Immersion Into Noise

Nymphaea Nerve Noise

Examined through the tradition of communicative symbolic interaction, immersion into noise's prevalent territorializing/deterritorializing configuration thus far appears to me to be roughly the inscribed parabolic space as we saw in the Apse of Lascaux. And, as such, noise art begins to create a cultural domain which is half illusionary and half real, just as any symbol is.

Rounded noise order seems an attempt to encircle vast shapeless infinity into a symbolically distinct scope and location through parabolic configuration. Hence, immersive noise consciousness seems thus far to be primarily a function of a desire to create a convincing illusion of non-self-containment through a semi-enclosed noise space which heralds the sanctum of the tribal magic circle, the circle which interpiercingly severs a space of sanctity from the profane. According to Nigel Pennick, the circle is one of the most ancient symbols used by humanity and is seen through the history of humanity as the embodiment of the universal whole, representing the perfect totality of the macrocosm. [181] It symbolizes the perfection of totality in that the circle is a geometric figure formed with one line with no beginning or end.

The central spot of the ancient symbolic immersive circle is the omphalos, the pivotal, still, capacity-point within the sacred circle. Inside the sacred immersive circle, the outside world is dominated and indeed defined by the omphalos' psychological protectoratship. The conceiving mentality behind the omphalos was that it marked the fixed point of the earth around which the spherical spiritual heavens whirled. Thus it represented a central place which remained steady and enduring while all else moved about it.

Today we know that the earth rotates on its axis once a day, and that it revolves around the sun once a year. In early times, however, astronomy was based on an ideal geocentric cosmology according to which the earth was fixed and immovable. The earth was conceived as being at the center of the universe and everything spun around it. In this cosmology, the universe itself was imagined as being bounded by a great sphere to which the stars, arranged in the various constellations, were attached. So while we today understand that the earth rotates on its axis once every day, in antiquity it was believed instead that once a day the great sphere of the stars rotated around the earth. As it spun, the cosmic sphere was believed to carry the sun along with it, resulting in the apparent movement of the sun around the earth once a day.

The omphalos' quintessence may have been only a scant central fire within a circular placement of stones on the ground which carved out the immersive space of emotional sanctity. However, an interpretation of this hoop of stones with centered still-point may be quickly conceived in terms of recognizing a point of view within the cyclical arrangements to the surrounding cosmos, as we see with the omphalos' evolution into the classical Greek maypole. A circle with a marked center and circular design elements emanating out from the central point is almost universally found in the world and it forms the basis of the floral rosette, one of the oldest and most widespread of ornamental designs. [182]

Accordingly, since its Mediterranean origin, western philosophy has fundamentally presented itself as a theory of the omphalos. And with this idea of the fixed, sacred, central spot we see the nucleus of the city/state, as the sacred staff of the seer (which was used to inscribe the perimeter of the sacred round circle) turned into the phallic obelisk (rather than the female pudendum) and begins marking the convex power point around which all is organized.

We shall quickly see in this and the next section how the sacred psychic circle (constructed around a central omphalos) connects to the sanctuary of the encircled sacred grove which itself connects to the origins of art in the West and to the maturation of the city/state. Thus far we have established that a parabolic immersive noise site is interiorly and conceptually encircling in aesthetic immersive sites, in order to enable the swallowed/semi-assimilated subject no avenue of self-protective flight from its excess of signification. What we have seen with the pudendum-like prehistoric embellished cave is that the prehistory of immersion into noise is primarily a history of assertively embellished aesthetic space in service of the virtual, the peripheral and the mercurial. It is for this reason that we will turn our attention now to certain aspects of the nymph myth continuum which makes up the enchanted nymphaea garden grotto [183] legacy, for the phenomenological awareness which such a lissom simulacra provides this discourse shall be serviceable in flushing out the extensive meaning of immersive expectations.

