Return to Table of Contents Contents Goin’ Baroque-Greg A. Grove, Ph.D. Our Age, Our Art-Greg A. Grove, Ph.D. Radiesthesia: Door to the Infinite- Greg A. Grove, Ph.D.
Goin’ Baroque-
Greg A. Grove, Ph.D. The word “baroque”
was originally a deprecatory term (barroco)
for a misshapen pearl—one that was clumsy, strange, and overblown.
In this sense the term came to describe a style of architecture,
sculpture, and painting that developed in Italy around 1600 and spread
more or less altered across the European continent. The baroque evolved out
of the classicism of the Italian Renaissance and in opposition to it.
However, the classical tendency remained as a parallel to the
baroque and continued into the early nineteenth century: the classical
standing for rule, the baroque for freedom from rule and independence of
imagination. Many critics of
the arts believe that the history of European culture from the end of the
Middle Ages can be understood as a conflict between the classical tendency
on the one hand, and the baroque-romantic on the other. If any one trait can be
called characteristic of the baroque it is expansiveness.
Whereas the universe to the classical mind was semi-closed and
finite, to the baroque it was open and infinite.
The baroque vision of the universe was an infinity occupied by
masses or bodies dynamically interrelated by great forces or tensions
which could be measured and understood with the experimental method. The baroque viewpoint
was skeptical of classical rationalism.
It exalted experimentalism, the direct study and measurement of
nature. It measured mass in
motion, the path and speed of light in optics, the pressures of gases,
even weighing the atmosphere of the earth.
The baroque vision was of man’s actual environment in its vast
variety. It was optimistic,
expansive, self-confident, eager, and impatient with old rules in art and
life. It was obsessed with
infinity. Moreover, man’s
intuition and imagination were added to the classical idea of reason. Boundless energy was apparent in the living and thinking of baroque man. He acted dramatically (the dramas of Shakespeare). The sheer enjoyment of color and light was at its height (the paintings of Rembrandt). The strong stimuli of ordered sounds were exciting (the music of J. S. Bach). Curves sweeping into contrasting curves dominated his architecture; tremendous rhythmic patterns and contrasting harmonies characterized his music; great and elaborate structures of poetic expression gave wings to his drama. Because the baroque was a restless time—of change and adventure—it is not surprising that musicians shared the excitement of the world about them. Experimentation was in the air. Composers and theoreticians introduced new sounds, new forms, new systems of tuning instruments, and new concepts of key relationships. AS in architecture and the visual arts, complex ornamentation eventually came to dominate music. Tempos were quickened and new relationships between instrumental and vocal forces were explored. Music was caught up in the dynamic spirit of the new age and reflected its love for the dramatic. This was a prolific
period in musical composition, and composers were usually equally expert
as performers and directors. The
baroque is of special interest to music lovers of today as it is the
earliest period to be consistently represented in the contemporary concert
repertory. Important
composers include: . Claudio Monteverdi,
who established the opera as a valid dramatic form. . Jean-Baptiste Lully,
whose emphasis on chorus and ballet pervaded French opera for 200 years. . Henry Purcell, who
wrote the first opera in English: Dido
and Aeneas (c. 1689) . Arcangelo Corelli and
Antonio Vivaldi, whose lives corresponded with the “Golden Period” of
the great Cremona violin makers. Their
string music marks one of the high points of the Italian violin school. . George Frederic
Handel, born in Saxony but lived the last 50 years of his life in England.
He created, in the oratorio, a form ideally suited to the tastes of
the English middle class (e.g., Messiah,
1742). Enhance your New Year
by listening to any of the following compositions: J S. Bach: Brandenburg
Concertos (1-6), Violin Concertos G.
F. Handel: Messiah, Water Music or Fireworks Music A. Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, Six Concertos Op. 10 J. Pachebel: Canon in D.
