The Creative Womb
The wisdom of our century is knowing that a world is made by interpretation. Some stubborn facts have an inevitable weight, but overall they style of our world is self-created. The Universe, who is all things and nothing, holds infinite worlds, and each person expresses herself into a series of worlds. Each world is a game, with its own rules, its own emphasis. We each choose the world that furthers our purpose.
Poe did more than write macabre literature, but he lived a macabre life: the use of drugs and the projection of a gothic atmosphere made the reality he was comfortable in, the world he epitomized into his art. Art, after all, is the epitome of a world, the emphasis of the aspects of our world which we give to the public so we may share a world.
The work of a work of art is in our apprehension and appreciation. The art works on us. When the art perfectly symbolizes the values of the creator, that art becomes itself artist, and fashions those who engage it in aesthetic contemplation. The symphony makes our lives a symphony, the dance makes our days a dance. As we see, so we are. Art holds the special ability to communicate worlds, to give us those stubborn experiences that we can't explain away. Art is formative.
Our actions are submerged in language, our language is submerged in thought, our thought is submerged in meaning. From felt and definite meanings we set a logic, from layers of conflicting logics we make a language, from the desires and intents of language we make a living in the actions of our daily existence. Tone unifies. A book is one if it holds one tone, or a range of tones that unify into one overtone.
The deepest of our memories is a sort of archetypical life-myth which we use to build our agenda. Our memories fall into an order of emphasis, a story, based on the river bed of that original myth. The personal myth is part inborn, part learned, and part chosen. We gain access to worlds, to mystics, philosophers, poets, and heroes, to the gods who subsume them, through art appreciation, including that special kind of art called religion, which is art framed as utter importance.
Appreciation is an accumulation of interactions with the elements of a genre till they become prominent. We maybe have to hear a song a dozen times to know all the lyrics. The first time, only part of the chorus stood out. This same process characterizes falling in love. First, we see the beauty of the beloved. Next we learn of her goodness, of which the beauty is a symbol, then we learn of the reasoning by which she structures her virtues, and finally we learn about her meaning, her sense of life, her inner heart. Art cultivates grace. When we have studied a work of art, we have also mirrored a study of our inner being.
Art is the culture which balances individuals with and against the all. Art is compensatory. Art balances. Ugly art is a balancing of an ugly situation, maybe giving the lie to saccharine idealists. Art expresses frustrated desires, let them flow and have free play. What is a desire, after all, but an obstructed action? We build with surplus energy, become restless, and look for creative expression. We lead mild lives and are oppressed by the ordinary. The tedium of our daily duties becomes intolerable. Eventually, we start to fantasize, to escape into literature, to dream of some adventure or some misadventure. Those fantasies are part of the creative womb of our daily life: they are part of the scene, objects in our world. We care about them because we mind them.
The rites and ceremonies of religion and justice express the power of art: religions are modes of participatory art. Just as the Christian congregation sings hymns together as one on Sunday morning, so does the church body continue the dance of the community during their dispersion throughout the week. All religions are this way.
The creator who chooses to create new forms, rather then creatively filling old forms, is always a danger to society. His floating emotions merge with his floating ideas in his unconscious, he begins to believe in himself, to insist on himself. His inner divine is able to make violence in the logosphere and mythosphere of our shared world, perhaps to fill a spiritual hole in the collective experience. He offers escape to the oppressed, for escape his freedom. He builds a new discipline, a new way of life. Common experience may be the subject of all great art, and also of those forms of art called religions, but each genre makes a difference, offers something only it can offer.
Criticism is judgment, and sympathy is necessary to make that judgment. Only what we love can we know, for knowledge is love, just as truth is understanding. The knowledge of having experienced something transfers into the understanding of a criticism. We may, after all, hate a thing merely because our style clashes against it. Art is a stylized experience. All art is a consummated rhythm, a building of excitement and a release of resolve.
Cities have rhythm which counterbalance the rhythm of states, nations, and the world. We all conspire together, we all breath the same air. Ama I call the Oversoul of America, but names never mattered as much as meaning. Art is part of our environment. Art sets the tone, music sets the rhythm. What are our internal emotions, after all, but themselves music? Art speaks a language of convention, a set of expectations, but so does all of life. All cultures have patterns and codes. We would not hate a tribesman if he in ignorance walked the streets unclad, but if an leering man did so, we would arrest him on charges of indecency.