Nymphaea is the Roman term used to describe temple fountain-shelters consecrated to the nymphs which were based on simple Agora grotto water spots. A nymphaeum, under the Romans, became a formal temple dedicated to the cult of a nymph. This temple often related to the source of a stream, but because these structures were based on the Greek natural grotto grove (with spring), the term later became applicable to both artificial fountain grottoes and to monumental public fountains. [184] Descended from classical and eastern Hellenistic prototypes, grottoes proliferated in the late 1st century BC and spread further during the Imperial era when they became a common feature in the gardens of wealthy landholders. A rigorous definition of the term nymphaea would limit its designation to sacred semi-enterable edifices that served as sanctuaries of the nymphs, and this is the sense which I am using the term here. Another important distinction to maintain, however, is that between the public nymphaeum and the private nymphaeum. Two principal types are evidenced in both cases: the rustic grotto niche, in imitation of the Arcadian cavern, and the architectural fountain-temple type (for example the, now chiefly collapsed, immense Nymphaeum Hortorum Licinianorum, or the extant Castell dell'Acqua Marcia, both in Rome). In private hands, the interior nymphaeum was often located within an architectural apse or in a large niche comparable to the cavea of the theater. The apse/nymphaeum constitutes the primary feature of the House of the Great Fountain in Pompeii, for example. [185]

Clearly, entry into art noise space is not so much an entrance into earthly expanse as it is a representational passage into non-space ad infinitum. Noise is the space of access/excess we know as part of the instantaneous computer communication world. Noise is also encoded into the nymphaea origins of the garden grotto with its legacy of immersive exaltation of the feminine and its endorsement of sumptuous love. Thus, it is upon the garden grotto's roots as a sacred/sexual nymphaeum grove (based on the sacred omphalos-pudendum) where we shall begin to build upon the previous section's noise recognitions by continuing to trace the outgrowth of noise culture as detected in arcane archaeological sources and philos-theological traditions, both of which are open to interpretation of course. What is stimulating about the noise nymph and the omphalos-pudendumic nymphaea tradition for our purposes is its usefulness in tracing the cast-around 360° ideal aspect of noise within an enclosed, or partially enclosed, container.

The grotto can be seen to embody the bucolic or the idyllic, the sacred or the profane, the mythological or the prescient, and/or simply be eloquently ornate. In a sense, it is the space of anti-noise. The grotto's space is the space of tranquillity, coupling, solitude, seclusion, obscurity, and cool pathos; but most significantly it is traditionally a metaphorical space symbolizing the human vector within the unbroken universal matrix. [186] But any metaphorical topos for the universe must be in its very constitution indeterminate, noisy, complex, unified and unsatisfactory in its denotation. The nymphaeum is that too, as its various definitions and types are capriciously broad while all sharing an accordant meaning.

We can take the labyrinth as a symbol of immersion itself, as the entire point of a labyrinth lies in getting lost and searching about, [187] along with the self-discovery encountered through the search. That and their necessarily willed abandonment, all of which is salient to noise consciousness. Hence, labyrinthine understanding offers an understanding of works of noise art in that it grants us experience by penetrating space/time and, in a sense, secures that space/time for us.

The labyrinth is a cultural noise space blending both landscape and architecture into an intricate search. In ancient times, when pregnant animal carcasses were cut open and disembowelled in preparation for consumption, there inevitably would be a great outpouring of the winding intestinal tract mixed up with the foetus. Not knowing anatomy as we do, it is supposed that primordial people took the winding intestines to be the birth canal. As a result these beliefs became part of Pagan lore.

The earliest surviving labyrinths, all of classical seven-ring design, are rock carvings and graffiti and patterns on coins, seals and ceramic vessels, rather than full scale forms that could be walked through or upon. Full-sized labyrinths were too vulnerable to survive thousands of years against the combination of neglect, erosion and overgrowth. Early surviving labyrinth designs are found carved on part of an ancient dolmen at Padugula, Nilgiri Hills, in southern India which dates back to 11,000 BC, on a 1,300 BC ceramic vessel found in Syria, and on a 1,200 BC inscribed clay tablet found at Pylos, Peleponnesos, Greece. The labyrinth carving found inside the Tomba del Labirinto, a Neolithic tomb [188] at Luzzanas, Sardinia, could conceivably date to 2,500 BC if it is contemporary with the tomb, but later burials make this uncertain. There are at least five labyrinths carved into rock faces above the town of Capo di Ponte, Val Camonica, in northern Italy, ascribed to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age (1,000–500 BC).

Crete, considered the place of origin of all of the Greek Gods and Goddesses, was a highly developed Pagan civilization before its volcanic destruction in circa 1400 BC, with active trade routes to and from Egypt and other lands in the Mediterranean. Various Cretan coins between 43 BC and 67 BC bore the classical seven-ring labyrinth design, both in square and circular forms. This classical labyrinth design is believed to have originated with the Cretan parable of Theseus and the Minotaur. According to Greek mythology, King Minos of Crete had a craftsman (Daedalus) construct the labyrinth in order to conceal the Minotaur; the half-bull/half-human progeny of Minos's wife Pasiphae and a bull-Zeus. Queen Paisiphae, evidently sexually unsatisfied by King Minos, had ordered the inventor Daedalus to construct a convincing full-size model of a cow in which she could conceal herself, exposing only her vagina. Zeus, greatest of the Gods (who was born inside Idean Cave on the island of Crete) descended in the form of a bull and mounted and impregnated her, resulting in the birth of the half-man/half-beast Minotaur.

