Nold Egenter on Twilight Zone (poem)

Comment by Nold Egenter

Nold Egenter, architect anthropologist, posted his comment on my poem, Twilight Zone. on my facebook on 7 August 2010: His contribution enriches my perceptions on culture and civilization. I gratefully acknowledge his sharing by publishing his comment here.

Dear Remigius,
reading your Twilight Zone Poem I get the impression that there is a strange and mysterious affinity among us! Having lived about 10 years in Japan trying to understand its cultural roots I came to feel that there is some sort of basic world view which can be called aesthetic, or what you call twigh-light, "a window of a cell", a journey "on the border of day and night", "in the community of the Earth and stars".

I think it is a full fledge world in which contrasting units are harmoniously perceived, a tree for instance with leaves moving in the wind, its trunk and roots being anchored in the ground. I think it is a world view which sees all things in similar ways as composed of contrasting parts forming a harmonious tension.

I suspect that this was a very primordial "aesthetic" world view, which to some extent could survive in what we call art today or architecture, but, in its essence and its original significance as forming a harmonious world is no more really understood. It seems however, that one can assume that it was something of profound meaning in many cultures of the world, e.g. YinYang and Daoism in China, Om in Ancient India, Ma'at in Ancient Egypt, 'coincidence of opposites' in European Middle Ages, and so on. As an aesthetic world, this world also was of a highly spiritual quality.

But then something happened - which had to do with the formation of civilisation. The harmonious structures developed in the early agrarian sedentary villages were spatially blown up by some peoples who 'smelt' the power which could be made with these provinces of villages by superseding them, using their own str...uctural conditions on a higher level of states with similar centres now as large monumental sanctuaries, palaces, for kings and their social elite.

I am somehow intensely working on this topic at the moment, trying to understand how culture (not cultureS!) really evolved. Am reading books on Mespotamia and Egypt with the hypothesis that culture evolved in Neolithic villages in the sense above and then these harmonious "islands" were overrun by mad power-freaks Alexander "the Great"-style and that this is the history we are still in.... It is a fairly mad world, in fact, if one really starts to understand its "mechanisms".

All the best for today, Cordially,
Nold Egenter

7 August 2010  

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