1.1 specification defines 14 functional areas or feature sets:[12]
- Paths
- Simple or compound shape outlines are drawn with curved or straight lines that can be filled in, outlined, or used as a clipping path. Paths have a compact coding. For example M (for ‘move to’) precedes initial numeric x and y coordinates and L (line to) precedes a point to which a line should be drawn. Further command letters (C, S, Q, Tand A) precede data that is used to draw various Bézier and elliptical curves. Z is used to close a path. In all cases, absolute coordinates follow capital letter commands and relative coordinates are used after the equivalent lower-case letters.[27]
- Basic shapes
- Straight-line paths and paths made up of a series of connected straight-line segments (polylines), as well as closed polygons, circles and ellipses can be drawn. Rectangles and round-cornered rectangles are also standard elements.[28]
- Text
- Unicode character text included in an SVG file is expressed as XML character data. Many visual effects are possible, and the SVG specification automatically handles bidirectional text (for composing a combination of English and Arabic text, for example), vertical text (as Chinese was historically written) and characters along a curved path (such as the text around the edge of the Great Seal of the United States).[29]
- Painting
- SVG shapes can be filled and/or outlined (painted with a color, a gradient, or a pattern). Fills can be opaque or have any degree of transparency. “Markers” are line-end features, such as arrowheads, or symbols that can appear at the vertices of a polygon.[30]
- Color
- Colors can be applied to all visible SVG elements, either directly or via ‘fill’, ‘stroke,’ and other properties. Colors are specified in the same way as in CSS2, i.e. using names like
blackorblue, in hexadecimal such as#2f0or#22ff00, in decimal likergb(255,255,127), or as percentages of the formrgb(100%,100%,50%).[31] - Gradients and patterns
- SVG shapes can be filled or outlined with solid colors as above, or with color gradients or with repeating patterns. Color gradients can be linear or radial (circular), and can involve any number of colors as well as repeats. Opacity gradients can also be specified. Patterns are based on predefined raster or vector graphic objects, which can be repeated in x and/or y directions. Gradients and patterns can be animated and scripted.[32]
- Since 2008, there has been discussion[33][34] among professional users of SVG that either gradient meshes or preferably diffusion curves could usefully be added to the SVG specification. It is said that a “simple representation [using diffusion curves] is capable of representing even very subtle shading effects”[35] and that “Diffusion curve images are comparable both in quality and coding efficiency with gradient meshes, but are simpler to create (according to several artists who have used both tools), and can be captured from bitmaps fully automatically.”[36]
- Clipping, masking and compositing
- Graphic elements, including text, paths, basic shapes and combinations of these, can be used as outlines to define both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ regions that can be painted (with colors, gradients and patterns) independently. Fully opaque clipping paths and semi-transparent masks are composited together to calculate the color and opacity of every pixel of the final image, using alpha blending.[37]
- Filter effects[38]
Main article: SVG filter effects
- Interactivity
- SVG images can interact with users in many ways. In addition to hyperlinks as mentioned below, any part of an SVG image can be made receptive to user interface eventssuch as changes in focus, mouse clicks, scrolling or zooming the image and other pointer, keyboard and document events. Event handlers may start, stop or alter animations as well as trigger scripts in response to such events.[39]
- Linking
- SVG images can contain hyperlinks to other documents, using XLink. URLs of SVG images can specify geometrical transforms in the fragment section.[40]
- Scripting
- All aspects of an SVG document can be accessed and manipulated using scripts in a similar way to HTML. The default scripting language is ECMAScript (closely related toJavaScript) and there are defined Document Object Model (DOM) objects for every SVG element and attribute. Scripts are enclosed in
elements. They can run in response to pointer events, keyboard events and document events as required.[41] - Animation
- SVG content can be animated using the built-in animation elements such as
,and. Content can be animated by manipulating the DOM using ECMAScript and the scripting language’s built-in timers. SVG animation has been designed to be compatible with current and future versions ofSynchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). Animations can be continuous, they can loop and repeat, and they can respond to user events, as mentioned above.[42] - Fonts
- As with HTML and CSS, text in SVG may reference external font files, such as system fonts. If the required font files do not exist on the machine where the SVG file is rendered, the text may not appear as intended. To overcome this limitation, text can be displayed in an ‘SVG font’, where the required glyphs are defined in SVG as a font that is then referenced from the
element.[43] - Metadata
- In accord with the W3C‘s Semantic Web initiative, SVG allows authors to provide metadata about SVG content. The main facility is the
element, where the document can be described using Dublin Core metadata properties (e.g., title, creator/author, subject, description, etc). Other metadata schemas may also be used. In addition, SVG definesandelements where authors may also provide plain-text descriptive material within an SVG image to help indexing, searching and retrieval by a number of means.[44]
An SVG document can define components including shapes, gradients etc., and use them repeatedly. SVG images can also contain raster graphics, such as PNG and JPEGimages, and further SVG images.
