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Brilliant, I’d love to dive into some of your thoughts about contemporary art and music, but before we do, Stephen Chan in the chat has asked, some of what has been described reminds me of fractals with nature, or is the relationship between archetypal patterns and fractals, are they two of the same, or is there some differentiation? I think the best way to understand symbolic patterns is fractals, that’s for sure. If are interested in that, my brother wrote a book called The Language of Creation, which goes more into it in almost like a mathematical way, but that is really the way to understand order. What fractals do in terms of symbolism is that in some ways you basically have one pattern, which is like one in many, like that’s the pattern, it’s like one in many, and unity is almost like one in two, so it’s like unity, opposition, and then resolution of opposition, sometimes it can become more complex, but usually that’s just the basic pattern, and it can be represented in all kinds of ways, as a mountain, as all these different types of patterns, but the idea that it’s fractal is very important, which means that because you can experience the pattern at every level, you can experience unity, so let’s say it this way, you can experience unity and multiplicity at, let’s say, let’s take the relationship between people and groups and things, you can experience it within yourself, we have a multiplicity of thoughts and passions and ideas, but you’re somehow able to notice that you’re one person, and then you can do that in a group, you have a family, so it’s like there’s multiple people in the family, but we recognize unity within that family, then you can scale that up into groups, into churches, or religious groups, or cities, nations, etc., etc., you can just keep scaling that up until you realize that the idea that, for example, the United States is one thing, it’s like why is it one thing, it’s like billions and billions of things, but it’s true through that fractal relationship, and one of the things that modernism has done is that, if we do want to get into modernism, is that modernism has tended to level the fractal nature of things, it tends to want to either stay in opposites, kind of irreducible opposites, often wants to reduce it into like a basic opposite, where you don’t have this self-same fractal structure, and so because of that, it tends to, so a good example would be, the way that traditional societies are usually set up, or have this fractal nature, so a medieval village has the home with the hearth, and then those homes in the hearth exist in neighborhoods with churches, and then all those neighborhoods with churches exist in like a bigger city with the cathedral, the cathedral is the highest building, and then it’s like the center for the entire city, and then now that reproduces itself all the way down, and so what modernism tends to do is that it like levels, it doesn’t tend to want to understand the fractal nature, and so it’ll create things like suburbs, like suburbs and let’s say shopping centers, and then there’s no centers, and the houses become de-centered, we don’t even think about the manner in which the house, the family would come together properly in a house, it’s just like living spaces basically that are just kind of leveled, so modernity tends to do that, it tends to move towards absolute uniformity, and then also idiosyncratic multiplicity, so and if you look at most modern movements you’ll notice that they tend to swing between those two extremes, and so you can have something like let’s say in painting you can have something like supremacism and expressionism happening at the same time, you know you have these movements towards abstraction where we want to reduce, you know if you think of Malevich’s painting for example, you want to reduce everything to its absolute essence, like color field painting even all the way into the 70s or conceptual art, and then you have you know absolute breakdown where it’s like everything goes, there are no rules, it’s just complete idiosyncrasy, you know you tape a banana to a wall and that’s considered equal to any form of art, so that’s definitely what I think happens, I don’t know modernism as much in music, so I sadly but I do see something about for example atonal music in the 20th century that it has that tendency, it’s like it doesn’t take it into account the fractal nature of how we experience music, and so you have this like imposition of mathematical structures that are extremely complex onto a musical system that doesn’t take into account the human desire for something like a simple round, like a simple return, or a simple cycle of coherent experience, and so I don’t think that modern music or modern art is, how can I say this, that it’s stupid or that it’s you know a lot of people have this idea that it’s just anything goes, no it’s not true, it’s not anything goes, it actually tends to be extremely like almost tyrannical imposition of like systems of thinking onto the art, and then you end up with things that people actually, or that very few people can enjoy because it’s so high that it’s almost impossible for it to land. Beautiful, I’ll take it. Tywee Roberts who can’t be here today has asked, you’ve discussed before your view on contemporary art as an odd fetishization of the art object removed from any actual function, could you say more about that and especially whether you think that contemporary music has arrived at a similar place, there’s much crossover between these two worlds and I wonder if music might have also been removed too far from having a functional context. