Spherical Human

The human being – once a perfect, spherical body with two faces looking towards opposite directions: Descended from the sun, moon and earth; striving to take possession of the heavens; punished by Zeus, shattered into two imperfect halves as man and woman; two complementary beings united in love; perhaps rediscovering wholeness …

Bernd Perlbach
(Thoughts on the myth of the spherical men, attributed to Aristophanes by Plato in his Symposion)

2022 · Spherical Human

Creativity

All do the gods give, the eternal,
To their favourites, wholly:
All the joys, the eternal,
All the sorrows, the eternal,
Wholly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
From a letter to Auguste zu Stolberg

2022 · Creativity

Cycle

And swift, beyond conceiving swift,
The earth is wheeling onward; mark!
From dark to light its surface shift,
From brightest light to deepest dark!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust I, Prologue in Heaven, Gabriel

2022 · Cycle

Grace

I believe that it is the fate of the Occident to bring the critically rational, wanting to understand on the one hand and the mystically irrational, seeking the redeeming experience of unity on the other hand into connection with each other again and again. Both attitudes will always dwell in the soul of the human being, and the one will always already carry the other as the germ of its opposite. This creates a kind of dialectical process of which we do not know where it will lead. I believe that as Westerners we must entrust ourselves to this process and recognise the pair of opposites as complementary. By allowing the tension of opposites to exist, we must also acknowledge that in any path of knowledge or salvation, we depend on factors beyond our control, which religious language has always called grace.

Wolfgang Pauli 1954

2021 · Grace

Geometry & Illusion

Of Einstein, Pythagoras, and Gauss,
of Riemann and Euclid.
From the flat to the curve,
from the absolute to the relative.

Oh eyes, have you been deceived in the end?
Is the straight line perhaps crooked?
Do you, O magic, turn space into time,
do you have even more in store for me?

Your mind is drawn to my sphere,
your knowledge brings you great honor,
yet the truth—the truth remains
for you, O human, a chimera.

2021 · Geometry & Illusion