08 September 2009

The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily - A rhizomestructure of meanings and metaphores

The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is a piece of litterature that was relevant in the task of architectual history, these day - for me.You can read it if you want, only 54 A5 pages.. here.

A true fairy story is a work of art. In 1795, there appeared in the German magazine Die Horen (The Hours) a series of stories of which the concluding one was a Fairy Tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This tale tells of magical transformation, yet one which, when the time is ripe, can be experienced by every human being. The author of these stories was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and the creation of this Fairy Tale was to have far reaching consequences...

I have never ever read souch a fairy tail and got so overwhelmed by its underlying messages. It gives me a impression of a flow of pictures in my sensory dimension, and right after a flow of abstract sublime codes/messages/hints/education about life in the spiritual dimension. But nothing is clear.. I thing I will see this fairytale as a rhizome structure of dimensions to accept its complexity.

Many people have analyzed it and some have more credible interpretations than other..

"This Fairy Tale was written by Goethe as a response to a work of Schiller’s entitled Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man). One of the main thoughts considered in these ‘letters’ centred around the question of human freedom".

"But both Schiller and Goethe recognised that freedom cannot be ‘imposed’ from the outside but must arise from within each person. Whilst he had an artistic nature, Schiller was more at home in the realm of philosophic thoughts and although Goethe found much pleasure in these ‘Letters’ of Schiller, he felt that the approach concerning the forces in the soul was too simply stated and, it should be said, working in abstract ideas was not Goethe’s way. So he set about writing a Fairy Tale that would show, in imaginative pictures, the way in which a human soul could become whole and free, thereby giving rise to a new and free human community..."

 I will actually talk more of this in a more general way. If you want to read a whole resyme of it you can do it her, but it is almost the same amount of text as the fairytail.. I see this as a dimension of the human existence written in a metaphoric way. It hits my internal system with messages that I have to interpret by my self. By compared it to a rhizomestructure I feel this could have some connections. 

The equalityness is for me about; different regimes of signs. It always has a multiple way of notification going in any direction. It looks like it has a start and a end, but actually you are in the middle of somewhere, in your mind, in a philosophical methaphor written by Goethe.

I wil try to explain this experience for you tomorrow with these little sketches..

 

 



3 comments:

Johannes Sverdrup said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
KED said...

Hei
"I have never ever read such a fairy tail and got so overwhelmed by its underlying messages".
I like this phrase in your text. On Tuesday we are introducing the notion Imbedded Information, that in one way can be seen as underlying messages.
Do you know the Charles Norton Lecture series? Italo Calvino gave six lectures in this series at Harvard, titled "Six memos for the next millenium", which I read many times in the early ninties. When I introduced this book for Marianne Skjulhaug two years ago she called me from Paris, saying "why have you not told me of this book before!"
In these six lectures (he died before the last one) titled Lightness, Speed, Visibility etc Calvino opens up what has informed his writing, given it direction.
Here I discovered the Italian author G.T. Lampedusa and his book "Il Gattopardo" (leoparden). This again opened up Italian literature for me and brought me into Claudio Magris Donau which informed one of our projects a lot (1993). And then into Umberto Ecos "Six walks in the fictional woods" that informed our project in Copenhagen in 1994.
So - to be overwhelmed by a text and a tales underlying messages can change your line of work. Early in Goethes text is this beautifull phrase: "We can take nothing back, which we have once shaken from us," said the Lights.

Knut Eirik

Johannes Sverdrup said...

Very nice tips there! I have already ordered the "Six memos for the next millenium", only 6$ used at amazone..

I think metaphores (underlaying messages) from literature and philosophy is a tool that have enormous potential to make content to our profession.
Im a novice regarding that "world", and Im saying again; very nice tips!

JOhannes