There are several variations of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but the main story is certain. Crete had won a victory over Athens and as a cruel tribute required that every nine years seven young men and seven maidens should be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, who was now confined in the labyrinth. The fourteen victims were chosen by lot, bringing terror to every family in Athens whenever the tribute became due. Finally, Theseus, son of King Aegeus, volunteered to resolve the matter by slaying the Minotaur. Aided by a ball of golden thread provided by the King's daughter Ariadne, Theseus entered the labyrinth, slew the Minotaur and exited the complex space by following the golden thread he had unravelled on his arrival, thus finding his way out and ending the cruel tribute.

This myth was widely known, as Zeus is a central figure in Greek mythology and, hence, became familiar in subsequent Roman culture. At Pompeii, where I visited, there was a square shaped seven-ring labyrinth scratched onto a crimson painted pillar in the House of Lucretius some time before the city was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. It has around it the cryptic words Labyrinthus, hic habitat Minotaurus. This demonstrates that the Romans were well aware of the Greek Minotaur's sinuous labyrinth.

Although not in the classical design, the labyrinth motif was used in mosaic pavements throughout the Roman Empire and these are the oldest surviving full-sized labyrinths. A significant variation on the classical labyrinth design is the addition of a second entrance (or exit), so that a procession can enter by one entrance, reach the center, and then emerge by a short exit without turning around. The design is still essentially unicursal, however. The most enduring Roman labyrinths were built in mosaic as such mazes. Other Roman mazes are complicated networks of paths, like a labyrinth. However, unlike a labyrinth, they have multiple openings and possible directions (not just one as in a labyrinth) which succeed.

The medium of mosaic offered much in the way of permanency to labyrinth and maze design. As well as being durable, many Roman mosaics were shielded from subsequent erosion by the collapse of the very buildings they once adorned, thus many examples have survived. Roman mosaic mazes consisted generally of a rectangular grid for most of the area which they filled, using the central area for pictorial illustration. Normally square and the size of a room, the most popular subject was the slaying of the Minotaur, but some Roman labyrinths simply portrayed the Minotaur, or other half-human/half-animal creatures such as centaurs. Eventually maze patterns were incorporated into the floors of some Catholic churches and cathedrals (less the Minotaur) such as in the nave of Chartres Cathedral which contains a majestic maze 9 meters (30 feet) in diameter to which penitent Christians peregrinated on their knees.

In my noise vision view, the earth is a kind of wild vibrational arena in which one omnijectively experiences the pleasures of the flesh while being cognizant of the fact that one is an expanding noise projection immersed in an amplifying orchestration. The effectiveness of such a noise aesthetic realization depends upon one’s advancements in the area of intellectual and emotional conceptions rooted in noise. Fortunately, the pudendum-based grotto is possibly a site par excellence in which to scrutinize this obviously thorny province of voluptuous noise vision.

To concentrate on the grotto is to summon all that was said concerning the archaic painted cave. Like in the treated cave, the art of the grotto uses (and then surpasses) nature to concoct an apparatus deemed suitable for shaping cognitive-vision/consciousness along the lines of the attributes of the omnijective expanding universe by modelling dilating connectivity in miniature. The discovery in the late-1920s by American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) that the universe was expanding implies remarkable things for the immersive space of the arcane grotto, as, like the painted cave, the grotto is a miniature zone of expanding liminality and cognitive crossing. It is a space of escape from the world of naive naturalism (for example, that proposed by the Italian theologian/philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)) and a zone of entry into the fluid, rhizomatic, and elfin world of connectivism where the spatial restrictions of conventional realism (think of the paintings of Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) or Winslow Homer (1836–1910)) need not apply, even while biological nature remains the grotto's starting point. Withdrawn into this zone of fay interchange, the immersant joins consciousness, not so much with the world outside, but with the classical Arcadian inner world of unconscious preterhuman existence, with its mantric cerulean rites of birth, pubescent passage, coupling, incantation and death.