[edit]SVG on the web
Google announced on 31 August 2010 that it had started to index SVG content on the web, whether it is in standalone files or embedded in HTML, and that users would begin to see such content listed among their search results.[45] It was announced on 8 December 2010 that Google Image Search would also begin indexing SVG files.[46] On 28 January 2011, it was discovered that Google was allowing Image Search results to be restricted exclusively to SVG files.[47] This feature was announced officially on 11 February 2011.[48]
[edit]Example
This code will show you a rectangle:
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<rect width="300" height="100" style="fill:rgb(0,0,255);stroke-width:1;stroke:rgb(0,0,0)" />
</svg>
svg(web vector graphics)
-scalable vector graphics
rectagle
<rect x,y width/…..
……id and css class
html likes for drawing
mozilla download center– a map of the wolr the svg map-
benjamin joffes
population demo
think about data visualizations
————————————-recordings ———–ur. data bases
bespin (created by mozilla)
again a data visualization for svg and canvas by the german elections
it supports all the modern ——-svg web / java script base
SVG web
SVG is the future so is the main requirment for obtaining a minimal understanding of
canvas and svg (they are
html 5 video
application cashe-database
embedding video -multiple files and scripting
JAVA SCRIPT(pro HTML SYNTAX)
web page external -conect with server-js examples provided on line
notes for lessons
(web page developer.moz.)
l01
java script is an object oriented language that is dynamic.
syntax related to C and Java
js does nt have classes – instead object prototypes
java script;s types are
A.numbers
– a js object -allowing numerical values- number object -Number() constructor
new Number(value)
the following example uses the
Number object’s properties to assign values to several numeric variables:var biggestNum = Number.MAX_VALUE;var smallestNum = Number.MIN_VALUE;var infiniteNum = Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY;var negInfiniteNum = Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY;var notANum = Number.NaN;
The following example converts the Date object to a numerical value using Number as a function:var d = new Date("December 17, 1995 03:24:00");print(Number(d));// printThis displays "819199440000".
*MAX_VALUE-MAX_VALUE.MIN_VALUE-MIN_VALUE.NaNNEGATIVE_INFINITYPOSITIVE_INFINITYprototypecharAt method
1.