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how music has evolved in the modern era, and he says thank you so much for your work and best wishes. No, I totally think that the same thing happened to music that happened to all the other arts is that if you think about the medieval world, people struggle to understand this and they think that it’s actually like a diminishing of art, but in the medieval world, poetry and music would always serve a function, which is why, for example, poetry would be panegyric. Most poetry in the medieval times would be panegyric, would be something like celebrating something, like celebrating a king, celebrating a saint, celebrating Christ and everything, and we tend to think like that’s lower, but it’s actually because it was trying to serve a purpose in the world, and music I think would have been the same. That is, most music would have been either, let’s say, folk music in terms of dancing, so it has a communal function. It would have been composed for certain events, for certain high figures like kings and nobles or whatever, to celebrate certain accomplishments, often related to poetry as well. So let’s say someone would compose a ballad to celebrate a great feat that would have happened in a battle, and then you can see, of course, that the highest version of that would be celebrating God, and so the highest forms of music would be directed towards the church and directed towards celebration of God, and I think that even as secular people, I think it’s probably possible to kind of understand why that is. It’s just saying we want the music to be integrated into everything else. We don’t want it to stand out as just a strange idiosyncratic thing, but rather we want it to integrate with other things, and therefore it has to participate in the world, and especially the church would have been a manner in which it participated in society at the highest level, celebrating the highest thing, but then also would have been in relationship to the poetry, in relationship to the images as well, in the space, let’s say, in a kind of sacred space, so architecture, music, all these things would have come together, into a kind of celebration. So what we see with the modern music is, first of all, I think already with the opera, we have a problem, which is that we have a problem because in some ways we’re moving towards, like let’s say, entertainment. Now there’s nothing wrong with entertainment. I think entertainment’s fine, but I don’t think that that’s the highest function that music can play, but sadly that is pretty much now, today, what it has been relegated to, and I think that already starts at the moment with the celebration of opera as being supposedly the highest art, and you see the same with dance. It’s like ballet becomes the highest dance. Well, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know. Wouldn’t the highest dance be more integrated? Like folk dancing or court dancing would have been more integrated into the world than ballet, because ballet is just spectator, and so I think that concert music already brings music into a space where it’s going to reach highs, so it’s like this is the thing. When I talk about this separation of absolute, let’s say, a kind of tyranny and then a kind of idiosyncrasy, so it’s going to bring highs, and so I totally agree that Bach and Mozart and maybe Beethoven are reach highs that liturgical music didn’t, because it kind of abstracts itself and it moves away from its ground, like the way that it’s incarnated into the world, but I think already when you get to Beethoven, you’re like in deep, you’re seeing the trouble like right out the door, like you’re just seeing the trouble coming, and I think that that trouble starts to unravel rather quickly, and so then you end up with composers that are so obscure in terms of popular capacity to listen, like if nobody listens to Webern that doesn’t study art, like nobody listens to all these modern composers, and then what happens is the music that becomes popular becomes more and more, let’s say, trite and more and more almost like all in the hips, right? It just kind of moves down into the hips, which was there in the Middle Ages, like you know there was dance, dance was part of it, but there was something kind of holding it together, but now it moves just into the hips, and then it’s like basically, you know, whatever electronic dance music is the end of that, it’s like it’s just a beat basically, it’s just a beat, pop music, it’s like just the same, especially now these like new AI, they sound like AI genre, I think they’ve been working using AI for a while, because you have these like melody tropes, and then you’re listening to a song, you’re like what the hell, like I just heard that, you know, and then they people kind of they pull out certain tropes from each other’s songs, and then all this song just ends up sounding exactly the same, it’s pretty, it’s pretty, it’s very weird, so I think that that, I think that the de-incarnation of music has led both to its moving towards something completely obscure, and that nobody cares about except for people that study music, and then coming all the way down, the one that’s the most incarnate in some ways, it was, I think jazz was the most incarnate, because it had, it did have, because it stayed with dance, I think it was still the best, the best of what the modern world had to offer was jazz, but even that gets like, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know, like I think I like listening to Miles Davis, but then I don’t, like I just like, I’m just like, what am I listening to, like I can handle 10 minutes, and then I’m done.