Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Utopia: Time Cast as a Voyage
1974
Oil, Acrylic and Lettering Canvas
73 1/2 x 73 1/2 in.

Subject: The dynamics of the intentional community

Symbol Evocation: Heaven on earth

Comments: When the German Existential Lutheran Theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) wrote, in 1951, an essay entitled Critique and Justification of Utopia, his conclusion was: "utopia: the suspension between the possible and the impossible." The 1950s was not a very sympathetic era toward utopian thought. It was a time coming down off the negativity toward utopia expressed by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in the 1930s and 40s. By the 1960s (a pro-utopia period) Tillich's apocalyptic non sequitur began to make sense. Because, utopia means one thing when you strip it of all scholarship and classical references to such notables as: Plato, Saint Thomas More (who coined the term "utopia" in 1516, Francis Bacon, Tommaso Campanella, Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells and all the rest. Utopia amounts to one simple concept: Heaven on Earth. Well, how can you have that? Isn't heaven supposed to be an "afterlife" experience-- if it exists at all? Was Northrop Frye right when he claimed the idea of utopia was worth the ink and paper the word was written on? Well I for one believe it does exist, meaning it has existed and can exist again because its ontological status is a special modality of mysticism-- a social mode.

Consider the symbol or structure of utopia:
The breathing in of the universe: When the one falls instantly and without effort into the many. This is the female aspect of the manifestation-- the breathing out, the great release. But when the many attempt the long and arduous struggle to come back to the one, this becomes the male aspect of the manifestation of the universe-- the breathing in-- the path to utopia or the alchemical task to resolve aspects of consciousness as a manifestation of the collective will with aspects of consciousness as a manifestation of one's immiscible self.

The path to utopia is expressed as a non-oppressive environment free from all systems whether they are hierarchies, holiarchies or heteroarchies. The form is the major fractal of the manifest universe-- the logarithmic spiral of equilangular spiral that makes an infinite number of revolutions around the one, becoming closer to it-- the source of all without ever violating the one from the power of the ego. The goal of this mystical topology is the utopic-- the space of the utopia. It is the space of nature, which when fully revealed to human consciousness demonstrates the unity of concepts which are apparently separated by the becomingness of history, such as: the abstract/ the real, the objective/ the subjective, death/ life, mass/ consciousness, the profane/ the sacred, matter/ spirit, body/ soul. Utopic space is the action of bringing together the dream of reason-- the freedom of the will as pure being (transcendence) with the temporal ecstasy of the imagination-- the control of the will as pure becoming (morality).
Since the path to true utopia is a fractal vector, it is the control of four other vectors that would if released veer toward spaces other than utopic space. Utopian or utopic space exists as a dimensional portal between the 4th and 5th dimensional realms. It is literally a symbolic space and is therefore an a-dimensional and not non-dimensional space. To be a-dimensional means that it is a space that transcends the natures of the dimensioned spaces that bound it, and it subsumes the natures of the boundary spaces. If utopic space loses the tension of its quadruple nature, it will simply collapse into a space of boundaries, depending of course, upon which of the spaces suddenly becomes dominant.

The boundary-- non-utopic-- spaces are: 1. Eutopia: A life lived in relation to the mystical experience and which abdicates the common good and all social connections and responsibilities. In this space the ego believes that it has become God. The vector is directly into the source of all. 2. Kakatopia (or Dystopia): Lives are lived in the knowledge of their mutual alienation ("we are all alone together"), in mutually repellent spaces-- this is the literal bad place. The vector continues the initial explosion of the one into the many which in now unnecessary. 3. Kenotopia: Lives lived in a space of comfort and ignorance without stress, striving or goals. It is the kitsch place. The vector is a circle, which is established at fixed distances from the source of all, depending when the life left the true path to utopia, and can therefore account for differences and levels of taste even in the realm of kitsch. 4. Oligotopia: A group of lives develops a system by which they can leave the path to utopia and enter kenotopia, which because of the system becomes the bureaucratic place. The vector is a line away from the source of all which is stopped by a pre-existing kenotopic space.

The fractal spiral of nature is evolution if the human consciousness was not present. To become one with nature means to be on the path to utopia. To be in or live in utopic space has a metaphor which I have always liked-- that is the Wheatstone Bridge invented in 1872 by Sir Charles Wheatstone. It is a device for measuring electrical resistances and consists of a powered conductor joining two branches of a circuit and a galvanometer. The electromotive force introduced into the circuit is totally balanced by electrical resistors. Both the power and the resistance can increase in a balanced potential. An ideal Wheatstone Bridge, which possesses an infinite resistance to an infinite electrical power supply, would produce an undetectable rising tension unless entry into the system was gained. This system of utopic space has always seemed to me to be the most vivid, because it represents the attempt to engineer the meeting of the immovable object with the irresistible force, and this process is observable only from within the system. Like utopia itself, it seems not to exist unless you are actually in it.