return ‘cat’.charAt(1)://returns “a”
return ‘cat”[1]:// returns”a”
c-strcmp()fuctin *
var a= “a”;
var b = “b” ;
if (a<b)
print (a+”is less than” +b);
else if (a>b)
print (a +”is greater than ” +b);
else
print (a + “and”+b+”are equal.”);
string objects-string values
var s_prim=- “foo”:
var s_obj = new String (s_prim);
console.log(typeof s_prim); // logs string
console.log(typeof s_obj);// Logs ‘objects’
|
|
s1 = "2 + 2"; // creates a string primitives2 = new String("2 + 2"); // creates a String objectconsole.log(eval(s1)); // returns the number 4console.log(eval(s2)); // returns the string "2 + 2" |
valueOf method-convert a string object to its primitive counterpart
console.log(eval(s2.value)f())); // returns the number 4
properties of string instances —methods —methods of string instances
String generic methods
Generics are also available on
Array methods.var num = 15;alert(String.replace(num, /5/, '2'));
/*globals define*/// Assumes all supplied String instance methods already present (one may use shims for these if not available)(function () { 'use strict'; var i, // We could also build the array of methods with the following, but the // getOwnPropertyNames() method is non-shimable: // Object.getOwnPropertyNames(String).filter(function (methodName) {return typeof String[methodName] === 'function'}); methods = [ 'quote', 'substring', 'toLowerCase', 'toUpperCase', 'charAt', 'charCodeAt', 'indexOf', 'lastIndexOf', 'startsWith', 'endsWith', 'trim', 'trimLeft', 'trimRight', 'toLocaleLowerCase', 'toLocaleUpperCase', 'localeCompare', 'match', 'search', 'replace', 'split', 'substr', 'concat', 'slice', 'fromCharCode' ], methodCount = methods.length, assignStringGeneric = function (methodName) { var method = String.prototype[methodName]; String[methodName] = function (arg1) { return method.apply(arg1, Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1)); }; }; for (i = 0; i < methodCount; i++) { assignStringGeneric(methods[i]); }}());
string instances-methods- non-native methods
3booleans
4fuctions
objects
number
string
boolean
object
example of a bounce game
analyze the code and underline the following
fuctions
variables
objects
……>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
ex game page
uowm2013-1lesson-javascript lanqauge code
// explanations about i frme -examples 14years old Nyegen Phong,
-change the gameHeight and gameWidth variables
-change the height and width attributes
iframe.game class, in the style of the index page
//asigning variables
var gameHeight = 320
var gameWidth = 360
var intervalOne,intervalTwo,timeoutOne,x
var angle = 2
var tempX = 0
var tempY = 0
var block = 1
var square = 0
var squareTop = 0
var squareLeft = 0
var squareMotion = 1
var speed = 80
var getPad = 0
var nextScore = 0
var score = 0
var count = 0
var collisionOne = 0
var collisionTwo = 0
var collisionThree = 0
document.body.style.margin = “0px”
document.body.style.padding = “0px”
function setupGame() // about fuctions, doc., pad L.T,R,…
{
document.getElementById(“game”).style.borderRight = “1px solid #aaa”
document.getElementById(“game”).style.borderRight = “1px solid #aaa”
document.getElementById(“game”).style.borderBottom = “1px solid #aaa”
document.getElementById(“game”).style.width = gameWidth+”px”
document.getElementById(“game”).style.height = gameHeight+”px”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.position = “absolute”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.width = “40px”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.height = “40px”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.backgroundColor = “#444”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.display = “none”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.position = “absolute”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.width = “40px”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.height = “40px”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.backgroundColor = “#444”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.display = “none”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.position = “absolute”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.width = “60px”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.height = “30px”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.paddingTop = “10px”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.textAlign = “center”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.font = “15px Verdana, sans-serif”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.backgroundColor = “#000”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.color = “#fff”
