Ability to grant beingness
An
article by L. Ron Hubbard, from
The Rehabilitation of the Human Spirit
lectures
When Mike Angelo painted
something or sculpted something, it was
quite perfect in its form. But if it was
just form that we were going on today, just
form alonesee, we're right up there
on the border of not quite able to talk
about this. MEST language sort of goes by
the boards. The form and line of the painting
and of the statue is good. It's good enough
so that you see a photograph of it and you
think that's fine. And it isn't until you
confront an original Mike Angelo, vis-à-vis,
that you realize that the fellow who painted
this thing really meant it. The amount of
life in the statue itself, which is being
controlled and held down in some fashion
or anotherthe thing is just about
to become a nova or something. It'sthe
amount of vitality. Now we are into, practically,
necromancy. In other words, that thing is
alive, and its life is quite apparent even
to a street urchin.
Now, I saw one time a very beautiful white
statue by an artist, or by a sculptor, whose
name I haven't any inkling of at all; and
it was in a perfectly strange and peculiar
part of the world that you wouldn't expect
an artist to have lived in; and it was so
simple as to form that it was hardly guilty
of being a statue at allwhich yet
had impressed into it so much vitality,
of a sort of a calm and pervading nature,
that it was actually filling up a whole
patio full of calmness.
The thing was alive. There was no doubt
about it at all. And this was not something
which a gifted few would perceive. Those
people who are completely dedicated to the
plow might not have seen it very easily,
but every beggar and peddler and maid and
person and gentleman and clerk on that street
would come over by that patio and sit down
and look at the statue for a short time
almost every evening. There were many better
places to sit. But they would come in and
they'd look at the statue, see? It was alive,
there was no doubt about that. And of course,
one could even say that they themselves
by looking at it and granting it further
being, it kept up the tradition of its existence.
And so you had a living something.
Have you ever seen a house that nobody
lived in go to pieces and lose its beingness?
Have you ever seen a town lose its beingness?
Or have you ever felt directly the beingness
of a town? People keep up this beingness.
Now, an artist can come ina writer,
a poet, something of this sortand
grant a new beingness to a town. Sort of
out of whole cloth, he just looks around
and he says, "Why, you have a beautiful
town here," and so forth, and he tells
the people all about it. And they've never
granted any beingness at all. They're so
busy trying to keep each other from eating
each other up, they've never noticed this;
but this is something they can agree upon,
this town. And the town comes to life, just
to that degree. It is alive then.
L. Ron Hubbard, from the lecture
BEINGNESS
Excerpted
from The Rehabilitation
of the Human Spirit lectures
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