Art and Conflict

Buddhist philosophy, Zen meditations, New Age mantras: these things don't work for an artist.  The artist thrives on conflict.  Not as an end in itself toward drama, but as a catalyst for the newness, novelty, originality that comes from the mixing pot of change.

Philosophy does not work for artists.  Art is something other than philosophy.  It is more vibrant, alive, because it is a thing alive.  It is not static, except insofar as a painting is static.  The life of art comes from its lack of stability, it's action as a cipher or funnel.  All that moves through it - thought, feeling, memory - speeds up, slows down, shifts, swirls, ceases to know itself within the chaotic realm.  Chaos is the wrong word.  It is life itself, in its need and propensity to move and change.  It is life in its vibrancy.  Within art, things shift and change, lose their definition, and become associative, malleable, and connected.  They become based on their ability to associate, rather than their ability to differentiate.

Art is the tendency to take two things, profess them as opposite, and then try to bring them as nearly as possible to on another, let them grace each other, pass by one another, to appear briefly as one and the same, without breaking the veil of illusion.

Art is an illusion.  There is always an artifice to art.  Art is alive in its Nothingness.  It thrives in it lack of being.  It is a ghost, a slight of hand, a suggestion of authenticity without the credibility.  It seeks to be real while professing to be false.  A truth within a lie.  It cannot speak its truth without its falsity.  If it were spoken truly, it would be offensive, or worse.

Language and Reality

An argument is a proof and a paradox. It says, if A then B, and if B then C, and so if A then C. The proof is a succession of A, B, C. But an argument is a paradox because it is a circle that does not close. It does not close because language is a self-suspended system. It relies on itself to justify itself.

Language is a closed system. It creates Rationality by agreeing with itself. It is a system that depends wholly on itself to make sense. It has no outer reference that validates it in the way that, for example, a person can refer to another person to validate their story. There is no point where language becomes real. There is no point where language and reality become the same thing. Another way to look at it is that language is a system of tools to create agreements between people. The only way that language can be validated is when people act according to what they say they will do or when life occurs in the way described by language.

People presume that language can define Reality, but it can't because language is merely a possibility for rationality. It is not rational in itself. It can create systems of rationality but it does not, as a whole, agree with itself. If you attempt to define reality there will always be a loophole, and that loophole is some other argument that contradicts your argument. People question reality when they see this loophole because they presume that language has a one-to-one relationship with reality, but reality includes sense as well as language. It includes sensory experience as well as linguistic experience.

The Elements of Drama

Art is subdivided into sections: one of them is drama. The dramatic art depends upon concepts of beauty and terror. All things on stage are suspended between the tension of beauty and terror. Tragedy is on the more terrible side, but has beauty behind it, giving it a reason to tell a story. Comedy is more on the beautiful side, but the terrible aspect is what makes us laugh. Now we have Romance, Thriller, Horror, Western, Science-Fiction. Our dramatic art has grown heads.

In reality, a terrible thing is only terrible. It has no beauty in it. In drama, all terrible things must have some beauty in them, and all beautiful things must have some terror. The beauty of a terrible thing is what makes us interested in hearing its story. Likewise, the terror of a beautiful thing is what makes us interested in hearing its story. A terrible character will not be appreciated without a touch of beauty. And a beautiful character will not be paid attention to unless there is some element in their life that is unknown.

Drama is, at its base, an event in language. It tells a story, and a story is an event in language. Even when the drama breaks off from using the conventional form of telling a story, the assemblage of images tells a message, and a message is an event in language, as well.

Adrenaline

I think that adrenaline is for creating focus. A normal person or a house cat has a short attention span, meaning it is impossible for them to maintain focus on a static, non-changing object for more than a couple seconds at a time. Inevitably, their focus will shift to some other world or mind object. A person cannot naturally think of only one thing for a longer stretch than a moment. It is impossible to do this. The mind is in motion at all times and cannot be naturally kept in focus on one non-real object for longer than it takes to think of an idea. This is because objects, in the mind, have no boundary or structure in the literal sense, and so are fluid and connect to other ideas without prejudice. Adrenaline functions when an animal needs to focus in order to heed toward their survival. The Adrenaline pumps in and an animal can then focus with more precision, over longer periods of time thus allowing them to survive in a world containing threat and danger.

Adrenaline allows us to focus in this way perhaps because the mind is moving faster when it is on adrenaline. It skips over rates of thoughts at higher intervals per second thus allowing the animal to quickly train their mind to focus on one object. Normal processes of habituating oneself take a longer period of time to train. But on adrenaline, the mind is moving at such a speed that the animal can to train their mind faster. Perhaps this is why motivation plays such a key role in learning. And perhaps it also explains a little why the source of our inspiration is such a mystery to us: it remains fogged by the unknown processes of our instincts.

This conversation perhaps lends itself to the notion that there are, indeed, frequencies of thought. But rather than adhere the term "frequency" to a non-real concept, such as is "higher orders of thought", we can adhere it to a measurable interval, which is real because it is mesaurable. This gives us a method for affirming the conjectures of our rational thought thus giving us a realm of knowledge, rather than giving us a term that is non-rational that we have to accept as rational thus making us accept something on faith in a realm where faith has no bearing.

The Engine

The Engine is the most romantic emblem of the last epoch. The defining character of its age, it encapsulated the rebelliousness and yearning for freedom that was caught, like a sparrow, in the bosom of young men. One wonders, in the Year of the Computer, where this rebelliousness and yearning has gone.

The engine's romance is stated succinctly by its power. There is a reason that inventors did not create a smooth-running, clean, and simple artifice, and that reason is that people like the noise. People like a heavy, complicated girth that roars, growls, and purrs threateningly. People like the spectacle of the sound. Push a button and it roars. The wall of sound is a monument to its pomp. It is unabashed. It is like a tiger who lacks the self-consciousness of his power. People are friends with this barrel-chested baritone with pistons festooned across his chest, clitter-clattering. Strap that to your back and hit it.

And here is the pie: when you are moving at a stellar speed, when you are tripping with ease and grace around elements and splitting the wind, the noise - the noise that is clattering and ricocheting off the blue arches of the sky - is in concert with your speed, part and parcel with your power. It is the mouth of the motion. The foot of the freedom. The stamp of the sprint.

An Amen

I thank you, God, for the piano.

My hands are together, raised to the sky.

My knees are on the ground, and I'm looking up in placid deference.

Thank you for that beetle with the black carapace

and those 88 clitter-clattering legs;

they sing in the wind when articulated like the crickets;

those eyes that peer at you with their whites from under a single stern brow.

Thank you for that noble, girthy elephant.

For that tiger.

I love you, Piano.

I want to make you scream and growl and chatter and gasp and sing.

The Birds of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary is actually a historical record of events. It is a recording, or a collection, of the times that words were used in history, and what those words were then made to mean.

I bet the process of creating the Oxford English Dictionary was like assembling the animals for Noah’s Ark. I bet it was like trying to organize the world. Every little thing in the world, corporeal and incorporeal, has an aspect and a name and it is jumbling around in your mind and looking at you with a different face until you let it fall into place and fall into families. There’s the Things You Do and then there’s the Things. There’s the People, and there’s the Animals, and there’s the Buildings. There’s the Things You Were Doing and the Things You Are Doing, the Things You Did and the Things You Will Do. There’s the Sicknesses and the Sports. Those are the big animals. And then there’s the strange and unfamiliar things that other people have done that you have never heard of. Those are the small animals. Those are the little birds that you take extra time with, to examine their unique plumage, to appreciate that this bird only lives on a particular tree in a particular forest and only a particular people hear it. There are limitless numbers of those little birds out there.