document.getElementById(“pad”).innerHTML = “PLAY“
document.getElementById(“play”).style.color = “#fff”
document.getElementById(“play”).style.textDecoration = “none”
padTop = Math.floor(gameHeight/2)-20
padLeft = Math.floor(gameWidth/2)-30
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.top = padTop+”px”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.left = padLeft+”px”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).innerHTML = “BounceGame”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).style.padding = “10px”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).style.textAlign = “center”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).style.font = “2.0em Georgia, serif”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).style.fontWeight = “normal”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).style.color = “#222”
timeoutOne = setTimeout(“intervalTwo = setInterval(‘demoGame()’, speed)”, 4000)
}
function demoGame()
{
angle = 2
clearTimeout(timeoutOne)
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.display = “block”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.display = “block”
if(square == 0)
{
x = document.getElementById(“square0”)
square = 1
}
else
{
x = document.getElementById(“square1”)
square = 0
}
bounceGame()
}
function newGame()
{
block = 0
angle = 2
tempX = 0
tempY = 0
square = 0
squareTop = 0
squareLeft = 0
squareMotion = 1
nextScore = 0
score = 0
count = 0
collisionOne = 0
collisionTwo = 0
collisionThree = 0
clearTimeout(timeoutOne)
clearInterval(intervalOne)
clearInterval(intervalTwo)
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.left = “0px”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.top = “0px”
document.getElementById(“square0”).style.display = “block”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.left = “0px”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.top = “0px”
document.getElementById(“square1”).style.display = “block”
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.top = (gameHeight-40)+”px”
document.getElementById(“pad”).innerHTML = “”
document.getElementById(“notepad”).innerHTML = “”
intervalOne = setInterval(“playGame()”, speed)
}
function playGame()
{
if(block)
{
return
}
if(square == 0)
{
x = document.getElementById(“square0”)
square = 1
}
else
{
x = document.getElementById(“square1”)
square = 0
}
bounceGame()
checkCollision()
}
function assignM(aM)
{
squareMotion = aM
}
function bounceGame()
{
if(squareMotion==1)
{
if(squareTop>=(gameHeight-40) && squareLeft>=(gameWidth-40))
{
assignM(3)
moveDR(-40)
}
if(squareTop>=(gameHeight-40))
{
assignM(2)
moveDL(-40)
}
else if(squareLeft>=(gameWidth-40))
{
assignM(4)
moveDL(40)
}
else {
moveDR(40)
}
}
else if(squareMotion==2)
{
if(squareTop=(gameWidth-40))
{
assignM(4)
moveDL(40)
}
if(squareLeft>=(gameWidth-40))
{
assignM(3)
moveDR(-40)
}
else if(squareTop<=0)
{
assignM(1)
moveDR(40)
}
else
{
moveDL(-40)
}
}
else if(squareMotion==3)
{
if(squareTop<=0 && squareLeft<=0)
{
assignM(1)
moveDR(40)
}
if(squareTop<=0)
{
assignM(4)
moveDL(40)
}
else if(squareLeft<=0)
{
assignM(2)
moveDL(-40)
}
else
{
moveDR(-40)
}
}
else if(squareMotion==4)
{
if(squareTop>=(gameHeight-40) && squareLeft<=0)
{
assignM(2)
moveDL(-40)
}
if(squareLeft<=0)
{
assignM(1)
moveDR(40)
}
else if(squareTop>=(gameHeight-40))
{
assignM(3)
moveDR(-40)
}
else
{
moveDL(40)
}
}
}
function moveDR(amount)
{
save = amount
amount = Math.floor(amount/angle)
if(angle == 0)
{
amount = 0
}
squareLeft += amount
x.style.left = squareLeft+”px”
squareTop += save
x.style.top = squareTop+”px”
}
function moveDL(amount)
{
save = amount
amount = Math.floor(amount/angle)
if(angle == 0)
{
amount = 0
}
squareLeft -= amount
x.style.left = squareLeft+”px”
squareTop += save
x.style.top = squareTop+”px”
}
function assignAngle(aa)
{
if(aa==1)
{
angle = 0
nextScore = 1000
}
if(aa==2)
{
angle = 2
nextScore = 100
}
score += nextScore
document.getElementById(“pad”).innerHTML = nextScore
