In my previous post, I mentioned Vivaldi's Andromeda Liberata. Now I will go further back in time to the Renaissance, whencefrom we get most of our modern concepts from (such as individuality, etc). Someone showed me a picture of Michelangelo's design for the ideal town square - explaining that, in those days, architects began to dream of ideal cities in the shape of octagons, pentagons and so on. (It is a shame really that this is viewed as limited to the Western society, since the idea of mandala-shaped cities is very prominent in Asia, of course. In my personal view, however, I do not sense why these Platonic, geometrical city shapes would be internally important. Even walking in a geometrical garden, there is a contradiction, not an expression, of natural principles and flow. You know it should be a square, but you just can't see it. The only place it makes sense is from above - an aerial view. Perhaps they were made to be admired from Space? Feel free to disagree, and let me know if you can make out the connection to an internal effect on the geometrical city's inhabitants... other than "We all live inside a perfect octagon and you do NOT! HA!").
When I saw this image of Michelangelo's town square, I had a very distinct reaction, that of accessing Other Sight. The psyche gives way to something wider, and thus relates to something that escapes everyday, directed scrutiny. Spiders create their webs, beavers build their dams, bees their hexagonal tubes, snails their perfectly spiral-shaped shells, etc - humans are also capable of amazing architecture.
We are, however, "symbologically" conscious of that which we create - and this symbol-consciousness sometimes obscures the wider implication of the symbols we use. For example, it is generally explained that Michelangelo wanted to portray the 12 constellations and even the Omphalos Stone, in his design (in his attempt to connect Italian identity to Etruscan culture). But explaining it this way tones down and encages the profound impact that these realities (constellations, Omphalos Stone) might have on perception. It is much easier to see them as artifacts in history, and get only their "legacy" value, rather than interact with them anew. Once we have named something, we think we have understood it. But how did the Omphalos Stone actually work? What do we really know about the workings of the minds of historical (and prehistoric) men? (I think there are a number of books on this very interesting subject, how the mind layers time, the spirit within things, and our fascination/horror with stories about "reactivation" of lost artifacts).
Michelangelo's involvement with such a concept can therefore be relegated to the level of the Ego (outer meaning), where he is entirely conscious of what his design "means" (the purpose he has imagined for it, a purpose which is entirely bound to his historical and political context). This, however, doesn't explain why his design ends up resembling the Native American "dream-catchers" (inner meaning), or our modern understanding of Relativity and Astronomy. And it doesn't say why this looks precisely like a Vortex or Wormhole grid, as it is understood by modern scientists.
Viewed this way, the issue of placing a statue of a Roman emperor in the middle star (which apparently went against Michelangelo's wishes) is certainly interesting. We tend to think of Roman emperors as people who were obsessed with order and who tended to plagiarize every culture they conquered, but some of them did ask a lot of questions: about themselves, the world, about what we're supposed to be doing here, and why they were found in such a demanding role.
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