The Natural Sun
Announcements about our sun and its natural conditions
- Chapter 28 -
Art and science buildings in the communal settlements
Concerning the other buildings of the consortium, these differ from the private dwellings only in the wall windows. Also the reason why the walls are non-transparent as distinct from the main building. The shape of these windows is usually semi-circular with just a few round or hexagonal ones.
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Nor do the rooves reach the height of the private dwellings being rather obtuse and low. Some consortium buildings have cupolas and so the consortium gives the impression of a sizeable city.
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The consortium is usually surrounded by a high rampart with several watch towers. There is usually a consortium theatre but not of your variety, where performances consisting of the pictorial presentation of one or other person's most diverse experiences. The pictorial performance then faithfully reproduces the region of the presenter's experience. One has to add that this equator's inhabitants are great friends of painting, wherefore with very few exceptions, the inhabitants are competent painters. For here, painting is also the only form of writing, it being every person's responsibility to reproduce nature faithfully.
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Knowing this, you shall understand the type of theatre performance presented there, for it consists of no more than certain clever pictorial acts, following which the whole theatre has the look of a big, rounded mural depicting a whole city or region of note, except that you have to think of a much larger mural than the frescoes on Earth. Because the theatre in such consortiums has a circumference of between six to eight hundred metres and a height often up to one hundred metres.
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You may like more details about such buildings and they shall be supplied. This theatre building cannot be entered like other private houses but by an underground entrance for which purpose there is a kind of projection similar to the side chapels of your houses of prayer. In this chapel there is a niche of a sizeable depression of about six metres, at the end of which is the portal whose wings swing outward. From this gate a staircase leads down as into one of your cellars and that into a depression of about fourteen metres. At the bottom of the staircase begins another staircase by which one accesses the middle of the theatre.
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About six metres from the theatre's interior wall runs a row of pillars which help to carry firstly the ceiling and also the roof. About six metres above the floor, these pillars also carry a spacious gangway with decorous railings from which one actually obtains the best view of the performance.
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In the middle of the theatre building, about two metres from the ascending staircase door there is another immensely sturdy pillar also supporting the ceiling and roof and carrying a spiral staircase up to the ceiling.
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Behind this pillar is another smaller one also reaching up to the ceiling. From the main central pillar about ten metres before the ceiling, runs another walkway over the second pillar and then to a row of pillars and through to the theatre wall upon which walkway one can get to the said spiral staircase of the central main pillar.
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At the same height of this walkway around the entire theatre wall, runs a three metre wide walkway, also provided with a railing of course. This gangway is not supported by pillars but is carried by bow type diagonal wall struts anchored in the wall.
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You may ask the purpose of this gangway? It serves no purpose other than to hang the mural from its railing hooks, which usually reaches down to the floor from this rail and hence not infrequently giving it a drop of between one hundred and sixty to two hundred metres.
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You may further ask how to get such huge paintings through the not so large entrance gate? It is done piecemeal in strips of about six meters each. These strips are hung side by side in their order from the walkway rail and together present a complete picture.
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When taken down, they are rolled up again and taken from the theatre building and into the so-called theatre library building or the presenter has the option of taking his props with him especially if the presented experience did not attract much favourable comment.
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Works of poetry are also more highly regarded than prose. What do they classify as poetry or prose? Prose is that which presents the author's own, ordinary life experiences. If these experiences are not notable or especially instructive they are handed back to the author without further ado and he is told that such presentations don't belong in this house in which only such things are to be performed as enrich the wisdom of man's spirit. If such prose works can demonstrate such extraordinary scenes then they are accepted, whilst the mundane is handed back to the presenter. Works of poetry are those not originating in experience but are products of spiritual imagination. Such works then remain on fairly extended exhibition.
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Why are such poetry works so popular? Because they are more rare, especially among the inhabitants of this belt. Wisdom being intrinsically bereft of fantasy in that the domain of imagination is the property of creative love. Wherefore with such performances the well-known maxim applies: where the great ones build, the little ones have their hands full. And all sorts of things are predicted for such work, everyone finding something else for a conversation in it, making it a favourite topic for people of this belt.
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Therewith the substance of the theatre building. But a clever critic could comment: near the top of the wall is a walkway from which the round mural hangs right down to the floor. The walls are not transparent, nor is there any opening in the ceiling. Since any potential windows would obviously have to be obstructed by the painting, we would ask the author to bring us also some light into this theatre building or we shall not get to see overly much of this mural!
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Just a little patience. Plenty of light is on the way. On your Earth it is custom to paint diverse theatre decorations. Behold, something similar is the case here, but the art of painting here does not consist of some theatrical goofing but this theatre painting-style employs luminescent paint making it also the most vivid and enduring. For in the sun, paint without its own light soon perishes, but with its own light it bears, as it were, the arms with which to fight off all destructive external light.
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Behold, this comprises lighting at this stage performance and so the theatre has windows indeed, but these serve for visibility only during the setting up of a production. Once it is set up, all windows are completely closed so that the attraction of this painting would not be spoilt by any other light beam.
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Although these paints in the sun are not hard to work with, much practice is required in order to, as you would say, allow for shade and light to be evenly distributed. With non-luminescent paint, shading is of course much easier to effect, but with luminescent paints, shading is subject to considerable problems. Because of this, the painters, especially the cooperatives of our belt, are so well practiced that it is easy for them to complete a mural in one year by your reckoning.
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To give you an idea of this technique, I remind you of a certain painting technique on Earth that has much in common with this type of light-painting upon our solar equator. It is the so-called porcelain painting on your Earth, where painting is done with paints that in the natural state appear extremely dull and uniform. When the crockery is subjected to glazing the beautiful colours emerge.
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Behold, the theatre exhibits are painted in this way. After the strips are painted they are covered with a kind of lacquer. Only then do the colours begin to appear vividly, all caused by free sunlight taken up initially by these dull colours and then vividly retained permanently.
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That is all that is noteworthy about the cluster housing theatre.
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Regarding the other cooperative buildings, these on the one hand serve as dwellings for the teachers of wisdom but on the other hand also as store houses for all sorts of memorabilia and smaller paintings.
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We can add in passing that these other buildings are usually grouped in an elliptical circle around the main building and that the cluster settlements are usually built upon the shores of lesser seas as well as on the high plateaus on the bank of major rivers.
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For the southern belt, just think of this as rather rounded off and enlarged and you have everything that the southern belt offers.
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Presently we shall move to land cultivation upon these two belts and so we can leave it for today.