Our Age, Our Art-Greg A. Grove, Ph.D. Experimental science
has determined the forms and tendencies of our civilization since the
Seventeenth Century. Religion and philosophy, as well as art, have had to adjust
to a scientific world-view. Thus,
an understanding of the physical universe is no longer solely based on
rationalism but is entirely relative to the station of observation
assumed by the experimenter. The
ultimate physical realities are negative and positive charges of
electricity, of light, and the world of “common sense” is not
ultimately real. Psychology suggests
that the subconscious mind of man is primarily instinctual, not
rational, and that subconscious reality is even more real than the
waking or conscious reality. “Sanity”
and “rationality” are, so to speak, accepted conventions of certain
kinds of society. The
Good, the True, and the Beautiful may mean anything to anybody. These interpretations
lead to a kind of every-man-for-himself situation in the matter of
understanding life, finding objectives, and expressing feelings in art.
They lead to a kind of chronic uncertainty in the individual with
regard to the meaning of existence and the part he should play in it.
Of course, he may be unaffected by them and rely on the old
values—traditional religion, philosophy, art, politics, economics, and
so on. The Challenge to
the Individual Yet in spite of
science, the most important threat to the individual is when his
insignificance is established; when societies become communal,
cooperative; when security rather than liberty becomes the watch word of
social revolutions. He
loses independence. His
means of livelihood becomes less and less his own concern, and he no
longer has control over his living or thinking. Technological developments have caused machines to become something more than a convenience to the individual. They help to increase a dependence on society; in the hands of any enemy, they drastically threaten his security. They complicate his life; they often kill him when he does not operate within their limits. In the mass production of machines, the individual plays less and less of a role, and their production becomes an assembly line. Machines affect his life so completely that he becomes almost resentful, to realize that he could not live without them and may very well die because of them. All of this adds up
to an almost painful quickening of the pace of life, increase in nervous
tension, with subsequent increase in mental disorders.
The Twenty-first Century is concerned almost to the point of
obsession with the problem of psychological sickness and health.
This indicates a deep-seated uneasiness of the individual in a
world becoming increasingly difficult to understand and live in. The Challenge to
the Arts This groping to find
a new expression for the tensions and uncertainties of life seen today
is characteristic of the styles called “experimental,” just as it is
characteristic of the thinking of contemporary philosophers.
What does all of this mean for the arts?
Twenty-first Century art—perhaps more than any of the other
phenomena of life—reflects an uneasiness.
It is full of tension and resentment.
It is indeed the rebellion of the individual against the
overwhelming and relentless facts of his environment, facts which seem
predominately hostile. The
artist’s recourse is to retreat from an exterior hostile world into
his own inner world where, with the warrant of science, he may find what
alone can be real for him—his own sensations, impressions, feelings,
dreams. The result is that
the art he produces seems often to have little to do with the public
world of common sense experience. It
is personal and subjective to an extreme, expressed in forms symbolic of
the artist’s personal experience.
Consequently, his art is often so personal, so private, it is not
easily understood. There is also a great
deal of theorizing about art today.
This is due in part to the general habit of the Twenty-first
Century and to the effect of science.
It is also due to the artist’s desire to prepare the public for
his work, to “explain himself” beforehand.
And what strikes me particularly is that modern art criticism
almost never touches on the problem of “beauty” per se.
It discriminates against romantic sentimentality and classical
rules and ideals, although it has sentimentality and classical rules of
its own, not always acknowledged. Although
it does not appear to discriminate against types of form and content
(indeed, it often borrows from other periods), it has an extremely
characteristic form and content of its own.
Its faith in nondiscrimination issues in a kind of product which
seems to go to the point of formlessness and meaninglessness.
This can be accounted for in numerous ways.
To a certain extent, I have already accounted for it. The Problem of Meaning and Form in Modern Art The problem of
meaning and form in the contemporary arts is one which is a natural
outcome of vast experimentation, which has created tremendous variety.
Each artist tends to create his or her own style rather than to
follow one set by others. The
arts have drawn eclectically, not only from the past, but from each
other. Technology has had important influences in changing the function of the arts, often setting up competitors such as photography, motion pictures, and television. Drama has been significantly modified by the availability of mechanisms of stage craft, electricity, and computer technology; design in painting and sculpture has been modified by machine design; architecture has become almost a kind of machinery. And it is not too
far-fetched to find in the new harmony in music implications of the
sounds of our machine environment.