}
function flashScore()
{
if(score > 0)
{
if(nextScore == “BounceGame”)
{
nextScore = score
}
else
{
nextScore = “BounceGame”
}
document.getElementById(“notepad”).innerHTML = nextScore
}
else
{
document.getElementById(“notepad”).innerHTML = “BounceGame”
}
}
function countUp()
{
if(count < (Math.floor(score/10)*8))
{
count += Math.floor(score/10)
}
else if(count >= (Math.floor(score/10)*8) && count <= (Math.floor(score/10)*9))
{
if((Math.floor(score/10)*9) > 200)
{
count += Math.floor(score/10)
}
else
{
count += 10
}
}
else
{
if(Math.floor(score/10) > 30)
{
count += 10
}
else
{
count += 1
}
}
if(count > score)
{
count = score
clearInterval(intervalOne)
intervalOne = setInterval(“flashScore()”, 2000)
}
document.getElementById(“notepad”).innerHTML = count
}
function checkCollision()
{
var actualLeft = getPad-30
if(squareTop == 0)
{
document.getElementById(“pad”).innerHTML = “”
}
if((squareTop+40)==(gameHeight-40))
{
difference = Math.floor(squareLeft-actualLeft)
if(difference>=(-39)&&difference<4)
{
collisionOne++
collisionTwo = 0
collisionThree = 0
if(collisionOne > 3)
{
assignM(Math.floor(Math.random() * 2) + 2)
}
else
{
assignM(3)
}
assignAngle(2)
}
else if(difference>=5&&difference<15)
{
collisionOne = 0
collisionTwo++
collisionThree = 0
if(collisionTwo > 3)
{
assignM(Math.floor(Math.random() * 2) + 2)
assignAngle(2)
}
else
{
assignM(3)
assignAngle(1)
}
}
else if(difference>=15&&difference<59)
{
collisionOne = 0
collisionTwo = 0
collisionThree++
if(collisionThree > 3)
{
assignM(Math.floor(Math.random() * 2) + 2) // examples by math creativity-flash creativity paul-
}
else
{
assignM(2)
}
assignAngle(2)
}
}
else if((squareTop+40)==gameHeight)
{
block = 1
clearInterval(intervalOne)
setupGame()
intervalOne = setInterval(“countUp()”, speed)
}
}
function getMouseXY(e)
{
if(navigator.appName==”Netscape”)
{
tempX = e.pageX
tempY = e.pageY
}
else
{
tempX = event.clientX + document.body.scrollLeft
tempY = event.clientY + document.body.scrollTop
}
if(tempX < 0)
{
tempX = 0
}
getPad = tempX
if(getPad <= 30)
{
getPad = 30
}
if((getPad-30) > Math.floor(gameWidth-60))
{
getPad = Math.floor(gameWidth-60)+30
}
if(!block)
{
document.getElementById(“pad”).style.left = (getPad-30)+”px”
}
}
document.onmousemove = getMouseXY
setupGame()
.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
example of multiple counters
we need some files in order to execute that script
dateandtime.php
example.html
css/countdown.css
js/ jquery.jCounter-0.1.0.js
what about the css file that configures series of parametres like
/*create a file named countdown.css in a folder css**************************************************
***************************************************/
.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
ul.jCounterDefault {
height: 5.2em;
margin: 0;
font-size: 16px; /* change to resize counter */
padding: 0;
}
ul.jCounterDefault * {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
ul.jCounterDefault li {
background-color: #333;
border: 0.16em solid #fff;
color: #fff;
display: inline;
float: left;
list-style-type: none;
margin-left: 0.2em;
min-width: 4.3em;
position: relative;
text-align: center;
border-radius: 0.5em;
-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 0.2em #777;
-ms-box-shadow: 0 0 0.2em #777;
-o-box-shadow: 0 0 0.2em #777;
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 0.2em #777;
box-shadow: 0 0 0.2em #777;
}
ul.jCounterDefault span {
display: block;
font: normal bold 300% times;
letter-spacing: 0.08em;
margin-left: 0.06em;
padding: 0 0.1em;
}
ul.jCounterDefault em.textDays, ul.jCounterDefault em.textHours, ul.jCounterDefault em.textMinutes, ul.jCounterDefault em.textSeconds{
display: block;
font: normal normal 80% “Trebuchet MS”;
letter-spacing: 0;
margin: 0 auto;
padding-bottom: 0.4em;
}
.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
what about the js first – jquery.jCounter-0.1.0.js
/**********************************
*create a file as the above
**********************************/
;(function($,document,window,undefined) {
//once upon a time…
$.fn.jCounter = function(options,callback) {
var consoleLog = false; //shows debug messages via console.log() if true
var customRangeDownCount; //if true, it will tell countdown_proc() it’s a down count and not an up count.
