La rel de l’arbre és una roda

“The root of the tree is a wheel”, eight words that appear at the start of Ramon Llull’s book Principles of Medicine. The syntax of Llull’s entire body of work is truly forest-like, both in the repeated metaphor of the tree, with which he pictures the various areas of knowledge and divides them into branches, and in the way and the showiness with which all kinds of connections and analogous demonstrations blossom in it. The two constituent components of the system of argumentation in the Art are unquestionably the derivations into a branch and the combinations in a wheel –reflections, relational circles.

Certainly, the entire Art rises up lofty and turns. As a result, the possibility of rotating in it from the root proves as wonderful as it is practical. Only in this way manner can the choreography of the trees, the mechanical clarity of the rationales and the bewilderment that all this might induce succeed in adapting to a possible overall wish to plant all trees in a wheel, as the converging or diverging lines of a single sphere.

It goes without saying that in a forest nowadays, the trees shoot up in the same way that any book by Llull offers itself to be reread. But if there is one image that illustrates the eight words of Llull’s phrase, it is that of the cart loaded with bundles of firewood, with the mule at the front, the wheel in the middle and Joan Estrada holding the rope at the back. The picture was taken in Taradell (c. 1950).

Perejaume, May 2016

 

Audiovisual installation produced by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona CCCB for the exhibition The thinking machine. Ramon Llull and the "ars combinatoria".

Script and direction: Perejaume
Shooting, editing and postproduction: Wasabi Produccions s.l.
Singers: Jaume Ayats, Sebastià. Bardolet, Pol Blancafort and Josep Pieres
Selection of Ramon Llull's texts: Perejaume
Adaptation and musical arrangements: Jaume Ayats

Related to The Thinking Machine

14 July 2016