What Truth Requires
Day 37 of Hilma af Klint and The Imaginary Possible
We take so much of what we believe on faith, guaranteed by someone else’s assurances and proofs and fears.
Often this means living within the limits of other people’s imaginations.
How do we learn to know what is true for ourselves?
We are encouraged to agree and rally around common sense though most of the time what is commonly accepted dead wrong.
The truth can be simple or complex but it is almost never as obvious as others want us to believe.
We often keep our most important truths hidden, sometimes for entire lifetimes, because we fear what the truth will destroy us or those we love.
Hilma af Klint dedicated her life to exploring unseen realities and painting them. She did this knowing that most of the people around her would not understand her discoveries.
Her family thought her odd, unconventional. Some people in town wondered if she was a witch because she bought so many eggs which she used to make tempera paint.
In one of her notebooks she wrote:
“Only for those prepared to abandon life in its known form, life will appear in new forms of greater beauty and perfection. But to reach this, silence must be achieved in both thought and feeling. This means losing part of life, for life is first and foremost permeated by human thoughts and feelings in a universal and common way.” —Hilma af Klint, Studies of the Life of the Soul
She was aware that pursuing the truth mean abandoning her own previously held beliefs as well as the beliefs commonly held by those around her.
I am thinking about this lately. What it takes to stop telling yourself the stories you’ve built your life around, the stories that have kept you safe.
The truth requires we do something we do not know how to do.
To know the truth, our truth, we must let go of what we have known, and instead move towards the unknown, the mysteries within and without.
PS.
The name of this painting is Centripetal Force.
Centripetal Force:
noun; a force that acts on a body moving in a circular path and is directed toward the center around which the body is moving.
Though I know almost nothing about physics, it does seem to describe some of what is going on here.