var endCounter = false; //stops jCounter if true
var eventDate; //time target (holds a number of seconds)
var pausedTime; //stores the time (in seconds) when pausing
var thisEl = this; //custom ‘this’ selector
var thisLength = this.length; //number of multiple elements per selector
var singularLabels = new Array(‘Day’,’Hour’,’Minute’,’Second’); //singular labels – use for localization
var pluralLabels = new Array(‘Days’,’Hours’,’Minutes’,’Seconds’); //plural labels – use for localization
var remoteDateURL = “http://www.devingredients.com/files/dateandtime.php”; //URL to external dateandtime.php file
var localDateURL = “dateandtime.php”; //path to local dateandtime.php file
this.options = options; //stores jCounter’s options parameter to verify against specified methods
//default settings
var settings = {
customDuration: null,
customRange: null,
date: null,
dateSource: ‘remote’,
fallback: null,
format: ‘dd:hh:mm:ss’,
timezone: ‘Europe/London’,
twoDigits: ‘on’
};
//merge the settings with the options values
if (typeof options === ‘object’) {
$.extend(settings,options);
thisEl.data(“userOptions”, settings); //push the settings to applied elements (they’re used by methods)
}
//METHODS
var jC_methods = {
//initialize
init : function() {
thisEl.each(function(i,el) {
startCounter(el);
});
},
//pause method: $.jCounter(‘pause’)
pause : function() {
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Activity: Counter paused.”); }
endCounter = true;
return thisEl.each(function(i,el) {
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
});
},
//stop method: $.jCounter(‘stop’)
stop : function() {
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Activity: Counter stopped.”); }
endCounter = true;
return thisEl.each(function(i,el) {
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
$(el).removeData(“jC_pausedTime”);
resetHTMLCounter(el);
});
},
//reset method: $.jCounter(‘reset’)
reset : function() {
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Activity: Counter reset.”); }
return thisEl.each(function(i,el) {
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
resetHTMLCounter(el);
startCounter(el);
});
},
//start method: $.jCounter(‘start’)
start : function() {
return thisEl.each(function(i,el) {
pausedTime = $(el).data(“jC_pausedTime”);
endCounter = false;
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
startCounter(el);
});
}
}
//checks whether this jCounter instance runs by a customDuration setting
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).customDuration) {
if(!isNaN(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).customDuration)) {
var customDuration = true;
} else {
var customDuration = false;
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Error: The customDuration value is not a number! NOTE: ‘customDuration’ accepts a number of seconds.”); }
}
}
//checks whether this jCounter instance runs by a customRange setting
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).customRange) {
var customRangeValues = thisEl.data(“userOptions”).customRange.split(“:”);
var rangeVal0 = parseInt(customRangeValues[0]);
var rangeVal1 = parseInt(customRangeValues[1]);
if(!isNaN(rangeVal0) && !isNaN(rangeVal1)) {
var customRange = true;
if(rangeVal0 > rangeVal1) {
var customRangeDownCount = true;
} else {
var customRangeDownCount = false;
}
} else {
var customRange = false;
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Error: The customRange value is not a valid range! Example: customRange: ‘0:30’ or ’30:0′”); }
}
}
//FUNCTIONS
//jCounter initializer
function startCounter(el) {
if(customDuration) {
if (pausedTime) {
if (!isNaN(pausedTime)) {
eventDate = Math.round(pausedTime);
}
} else {
eventDate = Math.round($(el).data(“userOptions”).customDuration);
}
currentTime = 0;
countdown_proc(currentTime,el);
$(el).data(“jC_interval”, setInterval(function(){
if(endCounter == false) {
currentTime = parseInt(currentTime) + 1;
countdown_proc(currentTime,el)
}
},1000));
} else if(customRange) {
