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THE PARADISIACAL MEMORY OF SILVIU ORAVITZAN
By Adrian Ionita
 I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea;Yet I know how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven;Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.
oceanum quem credidi: E. DickinsonGraciously tendered to our intellection, the inclusion of Silviu Oravitzan in a monumental artshow [1] is a contenting event, not only for a visual artist, but for a philosopher or poetic mind aswell. This happens mostly because of the beautifully blended nature of Oravitan’s artisticmessage and imagery. In his own words, Oravitzan is approaching the man’s challenge of transcending his earthly perspective, and see things from a divine point of view. [2] He does that, by using basic symbols as the Cross, the Center and the Light, inviting the viewer to forge anexploration in the elusive and mystifying realm of Paradisiacal Memory.Even though I am not obstinately concerned with salvation, I never relinquished my innocenttemptation to probe the congruities ingrained in our apprehension of mind, soul and memory.The subject is highly debated in the studies of human consciousness, mostly because eachdiscovery seems to add more mystery than it solves. The mandarin style of this literature ishighly metaphoric and persuasive. Oravitzan’s theoretical circumambulation seems to be anexercise fused in the same lineage.“When science has answered all its last questions- and solved all its problems - life will still beunexplained.” said Wittgenstein. His words fell on us deadweight. Still, the art world never feltthreatened by inadequacy towards objective reality or historical truth. Even though, in the artworld Oravitzan may look like an anchorite, he never invokes the authority of the Scriptures. Hisexercise is abstracted with primeval archetypes. The Paradise is one of them. The Hindusreferred to it as the Krita Yuba, the Hebrews as Eden, the Sumerians as Dilmun, and the Greeksas the Golden Age. It was observed by the Native Americans as the Time of the First People, by
 
Chinese as the Age of Perfect Virtue. It surfaced in so many cultures, that today became plausibleto believe that the myth has a historical content and, sometimes in the primeval past, some sort of grandiose drama impressed on the memory of the first people on Earth. [3]Oravitzan’s genuine idea is that transcending reality is a matter of identification and transpositionof symbols. Sacre and Profane are like a piece of stone broken in two. One part of it is in us andthe other part was kept by God. Transcendence and illumination are attained by solving the puzzle of putting these pieces together. A wonderful metaphor, repeated obsessively by the artist.Paradisiacal memory is embedded in the mystery of transcendental symbols. The Center, TheCross, The Light, embody in their simplicity, instructions to structure an ideal world. In one of his interviews, Oravitzan associates this process to a DNA code, probably in reference to adescription made in 1988 by Richard Heinberg [3]:“Perhaps the memory of Paradise can be compared to a metaphysical DNA code — a pattern thatis built into our psyche, just as the physical DNA code is built into our cellular structure - whose purpose is to guide the enfoldment of human culture. In this view, Paradise is simply the naturalway things are supposed to be, the way we were designed to live together and in relationshipwith Nature and Cosmos. In ignoring or short-circuiting that code of unfoldment, we trigger another part of that code - the warning system - which appears as the fear and expectation of apocalypse or purification.The new pattern into which the chaotic mass will be drawn cannot come from the old structuresof human culture. The only pattern strong enough to draw the disparate elements of human livesinto meaning and order is the pattern already present at the core of the collective unconscious -the paradisal memory of the natural state of being. “The obvious, naive question, which comes to mind, metamentalizing on the top of these thoughtsis whether we really can have a glimpse of the Paradise, the way a scientist is doinginterpretations of the DNA code.Locating the patterns already present in our memory has an entire history. In the past, it wasachieved through meditation aided by props like a mandala or an icon. In his interview withDeborah Howkins [2] Oravitzan claims that:“Time can be viewed as two continuums; historical time and extra-historical time - time out of history, or time before history, when the man was in paradise. In a way, the man “fell” intohistory when he was banished from paradise. Since we have been operating on historical time,man has been confronted with the events of daily life, with seasons, with love, births, deaths, or work. Yet, even while absorbed in these things, man has been obsessed with ideas that were notfrom his daily existence. Why? The answer for this, I believe, is that these signs were comingfrom his paradisiacal memory. Man has stored experiences in his memory that occurred beforehe became part of history, before he was banished from paradise. From this, we can explain the power of these symbols all over the world, before technology. Man has retained his memory of  paradise and the light he experienced there. Seeing these symbols help people recover or retrievetheir memories of paradise and in doing so, makes them feel closer to God. These symbols
 
inspire beatitude, peace - they help a person feel at peace with himself. They also foster feelingsof liberation from suffering and evil. “This brings us to the question, whether an icon is “recovered” through mental imagery from theabyss of a memory which exists there without experience, or is constructed through associationswith the visual world.In “The Craft of Thought, Meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, 400-1200 “,(Cambridge University Press, 1998) Mary Carruthers adduces a famous applology written toAbbot William of St. Thierry by the ascetic master Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), in which heexcoriates lazy monks who rely on other peoples images, instead of concentrating on aspectusand affectus, forms of memory training as concentrated inner seeing for a full recreation of “things”. Meditation is the interior reading of the book of one’s memory and the stylisticornament plays an important role in this process. Figuration prevents the meditators from inwardseeing, and in Mary Carruthers words, “to perfect their own mental machines”, or to “createmeditational compositions entirely within the mind, relying on images already in place”.Are there images already in place? In common monastic idiom, argues Marry Caruthers, one“remembers” Heaven or Hell, by making a mental vision or “seeing” of invisible things from thematters in his memory. She gives an example in the work of a rhetoric professor at Bolognia,Boncompagno da Signa (1235), who included in his discussion of rhetorical memoria, sectionsas “De memoria paradisi” or “De memoria inferni”, and even gave us clues for understandinghow we may “remember future things”, through their likeness to past things .According to Tony Birch , a philosopher and scholar of philosophical imagism, “Aristotledescribes recollection as a searching for an ‘image’ in a corporeal substrate (On Memory andReminiscence, 453a5). These references to mental images or pictures as if they were separateentities in the mind that could be literally seen have had many unfortunate consequences in thehistory of philosophy, especially after Descartes. As a result, Aristotle is usually blamed for  being the originator of the “picture in the head” view of mental images.” [5]Birch is referring to the Homunculus Argument, a highly debated theory of consciousness in the philosophy of mind. In order for an image to exist in our mind it has to be an observer like alittle man in our head or a homunculus to perceive it. But then, who is watching this observer?It’s like observing an image between the mirrors of a barber shop. The homunculus argument is a phenomenon which shows us how absurd is to imply that the act of self-observation is mediated by a separate observer. The perception is not a just a mot -a -mot transfer of data from here thereand the visual world. It is rather believed that images are “processed in much the same way thatfood is processed - broken down into its constituent parts and then built back up using a differentsubstrate, scaffold or template. The new template includes the viewer. So on one ’side’ we have‘the world’, on the other side we have the world+the viewer.” [6]Even though it is undeniable that we have mental images, their validity was contested byscientific scrutiny and only in the past decades their study emerged from the battle with the rigid positivism of the Behaviorism [7]
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