Science also gives us an environment. Science is the picking apart, the intellectual, and art is the putting together, the passionate. Art gives us our moral environment -- not the rules but the reality of our morality -- and science gives us the tools to criticize and challenge those rules. We inevitably absorb and identify with our surroundings: the man in the desert grows stark and callous, the northern folk are prepared for terror; religions are born in creative wombs, in literal environments, in climates and times. A religion universalizes and eternalizes when it is able to transcend its immediate environment, to apply to all men and not merely to a tribe.
Art is the measure of a culture; morality is poetry stacked; art is a wind vein showing us what the future holds. History gestures to the past; science, philosophy, and religion gesture to the eternal; art gestures to the future. Worlds create art, make certain ideas and expressions seem inevitable to us, even unique and spontaneous, as if we hadn't absorbed a million ideas subliminally. Yet each man from his innermost self, that unique and divine name he is, sheds a positive addition to the universe, gives himself as a gift, and is able to create something that has never been created before, could never created again, and can only be created by you yourself. We emanate our being in all we do, and publish ourselves for all time into the universe.
Art uniquely combines love and truth, beauty and power; art unifies work and play into a playwork, the work of art. Art is beautiful, so in the province of love, yet art inspires, shows us possibilities, gives us the desire to realize those possibilities in ourselves, shows us the ways to gain them. Art shows the world that a philosophy can make. A table of values, a way of loving, evokes certain modes of thinking, certain ways of creating our world.
Our inner name resonates across the universe. Certain memories from our childhood resonate with it, stand out, and become our life story. The difference between a happy childhood and a bad one is mostly interpretation. And just as certain memories are selected to put the access and emphasis on our lives, so does our voice pick up invitingly when somebody comes near us who is after our own, who resonates with us, soul to soul. In this way, that central energy and power evokes our full fate, chooses the music that will move us, chooses the friends who will love and empower us, chooses the books we will read, puts the objects in our hands that belong in our hands. We come to this life to create, to create something of the world and of ourselves, to grow into divine beings. Once we know our purpose, all things fall into place like tumblers in a lock.
The rock stars who indulge in sex, drugs, and rock and roll are not being extravagant. They need that world and those tools to foster a state of mind that can create and express that genre of music. Even if this particular band or that is able to get by on just the rock, that is only possible because the world of rock and roll has been set up by those who indulge.
In the same way, we all set up oscillators which energize our world, which echo back our energy and intensify it, pressing us to seek the extreme of our own logic.
We choose our forms and stay loyal to them. We marry ourselves to our forms, the ones we have commingled, individuality with community, self to world. We are inspired yes, but we also emanate: we emanate our own being with the breath of the muse who speaks to us. It is inspiration versus articulation, Dionysus versus Apollo. The inspiration has ambiguous form, the articulated, definite form.
And so let us ornament our lives with intimate and evocative objects. A poster of our hero, paintings of our ideal scene, colors to go with our creative project, these are the environment of our creative womb. The diet we eat fuels that special thing we are each to do. You are what you eat. The very flavors and styles feed into your work and your play. The friends you choose balance you out, tempt you to go farther, warn you to mind your weaknesses. The books you read, the poems you love, though these are all chosen in reference to what you by nature love, once you become conscious of what your project is, you can more deliberately filter out distractions and impediments. Look long into your mirror, in that form of meditation called reflection. Repeat your name to yourself. Have a daily orientation where you consider your life goal and the goal of this decade. Reinforce all your work, push yourself to higher triumphs. Never let yourself be comfortable, but prod yourself to greatness.
In this way we may create the creative womb by which we build the art of our lives, our very lives which are forms of art. In this way, we build our literal heaven, and we prepare our ethereal body. The very build of our muscles, the shapes of our face and nerves, reinforce that heaven, which in turn changes the mind, the I, our necessity. By giving our life theme music, a set of songs that reinforce our goals, diversify our purposes, and express every emotion of our heart, we gain momentum. All those resonators feed into each other and intensify each other. What we say to others and how we treat them changes them; they will mirror us, echo us, show us ourselves, become more like us, and we like them. Your full body is in your body of possessions, your full spirit is in the friends you hold, your full soul is in your sphere of influence, which reaches to the edge of the Universal All. There are worlds within worlds, and you are god of your world. Your words are magic, and create reality. Everything you do creates more you. The reward of virtue is more self. Good deeds do not get you into heaven; they show you are already there.
In this way, those things that speak to us also resonate with us; what we love also loves us; we can only see the beauty that we already are; and because we are able to sincerely hope for a thing proves that we should hope for it, and in the stretches of eternity, the heart will always be answered.
\ ~@M@~ /
perfectidius.com
No comments:
Post a Comment