eventDate = Math.round(customRangeValues[1]);
if (pausedTime) {
if (!isNaN(pausedTime)) {
var currentTime = eventDate – pausedTime;
}
} else {
var currentTime = Math.round(customRangeValues[0]);
}
if(customRangeDownCount) {
countdown_proc(currentTime,el);
} else {
countdown_proc(currentTime,el);
}
$(el).data(“jC_interval”, setInterval(function(){
if(endCounter == false) {
if(customRangeDownCount) {
currentTime = parseInt(currentTime) – 1;
} else {
currentTime = parseInt(currentTime) + 1;
}
countdown_proc(currentTime,el);
}
},1000));
} else {
eventDate = Date.parse($(el).data(“userOptions”).date) / 1000;
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).dateSource == ‘remote’) {
dateSource = remoteDateURL + ‘?timezone=’ + thisEl.data(“userOptions”).timezone + ‘&callback=?’;
} else if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).dateSource == ‘local’) {
dateSource = localDateURL + ‘?timezone=’ + thisEl.data(“userOptions”).timezone;
} else {
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Error: dateSource property can be set to ‘local’ or ‘remote’, ‘remote’ is default”); }
}
$.getJSON(dateSource,function(data){
var currentDate = Date.parse(data.currentDate) / 1000;
countdown_proc(currentDate,el);
$(el).data(“jC_interval”, setInterval(function(){
if(endCounter == false) {
currentDate = parseInt(currentDate) + 1;
countdown_proc(currentDate,el)
}
},1000));
});
}
}
//main jCounter processor
function countdown_proc(duration,el) {
//check if the counter needs to count down or up
if(customRangeDownCount) {
if(eventDate >= duration) {
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).fallback) {
thisEl.data(“userOptions”).fallback.call(this);
}
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
}
} else {
if(eventDate <= duration) {
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).fallback) {
thisEl.data(“userOptions”).fallback.call(this);
}
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
}
}
//if customRange is used, update the seconds variable
var seconds = (customRange) ? duration : eventDate – duration;
var thisInstanceFormat = thisEl.data(“userOptions”).format;
//calculate seconds into days,hours,minutes,seconds
//if dd (days) is specified in the format setting (i.e. format: ‘dd:hh:mm:ss’)
if(thisInstanceFormat.indexOf(‘dd’) != -1) {
var days = Math.floor(seconds / (60 * 60 * 24)); //calculate the number of days
seconds -= days * 60 * 60 * 24; //update the seconds variable with no. of days removed
}
//if hh (hours) is specified
if(thisInstanceFormat.indexOf(‘hh’) != -1) {
var hours = Math.floor(seconds / (60 * 60));
seconds -= hours * 60 * 60; //update the seconds variable with no. of hours removed
}
//if mm (minutes) is specified
if(thisInstanceFormat.indexOf(‘mm’) != -1) {
var minutes = Math.floor(seconds / 60);
seconds -= minutes * 60; //update the seconds variable with no. of minutes removed
}
//if ss (seconds) is specified
if(thisInstanceFormat.indexOf(‘ss’) == -1) {
seconds -= seconds; //if ss is unspecified in format, update the seconds variable to 0;
}
//conditional Ss
//updates the plural and singular labels accordingly
if (days == 1) { $(el).find(“.textDays”).text(singularLabels[0]); } else { $(el).find(“.textDays”).text(pluralLabels[0]); }
if (hours == 1) { $(el).find(“.textHours”).text(singularLabels[1]); } else { $(el).find(“.textHours”).text(pluralLabels[1]); }
if (minutes == 1) { $(el).find(“.textMinutes”).text(singularLabels[2]); } else { $(el).find(“.textMinutes”).text(pluralLabels[2]); }
if (seconds == 1) { $(el).find(“.textSeconds”).text(singularLabels[3]); } else { $(el).find(“.textSeconds”).text(pluralLabels[3]); }
//twoDigits ON setting
//if the twoDigits setting is set to ON, jCounter will always diplay a minimum number of 2 digits
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).twoDigits == ‘on’) {
days = (String(days).length >= 2) ? days : “0” + days;
hours = (String(hours).length >= 2) ? hours : “0” + hours;
minutes = (String(minutes).length >= 2) ? minutes : “0” + minutes;
