Generalized Esthetics

Extract

Forms are produced, it seems to me, by chance, by growth, by design or by imprint. The curves of a pebble, the elusive architecture of clouds, flames, cascades, the cracks in dried-out soil are the result of a variety of causes, or if you like, a variety of interacting accidents, compromises between concurrent forces, balances, wear, or varying degrees of inertia. These, though perhaps calculable, are hardly worth calculating. For we know ahead of time that the final outcome must be arbitrary, depending as it does on thousands of successive and transitory rivalries. No significant phenomenon can result from such a series. Forms generated in this way are the outcome of an infinity of varied accidents, which are conjoined, composed or cancelled out in an unpredictable manner. They are like dream images, and sometimes, just as ravishing. No law presides at their formation, which obeys too many laws at once, and, what is more, laws unaccustomed to one another and brought together by accident. The origin of this kind of form is properly assigned to chance, though I am well aware that such forms owe their appearance to a welter of determining causes, each of them tyrannical in their separate domain. But the welter, though in the end determinant, is itself accidental.