There are two elements that I have been chewing over that might help cogitation …..

1. The conflict between dark and light that is inherent in any discussion of Caravaggio. See beneath

2. Architectural (geometric and mathematical) structures either implied or espoused in musical composition. I’m finding texts that might interest you both in Frances Yates and also in the work of my great hero Athanasius Kircher, the last man in human history to know everything https://www.fulltable.com/ak/kircher2/aa.html and immensely influential then and now.

1. MANI There is a Christian presupposition that the Messiah establishes light into a dark world. But the prophet Mani (the root of Manicheism) offered a more ingenious, even moving interpretation of the relationship between Light and Dark in Matters Spiritual. For Mani the spiritual struggle was over between the forces of Good and Evil, and Evil had won (shades of Milton here) , scattering all shards of light out into a bleak dark landscape. And that the adept had a responsibility to gather the hidden shards and replace them in the Empyrean. The article I attach says, “ The Sun and the Moon were frequently visualized as ships, more specifically as ferries carrying the cargo of light. Here I would like to concentrate on an evidently widely held Manichaean notion, closely related to the concept of luminaries as ships, which is supposed to account for the waxing and waning phases of the moon. The liberation of light from the worldly sphere was conceived as a continuous process, in which both the cosmic mechanisms and the Manichaean elect actively participated. The purified light ascending from the world back to the Realm of Light was helped in its ascension by the so-called Column of Glory (or Column of Praise), the Moon, and the Sun. The Moon and the Sun continuously loaded and unloaded cargoes of liberated light. As attested in several sources, the changing shape of the Moon was explained by the Manichaeans as due to its receiving the light for fourteen days, and then transmitting it to the Sun for another fourteen days.”

Just a sensational visualisation but even more so for me when I was working up Marcel Duchamp’s thoughts making the narrative of the Large Glass. And the process behind his section called ”The Milky Way.” where he has a wry take on the shipboard process.

Manicheeism was a powerful force of belief, seen as in direct competition with Christianity, a tension leading to its violent suppression, but leaving a legacy of thought, of light being restored in fragments from the Dark.

A personal note. I did a paper at the very first Wyndham Lewis Symposium at the Tate. The Chair as Julian Symons who asked me whether I thought Lewis was Manichean. I hadn't the faintest fucking idea what he meant, and blathered my way through in a most unconvincing way. Never forgotten the panic.

https://www.fulltable.com/VTS/l/lewis/lewis.jpg

Music thoughts later