seconds = (String(seconds).length >= 2) ? seconds : “0” + seconds;
}
//updates the jCounter’s html values
if(!isNaN(eventDate)) {
$(el).find(“.days”).text(days);
$(el).find(“.hours”).text(hours);
$(el).find(“.minutes”).text(minutes);
$(el).find(“.seconds”).text(seconds);
} else {
if(consoleLog) { console.log(“(jC) Error: Invalid date! Here’s an example: 01 January 1970 12:00:00”); }
clearInterval($(el).data(“jC_interval”));
}
//stores the remaining time when pausing jCounter
$(el).data(“jC_pausedTime”, eventDate-duration);
}
//updates jCounter’s HTML values to 0 or 00, based on the twoDigits setting
function resetHTMLCounter(el) {
if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).twoDigits == ‘on’) {
$(el).find(“.days,.hours,.minutes,.seconds”).text(’00’);
} else if(thisEl.data(“userOptions”).twoDigits == ‘off’) {
$(el).find(“.days,.hours,.minutes,.seconds”).text(‘0’);
}
}
//method calling logic
if ( jC_methods[this.options] ) {
return jC_methods[ this.options ].apply( this, Array.prototype.slice.call( arguments, 1 ));
} else if ( typeof this.options === ‘object’ || ! this.options ) {
return jC_methods.init.apply( this, arguments );
} else {
console.log(‘(jC) Error: Method >>> ‘ + this.options + ‘ <<< does not exist.' );
}
}
//the end;
}) (jQuery,document,window);
////////////////////////////////////////////////
create the html file which contains the scripts. Notice the js
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
jCounter – jQuery plugin – devingredients.com
// the file is not working when runs locally
$(document).ready(function() {
//first counter
$(“.countdown1”).jCounter({
date: “01 january 2013 12:00:00”, //format: DD month YYYY HH:MM:SS
timezone: “Europe/Bucharest”,
format: “dd:hh:mm:ss”,
twoDigits: ‘on’,
fallback: function() { console.log(“Counter 1 finished!”) }
});
$(‘.pause1’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown1”).jCounter(‘pause’);
});
$(‘.stop1’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown1”).jCounter(‘stop’);
});
$(‘.start1’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown1”).jCounter(‘start’);
});
//second counter
$(“.countdown3”).jCounter({
format: “ss”,
twoDigits: ‘on’,
customDuration: 60*9, //9 minutes
fallback: function() { console.log(“Counter 2 finished! “) }
});
$(‘.pause3’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown3”).jCounter(‘pause’);
});
$(‘.stop3’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown3”).jCounter(‘stop’);
});
$(‘.reset3’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown3”).jCounter(‘reset’);
});
$(‘.start3’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown3”).jCounter(‘start’);
});
//third counter
$(“.countdown2”).jCounter({
format: “dd:hh:mm:ss”,
twoDigits: ‘on’,
customRange: ’10:9999′,
fallback: function() { console.log(“Counter 3 finished!”) }
});
$(‘.pause2’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown2”).jCounter(‘pause’);
});
$(‘.stop2’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown2”).jCounter(‘stop’);
});
$(‘.reset2’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown2”).jCounter(‘reset’);
});
$(‘.start2’).click(function() {
$(“.countdown2”).jCounter(‘start’);
});
});
Date-based countdown
00
Days
00
Hours
00
Minutes
00
Seconds
Custom-Duration Counter
00
Seconds
Custom-Range Count Up
00
Hours
00
Minutes
00
Seconds
/////////////////////////////
and finally the php file dateandtime.php
that has to be executed(+php server)
<?php
if (isset($_GET[‘timezone’])) {
$timezone = new DateTimeZone($_GET[‘timezone’]);
} else {
$timezone = new DateTimeZone(“Europe/London”);
}
$date = new DateTime();
$date->setTimezone($timezone);
$dateAndTime = array(“currentDate”=>$date->format(‘d F Y H:i:s’));
echo $_GET[‘callback’] . ‘(‘ . json_encode($dateAndTime) . ‘)’;
?>
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////download //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Δεν επιτρέπεται σχολιασμός στο HTML5-JS-Rhino
1 Απριλίου 2013
spectacle-architctrure-
Δεν επιτρέπεται σχολιασμός στο spectacle-architctrure-