Porphyry (circa AD 233–303), the neo-Platonic and Neo-Pagan author of De Antro Nympharum, [189] tells us in the French translation that, even in the earliest times, certain caves and natural grottoes were consecrated to the gods and goddesses, long before temples were conceived of and built (citing the cave of Lycean Pan in Arcadia, among others). [190] By way of preparation for the grotto, archaeological evidence has indicated that there are traces of a 15^th century BC Egyptian sacred garden grove in the temple complex at Karnak. I visited that old garden spot, which is tucked away deep inside the complex behind the sacred sanctuary temple of Amun (the hidden one), and found it barren but most immersively suggestive with its inner placement and diminutive scale.

It was from the Assyrian civilization in northern Mesopotamia that we find sacred groves within which modest shrines were contrived for supplication. Moreover, archaeological evidence shows that some Mesopotamian structures had pits positioned into their rooftops which were planted with a variety of sprouted ferns and flowers that constituted a minute garden site for contemplation connected with the cult of Tammuz and/or Dummuzi. These sacred cults were later imported into Greece where similar sacred groves were claimed in the wild, but now based on dissimilar female divinities called nymphs. [191] The grotto's noise poetics can particularly be traced to the coves dotting the coasts of Greece, such as the dazzling caverns in the Peloponnesus along the bay of Diros [192] or the one I swam in daily in Siros for a week in 2008.

Exactly where the Greek concept of the abounding sacred sexual nymph stemmed from is not known. I assume it is a descendent of the cult of Hathor from North Africa, but why this concept arose in North Africa, we do not know.

Ostensibly, in ceremonial observance of this long fertile tradition, there emerged the previously mentioned pudendumic nymphaeum, an ancient Greek secluded area dedicated to the nymphs which typically included an extemporaneous grotto with waterfall or spring, nestled in a grove of trees (or sea cove) with a central devotional arena. This reminds us again of the Greek temenos, the spot removed from the common land, dedicated, in this case, to nymph Goddesses. The pudendum provides the nymph worshiper a full or semi-encircled sacred immersive space in which to enter into communications with the nymphs, for example with Syrinx, an Arcadian nymph who turned herself into a reed to escape the advances of the shepherd God Pan. [193] Pan, who lived in caves, was son of the nymph Penelope and is thought of as the God of fertility and unbridled male sexuality, known for engaging in sexual activity with various nymphs in the form of a goat. No cave dedicated to Pan and the nymphs is more renown than the Corcyrian Cave on Mount Parnassus which is celebrated as the site of numerous Bacchic orgies. [194] Yet Pan is not to be confused with satyrs, who were Greek woodland spirits. Satyrs had a human upper body and the lower body of a goat and were generally depicted as having dishevelled hair with goat horns and ears, and with an exacerbated erect penis (ithyphallic). In early Greek art they were portrayed as offensive in appearance, but later they were represented as being handsome and sexy. Greek vases occasionally depict post-coital sleeping or sexually active nymphs such as Thetis (who attempted to make Achilles, her son, invulnerable by dipping him in the waters of the river Styx).

Few places testify more vividly to the development of the grotto than the cavern rich Bay of Naples. Insofar as the sea-based nymphaeum was incorporated by Roman culture into Italian gardens in the form of small grottoes with fountains or limpid pools of water, it advanced an eventually widespread European garden tradition (as Italy set the model for all early sophisticated European gardens). Grottoes in the Italian style generally present a pastoral, semi-nude nymph from Pagan fables (frequently Venus, the Roman adaptation of the Greek Hathor-based Goddess of love and beauty Aphrodite, whose myths she took over) tucked into a niche and accompanied by ferns and spouting or bubbling water. Venus, it must be remembered, was the Roman Goddess of love, originally associated with the biological fecundity of vegetal gardens. Amor, Roman God of love (the equivalent to the Greek Eros) was the son of Venus. Venus's cultural importance rose with the political fortunes of the clan of Julius Caesar (circa 100–44 BC) who claimed descent from Venus via Aeneas and Julia. Indeed Caesar instituted the cult of Venus and proclaimed her the Goddess of marriage and motherhood, Venus Genetrix, under which name he constructed a temple at the Forum in her honor. Her festival, Veneralia, is celebrated on April 1st. Most people today know of her from the 2nd century BC Hellenistic sculpture Venus de Milo, which was purchased by France and brought to the Musée du Louvre after her discovery in 1820 on the island of Melos or from Tiziano Vecellio Titian's (1485–1576) 1519 painting Worship of Venus at the Museo del Prado.