Angels On A Pin Head
Guilty of entertaining
Hugsap, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The disputation of angels on a pin head sent me off to consider Shakespeare’s equivocators (I knew I would fall foul on that inquisitorial stage) and the ‘dancing on a pin head’ metaphor / allegory in general.
Yeh, quickly – Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_the_head_of_a_pin%3F
Intention to discredit scholastic theology: In that case I am on the pinhead with both arguments there. Guilty on both counts the Lutherans and the Aquinas gang AND all the angels dancing, dancing.
No intellectual consequence: Who’s the judge? Me! – judge, jury and the accused. Guilty.
Dancing on a pinhead: The idea of dancing makes those poor angels themselves seem trite and superfluous. Surely though, a valid task; simply because of the effort and the purity of the intention. Let’s try to break the record of angels on a pinhead, which currently stands at..? Guilty (the dancing, the need for the pinhead and the entertaining of a numerical quality or beyond (tee-hee!)
Love! Love the idea of the Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese theologians debating the topic in Constantinople ibn 1453, while the city is besieged by the Turks. – That’s me as well – but there we are. I would discuss it while helping to operate the siege machine.
So there! Equivocator, Vacillator, Undecided Extemporiser, etc. Guilty.
About what? Mmm…
Equivocation is somewhat different, I am reminded. Ambiguous language, perhaps under torture, in the pleadings of a recusant or someone with secret papist plans.
‘You can be a liar, but you can’t lie to heaven’, says the Porter in Macbeth. This does strike at the middle to anyone who is a creative thinker. Artists can write manifestos but, in my opinion, an artist’s manifesto can only work if it includes the unresolved and the un-worked out, the vague and the striving to articulate.
I think of the actors accosted in the supermarket for the role they have played in a crime thriller.
Or Shostakovich’s music not being Stalinist enough, as in ‘Explain to me in what way your music embraces Stalinism. Go on! You know you can do it!’
So, an Artist must lie or become a collaborator of the worst sort if they are to sign up to anything completely, unless it is inherently ambivalent. The artist her / him / their self must be strident about where they are taking their unfolding talent along with a hypothetical set of evolving maxims that serve that quest. Self-serving, but hopefully, with a moral compass.
Unworldly really and that takes me back to the pinhead and ‘Here we are!’ and ‘Here I am’ equivocating, dancing and disputing.
xD