The Centre of the Centre
I spend way too much of my free time thinking about the nature of reality. When one’s conception of reality is shattered, we refer to this state as ontological shock.
I’ve personally found myself in this state more times than I have fingers – religiously, politically, socially – when the framework for your life breaks down, you are left discombobulated, a part of you dies with the idea.
COVID for me came as an ontological shock. Before COVID, the knowledge that the world could shut down ran counter intuitive to the privileged banal malaise I found myself living in as a white(ish) collar professional in an affluent Western country.
I know it was not just me, COVID changed that for everyone – we were forced to reevaluate our trust in the public, our own close relationships and the bonds that hold us together as a society. We will likely carry this ontological shock, and the subsequent traumas it catalyzed, for decades to come.
It was reflecting on my ontological world view during this period that I conceived of The Centre of the Centre. It came to me as a question first: What is at the very centre of existence? What is existence at its most basic fundamental level?
As is often the case when one is forced to reflect upon mortality, during COVID my usual pro-science worldview was shaken with the need to find meaning and understanding in my life. I could not personally turn to religion, so I turned to art and the cultural history of symbols. I did find comfort in the ontology of several mythic traditions – the cyclical nature of the Vedic sagas, the drop returning to the sea of souls – anything that could shake me of the fear that the universe itself is indifferent to my human existence.
In many creation myths, the idea of two polar opposites – one the creator, one the destroyer – plays a primary role in balancing the cosmos. It’s represented in the Tao as the yin and yang, opposing forces each containing an aspect of the other. In (the aptly named) Manichean religion it was the good forces of light in eternal struggle with the evil forces of darkness.
I can not claim to have anything beyond a rudimentary grasp of duality as it manifests in these rich cultural traditions, nor can I claim to have an advanced understanding of physics or computer science. None-the-less, I was quite drawn to the idea of this ontological binary and how it overlays with the digital binary of the modern world. 1 ‘on’, an act of creation or release of energy and 0, ‘off’, the null, the energy of inaction; Both necessary to our digital ontology.
Quantum computing has introduced us to a potential disruption of this binary in the form of the qubit. Not a trinary system, but the same superimposed state that Schrodinger’s cat finds itself in: A state of potentiality.
I imagined the centre of all existence to be this super-positional state; Long brushstrokes drawing in towards, short bursts of brushstrokes bursting out, containing within itself all that exists. It is one of the few times in my painting journey that things flowed out of me organically.
It is not a being of creation or entropy but occupying both positions at the same time. The Yum and Yab of reality containing within it the cosmic egg.
(Apologies to any real scientists or cultural historians if any of that was painful to read.)