Above all, technology has invented a new kind of aesthetic, that
of the functioning machine—the airplane, the automobile—which tends
to take the place of the older arts in the public’s mind as a source
of beauty in the environment. Mechanical
reproduction of sound via phonograph records, compact discs, and
cassette tapes supplies universally what instruments formerly could
produce only locally. The
traditional arts and their performers have much to do to survive against
this competition. That they
have not been entirely successful is indicated by their low economic
value to society. Therefore, the actual
artistic method of presenting form and content in experimental art is to
evoke and suggest emotions of the most complex and personal sort, often
by means of connections between words, colors, sounds, but rarely
experienced in combination. This
whole process is the artist’s attempt to express his own feelings in
terms of forms, even if realistic, that are symbols for those feelings.
The artist must never state; he must suggest with as much
subtlety as possible, yet he has the great feat of being obvious.
He must never appeal to one level of meaning or one level of
consciousness but must construct his symbolism so that it involves
several different facets of meaning and engages several levels of
consciousness. Surrealism,
as an experimental style, is particularly interested in this method. The experiments have
been many. Some of them were short-lived, some continue on.
Some were widely influential, others abortive and almost
stillborn. The parade
includes Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism, and
many less important “isms.” Not all of these
fragmented aspects of the experimental approach have counterparts in
each of the arts. Some, like Constructivism and Expressionism, do—but there
is no possibility of gaining a unified understanding of modern art.
Although this experimental method and its products may seem
strange to us, they have the backing of the new scientific
interpretation of reality. They
are our age, interpreting it through the eyes of the sensitive
individual, just as science interprets it through mathematical
generalization. If we are to be fully aware of the world in which we live—a world that is continuously being newly understood—we cannot neglect, ignore, or hide from the message that is being given through both the art and science of today. Radiesthesia: Door to the Infinite -by Greg A. Grove, Ph.D.Although the word radiesthesia
may be foreign to our ears, it was not always so. Evidence points to many ancient cultures where radiesthesia
was practiced as far back as 2000 years.
The Egyptains, Hebrews, Scythians, Persians, Medes, Etruscans,
Greeks, Romans, Hindus, Polynesians, Peruvians, and even American
Indians used some sort of rod or pendulum for magical purposes.
When selecting building sites during the reign of Emperor Yu,
the Chinese were especially adept at detecting “the Claw of the
Dragon,” a reference to dowsing for noxious rays originating from
unwholesome underground water, soil composition, or air ionization
intensity. The Druids were also sensitive to magnetic forces.
According to author Greg Nielsen in his book Pendulum
Power, “Druid magicians with the power of the rod may have
located the vibrationally correct site for building the giant
structure, Stonehenge.” As the art and science of radiesthesia matured
over time, pioneers in the field began to publish works about it,
especially in France, Belgium, and Italy, where many of its
practioners were Catholic priests with a strong aversion to occultism
and magic. Apparently
there was no serious conflict between orthodox religiosity and
radiesthesia because, in the words of Abbe Mermet, “The constancy of
physical laws, their neutrality in regard to any religious or
philosophical question, constitute criteria showing that we are
confronted with purely natural forces.”
Outside the cloister or monastery radiesthesia became a
worthwhile method of diagnosis in the field of medicine. However, it was around the turn of the Twentieth
Century that L’Abbe Bouly, French priest of Haderlot, is credited
with coining the term “radiesthesia” from the Latin radius
for “radiance” and the Greek aisthesis
for “sensitivity.” Radiesthesia
today covers both detecting and measuring electromagnetic vibrations
or rays from any source—living or inert.
According to Major Cooper-Hunt, this includes the four great
kingdoms of manifest Nature—minerals, plants, animals, and man—as
well as those beyond human perception: the angelic, the celestial, and
the divine. As an outgrowth of the ancient art of divination or dowsing, radiesthesia takes an intermediate place between physics and metaphysics, embracing the laws of classical physics, gravitation, light, heat, electricity, magnetism and Hertzian waves, yet intrinsically linked to results which are often regarded as supernatural and mysterious, transcending those of Nature. In the words of pendulist F. A. Archdale, “There is no magic in radiesthesia; it is a faculty which most people possess and consists in their ability to receive rays or waves surrounding them and to pass them on, through muscular reflexes, to the instrument they are using: the pendulum. It is, in fact, a scientific investigation in which many medical men, research workers, priests, geologists, and policemen have specialized.”
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