Dennis Hollingsworth

Black Monad

The folks at The Partially Examined Life. were kind to send me a high five in an earlier blogpost about them in this blog.

Gents, they are.

Check out their recent podcast about race, episode #52. As they laid out their analysis, I kept mapping the structure of ideas that they presented to the overarching dialog in the art world. See if you do too. It's worth your while watch their blog because all of the interstitial posts between podcasts are great, even the commentary within them.

Part way through an already interesting discussion, they drop monads into the conversation... my ears perked up even more. Then guest Lawrence Ware let loose with "Black Monad" and I doubled over with a big smile.

Shortly before I knew much about Leibniz, I named the spiny hemispheres in my paintings monads. All I knew at the time was that the venerable philosopher imagined a universe of indissoluble individuals rendered as mirrored spheres. Later the more I learned, the more I felt justified in my nomination. Each monad was an empire unto itself and to describe how they could communicate, Liebniz has them vibrating like tuning forks. (By the way, Voltaire was so revolted at the optimism -positivism?- of Liebniz's Monadology that he wrote Candide. Two more poles in the world: optimism and pessimism.) Click on the wikipedia link and you'll find gems like: "True substances were explained as metaphysical points which, Leibniz asserted, are both real and exact ? mathematical points being exact but not real and physical ones being real but not exact." It's like he was anticipating the position/velocity marvels of particle physics!